is there some pragmatic difference between 99% of the world having the same moral view about some action and a high degree of moral objectivity about that action ?
— Rank Amateur
The question makes no sense. Either a moral proposition is objectively true (true independent of anybody's "moral view") or it's not. The phrase "high degree of moral objectivity" makes no sense
if you don't think it would matter to the subjective vs objective argument if 99% of the people in the world held the same moral view - You are right there is no need to keep chatting -
But if you don't see that there are probably a few {questions about the solar system} that 99% of the people in the world, if they honestly answered what their conscience said, would have the same {view that the sun revolves around the earth} is not an argument against {the earth revolves around the sun} - then you are wed to proposition in conflict with that - sounds like religion to me.
I'm not seeing the difference, yet you would not argue that the sun does indeed revolve around the earth.
Physical facts about the universe are not matters of conscience, they are matters of reason. There is a difference. Your conscience does not tell you there is a cat on the chair, your reason does. Your conscience tell you it would be wrong to torture the cat for fun.
But I am happy to go down a road where you think there are absolute moral truths, no matter what we think about them - but that is not where you want to go.
if you don't think it would matter to the subjective vs objective argument if 99% of the people in the world held the same moral view - You are right there is no need to keep chatting -
What do you mean by "same moral view". All you've established is acceptance here that a large majority of people will have similar moral views about one specific issue - 'child torture'. There are very many contentious moral issues facing us today which are far less clear cut and in my view it would be profoundly unhelpful for either side of these disputes to claim objective truth for their views.
What do you mean by "same moral view". All you've established is acceptance here that a large majority of people will have similar moral views about one specific issue - 'child torture'. There are very many contentious moral issues facing us today which are far less clear cut and in my view it would be profoundly unhelpful for either side of these disputes to claim objective truth for their views
No where did I say all moral judgments are objective - only some, and maybe only a handful.
And I repeat that if as i think. and it think you would, agree 99% of the people in the world could hold the same moral view on a handful of moral judgments, and that has no bearing on if morality is always relative or not - I would have to respectfully disagree
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:18#2669000 likes
is there some pragmatic difference between 99% of the world having the same moral view about some action and a high degree of moral objectivity about that action ?
Yes, of course. The pragmatic difference is that the two are two completely different things. Agreement, commonality has nothing whatsoever to do with objectivity.
if you don't think that if 99% of the people in the world could hold the same moral view and it not be relative to a discussion of relative - vs objective morality - we will just have to disagree
Yes, of course. The pragmatic difference is that the two are two completely different things. Agreement, commonality has nothing whatsoever to do with objectivity.
just some amazing coincidence that on some issues, there is probably a near uniformity of all human conscience judgement. Just a tail on the bell curve of moral judgments.
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:26#2669070 likes
How is that a big clue? The two things don't have anything to do with each other. How in the world would I know just how common some relatively unusual stance might be? That has no impact on being able to guess that there might be some people with that stance.
if you don't think that if 99% of the people in the world could hold the same moral view and it not be relative to a discussion of relative - vs objective morality - we will just have to disagree
How would it have anything to do with "relative vs objective morality" unless you were doing what I noted before that you objective to--my pet peeve, re the apparent assumption that it goes without saying that the popularity of something has some significance for its normative merit.
How is that not a big clue? The two things don't have anything to do with each other. How in the world would I know just how common some relatively unusual stance might be? That has no impact on being able to guess that there might be some people with that stance.
if you don't think that if 99% of the people in the world could hold the same moral view and it not be relative to a discussion of relative - vs objective morality - we will just have to disagree
— Rank Amateur
How would it have anything to do with "relative vs objective morality" unless you were doing what I noted before that you objective to--my pet peeve, re the apparent assumption that it goes without saying that the popularity of something has some significance for its normative merit.
now you are just wasting time just repeating back the same point - and making declarations without support or reason.
going down this whole line of reason with you, Reply to ChrisH and Reply to Isaac has turned into, is you guys are right and i am all wrong because morality is relative because you all say so. Not one of you has directly addressed the issue. It is all tactic and repeat - like Reply to Janus, i think we have reached a point of diminished returns on this line of reason -
good news is i might have another one
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:37#2669110 likes
The objective standard is the duty to do no harm (arising from the instinctive avoidance of pain and the finding of oneself in a cooperative society where people depend on others for wants, needs, and survival). Whether an act or non-act is morally right or wrong is determined by this standard and this standard alone. Many acts are approved of or disapproved of according to personal sentiments, but if they don’t relate to the objective standard I just outlined, then they are not moral concerns (which some call moral relativity and others call amorality).
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:42#2669130 likes
The objective standard is the duty to do no harm (arising from the instinctive avoidance of pain and the finding of oneself in a cooperative society where people depend on others for wants, needs, and survival).
How do you go from the instinctive avoidance of pain (which I don't actually agree is a fact as anything that simple, but we can ignore that for now) and the cooperative society fact to "one has a duty to do not harm"? That would need to be supported.
You all believe that all moral judgments in one degree or another are relative. But due to the fact they are moral judgments they involve making some qualitative statement about their nature they have to be good or bad, right or wrong.
Are we ok so far with this so far ?
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:44#2669150 likes
I don't quite understand the way you worded that, but if you're just saying that moral judgments are judgments that interpersonal behavior (that one considers more significant than etiquette) is morally good bad, right or wrong, etc., that's fine, yes.
How do you go from the instinctive avoidance of pain (which I don't actually agree is a fact as anything that simple, but we can ignore that for now) and the cooperative society fact to "one has a duty to do not harm"? That would need to be supported.
I outlined an argument for this several pages ago. I also described how morality works in a cooperative society. It was an exchange with S.
You could try just telling me what the percentage of people with some stance has to do with relative/subjective vs objective morality in your view.
I have, a few times, in a few forms. but once again- other than in a smoke filled dorm room - near unanimity of a particular view would clearly cause a problem with a view they all reached that conclusion independently and it was just an amazing coincidence -
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:45#2669180 likes
Too bad we don't have post #s here, but can you give me at least a small text string that I can identify the post by? That way I can quickly search for it.
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:47#2669200 likes
I have, a few times, in a few forms. but once again- other than in a smoke filled dorm room - near unanimity of a particular view would clearly cause a problem with a view they all reached that conclusion independently and it was just an amazing coincidence -
Ah--yeah, I addressed that, but aside from that, do you think that relativism/subjectivism vs objectivism somehow amounts to saying that people arrive at stances arbitrarily, so that it's like rolling dice and it would just have to be a coincidence that they have the same stance?
Reply to Terrapin Station perfect. would you also agree there is some line, in regard to any issue where they are dichotomous. Good cant ever equal bad, and right can not equal wrong about the same issue.
would you also agree there is some line, in regard to any issue where they are dichotomous. Good cant ever equal bad, and right can not equal wrong about the same issue.
If someone uses the terms in anything like the conventional senses, which we can assume, then sure, if they feel that x is good they're not going to feel that x is bad, and if they feel that x is right they're not going to feel that x is wrong.
“In your view morality is about sentiments? If so, I disagree if that’s all there is to it, and I can see how you would not have socialization as the consequent. I believe in rationalism if by “innate knowledge” one means instinct. I believe in empiricism if one believes that the blank slate is a really complex and convoluted matrix that experience “writes on”. Moral sentiments are more than just feelings, though. One has to learn what one is feeling about. One learns through experience that pain is bad. It may also be instinctual or at least partly? Socialization (reports from elders or peers) teaches us that hitting someone causes pain in them, and this is reinforced when someone hits us and we feel pain. We learn through experience (also part of the socialization process) what pain feels like. In this way, we learn that hitting people unprovoked is bad. Now, you might feel that hitting someone unprovoked is satisfying, but socialization (reports from elders and peers that it causes pain) and experience should tell you it is bad. If with this you still feel that hitting someone unprovoked is good, then you are simply mistaken about a moral truth. It has nothing to do with what makes you feel good. It has everything to do with living in a community and not causing harm where possible. One should not harm community members when we depend on the community for survival, wants, and needs. If one harmed a community member unprovoked, then one should expect to be harmed in return. This is neither good for the individual (pain sucks), nor is it good for the community. One harm can lead to two. Two harms can lead to three, etc. Usually, the loved ones feel through empathy the harm done to the harmed party. This can lead to further aggression, and soon large parts of the community are at strife. This is not good for individuals or the community (remember how individuals rely on the community for survival, wants, and needs) because cooperation soon breaks down and it becomes more difficult to survive and satisfy wants and needs. I would then conclude that harming someone unprovoked is morally wrong. “Objectively” wrong. Whatever “objective” really means.”
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:53#2669280 likes
If morality came from the individual, then there would be no need for socialization.
Socialization ensures the smooth working of society.
Society is the necessary conclusion of social creatures with shared linguistic meaning and communication.
Followed by:
Society has the goal of survival and flourishing of the community.
In order for this survival and flourishing, moral laws must be formed.
Moral laws are also grounded in moral feeling.
That moral feeling has as its basis the avoidance of pain.
Moral laws dissuade the inflicting of pain, which also helps to ensure the survival and flourishing of society.
If moral laws didn’t exist, then society would not have lasted this long.
Society has lasted.
Hence, MORAL LAWS EXIST.
We'd have to go over that piece by piece.
The first premise seems kind of arbitrary to me. How are you figuring "If morality came from the individual, then there would be no need for socialization" to start?
Reply to Terrapin Station so then there has to be a near objective understanding of good or bad or right and wrong - for all these subjective judgments to have any meaning.
How does moral relativity deal with the issue that it needs some objective understanding of good or bad right or wrong - for their moral judgments to have any meaning ?
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 15:54#2669300 likes
Ah--I'll read what you just pasted above, although I might need to do it in a bit (I need to run out)
you just agreed a sec ago that good cant equal bad, and right cant equal wrong on a specific issue - that means they have objective meaning.
I said "If someone uses the terms in anything like the conventional senses, which we can assume, then sure, if they feel that x is good they're not going to feel that x is bad, and if they feel that x is right they're not going to feel that x is wrong."
That doesn't imply "objective meaning." I dont believe there is any such thing. I think that's as much of a category error as "objective morality."
Just a question. If, in a future world, some evil genius had arranged things such that torturing an innocent child brought about a harmonious society, would that make torturing the child morally right?
— Isaac
Zero. Not even a little bit.
I feel exactly the same way. Good thing this stuff about a harmonious society is a load of codswallop, so we don't ever have to worry about that. Phew!
After all, one man's horror is just another man's just stretching out, yes?
— tim wood
Yes, obviously. Hitler clearly was not horrified by what he did, so it's pretty irrefutable that one man's horror is just another man's stretching out. Are you suggesting that Hitler was horrified by what he did?
there has to be a near objective understanding of good or bad or right and wrong - for all these subjective judgments to have any meaning.
How does moral relativity deal with the issue that it needs some objective understanding of good or bad right or wrong - for their moral judgments to have any meaning ?
Goodness, in the moral sense, is a feeling, badness is a feeling. I can quite easily say that the pain is bad without any objective measure. I can say this apple tastes good without any objective measure. Why does it suddenly become a problem when describing moral feelings?
As to right and wrong, I understand it's often used as a reasonably well understood shorthand, but it really doesn't make any sense in a rigorous argument. 2+2=4 is 'right' (when following peano axioms), but that's just the same as asserting that 2+2=4. 2+2=5 is 'wrong' (by the same method), but that's just the same as asserting 2+2 does not equal 5. "The cup is blue" is right, if and only if the cup is blue. "Murder is wrong" doesn't make any sense in either of these ways of speaking. We can't say it's the same as asserting "Murder isn't" and if it's like the cup example, the murder is wrong if and only if...what?
We could say that 'good' is just a class of actions, like 'blue' is a class of colours. Then you'd be right to say that if the majority of language users are using the word that way then that's the right way to use it. By that approach we can say that murder is objectively a 'bad' action, because that's what the word 'bad' means in that context, it means "things like murder". But then why shouldn't I do any of the actions in the 'bad' class? You're missing the compulsion to act/avoid which is a part of morality.
We're obviously not simply compelled to act in whatever way the majority want, so from where are you getting the compulsion? How are you getting your 'ought' from your 'is'?
Goodness, in the moral sense, is a feeling, badness is a feeling. I can quite easily say that the pain is bad without any objective measure. I can say this apple tastes good without any objective measure. Why does it suddenly become a problem when describing moral feelings?
But you can’t bite the apple and tell someone it tastes both good and bad at the same time. In order to communicate your view of the taste of the apple you have to use adjectives with some degree of objective meaning. If we have widely varied subjective views on goodness or badness as it relates to apple taste we can’t effectively communicate. Your view of the apple is now meaningless to me.
Same problem still applies. If the intent is what makes it moral, then what of the situation where you may have to, for example, murder some innocent to save others. Your intent behind committing the murder is to save the others (the harmonious society), but that does not make you undertake the murder with relish, safe in the knowledge that it is best for the community. Something still tells you murder is wrong, even when your intention is purely the best interests of the group. If that something is not morality (because by intention, you've determined this action is, in fact, moral) then what is it?
If you murder someone because that action is the lesser of two evils how is that relevant to the point that an act is moral if its intent is to do the least harm possible to social harmony? Of course "something still tells you murder is wrong"; the very fact that you generalize that statement is pointing you away from moral relativism. So, what you say here only seems to support what I have been arguing, against the notion that morality is merely a matter of personal preference.
VagabondSpectreMarch 20, 2019 at 20:43#2670440 likes
I don't see how we can do this in the face of such uncertainty, without assigning an ordinal value to each option, we cannot order them, and if are admittedly unclear about the details, how can we be clear about the ordinal value we assign. Throwing out the nonsense, we agree on, the unreasoned and the insane, but all we have left after that is a pool of equally viable options. I don't se any logical reason why, in some areas, one option may not still rise slightly above the others. I see no logical reason why it might not be the case that all the options just happen to be very obviously ordinal. But I cannot see what worldy force would make this the case for all decisions.
It's not the case for all decisions... Positive moral claims (claims pertaining to positive moral obligations) are notoriously disagreeable, and there seems to only be a few of them that we're able to coherently conclude upon. Even where we can have these kinds of conclusions, they're at best tentative (they're waiting for something better to come along). The vast majority of our applied moral knowledge takes the form of negative claims (negative moral obligations) because empirically/epistemically, they're low hanging moral fruit.
I'm not saying that we may always access the evidence required for strong induction (or are always capable of interpreting it), I'm saying that in some situations we can do so sufficiently, especially with regard to negative moral claims.
The only difference between us might be our epistemic position. We agree that objectively certain knowledge is incoherent or is a misleading misnomer, where what we're actually doing is using observation and inductive reasoning to approach or approximate truth. The basic principles of the scientific approach, such as falsification and seeking descriptive+predictive power, are the semi-formal guides of induction: when we falsify propositions through sound trials and testing, we can, with very high confidence, eliminate them as a possible truth; but when we positively demonstrate the consistency or predictive power of a given model or proposition (which might always be relative to the predictive power of our next best models), we may still gain some rational confidence for it, but it is never on the same order of magnitude as the confidence we have that "well falsified" claims are indeed false.
We could pretty much divide all human "knowledge" into two categories: things we think are true, and things we think are false. To parallel this in the realm of moral knowledge, we have things we think we should do, and things we think we should not do. With both general and moral knowledge, both our positive and negative propositions have their utility. We can really only (with high epistemic confidence) avoid bad moral outcomes by subscribing only to negative moral propositions; and where morality in practice vaguely drifts from "avoid harm" into "promote good", negative moral claims become less useful while positive moral claims become essential. In practice we cannot avoid forming positive beliefs about the world, uncertain though [s]it[/s] we may be; planning for the future can be as much about where we do want to go as where we don't want to go, it might just depend on the risks and the stakes. We're still left with reason and observation as our main tools for treating positive moral claims, and though situational complexity can sometimes give human intuition the advantage, it is woefully under-equipped for many areas of specific decision making. The effectiveness and relative risks of vaccines are an example of something that intuition would have a very hard time accurately guesstimating; the more actual observation and evidence we gather around the subject (the better we model it), the more confidence we can have in our predictions of outcomes. All we necessarily disagree about regarding vaccines is our ability to predict its outcomes with reasonable confidence (either you have a higher bar for reasonable confidence (the intuition beating kind), or you believe that evidence pertaining to the effects of vaccines is too hard to come by, or to interpret (even for teams of preeminent experts) (or a combination of the two, along with other factors such as perverse incentives which pollute the field of knowledge).
What CEO in their right mind is going to invest in a drug which only a small number of people will need, to replace a drug they currently sell to everyone?
You will almost certainly find this controversial, but Bill and Melinda Gates are under the belief that by delivering basic medicines, including well proven and highly statistically effective vaccines, that they've turned 10 billion dollars of charitable investment into 200 billion dollars of created wealth (wealth created by the saving of lives).
When it comes to big pharma, I really am with you in the "let's not just blindly trust profit chasing corporations" boat (I would really not want to roll the dice with any psychotropic medication, especially anything with a recent patent). But not all vaccines are inherently profit driven, though in many cases we do allow the free market to produce them for us. There's a difference between a seasonal flu shot and a standard MMR vaccine. The flu is deadly in rare cases, but mostly people are just trying to avoid getting sick because of the discomfort. Comparing this to something like an MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine, the motives are completely different. One product is actually produced and marketed for profit, while the other is made cheap or free because it has been so effective at preventing deaths.
Sometimes the free-market does create philanthropic incentives. Many scientists and researchers in medical fields genuinely are trying to create things to improve life rather than improve corporate profits. Sometimes corporations, even for greedy reasons, do good things. The list of essential vaccines that have saved millions of lives since their inception are among them.
Not entirely, but it still highlights a difference between us. I don't see the point in keeping people alive if they're not going to be happy. It's people's happiness that matters to me. Why do people do risky sports? Because the increase in happiness is worth the reduced life expectancy. So psychology and sociology are important considerations. We can't just presume people want to remain alive for as long as possible at all costs, want to have as much wealth as possible at all costs. Clichéd though it sounds, this is just not the case.
Aren't you on some level treating people like children in doing so?
I'm with you about the existential and psychological need for happiness, but what if someone is unhappy because they cannot get their own (ridiculous) way? (Or maybe more to the point, what happens when they're unhappy precisely because they've gotten their own way?). Our expectations do not always conform to reality, and in so far as we can inform our expectations (and hence the way we feel about the related action) with reason and evidence, we can tend toward more accurate and consistent feelings about actions.
We are agreed here, as I think we've now firmly established. Where we disagree is simply over the strength of evidence contradicting one's 'gut' that is required to make one change. For me it is very high, for you it seems to be merely a preponderance.
A preponderance of good evidence! Morality is the name; cumulative induction is the game!
As to the test for murder, there is such a test: would you consent to be murdered (not would you want to be murdered); do you imagine that everyone would or should consent to be murdered? And then why not?
But that is not a test for whether murder is wrong, its a test for whether I'd want it done to me. If 'wrong is just the word we use to describe things we like don't want done to us, then fine, but now why shouldn't I do it? Quoting tim wood
As to "reason first," I think you confuse temporal with logical priority. A think doesn't have to be first on the clock to be primary. And, word games: you could say that you have to have something to reason about before you can reason, but if so, how do you ever start reasoning?
I disagree strongly here. I don't see how you can justify that kind of accusation. What does "good faith" even mean in this context, and what types of argument are you identifying as examples of "bad faith" As far as I read the discussion, it started out with Tim simply declaring, without argument, that some things were simply "wrong". Some relativist have tried to make their case and been met with just a repeated assertion that "some things are just wrong". I tried to explain my position with a thought experiment (a perfectly normal, common philosophical tool) and you took the hump and said you weren't engaging anymore.
How is that discussing with an open mind?
Good faith means that when you point out inconsistencies or inadequacies in the other's position they provide a cogent argument to show that it is not in fact an inconsistency, or if they can't, then admit that iit is an inconsistency. As I read this thread (and others) Terrapin never does that, but introduces any red herring he can find, or pretends not to comprehend what is being said, that is he dishonestly uses any strategy to avoid admitting that his position is inconsistent, mistaken or explanatorily inadequate. And S, although not as bad as Terrapin, is also tending that way. Sure you might say that is just my opinion, but it is my honest opinion, so I call it as i see it.
An example is that Terrapin will counter any argument that appeals to the prevalence of shared values on the most central moral issues (murder, rape, torture, theft and so on) with the objection that the almost universally cross-culturally prevalent attitudes that condemn those is merely a matter of those attitudes being more "popular", which basically gives them no more inter-subjective weight than personal culinary preferences.
And yet when I say that from the perspective of someone who is morally neutral, who is amoral, assuming moral relativism, all moral stances are equal, and that there is thus no inter-subjective rational warrant to prefer one stance over the other, he claims that no one is in fact morally neutral and that this is demonstrated by statistics involving studying "hundreds, even thousands" of people.
Even if it were accepted that those statistics are accurate and that they reflect what is the case with billions of people, his own position should dismiss it on the basis that it is an appeal to populism. Because there is no objective (on his view of objectivity) reason why people should not be morally neutral, just as some people are indifferent to some foods or art works.
moral judgments are judgments that interpersonal behavior (that one considers more significant than etiquette) is morally good bad, right or wrong, etc., that's fine, yes.
and the relevant question is 'on what basis could one think that some interpersonal behaviors are "more significant than etiquette"?'. Not just because it is popular to think that way surely?
No, it seems obvious that matters that are considered matters of morality and not matters of mere preference or popularity are 'life and death' matters, and such matters are profoundly important to almost all of us because life and death is profoundly important to almost all of us, and that is the "objective" element of commonality that operates in moral thought and feeling, makes it more than a matter of popularity or mere personal preference, and which moral relativism cannot even begin to explain.
it seems obvious that matters that are considered matters of morality and not matters of mere preference or popularity are 'life and death' matters, and such matters are profoundly important to almost all of us because life and death is profoundly important to almost all of us, and that is the "objective" element of commonality that operates in moral thought and feeling, makes it more than a matter of popularity or mere personal preference, and which moral relativism cannot even begin to explain.
I agree.
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 22:29#2670740 likes
It seems odd to me to ask why someone would care about how they think about things, how they conceptualize things, their feelings, their perceptions, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise that people care about themselves.
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 22:34#2670750 likes
But you can’t bite the apple and tell someone it tastes both good and bad at the same time. In order to communicate your view of the taste of the apple you have to use adjectives with some degree of objective meaning. If we have widely varied subjective views on goodness or badness as it relates to apple taste we can’t effectively communicate. Your view of the apple is now meaningless to me.
Alternate views of what communication is/how it works are possible, but it would be a huge tangent to get into.
Terrapin StationMarch 20, 2019 at 22:38#2670760 likes
An example is that Terrapin will counter any argument that appeals to the prevalence of shared values on the most central moral issues (murder, rape, torture, theft and so on) with the objection that the almost universally cross-culturally prevalent attitudes that condemn those is merely a matter of those attitudes being more "popular", which basically gives them no more inter-subjective weight than personal culinary preferences.
The argument that some P is correct (or "more correct" or whatever you might like to say) because it's more prevalent is the argumentum ad populum fallacy.
Maybe you personally put a lot more weight on something because it's more prevalent, and you're not claiming that the prevalence has anything to do with it being correct, so that it's just a pledge to conformity, essentially, and that's fine. But not everyone is so rah rah conformity. If you want to jump off of a bridge just because everyone else is, be my guest.
And yet when I say that from the perspective of someone who is morally neutral, who is amoral, assuming moral relativism, all moral stances are equal, and that there is thus no inter-subjective rational warrant to prefer one stance over the other, he claims that no one is in fact morally neutral and that this is demonstrated by statistics involving studying "hundreds, even thousands" of people.
Right, no one is in fact morally neutral, but I said:
[i]"A hypothetical person with no preferences would indeed not be able to find a reason to prefer one moral stance over the other, no matter what the person were to look at. The very idea of that doesn't make any sense. We'd be wondering if a person who has no preferences in domain D might gain preferences in domain D as an implication or upshot of examining some set of facts (such as the fact that J prefers m, K prefers n, etc.), or the fact that A causes B. They wouldn't, because no set of facts implies any preference. That's just the point. So it's an argument in favor of the relativist position, not an argument against it.
"The person might develop preferences based on simple exposure to something they weren't previously familiar with (if John never heard jazz before and then starts listening to a lot of jazz, he might develop (or learn he had) preferences for some of it), but that's a factor of how their brain works, and then it would turn out that it's not true that the person has no preferences after all."[/i]
I don't know if you bothered to read that reply to you.
Even if it were accepted that those statistics are accurate and that they reflect what is the case with billions of people, his own position should dismiss it on the basis that it is an appeal to populism.
I wasn't saying that anything was correct/incorrect because it was popular/prevalent. I wasn't saying anything about conforming to what's popular/prevalent. I merely said that it's a contingent fact that there are no conscious morally neutral people. If that weren't a fact that would be fine. But we can't find any conscious morally neutral people when we look for them.
Because there is no objective (on his view of objectivity) reason why people should not be morally neutral,
Correct. The fact that there are no conscious morally neutral people has zero implication for what should be the case. It's just contingently the case.
Maybe you personally put a lot more weight on something because it's more prevalent, and you're not claiming that the prevalence has anything to do with it being correct, so that it's just a pledge to conformity, essentially, and that's fine.
Oh, it's "fine" is it, really?
This is a prime example of how you twist what is said to suit your purposes. As I have already explained many times, I don't put more weight on the almost universally shared moral values merely because they are more prevalent, To the contrary, they are more prevalent on account of the fact that almost everyone puts more weight on them because they involve the most basic questions of life and death, and that's precisely why it is obvious that, contra your one-dimensional view, 'life and death' moral dispositions are not anything like mere personal preferences.
But of course I believe this would be a wasted reply if it were actually addressed to you, since I predict you won't acknowledge and directly address this obvious difference, because it is fatal to your simple-minded moral relativism. And you will never admit you are inconsistent and that your position is explanatorily inadequate; instead you will probably just distort what I said here again to produce more red herrings, to try to make it look like I am indulging in populism or whatever you can think up to try to deflect attention away from the intellectual poverty of your position. So, this reply is really not for you, but for others to make clear to them how I view your tactics. I won't reply to you unless you lift your game, and actually address what is being said without attempting your usual tendentious distortions and professions of incomprehension.
Why are human emotional responses so frequently characterised as mere preferences? Why can't they be, in the context of morality, profound and heartfelt passionate dispositions?
Morality. All humans follow one after (mostly)adopting their first world-view via language acquisition. Morality - all morality - consists entirely of thought/belief about the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Morality makes up the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Moralities - all of them - vary afterwards. The variances have a direct correspondence with/to that which is subject to particular influence(s). Those include familial, socio-economic, historical, cultural, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and any and all of the other manifestations arising from the evolution of human knowledge.
None of us can doubt the truthfulness of our first worldview. That is true of everyone. We are all borne with the inability to doubt the veracity of our own worldview. Then we all have a sudden, sometimes quite uncomfortable reality check. What happens differs from expectations. We become painfully aware of our own fallibility, assuming one is capable of such a thing. Those who do not better have a fairly accurate understanding of themselves and the world around them, and be fortunate enough to pursue their own happiness. Not everyone can.
War-torn... Abject poverty... Powerless...
Those people have no ability to doubt their own worldview either, until they have one that is... just like everyone else.
The reason for all this is clear enough for all to understand:One cannot doubt the rules of socially acceptable behaviour unless s/he has a baseline from which to do so. That baseline is one's first/initial/original world-view. Those primary baselines are all replete with the language community's moral sensibilities.
All reasonable doubt is belief-based. All doubting is doubting the truth of something or other that has been heard and/or read. All doubting of morality comes via common language use. All language acquisition has universal common denominators. The students' utterly complete inability to doubt the truthfulness of what's being learned about the world and/or him/herself. This holds good regardless of that which is subject to the influence of individual, societal, familial, historical. and/or cultural particulars.
All morality is first adopted.
That which is common to all is universal. There are some things common to all moralities. Those things warrant careful thought experiments. Preferably, this special kind of thought experiment will have some falsifiable/verifiable foundation.
All initial world-views consist of thought/belief about the world and/or oneself. All initially adopted morality consists of thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves. None of us has the ability to doubt the truthfulness of the common language teachers' lessons about life. They are all lessons.
All adoption of one's first world-view is accompanied by an inherent incapability to doubt.
Thought/belief is prior to doubt. Some of that is thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. All thought/belief presupposes it's own truth somewhere along the line. All thought/belief is meaningful to the thinking/believing creature. Some thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour comes prior to learning the social code. I would posit that some thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour is formed and/or held by everyone, regardless of that which is subject to particulars. That is...
Some moral thought/belief is prior to language acquisition and held on a universal basis by everyone.
That which is subject to individual particulars is little to nothing more than an unhelpful distraction during moral discourse. That which is true of everyone lends itself to being a rock-solid dependable foundation.
We are interdependent social creatures by our very nature. The sheer amount of time that a human requires prior to his/her ability to fend for themselves is unmatched in the animal world, aside from elephants. They're comparable. The pure faith upon which one takes on their first world-view is universal. The unmatched trust that we each have(had) in our teachers is also universal and is displayed on an everyday basis.
But you can’t bite the apple and tell someone it tastes both good and bad at the same time. In order to communicate your view of the taste of the apple you have to use adjectives with some degree of objective meaning.
Absolutely, but I don't understand what this point has to do with the objectivity of morality. If I say "this apple tastes good", I have to be referring to at least what I hope is some common feeling 'good' in order for my interlocutor to know what I mean.
So 'good', in that context, has a shared meaning, in that we use it to describe states of mind we think we share.
So when I say "murder makes me feel good" everyone knows what the feeling is that murder gives me. When I say "murder makes me feel 'bad' I everyone also knows what the feeling is that murder gives me. These are completely objective meanings of 'good' and 'bad'. None of this has any bearing on proving that" murder is bad" is an objective fact.
No one has yet describe what "murder is bad" even means for the objectivist.
I take it to mean "murdering someone (or the thought of doing so, or the thought of associating with someone who does) makes me feel bad".
"Bad", in this sense has a perfectly objective meaning, but which actions make me feel it is entirely subjective.
What is the equivalent definition of "murder is bad/wrong" for the objectivist?
We tried "Murder is something which most people feel one shouldn't do" but that directly replaces 'thing most people feel one shouldn't do' with 'wrong/bad'. This would make women voting wrong/bad in the 19th century.
We tried "murder is something which does not bring about social harmony" - fine, I'd agree with that, but it does not capture any obligation not to do it. What compels me to care about social harmony?
We tried "murder is something one wouldn't do if one intended to bring about social harmony" - again, a fact I pretty much agree with, but doesn't explain why murder would still feel awful even if it were being done with the intention of bringing about social harmony, and it still suffers from the problem of just kicking the can. Why must anyone care about social harmony? We've had the argument that the vast majority of people simply do care about social harmony, so we can presume it to be a fact and follow from there. But again, this still ends up relative. It still ends up with "for all those who care about social harmony (the vast majority), murder is wrong" ("for those who don't, it isn't").
We tried "murder is irrational", but I'm afraid I've still yet to understand how rationality alone, absent of any objective makes any sense. It's like just having peano's axioms and an equals sign and expecting to get the correct answer. No one has even set the sum yet.
So I'm still waiting. Could some objectivist please translate for me, from their point of view "murder is wrong/bad" without reusing the terms "wrong/bad" because those are the ones whose use I'm struggling to understand.
If you murder someone because that action is the lesser of two evils how is that relevant to the point that an act is moral if its intent is to do the least harm possible to social harmony?
Because I want to know what your definition/explanation is for that feeling under your system. By your definition, if murder is being carried out with the intent to bring about social harmony, then it is moral. If it is moral, then what prevents someone from undertaking it with great pleasure. What name do you give, and preferably explanation of, the fact that most of us would still find murder abominable even if it was being done to bring about social harmony.
You still haven't explained my basic emotion. I think torturing a child is monstrous and I have no intention of ever doing it. Full stop. I have not had to carry out any rational calculations to arrive at this decision. I have not gone through all the consequences of doing so to check whether or not social harmony will be brought about in the long term. The feeling of abomination is already there, it always has been. I don't recall ever giving long term social harmony a second thought.
Long term social harmony may very well be the reason evolution put that feeling in my brain. I think that's a very sound explanation. But evolution is a natural force, it doesn't make 'mistakes' because it doesn't have any intentions. So if, for whatever reason, evolution did not put that feeling in someone's brain, on what grounds do we say that they are 'wrong'?
I'm not saying that we may always access the evidence required for strong induction (or are always capable of interpreting it), I'm saying that in some situations we can do so sufficiently, especially with regard to negative moral claims.
Yes, I'd agree with you here. Given equal objectives, there are definitely some situations where the evidence is sufficiently overwhelming that I think it a reasonable strategy against those who follow a different route, to simply point this fact out of in the hope that they too will be overwhelmed by the inductive certainty of the conclusion.
No, basically I think you've captured it. I think the only point you may have overemphasised is that I'm not really arguing that intuition is a good (or better) guide than reason in terms of getting the right answer (meeting our long term objective).
I think it can be sometimes, with regards to vaccination, for example, the intuition that we do not simply inject healthy children with an unknown (to the decision-maker) chemical for some advantage we've simply been told will accrue t later down the line, is one which certainly should require a high degree of evidence to overcome.
The more important point, to me, though, is that following intuition simply feels better and so automatically has a higher weight in those situations where the right course of action is being weighed merely on a preponderance of evidence.
In other cases, where the evidence is overwhelming, them yes, intuition can be cast aside.
No, I understand. I'm only talking about the risk inherent in the uncertainty about whether the actual vaccine in question (or just one of its ingredients) is profit driven, and the extent to which an individual parent can ever know this. Its not as if the doctor, when asked, is going to say "oh yes, this one is profit driven".
Many scientists and researchers in medical fields genuinely are trying to create things to improve life rather than improve corporate profits. Sometimes corporations, even for greedy reasons, do good things. The list of essential vaccines that have saved millions of lives since their inception are among them.
I don't doubt this, and I hope I haven't given the impression that I do, simply in my attempt to play devil's advocate. It's the uncertainty about which any particular vaccine is that I'm wanting to highlight with regards to the effect that uncertainty has on moral decisions.
Aren't you on some level treating people like children in doing so?
I'm with you about the existential and psychological need for happiness, but what if someone is unhappy because they cannot get their own (ridiculous) way? (Or maybe more to the point, what happens when they're unhappy precisely because they've gotten their own way?). Our expectations do not always conform to reality, and in so far as we can inform our expectations (and hence the way we feel about the related action) with reason and evidence, we can tend toward more accurate and consistent feelings about actions.
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing here. My point was that merely "saving lives" cannot be presumed to be a goal above all others, such that any technology or lifestyle change which brings about this goal can be given objective superiority over one's that do less well in this regard. People have goals other than staying alive for as long as possible.
Im not, in any sense suggesting that society as a whole has a duty to make everyone happy, but I think we're really straying too far from our objective common ground when we start deciding that someone's happiness is not 'good enough' type of happiness. Yes, I personally think that getting your own way shouldn't be something that always makes you happy. I personally feel that some of the things people claim to want are 'ridiculous'. But I have absolutely no grounds whatsoever to tell them that they are objectively wrong to feel that way.
Good faith means that when you point out inconsistencies or inadequacies in the other's position they provide a cogent argument to show that it is not in fact an inconsistency, or if they can't, then admit that iit is an inconsistency.
Fair enough, but can't you see, that's exactly what our side think your side aren't doing either? If we all agreed on what an inconsistency or inadequacy was, this matter would have been solved hundreds of years ago.
As I read this thread (and others) Terrapin never does that, but introduces any red herring he can find, or pretends not to comprehend what is being said, that is he dishonestly uses any strategy to avoid admitting that his position is inconsistent, mistaken or explanatorily inadequate.
But this is all just from your perspective, and differing perspectives are what constitute an argument in the first place. Of course you think his retorts are red herrings, of course you think his strategy is dishonest and his position inconsistent. If you didn't you'd agree with him. You don't, so you evidently need some reason why that is the case.
You talk as if 'red herrings', 'pretending', 'dishonesty', 'consistency' and 'explanational adequacy' were matters on which some conclusive judgement could be made when 2000 years of philosophical argument stands as glaring evidence that they are not.
Philosophy well done. Put it out there, avail it to proper critique.
The general theme of your series of comments seems to focus on the pre-rational or early rational chronology of moral agency. If such chronology is more reactive to outside influence from which experiences are attained, yet moral philosophy in and of itself is predicated on active determinations, which presupposes fully developed rational capacity with its set of experiences already attained, then it is reasonable to suppose the former is merely forms of consequential inclination, rather than a true system of morality, which is just as reasonably supposed to incorporate a form of antecedent obligation that a psychologically incomplete rationality cannot abide.
———————-
That which is subject to individual particulars is little to nothing more than an unhelpful distraction during moral discourse. That which is true of everyone lends itself to being a rock-solid dependable foundation.
Absolutely. Now all that’s required is a logically and experientially verifiable reduction to that which serves as a rock-solid dependable foundation which is true of everyone. I shall submit, there are but two.Quoting creativesoul
Morality. (The human constituency) All humans follow one (the human activity)
, is one. May we agree reason is the other? Reason the human constituency first, reason the human natural activity second.
, and that's precisely why it is obvious that, contra your one-dimensional view, 'life and death' moral dispositions are not anything like mere personal preferences.
What in the world would the argument be for this claim:
Iff moral stance M is prevalent to at least r extent (I don't know just how prevalent it has to be in your view, hence the variable), then moral stance M is not anything like a mere personal preference.
?
Terrapin StationMarch 21, 2019 at 13:43#2672340 likes
Why are human emotional responses so frequently characterised as mere preferences? Why can't they be, in the context of morality, profound and heartfelt passionate dispositions?
Exactly. There's a weird bias against things that are mental phenomena, where the bias has it that something is far less valuable, worthwhile, worth talking about, etc. if that's the case.
Given how important love is to most of humanity, you'd expect this bias to lead to people claiming that love can't be just a mental phenomenon--and maybe some folks do claim that, I don't know.
Terrapin StationMarch 21, 2019 at 13:51#2672380 likes
Morality. All humans follow one after (mostly)adopting their first world-view via language acquisition.
In my view it doesn't at all depend on language-acquisition. A baby, from the start, is going to be okay versus not be okay with some things that you do to it, and that's all that morality is--those sorts of dispositions. It takes a bit more time/development for the baby to extend those reactions to behavior not directly involving itself--in other words, it takes a bit more time for empathy to develop, but it doesn't take very long, and it certainly precedes language acquisition.
You have your tag-line, "reason the slave of the passions." Beyond that, not so much. Why don't you put your sling-shot away and take a little time and make all this clear, including what your tag-line means.
In my view, reason is the slave of reason, nothing else, and not a slave either, but a partner.
If you know why Hume said that, then you'll know why I said that. You are unfamiliar with Hume, I take it? There are some good online resources to help you understand what his point was. Otherwise, why do we need to start from scratch as if you have no background knowledge, or as though you can't get yourself up to speed?
As for your view, good for you, but what are your arguments against Hume?
The general theme of your series of comments seems to focus on the pre-rational or early rational chronology of moral agency. If such chronology is more reactive to outside influence from which experiences are attained, yet moral philosophy in and of itself is predicated on active determinations, which presupposes fully developed rational capacity with its set of experiences already attained, then it is reasonable to suppose the former is merely forms of consequential inclination, rather than a true system of morality, which is just as reasonably supposed to incorporate a form of antecedent obligation that a psychologically incomplete rationality cannot abide.
Indeed. Moral agency requires thinking about thought/belief. A language-less creature cannot do this. I'm after what grounds all morality in order to compare it with conventional moral discourse.
Hume's notion of passions and reason fails to draw and maintain the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. Reason can change one's passions. Therefore, it is not a slave to one's passions.
Terrapin StationMarch 21, 2019 at 16:13#2672640 likes
I'm after what grounds all morality in order to compare it with conventional moral discourse.
Unless you bring it with you, other than my brief and scattered remarks, and perhaps not even then, you won’t find what you’re after here. People are too bound up in projecting outward to demonstrate, rather than retreating inward to discover, those grounds.
But likely you would not consent to murder because murder is not a good thing.
Again, you've completely lost me here. I don't consent to be murdered because I don't want to be murdered. I like my life and I don't want it to end. I can't say the goodness or badness of the thing itself really enters into it.
Do you accept as meaningful the proposition that something - anything - is. X is. This table here is. Relative? Depends on how I feel about it? What do you say?
Yes. As I've said before. As far as I'm concerned, there are two types of propositions that (or two ways of looking at the same proposition). In the first one might say "Dogs exist" and look at it linguistically. In this sense the statement is made true by agreement. If most people say dogs exist, then dogs exist. If they say it of unicorns and you can't find any, then you're just using "exist" wrongly.
But the other way of looking at a proposition such a "x is", is to see what verifying behaviour is associated with treating x as if it is.
But I can't make sense of a proposition such as "murder is wrong" in either of those senses. I've explained why to Rank above, so if you don't mind I'll refer you to that, it's only a couple of posts above.
But likely you would not consent to murder because murder is not a good thing. And most people would reason it out that way.
It is first and foremost a matter of moral feelings. If most people felt differently about it, then they would reason differently about it. Perhaps now you can see why reason is the slave of the passions. But I doubt it. You seem to have made your mind up to argue against it no matter what. For you, reason [i]simply must[/I] play a much more vital role, or else [I]all is lost![/I] Really, this has more to do with psychology than philosophy. You're actually not being reasonable at all, except perhaps in a more superficial sense. Underneath the visard, you're being emotional and alarmist. That has been quite clear from the start, actually. Clear to me at least. The first step for yourself and others who match your psychological profile is to come to the realisation that all will not be lost.
Why are human emotional responses so frequently characterised as mere preferences? Why can't they be, in the context of morality, profound and heartfelt passionate dispositions?
— ChrisH
Exactly. There's a weird bias against things that are mental phenomena, where the bias has it that something is far less valuable, worthwhile, worth talking about, etc. if that's the case.
Given how important love is to most of humanity, you'd expect this bias to lead to people claiming that love can't be just a mental phenomenon--and maybe some folks do claim that, I don't know.
Hear, hear. How many times have we seen this? In how many discussions? And over and over again. Forgive me for being pessimistic, but it is hard not to be when you witness stuff like this.
This loaded language was what my very first objection was about. And "mere" preference is but one example of it in this discussion.
Reason can change one's passions. Therefore, it is not a slave to one's passions.
— creativesoul
Okay, go ahead and reason me out of my passionate belief that murder is wrong.
An exception negates the claim. If all reason were a slave to one's passions, then reason could not be used as a means to change one's passions, but it most certainly is. Therefore, reason is not always a slave to the passions...
Moreover...
The inherent issue with Hume(and he's not alone) is that his notion/conception of "passions" conflates all sorts of different things. Desires, wants, needs, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, etc. Reason is not distinct from any of these things. Reason is thinking about thought/belief. Thought/belief is chock full of emotional meaning, wants, needs, and desires...
I'm after what grounds all morality in order to compare it with conventional moral discourse.
— creativesoul
Unless you bring it with you, other than my brief and scattered remarks, and perhaps not even then, you won’t find what you’re after here. People are too bound up in projecting outward to demonstrate, rather than retreating inward to discover, those grounds.
Rhetoric is a sure sign that one's position/argument is sorely lacking. I'm no theist. That's a funny thing to say about someone like me... you clearly haven't read much of my writing.
I'm of the very strong belief that we can acquire knowledge of that which existed prior to our awareness and/or naming it.
People are too bound up in projecting outward to demonstrate, rather than retreating inward to discover, those grounds.
You know, while I am sympathetic to the above, I would like to note that no one can do that alone. No one. No how. No way.
It always take an other. We are interdependent social creatures by our very nature. No one makes a mistake on purpose. Everyone's thought/belief system(worldview) is self-contained. We cannot see our own shortcomings. That takes an other... along with a certain humility... and a bit of shared meaning of course.
There's a weird bias against things that are mental...
What's weird about it? The bias is rightfully justified given the historical accounts ranging from Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hume through modern day snake oil sales people, many of whom get paid quite handsomely for spouting rubbish...
Those accounts are bunk. The mental/physical distinction is bunk when it comes to taking adequate account of anything thought, believed, spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered. I'm biased against them as well, and yet on my view nothing is more important than having a good grasp upon what thought/belief is and how it works... If one gets that wrong, then they've gotten all sorts of other things wrong as a result.
Morality consists of and/or is codified thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
...commonality has no normative weight except for people who happen to be rah rah conformity.
This is interesting, to say the least. Did you come up with emotivism? Except for those who happen to be rah rah conformity, you say? Why should we equate what's right with what feels right, and vice versa?
:yum:
A little tongue-in-cheek...
:wink:
Haven't you ever taken an action that you thought/believed and/or strongly felt was good, right. and/or moral at the time only to later find out that you were sorely mistaken?
If so, I suggest you re-think the emotivism aspect of your position... clearly there's an issue.
And there is no exception to [i]Hume's[/I] claim that reason is the slave of the passions, as opposed to [i]your own[/I] claim, which only [I]thinks[/I] it is attacking Hume's claim.
If the passion changes, then reason follows like a slave. If you could somehow succeed in changing my passionate belief that murder is wrong, even though that is practically impossible, reason would then do the bidding of my newfound passion like an obedient slave.
His point was not that passions can never change under any circumstances, including being reasoned with, although it is certainly true of innumerable cases that reason is weak or powerless. Reason is, and remains, a slave to the passions. It is our passions which are primary, as you tacitly acknowledge with your own failed attempt to attack Hume, since you tacitly acknowledge that it is the passions which we must get through to in order to have any hope of altering a moral judgement.
Desires, wants, needs, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, etc. Reason is not distinct from any of these things. Reason is thinking about thought/belief. Thought/belief is chock full of emotional meaning, wants, needs, and desires...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason
VagabondSpectreMarch 22, 2019 at 06:40#2674910 likes
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing here. My point was that merely "saving lives" cannot be presumed to be a goal above all others, such that any technology or lifestyle change which brings about this goal can be given objective superiority over one's that do less well in this regard. People have goals other than staying alive for as long as possible.
Im not, in any sense suggesting that society as a whole has a duty to make everyone happy, but I think we're really straying too far from our objective common ground when we start deciding that someone's happiness is not 'good enough' type of happiness. Yes, I personally think that getting your own way shouldn't be something that always makes you happy. I personally feel that some of the things people claim to want are 'ridiculous'. But I have absolutely no grounds whatsoever to tell them that they are objectively wrong to feel that way.
My points was just to stress that even given a specific subjective feeling (pertaining to the inherent virtue of a given action, for instance) reason and evidence might still be of some persuasive and bias-escaping use (re: internal values consistency and consistency with foreseeable outcomes). All I'm really saying is that in some cases even when people make a direct appeal to feelings, we can still sometimes persuasively call a kind of bull-shit. I'm thinking of cases of naive risk-taking or naive risk avoidance. Some extreme sports give their practitioners an incredible rush (the kind of rush that makes life more worthwhile), but some of those sports are also extremely deadly. Wing-suit gliding is one such dangerous sport, so much so that there are no established long-time professionals (their death rate is too high). At some relative level of risk for each individual it becomes statistically likely that the utility loss of their shortened lifespan outweighs the extra hedons they gain from doing the sport (average hours before death is a good way to conceptualize the overall risk and reward ratio).
I'm definitely not saying we should forbid people from practicing this sport (although we should probably regulate it for safety reasons); to forbid it would be naive risk avoidance. But in reality, for many people, they're not getting the kind of long term hedonic quality and quantity that they would otherwise get (because of the high risk of death)./ It's not an example with a clear-ish answer either way, but it helps to expose the kinds of reasonable considerations we can make against our own feelings and the feelings of others. There are probably wing-suiters out there who aren't actually aware of the statistical likelihood of accidental death (maybe not many). All it might take to persuade them is a bit of data.
The "treating them like children" comes from the archetypal scenario that comes to mind when we resign that we cannot reasonably persuade our way through specific emotional whims, which is that of a parent trying to correct the behavior of an emotional and rationally naive child. Sometimes we must inevitably differ due to strong and immovable emotions, but sometimes our emotions are downright misinformed, and can be dislodged with the right leverage.
I don't think I can point-point any remaining significant disagreement between us, if any at all. The major sources of our earlier disagreement seems to have been the result of semantic interpretation (and maybe a bit of epistemic optimism vs epistemic pessimism)
The more important point, to me, though, is that following intuition simply feels better and so automatically has a higher weight in those situations where the right course of action is being weighed merely on a preponderance of evidence.
In other cases, where the evidence is overwhelming, them yes, intuition can be cast aside.
I'm also interested in the value of intuition, and under my meta-ethical view its place is as a kind of intelligent decision maker (Ultimately a heuristic) that serves as a functional method-in-practice to help us make complicated decisions; emotion and feeling is its compass. Intuition can be entirely persuasive on the individual level, and in cases where intuitive knowledge is fundamentally malformed or mistaken, it can keep individuals in long-term patterns of behavior that are destructive toward their own moral goals and values.
The peculiar thing about intuition is that it is more directly the result of evolution and natural selection than are our conscious thoughts (intuition largely operates subconsciously (through evolution-endowed emotions), while the conscious mind is able to learn and react in real time to our immediate environments). Intuition is well equipped to keep us safe and help us reproduce across a range of typical environments that humans happened to find themselves in, in the distant past. Modernity being so very novel (a downright freak-show from an evolutionary stand-point), we're being faced with situations containing layers of complex relationships which human intuition has never before had to contend with. More than ever our actions can ripple across time and space in surprising ways which can affect other people, and the ramifications of the actions of others are harder than ever to escape by any means (pollution is a relevant example). No longer can we go our separate ways when we come to strong disagreement (which interestingly is the primary method of resolving severe conflicts among nomadic hunter-gatherers, obviously because the environment allowed for it). Our instinct for fight or flight actually poisons our conscious thought when it becomes a factor in situations for which both fight and flight are sub-optimal options. This view is why I approach the persuasive component of methods, frameworks, and arguments as so fundamentally important. The most universally persuasive argument becomes the most true in practice, and in terms of reaching our moral goals it becomes the most morally useful. The only caveat is that the persuasive vectors we choose must somehow we based in reason, observation, and evidence, else we're just a bunch of moral sophists who run the risk of succumbing to and promoting bad moral propositions.
Rhetoric is a sure sign that one's position/argument is sorely lacking.
No, rhetoric is a sure sign that one is a human being who's capable of expressing themselves in ways more diverse than making a series of barely connected assertions.
I'm of the very strong belief that we can acquire knowledge of that which existed prior to our awareness and/or naming it.
Aren't you?
I have no idea what this means. There seems to be a tendency on this site for people to just string words together without any thought given to what they effectively communicate. It's like reading the dictionary at random.
What on earth is "that which existed prior to our awareness and/or naming it."?
I think your point about optimism vs pessimism was very salient, perhaps explaining more about our disagreement than you even intended by it.
You talk about using reason to persuade people of both methods and perhaps moral values they might actually prefer if only they tried them (I hope I've paraphrased reasonably accurately). I agree with both objectives, but am more pessimistic than you about the likelihood that something as complex as reason will ever do such a job. Get a famous actor to say it, and you're on to a winner. Stand on your podium and make a reasoned argument and I'm afraid I rate your chances of success very low.
You talk about the good people of the scientific research establishments who work pretty hard to try and improve our lives. I just see the increasing "publish or perish" pressures, the financial influence of corporations increasing, the quality of teaching falling as workloads become increasingly untenable, a generation of students more interested in career climbing than curiosity...
We could go on... It doesn't seem to me that you've disagreed with the existence of any of the factors I've raised, and I certainly haven't disagreed with any you have. It just seems to be a matter of the weight we give them.
For me, your wing-suiters are a great example. Yes, maybe one or two might be unaware of the actual statistics and rational enough to change their minds if enlightened, but I'd stake my next paycheck on the fact that the motives of the vast majority can be explained (and indeed manipulated) better by basic psychology, than by reason.
Terrapin StationMarch 22, 2019 at 12:25#2675400 likes
Morality is codified rules of behaviour. Code is language.
(1) that would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.,
(2) it either ignores or gets wrong what meaning is/how meaning works,
and
(3) it ignores that someone feeling one way or the other about interpersonal behavior--assessments of permissibility, etc. is a unique phenomenon, contra for example behaving in a way that doesn't upset the apple cart in relation to other persons' behavior precipitated by their feelings about interpersonal behavior. In other words, there's an important difference between Joe feeling that it's wrong for him as a 40 year-old to have sex with eager 13 year-olds and Joe behaving in accordance with the prohibition of such sex because of the social repercussions of it should he engage in that activity and be found out.
Sure, but only to the extent of patience, re: when barking at the moon and Wiki have equal dialectical authority, I find myself with nothing to say.
————————-
If one gets that wrong, then they've gotten all sorts of other things wrong as a result.
Quite so. As we can see here........
“Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be deriv’d from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already prov’d, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.”
......passions presuppose morals, by Dave’s own words (THN, 3.1.1., 1739), and furthermore serve as causality for actions, so it is reasonable to suppose an underlying stratum with respect to the myriad styles of passion themselves. By relegating reason to an inactive participant in mental operations outside logic and scientific truths, and pissin’ all over the very idea of a priori knowledge, all he had left to work with was the various and sundry sentiments as an inherent objective reality in humans. Which is really a shame, because he did acknowledge that on which Kant built his entire tripartite critique, the distinction between speculative and practical metaphysics.
So close he was.....
“Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and cou’d explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings.” (THN, intro)
.......but missed by a Scottish country mile he did.
But we can’t blame anybody for operating under the cultural influences of his day, just as we all do, and his day was governed almost entirely by the amazing advances in science and technology, seen in the birth pangs of the British Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, all he had to work against was the foolishness of pure subjective idealism of the clergy. So...empiricism ruled the philosophical roost because everything having to do with anything had an empirical foundation.
Hume is credited in some pertinent literature for initiating a formal moral relativism. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that those who followed would seize on the following, yet drop out completely the very notion of the sentiment in general and particular forms of passion specifically, as the ground of morals. Becoming colloquially seen as a version of “Hume’s Guillotine” (not the is-ought kind) because it in effect chopped off his own philosophy: if a passion is accompanied by a false judgement, and if it isn’t passion that causes a false judgement, then that which does, absolutely must be the only thing left in what Hume calls “the disquisitions of all philosophy”........reason.
“....Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ’Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ’Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. A trivial good may, from certain circumstances, produce a desire superior to what arises from the greatest and most valuable enjoyment. (...) In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ’tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment....” (THN 2.2.3.3. 1740)
I understand modern moral philosophy frowns on that which came to be when there wasn’t such a thing even as a telephone, and barely an indoor toilet, where now some wannabe with letters after his name manufactures a solution for which he then needs to create a problem. (Sigh)
Terrapin StationMarch 22, 2019 at 13:40#2675590 likes
This is interesting, to say the least. Did you come up with emotivism? Except for those who happen to be rah rah conformity, you say? Why should we equate what's right with what feels right, and vice versa?
Have I ever suggested that any view should be adopted because it's popular?
You should adopt a view akin to emotivism because it's factually correct, it's what the world is like.
What's weird about it is that it's difficult to understand where anyone got the idea that there's something inherently inferior about mental phenomena. Especially since mental phenomena are so central to us as sentient beings. The need to place (almost) all phenomena outside of us, so that mentality is, at best, always just perception, is ridiculous. (And in fact, some people want to even do away with perception being mental, or want to do away with minds altogether.)
Haven't you ever taken an action that you thought/believed and/or strongly felt was good, right. and/or moral at the time only to later find out that you were sorely mistaken?
I've had different views at different times, sure. That's one thing that moral stances are relative to--time.
Terrapin StationMarch 22, 2019 at 14:03#2675640 likes
You talk about using reason to persuade people of both methods and perhaps moral values they might actually prefer if only they tried them
Reason is important in figuring out how to appeal to someone, but re the present topic, you have to know the moral stances that person already holds, especially their core/foundational stances. Particularly if you can find some apparent conflict with other stances they hold, you can try to persuade them to another stance via an appeal to consistency. That might not work, but it can, and does often enough, that it can be worth trying.
Reason is important in figuring out how to appeal to someone, but re the present topic, you have to know the moral stances that person already holds, especially their core/foundational stances. Particularly if you can find some apparent conflict with other stances they hold, you can try to persuade them to another stance via an appeal to consistency. That might not work, but it can, and does often enough, that it can be worth trying.
Maybe. I'm not too beholden to my negativity about the effectiveness of reason to want to dismiss the idea entirely, though I might have sounded that way.
My experience with trying to communicate conflict and inconsistencies within positions (moral or otherwise) has been none too dissimilar to that of this thread. What seems to me to be a clear and reasonable explanation of such is treated as if I were speaking Greek, and what I get in return, by way of rebuttal might as well be randomly selected words from a dictionary for all the sense they make. I'm afraid it's all made me perhaps a little too cynical about the whole process. It is, however, quite useful for honing one's own position, so I can't dismiss the whole thing.
As long as he wants to, then, we have no complaint."
Is that about right?
Why on earth would we have no complaint? I think I speak for all the relativists who've posted here in saying that we do not want to be murdered. The Lord wants to murder us, we do not want to be murdered. What is there not to get about that?
It would appear, then, that if the persons of the relativists on this thread were gathered away somewhere and informed that the lord of the castle intended to murder them, the best they could do is say, "Are you sure that he wants to?" And on being answered in the affirmative, would have to reply, "Ok, then, we just needed to know that he wants to. As long as he wants to, then, we have no complaint."
Is that about right?
Are you voluntarily trying to come across as stupid?
It would be possible to have a good discussion about this sort of stuff where the discussion isn't solely fueled by straw men and playing stupid.
What's weird about it is that it's difficult to understand where anyone got the idea that there's something inherently inferior about mental phenomena.
I think the idea is that mental phenomena are subject to bias and subjective limitations which weaken conclusions while if something can be confirmed seperate from those bias’s and subjective limitations then its a stronger conclusion.
Even if you disagree with that, is it really that strange?
Terrapin StationMarch 22, 2019 at 17:55#2676150 likes
I think the idea is that mental phenomena are subject to bias and subjective limitations which weaken conclusions while if something can be confirmed seperate from those bias’s and subjective limitations then its a stronger conclusion.
The whole notion that we'd be confirming everything independently of mentality is already the bias though.
In other words, if something exists only as mental phenomena, then all we need to confirm is that someone has whatever mental phenomenon. The notion that it should be (or needs to be or whatever) something additional is already the bias against mental phenomena.
You'd think that we'd simply want to peg what things really are, and not be biased against simple facts.
You'd think that we'd simply want to peg what things really are, and not be biased against simple facts.
Yeah, some people do, some care only to have a set of beliefs about the world which make them happy enough to get through the day. I can get on with either type. What happens in ethics though is we get a third type, the ones that want a stick to beat everyone else with. That's what the objectivists are looking for, and that I don't get on with at all.
Well, Im not sure why you are talking about “everything independently of mentality”, I may have missed parts(s) of the conversation I so rudely interjected myself into.
Anyway, you see an error or have disagreement...im just wondering why this particular error is strange to you? Why is it more weird than other errors you might take issue with?
Cuz its so obvious to you I take it? Its weird becuase its so simple to understand why its erroneous?
It is completely clear that Hume's is a theory built on certain presuppositions and a model. That is, given the model, then if this, then that.
All the good ones do that, to be sure, and we shouldn’t chastise them for wishing the integrity of their respective philosophies be maintained. Both Hume and Kant reminded the reader to stay within the theory in order to get the most out of it, and if the reader was sufficiently qualified to rebuke it....have at it.
Both even when so far as to say the only way to rebuke either theory was to change the definitions or rearrange the system itself. Egos at work, both of ‘em.
DingoJones;:Anyway, you see an error or have disagreement...im just wondering why this particular error is strange to you?
I think the bemusement stems from the fact that human emotional responses are dismissed so casually ("mere preferences"), in the context of morality, when emotional dispositions must surely be central to any test of 'well being' (or whatever you think is the purpose of morality).
I guess I just dont see it. Its exactly what you would expect from someone who thinks morality is somehow objective, just as you would expect someone who views morality as about feelings about things to NOT have this bias against mental phenomenon.
There is no reason why they should care, not one that I can make any sense of. I don't get why you think that means no one will. We do not only do that which we are compelled by reason to do.
You-all relativists apparently would choke before you might acknowledge it wrong, just plain wrong.
I think, whether or not the are conscious of it or not, the rope the relativists can not let go off, is a question of source. Like you, I tried to show on some moral questions there would be a near universal view. The only relativinist answer to this is an amazing coincidence, or pointing to some incredibly rare outlier and say, " see he doesn't think so, so it is relative". All other answers require a source outside the individual, a source for a common belief or thought. That is a hard rope to let go of for some.
any difficulty in comprehending, understanding, or applying that thought must be attributed to the reader
....it may do well to understand just what a passion, Hume style, really is:
“As all the perceptions of the mind may be divided into impressions and ideas, so the impressions admit of another division into original and secondary. (...) Original impressions or impressions of sensation are such as without any antecedent perception arise in the soul, from the constitution of the body, from the animal spirits, or from the application of objects to the external organs. Secondary, or reflective impressions are such as proceed from some of these original ones, either immediately or by the interposition of its idea. Of the first kind are all the impressions of the senses, and all bodily pains and pleasures: Of the second are the passions, and other emotions resembling them.”
While Hume relates passions to emotions, as we would do, he does not relate emotions to feelings as we would do. Hume calls them all perceptions of the mind, but modern thinkers do not attribute perception to anything but the senses. Kant removes emotions, or feelings in general, in his moral theory in order to get rid of passions and make room for practical reason alone, because (he says) no feeling allow us to arrive at a cognition, which any moral judgement must do.
Terrapin StationMarch 22, 2019 at 23:29#2677030 likes
hen it should be easy as pie for you to present something -
We're explained to you many times that the fact that moral stances are preference-based doesn't imply that one doesn't have preferences--that's pretty obvious, isn't it? They wouldn't be preferences otherwise.
If you're strictly focusing on "reasons that might persuade someone else," how in the world are you arriving at a notion that just in case something is an extramental fact and can be supported with non-personal reason(s), then other people have to be persuaded by it? You could only think something like that if you've been living in a bubble all your life.
Terrapin StationMarch 22, 2019 at 23:31#2677050 likes
Like you, I tried to show on some moral questions there would be a near universal view. The only relativinist answer to this is an amazing coincidence
I actually explained this to you a couple times already. It's no more a coincidence than the fact that we all have noses above our mouths. We don't have to say that noses above our mouths are NOT something that our bodies do, do we?
Terrapin StationMarch 22, 2019 at 23:32#2677060 likes
It's like we have to keep repeating the same kindergartenish explanations over and over in response to the same "Let's play stupid" straw men.
Philosophy can't be just about pretending to be learning disabled.
Reply to Terrapin Station as crazy as this possibility is, I might disagree with the nose analogy, even crazier, you could be wrong. It is possible. It does seem a tad ironic that the group who argue relative and subjective in regard to morality, act as if this particular view of morality is objectively true.
Would you accept the addition that they fail to acknowledge that once reason has been applied, then the product of that reason is a product of reason, not and no longer a mere "passion."
Does passion have anything to do with it? Sure, why not - it depends on a pretty thorough explication of "passion" though.
Maybe passion like milk, eggs, flour, sugar, yeast (and some other yummy ingredients). Correctly mixed and baked and iced and you have cake. From the ingredients, but no longer just the ingredients.
I think our passions (what we desire), impacts our thoughts, and ordering and evaluating our thoughts against our passions, and our values, and against the things we hold as true impact our reason, and our reason impacts what we desire, and so on and so on. And I can think of no way you could isolate any part of that system as being before the other. It all seems so interdependent to me.
But again, happy to call it human nature, or evolution, or what ever you like. It is as near a fact as I can think of, that on more then a handful of moral choices, nearly every human conscience on the planet would evaluate it the same. That is difficult to reconcile without allowing for some degree of objective morality on some issues.
I'm always amazed by the sheer amount of - apparently - unrecognized double standards underwriting your rhetorical drivel. A well-considered measure of rhetorical power is and always will be accompanied by an argument with the strongest possible justificatory ground. You wield the rhetoric. The argument remains unseen.
I cannot help your lack of understanding. If you have an argument of your own, I'll be glad to put it to the same tests that I use for determining the value of my own. If not, I doubt you'll receive much more of my attention. Some folk here know what I'm talking about. It's a reading comprehension thing, you might not understand.
Morality is codified rules of behaviour. Code is language.
— creativesoul
(1) that would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.,
(2) it either ignores or gets wrong what meaning is/how meaning works,
and
(3) it ignores that someone feeling one way or the other about interpersonal behavior--assessments of permissibility, etc. is a unique phenomenon, contra for example behaving in a way that doesn't upset the apple cart in relation to other persons' behavior precipitated by their feelings about interpersonal behavior. In other words, there's an important difference between Joe feeling that it's wrong for him as a 40 year-old to have sex with eager 13 year-olds and Joe behaving in accordance with the prohibition of such sex because of the social repercussions of it should he engage in that activity and be found out.
Non-sequiturs won't do here.
There's an argument. You are objecting to the primary premiss. The primary premiss is both true and verifiable. I'll have nothing more to do with this conversation unless your tack takes a 180.
The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.
The above is clearly false. It stands in direct conflict with everyday observable events. It may well be consistent, coherent, and/or otherwise lacking self-contradiction. It may well be a valid conclusion. It is false nonetheless. False conclusions cannot be arrived at by logical means/valid argument. Hume's argument is valid(I'm granting that without prejudice). Therefore, at least one of the premisses is false.
The argument supporting the objection is as follows: The rules of morality are written in and/or reported upon and/or taken account of with common language. All of them. There is no better place to 'look' for empirical evidence to be used to help us consider Hume's position on morality. The rules of morality are the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. The rules of morality have evolved over time. Written history will attest to this. This evolution is the result of people changing their minds about what counts as acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
Slavery. Reason changed minds all over the world. Thankfully.
The above conclusion is false.
Nice post. There's a number of different facets of understanding to be discussed. I have my own copy of the Enquiry. May be worth a reading group thread. Let some flies out of the bottle.
Moral agency is existentially dependent upon thinking about the rules of behaviour. The rules of behaviour are statements of thought/belief. Moral agency is what's happening when one is carefully considering what sorts of behaviours are good and what sorts of behaviours are not; what one ought do, and what one ought not, etc.
All observable and thus undeniable moral agency includes a creature which adopts, and thus must begin working from, it's initial worldview. The adoption of world-views replete with moral thought/belief is existentially dependent upon common language replete with codes of conduct.
To say that some moral propositions are apodeictic is not to say that the opposite is impossible of thought or action, but it is to say that the truth they express is certain. Not equivocal, Not a matter of mere opinion. Not a product of passion.
Yes, we know what apodeictic means. What we're missing is your argument for why moral position are such truths. You just keep re-stating your belief that they are with increasing incredulity. I'll start you off. Murder is universally and objectively wrong because...
It is as near a fact as I can think of, that on more then a handful of moral choices, nearly every human conscience on the planet would evaluate it the same. That is difficult to reconcile without allowing for some degree of objective morality on some issues.
Why? You've repeated this argument several times without answering the key question about it. If the vast majority of people evaluate the earth to be flat, or the vast majority of people evaluate black people to be of lesser worth than white people (both of which have definitely been the case in some closed communities), then do we have to accept those evaluations as objective truths. If not why is the majority opinion on murder different. All you've given me so far is that murder is a matter conscience (I think the worth of black people is a matter of conscience too, but we'll deal with that later). What you've not provided is your reason why being a matter of conscience suddenly make the majority belief into objective fact. If I argued that all 'purple apples could fly' and you retorted that apples can't fly, it would not be a suitable counter argument to simply point out that purple apples are different because they're purple. You'd expect an argument as to why being purple caused this difference.
So why does the fact that moral rules occur in the conscience mean that, unlike all other beliefs, what the majority think makes a belief into objective fact?
I cannot help your lack of understanding...Some folk here know what I'm talking about. It's a reading comprehension thing, you might not understand.
If the best you can manage is just to say that every counter-argument to your Delphic declarations is either a red-herring, a non-sequitur or the result of a failure in understanding then you might as well not bother writing anything. This is a philosophy discussion forum, not a podium from which to pronounce to your followers. Pathetic.
If the best you can manage is just to say that every counter-argument to your Delphic declarations is either a red-herring, a non-sequitur or the result of a failure in understanding then you might as well not bother writing anything. This is a philosophy discussion forum, not a podium from which to pronounce to your followers. Pathetic.
Philosophy discussions include calling out fallacious reasoning when and where it happens. It is happening here and now. The best I can do is call it out. An astute reader will notice the sheer lack of valid rebuttal coming from folks like you.
Do you have a valid counterargument? Do you have a valid argument? We all know you are rhetorically talented. Rhetoric alone doesn't cut it. Shut up and learn.
Philosophy discussions include calling out fallacious reasoning when and where it happens.
So. I'm arguing with your approach of presuming that because you think it is fallacious, it is therefore fallacious and no further argument is required. Its unpleasantly arrogant.
No, you can provide reasoning as to why you think it is fallacious. Do you really think that responding to an entire post with "Non-sequiturs won't do here" followed by a bare assertion that what you said is true, is a quality philosophical argument?
Arrogant and rude, who the hell do you think you are that you can tell others to shut up and learn as if we were your students? I thought this thread had become unpleasantly ad hominem on a number of occasions before but it has managed to at least return to the actual arguments. If all you want to do is declare your edicts and tell your interlocutors to "shut up and learn" then you have no place on a philosophy forum.
Why? You've repeated this argument several times without answering the key question about it. If the vast majority of people evaluate the earth to be flat, or the vast majority of people evaluate black people to be of lesser worth than white people (both of which have definitely been the case in some closed communities), then do we have to accept those evaluations as objective truths. If not why is the majority opinion on murder different. All you've given me so far is that murder is a matter conscience (I think the worth of black people is a matter of conscience too, but we'll deal with that later). What you've not provided is your reason why being a matter of conscience suddenly make the majority belief into objective fact. If I argued that all 'purple apples could fly' and you retorted that apples can't fly, it would not be a suitable counter argument to simply point out that purple apples are different because they're purple. You'd expect an argument as to why being purple caused this difference.
So why does the fact that moral rules occur in the conscience mean that, unlike all other beliefs, what the majority think makes a belief into objective fact?
You can't make an argument by exception to a point I acknowledge at the outset is not for all, but for some judgments. Comparing judgments about the nature of physical things to moral judgments is a category error. One has nothing to do with the other. Let me break down my argument and you tell me what part is false.
P1 - such a thing as human conscience exists ( please no semantic "exists" arguments)
P2 - I propose that on some moral judgments, an overwhelming number of human consciences would have the same moral judgment.
Conclusion: Some moral judgments are for all practical purpose appear to be objectively true or false regardless of person, culture, time, or place.
What I have been asking for, which has not been answered yet, is how moral relativism explains this phenomenon. Lots of you have typed lots of stuff after I raise this point, none of it in anyway is close to answer.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 12:20#2678030 likes
Gosh, I never thought of that! Imagine that: there are preferences, and, what they are, are preferences. I'm glad to have that information! Move on.
Yet you and others continually suppose that per relativist ethics, when an individual is confronted with a different moral stance than their own, they will suddenly be incapable of having or expressing a preference. So how do we explain your cognitive difficulties here?
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. The fact that "an overwhelming number of human consciences would have the same moral judgment." does not automatically lead to "Some moral judgments are for all practical purpose appear to be objectively true or false regardless of person, culture, time, or place."
This is exactly why I asked you about what you think makes conscience special in this regard.
We've been through all this before, so let's try not to repeat ourselves.
You say "because some x (human conscience) results in some y (the conclusion/feeling that murder is wrong) the majority of the time, we can take it as objective fact that y is true.
I say that if we apply that logic to other conclusions/feelings which the majority hold, it leads to unsavory conclusions (such as that black people are inferior).
You say it's different because the conclusions resulting from conscience are not the same as other conclusions.
I say, I agree, but like with my example of purple apples, simply because they're not the same doesn't mean the dissimilar thing has the properties you claim it has.
So, one more time. Why does the fact that human conscience leads to these conclusions mean that we can treat the majority conclusion as objective fact, whereas with other types of conclusion (such as that black people are inferior) we do not treat the majority view as objective fact.
I understand the two are different, so please don't just repeat that, I'm asking you why that difference has the effect you're claiming it has.
Reply to Isaac Talking past each other, I say some degree of objective morality is a better explanation of near unanimous moral judgments on some issues than relative morality.
What I keep asking for, and have not seen yet is how this is explained by relative morality. You all keep telling me I am wrong, without any explanation how moral relativism addresses this.
Someone please make a coherent argument how moral relativism explains that near every human being on the planet would think torturing babies for amusement is morally wrong.
on more then a handful of moral choices, nearly every human conscience on the planet would evaluate it the same.
If this is the case, and given the choice of deciding whether or not, e.g., is courage worthy of honor, which would seem to suffice for part of a handful of thoroughly objective considerations, it would have to be shown the choice is a moral choice, and, that conscience is responsible for its evaluation. Cases in which the considerations are reversed, yet still fulfil the criterion of objective consideration, re: is arbitrarily taking a human life good, it should be asked whether the choice is predicated on actually taking one, which is indeed a very moral choice, or witnessing the taking of one, which is merely an observation resulting in criticizing a choice without any knowledge whatsoever of its moral circumstance.
Obviously, there are agreements common to humanity in general. But morality is not found in agreements, that being no more than cultural suitability, sustainability, or simply allegiance, but rather, morality is always found in disagreements, and moral philosophy has to do with the reduction to the explanations for them. Its awful hard to say one is acting morally when in fact he acting as is expected of him, in which case his particular humanity (it is not honorable to prosecute a young Muslim American for learning to speak Farsi) couldn’t be distinguished from his general complicity (if you’re America you will speak English, dammit!!!)
If (iff) one thinks morality a fundamental, that is to say, a singular, constituent, human condition, it follows necessarily that objective morality is at best a categorical error and at worst self-contradictory.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 12:45#2678120 likes
It does seem a tad ironic that the group who argue relative and subjective in regard to morality, act as if this particular view of morality is objectively true.
You're probably reading "Morality is subjective" as me saying something other than "Morality is of bodies" in the sense that "Noses are of bodies," despite the fact that I've tried to correct that misunderstanding tens of times (if not hundreds in general on the board)
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 12:49#2678150 likes
Aren't non-sequiturs only pertinent to arguments? I wasn't forwarding an argument in what you quoted relative to this response. I was simply making some comments.
There's an argument. You are objecting to the primary premiss. The primary premiss is both true and verifiable.
I don't know what argument you're talking about there, but it must be obvious that I don't agree that the primary premise of whatever argument is true.
If this is the case, and given the choice of deciding whether or not, e.g., is courage worthy of honor, which would seem to suffice for part of a handful of thoroughly objective considerations, it would have to be shown the choice is a moral choice, and, that conscience is responsible for its evaluation. Cases in which the considerations are reversed, yet still fulfil the criterion of objective consideration, re: is arbitrarily taking a human life good, it should be asked whether the choice is predicated on actually taking one, which is indeed a very moral choice, or witnessing the taking of one, which is merely an observation resulting in criticizing a choice without any knowledge whatsoever of its moral circumstance.
Obviously, there are agreements common to humanity in general. But morality is not found in agreements, that being no more than cultural suitability, sustainability, or simply allegiance, but rather, morality is always found in disagreements, and moral philosophy has to do with the reduction to the explanations for them. Its awful hard to say one is acting morally when in fact he acting as is expected of him, in which case his particular humanity (it is not honorable to prosecute a young Muslim American for learning to speak Farsi) couldn’t be distinguished from his general complicity (if you’re America you will speak English, dammit!!!)
If (iff) one thinks morality a fundamental human condition, it follows necessarily that objective morality is at best a categorical error and at worst self-contradictory.
I don't see how any of that says anything that shows relative morality is a better explanation of near unanimous moral judgments on some issues than some degree of objective morality.
I want you all to leave your beer fueled smoke filled dorm room esoteric philosophy chat, and apply it.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 12:58#2678170 likes
I don't see how any of that says anything that shows relative morality is a better explanation of near unanimous moral judgments
Why do you believe that if something is a "product" of our bodies, then it would be inexplicable for that thing to be significantly similar from person to person?
You're probably reading "Morality is subjective" as me saying something other than "Morality is of bodies" in the sense that "Noses are of bodies," despite the fact that I've tried to correct that misunderstanding tens of times (if not hundreds in general on the board)
This point is nonsense.
I have given you all a challenge, show that relative morality is a better explanation than some degree of objective morality for the near universal moral judgments on some actions.
Someone please make a coherent argument how moral relativism explains that near every human being on the planet would think torturing babies for amusement is morally wrong.
It doesn't. Moral relativism explains how some humans do think torturing babies for fun is OK (by positing that there must therefore be no objective moral fact). Evolution is what explains why near every human being on the planet does think torturing babies for amusement is morally wrong (because it would be difficult to raise the next generation if we didn't).
Why must moral relativism explain what you want it to? Moral objectivism doesn't explain why most people have noses, but that isn't an argument against it.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 13:11#2678210 likes
I really wish you'd read it and remember it, though. That you and others won't is why I have to explain it tens, if not hundreds of times, and why I'll continue to have to do so.
I have given you all a challenge, show that relative morality is a better explanation than some degree of objective morality for the near universal moral judgments on some actions.
Here's a very simple reason why:
Under subjectivist morality, the only explanation that we need for near-universal moral judgments is that our bodies develop in similar ways--a notion that's quite uncontroversial for most things (otherwise medicine wouldn't work, we'd not be able to explain why almost everyone has ten fingers and ten toes, etc.).
Under objectivist morality, we need to both posit (1) that moral stances somehow occur independently of us, and (2) that we perceive them, cognize them, etc. significantly similarly, which we'd still only solve by positing that our bodies develop in similar ways (due to genetics, environmental influences, etc., just as above).
So per Occam's razor, subjectivist morality is the simpler approach; it doesn't posit unnecessary (and frankly unsupportable) entities. Objectivist morality has to posit the same thing that subjectivist morality posits (bodies thinking things, expressing moral stances, etc.), and it would have to explain commonality on that end via the same approach (bodies developing similarly, with similar abilities, etc., due to genetics, common environmental factors, etc.); but it posits things additional to that, too. The only way it could avoid doing this is by attempting to take bodies out of the equation, but I don't know how you'd do that and still talk about people agreeing on moral stances, people behaving morally, etc.
By the way, I'm saying "subjective" above, not "relative," because we keep using "relative" in contexts where that's not really what we're saying (and I really mean "we" there--I've done this many times, too, in the guise of going with the flow of the thread). Relative ethics/morality is broader than subjectivist ethics/morality (and not even necessarily overlapping with it). Relativists can be objectivists. They can believe that something occurs independently of persons. They'd just say that the thing in question can differ due to differing relations. All of that can be independent of persons on a relativist view. It's subjectivists who say that the thing in question is dependent on persons. Also, subjectivists are usually relativists (as I am), but they wouldn't have to be. A subjectivist could say that something depends on persons, but that it's invariable as such, and thus not relative at all.
An easy way to remember that relativists can be objectivists is to think of physics. Special and general relativity in physics aren't conventionally positing subjective phenomena. They're conventionally seen as claims about objective reality--ways that objective reality is relativistic.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 13:19#2678220 likes
What we still need to figure out, but you won't answer is why you believe that if something is a "product" of our bodies, then it would be inexplicable for that thing to be significantly similar from person to person.
Not to mention that you seem to be inconsistent in your belief about this, because you think that we all significantly similarly perceive objective moral stances . . . unless somehow you believe that perception is not of our bodies. But then how do you get to acknowledgement of objective moral stances, etc.? At some point I'd think you'd have to involve our bodies.
Although I’ve been burned by commenting to people to whom I’ve erroneously attributed philosophical maturity, I feel I’m on solid ground here. I’m almost positive you’ll never criticize me for failure to approve a thing, when all I had intended was to disapprove some other thing unrelated to it.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 13:58#2678370 likes
I can't help but think that some of this stems from misunderstandings--namely, believing that relativists and/or subjectivists are more or less saying that morality is wildly divergent from person to person, and that it's essentially arbitrary. But no one is actually claiming anything like that.
What I'm saying is that morality/moral stances are something that occurs in minds only (which I believe are brains functioning in particular ways). I'm saying that moral stances do not occur outside of minds. I'm not saying anything suggestive of moral stances being arbitrary, being necessarily widlly divergent, etc.
I'm essentially making a claim about the location of a phenomenon.
There are upshots to what I'm saying, upshots where it makes a difference if we're saying that something only occurs in brains functioning in mental ways versus elsewhere, but the core idea is that moral stances only occur in brains functioning in mental ways.
Reply to tim wood The encyclopaedia entry you linked to explains much of it. "His view is not, of course, that reason plays no role in the generation of action. His thesis is that reason [I]alone[/i] cannot move us to action; the impulse to act itself must come from passion. The doctrine that reason alone is merely the 'slave of the passions', i.e., that reason pursues knowledge of abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions' goals and provides no impulse of its own, is defended in the Treatise".
This, by the way, shows that @creativesoul didn't understand the claim that he was attempting to refute.
Now, what is your argument against this, assuming you have one?
You should adopt a view akin to emotivism because it's factually correct, it's what the world is like.
At least you're thinking about it properly, contrary to @Janus. Meta-ethics is about what the world is like with regards to morality. It is not about how the world ought to be. His point that our moral philosophy should aim towards a harmonious society completely misses the point, and he doesn't seem to realise that that is merely an expression of his own personal moral feelings on the matter, nothing more. It is but a projection.
Reply to tim wood Jesus H. Christ. No, that's certainly not about right. That's the same gross misunderstanding of moral relativism that I've been repeatedly correcting and demonstrating to be a result of bad logic. Unfortunately, you appear to be very far behind and stuck on the same basic error.
Reply to tim wood No, your reply is what's not reasonable. It is not at all reasonable to assume that absent objective morality, no one should complain about any attempts made by anyone to murder them. That's not just wrong, it's daft. If you genuinely want to understand why that is bad logic, then I suggest going over the responses in this discussion to the aptly named Rank Amateur.
Reply to tim wood You claim to have read the encyclopaedia article about Hume's moral philosophy, and particularly with regards to his famous quote that reason is the slave of the passions, which you even quoted in the very comment that I'm replying to, yet your comment suggests that you don't get it.
"If you deny reason..."
I don't. It has a role. A subservient role.
This discussion is not a discussion of equals. This discussion is a teacher-pupil sort of discussion, where Tim (nice, but...) is very much the pupil and myself and others are very much the teachers.
Reply to tim wood I didn't say that Kant is a joke, I said that his categorical imperative is a joke, because it is.
And yes, obviously murder is wrong in some sense, and that sense is the sense of wrong that is explained by moral relativism, not the sense of wrong which moral absolutism fails to properly explain and thus resorts to dogmatism and bad logic. Bad logic like your fallacious appeal to absurdity: "But murder is (absolutely) wrong! Superficially, and by my narrow judgement, the contrary seems absurd. Therefore the contrary is false". That seems to be your implicit logic.
Reply to Terrapin Station Tell me about it. It's bad enough that this discussion is teacher-pupil, but it is far worse when the pupils are bad pupils. Bad pupils repeat the same mistakes without learning from the teacher, and bad pupils are not intellectually honest. I have already effectively expelled one bad pupil for the latter, though he most definitely was a bad pupil for the first reason also.
Reply to creativesoul My argument consisted in showing that your premise, even if true, doesn't refute Hume's claim, only at best your misunderstanding of it. Your understanding of "reason is the slave of the passions" is about as good as your understanding of "meaning is use". And no, that isn't praise.
Feel free to try again, but philosophy is like shaving, and if you keep ending up with cuts all over your face, then that suggests that you're not good at shaving. You are no match for Hume. Not even remotely close.
Reply to Rank Amateur Two words: Ockham's razor. Moral relativism explains that in the way that a normal person would explain that, minus the additional unwarranted assumption of objective morality. We're human after all, as Terrapin keeps telling you. It is no more of a mystery than why lions tend to group together. Have you ever read about the moral philosophy of Nietzsche? If not, you really should look into it, particularly the term "herd morality". Herd-like behavior is not evidence of objective morality, so back to the drawing board you go.
I can't help but think that some of this stems from misunderstandings--namely, believing that relativists and/or subjectivists are more or less saying that morality is wildly divergent from person to person, and that it's essentially arbitrary. But no one is actually claiming anything like that.
What I'm saying is that morality/moral stances are something that occurs in minds only (which I believe are brains functioning in particular ways). I'm saying that moral stances do not occur outside of minds. I'm not saying anything suggestive of moral stances being arbitrary, being necessarily widlly divergent, etc.
I'm essentially making a claim about the location of a phenomenon.
There are upshots to what I'm saying, upshots where it makes a difference if we're saying that something only occurs in brains functioning in mental ways versus elsewhere, but the core idea is that moral stances only occur in brains functioning in mental ways.
I think I understand your point, let me try and paraphrase it back. The moral judgment we as individuals communicate, has an origin in our individual thoughts and reasoning on the issue. And since its origin is internal to each individual, all of them are unique individual judgments.
And there is no more reason to give then that for subjective morality, it is my thought and I am the origin of all my thoughts.
If I have that right, then I say poppy cock that it in anyway answers the question of why all these unique and self determined evaluations are nearly universal on some issues.
You want to brush that off, as well that is just the way we are made, like noses. But that is the entire crux of the issue. We all didn't independently decide we wanted noses and we would put them between our eyes. Something outside the individual decided that we would get a nose and where it would go.
The crux of the issue is source.
Call it evolution or human nature, but the reason there is near universal moral agreement on some issues is, there is some agency that is more universal than the individual that internally demands we have that view. We universally could no more disagree with on conscience on some points then individually decide where we would want to place our individual nose.
It is objective biology and outside individual human desire or judgment where our nose goes, and it is to a high degree outside individual thought and reason what our human conscience tell us is right or wrong about certain issues.
Someone please make a coherent argument how moral relativism explains that near every human being on the planet would think torturing babies for amusement is morally wrong.
— Rank Amateur
It doesn't. Moral relativism explains how some humans do think torturing babies for fun is OK (by positing that there must therefore be no objective moral fact). Evolution is what explains why near every human being on the planet does think torturing babies for amusement is morally wrong (because it would be difficult to raise the next generation if we didn't).
Why must moral relativism explain what you want it to? Moral objectivism doesn't explain why most people have noses, but that isn't an argument against it.
"It doesn't " is the best explanation so far
Is it really moral relativism or some form of mental illness that is a better explanation of why some incredibly small number of individuals would think baby torture for fun is morally permissible
evolution is what explains .....
I have said that exact thing, and we are in complete agreement - so by our very nature as it has evolved as species, we all hold near universal views on the morality of some issues - I call that highly objective, don't you?
“Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions”
.....he should have realized his own words suggest morals are antecedent to passions. And when combined with......
“a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ’tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment”
.....suggests an undefined chronology between an unreasonable passion and the false judgement that goes with it. Is the passion unreasonable because of the false judgement or is there a false judgement because the passion is unreasonable?
And another thing. Hume says what reason is good for, re: science and logic and other relational categories, where it has power and authority, “as it’s proper province is the world of ideas“, but “as the will always places us in that of realities” and “a passion is an original existence”, we are to suppose it is these disparities which prohibit reason from factoring into moral decisions.
If Hume had only recognized the duality of reason itself, the pure and the practical, Kant would have had nothing with which to set the world on fire. Or, more probably, he would have had to find something else with which to set the world on fire.
Reply to Rank Amateur You're trying and failing to argue against Ockham's razor. Your additional requirement - "And also, morality is objective!" - doesn't improve the explanation. It's not like DNA, it's like luminiferous aether.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 18:52#2678980 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station It's interesting that it has mostly been the case that those who understand your position agree with it, and those who don't understand it disagree with their own misunderstanding.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 19:11#2679020 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Same here, lol. Understanding the position is that key first step that some people here are failing on. They are getting way ahead of themselves. The moral of the story is: don't try to run before you can walk.
Reply to tim wood Yes, but obviously I have already considered and assessed the argument for why reason is a slave to the passions and judged it to be successful enough, hence my mentioning of the oft-quoted line to begin with. You have yet to put forward a superior alternative in my assessment. You have yet to put forward a greater reason for concluding the contrary, namely that reason is not a slave to the passions, whether semantic or otherwise.
And I steadfastly refuse to address what the Kantian in the background has said if he hasn't the decency to even speak to me. He who has the nerve to suggest that I lack philosophical maturity. I think they call that projection.
You understand that on my view it's biology that produces our moral stances, too, right?
I never argued this near universal agreement was not biological, I have said a few times said it could be evolved. It is just not a individually unique biology.
Lots of rhetoric on my challenge- just no reasonable answers
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 19:32#2679140 likes
I never argued this near universal agreement was not biological, I have said a few times said it could be evolved. It is just not a individually unique biology.
Re "individually unique" that's irrelevant to this discussion. (I have a view on that, but it has to do with nominalism, and we can leave that out of this discussion.)
"Individually unique" seems pertinent to something I wrote earlier today: "I can't help but think that some of this stems from misunderstandings--namely, believing that relativists and/or subjectivists are more or less saying that morality is wildly divergent from person to person, and that it's essentially arbitrary. But no one is actually claiming anything like that."
Reply to Rank Amateur Sometimes it is better to set tasks that help one to connect the dots themselves rather than simply spelling something out, don't you agree? Compare the following:
Light is electromagnetic radiation within a certain portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it appears to have wave-like properties. Therefore, luminiferous aether.
The world contains people who live meaningful lives, and who are capable of judging right from wrong. Therefore, God exists.
Lots of people have in common the judgement that murdering children is wrong. Humans are such that they tend to feel a certain way about it which leads to that conclusion. Therefore, objective morality.
s pertinent to something I wrote earlier today: "I can't help but think that some of this stems from misunderstandings--namely, believing that relativists and/or subjectivists are more or less saying that morality is wildly divergent from person to person, and that it's essentially arbitrary. But no one is actually claiming anything like that."
No I don’t you just have not come up with any reason why on some issues it is near universal. If you want to say we have all evolved as humans to feel that way, I will agree but that seems quite objective to me with the source being a shared human evolution.
Terrapin StationMarch 23, 2019 at 19:45#2679220 likes
you just have not come up with any reason why on some issues it is near universal.
The post I just linked you to explained it yet again. It's about the fifth or sixth time in this thread that I've explained it: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/267821
I will agree but that seems quite objective to me with the source being a shared human evolution.
Re this, for the umpteenth time, ALL that I'm saying by the term "subjective" is that we're referring to a mental phenomenon. We can just drop the terms "subjective/objective" and I can just say that "moral stances do not occur outside of persons thinking them." The reason that they think them is biological. Biology is as it is because of evolution and common environmental factors, which lead to near-universal agreement on some things.
Reply to tim wood You are having the same problem that Rank Amateur is having as a result of additional unwarranted assumptions which can be cut out with Ockham's razor. If we were to go through the motions in detail, we'd see much in common between us, such as we both feel strongly against murder, we both judge murder to be wrong, we both don't want to be murdered, we'd both complain for these reasons, and so on. The big difference is your additional unwarranted assumption which stands out like a sore thumb, and which I have the good judgement to reject.
You also have persistent problematic misunderstandings about the logical consequences of moral relativism which seem practically irresolvable for you, in spite of valiant efforts. I mean, look, we've reached [I]forty[/i] pages now, and you seem none the wiser. As I've said before, and of others, the real problem here seems psychological. You have a psychological problem with moral relativism, such that you simply must defeat it, no matter what.
we all hold near universal views on the morality of some issues - I call that highly objective, don't you?
Absolutely and fundamentally not, no. And I've already explained why.
We do not normally treat things most people feel as objective truth and with very good reason. It would make it at one time objectively true that black people are inferior, for example.
You've said thoughts arising from conscience are different, and I agree, they are different.
What you continue to avoid answering is why you think that difference causes us to consider majority thoughts on morality as objective truths when not only do we not do this for any other class of thought, but we take great pains to avoid doing so.
Under subjectivist morality, the only explanation that we need for near-universal moral judgments is that our bodies develop in similar ways--a notion that's quite uncontroversial for most things (otherwise medicine wouldn't work, we'd not be able to explain why almost everyone has ten fingers and ten toes, etc.).
I do not understand your link between our near general agreement agreement about some things, and our biological development. If you include some near universal evolutionary dispositions I am there. But I don't get the link between we all have a nose and 10 toes so we all think the same about a specific thing and it is subjective.
Can you give me the full logic of this link please.
What you continue to avoid answering is why you think that difference causes us to consider majority thoughts on morality as objective truths when not only do we not do this for any other class of thought, but we take great pains to avoid doing so.
I have never called this near universal moral judgment on some issues a "objective truth". I said it points to their is an objective moral judgment on some actions. Meaning there is some source of this judgment that is not relative or subjective to the person, the culture or the time.
Reply to Rank Amateur What don't you claim to understand this time? Or is this just another delaying tactic? If I understand it, then why don't you? He's saying that morality consists in preferences, and that preferences are a mental phenomenon, and that we're naturally predisposed to have certain preferences, which explains their prevalence. That is roughly analogous to saying that faces consist of facial features like a nose, and that facial features are bodily things, and that we're naturally predisposed to have a nose, which explains their prevalence.
I understand it because I have a certain level of intelligence. Just putting that out there.
Re this, for the umpteenth time, ALL that I'm saying by the term "subjective" is that we're referring to a mental phenomenon. We can just drop the terms "subjective/objective" and I can just say that "moral stances do not occur outside of persons thinking them." The reason that they think them is biological. Biology is as it is because of evolution and common environmental factors, which lead to near-universal agreement on some things.
Why, simply because it is a moral judgment, by an individual thought, makes that thought by definition subjective. People in that same mental phenomenon make a moral judgment, that the sorce of that thought is nearly universal, inherent in being human. Call it human nature or evolution- but if you agree such judgments exist they would seem to be much much more objective than subjective.
The biology of our brains is what he means, the chemistry of our minds. For example, empathy comes from our evolution. It shouldnt be controversial that empathy is at least related to “near universal” moral agreements. The 10 toes was part of an example about something else (medicine) besides morality where we make “near universal” judgements based on our bodies developing in certain ways.
Correct me if im wrong on that Terrapin.
Not only the ownership, or possession of it, but included is the principle of its preservation. If we have a truth the negation of which is impossible, we have a law. If we have a law, we have the ground of a moral philosophy. Because the law is a priori, it is neither relative nor objective. It is, instead, a good place to start.
Reply to DingoJones I understand the point, what has not been explained is the link that makes these judgments subjective by definition because a human being makes them. It is a source argument. And my point is there is either some source behind these near universal judgments that we all share, making such judgments objective. Or, are we all the individual source of all our own judgments, and it is just a matter of coincidence that on some issues all these individual mental actions the same.
Reply to Rank Amateur There is no more or less objective the way that I use the term. Something either is or isn't. And morality isn't. Nor is it universal. Near universal isn't universal, so if a moral judgement is only near universal, then it isn't universal. It helps to be logical. You should give it a try.
Why, simply because it is a moral judgment, by an individual thought, makes that thought by definition subjective.
This what subjective means. You referenced a thought...thats the domain of subjectivity. Morals are not found under rocks, or anywhere in the physical world. You find them in minds, and of course those minds manifest in the physical world, in this case they manifest as actions concerned with morality. The moral agreement you speak of doesnt make those notions of morality as happening somewhere else besides in our minds excepting as I described above as manifested in our world by humans. As usual when dubjectivity and objectivity are being used in discussion, the disagreement is almost (dare I say) illusiory, a matter of semantics and categories.
?Rank Amateur There is no more or less objective the way that I use the term. Something either is or isn't. And morality isn't. Nor is it universal. Near universal isn't universal, so if a moral judgement is near universal, then it isn't universal.
So exactly how many does it take in your world to shift it from objective to subjective 1 in 7.5 Billion, 10, 1000, 1%. ? Rare exceptions does not proof subjectivity.
I understand the point, what has not been explained is the link that makes these judgments subjective by definition because a human being makes them. It is a source argument. And my point is there is either some source behind these near universal judgments that we all share, making such judgments objective. Or, are we all the individual source of all our own judgments, and it is just a matter of coincidence that on some issues all these individual mental actions the same.
They are subjective because they are mental notions. Again, thats what the subjective realm is. No minds, no subjectivity.
Reply to Rank Amateur False dichotomy. It is not a coincidence that we have noses. An explanation has been given which doesn't fit your false dichotomy. You're just coming up with ways to reject it because you can't handle the truth. Morality must be objective and God must exist, right? Why even bother trying to be rational if that's how you're approaching this? Why even enter into philosophical discussion about these things?
you did not address the source of these judgments.
It actually has been addressed, I think whats tripping you up perhaps is that there is an interaction between objective stuff and subjective stuff. Draw a distinction between morality and moral acts. These happen in different domains so the source of moral judgements is seperate from the morality people live in accordance with. The latter are acts of morality, the objective manifestation of subjective judgements.
Not being obstinate or argumentative. Maybe just ignorant. I just don't see the logic in the biology argument, as defacto proof of subjective morality. Again it well could be my ignorance of the topic. But we just at a point now where we are just repeating the same thing. I'll do some reading on your position and see if I can get the logic.
Reply to Rank Amateur Objectivity is not a scale or quantitative. It is not a matter of popularity or prevalence. That has already been refuted with a reduction to the absurd about slavery and Flat Earth Theory, so you should concede the point. You are either making a category error or talking about something else. Universality is quantitative: it means all. But universal or near universal doesn't mean or logically imply objectivity. That is your fallacy.
And there is no need to prove the obvious subjectivity in moral matters. That is not controversial at all, and is accepted on both sides. But you have a massive burden to prove that morality is objective. Do not try to shift the burden again or you'll trigger my wrath. There are rules about this for a reason. You don't get to just assume something controversial and sit back whilst goading others to argue against it. That is dishonorable. It is immoral. It is a vice. Please don't be a bad pupil. Learn from our previous encounters. You should explicitly state that you're either unable or unwilling to meet your burden if that is the case. That would be the intellectually honest thing to do. That would be the right thing to do. I am very strict on things like this, because it is very important. Far more important than relatively petty complaints about tone or insults. You can call me a cunt, but don't dare break my rules about intellectual honesty, the burden of proof, remaining on point, and so on. That's a cardinal sin. And I hope the Kantian in the background is taking note, because this is what philosophical maturity looks like.
If one gets that(non and/or prelinguistic thought/belief) wrong, then they've gotten all sorts of other things wrong as a result.
— creativesoul
Quite so. As we can see here........
“Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be deriv’d from reason...
This presupposes that nothing and/or no things that has/have/had an influence on actions and affections can be derived using reason. As if these possibilities are mutually exclusive and/or incompatible with one another. That is a very dubious presupposition that quite simply does not correspond to that which happened yesterday, is happening today, and will most likely be happening again tomorrow..
Some political/financial powers have world-views that are so heavily laden with thinking about thought/belief that one could sink a ship with them. Those belief systems are operative and derived from thinking about thought/belief. Some people have tremendous power over other folks' lives and/or financial livelihood. Some of those people write the morality which not only governs lives, but also affects/effects an overwhelming number of the citizens living in the world.
That which influences actions and affections can be derived from reason. Hume's mistake is conflating simple, rudimentary, and/or basic thought/belief with the linguistically informed/ladened. He was not alone.
Reply to creativesoul [I]Your[/i] mistake is to not understand that when he talks about reason in passages like that, he means reason alone as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains. Pure reason, not reasoning about passions you have experienced. The latter only supports his point that reason is the slave of the passions, as the reasoning follows suit to the passions. The passions are master. If you want to win over the master, you appeal to him as directly as possible. Appealing to the slave won't do any good, except by relaying the message to the master.
Aren't non-sequiturs only pertinent to arguments? I wasn't forwarding an argument in what you quoted relative to this response. I was simply making some comments.
I'm confused then, I suppose. Did you not quote me and charge the excerpt with ignoring and/or neglect?
Yes, that actually happened.
Three charges of neglect. None true.
When I wrote "non-sequitur" I was drawing your attention to the situation at hand. None of those charges follow from my position. You quoted me, and then aimlessly opened fire. "Non sequitur" was not about your argument, it was about the fallaciousness of your inquiry.
Hume's notion of "passions" contradicts that which has happened everyday, and is still happening.
It leads to false conclusions; they do not square with fact. Validity is utterly inadequate for truth. A position can be very complex, very coherent/valid, and arrive at falsehood.
That's just the way it is. I'm not making it up. I'm just pointing it out.
Meaning there is some source of this judgment that is not relative or subjective to the person, the culture or the time.
Yes, maybe. What you're adding to that without due cause is that this 'source' is only the source of the majority. Why is it not also the source of the minority. What support do you have for the notion that the 'source' must deliver a single proposition? Why can this 'source' not hand out to most people the idea that murder is wrong, but to a small minority hand out the notion that murder is OK?
No problem. I too will have to duck out for a while because I'm afraid CS's writing makes me want to smash my phone and I can't really afford to do that.
Hume is wrong/mistaken because he's that which contradicts the corresponding existentially dependent thinking about thought/belief yesterday and/or today and/or tomorrow about that which is/isn't the prior to that which precedes language and/or naming.
That's just the way it is. The Oracle has spoken. Turns out that wisdom sounds a lot like gibberish.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 11:44#2681350 likes
I'm confused then, I suppose. Did you not quote me and charge the excerpt with ignoring and/or neglect?
Yes, that actually happened.
Three charges of neglect. None true.
When I wrote "non-sequitur" I was drawing your attention to the situation at hand. None of those charges follow from my position. You quoted me, and then aimlessly opened fire. "Non sequitur" was not about your argument, it was about the fallaciousness of your inquiry.
"Non sequitur" refers to something being stated in the context of an argument as if it follows--that is, as if it is valid, but it actually does not follow, it is not valid.
All you're saying really is that you disagree with me that "Morality is codified rules of behaviour. Code is language" "amounts to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc"--well, we should hope you disagree with that, otherwise you'd be forwarding stances more or less dishonestly, because you'd think that you're ignoring something but you'd not care.
Nevertheless, what you stated amounts to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 11:58#2681360 likes
I do not understand your link between our near general agreement agreement about some things, and our biological development.
Your brain is part of your biology. Your brain is as it is due to a combo of genetics (which have an evolutionary history) and environmental factors. From person to person, brains have a lot of similarities because of this.
Well, what it is to have mental phenomena is for a brain to be in a particular state.
I use the term "subjective" to denote mental phenomena.
If you include some near universal evolutionary dispositions I am there. But I don't get the link between we all have a nose and 10 toes so we all think the same about a specific thing and it is subjective.
The link is simply that your nose and fingers and brain are all part of your body. Your body is as it is due to genetics (with an evolutionary history again) and environment. Nature and nurture. Your brain, part of your biology, is what functions as a mind. The term I use for mental phenomena is "subjective." It's just another way of saying that we're refering to mental phenomena, and not other sorts of things that aren't mental phenomena.
People in that same mental phenomenon make a moral judgment, that the sorce of that thought is nearly universal, inherent in being human. Call it human nature or evolution- but if you agree such judgments exist they would seem to be much much more objective than subjective.
Since I'm calling mental phenomena "subjective" and I'm reserving "objective" for things that aren't mental phenomena, then if we're talking about people making a moral judgment as mental phenomena--we're saying that what it is to make a moral judgment is to be in a particular mental state, then even if 100% of everyone, throughout all of history, has that same exact moral judgment, because of how humans have evolutionarily developed, and that led to their brain working a particular way so that they all make that same moral judgment, then I'm calling that moral judgment "subjective," solely because/only because we're talking about mental phenomena, and "subjective" is a term I use to refer to mental phenomena.
It seems to me like I'm explaining this in a way that anyone should be able to understand (not necessarily agree with, but simply understand). But people are responding as if it's very difficult to understand for some reason. I don't know how to explain it so that it's simpler or more straightforward.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:07#2681380 likes
I understand the point, what has not been explained is the link that makes these judgments subjective by definition because a human being makes them. It is a source argument. And my point is there is either some source behind these near universal judgments that we all share, making such judgments objective. Or, are we all the individual source of all our own judgments, and it is just a matter of coincidence that on some issues all these individual mental actions the same.
You keep repeating this, and it's why I've used the analogies to things that should be less controversial.
Unless you think that we're not the sources of our noses, for example, you'd have to explain why the fact that we're the individual source of our own noses makes it a coincidence that there are such similarlties in them re placement, function, shape, etc.
If you think that we're not the sources of our noses, then you'd have to explain what you believe the source to be.
Part of the issue here might be confusion over whether we're talking about x as x--noses as noses, versus things that are prerequisites for x, preconditions for x, things that contribute to x being what it is, without actually being x itself. So, for example, genetics contributing to nose development, while the genetics in question aren't actually a nose.
I'm not going off on this tangent to be silly. I'm trying to understand what seems to be a perplexing viewpoint--the fact that you seem to think that if something is "of us"--it only occurs in or of our bodies, then it must be an odd coincidence that there would be any similarities in it.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:10#2681390 likes
The 10 toes was part of an example about something else (medicine) besides morality where we make “near universal” judgements based on our bodies developing in certain ways.
Correct me if im wrong on that Terrapin.
Not a judgment about. It's something that is a part of our body, that has a lot of similarities from body to body (almost everyone has 10 of them, etc.), but that we're not stumped about regarding how there can be such similarities if it's something that's simply a development of our bodies.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:12#2681410 likes
Since I'm calling mental phenomena "subjective" and I'm reserving "objective" for things that aren't mental phenomena, then if we're talking about people making a moral judgment as mental phenomena--we're saying that what it is to make a moral judgment is to be in a particular mental state, then even if 100% of everyone, throughout all of history, has that same exact moral judgment, because of how humans have evolutionarily developed, and that led to their brain working a particular way so that they all make that same moral judgment, then I'm calling that moral judgment "subjective," solely because/only because we're talking about mental phenomena, and "subjective" is a term I use to refer to mental phenomena.
This was clear, I understand. And just disagree. Which is fine.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:16#2681450 likes
So exactly how many does it take in your world to shift it from objective to subjective 1 in 7.5 Billion, 10, 1000, 1%. ? Rare exceptions does not proof subjectivity.
No number can do it. It's not a term about how common something is, or how universal it is. It's a term denoting whether something is a mental phenomenon or not. If 50 trillion people, always, for all time, in the past, now, and for all of the future, think exactly the same thing, it's still something they think. That's all I'm saying. It's something they think, and not something other than what they think.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:18#2681470 likes
Once you understand how the term is being used, the next step is to understand the logical upshots of whether we're only talking about a mental phenomenon or not.
The most important aspect of this is the belief that there's some significance to something being very common, being near-universal, aside from the fact that it's very common or near-universal.
We need to explore the belief that there's some other significance to it.
I see. I used “judgement” to try and put things in a way Rank would easier digest but if that twisted what you meant then apologies. It should teach me not to speak for others but it wont ;)
My definition of subjective morality is a moral judgment that has no inherent truth value. That the truth value of the statement, or the mental phenomena , is dependent on or subject to something else. It is not always true, it is only true if (fill in the blank)
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:46#2681560 likes
As I've said a number of times, I don't think the terms are important. I'm fine with dropping the terms "objective" and "subjective." I've suggested dropping them a number of times, including earlier in this thread.
So I'm just saying that moral judgments are things we think.
Do you agree with that?
And on my view, I don't believe that moral judgments (or whatever else we might want to call them--moral whatevers) occur, as moral judgments (whatevers) other than as things we think.
And then what matters are the upshots of the fact that moral judgments are things we think.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:49#2681600 likes
My definition of subjective morality is a moral judgment that has no inherent truth value. That the truth value of the statement, or the mental phenomena , is dependent on or subject to something else. It is not always true, it is only true if (fill in the blank)
Trying to avoid getting too much into truth theory, because my views on that are a big can of worms that require getting into a bunch of "technical" analytic philosophy stuff, we can just ask what it would amount to for something that exists only as a mental phenomenon to be "true"
As I've said a number of times, I don't think the terms are important. I'm fine with dropping the terms "objective" and "subjective." I've suggested dropping them a number of times, including earlier in this thread.
So I'm just saying that moral judgments are things we think.
Do you agree with that?
And on my view, I don't believe that moral judgments (or whatever else we might want to call them--moral whatevers) occur, as moral judgments (whatevers) other than as things we think.
And then what matters are the upshots of the fact that moral judgments are things we think.
There is nothing there to disagree with. But it just does not say anything of value about the utility of moral judgments
My definition of subjective morality is a moral judgment that has no inherent truth value. That the truth value of the statement, or the mental phenomena , is dependent on or subject to something else. It is not always true, it is only true if (fill in the blank)
That is most certainly an idiosyncratic way of viewing subjectivity, but it doesnt matter, just drop the term then.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 12:54#2681650 likes
There is nothing there to disagree with. But it just does not say anything of value about the utility of moral judgments
Well, so for value, I'd also say that that is only something we think.
Re utility, I'm not sure what you'd be looking for. My approach would typically be descriptive, but that may not do anything for you.
Re the upshots of something only being something we think, one of the important issues is whether we can get such a thing correct or not. If we say we can get something that's only mental correct, then we need to be able to say just how that would be the case.
“Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be deriv’d from reason....”
-Mww
[quote="creativesoul;268047"]This presupposes that nothing (...) that has/ (...) an influence on actions and affections can be derived using reason.
Yes, the keyword being affections, which Hume specifically names as “...perceptions of the mind...”. Thus, if reason cannot tell us of affections, it cannot tell us of the mind, which is, as Kant called it, “a wretched subterfuge”, strictly due to Hume’s rabid anti-rationalism. (CpR 1.3.45., 1788)
————————-
Hume's mistake is conflating simple, rudimentary, and/or basic thought/belief with the linguistically informed/ladened
Might this hold some relevance to your thought/belief characterization? I’m still working on it, how I might find something comparable in my own mind. (I still need to separate them; it’s my cognitive bias at work....sorry)
“....Certain statements have strong existential implications; we might say that they are 'ontologically loaded." There is a tendency to equate the making of these statements with the making of an ontological commitment. But to do so would be a mistake, one that has prompted Quine to devise a formula to help keep our tendency in check. Quine draws a distinction between linguistic facts and ontological attitudes. The fact is, as Russell and Quine have pointed out, that statements can be meaningful without referring to anything. A person can play with linguistic objects to his or her heart's content without embracing any ontology that might be said to be "included" or "inherent" in the objects. We can tell stories about Pegasus without committing ourselves to its existence. Of course, with certain linguistic entities, the ontological implication can be strong, and the game can be dangerous. These days, we have quite happily accepted the Russell-Quine doctrine, and do not see ontological commitments in statements employing certain linguistic entities. We now accept that we only commit ourselves when we specifically give the variable a value....”
(A. T. Nuyen, 1985)
The right or wrong of something like "Murder is bad" or "One should not murder" is a moral right/wrong, and it's identical to the preferences "Murder is bad" or "One should not murder." The grounds of determination is someone having those preferences.
Moral stances are preferences of interpersonal behavior, not just with respect to oneself. "No one should murder anyone" is a preference that many people have.
According to the philosophy of Terrapin, et al, the 20th century murders by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and a host of imitators are nothing whatsoever wrong in themselves. Apparently that's even a nonsensical idea.
The problem I have is that I have no idea how anything qualifies as 'wrong in itself' (i.e. wrong even if no one believed it was wrong)?
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 19:33#2682460 likes
the 20th century murders by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and a host of imitators are nothing whatsoever wrong in themselves. Apparently that's even a nonsensical idea.
I'm confused then, I suppose. Did you not quote me and charge the excerpt with ignoring and/or neglect?
Yes, that actually happened.
Three charges of neglect. None true.
When I wrote "non-sequitur" I was drawing your attention to the situation at hand. None of those charges follow from my position. You quoted me, and then aimlessly opened fire. "Non sequitur" was not about your argument, it was about the fallaciousness of your inquiry.
— creativesoul
"Non sequitur" refers to something being stated in the context of an argument as if it follows--that is, as if it is valid, but it actually does not follow, it is not valid.
All you're saying really is that you disagree with me that "Morality is codified rules of behaviour. Code is language" "amounts to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc"--well, we should hope you disagree with that, otherwise you'd be forwarding stances more or less dishonestly, because you'd think that you're ignoring something but you'd not care.
Nevertheless, what you stated amounts to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.
p1.Morality is the codified rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
p2.Codes consist of common language.
C1.Morality consists of common language.
p3.Common language is existentially dependent upon shared meaning.
C2.Morality is existentially dependent upon shared meaning.
Agree or disagree?
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 20:30#2682610 likes
Cool. From real world observation to the a priori reduction to a principle, hence the possibility of a law, is only good for something else, just as in logic, with just as much power. Can’t just stop there, though; gotta use that undeniability to build on, like the ownership of one’s life and what we can induce from that. Even so, anything new to think about can’t hurt.
“Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions”
.....he should have realized his own words suggest morals are antecedent to passions. And when combined with......
“a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ’tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment”
.....suggests an undefined chronology between an unreasonable passion and the false judgement that goes with it. Is the passion unreasonable because of the false judgement or is there a false judgement because the passion is unreasonable?
Yes. Hume worked from an utterly inadequate framework, including a sore lack of understanding existential dependency. Again. He was/is not alone.
The first premiss is both true and verifiable. How do you reconcile ignoring truth and/or holding a position that does not square with the way things are?
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 20:37#2682670 likes
The verification of what we're talking about when we are talking about morality is provided by how current and past convention used the term...
If you want to talk about something other than the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour, then I suggest that you quit using the term "morality" as a means for doing so. No one will know what you're on about.
Intellectual honesty starts with the ability to admit it when we're wrong.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 20:51#2682760 likes
The verification of what we're talking about when we are talking about morality is provided by how current and past convention used the term...
But I disagree with you that your definition covers the conventional usages of the term. That was just the point I made. It's exactly why I wrote, "(1) that would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.,"
There does not seem to be much reason to think that a single definition of morality will be applicable to all moral discussions. One reason for this is that “morality” seems to be used in two distinct broad senses: a descriptive sense and a normative sense. More particularly, the term “morality” can be used either descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior, or normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.
Two ways to use "morality". Both refer to codes of conduct.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 21:00#2682830 likes
Gert doesn't even define morality as narrowly as you defined it. I've already pointed that out.
Anyway, if he did, it would simply be a case of me not agreeing with Gert's definition, either.
A verification that some widespread, common phenomenon is exhaustively defined by x wouldn't be that some arbitrary person who has an academic background in the phenomenon has defined it as x.
I swear, sometimes I get the impression here that I'm talking with basement dwellers who think that reading a single web page--like an SEP page on something--makes them an expert in something they never experienced, even though they also quickly reveal that they aren't even really grokking the page about the stuff they otherwise have zero real world experience with.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 21:01#2682850 likes
Two ways to use "morality". Both refer to codes of conduct.
Are you asserting that it's necessary to agree with Gert, by the way?
Is this really how you do philosophy as a "creative soul"--you find someone who you can verify is a professional in the field, read what they said, then treat it like gospel that everyone has to agree with?
I wasn't saying anything merely rhetorical. I was hoping you'd address all of that. The goal is to get your noggin working a bit better. To really do philosophy you need to think critically about stuff. That's what I'm trying to kickstart.
Terrapin StationMarch 24, 2019 at 21:08#2682910 likes
"To learn the breadth of what 'morality' conventionally refers to, you read the SEP page on it, and then you're done. Just repeat/paraphrase what you read there, and that's all you need to do."
Reply to Terrapin Station It's weird that he seemed to have no idea of the correct use of "objective", and that he didn't use logic, as others have done, in order to see why that definition would fail. Facts are clearly objective, and facts clearly don't change based on popular belief. Our planet didn't change from being flat to being spherical in sync with popular belief about it.
Reply to tim wood But Tim, please try to understand you have a giant burden that we simply don't have, and a giant burden that you've utterly failed to even come close to meeting. Dogmatism simply does not cut the mustard. Participants in this discussion do not have a burden to support what is obvious and agreed upon by both sides. So we do not have a burden to support that we feel strongly against murder, judge it to be wrong, and so on. It is your additional claims which require support, and after 43 pages, you still haven't provided any logical support. Going back through this discussion, one will find fallacy after fallacy from your side. It is frankly an embarrassment.
Reply to tim wood Indeed! Overcoming the initial prejudice, the superficial sense of absurdity, is a step in the right direction. It's not absurd at all when you actually think about it. When you actually think about it, the alternative is absurd. With my meta-ethical position, I can still say that murder is wrong, and that it's true that murder is wrong, and make sense. That is an advantage over your meta-ethical position, which can do the first two, but is committed to nonsense, so although you can say it is true, if it amounts to nonsense, it can't be. Moral absolutism is simply nonsense, it seems. How would you even attempt to explain it? Bearing in mind that dogmatic assertion is not explanation. You wouldn't, for example, accept someone dogmatically asserting that God exists, would you? You'd demand an explanation in support of the assertion, or else rightly dismiss it.
Reply to tim wood It would be interesting, to say the least, to see you attempt to argue that I cannot condone murder without implicitly condoning my own murder, given that that is simply illogical, given that obviously I would just implicitly make an exception of myself. I predict that your argument would beg the question and contain at least one false premise.
If it goes something like this:
If the categorical imperative...
Then it will instantly fail for begging the question, because we most certainly are not all Kantians, and we most certainly do not all accept the categorical imperative, and Kant is most certainly not God, and his writings on the subject are most certainly not Biblical.
As to the right/wrong of it, it is, most simply, answered by the thing itself. That is, not as a matter of preference, desire, or inclination, nor even on mere abstract reasoning. It rests on the thing itself, properly understood.
This, in conjunction with your “my ownership of my life is absolute”, is the proof of the law serving the fundamental ground of moral interest. Murder, the thing itself, is properly understood as revoking the principle of ownership; some other rational agency has usurped the given right to exist. Revoking the ownership principle is logically equivalent to contradicting the law, and all contradictions are false if the affirmative is true. Therefore murder absolutely cannot be a positive moral interest to any rational agency, which makes yourself included explicit.
No objectivity, no relativity needed here, for it is absurd to consider any otherwise rationally competent agency would reject the ownership principle.
Reply to ChrisH Yes, he started talking about reason, not wrongness, but even then, wrong-according-to-the-categorical-imperative is clearly not wrong-in-itself. It's a good thing that there are people such as yourself with their eye on the ball.
Hume's mistake is conflating simple, rudimentary, and/or basic thought/belief with the linguistically informed/ladened
— creativesoul
Might this hold some relevance to your thought/belief characterization? I’m still working on it, how I might find something comparable in my own mind. (I still need to separate them; it’s my cognitive bias at work....sorry)
Yes. No apology necessary. The position I argue from/for is not a conventional one.
The very conceptions of 'pure reason' and 'passions' that Hume employs stem from a gross misunderstanding of what all thought/belief consists of and how it all works. The result is clear. His conclusions are false.
“....Certain statements have strong existential implications; we might say that they are 'ontologically loaded." There is a tendency to equate the making of these statements with the making of an ontological commitment. But to do so would be a mistake, one that has prompted Quine to devise a formula to help keep our tendency in check. Quine draws a distinction between linguistic facts and ontological attitudes. The fact is, as Russell and Quine have pointed out, that statements can be meaningful without referring to anything. A person can play with linguistic objects to his or her heart's content without embracing any ontology that might be said to be "included" or "inherent" in the objects. We can tell stories about Pegasus without committing ourselves to its existence. Of course, with certain linguistic entities, the ontological implication can be strong, and the game can be dangerous. These days, we have quite happily accepted the Russell-Quine doctrine, and do not see ontological commitments in statements employing certain linguistic entities. We now accept that we only commit ourselves when we specifically give the variable a value....”
(A. T. Nuyen, 1985)
I personally find the categorization of philosophical subject matters much more of a problem than not. Talking about "ontological implications" is to identify that which is relevant to our classification of certain kinds of thought/belief. It leads nowhere useful if those classifications are grounded upon an inherently inadequate notion of thought/belief.
If one cannot replace the namesake with it's referent and carry on, then one doesn't know what s/he is talking about.
All correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content.
What's the point of a few Kantian's agreeing amongst themselves? That's not much of a debate, is it? I'm still waiting for the impossible, namely for someone to make sense of the nonsense of murder being wrong in itself.
Reply to Mww Yes, the ham-fisted invocation of objectivity, understood as opposed to subjectivity, in the arguments of the moral relativists is a category error. Morality is obviously an inter-subjective phenomenon, and even in the sciences, the closest we can come to objectivity is inter-subjective consensus.
Agreed. I’ve yet to experience ontological conditionals as anything but complicating, rather than clarifying. I mean...whatever I’m talking about must already be somehow, and must already relate to what I’m talking about....or I wouldn’t have anything to talk about. AAARRRGGGGG!!!!!!
As to Hume, given that we understand things better nowadays, can we say he did the best with what he had to work with? Even without admitting that it only took 50 years to blow his whole scheme out of the water......still.....
Reply to tim wood You really should stop mischaracterising those you're debating. No one here is saying that nothing is wrong in the unqualified way that you just said it. I shouldn't have to point out that moral relativists and emotivists are not moral nihilists. We accept that there is right and wrong.
Which apparently you reserve unconditioned license to do. Or since everything is relative, agreement cannot have anything to do with things, because that would allow for something to be the case
Again, in my opinion the definition is too narrow, because it would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc. It's the case that people commonly refer to other things, too, by those terms. I'm not saying that we have to go with what folks explicitly have in mind regarding what they're referring to--especially because many people believe fictions, believe things that are incoherent, etc., and we want to talk about what's really going on, the phenomena that are actually occurring, but a definition of a term like this should be able to cover what most folks are functionally doing with the term in this regard. The suggested definition is far too narrow for that.
That it's not my view doesn't imply that I think there is something that is correct and incorrect for everything we can mention/talk about. I'm able to look at things a bit more nuanced than thinking that if one thing has a property, everything extant must have the same property. You should be able to do this, too, unless you think, for example, that ice cubes must be able to make toast just because a toaster can.
Reply to creativesoul No, it's Tim's, for one. That's where this stems from, as far as I can tell. See his comment on the previous page. He strongly suggested that the acts of Stalin and others like him were wrong in themselves, and that this is not nonsense. He has thus far failed to explain this. I rightly reject it as nonsense. Where do you stand on this?
Morality is obviously an inter-subjective phenomenon,
Are you saying anything different ontologically with "intersubjective" other than the fact that people can interact with each other behaviorally, including that they can utter agreements, they can cooperate, etc.?
In case you forgot, I am fine with inter-subjectivity.
I'm fine with it, too, depending on how we define it, but the definition I'm fine with doesn't amount to much, and the definition I'm fine with doesn't actually cover moral judgments qua judgments. Third-person observable behavioral stuff isn't identical to mental stuff. Judgments are incorrigibly mental stuff.
Reply to S If you are the kind of moral relativist who claims that moral truths are relative only to individuals' preferences, then you are not "fine with inter-subjectivity", despite the fact that you might lack the subtly to realize that.
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 00:52#2683940 likes
If you are the kind of moral relativist who claims that moral truths are relative only to individuals' preferences, then you are not "fine with inter-subjectivity", despite the fact that you might lack the subtly to realize that.
Again, it depends on what you're saying intersubjectivity amounts to, exactly.
I'm the sort of moral relativist who says that there are no moral truths, period. Subjective, intersubjective, objective, whatever. Truth value is a category error here.
Reply to Janus I'm not. I'm flexible in that regard as previously discussed and apparently forgotten. Relative to me, relative to you, relative to us, relative to society, government, religion, Kantianism, whatever. It's all relative. And it is all properly made sense of through moral feelings, otherwise it's merely illusory nonsense.
And obviously, inter-subjectivity is just a bunch of individual subjectivities grouped together with subjective elements in common. Nothing much to do with objectivity. Yes, obviously a whole bunch of us feel the same way about murder. What of it? And please don't bring up a harmonious society, as that misses the point.
All truths are only such insofar as they are based on inter-subjective agreement; and that goes for both scientific truths and moral truths. So, the universally agreed upon idea that murder, rape, torture and so on is wrong is a truth in the context of the inter-subjective agreement that it is such. individual preference doesn't come into it when it comes to such moral truths, any more than it does with science. The simple-minded demand for empirical evidence in the domain of moral thought is the category error.
Reply to S I haven't accused you of anything; I said "IF you are that kind of moral relativist". But really, it's so obviously trivially true that moral truths are relative to inter-subjective agreement, it makes me wonder what you have confusedly thought you have been arguing about so vehemently for all these pages. :gasp:
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 01:02#2684040 likes
All truths are only such insofar as they are based on inter-subjective agreement; and that goes for both scientific truths and moral truths. So, the universally agreed upon idea that murder, rape, torture and so on is wrong is a truth in the context of the inter-subjective agreement that it is such. individual preference doesn't come into it when it comes to such moral truths, any more than it does with science. The simple-minded demand for empirical evidence in the domain of moral thought is the category error.
Interesting to find someone who actually subscribes to a consensus theory of truth . . . interesting because it's rare. Rare because it's pretty clearly wacky, unless it's simply borne out of a passion for sociological phenomena at the expense of describing other phenomena.
Reply to Janus You said of something that it was "in the arguments of moral relativists". Who were you referring to? Two moral relativists here have rejected what you said.
And I'm most obviously arguing against anyone who is a moral objectivist or a moral absolutist, but it's not that simple. I also disagree with Terrapin over his noncognitivism, T Clark over cultural relativism, yourself and T Clark over individualism...
I'll argue with anyone who disagrees with me over anything.
He thinks if there's anything bad, it's only because they think so. Do you agree with Terrapin?
So is this trolling, or are you really dim enough to not even realize that I consider anything morally bad? One thing I might consider morally bad is continually trolling straw men.
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 01:09#2684080 likes
There's no sense of the word "opinion" that I use, or that's in common use, that I would say fits that. You could suggest a definition, though, I guess.
Reply to Terrapin Station What could truth be if not "truth for us"? The things that are true in human life are the things that all of us (the sensible ones at least) can agree upon. All truths are, in principle at least, relative in that sense and are thus fallible.
What else do you think truth could be? Are you wanting to propose that there are some absolute truths 'out there'? Perhaps there are, but what could they possibly be to us?
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 01:12#2684100 likes
There's no sense of the word "opinion" that I use, or that's in common use, that I would say fits that. You could suggest a definition, though, I guess.
Ah--maybe I have to take that back. Here's one supposedly common definition of "opinion:" "the beliefs or views of a large number or majority of people about a particular thing"
Given that definition, it would be very strange to say that one doesn't think that 2+2=4 is an opinion that people have.
Would you not be able to make sense of "It was true a moment ago that I thought of eating ice cream"?
The fact that it was true a moment ago involved no one else in any manner, and it couldn't have--since I didn't tell anyone what I thought at the time. Yet it still was true at that time.
On your view, you should not be able to make sense of that usage of "true."
Reply to Janus I strongly disagree here. It makes no sense to me not to be flexible enough to switch between a group context and an individual context. Wrong for them isn't necessarily wrong for me, and that clearly matters a lot, or wouldn't it matter if I was the only non-racist subject in a large group of subjects? Racism would be right, and my individual moral judgement irrelevant?
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 01:22#2684160 likes
A similar example is, "It is either true or false that one hour ago, you were thinking of airplanes. I want you to not tell anyone the answer, but think it to yourself, then write it down on this piece of paper that you do not show to anyone, and seal it in this envelope."
There is a truth value there, but one that we've designed so that no one else at all can corroborate, unless we unseal the envelope at some future time.
On a consensus view of truth, the above can't make sense. Yet it's a common sense in which truth value is used. So a consensus theory of truth winds up ignoring common usage of the term it's supposed to be defining.
Reply to Terrapin Station You believe it was true, but you could be mistaken. Obviously consensus can have no purchase in regard to some matters than can only be known to the individual. But again, this is a red herring in the context of discussing moral truth, and it is typical of you to introduce such weak analogies when you cannot come up with any cogent response.
I strongly disagree here. It makes no sense to me not to be flexible enough to switch between a group context and an individual context. Wrong for them isn't necessarily wrong for me, and that clearly matters a lot, or wouldn't it matter if I was the only non-racist subject in a large group of subjects?
It would be wrong for you to think that some moral claim is not wrong if everyone agrees that it is wrong. If you did you would be a sociopath and not fit for human society. In any case, if you are "switching to a group context" that means you are taking into account what the group thinks, so it cannot be a matter of mere personal preference, as tastes for certain kinds of foods are. You just don't want to admit that your moral dispositions are enculturated, and are nothing special.
Reply to tim wood I am very much [I]not[/i] missing the point. I am objecting to your deliberately misleading wording, and I will continue to do so. This has been a problem from the very start. Remember, "mere" preference? Remember, "destructive"? Well, guess what? "Nothing is wrong!" is on that same list. The last one should [I]always[/i] be clearly qualified in a discussion such as this, where [I]no one[/i] is a moral nihilist.
Reply to Terrapin Station This is nonsense. Of course people take the words of others to be true if they trust them. Obviously consensus, in terms of actually checking, can only operate where more than one person has access to what is being checked.
You're also ignoring the fact that your belief that you were thinking of some particular thing an hour ago is itself a relative truth insofar as it relies on your memory.
I'm not sure if Tim has used that term but I certainly have. What is your problem with it? It's use (by me at least) just denotes the fact that some kinds of moral relativists want to say to say that moral dispositions are nothing but personal preferences. And of course I haven't anywhere said that they are not also personal preferences; it is trivially true that they are.
Reply to Janus How would that work out in my example, then? I want you to actually try to show us where your logic leads. I am a sociopath for judging racism to be wrong, and my judgement is nothing special? Is that what you're suggesting? If you say that they're wrong, then that can only suggest individual moral relativism or moral objectivism, both of which you reject. Seems lose-lose for you. I have you trapped.
And obviously my judgement didn't come from my racist society. So again, you're trapped.
And omfg, please stop with the mere food preference bullshit. You're better than that, or so I thought.
Everyone doesn't think that racism is right, anyone who thinks about it will soon see that it is not. Surely you can do better than that.
This is a rather pathetic attempt to shift the argument away from the overarching moral principles that everyone does agree upon, so it is just another red herring. You simply don't want to admit that your view is inadequate and inconsistent with human experience. Your ego is getting in the way of your understanding and will ruin your philosophical development if you are not more careful.
Reply to Janus You can't change the thought experiment. Don't you know how these things work? In the thought experiment, everyone else in my society is a racist. That isn't so unbelievable given our history.
You aren't properly responding, because you don't have a leg to stand on, and you've begun to resort to name-calling and evasion, which is tantamount to throwing in the towel.
Janus's position has a lot going for it, so long as we completely ignore our history of slavery, genocide, extreme torture, racism, and severe oppression - all of which were commonly accepted and intersubjectively true amongst large groups at one time. If you were one of the individuals who judged against the herd, then you were just a sociopath, and nothing special. You can be written off as irrelevant. Morality is herd-morality! Or so bleats the sheep.
Reply to S People all generally agree that other human beings should be treated with care and respect. If there were a society whose members were all racist, it could only be on account of a shared belief that others who are not members of that society are less than human, and are hence not due the care and respect that humans would be.
So such a thing would be on account of poor reasoning (maybe bolstered by irrational fears) and nothing more; and it is consequently irrelevant to the argument. You're doing a Terrapin and trying to shift the argument because you can't win it in the relevant context.
Reply to S This is rubbish. There is no evidence that everyone ever agreed with the things you cited; and you are persisting with trying to shift the goalposts; which I am starting to see is typical with you. It's not good philosophy.
Reply to Janus To disagree with what I just said of history only suggests your own ignorance of history. I know quite a bit about history. I am about as obsessed with history as I am with philosophy.
And if you aren't disagreeing with what I said, but instead with something I didn't say, then you're missing the point. I recommend reviewing what I actually said. The thought experiment resembles our history to a certain degree, I didn't intend to suggest that it replicates it exactly. It doesn't need to. It isn't totally incomprehensible. It is a possible world scenario. But if you are petty enough to object to the "everyone else" part, then just swap it for "most others in my society". In the thought experiment, I am white, and so is everyone else in my village. I've never even seen anyone of a different skin colour in person. My culture is very much racist. My parents are racist. But I am not.
You'll probably just try to cheat by altering the thought experiment, which results in failure. Or you'll refuse to even engage it, which results in failure.
Reply to S Try using your brain with a bit of a sense for nuance for a change! Do you think the slaves agreed with slavery, those whose whole race was wiped out agreed with genocide, the oppressed agreed with oppression or those tortured agreed with torture?
Not to mention the rest of society; for example there is no evidence that anyone who was not an aristocrat agreed with slavery, and it is not even plausible that even all the aristocrats believed that slavery was a good thing.
In Australia, for example, the aboriginals were treated abominably, including often being summarily murdered, by the early settlers, and if you think that, at the time, everyone who was not an aboriginal would have agreed with that treatment, then you'd be wrong; there is documentary evidence that it was a contentious issue at the time.
And the issue that was contended was not whether or not it is right to murder humans, but rather whether or not aboriginals qualified as humans. So your attempt to shift the argument away from the overarching moral truths is misguided at best and disingenuous at worst.
Reply to Janus Try cutting out the petty insults and irrelevant personal attacks! The history was relevant to the extent that my thought experiment isn't totally incomprehensible. It is relatable on some level. It is a possible world scenario. It resembles periods of our history, though it obviously doesn't replicate them exactly, which is neither necessary nor was ever my intention. You've predictably failed by either refusing to engage it or by adding elements to the thought experiment that aren't in the set up of it.
You're ridiculously blinkered to the "everyone else" bit. I have tried to resolve this problem. Please review what I've said. I often edit my posts too late, so things can be missed. I would apologise for that, but you're acting like a jerk, so an apology from me to you over anything at all is out of the question right now.
If you want a historical example of what I'm getting at, with plenty of evidence in support of it, read Hiter's Willing Executionors: Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Agreed. I’ve yet to experience ontological conditionals as anything but complicating, rather than clarifying. I mean...whatever I’m talking about must already be somehow, and must already relate to what I’m talking about....or I wouldn’t have anything to talk about. AAARRRGGGGG!!!!!!
What matters is existential dependency...
The distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief is imperative. All philosophical positions are existentially dependent upon the latter. Some of them take proper account of that which is not.
Reply to Janus Oh look, more name calling. What a surprise. There is no universally agreed upon. Do you even know what that means? And your criticism of the thought experiment completely misses the point. You would probably struggle with the trolley problem, the pleasure machine, Mary's room, p-zombies, brain in a vat, and any other thought experiment at all that differs in any way from the popular or predominant view of reality.
Reply to S It's rather rich that you, of all people, complain about others delivering insults! In any case, by all means carry on with your idiocy; don't let me stop you, I don't care either way.
Reply to Janus Don't worry, I'll be the better person and refuse to resort to name calling. On second thought, fuck it, it turns out that you're a bigger fool than I ever could have imagined. But it was good while it lasted.
Reply to Janus Yes, you did [I]very, very[/i] well. Have a [I]giant [/i] pat on the back. Your prize is mindless praise from everyone who is biased against me. Enjoy. Drink it up. But be careful not to choke.
Reply to S Well yes, of course everyone who disagrees with you must necessarily be both biased against you and mindless, even though the whole morality thing is nothing to do with reason but is merely a matter of personal preference. :rofl:
Reply to Janus It is widely known that the word "mere" carries a negative connotation. With Tim at least, that is but one article of potential evidence out of a whole catalogue of evidence upon which I've made my case that he is deliberately appealing to emotion through the exploitation of language. And also, when "mere" preference in moral matters is idiotically or deceptively compared with preferences relating to foodstuffs, then the fallacy is clear enough. It's right out of the sophist strategy manual: if you can't argue against a position properly, then try to make it superficially appear trivial.
Reply to Janus No wonder you're so confused. The allegation of bias and of mindlessness was not a moral judgement, it was an intellectual judgement. And I have very clearly said on multiple occasions that I don't think that morality has nothing to do with reason. What's worse is that you're not the only one to make that error. The problem is that it goes in one ear and right out the other.
Reply to S The allegation of bias is a moral judgement, but obviously the allegation of mindlessness is not unless you mean that the other is not using, as opposed to not having, a mind in which case it is a moral judgement. In any case, I don't believe it was an intellectually motivated judgement, but an emotionally motivated one.
If you want to claim it was an intellectual judgement, then set out your reasoning. What, according to you, does morality have to do with reason beyond giving reasons after the fact for your emotional preferences?
I mean, if your emotional responses are all that is required to justify your moral beliefs, why do you need to give reasons for them at all? And how, without appealing to inter-subjectively shared values could you possibly rationally justify your emotional responses?
Your arguments constantly take the form of more or less veiled insults and bare assertions; which makes you look very uncertain of your position, bombastic bluster notwithstanding.
Anyway, I'm probably wasting my time responding to you, because I have little confidence that you will engage in any discussion in good faith, but today it's not so bad since it rained here and I was not able to work on the current landscaping project. :smile:
Reply to Janus It was obviously a judgement relating to the intellect, rather than to morality, even if I allowed my emotions to cloud my judgement, as you suggest. Why should I have to defend the obvious? Clearly, given my wording, I wasn't judging him to be immoral. I made a judgement about bias and about mindlessness, and obviously the latter wasn't intended to be taken literally, which would be a silly way to interpret it.
If you want to know what I think about the role that reason has to play, then you should review what I've said already about that, rather than expecting me to repeat myself. I stand by my objection that I didn't claim, as you said, that reason has nothing to do with morality. The irony of your moving the goalposts, in spite of accusing me of doing that, has not been lost on me. Nor has your projection about insults, bombastic bluster, bare assertions and the like.
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 10:45#2685480 likes
You believe it was true, but you could be mistaken. Obviously consensus can have no purchase in regard to some matters than can only be known to the individual. But again, this is a red herring in the context of discussing moral truth, and it is typical of you to introduce such weak analogies when you cannot come up with any cogent response.
I just want to address one thing first: I wasn't introducing an analogy. I was explaining a common way that true/false are used that the consensus theory of truth can't make sense of. It's an objection to the consensus theory of truth based on there being phenomena that the theory is supposed to address that the theory can't make sense of.
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 10:56#2685550 likes
You believe it was true, but you could be mistaken
I know I shouldn't address more than one thing because the other will be overlooked, but I can't bypass this. As a response to my example of a common way to use the concept of truth, your response shows that even you, as someone forwarding a consensus theory of truth, do not actually use the word "true" to refer to a consensus.
How do we know this? Well, because saying "You believe it was true," in response to the example, would make absolutely no sense if you were referring to something that a consensus of people are doing. If the scenario is to write down whether something is true or false that only that individual can know, then obviously it's not a question of whether a consensus of people is doing/saying something.
The whole point of the example is to show that if "true" refers to something that a consensus is doing, then no sense can be made of "true" in the context I presented. But you seem to have made sense of it just fine. So you're not actually using "true," intuitively, to refer to something a consensus is doing.
Now maybe you're not actually forwarding a consensus theory of truth, but you're doing the old "A consensus that P is true makes it more likely that P is true," but in that case a consensus that P is true isn't identical to what it is for P to be true, so the fact that there's a consensus about some moral stance wouldn't amount to that moral stance being true by virtue of the consensus. In other words, what it would "mean" for a moral stance to be true wouldn't be identical to there being a consensus on the stance. What it would "mean" for a consensus to be true would have to be something aside from that. Well, what would it be aside from that?
All truths are only such insofar as they are based on inter-subjective agreement; and that goes for both scientific truths and moral truths.
If it be granted scientific truths, not as such but in themselves, are empirical, and moral truths, not as such but in themselves, are thought, we arrive at a distinction between the former truth as sufficient and the latter truth as necessary. The former from the principle of induction which can never suffice for a totality of possible conditions, any one un-met of which is possibly capable of falsifying a truth, and the latter from the principle of deduction which has the power of proof but not the availability of verifying a truth. Induction starts with observation and expands its conclusions into the world of objects in general; deduction starts with observation and reduces its conclusions into a singular object of the objects of the world in general.
A truth as such as it relates to inter-subjective agreement has to do with the direction of its dissemination, which is the opposite of its origination. Empirical truths are already extant in the world, merely being discovered, hence disseminated inward to the subjects, moral truths are extant in the subject, being determinations of will, and disseminated outward to like subjects. It follows that empirical truths are objective and the agreement with them is a condition of agreement with the state of affairs of the real world, and moral truths are subjective and agreeing with them is a condition of the state of affairs of the moral world, the qualitative difference being disagreement with the former is necessarily irrational because this kind of truth represents a fact, but disagreement with the latter is not necessarily irrational because this kind of truth merely represents an interest.
Therefore, a truth in itself has no need of inter-subjective agreement, whereas a truth as such, does.
I for one appreciate the inclusion of the qualifier “as such”, but you are aware of the catastrophic flaw in both our comments, right?
Reply to Terrapin Station He only calls matters which can only be known to the individual a red herring in the context of moral truth because he defines moral truth in accordance with herd-morality. But of course, morality isn't herd-morality. Herd-morality is just a morality, and it has no authority over my morality. I know my own moral truths.
In the thought experiment, I am white, and so is everyone else in my village. I've never even seen anyone of a different skin colour in person. My culture is very much racist. My parents are racist. But I am not.
I'm a monkey in a jungle. I've been raised by other monkeys just like me. I'm taught all about the others who are not like us. I learn how to talk and think about us and them. They are not to be admired. None of them. We do not like and/or respect others who are not like us. We do not know any of them either.
Reply to creativesoul No, wrong question. Off topic. Where did their moral judgement come from? From them. From their feelings. It is obviously not impossible to be a black sheep. It is obviously not impossible to have a different judgement from your parents or the prevailing judgement of the time and place.
Here we have yet again another position based upon a sore lack of understanding what thought/belief is and how it all works.
All world-views are adopted via language acquisition. Those include morality. Racist morality is adopted. During the initial adoption process(language acquisition), one cannot doubt what they're being taught. Doubt is belief based, and one's first worldview is the ground of doubt. A child borne into a village/culture where everyone is racist cannot doubt what they're being taught.
Doubting that requires being exposed to something different. Sapientia's hypothetical is impossible, despite his certainty.
Reply to creativesoul For a start, they're two different things: thought and belief. But no one really cares about your pet tangent. Most of us are sick to death of it by now.
And no, it isn't impossible, and the thought experiment doesn't preclude something as vague and infinitely broad as exposure to "something different", anyway. As usual, you're criticising something you don't properly understand.
Empirical truths are already extant in the world, merely being discovered, hence disseminated inward to the subjects, moral truths are extant in the subject, being determinations of will, and disseminated outward to like subjects.
I would not put it quite like that. I would say that empirical truths are real relational potentialities that become actualized (discovered) in our embedded experience within the world. Likewise moral truths are real relational potentialities that become actualized in our embedded experience within community.
Neither, as truths, are merely matters of personal opinion or preference.
disagreement with the latter is not necessarily irrational because this kind of truth merely represents an interest.
When it comes to the universal moral truths, I think disagreement is irrational. For example I don't believe it is possible to rationally disagree with the moral truths that murder, rape, torture and so on are wrong. Can you think of any examples of disagreements with those moral truths that you would consider to be rational?
Therefore, a truth in itself has no need of inter-subjective agreement, whereas a truth as such, does.
I for one appreciate the inclusion of the qualifier “as such”, but you are aware of the catastrophic flaw in both our comments, right?
We have a notion of truth in itself, just as we have notions of actuality in itself, things in themselves, and so on: basically noumena, but these 'truths' cannot be anything for us, all our truths are relative to our own experience; they are relational, not absolute.
I'm interested to hear more about the 'catastrophic flaw" though.
I don't understand what you're getting at here. I'd have thought a moral stance requires explanation (reasons) regardless of what they're based on.
Why would my moral stance on something not require explanation if it were based on an emotional response?
If moral stances are merely personal emotional responses then they would have no need of inter-subjective justification, and if they are in no need of inter-subjective justification then they are in no need of explanation.
Of course I don't believe moral stances are merely personal emotional responses or preferences. They are inter-subjectively acquired, sustained and justified, so they are relative not merely to individual subjects.
Terrapin StationMarch 25, 2019 at 20:35#2687660 likes
Of course I don't believe moral stances are merely personal emotional responses or preferences. They are inter-subjectively acquired, sustained and justified, so they are relative not merely to individual subjects.
The idea of a moral stance that has no meaning or judgment attached to it is incoherent.
When it comes to the universal moral truths, I think disagreement is irrational.
Agreed, in principle. Disagreement would be irrational iff universal moral truths are established by means of an antecedent law. I presented Tim with a logical proof for establishing the universality of murder being immoral, so I think each instance of such establishment would require a proof of its own. But that being given, disagreement would indeed be irrational.
——————-
Awww......I was hoping you’d offer a possibility for the flaw. But never mind......we both gave all sortsa stuff about truth, but neither of us reduced the concept to something relevant to the stuff we said. In other words, what is truth? Or, even better, is there any sense of truth at all, that would falsify the stuff we said.
I like your “notion of truth”, but doesn’t analytic philosophy demand more than a notion?
I’ll go first: truth is the non-contradiction of a conception with its object.
Doubting that requires being exposed to something different.
If this is indubitably the case, you’d have to either find or assume something different in order for the doubt necessary to counter the societal norm to manifest. You won’t be able to find it, because it wasn’t given, and if you assume it, you’re open to accusations of assuming the antecedent.
It should be the case that an offset for the norm is impossible, but you’ll never be granted a successful argument.
"I presented Tim with a logical proof for establishing the universality of murder being wrong...".
A logical proof! It doesn't establish anything unless it is logically sound. And likely, out of those of us who have already developed a meta-ethical position on such matters, only those of us who are already moral universalists on murder being wrong will accept that it's logically sound.
Reply to tim wood A universal moral truth would be a moral truth which is universal in some sense. Universal meaning of all. I don't think that is something which can be logically demonstrated, in any sense that I can think of. Sure, someone can string together a valid argument, but that's not too difficult. It seems that one would have to abandon the understanding of morality which makes the most sense in favour of a more problematic understanding which hasn't stood up to intellectual scrutiny. The debate has very much gone downhill in my assessment when there are just a small group of people agreeing amongst themselves with the dogmatic stance that any one who rejects the meta-ethics of moral universalism (at least in relation to something like murder) as unwarranted, is simply mistaken. I happen to feel very strongly against murder, but no matter how strongly I feel against it, or how strongly others feel against it, that isn't enough to support moral universalism. Where is the evidence? And no, not evidence that murder is wrong, which I think everyone in this discussion agrees on. But evidence that this is a universal moral truth. There is much talk, and much patting on the back, but little if any substance, it seems.
In the thought experiment, I am white, and so is everyone else in my village. I've never even seen anyone of a different skin colour in person. My culture is very much racist. My parents are racist. But I am not.
But what are we to make of the claims of you and Terrapin - he explicitly with you in explicit support - that neither of you can find anything at all wrong that any of the greater and more murderous monsters of the 20th century did.
Your wording is misleading. To claim that they couldn't 'find' anything wrong presumes in its expression that wrongness is something one could potentially find in a universal sense, yet that is the very point in question. This is just sophistry.
But because presumably Mao, Stalin, Hitler, et al didn't themselves think they were doing wrong, then apparently that's enough for S. and Terrapin.
More sophistry. "Enough" for what? Again, your language use deliberately implies that which is the matter in question, that there is some task of universal judgement to be done and that S and TS are satisfied they have completed that task. The meaningfulness of such a task is the very matter in question.
They didn't think it was wrong, therefore it isn't wrong.
No. This has been repeatedly explained to you and your refusal to acknowledge this is nothing but bad faith. To a relativist, 'wrong' is that which they feel is wrong, so it doesn't even make sense to say an action isn't wrong which they feel is wrong. Again you're simply presuming your world view is true and then showing how relativism doesn't work from that perspective. Well, obviously it doesn't, but it's the perspective that is in question.
As to the reason, that's been rehearsed here. In short form it's do unto others..., together with its sister, don't do unto others.... The forms of the golden rule.
And there's the idea that if a thing is a good, then it ought to be universalizable.
No problem. It is good for all people calked Jim (who live at 23 The Boulevard, born 23/01/1960) to commit murder. Would Jim the psychopath rationally want that rule be universalised? Yes.
Suppose I say, "The relativism of moral relativism is relative."
How do you handle that? Will you dismiss it? A display of ignorance if you miss both the significance and the force of the challenge.
Aside from the unpleasant arrogance that accompanies this question. If you were to argue that relativism was relative, I would expect the same support as has been presented here. Is it universally true that relativism is the case? Is there a mechanism by which this truths is made universal? Which is the simpler explanation?
But don't waste our time with the usual hand-waving. Don't direct us back, because I've been back and it isn't there. I will respond to a substantive reply, like the one above.
Honestly, is this what you think passes for quality debate? You offer a circumlocutory way of saying "I don't agree with you" and then accuse your interlocutors of hand-waiving and lack of substance.
Terrapin StationMarch 26, 2019 at 10:41#2690000 likes
I presented Tim with a logical proof for establishing the universality of murder being immoral,
Could you reference that post somehow if it's not too much trouble? Maybe link to it, or at least retype or paste a brief text string that's unique to it?
Terrapin StationMarch 26, 2019 at 10:49#2690060 likes
. But because presumably Mao, Stalin, Hitler, et al didn't themselves think they were doing wrong, then apparently that's enough for S. and Terrapin. They didn't think it was wrong, therefore it isn't wrong.
No one has ever said anything like "therefore it isn't wrong," and in fact we've explicitly explained, in some detail, in quite a few different posts, why and how such a "therefore" doesn't work, is absurd, depends on a category error, etc.
preference can imply a relativism whereas a truth can not.
— Mww
So it's not true that physical phenomena are reference-frame relative per the theory of relativity?
Correct. It is not true that physical phenomena are reference-frame relative. It’s an isotopic universe which means there is no preferred reference frame for the occurrence of phenomena. But I understand what you were driving at, so yes, per SR, the observations of phenomena show reference frame relativity.
Still, I think I will invoke the dreaded categorical error, insofar as my “preference can imply a relativism whereas a truth can not” predicated on logical thought, is very far removed from SR, predicated on metaphysical naturalism.
As an aside, metaethical moral relativism didn’t come into vogue until the early 20th century, about the same time as the paradigm shift in natural science. I wonder....did one chose “relativism” because the other chose “relativity”? Or the other way around?
Terrapin StationMarch 26, 2019 at 11:30#2690270 likes
It’s an isotopic universe which means there is no preferred reference frame for the occurrence of phenomena. But I understand what you were driving at, so yes, per SR, the observations of phenomena show reference frame relativity.
I'm not clear on the distinction you're making there, and in particular, I'm not sure why you're bringing up the idea of a preferred reference frame.
Of course. Anything can be found problematic if one tries hard enough. In any speculative philosophy with syllogistic arguments, the author can only advance valid conclusions, consistent with the premises the philosophy expounds.
It then becomes incumbent on the dialectical opponent to prove the premise false.....not problematic or merely inconclusive or irrelevant.....but false, in order to falsify the conclusion.
We’re even then. I wasn’t clear on why you brought up physical phenomena when what you were responding to was mental preference. So I just ran with it, trying to connect them somehow.
Terrapin StationMarch 26, 2019 at 11:50#2690340 likes
We’re even then. I wasn’t clear on why you brought up physical phenomena when what you were responding to was mental preference. So I just ran with it, trying to connect them somehow.
I had no way of knowing you scope for saying "'Truth' can't be relative," and especially given that most folks on this board use "truth" to refer to objective facts in some manner, I figured your scope was one of maximum generality.
Tim used “ownership of my life is absolute”, and I used that as a condition for the argument. So no, in this case the alluded truth was a reduction to a minimum particular, not an induction to maximum generality.
And I didn’t say, and I didn’t mean to imply, that truth can’t be relative, but only that the truth of murder being immoral can’t be relative, and then iff one accepts the conditions given in the syllogism.
Agreed, most folks do use truth to refer to objective facts in some manner. But moral philosophy doesn’t deal in a posteriori facts, but moreso a priori practical reason. Anthropology and empirical psychology may deal in objective moral facts, but, being a transcendental reductionist, I’m not impressed with them.
Terrapin StationMarch 26, 2019 at 12:28#2690420 likes
"those persons thought their actions were acceptable..."
Both of those are about what those individuals think. What they think implies nothing outside of the context of what they think.
Actually, I should clarify that. The second is about what they think, and the first is a statement that actions aren't right/wrong outside of what people think.
Doubting that requires being exposed to something different.
— creativesoul
If this is indubitably the case, you’d have to either find or assume something different in order for the doubt necessary to counter the societal norm to manifest. You won’t be able to find it, because it wasn’t given, and if you assume it, you’re open to accusations of assuming the antecedent.
It should be the case that an offset for the norm is impossible, but you’ll never be granted a successful argument.
It's not impossible. It does require something new. New correlations between some old things and some new things. Not worth getting into here, but it cannot happen until one first has a baseline from which to doubt/question.
This recent talk about 'universal' and 'truth' and 'moral truth' seems misguided to me.
I argue, though, that the matter must be dug deeper to find a commonality. If both the murderer and I agree that neither of us consents to be murdered, and our several reasons are reconcilable, then we have a common ground upon which our respective views are most clearly contradictory.
What about relativism prevents two people from seeing if they agree about some fundamental preferences? Relativism does not argue (and has not been in this thread) that there is no room for any rational argument. If two people agree that they both wish to avoid killing innocent people, then an argument could be had about how best to achieve that goal. Relativism is just acknowledging that there has to at least be a goal in the first place, that not amount of application of rationality to facts can tell you what you ought to do. Once a goal is present and agreed on, any amount of rational argument can take place as to how to achieve it. Although if this thread is anything to go by, that is of almost no use whatsoever.
Presumably both agree they would not be murdered, but the murderer nevertheless would murder, while we would not. It's very tolerant of you to refrain from a judgment about the murder of others, but then you must not invoke that judgment when he comes for you.
You keep going on about this and it's very disingenuous of you. No one is refraining from judgement about other people murdering, no one is forced to let others murder them without complaint.
Incomplete because it appears to deny the universality of reason
Firstly, reason is clearly far from universal. You think you're applying it here, I'm convinced you're not. How does that happen if reason is universal? Secondly, even if reason is universal, relativism makes no comment on that, relativism is a statement about the motives on which reason acts, not reason itself.
make a clear argument. I call you out as not having one, because you have not yet presented one. It's very Trumpian, and ultimately disgusting and sickening and toxic. Don't tell me what you did, because in this thread you've never done it. Do it now.
Can you please try to act like a grown up. Anyone who's spent any serious time debating will know there are differences of opinion. What seems clear to you is a mystery to me, and what seems obvious to me is opaque to you. If all you're going to to is bluster about how anything that doesn't make sense to you must therefore not be an argument, and anything which is opposed to your world view is disgusting and toxic, then what the hell are you doing on a discussion forum?
You’re right, it’s not impossible, if something new is available. But in the case at hand, there was posited a non-compliance, an offset of the norm, but with nothing new justifying it. I must say I had secret hopes as to why you conceded, but I’ll probably never know, other than, as you say.....not worth getting into.
I understand relativism as the referral of all judgments back to a set of criteria, the relativity arising in that your set of criteria differs from my set. But is that the limit?
Demonstrate why it's not.
Apparently the relativist stops there and allows as how it's a matter of preference, opinion, and therefore we on one side have no grounds beyond our personal views to condemn the other side.
Please demonstrate anytime in history where any one group of people have made a collective decision that appeals to any type of provable objective code.
If you can't, then how can you manage to type out paragraph after paragraph pertaining to, effectively, nothing? It's very straightforward. Any extended dialogue develops in the nuances of believing in an objective reality. If you can't first perceive and demonstrate that objective reality then stop waffling.
Reply to tim wood First of all, I've explained why I think that Kant's categorical imperative is a joke directly in reply to you at least a couple of times now. Your forgetfulness or dishonesty in this regard is not excused. I don't know why some people here seem to think that this sort of denial is acceptable as a response. It isn't. Rank Amateur is by far the worst for doing this, as he does it with such frequency that it beggars belief.
Secondly, I read as far as your straw man that I cannot find anything at all wrong with the actions of the infamous mass murdering humans (I strongly believe that it is counterproductive to dehumanise them by calling them monsters. That they were human is extremely important to explicitly acknowledge) of the 20th century, and I decided not to read any further as result.
I like your “notion of truth”, but doesn’t analytic philosophy demand more than a notion?
I’ll go first: truth is the non-contradiction of a conception with its object.
The best definition of truth that one hundred years of analytical philosophy was able to produce would seem to be Tarski's deflationary T-sentence: “'Snow is white' is true iff snow is white”.
It reminds me of Aristotle's: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” Apparently not much progress with a definition! But we do have a notion of truth which is in accordance with those two formulations, I would say.
And I think your formulation exemplifies the same basic logic of correspondence.
Expressed in the terms of your formulation, for me the object of moral thinking is harmonious community. So, to say that murder is good is a contradiction with its object, because, as Kant pointed out, murder cannot be a general moral good if the object of any moral good is social harmony. "Murder is good" thus cannot be true.
The objection that some have raised that murder might be good for say a serial killer is inapt, because the question is whether murder can be a general good, and not merely whether it could be a good for a few psychopaths.
Reply to Isaac Ah, new terms to add to the catalogue of evidence in support of my charge against Tim: "Trumpian", "disgusting", "sickening", and "toxic". They are accompanied by "mere", "destructive", "childish", and others. Related is the guilt by association fallacy with Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others, although that's actually a 3-in-1, as it's also a straw man and an implied ad hominem: a straw man, because unlike them, we judge their actions to be wrong, yet Tim deliberately says otherwise; and an ad hominem because the suggestion is that you shouldn't even consider what a moral relativist says, because he is like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others. The general category for these sort of fallacies is an appeal to emotion.
Terrapin StationMarch 26, 2019 at 20:45#2691860 likes
But you appear to either refuse to, or cannot, generalize that view even so far as to say that their actions, among the most horrendous in recorded history, are simply wrong simpliciter.
Because I don't want to claim that the world is some way that it isn't ontologically. The idea of something being morally wrong simpliciter is false in terms of what the world is like ontologically. I see our job as philosophers as being to analyze, observe, report what the world is factually like. It's the same thing that scientists should be doing. We're just using a different methodology.
What, then, is the natural, or default, state? Nothing is wrong? Nothing is right?
Things are morally wrong or right from subjective perspectives. Subjectivity is the correct realm for moral judgments. We need to talk about them in the context of the correct domain. Not a domain that makes no sense for them, because it's not what the world is like.
I understand relativism as the referral of all judgments back to a set of criteria, the relativity arising in that your set of criteria differs from my set.
I'm not saying anything like this. I'm saying that moral judgments are something that individuals do, and that's all they are--something that individuals do. That's the correct domain for them. Every individual could do some moral judgment identically (ignoring nominalism for a moment). We could all have the same criteria. Nonetheless, it's still just something that we do as individuals. We can't get correct or incorrect a "non-personal moral judgment" because there is no such thing.
Apparently the relativist stops there and allows as how it's a matter of preference, opinion, and therefore we on one side have no grounds beyond our personal views to condemn the other side.
Again, and again, and again, and again . . . we've tried to correct this misunderstanding of yours. NO ONE IS SAYING WHAT YOU JUST SAID ABOVE. No one. The correct domain for moral judgments is what we think as individuals. What we think as individuals in this case, for most of us, happens to be that we condemn people who murder. We don't say this because the universe outside of people says that there's a problem with murder. We, as individual people operating in the world, thinking about it, etc. feel that there's a problem with murder. Hence we condemn it.
Reply to Terrapin Station I vote that analyses such as these be archived for the purpose of being a valuable lesson in how not to argue against moral relativism, or even, really, how not to argue in general.
Reply to tim wood Poisoning the well. You're just pissed off because I'm like a gadfly with attitude. I am "toxic" like Socrates was "toxic" to the Athenians. But Socrates wasn't as wry or caustic as me. So I guess I'm "doubly toxic".
Reply to tim wood I'm far too principled to cave in to such petty judgements, which is what you really want from me. But I do at least consider them, because I'm philosophical like that.
I gotta say, being an unabashed transcendentalist, if ANYBODY had said he’d said anything about Kant in general and the CI in particular, I would have known about it. I would have researched the crap out of it just to see where it was right or wrong. Like you, I went back through the entire thread, and found not a gawddamn thing about anybody telling you anything about the CI, joke or otherwise.
So I’m with you, for whatever that’s worth. I wouldn’t have gone through the same trouble as you, just to find out the same thing and come to the same conclusion. There’s dishonesty in the building, dishonorable and disrespectful, herein never to be taken seriously.
It wasn't hard to find at all. I used the advanced search function and found it with ease in a matter of minutes. Yes, I know, he now has egg all over his face, and I can't think of anyone more deserving.
He owes me an apology, but this has gone so far that I think that I would throw it right back in his face, even if he did offer me an apology.
Reply to tim wood Well yes, that's actually the point, at least in part: [I]I[/i] find the categorical imperative to be a joke, and I have my reasons. It is a joke [I]to me[/i], but in a wider sense also. (Believe it or not, I am quite aware that not everything is all about me). Of course, I acknowledge that others judge it to be of far greater significance. It is of greater significance to them. What I said is not merely about mere, foolish, toxic, destructive, me. Such criticisms about Kant's categorical imperative, which are also necessarily about what I think, whether that's implicit or explicit, happen to resonate with others also. Kant is only human after all, he is not God. God is dead, and Kant is human, all too human. His writings are largely a symptom of the moral prejudice of a philosopher, and that is largely true of many of those philosophers who came before him.
And yes, you don't see reason in meta-ethical moral relativism. You don't see reason in it largely because you still don't even understand it, 47 pages later, in spite of reasonable efforts. And you don't even understand that you don't even understand it. You persist in attacking your own misunderstanding, and you seemingly have no qualms in resorting to unreasonable and underhanded tactics in pursuit your narrow-minded goal to "defeat" meta-ethical moral relativism, or amoralism, or moral nihilism, or chaos, or doom, or destruction, or Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Trump, disgusting, evil, toxic monster! (They're all one and the same to you, right?).
Reply to tim wood After 47 pages, I think I've shown that I have the patience of a saint, but even saints have their limits. Members like Isaac and Terrapin Station clearly know what they're talking about and are more than capable of setting you straight, but you should try much harder if you genuinely want to gain an understanding of moral relativism. As for me, I've grown sick and tired, as it has been dealt with ad nauseam.
And as for Kant and his categorical imperative, you haven't said anything at all which would give me reason to withdraw or rethink my criticism. Merely saying that I don't understand him and suchlike is not a valid response, and don't even think about giving me a "You too!" style response, because I have put great effort into explaining moral relativism to the likes of you and Rank Amateur, even though it has been a thankless task, yet you've shown very little improvement, if any. We're still having to correct the same basic misunderstandings 47 pages later.
Reply to tim wood First of all, although I am far from an expert, I do have some background knowledge here, as a matter of fact. I know that yourself and others might want to make out like I'm a know-nothing on Kant, but that simply isn't true.
Secondly, I don't think that quoting from the SEP, or worse, directly from Kant, is the best way to get his point across. I think, generally, the best way to get a point across is to be clear and to simplify and avoid jargon where possible.
What I find annoying about Kant, and this is especially true of Kant, is the amount of jargon he coined, which needs to be translated in order to be understood. I already knew about "hypothetical imperatives". I wasn't too clear on "practical reason". One online source states that he defined it as the capacity of rational agents to act according to principles (i.e. the conception of laws). And this stuff about "rational agency" and "autonomous will" and the like is similarly obscure unless you are already fluent in Kantanese, which I'm not. I'm not fluent in Hegelese or Heideggerese either, although Kant isn't half as bad as those two. And it annoys me that that's even a problem in the first place, because I doubt the supposed necessity of it.
But anyway, yes, of course I disagree with Kant's categorical imperative. That much is surely obvious. Though, evidently, I haven't just dismissed it as a joke, in spite of doing so initially, and justifiably in response to your bare assertion which it was replying to, in accordance with Hitchen's razor. I've submitted criticism, and I stand by that criticism.
Bringing up hypothetical imperatives seems to miss the point of my criticism. Kant might well have had them in his sights, but so what? They make way more sense, and are way more relatable than his categorical imperative. I am criticising his categorical imperative. I am asserting that he largely failed, because the categorical imperative is largely alien and useless and ineffectual. I know enough about logic to recognise a logical conditional when I see one, and that is how it is commonly argued. I'm just skipping ahead to that key bit. One can ask, "Why should I act only according to that maxim whereby I can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law?". And that's when the conditional kicks in. "Well, if you were to...". But I don't. And my morality is just fine, thanks. I know that intuitively. The categorical imperative is redundant and artificial. I am not subservient to any supposed universal moral laws. That is not my measure of right and wrong. My own conscience is sufficient for the job. How can that objection be overcome? I don't think that it can. That's what I meant when I said that it has no force over myself and others. It cannot override my moral foundation in moral feelings. It is just a curious little thought experiment, but it isn't at all practical or realistic. What's practical and realistic is simply appealing to your conscience without any need for Kant's abstract and rationalist way of thinking.
New thought/belief about the societal/familial rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
All new moral thought/belief that knowingly and deliberately goes against the societal grain begins by questioning the truth, veracity, and/or dependability of the morality that one already has.
The ability to do that takes something else. Something aside from the rules we first learn to live by.
In Sapientia's candidate, we could very well have all this and more. So, yeah...
It is possible for one to learn to how to disagree with the morality adopted within his/her/their original worldview.
It takes something else. It takes thinking about one's own thought/belief(worldview) in terms of the re-evaluation of behaviour and/or the historic 'moral concepts' such as good/evil, good/bad, praiseworthy/blameworthy, etc.
Thinking in such terms requires being able to use such terms in some acceptable form or other.
Something original would be a novel correlation. Something new could be a novel correlation to the individual, but it also could have already been made by someone else.
Is that more what you're looking for?
I've no idea what purported sense of 'universal' is being put to use here?
All are originally acquired solely by virtue of being adopted via common language acquisition. Regardless of all individual subject particulars, all original adoption of worldview(language acquisition) requires a pure and unadulterated lack of doubt in what's being learned. Unquestioned trust in the truthfulness of what is being learned.
One cannot doubt unless one already has/holds some pre-existing thought/belief upon which the doubt is grounded. Early on during initial language acquisition, there is no such baseline.
Can one of the participants here that is using the notion of moral truth offer a criterion for truth, and then one for a kind of truth called "moral", and then again for a 'universal' and 'moral' truth?
We all surely agree on some moral utterances of ought. Universal agreement is neither equivalent nor adequate for truth. So, while it is certainly aim-worthy, it is not truth worthy.
All people deserve to have a certain amount of respect already bestowed upon them prior to actually meeting them, or knowing anything about them.
Sometimes people from all walks of life do things that are not good. One of those things is judging a whole group of people without adequate ground to make that judgment. Not all judging of a group of people is to be avoided. To quite the contrary, sometimes it is necessary.
I do not care that someone is black in any other way that I care that anyone is any 'race'. The scare-quotes are a nod to the guys that argue dna based objections to race. Rather, I care that there are people from all walks of life who are assholes as a result of not giving a fuck about others. Sometimes those not cared for can be other races, religions, ethnicities, families, cultures, etc., as a group.
The fallacy is gross overgeneralization. Sometimes, the product is racism. Sometimes those committing the fallacy of thought about a group of people can wield tremendous power over the very groups that they do not give a fuck about.
That power is governed by the perpetrators moral thought/belief.
Everything ever written, spoken, and/or otherwise uttered comes through a subject.
All codes of conduct do as well.
What is the term 'objective' doing here aside from putting an utterly inadequate framework to use and creating unnecessary complexity? Not all complexity is admirable.
One's initial worldview includes one's initial morality. Both are subject to the influence of individual particular circumstances. World-views and the morality that they always include are relative.
If yours are constitutive of reason, please advise me as to how.
One cannot bring about the desire to maintain social harmony, for example, simply by desiring it. We live in, and interact with, an environment and a diversity of relatively autonomous actors. As such the fulfillment of any desire is going to require significant rational analysis of one's environment to assess how best it can be delivered.
So...can we move on to your response to the rest of my arguments?
Dude, your analysis is praiseworthy and spot on. But is it really worth your time and effort? We're at 47 pages. When is enough enough?
Thanks, I appreciate the support. Is it worth it? Probably not to be honest. It's a strange place here, billed as a discussion forum, but very much comes across as a personal blog for a few people to simply declare what they 'reckon' and keep doing so in the face of any contrary position.
I enjoy engaging with people who have a different opinion to me as I find it helps to hone my own arguments, but there's only so many times I can say the same thing in slightly different ways.
But to be honest, the biggest reason I keep reading is that some of the nonsense people write is hilarious...
(By the way, I'm not being notified properly when you tag me, so if I miss anything, apologies in advance.)
the question is whether murder can be a general good, and not merely whether it could be a good for a few psychopaths.
As I've repeatedly pointed out (with no response, and this goes for @tim wood too) this is only true of any particular level of granularity you choose. Murder is a subset of killing, it is a type of killing. So if you can't say "all killing is OK (you can't generalise the rule" it's OK to kill"), then does that make all killing bad?
Obviously it can't, and having this pre-defined answer in mind you move the goalposts such that you're able to change the question until it matches the answer you were looking for all along.
But why stop there? Killing by psychopaths is a subset of all murder, murder by people called Dave on a Tuesday at 6:00 is a subset of all murdering. Could it be rationally universalised by Dave, that such killing was OK? Yes it certainly could.
And how did Kant get around this problem? He fudged it with some waffle about having to be honest with yourself about what it is you're universalising. Which makes the whole thing subjective again since the satisfaction with one's self-honesty is a subjective judgement.
This is not reasoned debate to the end of learning; it's just a street-fight. You have demonstrated your ignorance of any better way. From now on you're not S., but mere-s. Kant is not a joke, you are, but not a funny one. You're not worth arguing with, because you don't know how.
Come on. Just re read your own previous comments. The whole thing has been a street fight from start to finish and you're just as responsible for that state of affairs as anyone else. You've barely presented an argument beyond your own incredulity and you've basically spent more time accusing the other side of being "toxic" and trying to imply that we have no feeling about Hitler, than you have actually addressing any of the points raised.
If you want want to raise the tone of the debate (and God knows it needs raising), then lead by example, not by slander.
For fuck's sake man. You've written twelve posts in a row and none but one of them address anyone here directly by quote. More than half of them are just trivial truths and the rest statements of what I presume you think are 'facts' without any argument to support them.
This is supposed to be a discussion not your personal blog, will you please stop spamming and try to engage with one of the actual threads of discussion going on here.
Yes, I believe I've got this exactly, and have had it exactly.
If you had it then you wouldn't say that anyone's view amounts to "if S thinks that m isn't wrong, then R says that fact implies that m isn't wrong simpliciter"
You’re right, it’s not impossible, if something new is available.
— Mww
New thought/belief.
Yes, but there is still the question about a possible instantiation for it. If a society is of a certain moral persuasion, and a fully inculcated member is nonetheless subsequently in moral opposition to some part of it, the question is raised as to where the opposition came from. Without experience, without some external influence, he is subject to his own a priori practical reason as the source of his opposition. But where did reason get the idea the societal norm should be opposed in the first place? What enables a subject to declare that whatever some norm might be, he is opposed to it? If it be supposed the opposition arose from mere feeling, for lacking experience reduces the means to nothing else, then it becomes manifest that feelings have the power over reason, which is impossible because feelings have no object until reason cognizes one as belonging to it necessarily.
“This just doesn’t feel right” may be at the attention of conscious awareness of a subject as a relevant feeling, and it should be given he understands both the “this” and the “not right”, otherwise he would have no ground for the feeling to begin with, but that in itself does not enable its negation. The most he is rationally allowed to conclude, is whatever sustains racism, he opposes. Or, which is the same thing, whatever feelings the majority hold in the form of a social norm, he does not. But to declare from that alone that he is in fact a non-racist, without the experience with which to connect the declaration, and without the cognition of some object that belongs necessarily to the feeling he has but the other members do not, he is admitting to an irrational cognition.
In short, one merely saying he is non-racist with respect to an entire society of normalized racists, doesn’t make him so. He may think himself non-racist, but without the experience of being in the proximity of the conditions by which the racism is distinguished, he wouldn’t know whether he was or not.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 12:38#2693700 likes
But here's the difference: for you-all, it's "bad-in-my-opinion, but not only does that not make it bad, it makes it impossible for it to be bad, except in my opinion," & etc.
See, here is an example that you do not have it. No one is saying "not only does that not make it bad." What makes something bad morally is that an individual has the disposition that it's bad morally. That's what making something bad morally is. Things are morally good or bad to someone. The only way "does not make it bad" follows from any set of facts is if no one has the disposition that it's morally bad.
More to the point, you-all have stated that inasmuch as (presumably) the bad actors did not think their actions were bad, then it's nonsense to say they were bad.
Which is simply saying that from their perspective, it's not bad if they do not think it's bad.
do you suppose reason and its products to be universalizable?
I'm a subjectivist on reason/rationality, too. You know my view on mathematics.
On my view, there's a tendency that people have to project at least aspects of their mental phenomena "into the world at large"--to project it outside of their heads, and figure that it must be present in the outside world just the way that a rock is present in the outside world . . . only they make an even worse move and figure that it must be present in the outside world in some abstract manner, where it doesn't really have a location, but it also doesn't have "no location," and so on. People tend to do this with the things they feel strongest about, that they can't imagine thinking otherwise about, as if, for some reason, their own minds could not be capable of being that firmly convinced of anything--the idea basically amounts to people thinking that the source of the content (moral judgments, principles of reason, etc.) must be something outside of themselves, so that there's basically an implication that brains can't work that way by themselves.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 13:25#2693830 likes
You get to ask him if he did or ordered anything bad. He answers no, that he did not (this is to the judgment, not any factual matter). Question: we know that you think he did bad things. But did he do bad things?
"Did he do bad things," then, is necessarily asking for someone's opinion about this. "Bad" is always "to whom"?
I've no idea what purported sense of 'universal' is being put to use here?
Ironic, isn’t it, that conceptions or ideas or even mere notions, intended to be so all-inclusive the induction principle cannot falsify them, can only be derived from the reduction to a single instance?
Here, if I ever use the term “universal”, I mean it to stand for a circumstance that would be constant for a rational agent no matter where he is or the conditions under which he finds himself. Otherwise, I don’t think the term should be used at all.
Because sets of criteria can be thought of as being in layers. From a surface you dig down a little, but you can dig more, and more. The goal is to reach a limit.
Agreed. Please, among these historical agreements, demonstrate what objective reality was discovered.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident...". If you're not American and do not know this reference, google the American declaration of independence." That is a time in history when one group made a collective decision that appeals to any type of provable objective code.
Yes, they made an appeal but I asked for provable appeal. Historically, we have always made appeals to objective moral law, this doesn't mean they were successful. It also doesn't mean that the decisions made did not benefit for more social cohesion.
For an objective moral law, you first need to demonstrate that social cohesion is an objective "right" or desire.
It is my guess that most constitutions for government make such appeals. Certainly with respect to many civil movements in history, groups of people have made collective decisions that appeal to objective codes.
You're right, but this is because it's assumed that what people desire is social cohesion. It's convoluted to first consider whether the majority of people desire freedom from pain and misery.
Consulting the relativity of morality doesn't aid the emotive momentum of civil rights movements. People are happy to roll with the prerequisite that murder is "wrong"; Most don't question relativity.
Importantly, (and please acknowledge this point) there is no functionality to an objective morality, even if it exists; We are free to ignore it, should we feel differently.
Some people would dictate that the bible objectively states that homosexuality is wrong. Even if they could (they can't) objectively demonstrate this, it doesn't benefit anyone; We can ignore it, save for the punishment of hellfire, should they be able to prove it (they can't).
Perhaps I'm being presumptuous about most of the world, but certainly your average person on the street would be mistaken. Not necessarily mistaken... but ignorant to the concept.
Hmm... I suppose that most wouldn't be objectivists when it comes to aesthetics, but most wouldn't be inclined to draw comparisons between aesthetics and morality.
What makes something bad morally is that an individual has the disposition that it's bad morally. That's what making something bad morally is. Things are morally good or bad to someone.
I understand what you are saying, and if I have missed it mea culpa ahead of time. But has this point actually been supported here. Again - not being difficult - but trying to understand.
This view that moral judgments are individual metal phenomena - and therefore by definition subjective.
is, i think at the core of the disagreement. But I have not seen this, or if i did, i did not recognize it as such, supported in any way.
I think there is some reasonable evidence to question the underlying assumption of de facto subjectivity simply because it is an individual metal phenomena.
I can think 2 + 2 = 5, and most would say that i was in error, it is objectively true it = 4, and so on for many physical and verifiable things. So I would say there is evidence that I can think things that are in conflict with objective and verifiable reality.
Both Reply to tim wood and myself have pointed to near universal moral judgments, and at least my underlying question on these is, as above, does it not show that there can be objectively moral views that individual thoughts can be in error of.
It seem the majority of your argument, at least to me rests on an assumption that has not been support yet as far as i can see.
Is there some support for: all moral judgments are individual mental phenomena and therefor subjective. ?
with out support the argument seems circular to me.
P1 - all individual mental phenomena are subjective
P2 - Moral judgments are individual mental phenomena
C - moral judgments are subjective
again - truly trying to understand
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 14:48#2694160 likes
I'm going to flip the order of your post around a bit:
Both ?tim wood
and myself have pointed to near universal moral judgments, and at least my underlying question on these is, as above, does it not show that there can be objectively moral views that individual thoughts can be in error of.
How would it show that, though? Why wouldn't it just show that (almost) everyone thinks in the same way?
So I would say there is evidence that I can think things that are in conflict with objective and verifiable reality.
Definitely. And what do we need in those cases? We need some evidence of the thing in question occurring extramentally. That's all we need to do. If we can provide some evidence of moral judgments occurring extramentally, then cool. Insofar as we're making a claim about those extramental moral judgments that we've provided evidence of, we'd be able to get correct or incorrect what those extramental moral judgments say.
Is there some support for: all moral judgments are individual mental phenomena
I'm assuming you'd want to include an "only" at the end of that--presumably that's what's at issue. The support is this: there's a complete lack of evidence of moral judgments occurring outside of minds.
"Therefore subjective" is just a stipulation of definition. We're using "subjective" to refer to "occurs only in minds." That doesn't need any support. It's just a stipulation about how we're going to use a term.
there's a complete lack of evidence of moral judgments occurring outside of minds.
and as on many many many other things - lack of evidence, is just lack of evidence. And even that is in dispute. And at the core of point all along. Near universal moral judgments on some issues is evidence that the source of some moral judgments could have a source outside individual mental phenomena.
We will disagree here which is fine - just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
"Therefore subjective" is just a stipulation of definition. We're using "subjective" to refer to "occurs only in minds." That doesn't need any support. It's just a stipulation about how we're going to use a term
I know it is sufficient to you and yours, but to me at least the core basis for your entire argument is poorly supported at best, and in a very real way begs the entire question.
but thanks so much for a good and understandable reply.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 15:00#2694200 likes
Near universal moral judgments on some issues is evidence that the source of some moral judgments could have a source outside individual mental phenomena.
Again, how would that be evidence of that? You're not explaining this idea. You're just stating it, but it seems completely arbitrary to me.
I don't want to write anything else for a moment, because I want the only response to be asking you HOW that would be evidence of objectivity.
Question: we know that you think he did bad things. But did he do bad things? The question seems absurd, but it matters because it amounts to the question of what the ground of any standards will be.
The question is not absurd *because* it removes the answer from psychology, which is the empirical doctrine of inclinations, and installs it into metaphysical doctrine of good. Does an action occur because it is good for something, in which case the means informs the good as a preferred end, or does an action occur because it is good in itself, in which case the means informs itself. Acting from preference is a means to an end which may be self-contradictory, hence immoral; acting from good in itself is a means entirely consistent with its ends and cannot be immoral.
The question may be asked, did he do bad things, but the question reduces to, did he think he did good things because he thought they were things good in itself to do? Such being the case, any semblance of preference immediately factors out of the moral equation, because if he acts from good in itself, he is acting on a subjective principle, the deviation from which is immoral for him.
Being not much more than merely kicking necessity can down the metaphysical road, and given the inherent imperfection of humans in general......there might not be a final answer to “is there a standard?”
I don't want to write anything else for a moment, because I want the only response to be asking you HOW that would be evidence of objectivity
firstly, this is your flying teapot, not mine. It should not be my job to prove your point is false. In pure argument form - I can just remain unconvinced that you have provided sufficient support for your position and remain skeptical. But being an agreeable sort -
Observation:
Almost all human beings on the entire planet have the same moral judgment on a particular action.
Possible explanations:
1. billions upon billions of individual mental phenomena all independently reach the same moral judgment.
2. there is some reason or basis external to individual and independent mental phenomena that is the source of the near universal judgment. Call it instinct, human nature, evolution, God, or what you please.
I find 2 a more logical explanation than 1.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 15:15#2694300 likes
We could just as well say that "every single person having a different moral stance on x" could have an outside source--and sure, it could. It's not impossible.
But how is that evidence of there being an outside source?
Mere possibility isn't sufficient to believe anything, because the contradictory is usually possible, too.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 15:19#2694320 likes
firstly, this is your flying teapot, not mine. It should not be my job to prove your point is false. I
I'm not asking you to prove anything. I'm asking you "Could you please explain what the heck you're thinking here, because it just seems completely mysterious to me."
billions upon billions of individual mental phenomena all independently reach the same moral judgment.
Re this, do you find it plausible that billions of individuals have other bodily similarities, where the similar things are not given wholesale to the individuals from outside of themselves?
Reply to Terrapin Station No worries - I think we are fine to agree to disagree now - i just wanted to check to see what the basis of your core assumption was, to make sure I wasn't missing anything. No need to keep repeating our positions back and forth. All good my friend.
By the way friend sent me a text reminding me yesterday was the anniversary of the Wall of Sound - thanks bear
I think the problem lies in the fact that "objective morality", whatever it actually means, doesn't provide a function. You may as well state that there's a metaphysical shit on a wall that we all have an unconscious relation to.
Morality is about functionality and problem solving.
By definition, because this objective morality is supposedly independent of the individual, it is subjective in itself. It is meaningless to try to obtain guidance, if that is the aim, because we all have contextual desires.
Any instinctual agreements over moral action can be explained via evolution; But it's just an observation of what is, it doesn't hold relevance to how it should be.
Reply to Edward thanks Edward, really. But I'm good on opinions on this topic. I just checked back in to see if my understanding of the base assumption was correct and what the support for it was. I don't mine agreeing to disagree - but I wanted to make sure my understanding of the counter position was correct.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 16:57#2694780 likes
But I fail to understand how in that case you can move out of your personal preference mode to register any sort of complaint or argument that anyone should find cause to pay attention to, except as they prefer to.
Yeah, either they already have the same moral preferences, or you have to try to "talk them into them" by appealing to other preferences they have, other things they believe, or you're out of luck. As it is, there are many moral stances that I'm simply out of luck on re having anything done about them. My stances in those regards are too unusual. Unusual enough that there's no way I'm going to be persuading anyone to them, at least without far more time and energy than I'm willing to put into it.
Believing in objective morality makes no difference in this regard, by the way. If the right other people (read "people with the power to do anything about it") don't share your beliefs about which moral stances are the objectively correct ones, you have to try to talk them into your view or you're out of luck.
2+2=4 is an expression of a certain kind of reason. Is it true, or is it true-for-you but not true, or maybe not true at all, but you just go with it? Which, please?
No it isn't. It is a description of a rule, or the application of reason to a set of axioms. This is basic mathematics. Maths is based on axioms. The Peano axioms, if assumed, for example, will lead to 2+2=4,but nothing in the world simply makes it the case by reason alone, how could it possibly?
Quite a while ago I distinguished between murder and killing; you must have missed that.
No I didn't, that's exactly the point I was making. You distinguish between murder and other killing. Murder is different. Jealous murder is different from all other murder (even carrying a different sentence in some countries). Jealous murder committed by men is different from all other jealous murder...and so on.
Your remarks about Kant and generalization simply make clear you have no understanding of his ideas.
And we're back to this childish shit again, didn't take long. Is this your counter argument to everyone who disagrees with you "you obviously don't understand..."? My argument is exactly that of Elizabeth Anscombe in "Modern Moral Philosophy" where she argues that Kant's Categorical Imperetive "... is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it.”. So unless you're also claiming that your understanding of Kant is better than hers, then can we just try to have an adult discussion about the issues rather than waive criticism away with a vague claim of misunderstanding?
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 17:02#2694840 likes
In this you're akin to a pre-Kantian idealist. To the idealist it all occurs only in minds. The question, then, is that if it really is all a matter of mind, then how do you know anything at all of the world? How do you know anything at all, period? How even do you get to the question of knowledge?
Morality is subjective. But morality isn't the entirety of the world. There are plenty of objective things. Morality just ain't one of them.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 17:04#2694850 likes
I understand what you are saying, and if I have missed it mea culpa ahead of time. But has this point actually been supported here.
I don't understand what you mean by supported. I presume you don't deny that "Things are morally good or bad to someone.". It is a given that moral views are the property of people right? So what you're trying to argue is that in addition to being something people experience, moral views come from somewhere.
So the relativists, not believing that to be the case, have nothing to support. We are saying only that with which we all agree "people have moral views". It is the objdctivists who are positing some additional thing. Now if you want to just say "I believe this additional thing exists, can you prove overwhelmingly that it doesn't" then I have no issue with you. The answer is, no, I cannot prove to you overwhelming that it doesn't.
If, however, you're saying that it is a fact that this additional thing exists and I must prove it doesn't in order to sustain my position, then I'd take issue with that.
I also believe that Occam's Razor has proven itself to be a useful technique, which make my presumption of no additional factor a better argument to start with, but if you don't believe that, then we must simply disagree on the matter.
I meant what is the basis of TS's and I think your core belief that all mental phenomena is by definition subjective.
TS has already acknowledged and I think you would agree that the "all" is not correct. Things that can be shown to have objective truth outside this, such as physical reality, are not subjective by the definition above. The cat is on the chair is objectively true no matter the mental phenomena of an individual who says otherwise. So we are capable of objective thought and about thinking incorrectly about things that are objectively true. But to TS and you this does not apply to moral judgments. And as best I can tell the reason for this, just is, and has no support. TS's case is a pure no seeum argument - I don't see any evidence that there is any other way, so there is not any other way. Yours seems to be pure denial that such a thing is possible.
So the relativists, not believing that to be the case, have nothing to support
And you do understand how completely circular that is.
Cutting to the chase - I do think it is very possible as I have said a few times, that it is very possible that there is an outside source to some moral judgments. Call it human nature, instinct, evolution or God.
And I find this a better explanation of the near universal moral judgments on some issues than your explanation.
I don't feel either of us has any certain advantage one over the other with the basis of our core beliefs and that is what I wanted to check. And with that the case, I am happy to agree to disagree.
I meant what is the basis of TS's and I think your core belief that all mental phenomena is by definition subjective.
I don't think all mental phenomena are subjective. Terrapin and I differ on this significantly. Personally I find the most successful definition of the subjective/objective divide is that subjective refers to truths which others cannot possibly verify to their satisfaction, and objective are truths which others can verify.
"I like this pizza" is subjective because nobody could possibly verify that I do (I might only be pretending to enjoy it). There's no external evidence which proves the matter.
"The cat is on the chair" is objective because generally if someone else looks, finds the cat to be on the chair, they are satisfied.
This division is a of course, not always clear. If, in theory, we could mri scan somebody and neuroscience had advanced to a level where we can identify likes and dislikes, "I like pizza" might one day become objective.
Anyway, that aside the issue with morality is about relativism, not subjective Ness. I believe moral statements are only relatively true. It is true that I think murder is wrong (generally), but it is nonsensical to ask if murder is wrong absent of any person thinking it.
This has nothing to do with subjectiveness and everything to do with the location of the 'wrongness'. The idea that murder is wrong is contained within the minds of individual people. That much I presume we agree on. I see no reason to presume it is also contained elsewhere. As Terrapin has said, noses are contained within people too, we are not surprised that they are all similar. The 'blueprint' for noses is contained within DNA which has been inherited from a common ancestors, so it's obvious why they're all much the same.
Again, I'm just saying that moral sentiments are contained within minds, and everyone already agrees with that so I feel no need to support it. I don't see any reason to think they also occur elsewhere.
I do think it is very possible as I have said a few times, that it is very possible that there is an outside source to some moral judgments. Call it human nature, instinct, evolution or God.
And I find this a better explanation of the near universal moral judgments on some issues than your explanation.
Evolution is not an outside source. The means by which evolution acts is by inheritance of genetic material, mutation in an individual and environmental selection. There is no mechanism by which it ensures we all have the same moral sentiments, and even if there were, I don't understand how that would make a person without those sentiments 'wrong'. Are people who are born without a nose 'wrong' for not having one?
Again, I'm just saying that moral sentiments are contained within minds, and everyone already agrees with that so I feel no need to support it.
that could actually be the worst philosophic argument I have ever heard.
Isaac - I completely understand your point, and I completely disagree. Nothing wrong with that. The core base of your belief is on as shaky ground as mine. That is the reason there is so many different views on the basis of morality. If that was not the case - we wouldn't be disagreeing, and we would not be at 49 pages.
that could actually be the worst philosophic argument I have ever heard.
Really? Are you saying that moral sentiments are not in people's minds? That when I think "murder is wrong" that thought is not taking place in my mind? That's all I mean by it.
Kant's Categorical Imperetive (sic) “...is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it.”.
Anscombe MMP, 1958)
The categorical imperative is a misrepresentation. Anscombe actually said “...his rule on universalized maxims is useless without stipulations....”.
“....A maxim is the subjective principle of volition...”
(Kant FPMM, 1785)
"...Act always on such a maxim as thou canst at the same time will it to be a universal law"; this is the sole condition under which a will can never contradict itself; and such an imperative is categorical....”
(ibid)
It is clear the maxim, the subjective principle, being universalized is antecedent to an imperative behavior. It is the rule that’s claimed to be useless, and the categorical imperative is not a rule. It is a law. The difference is critical to deontological moral philosophy in general, and Kant’s mandate for pure practical reason, the concept of an autonomous, freely determinant will, in particular.
“....there is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, (...) and commands are laws which must be obeyed, that is, must be followed, even in opposition to inclination. (...) the categorical imperative, is not limited by any condition, and as being absolutely, although practically, necessary, may be quite properly called a command....”
(ibid)
Hypothetical imperatives are rules, and if Anscombe’s thesis is to have power, she must only refer to these alone, in which case the they would be useless without a stipulation, which is not necessarily given:
“....When I conceive a hypothetical imperative, in general I do not know beforehand what it will contain until I am given the condition...”
(ibid)
The view to constructing a maxim, with respect to hypothetical imperatives, is nothing more than addressing whatever arbitrary want the description of the action provides. The view to constructing a maxim, with respect to a categorical imperative, involves a command of will, by which the description of the action must abide without exception.
Furthermore, there are as many hypothetical imperatives as there as circumstances that call for a moral determination and their respective maxims are just as many, as suits the mood of the will determining them. But there is one and only one categorical imperative, which demands the maxim one wills to become universal law, from which a certain act must follow necessarily by rule of law such that the act and the law do not contradict themselves, be chosen wisely. This proposition reduces to the proposition that the determinant will (the law) and the judgement of volition (the act) do not contradict themselves.
Is there remaining a question as to what form a relevant description of an action corresponding to a universalized maxim would have? While it is true Kant does not include a description per se, he makes it quite clear what the action is doesn’t matter. If one acts as if the maxim to which the imperative relates were a universal law, he is justified in calling himself morally worthy.
But, as I said before, I’ll never be famous, so....who cares.
If, in theory, we could mri scan somebody and neuroscience had advanced to a level where we can identify likes and dislikes, "I like pizza" might one day become objective.
The categorical imperative is a misrepresentation. Anscombe actually said “...his rule on universalized maxims is useless without stipulations....”.
“....A maxim is the subjective principle of volition...”
(Kant FPMM, 1785)
"...Act always on such a maxim as thou canst at the same time will it to be a universal law"; this is the sole condition under which a will can never contradict itself; and such an imperative is categorical....”
(ibid)
It is clear the maxim, the subjective principle, being universalized is antecedent to an imperative behavior. It is the rule that’s claimed to be useless, and the categorical imperative is not a rule. It is a law. The difference is critical to deontological moral philosophy in general, and Kant’s mandate for pure practical reason, the concept of an autonomous, freely determinant will, in particular.
“....there is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, (...) and commands are laws which must be obeyed, that is, must be followed, even in opposition to inclination. (...) the categorical imperative, is not limited by any condition, and as being absolutely, although practically, necessary, may be quite properly called a command....”
(ibid)
Hypothetical imperatives are rules, and if Anscombe’s thesis is to have power, she must only refer to these alone, in which case the they would be useless without a stipulation, which is not necessarily given:
“....When I conceive a hypothetical imperative, in general I do not know beforehand what it will contain until I am given the condition...”
(ibid)
The view to constructing a maxim, with respect to hypothetical imperatives, is nothing more than addressing whatever arbitrary want the description of the action provides. The view to constructing a maxim, with respect to a categorical imperative, involves a command of will, by which the description of the action must abide without exception.
Furthermore, there are as many hypothetical imperatives as there as circumstances that call for a moral determination and their respective maxims are just as many, as suits the mood of the will determining them. But there is one and only one categorical imperative, which demands the maxim one wills to become universal law, from which a certain act must follow necessarily by rule of law such that the act and the law do not contradict themselves, be chosen wisely. This proposition reduces to the proposition that the determinant will (the law) and the judgement of volition (the act) do not contradict themselves.
Is there remaining a question as to what form a relevant description of an action corresponding to a universalized maxim would have? While it is true Kant does not include a description per se, he makes it quite clear what the action is doesn’t matter. If one acts as if the maxim to which the imperative relates were a universal law, he is justified in calling himself morally worthy.
... Or you could have just said "did you mean Categorical Imperetive, or did you mean maxim?"
Yes, I suppose it does, but what's important to me in the use of the terms is the pragmatic meaning, the reason why the distinction is of use to me. But I take your point.
I do not know how you get this. The entire point is that's all that you-all will acknowledge, is a feeling. I argue that the monstrousness of these bad actors is bad in itself. You-all apparently need to personally suppose it bad, but do not acknowledge it as badness. More to the point, you-all have stated that inasmuch as (presumably) the bad actors did not think their actions were bad, then it's nonsense to say they were bad.
Question: do you suppose reason and its products to be universalizable? 2+2=4 is an expression of a certain kind of reason. Is it true, or is it true-for-you but not true, or maybe not true at all, but you just go with it? Which, please?
There's nothing about your post which hasn't already been addressed. What is the point of this crazy merry-go-round? Serious question.
Importantly, (and please acknowledge this point) there is no functionality to an objective morality, even if it exists; We are free to ignore it, should we feel differently.
Some people would dictate that the bible objectively states that homosexuality is wrong. Even if they could (they can't) objectively demonstrate this, it doesn't benefit anyone; We can ignore it, save for the punishment of hellfire, should they be able to prove it (they can't).
It's a relief to see someone who gets it, amongst others who simply don't. These are very good points. I have made them myself a number of times, and in a number of different discussions.
Some people fail to see the logic of this, and are guilty of special pleading, e.g. "Yes, but with murder it's different!".
It is a characteristically religious mindset, actually. Not like the open-mindedness of Hinduism, which is more accepting of other religions, but like the mindset of "My religion is the One True Religion, and only My Religion has authority over what's right and wrong!".
"If you don't accept my religion, then you're a heathen!"
"If you don't accept my morality, then you're a psychopath!"
And what are your qualifications for making that diagnosis? And why don't I recall undergoing a professional assessment conducted by you?
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 20:28#2695630 likes
I meant what is the basis of TS's and I think your core belief that all mental phenomena is by definition subjective.
Again, that isn't a belief. It's simply a stipulation about how I use a term. Different people use the same terms in different ways. I use that term to refer to mental phenomena.
And as on many many many other things - lack of evidence, is just lack of evidence. And even that is in dispute. And at the core of point all along. Near universal moral judgments on some issues is evidence that the source of some moral judgments could have a source outside individual mental phenomena.
Mere possibility isn't sufficient to believe anything, because the contradictory is usually possible, too.
Indeed, and that's what his argument boils down to. It is easily refuted. It isn't able to rule out competing explanations. Maybe there's an outside source. Maybe there isn't. It isn't difficult to imagine a possible world with either scenario. You're right to press him on [i]how[/I] near universal judgement is evidence of what he asserts (without supporting argument) that it is evidence of, but if you expect a proper response, you'll probably end up disappointed. He is intellectually dishonest and will refuse his burden of proof, yet he also won't concede. Instead, he'll respond with red herring after red herring, until you get distracted or grow sick and tired.
Except, wait a minute. Does an outside source even make any sense in the context of morality? Maybe it's not even possible, because it's a category error.
Morality is subjective. But morality isn't the entirety of the world. There are plenty of objective things. Morality just ain't one of them.
Yes, for Christ's sake, this [i]really[/I] shouldn't have to be clarified, let alone over and over again. I am also a moral subjectivist, but would anyone here in their right mind accuse me of idealism? Just look at my recent discussions. Look at the sheer number of criticisms I have made of it.
It beggars belief that anyone could struggle so much with such an elementary distinction.
Terrapin StationMarch 27, 2019 at 22:14#2696090 likes
Yeah, it's frustrating to have to keep correcting such simple things against straw men.
And why is it only people like us who are doing so? That is telling. The people on the other side of the debate either do not detect these problems or keep silent about them. With bad arguments like that, if I was on the other side of this debate, I would actively set out to dissociate myself with them. But instead, we see a lot of back patting. "Well said!", "Good point, Tim!", "Let's jerk off to Kant together, Tim!".
If, however, you're saying that it is a fact that this additional thing exists and I must prove it doesn't in order to sustain my position, then I'd take issue with that.
This is a general problem with him which spills over into other discussions. He either doesn't get how the burden of proof works or he deliberately disregards it. He only cares about trying to deflect attention away from his weaknesses and trying to manipulate his interlocutor into presenting justification after justification after justification, hoping to catch him out on something.
Is that an honourable way to engage in philosophical discussion?
Yeah, I could have, but I was more interested in what she said.
If you were interested in what she said, then you wouldn't need to post it on a public forum. Just read the book.
If you thought other people in this discussion might be interested, then perhaps you could explain the relevance. I raised her argument as a position against the potential granularity of statements like "murder is wrong, one should not murder", which is exactly what her argument is against, so if you have any response to that line of argument perhaps you could post that instead of the playing childish games of one-upmanship with terminology.
As Tim said, this isn't a discussion its a street fight.
OK, I guess. I’m not happy with tautological truths myself, but ehhhh.....I’ll never be famous.
Agreed on harmonious community, if one thinks of morality as an act, or a set of actions.
I don't see those formulations as "tautologous" so much as expressing the logical relation between actuality and truth. I agree that morality, if it is to have any communal significance, cannot but consist in acts. As principled intention it has significance for individuals to be sure; but where individuals do not transform intention into action I would say there can be no communal significance.
But, as I said before, I’ll never be famous, so....who cares.
I think your explication of Kant here is very good. It highlights the question as to whether Kant's CI is really categorical in relation to all acts of moral significance, or maybe rather whether it is instead the general maxim and not any specific prescriptions which is categorical in cases such as lying. As you no doubt know, one of the main objections to Kant's CI is that he is taken to claim that certain actions, for example lying, are always wrong in every situation and ought never be done under any circumstances. (What I say here would obviously not apply to acts such as murder, rape and torture).
So you have the well-worn thought experiments like what if you were in Warsaw and you had Jews hidden in your cellar, and Nazi soldiers knocked on your door and asked if you were harbouring any Jews? If the usual interpretation of Kant is assumed, then according to that you should tell the soldiers that there are Jews in your basement.
Now if you wanted to say that you should not tell them about the Jews, and were challenged to universalize that determination as a maxim it would be something like "Never lie unless Nazi soldiers are asking if you are harbouring Jews when you are harbouring Jews". That seems way too specific for a universal maxim, so perhaps we could make it less specific and say something like "Never lie except to protect the innocent from unjust harm". The problem is that it would seem to be impossible to construct an unambiguous maxim which does not consist in a treatment of morally relevant actions such as lying simpliciter which says they are just always wrong.
In one of his replies to me, @Isaac (I believe deliberately) conflates murder with killing. I think what he wrote there was a red herring, it was irrelevant to the points I had made and consisted in an attempt to undermine them by sophistry, and so I didn't think it was worth responding to. (Life is too short to waste!) The reason I bring that up is because Kant did condone capital punishment, but only as punishment for committing murder. He asserted that a convicted murderer should be killed and that it is actually our moral duty to kill him or her. (Not saying I do or don't agree with that, by the way). In any case the point is that for Kant murder is always wrong and killing is not always wrong.
Apart from Kant's requirement for an unambiguous maxim, we also have his notion of intention. If your intention is always to do what is right, according to a conscience unfettered by self-interest, and that is translated into the basis of your actions, then perhaps Kant would say that you are behaving morally.
By the way you have said "I'll never be famous" at least a couple of times now. I'm just wondering what the significance of that is. Do you want to be famous? Or do you think you ought to be famous? No criticism here; I'm just curious.
Call it whatever you like, directly or indirectly, but you can bet your ass Tim wasn’t talking about me when he said it. Nevertheless, I call it passing on an instruction. I’m not qualified to refute her, only to present him. Let the chips fall where they may.
So you have the well-worn thought experiments like what if you were in Warsaw
Yeah, The Good Professor took some serious flak for his conditions for maxims on lying. There are several references for the topic, and in typical Kantian fashion, one doesn’t say exactly the same as any other. But in an essay to the Frenchman Benjamin Constant,** he was pretty adamant in defending the subjective principle of absolute truthfulness. He justified it by changing the doing of harm to the doing of wrong, and it is always a violation of duty to do wrong. One must bring plenty of his own salt in cases like this.
Still, mass casualty events in Kant’s time were natural. I’d have to think he’d have done a little different job on this lying thing, if he’d witnessed WW1 or the Holocaust.....Hiroshima.......or some such man’s inhumanity to man thing. We are much less susceptible to perfection than his philosophy suggests for us.
—————-
morality, if it is to have any communal significance, cannot but consist in acts. As principled intention it has significance for individuals to be sure; but where individuals do not transform intention into action I would say there can be no communal significance.
Absolutely. But it still raises the question as to whether one can still be a worthy moral agent if he is the only human around. He might be, but what would it matter sans community to be moral in. Nobody ever stipulated empty environment for a location of morality, over a communal social environment.
—————-
Absolutely. But it still raises the question as to whether one can still be a worthy moral agent if he is the only human around. He might be, but what would it matter sans community to be moral in. Nobody ever stipulated empty environment for a location of morality, over a communal social environment.
Moral agency, intention or action would seem to be pretty meaningless without community. If one were alone in the natural world one might form worthy moral intentions and commit to worthy moral actions in relation to animals and plants; a form of community!
Reply to Mww I am far more familiar with Kant's CPR than with his CPrR or his CPJ. So my understanding of duty may not be in strict accordance with Kant's (and it might take a lifetime of study to determine whether or not it is given the controversies which seem to be involved in Kant scholarship), but it seems to me that if we have an understanding of what is involved in moral duty, that it is nonetheless the case that we still need the unadulterated intention to carry it out.
Any understanding may be, by Kant's or any other lights, not up to it, but if our intention is pure, then we would still be acting morally, it seems to me. The question is whether any understanding of duty can be comprehensive enough to cover all situations, or whether we could know that our understanding of duty is the best possible understanding of it. Of course, there is also the question of whether pure intention is possible at all.
You’re right, it’s not impossible, if something new is available.
— Mww
New thought/belief.
— creativesoul
Yes, but there is still the question about a possible instantiation for it.
Indeed. We must know how deliberate change in one's deeply inculcated moral belief happens; what it takes in order to happen; what is required; etc. We need to know what the event itself needs to have already happened, in order for it to be able to. Otherwise, there is no way to know what it is that we're looking for and no way to know when we've found it.
We know it happens.
If a society is of a certain moral persuasion, and a fully inculcated member is nonetheless subsequently in moral opposition to some part of it, the question is raised as to where the opposition came from.
Indeed.
Without experience, without some external influence, he is subject to his own a priori practical reason as the source of his opposition. But where did reason get the idea the societal norm should be opposed in the first place? What enables a subject to declare that whatever some norm might be, he is opposed to it? If it be supposed the opposition arose from mere feeling, for lacking experience reduces the means to nothing else, then it becomes manifest that feelings have the power over reason, which is impossible because feelings have no object until reason cognizes one as belonging to it necessarily.
See, that's far too entrenched in the mistake of a brilliant man. If he did not deliberately misrepresent his own thought/belief, then I would be quite confident in saying that he was a good man. With that in mind, good men make mistakes just like bad men. In Kant's case, his categories of thought cannot take the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief into consideration.
What is the notion of a priori doing here?
I'm not entirely certain of Kant's actual stance. Seems to me though, that conventional understanding of a priori ought at least be capable of clearly and accurately setting out Kant's delineation. Correct me if I'm off here, but isn't a priori the name of a very particular kind of thought/belief; one of which Kant himself claims is existentially independent of all experience:That which we can deduce and/or induce while sitting in a chair? That which must be presupposed within all experience. I've also entertained that notion. That which is necessary for all experience. I've thought in those terms as well. I find none of them reliable for taking proper account of the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
Deliberate oppositional change to one's morality always happen through complex common language use. There are no exceptions and/or actual examples to the contrary. It is a series of connected events. Undoubtedly one's morality must already be an operative element within one's thought/belief system(world-view). Otherwise, one one cannot question it. One must already be following some set of behavioural rules in order to place them under suspicion.
These things are true of everyone who is placing their initial worldview under suspicion, regardless of the particulars.
If the only way to question a certain kind of thinking is by virtue of using a specific well-defined set of linguistic terms in a conventionally accepted manner, then it only follows that that particular kind of thinking is itself existentially dependent upon complex language acquisition replete with the terminology. Some accounts of morality pride themselves upon such complexity. Questioning such an inculcated morality is existentially dependent upon thinking about one's own pre-existing thought/belief. All thought/belief about the rules of conduct requires first isolating the rules as a means for subsequent consideration.
Some thought/belief does not have such existential dependence. Some moral thought/belief is not existentially dependent upon language.
Prior to common language no one approves of another harming them. Everyone disapproves.
Call it whatever you like, directly or indirectly, but you can bet your ass Tim wasn’t talking about me when he said it.
Of course, because he's biased in your favour. When he said the street fight comment, he most likely excluded himself and people like you. Even though you lot are as guilty as the rest.
Well yes... The entire rest of the debate. Your response to the fact that we do not say that 'killing' is wrong. We'll start there. Why do you think, from a purely rational perspective that the maxim "one should not kill another" is not rational?
LOL. Oh hell no, I don’t want to be famous. I use authority to make some points, but I grant that what I say of my own accord has no kind of authority. Opinion, no matter the pretty prose and precise grammar, is nonetheless mere opinion.
I mean it as sort of an anticipatory, “well who the hell are you? What makes you any better than me?” kinda thing.
See, that's far too entrenched in the mistake of a brilliant man. If he did not deliberately misrepresent his own thought/belief, then I would be quite confident in saying that he was a good man. With that in mind, good men make mistakes just like bad men. In Kant's case, his categories of thought cannot take the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief into consideration.
Yikes!! That’s a tough one, right there. Lemme see if I understand this the way you intended:
......too entrenched.....that’s me, in the writing of the scenario;
......if he did not deliberately, his own thought/belief, he was a good man.....he being the subject of the scenario, the guy In moral opposition to the norm....
Good men make mistakes just like bad men, sure, but there’s no sense of good/bad anywhere here. The scenario has to do with racist norm vs. non-racist exception to the norm. Adding in good/bad doesn’t address the origin of the moral divide. Is the good man and/or the bad man in the scenario, or is that a general provision for all scenarios? You say if he had not misrepresented his own thought/belief, he would be a good man, but where in the scenario was it ever presented that he was a bad man? If all he’s doing is morally opposing the extant racist norm of his society, why isn’t he automatically a good man? Not from your or my point of view because *WE* think racism ugly from a distance, but from *HIS* point of view, because he’s in the midst of it experientially?
I shall take your word that Kant’s categories of thought cannot take the actual distinction... into account. I’m sure such failure has something to do with all that said beforehand.
————————
1.)........Deliberate oppositional change to one's morality always happen through complex common language use.....
2.)........If the only way to question a certain kind of thinking is by virtue of using a specific well-defined set of linguistic terms in a conventionally accepted manner......
3.)........Questioning such an inculcated morality is existentially dependent upon thinking about one's own pre-existing thought/belief. All thought/belief about the rules of conduct requires first isolating the rules as a means for subsequent consideration......
4.).......Some moral thought/belief is not existentially dependent upon language.
1.) OK, granting that complex language use does not necessarily include actual speech.
2.) OK, but the problem remains, in the given scenario of a completely racially entrenched society, there shouldn’t be any set of linguistic terms contrary to the terms of the inculcation. Sorta like a minor Mary’s Room, insofar as all this guy has ever heard are racist terms and conditions, so supposing he will understand non-racist terms and conditions when there aren’t any.....well, how would that even happen?
3.) Absolutely. Herein lies the employment of a priori practical reason.
4.) Yes, agreed. Morality itself, or some ground for it, or the means for its possibility, reside in humans as a intrinsic condition. If not language, then what? Feeling or reason are the only choices.
Nice street fighting with you, mon amie. May the Gods of Proper Dialectic smile upon your countenance and bring you a vast array of Plato/Platypus jokes and Andy Warhol reprints.
One ideology in conflict with another doesn’t negate the rationality of the given maxim. It may be irrational to even have a conflict, but that is not under consideration. One can hold the maxim “one should not kill”, and still go about his business as a soldier in the combat field with his morality intact.
“thou shall not kill”, an absolute declarative statement per the Ten Commandments, e.g., is irrational, because it is impossible in all cases to avoid it and simultaneously hold with a more valuable maxim “the wonton violation of ownership of life is wrong”. Wherein lies the distinction between the should not of killing and the shall not of murder, insofar as the former may be forgivable but the latter is may never.
Technically speaking, in deontological moral philosophy, “one should not kill” is not a maxim, it is a directive. The maxim proper would be, in the correct form of a subjective principle which prescribes a possible volition, “no life has preference over another”, and the hypothetical imperative standing for what the possible volition actually becomes, “ therefore one has no right to kill”. Because killing is not always avoidable, this hypothetical, while not tacit permission to kill, maintains an agent’s sense of personal moral worthiness if he should be put in a position where he must exercise his prerogatives.
Terrapin StationMarch 28, 2019 at 13:51#2698760 likes
I'd say that any moral stance, n, is rational only in relation to some other, effectively foundational stance or desire, goal, etc., m, where n is either a consequence of or prerequisite for m.
If that is the case, then n as a prerequisite for m contradicts m being an effectively foundational stance. N can’t be both before and after m if m is the foundation.
I’d say being rational means no more than being non-contradictory. If so, n is rational in relation to m as long as n doesn’t contradict m. ‘Course, that doesn’t say squat about the rationality of m, but if it is a effectively foundational stance, it better not be self-contradictory.
if we have an understanding of what is involved in moral duty, that it is nonetheless the case that we still need the unadulterated intention to carry it out.
I think that because Kant stipulates that morality is a fundamental human condition, and such morality in human form at least, is claimed to be predicated on the principle of duty, intentionality is given automatically. I mean...we couldn’t be not moral, so not matter what we actually do with respect to it, we are going to do something. We intend to do something in conjunction with the being of moral agency. That is not to say that other theories in moral philosophy doesn't or shouldn’t attribute more value to intentionality, so you might be quite right in stating our need.
Intentionality maybe arises from the connection of an imperative with its result. I judge an imperative as an action with the intent that the end to which the imperative aims is actually attained. But I might have misjudged, in which case my intentionality, while still there, was not met.
I understand philosophy in general makes a big deal out of intentionality, but like the language thing, I don’t see much power in it.
One can hold the maxim “one should not kill”, and still go about his business as a soldier in the combat field with his morality intact.
So morality is something more than sticking to a rule, or are you saying here, as below that one determines what is a moral action by reference to its objective "one shouldn't kill, but sometimes one must and that is then moral as long as one has tried hard enough not to kill? I'm struggling to understand what" one should not kill" could possibly mean in terms of rationally determining that which is moral.
thou shall not kill”, an absolute declarative statement per the Ten Commandments, e.g., is irrational, because it is impossible in all cases to avoid it and simultaneously hold with a more valuable maxim “the wonton violation of ownership of life is wrong”.
OK, so how is the relative value of these two conflicting maxims judged? How does rationality alone determine which should be abandoned in favour of the other?
“no life has preference over another”, and the hypothetical imperative standing for what the possible volition actually becomes, “ therefore one has no right to kill”. Because killing is not always avoidable, this hypothetical, while not tacit permission to kill, maintains an agent’s sense of personal moral worthiness if he should be put in a position where he must exercise his prerogatives.
Right, so this is Anscombe's argument (and others). All this comes down to is the tail wagging the dog. "Why did you kill that person?", "Well...it was one of those special circumstances where I exercised my prerogative"
Not to mention of course the fact that "no life has preference over another" remains just an opinion, unless you support it with rational argument, the only version of which that has so far been advanced is universalisation, which is the very thing you're now saying doesn't apply to murder - the example we've been working with from the start.
So morality is something more than sticking to a rule
I see it that way, yes. Morality is a fundamental condition of being human. It’s not a thing; it’s the name given to one of the things that makes us human, separates us from any other biological agent.
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......(or, as below) one determines what is a moral action by reference to its objective
I see it as one determines what is a moral action by reference to its law. Here is is where relativism enters; a law is determined by the will so can be variable by the will determining what it is. One is free to choose that which defines him. It’s what makes all the same (we’re moral) but different (we’re free).
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how is the relative value of these two conflicting maxims judged?
I can’t unpack what you’re calling these two conflicting maxims. “Thou shall not kill” is not a maxim, and being a command, doesn’t require any rationality in response to it anyway. Why would it, if under any possible circumstance, the agent holding with this command isn’t going to kill anything. Period.
The maxim is “the wanton violation of ownership of life is wrong”, and the relative value in that relates solely to the will that determines it, the will which could have just as permissibly determined some other maxim. Or, it’s relative value could be with respect to some other freely determinant will inhering in some other moral agency, which is free to determine a completely different maxim. Then I guess the relative value would manifest in whether or not the one guy gets along with himself, or whether those two agents get along with each other.
Bear in mind, this “wanton violation.....” is just an example of what a maxim might look like. It is the correct form, but the idea it presents could be anything.
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I don’t understand. The idiom means some small thing overriding some big thing. Cart before the horse, and the like. How does this relate to anything? Are you saying a guy who kills for fun, while not admitting any immorality whatsoever, does so because he’s thinking he’s merely doing what feels good and therefore can’t be held liable? Yeah, so? What else would you expect? If that’s what you mean, all you’re doing is superimposing your morality where it doesn't belong. You get to judge his actions using your morality as a baseline, so to you his actions are atrocious, but you don’t get to judge his moral agency because his agency is exactly the same as yours. Hence.....subjective relativism in its proper sense.
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Not to mention of course the fact that "no life has preference over another" remains just an opinion, unless you support it with rational argument,
Yes, it is an opinion. Any maxim is a product of reason, given from one mind, and internally maintained, which is the very definition of opinion. That opinion may be grounded in experience, teachings, culture, whatever, but the formulation of it is entirely a subjective enterprise. Similarly, the support is a product of reason antecedent to the formulation; reason is the means, opinion is the ends. When the opinion is expressed as a hypothesis in a theory, or a tenet of a philosophy, the rational argument is already given in order for the hypothesis or tenet to even exist. Although, I suppose a guy could advance a theory by just saying “x....” without saying why, but that’s pretty crappy theorizing and he probably doesn’t care about the seriousness with which it is received. Nevertheless, I, as a moral agent, am only concerned with the “life” part, not the content of it. No LIFE has preference, but certainly some life contents....what one has done with his....have greater value than others. But we don’t judge morality on content of life, but rather on content of self.
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universalisation, which is the very thing you're now saying doesn't apply to murder
Again...I’m not understanding this. If universalization means the end result of a maxim, then if I held the maxim “wanton violation of ownership of life” I would be happy if every single moral agent ever acted as if that were indeed a universal law that the ownership of no life be ever wantonly violated. Or, in short....conventionally spoken.....don’t murder anybody.
Yes. On here someplace was presented a scenario of a fully racist culture, with a single member’s instance of avowed non-racism, but without any visual experience of a non-racist conditions given in the scenario.
I agree with you that the instance of contrariness to a norm can only arise from some kind of doubt about that norm, which in turn can only arise from either experience, including language use, or feelings. I’m saying feelings are not sufficient for negating a norm, such that one is justified in claiming to be its opposite, even while feeling a dissatisfaction with it.
I see it that way, yes. Morality is a fundamental condition of being human. It’s not a thing; it’s the name given to one of the things that makes us human, separates us from any other biological agent.
Well, I agree with the first part. I'm not sure where you're getting your data from to support the second part, but that's probably a whole other discussion.
I see it as one determines what is a moral action by reference to its law. Here is is where relativism enters; a law is determined by the will so can be variable by the will determining what it is. One is free to choose that which defines him. It’s what makes all the same (we’re moral) but different (we’re free).
I completely agree with this, but this is really the whole of moral relativism as it's being presented here. No one is saying that morals are fished out of thin air at random. So the argument that rational thought is required to determine a course of action is never opposed. What is opposed is the presentation of objectivism here which states that, for example, murder is objectively wrong for all people at all times, which it appeared at first you were supporting.
That which is moral is always a rational determination, so “one should not kill” is just one more in an constant barrage of them.
Fine, but not only a rational determination, the subjective feeling that some law exists (I wouldn't put it that way myself, but I'm trying to use your terminology), must come first, and it is this which makes morality relative.
I can’t unpack what you’re calling these two conflicting maxims.
Don't worry, I had a completely different interpretation of what your paragraph here evidently meant, so my reply will make little sense in that context. I presumed you were referring to the circumstance of conflicting laws (where both states do not appear possible to bring about simultaneously. The trouble is, your deontological language just doesn't translate well into normal usage.
I don’t understand. The idiom means some small thing overriding some big thing.
The idiom refers to the wrong part of a duality being in charge (the dog should be the one wagging it's tail, not the other way round). What I'm saying here is that from my position people tend to justify, post hoc, that which they desire to do anyway. The complexity and flexibility of deontology in the regard you mention is exactly how this happens. I think it's a mistake to hide behind a woven rationalisation.
Again...I’m not understanding this. If universalization means the end result of a maxim, then if I held the maxim “wanton violation of ownership of life” I would be happy if every single moral agent ever acted as if that were indeed a universal law that the ownership of no life be ever wantonly violated. Or, in short....conventionally spoken.....don’t murder anybody.
We seem to have come from possible agreement back round to this absolutism. If you don't want to murder anyone, or live in a world where people do, then that's great, by me. But there's nothing irrational about saying I don't want anyone to murder me, but I shall murder whomever I please. Most of us do not need any rational calculation whatsoever to know that murder is wrong, and that's a good thing, it saves a lot of time and reduces errors.
What is opposed is the presentation of objectivism here which states that, for example, murder is objectively wrong for all people at all times, which it appeared at first you were supporting.
I have no truck with moral objectivism; it’s actually an impossible view, simply because humans are fundamentally all the same, but our entire evolution has been predicated on territory and culture, rather than uniting as a species. Some here have, nevertheless, advanced propositions favoring the possibility of specific inclinations in which murder, slavery, racism and such, are very close to being abhorant to all humans, which I don’t have any problem with. But inclinations are very far from moral interests, and are provably absent any aspect of universality whatsoever. What I do support, is if all humans held the categorical imperative, act only in such a way that the ownership of life be never violated.
Hopefully you recognize that while a categorical imperative describes one agent, the universality of it only has any relevance as if the same categorical imperative operates in all minds. You could say it is the hope of absolutism, or objective universality, but no one ever expects it as a result. It’s just a high-falootin’ way of saying, if you want to be the best you can possibly be, this is how.
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What I'm saying here is that from my position people tend to justify, post hoc, that which they desire to do anyway. The complexity and flexibility of deontology in the regard you mention is exactly how this happens. I think it's a mistake to hide behind a woven rationalisation.
Deontology allows for this, because of the fragility and inconsistency in human activities. The categorical imperative is one thing, very strict, the bottom line, that which is the end game. But end games don’t permit inconsistencies, so if categorical imperatives were all there was, morality would always be contradicting itself. Hypothetical imperatives, as those with “should” as the actuator, as opposed to “shall”, only pronounce those acts which permit acquiescence to desires, wants, that for which the ends are always something else. Yes, the flexibility of deontology grants this, but it is not thereby post hoc, nor a woven rationalization. It is just weak, permissive....like us.
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But there's nothing irrational about saying I don't want anyone to murder me, but I shall murder whomever I please.
You know, just these words, even in context, can only be understood as the epitome of irrational. I’m going to leave it alone until it becomes clearer to me exactly what you mean. Somehow I don’t think you meant what the words say.
I think that because Kant stipulates that morality is a fundamental human condition, and such morality in human form at least, is claimed to be predicated on the principle of duty, intentionality is given automatically. I mean...we couldn’t be not moral, so not matter what we actually do with respect to it, we are going to do something. We intend to do something in conjunction with the being of moral agency. That is not to say that other theories in moral philosophy doesn't or shouldn’t attribute more value to intentionality, so you might be quite right in stating our need.
My understanding is that Kant grounds the practical belief in human freedom on the universal fact of moral responsibility. You cannot live in any society and not be considered responsible for your actions towards others. Others may be inadvertently affected by your actions, but that is not generally considered to be a matter of moral responsibility unless it involves some definite negligence. I think the idea of deliberately acting towards others and being responsible for those actions is where the intentional dimension comes into play.
I might be concerned, for example, with appearing to do my duty, however that duty might be inter-subjectively conceived rather, than with actually doing it, and I might, on the strength of that concern, despite my lack of intention to do anything beyond keeping up the appearances, actually do my duty superlatively. Kant will not praise me for that!
Kant actually accords greater moral merit to one who does something that they really don't want to do out of a sense of duty, than someone who does their duty because that is what they love to do. Although I must say that seems perverse to me.
Not to mention of course the fact that "no life has preference over another" remains just an opinion, unless you support it with rational argument, — Isaac
Yes, it is an opinion. Any maxim is a product of reason, given from one mind, and internally maintained, which is the very definition of opinion.
I don't think it is merely an opinion. Considered in the absence of emotional bias, no life does have preference over any other, and that is precisely because there is no purely rational justification for preferring one life over another. There may be practically rational justifications for doing so such as 'her life is more important because she is the queen' and so on.
On the other hand, of course anyone is going to prefer the lives of their family over the lives of strangers, but that preference is exactly what the Kantian notion of duty would exhort you to ignore in determining where your duty lies.
Kant actually accords greater moral merit to one who does something that they really don't want to do out of a sense of duty, than someone who does their duty because that is what they love to do. Although I must say that seems perverse to me.
It’s a never ending reduction, seems like, doesn’t it? One does his duty when he doesn’t really want to, which is much more morally meritorious because it’s more painful than pleasurable, out of respect for the law to which duty requires your adherence. Coincidentally enough, respect is what Kant uses to replace the prevalent atttitude of his day, feelings. We normal people don’t usually consider respect a feeling, so it fits well as a replacement for it. That he was Prussian certainly didn’t hurt.
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her life is more important because she is the queen'
I’ll go ahead and disagree with this. Her actions may be more important because she must do queenly things, but her life, irrespective of Her Highness, still occupies space and time, is created, suffers, and belongs to her alone, just like mine. Just as in your “On the other hand.....”
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I think the idea of deliberately acting towards others and being responsible for those actions is where the intentional dimension comes into play.
You know.....nobody talks too much about the responsibility side, do they. I know I’m more into the causation rather than the correlation, but one does necessarily follow from the other, true enough.
We normal people don’t usually consider respect a feeling, so it fits well as a replacement for it.
That's an interesting question; is respect a feeling? We may respect others, which if it were a feeling, would be a positive feeling, even if we don't like them, which is a negative feeling. I think this, inter alia, shows that feeling is not the primary element in moral dispositions. So for me the separation of thought from feeling and the privileging of one over the other, as expressed in formulas like "Reason is, and ought to be, slave to the passions" betrays somewhat simpleminded thinking.
I’ll go ahead and disagree with this. Her actions may be more important because she must do queenly things, but her life, irrespective of Her Highness, still occupies space and time, is created, suffers, and belongs to her alone, just like mine. Just as in your “On the other hand.....”
I agree, and I was not intending to support any kind of general claim that some people's lives could have, on account of their greater importance to the community, greater ethical value than the lives of others. On the other hand (as with my other "On the other hand") would we not think there was something wrong with a person who did not value the lives of his friends and family more than those of acquaintances, not to mention strangers? From a deontological perspective valuing your family over strangers could not be a virtue; but from the perspective of virtue ethics it might be.
I tend take some things from deontological ethics and some from virtue ethics; but I don't tend to take utilitarian ethics into general account (although I can imagine that it might have a place in some special circumstances).
Yes. I'd like to confirm points of agreement and/or mutual understanding.
One can change one's mind about what counts as acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. Everyday fact bears witness to this. We can look for ourselves. There are accounts/reports of it all over the place. We can look at those. We can be a part of it, and/or watch another go through it. We can - as a matter of everyday fact - help another go through it iff we know what it takes, want to do what it takes, and circumstances do not stand in the way.
That's a bit of our agreement, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If all the above is acceptable enough...
So, one can doubt their original morality. It happens. How does it happen was the question I then sought answer for. You and I gave differing answers. I do not think/believe that they are utterly incommensurate/incompatible with one another. There seems to be much agreement. Although, I do think that there is a choice to made between which account is more reliable, truthful, dependable, trustworthy, etc.
We're talking about the same events. We're talking about the necessary preconditions of those events. The notion of a priori reason may well be capable of taking account of such an event. Everyone can understand the event despite not being able to use Kant's terminological framework as he did. So, neither the event nor understanding the event requires Kant's framework.
Morality, as current convention has it, is a term used in many ways. It is well-worn. There are a plurality of referents, conceptions, notions, and/or ideas referred to by the one who uses the term. That is true of all terminological usage. To avoid misinterpretation, I am using the term "morality" as a rigid designator. It always refers to codes of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. I want to see where this leads when held in light of my own notion of thought/belief.
When I use the term "moral belief", it refers to belief about the aforementioned rules(belief about morality). It is a kind of belief that is determined solely by virtue of it's content. All kind of thought/belief is determined by virtue of what it's about.
What counts as "moral" behaviour follows from one's notion of morality. Here I've not used the term "moral" as a synonym for good and/or acceptable. It is not being used to indicate my approval.
Is morality the sort of thing that can exist in it's entirety prior to language acquisition?
If we follow current convention, it cannot, unless the written rules for acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour are not existentially dependent upon common language. They are by definition existentially dependent upon common language use.
So, according to current convention. No. Morality cannot exist in it's entirety prior to common language.
This comes up against my own understanding of what counts as moral thought/belief. If moral thought/belief is about codes of conduct, then it only follows that moral thought/belief is itself existentially dependent upon common language. Moral thought/belief then, it must be admitted, is a product of thinking about one's own pre-existing thought/belief.
That would fail to draw the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. It would relegate all moral thought/belief as metacognitive in it's nature. But it's not. All deliberate oppositional change in one's original adopted morality is.
Something is wrong here... Clearly.
Interesting things happen when considering this; language is not required for thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. It is required for thought/belief about unacceptable thought, and/or belief.
So here we must make some sort of decisions.. Some may include...
1. Deny that a non-linguistic and/or pre-linguistic creature can form and/or hold meaningful thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour
2. Deny that all thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour counts as moral belief
3. Admit that current convention is found to be lacking explanatory power in this regard
4. Reject the framework(my method or convention's definition of "morality")
Or...
5. Come to the realization that the written rules of conduct consist entirely of and/or are otherwise underwritten by thought/belief statements:Thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour.
If all thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour counts as morality, then morality - in rudimentary form - is not existentially dependent upon common language.
But there's nothing irrational about saying I don't want anyone to murder me, but I shall murder whomever I please.
— Isaac
You know, just these words, even in context, can only be understood as the epitome of irrational. I’m going to leave it alone until it becomes clearer to me exactly what you mean. Somehow I don’t think you meant what the words say.
To doubt what is being taught, one must have a baseline from which to doubt. All doubt is belief-based. To doubt 'X' is to doubt that 'X' is true. Let X be a statement of thought/belief.
During the formation of one's first world-view, the teachers can be many, and the teachers can be few. It is entirely possible to doubt the truthfulness of what is being taught in all those cases, if the student has pre-existing thought/belief that is contrary and/or otherwise places the teaching under scrutiny. If one attempts to teach a child that all people of a certain group are this or that, and the student knows someone of that group that is not, then the student already has the black swan in mind.
Sapientia's candidate does not preclude this.
If the candidate had but one teacher or set of teachers all of whom held the same sort of unshakable certainty, and whose belief system actually glorified and looked fondly upon continuing to hold that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
In these cases it ain't so easy to change one's mind.
I'd say that any moral stance, n, is rational only in relation to some other, effectively foundational stance or desire, goal, etc., m, where n is either a consequence of or prerequisite for m.
That's what certain rationalist philosophers and their fanboys either miss or try in vain to overcome. This was Hume's great contribution to moral philosophy. From what I know of Kantian philosophy, and from what I've seen presented here, nothing in the aforementioned even comes close to a refutation of this point. It is just words on a screen which achieve nothing. Those continually submitting this text seem to be under the illusion that they've actually achieved something of substance. It is quite absurdly humorous.
if it is reasonable that a) you don't want to be murdered, but b) you can yourself murder as you desire, then it is reasonable that others feel the same way.
First of all, you've made a very important change to what I actually said which makes all the difference. I said "I shall murder whomever I please" and you re-quoted it as "you can yourself murder as you desire".
The use of the word 'can' begs the question because it presumes a priori that there is a universal moral code that one might consult to see if I 'can' murder someone, otherwise what would the opposite mean? So the first problem is that the proposition you're asking me to counter makes no sense unless I already presume moral objectivism (we've been here before). I mean, what else would "I can murder" mean without presuming there is a universal moral law? - I'm physically capable of murder? - Well, that definitely could be the case for some and not others.
Secondly, even if one were to get around the 'can' issue. Let's say hypothetically that the whole world is sat round a table deciding what 'The Law' should be, and I propose "No one can murder me, but I can murder whomever I choose". You might say then that is not a very rational suggestion because if everyone adopted it, my first desire (to not be murdered) would be logically frustrated by my second (that I may murder whomever I choose). But this being the case relies not on pure reason, but on a fact about the world. If I behave some way, others are likely to copy. If I think it reasonable that I can murder whomever I please, others may too. Again here you're begging the question with regards to reason being universal. In reality, I have no reason at all to think that, just because I propose to murder whomever I please, that other people will reach the same conclusion (note will reach, not may reach, because without already assuming a universal moral law, 'may reach', as in 'allowed to' doesn't make any sense). I actually observe a world in which most people refrain from murder even when they can get away with it, so I've no reason not to presume they will continue to do so despite my new law.
Thirdly, the desire to avoid being murdered, and the desire to murder are not necessarily equal, so to say that the second part irrationally frustrates the first is incorrect. It may frustrate the first (in specific social environments, as mentioned above), but that is often entirely necessary of two conflicting desires. Saying "I may eat as much chocolate as I like, and others may restrict my access to chocolate" is not irrational, its a sensible diet plan. There is the desire to eat chocolate, and the desire to stay thin, and they conflict with one another.
Fourthly, there is the issue of granularity. Even if, despite all that, we remain committed deontologists, but nonetheless psychopaths. We can simply re-write our law. I {people called Jim born on 15th July 1965, with brown hair, blue eyes and an evil mustache} may murder whomever I please, but no one without those credentials may murder me. Now, if I presume that is rational, then I may presume everyone else would reach the same conclusion, which is fine by me.
Hopefully you recognize that while a categorical imperative describes one agent, the universality of it only has any relevance as if the same categorical imperative operates in all minds. You could say it is the hope of absolutism, or objective universality, but no one ever expects it as a result. It’s just a high-falootin’ way of saying, if you want to be the best you can possibly be, this is how.
I see what you're saying, but think you're fixing something which isn't broken. I don't think there is any evidence at all that people need guidance rationally through such a vague mechanism. Ask a five year old if they think it's OK to kill another person, or steal. They've already picked up that it isn't and they're hardly masters of rational thought. Our biology is far more powerful than our rationality and is, by weight of overwhelming evidence, very obviously the thing in charge. Luckily, for our rapidly changing environment, we come built in with a mechanism to adapt, we copy others. We behave the way we see others behave. We induct rules from those observations in the same way we learn the rules of language. So we don't need complex deontology. Basic functional society is enough and that requires that we get the social environment right, not moralise. It's like trying to talk a cog into playing the right role in a machine rather than just putting it in the right place for it to do so.
You know, just these words, even in context, can only be understood as the epitome of irrational. I’m going to leave it alone until it becomes clearer to me exactly what you mean. Somehow I don’t think you meant what the words say.
How can one overcome racism in the example provided s/he has no external source aside from the racist imbedded language use s/he learns?
What are you even doing with the thought experiment I introduced? Must you take everything on one of your peculiar tangents? The point I was making was simple enough and seems uncontroversial. People are only resisting it because they don't want to concede.
Allow me to get you back on track:
There's nothing which makes it impossible for one to deviate from the herd-morality prevalent in a society, and to deviate [i]in a good way[/I]. The adherents of herd-morality commit the fallacy of only considering scenarios where the herd-morality conforms with their own morality, and so they naturally judge deviation as bad. But when they're confronted with a scenario where the herd-morality doesn't conform with their own morality, as with the racism example, they don't know how to reasonably justify their stance, which explains the irrational dismissiveness I have received. Special pleading and irrational denial is no reasonable justification.
These denialists don't even realise that they're tacitly appealing to their own individual sense of morality here, which is evidently primary.
And again, to be clear, I have not once suggested any sort of absolute isolation or immunity of any external influential factors. Nonconformity is very much possible, and very much not attributable to the herd. Though it can be somewhat rare for an individual to stand out from the herd, to deviate from a dominant culture, it can and does happen, and that is because we are individual moral agents and not Borg.
This is the nail in the coffin. The responses, if there are any, will probably just be more words on a screen which achieve nothing. And one thing is certain, ramblings about "thought/belief" and "existential dependency" and "prior to language acquisition" won't do anything except provide those of us in the know with entertainment. It is even more entertaining when someone actually takes it seriously and tries to make sense out of nonsense. (Perhaps by "all mimsy were the borogoves", he meant...). So by all means, please continue down this route, and I'll grab some more popcorn.
I remember when @Mww was still sensible enough to side with me over @creativesoul. Now those two are all chummy and he is bitterly set against me, even though I talk [i]way[/I] more sense.
I’m saying feelings are not sufficient for negating a norm, such that one is justified in claiming to be its opposite, even while feeling a dissatisfaction with it.
Well they are in my case. If you were to take me to a time and place where racism was very much the norm, then I assure you I would stand by my feelings against it. I'm not that fickle or sheeplike.
Fine, but not only a rational determination, the subjective feeling that some law exists (I wouldn't put it that way myself, but I'm trying to use your terminology), must come first, and it is this which makes morality relative.
Yes, and again, this relates to Hume. It was he who made these brilliant points revealing the fundamental nature of morality. The subjective feeling comes first, and is primary, and then the rational determination follows suit. Or, as Hume famously put it, reason is the slave of the passions.
Kant is mostly known in ethics for introducing a novel way of going about morality, how to determine right and wrong, which pales in comparison to what Hume did in this branch of philosophy, in my opinion.
The idiom refers to the wrong part of a duality being in charge (the dog should be the one wagging it's tail, not the other way round). What I'm saying here is that from my position people tend to justify, post hoc, that which they desire to do anyway. The complexity and flexibility of deontology in the regard you mention is exactly how this happens. I think it's a mistake to hide behind a woven rationalisation.
If that is the case, then n as a prerequisite for m contradicts m being an effectively foundational stance. N can’t be both before and after m if m is the foundation.
For example, let's say that Joe has a love of a particular part of the Amazon and really wants to live there, so he wants to build a house there. It turns out that he won't be able to do that without the approval and assistance of a nearby tribe. But the nearby tribe won't cooperate unless Joe, who is a doctor, agrees to provide free medical care for the tribe in emergencies, and free checkups every year. So it's a prerequisite for meeting Joe's desire to build his house that he agrees with the moral stance that he should provide free medical care to the tribe in exchange for their cooperation. So a moral stance that's a prerequisite to a foundational desire for Joe is rational to adopt.
It's easy to set up a foundational moral stance example in a similar vein.
To doubt what is being taught, one must have a baseline from which to doubt. All doubt is belief-based. To doubt 'X' is to doubt that 'X' is true. Let X be a statement of thought/belief.
Struggling to see what any of this has to do with morality, but my best attempt at piecing together your line of argument is to something like -
Morality is a set of rules we learn by observation and we cannot doubt the rules we first learn unless we have cause to doubt. We must be presented with some alternative belief system to weigh against the baseline one.
But if I have your line of argument right, then how does it explain the fact that lesions in the medial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and different locations within the bilateral temporal lobes, can cause people previously disposed to sociable behaviour to become prone to violence, theft and even murder. If the proscription against those things is a linguistic, or learned one which can only be changed by doubt, why would specific brain damage have an effect on moral behaviour?
First of all, you've made a very important change to what I actually said which makes all the difference. I said "I shall murder whomever I please" and you re-quoted it as "you can yourself murder as you desire".
The use of the word 'can' begs the question because it presumes a priori that there is a universal moral code that one might consult to see if I 'can' murder someone, otherwise what would the opposite mean? So the first problem is that the proposition you're asking me to counter makes no sense unless I already presume moral objectivism (we've been here before). I mean, what else would "I can murder" mean without presuming there is a universal moral law? - I'm physically capable of murder? - Well, that definitely could be the case for some and not others.
Indeed, we have. How many times now? A hundred? A thousand? I lost count a long time ago. We have over fifty pages of this now. Pretty crazy.
I see what you're saying, but think you're fixing something which isn't broken. I don't think there is any evidence at all that people need guidance rationally through such a vague mechanism. Ask a five year old if they think it's OK to kill another person, or steal. They've already picked up that it isn't and they're hardly masters of rational thought. Our biology is far more powerful than our rationality and is, by weight of overwhelming evidence, very obviously the thing in charge. Luckily, for our rapidly changing environment, we come built in with a mechanism to adapt, we copy others. We behave the way we see others behave. We induct rules from those observations in the same way we learn the rules of language. So we don't need complex deontology. Basic functional society is enough and that requires that we get the social environment right, not moralise. It's like trying to talk a cog into playing the right role in a machine rather than just putting it in the right place for it to do so.
Yes! I agree. The gist of that criticism of the categorical imperative is what I was getting at in my criticism of it in the last paragraph here, though we come at it from slightly different angles. You're good at explaining things. You have a way with words. Here's what I said of it earlier:
Bringing up hypothetical imperatives seems to miss the point of my criticism. Kant might well have had them in his sights, but so what? They make way more sense, and are way more relatable than his categorical imperative. I am criticising his categorical imperative. I am asserting that he largely failed, because the categorical imperative is largely alien and useless and ineffectual. I know enough about logic to recognise a logical conditional when I see one, and that is how it is commonly argued. I'm just skipping ahead to that key bit. One can ask, "Why should I act only according to that maxim whereby I can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law?". And that's when the conditional kicks in. "Well, if you were to...". [I]But I don't[/i]. And my morality is just fine, thanks. I know that intuitively. The categorical imperative is redundant and artificial. I am not subservient to any supposed universal moral laws. That is not my measure of right and wrong. My own conscience is sufficient for the job. How can that objection be overcome? I don't think that it can. That's what I meant when I said that it has no force over myself and others. It cannot override my moral foundation in moral feelings. It is just a curious little thought experiment, but it isn't at all practical or realistic. What's practical and realistic is simply appealing to your conscience without any need for Kant's abstract and rationalist way of thinking.
Indeed, we have. How many times now? A hundred? A thousand? I lost count a long time ago. We have over fifty pages of this now. Pretty crazy.
Yes. Half the arguments in this thread could be summed up as "if we presume moral universals, then morality must be universal". The issue at stake is really what it is reasonable to presume, not what is the case once we have made certain presumptions.
Yes! I agree. That's what I was getting at in my criticism here.
Yes, I see you've already covered this. I particularly liked your "I am not subservient to any supposed universal moral laws". Its hard to keep track of all everyone's said as I think everyone has said everything at least ten times by now.
Struggling to see what any of this has to do with morality...
He's just running off on a pet tangent like he usually does. This time it began by picking up on my thought experiment directed against Janus's weak position, where I contrasted individual morality with herd-morality regarding racism. I accept that it can work both ways: that the individual can be wrong or that the herd can be wrong, but Janus seemed to be suggesting that the herd is right by default and individual morality doesn't matter, which is easily refuted by multiple examples, racism being just one of them.
Yes, I see you've already covered this. I particularly liked your "I am not subservient to any supposed universal moral laws". Its hard to keep track of all everyone's said as I think everyone has said everything at least ten times by now.
Still... Once more unto the breach...
Haha, I remember about thirty pages ago predicting that the same problems would just reoccur over another twenty pages.
Hey guys, I have a few criticisms of moral relativism that I don't think have been covered yet.
Are you ready for this? Drumroll please.
Moral relativism treats every moral judgement as equal. If you're a moral relativist, and someone attempts to murder you, you just have to say, "Okie dokie! Go ahead and murder me!".
Also, you're basically condoning the holocaust. Why would you do that? You vile bastard.
:rofl:
Terrapin StationMarch 29, 2019 at 11:17#2702570 likes
Moral relativism treats every moral judgement as equal. If you're a moral relativist, and someone attempts to murder you, you just have to say, "Okie dokie! Go ahead and murder me!".
Also, you're basically condoning the holocaust. Why would you do that? You vile bastard.
Oh yeah, also, passionately expressing a strong objection to murder is like casually saying, "I like cheese puffs".
What original philosophical insights, wherever did you find them! Best not let the opposition get a hold of such damning arguments as those, they'd have us beat in no time!
I am using the term "morality" as a rigid designator....
What counts as "moral" behaviour follows from one's notion of morality.....
It always refers to codes of acceptable/unacceptable behavior....
Is morality the sort of thing that can exist in it's entirety prior to language acquisition? If we follow current convention, it cannot, unless the written rules for acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour are not existentially dependent upon common language. They are by definition existentially dependent upon common language use. So, according to current convention. No. Morality cannot exist in it's entirety prior to common language. That would fail to draw the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. It would relegate all moral thought/belief as metacognitive in it's nature. But it's not. All deliberate oppositional change in one's original adopted morality is......
language is not required for thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. It is required for thought/belief about unacceptable thought, and/or belief.....
So here we must make some sort of decisions. Some may include.....
1. Deny....; 2. Deny...; 3. Admit.....; 4. Reject....
5. Come to the realization that the written rules of conduct consist entirely of and/or are otherwise underwritten by thought/belief statements.....
If all thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour counts as morality, then morality - in rudimentary form - is not existentially dependent upon common language.....
What is it (Kant’s a priori practical reason) doing here?
.......
Last things first. Kant is how all the above even happened. You couldn’t have thought any of that without the machinations in your head. The ideas are yours, the words are yours, the very thesis is yours, and very well may have nothing whatsoever to do with Kantian philosophy. The formulation from one to the other to the other are......ooooo yeah........necessarily a product of Kantian a priori practical reason. Can I get an a-MEN, BROTHER!!!!!
Sorry for butchering your well-written thesis, and hopefully I pulled the pertinent bullet points. I understand the keywords as morality as a rigid designator, morality in its ENTIRETY, and the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable. Morality isn’t about our agreements; it’s always about our disagreements.
This gives me the most trouble: Language is not required for thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behavior because behavior follows from one’s notion of morality, granted. However, to say language is required for thought/belief about unacceptable thought, and/or belief (without recourse to behavior), still leaves unexplained what that language would be. Could it be because one can witness behavior in another so needs no language to judge it, but if all there is, is thought/belief there is no behavior to witness, hence nothing to judge. If there’s nothing to judge, what use would language have? I’d have to talk to somebody about what he’s thinking, but without any reason to talk to him in the first place? The only conditions under which this would work is in a dialogue about possible behavior, about possible relative notions of a set of rules, about morality itself.
Anyway.....well done; it was fun. Hope I did you justice.
If the candidate had but one teacher or set of teachers all of whom held the same sort of unshakable certainty, and whose belief system actually glorified and looked fondly upon continuing to hold that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
In these cases it ain't so easy to change one's mind.
If that is true, then it follows necessarily that lacking any evidence whatsoever, what was not so easy becomes impossible.
[quote="Isaac;270170"]Let's say hypothetically that the whole world is sat round a table deciding what 'The Law' should be........
(Herein is the groundwork for universality, re: the whole world, implying each and every moral agent)
.......and I propose "No one can murder me, but I can murder whomever I choose". You might say then that is not a very rational suggestion because if everyone adopted it my first desire.....
(It is not a desire, it is to be a law. If adopted, there is no possible desire to do anything but what the law demands)
..... (to not be murdered) would be logically frustrated by my second (that I may murder whomever I choose).
OK. The irrationality lies in the inherent contradiction. If the law became universal, was adopted as spoken by the whole world, the second part of the law is moot, because every single member adopts that no one can murder me. Therefore, you could never murder anybody.
I suppose the notion of universality incorporated in the maxim is in itself not irrational, but it is so improbable in its adoption that rather than irrational, it is the more rationally negligible.
Basic functional society is enough and that requires that we get the social environment right, not moralise. It's like trying to talk a cog into playing the right role in a machine rather than just putting it in the right place for it to do so.
True enough. Rather Utopian, though, isn’t it? Idealistic? You’re asking for something history has never given, except in small pockets the rest of humanity failed to value properly. If all we have is social environment and moralizing about social environment, and social environment hasn’t sufficed to render moralizing of no import........why not moralize? Even if dialectic on how to improve social environment so it becomes right, what is that besides moralizing? If it isn’t moralizing, then we’re open to arguing such things as economy, boundaries, relative judicial systems, etc., in order to arrive at social environment right-ness. And all those have at their base, morality.
Terrapin StationMarch 29, 2019 at 13:57#2703030 likes
let's say that Joe has a love of a particular part of the Amazon
I see what you mean, wherein the realms of anthropology and morality tend to overlap, something like Janus’ civil intentionality. Virtue ethics. That’s ok, it’s a viable consideration. My objection stems explicitly from the distinction I hold between morality the “rigid designator” and anthropology the subjective interaction.
Terrapin StationMarch 29, 2019 at 14:14#2703090 likes
To make it more generalized, the idea is just that someone has a preference of x that's not based on something else, but to make x obtain, some (other) moral stance is required, otherwise x won't come to be.
Re "rigid designation," the whole idea of that isn't really worth bothering with in my opinion.
That which is moral is always a rational determination, so “one should not kill” is just one more in an constant barrage of them.
— Mww
Fine, but not only a rational determination, the subjective feeling that some law exists (I wouldn't put it that way myself, but I'm trying to use your terminology), must come first, and it is this which makes morality relative.
Interesting. How would you put it, and how does it make morality relative?
So for me the separation of thought from feeling and the privileging of one over the other, as expressed in formulas like "Reason is, and ought to be, slave to the passions" betrays somewhat simpleminded thinking.
Agreed. Good thing about Hume...he wrote in good ol’ English, no translational ambiguities. What he wrote is what you get, and of no great difficulty to understand. We know what he meant by reason, we know what he thought its limitations were which regulates its employment. Add in the conditions of the day, his empiricist bent, gives us what we see as simple-minded thinking. Still, it only took 50 years for his moral theory to be shown incomplete and thus sufficiently refuted.
I think his biggest detriment to moral philosophy was....plain and simple....he worked backwards, insofar as he tried to synthesize modern empirical thought to ancient virtue ethics. Which just doesn’t work. You can’t get Greek virtue utilitarianism to inform British Enlightenment sentimentalist plurality.
Kinda funny, if you ask me. People are so much more apt to think themselves as sentimental entities, than to think themselves rational entities.
It's funny when people think that Hume has been refuted when the evidence suggests otherwise. I doubt that many people who aren't Kant fanboys would agree that Kant refuted Hume on ethics. He developed Hume's metaphysics, but ethics? Nope.
My understanding is that Kant grounds the practical belief in human freedom on the universal fact of moral responsibility.
Another good point, and relates to what you said about Hume’s simplistic thinking. Hume was an empiricist, which makes explicit the principle of cause and effect be paramount in his thinking. From that, comes this:
“....It appears that, in single instances of the operation of bodies, we never can, by our utmost scrutiny, discover any thing but one event following another, without being able to comprehend any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connexion between it and its supposed effect. The same difficulty occurs in contemplating the operations of mind on body- where we observe the motion of the latter to follow upon the volition of the former, but are not able to observe or conceive the tie which binds together the motion and volition, or the energy by which the mind produces this effect. The authority of the will over its own faculties and ideas is not a whit more comprehensible: So that, upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexion which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seemed conjoined, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or force at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life....”
(WSM, 1737)
“.....It is God himself, who is pleased to second our will, in itself impotent, and to command that motion which we erroneously attribute to our own power and efficacy....”
(EHU, VIII, 1748)
Hume couldn’t conceive a natural connection between the “authority of the will over its own faculties”, therefore he was left without a cause for a given effect, anathema to an empiricist but sufficient for a sentimentalist. We don’t know whether he threw out the concept of freedom, or never even thought of it to begin with, but the point is, he stopped short, philosophically. Perhaps the shadowy ghost of infinite regress curtailed his intelligence....dunno. Left it to the heavens, he did.
Kant, an the other hand, granting Humian cause and effect in the physical world as given, thus recognizing the need for consistency of the principle with respect to the authority of the will in a possible metaphysical context wherein your “universal fact of human responsibility” is an effect and presupposes a necessary cause. But he was still at the mercy of infinite regress, for to suppose freedom as a cause necessitates it be at the same time an effect. What Hume didn’t consider is this:
“....I adopt this method of assuming freedom merely as an idea which rational beings suppose in their actions, in order to avoid the necessity of proving it in its theoretical aspect also. The former is sufficient for my purpose; for even though the speculative proof should not be made out, yet a being that cannot act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here from the onus which presses on the theory. We have finally reduced the definite conception of morality to the idea of freedom. This latter, however, we could not prove to be actually a property of ourselves or of human nature; only we saw that it must be presupposed if we would conceive a being as rational and conscious of its causality in respect of its actions, i.e., as endowed with a will; and so we find that on just the same grounds we must ascribe to every being endowed with reason and will this attribute of determining itself to action under the idea of its freedom...”
In short, Hume couldn’t prove a cause, Kant showed no proof was necessary. We couldn’t tell the difference between a rational being with freedom theoretically proven as cause for the authority of the will, from a rational being with merely the presupposed idea of freedom as the means for the authority of the will.
(It is not a desire, it is to be a law. If adopted, there is no possible desire to do anything but what the law demands)
It's hard to fit my world view into the language of your deontology. I talk about numerous desires, within a particular social dynamic leading to rules, but rules no more strict than the rules of grammar. I'm trying to translate that into your language so we can see if there's any common ground, but you might have to meet me in the middle, it's not going to work if you want every proposition translated into Kantese, some just don't translate, there are presumption contained within the language that I just don't hold to.
The irrationality lies in the inherent contradiction. If the law became universal, was adopted as spoken by the whole world, the second part of the law is moot, because every single member adopts that no one can murder me. Therefore, you could never murder anybody.
Well, this bit is what the rest of my paragraph was supposed to address. It is only irrational if you take laws as absolute, rather than as signposts, and that is a premise I don't accept. Even laws in the strictly legal sense sometimes contradict one another and it is necessary to find a route through. So "no one may murder me" is one law, but "I may murder whomever I choose" is a law, the following of which would constitute a breach of the first law but, crucially, not for me. It would be my victim who would claim the breach. "someone has murdered me! And this is against the rule we all agreed to" (their ghost might exclaim). But I would respond "no, the law we all agreed to was that no one can murder me, and as no one has, all is well".
Rather Utopian, though, isn’t it? Idealistic? You’re asking for something history has never given
I don't agree with that premise, but I think, again, we do not want to get too sidetracked. Suffice to say I'm something of a Rousseauean when it comes to paleoanthropology.
Even if dialectic on how to improve social environment so it becomes right, what is that besides moralizing? If it isn’t moralizing, then we’re open to arguing such things as economy, boundaries, relative judicial systems, etc., in order to arrive at social environment right-ness. And all those have at their base, morality.
You could call it moralising, I suppose, but that seems rather a broad definition. Is surgery really moralising because at it's base is the desire to protect human life? Humans seem to function in a way they themselves report as 'well' in particular social and physical environments, and significantly less well outside of them. Maintaining these environments is often a dynamic feedback from the very social interactions they maintain, much like a thermostat responds to the heat it itself was responsible for generating. Morals, set out as a single, universal set of rules which every person is somehow compelled to follow does not fit this dynamic model.
Interesting. How would you put it, and how does it make morality relative?
As above. I see moral rules as emerging dynamically from hundreds of independent social interactions between individuals, many of whom want different things. The rules change, adapting to different environments and different groups of people. It's hard to parse all that in terms of universal 'laws'.
It's hard to fit my world view into the language of your deontology. I talk about numerous desires, within a particular social dynamic leading to rules, but rules no more strict than the rules of grammar. I'm trying to translate that into your language so we can see if there's any common ground, but you might have to meet me in the middle, it's not going to work if you want every proposition translated into Kantese, some just don't translate, there are presumption contained within the language that I just don't hold to.
Now that I understand your world-view having a Rouseauan flavor, I can see why not. Wouldn’t work at all, would it? I’m willing to meet in the middle, so use your own language, but first let it be known what we are meeting in the middle of. Me as a transcendental Kantian on the one hand and you as a...what, virtue ethicist?....on the other. You tell me, keeping in mind this is a thread on morality.
You know, Kant acknowledged Rouseau’s major influence on his political and civil philosophy. In “Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime”, 1764, Kant says “...I am by natural inclination a researcher ... and I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of man. (...) Rousseau set me upright. And I would consider myself more useless than the ordinary worker if everything I did did not contribute to securing the rights of man....”. There are also references to Rousseau in “Anthropology From A Practical Point of View”.
Terrapin StationMarch 29, 2019 at 22:51#2704440 likes
Last things first. Kant is how all the above even happened. You couldn’t have thought any of that without the machinations in your head. The ideas are yours, the words are yours, the very thesis is yours, and very well may have nothing whatsoever to do with Kantian philosophy. The formulation from one to the other to the other are......ooooo yeah........necessarily a product of Kantian a priori practical reason. Can I get an a-MEN, BROTHER!!!!!
My report of Kant's shortcomings are existentially dependent upon Kant's words.
Kant's linguistic framework is utterly incapable of taking proper account of the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
He and Hume are equivalent in that regard, as is all of Western philosophy that I'm aware of.
Funny thing is, that that difference is undeniable.
If one gets thought/belief wrong, then one gets something or other wrong in their report/account of anything and everything ever thought, believed, spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered.
Kant's CI...
Now that remains more than admirable. His staunch rigidness against not being honest in one's testimony. His demand of always testifying honestly and sincerely. That remains admirable.
If the candidate had but one teacher or set of teachers all of whom held the same sort of unshakable certainty, and whose belief system actually glorified and looked fondly upon continuing to hold that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
In these cases it ain't so easy to change one's mind.
— creativesoul
If that is true, then it follows necessarily that lacking any evidence whatsoever, what was not so easy becomes impossible.
Any and all evidence to the contrary of one's belief system becomes such as a result of it's being used as such. Prior to the use, what becomes evidence is not yet... evidence.
In light of that, your response doesn't make much sense to me.
Kant is working from two notions, one of which is pure reason in comparison/contrast to the other which is emotion.
The two are inseparable.
Pure reason consists of thinking about one's own thought/belief. All thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon something to be thinking about. Thought/belief exists prior to thinking about thought/belief.
Pure reason is existentially dependent upon a much more rudimentary kind of thought/belief. Pre-reflective, one might say. The kind of thought/belief that is later named, isolated, and thus further considered must exist prior to it's being reported upon. All examples of doing this show it's being done with written language replete with names for mental ongoings.
That which is being reported upon exists in it's entirety prior to our report. Prelinguistic thought/belief exist in their entirety prior to being reported upon.
All thought/belief consists entirely of mental correlations drawn between things. The first place we look and see this would be language use itself. Our reports, all of them, consist entirely of predication. All predication is correlation.
Is mental correlation adequate? Is it both, necessary and sufficient, such that all predication counts as being thought/belief? I can't imagine a good argument against it. Without a creature capable of drawing mental correlations between different things, there could be no such thing as predication of any kind. So, predication is itself existentially dependent upon mental correlations.
Can mental correlations between different things exist prior to predication?
Of course!
What would those things be? What things would become a part of the creature's mental correlations? In this early stage, of course, the creature has no language. So the pre-linguistic mental correlations could not include linguistic tokens, characters, signs, marks, and/or symbols.
Physiological sensory perception doesn't need turned on. That happens autonomously. Fear doesn't need turned on. That happens autonomously. Contentment need not be turned on. That is the simplest of mind states along with it's counterpart... discontentment.
Hunger pangs and the visceral satisfaction thereof...
...and the things connected to these.
The sheer quantity of possible combinations is more than adequate to account for all the different kinds of thought/belief. The complexity of thought/belief is established and/or determined solely by virtue of complexity of the correlations. The kind is reflected by it's content.
Kant named some kinds that would be possible if things were not the way they are. If the emotional aspect of all mental correlation were non-existent... things would be a different way. As it stands however, emotion and thinking about thought/belief are inseparable, despite lots of folk thinking/believing otherwise.
Yes, that just means ability. Had it been in my mind to reference a permission, I'd have written "may."
Well then the answer to your question is obviously yes. Unless you are suggesting that the laws of physics intervene in order to make Kant right (and God knows at this stage I wouldn't put it passed you), then it is obviously reasonable to say "a) you don't want to be murdered, but b) you can yourself murder as you desire,". How could it possibly not be? The first is a statement about your preferences and the second is a statement about the lack of physical limitations on some action you may take.
I am sure you understand this. Why do you write as if you do not? I do not question what you can desire. I question whether you can reason.
No, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. You've yet to explain how one can derive an action from reason alone. Absent any desire, the application of reason has nothing to work with. What 'reason' is there to do anything without the desire to do it?
Me as a transcendental Kantian on the one hand and you as a...what, virtue ethicist?....on the other. You tell me, keeping in mind this is a thread on morality.
Yes, by and large a virtue ethicist. I think that large decisions such as those made by governments and corporations, should probably be made on utilitarian grounds, but at a personal level, I trust my instincts most. I'm also an ethical naturalist in that I believe the source of moral thought is biology.
Terrapin StationMarch 30, 2019 at 10:32#2705670 likes
I’m comfortable allowing rigid designator to stand as a distinctive representation of a concept. A stop sign can be a rigid designator. I don’t intend anyone should also agree with and use my terminology, but he should understand without complication what I mean when I use it.
Nothing too deep or troubling about that, I wouldn’t think.
My report of Kant's shortcomings are existentially dependent upon Kant's words.
So.....Kant, because your report informs me that his “linguistic framework is utterly incapable of taking proper account of the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief”, must have something or other wrong in his reporting, in some or all of his various essays, manuscripts, theoretical speculations, etc.
If that is the shortcoming you’re reporting on, this incapable accounting, what makes your thought/belief not wrong? Is it even possible to show his linguistic framework and the intrinsic incapacity attributed to it, to someone else?
I don't understand a lot of the content of Mww's posts, either, but so far I'm just attributing it to very different paradigms than my own that I figure would be impossible to sort out in this context.
I’m comfortable allowing rigid designator to stand as a distinctive representation of a concept. A stop sign can be a rigid designator.
I just can't make any sense out of saying/supposing that anything would be rigid. To me that is not at all how reference, meaning, etc. work, and it's very obvious that it's not how they work.
And if it's otherwise just supposed to be saying something about identity, then it's a very convoluted, confused, misleading way to say something so simple that it's not worth saying.
Any and all evidence to the contrary of one's belief system becomes such as a result of it's being used as such. Prior to the use, what becomes evidence is not yet... evidence.
I’ve lost interest in this. The reductionism necessary to validate my argument is so far down in the weeds it couldn’t possibly pass the wtf test.
“...The capacity of experiencing Pleasure or Pain on the occasion of a mental representation, is called ‘Feeling,’ because Pleasure and Pain contain only what is subjective in the relations of our mental activity. They do not involve any relation to an object that could possibly furnish a knowledge of it as such; they cannot even give us a knowledge of our own mental state. For even Sensations, considered apart from the qualities which attach to them on account of the modifications of the Subject, as, for instance, in reference to Red, Sweet, and such like, are referred as constituent elements of knowledge to Objects, whereas Pleasure or Pain felt in connection with what is red or sweet, express absolutely nothing that is in the Object, but merely a relation to the Subject. And for the reason just stated, Pleasure and Pain considered in themselves cannot be more precisely defined. All that can be further done with regard to them is merely to point out what consequences they may have in certain relations, in order to make the knowledge of them available practically...”
Available practically. The practical and the pure are very different. Pure reason has nothing to do with emotion, for emotion, reducible to none other than feelings of pain and pleasure, can provide us with no knowledgeable object, but merely a subjective condition. The separation of emotion from pure reason is very clear.
—————————-
Is mental correlation adequate? Is it both, necessary and sufficient, such that all predication counts as being thought/belief? I can't imagine a good argument against it.
Such that predication counts as thought belief? It does not follow necessarily from mental correlation being both necessary and sufficient, that such counts as thought/belief. Mental correlation *IS* predication itself, and could count as pure reason with as much validity as counting as thought/belief.
——————————
Physiological sensory perception doesn't need turned on. That happens autonomously.
Physiological sensory apparatus doesn’t need turned on; it is available for perceiving autonomously, all else being given. Sensory perception requires an affectation, therefore is not autonomous.
Contentment need not be turned on. That is the simplest of mind states along with it's counterpart... discontentment.
Contentment = pleasure; discontentment = pain. Absolute most basic human emotional states, granted. Innumerable objects responsible for one or the other of these emotional states, sure. Do we need to reason between the state and the object that informs it? No, we don’t. After the fact, we may reason as to the effect (sorrow) with respect to its cause (forgot my anniversary). Be that as it may, for an emotion to manifest as either pain or pleasure requires an object to turn it on. It is required the wavefunction collapse to a probability density of 1, in order to recognize a certainty.
(Sorry.......that just popped in out of nowhere. Disregard)
————————-
“...The capacity of experiencing Pleasure or Pain on the occasion of a mental representation, is called ‘Feeling,’ because Pleasure and Pain contain only what is subjective in the relations of our mental activity. They do not involve any relation to an object that could possibly furnish a knowledge of it as such; they cannot even give us a knowledge of our own mental state. For even Sensations, considered apart from the qualities which attach to them on account of the modifications of the Subject, as, for instance, in reference to Red, Sweet, and such like, are referred as constituent elements of knowledge to Objects, whereas Pleasure or Pain felt in connection with what is red or sweet, express absolutely nothing that is in the Object, but merely a relation to the Subject. And for the reason just stated, Pleasure and Pain considered in themselves cannot be more precisely defined. All that can be further done with regard to them is merely to point out what consequences they may have in certain relations, in order to make the knowledge of them available practically...”
It is required the wavefunction collapse to a probability density of 1, in order to recognize a certainty.
(Sorry.......that just popped in out of nowhere. Disregard)
I just can't make any sense out of saying/supposing that anything would be rigid
If you stopped at the stop sign, the rigidity of the designator is validated. If you didn’t, the designator is no less rigid, but you disregarded it for whatever reason. All the designator needs, is for what it represents to be understood, not necessarily agreed with.
If you stopped at the stop sign, the rigidity of the designator is validated. If you didn’t, the designator is no less rigid, but you disregarded it for whatever reason. All the designator needs, is for what it represents to be understood, not necessarily agreed with.
If you stopped at the stop sign, the rigidity of the designator is validated. If you didn’t, the designator is no less rigid, but you disregarded it for whatever reason. All the designator needs, is for what it represents to be understood, not necessarily agreed with.
There's zero rigidity to "what it represents" though.
There's zero rigidity to "what it represents" though.
Because the designator is not universal and necessary with respect to its representation, it isn’t rigid? The world ends if you don’t stop at the stop sign? We both know that’s not true, so those can’t be the criteria for rigid.
Terrapin StationMarch 30, 2019 at 17:08#2707410 likes
The world ends if you don’t stop at the stop sign? We both know that’s not true, so those can’t be the criteria for rigid.
That part doesn't make sense to me. Supposedly one of the criteria is that a term always refers to the same thing, in all possible worlds, but a term that doesn't always refer to the same thing isn't going to meet that criterion.
All you gotta do is ask yourself.....how many other worlds have I been to? None....probably....so universality is irrelevant. That leaves necessity.
In this particular case, no other sign, of this given color, shape and location, ever has any other purpose than to signal an action with respect to what the sign represents. Therefore, necessity is satisfied, and the designation is rigid. Sorta like....if this is all it can be, it must be necessary for it to be that. If sufficient compliance is attained, universality is possible.
Reply to Mww Possible worlds are stipulated. One cannot logically conceive of “what that sign represents” to be other than what it represents given the meaning of the word “stop”, its color, location, etc. I would agree that it is a rigid designator.
Reply to Mww So “morality” must always refer to acceptable/unacceptable behavior is a necessary truth. Moral beliefs can change so instances of moral beliefs are contingent truths. I think that is what creativesoul was saying.
Terrapin StationMarch 30, 2019 at 20:12#2708120 likes
In this particular case, no other sign, of this given color, shape and location, ever has any other purpose than to signal an action with respect to what the sign represents. Therefore, necessity is satisfied, and the designation is rigid. Sorta like....if this is all it can be, it must be necessary for it to be that. If sufficient compliance is attained, universality is possible.
There's no purpose period except for an individual thinking about something in terms of purposes. Same with representation. Since different individuals can and do think about things differently, as well as potentially the same individual on different occasions, there is no rigidity.
So “morality” must always refer to acceptable/unacceptable behavior is a necessary truth.
I think that’s how he uses the word, yes. But it works just as well for me, when I say it is a rigid designator which must refer to, or represents, one of the two fundamental conditions of being human, which just happens to use the same word.....morality. I think his is use much more general than mine.
What I said must relate to what you said. You spoke of sources relevant to human thinking which means my response has to be relevant to human thinking. Not paint or canvass.
So, you start out by saying that there is no x aside from F, where the scope seems to be universal, and the claim thus controversial . . . But then you suddenly clarify that you're restricting the scope to y, which is definitionally F.
Terrapin StationMarch 30, 2019 at 20:34#2708350 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station Ah. Perhaps you were speaking of me talking about objective referents? When we speak about them, we are really speaking about our thoughts about external stimuli indirectly apprehended through our sense organs.
I don’t agree with direct apprehension of external phenomena.
Nor do I. Direct perception, sure. No apprehension of external things is direct. The external thing has to become a representation. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff. Scientifically or metaphysically, doesn’t matter.
Terrapin StationMarch 30, 2019 at 21:07#2708450 likes
So we got into a tangent about so-called "rigid designators." I said I don't believe the distinction holds any water, because of the subjectivity of representation, reference, etc. Then Mww wound up saying, "There is no source other than ourselves for anything whatsoever," which I don't at all agree with, but then added, "That we’re conscious of, anyway," which I read as saying "In terms of consciousness qua consciousness."
Terrapin StationMarch 30, 2019 at 21:08#2708460 likes
I'm not at all an idealist or representationalist. I don't think that either idealism or representationalism are at all empirically supportable.
“...The capacity of experiencing Pleasure or Pain on the occasion of a mental representation, is called ‘Feeling,’ because Pleasure and Pain contain only what is subjective in the relations of our mental activity. They do not involve any relation to an object that could possibly furnish a knowledge of it as such; they cannot even give us a knowledge of our own mental state. For even Sensations, considered apart from the qualities which attach to them on account of the modifications of the Subject, as, for instance, in reference to Red, Sweet, and such like, are referred as constituent elements of knowledge to Objects, whereas Pleasure or Pain felt in connection with what is red or sweet, express absolutely nothing that is in the Object, but merely a relation to the Subject. And for the reason just stated, Pleasure and Pain considered in themselves cannot be more precisely defined. All that can be further done with regard to them is merely to point out what consequences they may have in certain relations, in order to make the knowledge of them available practically...”
Available practically. The practical and the pure are very different. Pure reason has nothing to do with emotion, for emotion, reducible to none other than feelings of pain and pleasure, can provide us with no knowledgeable object, but merely a subjective condition. The separation of emotion from pure reason is very clear.
Kant clearly claims that there is a distinction between emotion and thinking about thought/belief. His conceptions support this idea. He defined all his different notions accordingly. I've granted his coherency.
Is mental correlation adequate? Is it both, necessary and sufficient, such that all predication counts as being thought/belief? I can't imagine a good argument against it.
— creativesoul
Such that predication counts as thought belief? It does not follow necessarily from mental correlation being both necessary and sufficient, that such counts as thought/belief. Mental correlation *IS* predication itself, and could count as pure reason with as much validity as counting as thought/belief.
Not quite.
All predication is mental correlation. Not all mental correlation is predication. I completely agree that Kant's notion of pure reason consists entirely of mental correlations. It consists of the all the different rational connections/relations he drew between different things, nearly or mostly all of which are existentially dependent upon language to begin with. That's the bulk of the problem.
It does not follow from the fact that emotion - alone - cannot furnish us with knowledge about objects that pure reason does not include and/or consist of emotion - at least in part.
Consider this for a moment.
If all thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon pre-existing thought/belief, and all pre-existing thought/belief is existentially dependent upon emotion, then it only follows that all thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon emotion.
If all thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon pre-existing thought/belief, and all pre-existing thought/belief has emotion as an elementary constituent therein, then it only follows that all thinking about thought/belief has emotion as an elementary constituent therein.
If thinking about thought/belief does not include thinking about the emotional aspects of thought/belief, then such considerations are not taking proper account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to the account.
Terrapin StationMarch 30, 2019 at 21:41#2708620 likes
I invoked "rigid designator" as the best means I know of for avoiding misinterpretations regarding my use of the term "morality". In addition, it avoids equivocating. I think that that is prevalent in this forum.
Salva veritate is quite the helpful tool around these parts...
Physiological sensory perception doesn't need turned on. That happens autonomously.
— creativesoul
Physiological sensory apparatus doesn’t need turned on; it is available for perceiving autonomously, all else being given. Sensory perception requires an affectation, therefore is not autonomous.
On Kant's view, perhaps. Not on mine. I see no reason whatsoever to conclude that physiological sensory perception does not happen autonomously simply because there needs to be 'something' perceived.
Happening autonomously simply means that it is not the result of an intentional, deliberate, and/or purposeful conscious effort.
Contentment need not be turned on. That is the simplest of mind states along with it's counterpart... discontentment.
— creativesoul
Contentment = pleasure; discontentment = pain.
All pleasure may qualify as contentment on your view, and all pain may qualify as discontentment as well. I would not disagree with that. There is no equivalence however. Not all contentment is pleasure. Not all discontentment is pain.
Add in the conditions of the day, his empiricist bent, gives us what we see as simple-minded thinking. Still, it only took 50 years for his moral theory to be shown incomplete and thus sufficiently refuted.
Yes, I agree; it would be anachronistic to say that Hume was simpleminded just because his views seem simpleminded today.
I think his biggest detriment to moral philosophy was....plain and simple....he worked backwards, insofar as he tried to synthesize modern empirical thought to ancient virtue ethics. Which just doesn’t work. You can’t get Greek virtue utilitarianism to inform British Enlightenment sentimentalist plurality.
I'm not sure what you mean by "he tried to synthesize modern empirical thought to ancient virtue ethics.". Would you mind elaborating on that? Also I don't see virtue ethics as any form of utilitarianism, so that is puzzling as well!
Kinda funny, if you ask me. People are so much more apt to think themselves as sentimental entities, than to think themselves rational entities.
For me, in the ethical, moral and practical spheres (at least!) rationality and sentiment (I prefer 'feeling' because of the connotations of 'sentiment') are inseparable. So, I would say that morality is not reducible to feeling, but that feeling is an inextricable element of morality (as is rationality). I would go on to say that because rationality is ineluctably inter-subjective, then so is morality. So, morality is not a mere matter of individual feelings and responses (although it is obviously and truistically also that). Moral dispositions are syntheses of thought and feeling which cannot occur in the "vacuum" of the mere lone individual; to think that is to indulge a romantic fantasy which ironically ("ironically" because it is such an unromantic notion) originates in the idea of the atomistic separation of the individual.
It does not follow from the fact that emotion - alone - cannot furnish us with knowledge about objects that pure reason does not include and/or consist of emotion - at least in part.
No, it doesn’t. Emotion cannot furnish knowledge at all, we allow ourselves as having knowledge, therefore, with respect to knowledge, emotion and pure reason are mutually exclusive. If one wishes to claim reason has an emotional component, he’s welcome to enunciate and sustain it somehow.
——————-
Consider this for a moment. (...) If thinking about thought/belief does not include thinking about the emotional aspects, then such considerations are not taking proper account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to the account.
If I’m considering what color to paint the bedroom, if I fail to think about the starving children in Somalia, then it follows I’ll never decide what color to paint the bedroom because of it? Even if I’m a naturally emotional kinda guy, I don’t need to think an emotional aspect if what I’m thinking about has no emotional content.
Another good post. You’re fun to read...makes me critique both of us.
Kant, an the other hand, granting Humian cause and effect in the physical world as given, thus recognizing the need for consistency of the principle with respect to the authority of the will in a possible metaphysical context wherein your “universal fact of human responsibility” is an effect and presupposes a necessary cause. But he was still at the mercy of infinite regress, for to suppose freedom as a cause necessitates it be at the same time an effect. What Hume didn’t consider is this:
“....I adopt this method of assuming freedom merely as an idea which rational beings suppose in their actions, in order to avoid the necessity of proving it in its theoretical aspect also. The former is sufficient for my purpose; for even though the speculative proof should not be made out, yet a being that cannot act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here from the onus which presses on the theory. We have finally reduced the definite conception of morality to the idea of freedom. This latter, however, we could not prove to be actually a property of ourselves or of human nature; only we saw that it must be presupposed if we would conceive a being as rational and conscious of its causality in respect of its actions, i.e., as endowed with a will; and so we find that on just the same grounds we must ascribe to every being endowed with reason and will this attribute of determining itself to action under the idea of its freedom...”
In short, Hume couldn’t prove a cause, Kant showed no proof was necessary. We couldn’t tell the difference between a rational being with freedom theoretically proven as cause for the authority of the will, from a rational being with merely the presupposed idea of freedom as the means for the authority of the will.
This is a nice analysis, and a very apt quote from Kant. I have also long thought that we think freedom of the will because that is what our experience of action and responsibility, and most specifically moral responsibility, seems to show us. The question 'But do we REALLY have free will?' is at best unanswerable, and at worst inapt and even incoherent. The idea that it is a coherent question seems to be a chimera created, again, by outmoded and unfortunate atomistic, mechanistic thinking.
A theory predicated on logic, internally consistent, and non-contradictory....can be wrong?
Of course it can be. Coherency is insufficient for truth. This is particularly the case regarding accounts of and/or when one is reporting upon that which existed in it's entirety prior to the account/report.
They can’t be, they are purely speculative. Nothing about either of those is subject to the scientific method. But they can still be logical.
That's right, and the same goes for materialism and physicalism, despite what any methodological assumptions that are made in the practice of science might seem to indicate.
A theory predicated on logic, internally consistent, and non-contradictory....can be wrong?
No, and I think this is where many people become confused. It is well accepted in philosophy of science that theories cannot be verified to be right or wrong. A theory is provisionally accepted as long as it seems to be, regarding what is observed, the most explanatory one available and as long as any predicted conditions and events that it entails are consistently observed to obtain.
Terrapin StationMarch 31, 2019 at 00:40#2709500 likes
So “morality” must always refer to acceptable/unacceptable behavior is a necessary truth.
Twaddle. That's just one common definition, and it doesn't even account for intentions, character, or consequences, which are three very important aspects of ethics.
Does anyone else find it cringey when someone tries to twist what Kant says to fit their own crackpot ramblings? Or to claim that some famed intellectual utterly failed and got things wrong in light of said crackpot ramblings?
Einstein was wrong about the atom, because he utterly failed to distinguish between atoms and thinking about thought/belief. He failed to realise that atoms are existentially dependent on that which is prior to thought/belief.
The question 'But do we REALLY have free will?' is at best unanswerable, and at worst inapt and even incoherent. The idea that it is a coherent question seems to be a chimera created, again, by outmoded and unfortunate atomistic, mechanistic thinking.
The final words on Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone”, the way it was said....fits that comment to a gold-plated tee: ahhh, that’s just beautiful.
It is well accepted in philosophy of science that theories cannot be verified to be right or wrong. A theory is provisionally accepted as long as it seems to be, regarding what is observed, the most explanatory one available and as long as any predicted conditions and events that it entails are consistently observed to obtain.
Yep. Not to mention, coherence is not a condition of a valid theory. Just because it doesn’t make sense to someone, or even a group of someone’s, doesn’t mean it is senseless.
If ontology isn’t presupposed or irrelevant, I don’t care what it is.
— Mww
Haha (or were you not joking?)
Nope, not joking. Being or becoming is already present in transcendental reductive epistemology. Working with what is, beats working with how something becomes what it is.
Terrapin StationMarch 31, 2019 at 11:49#2710770 likes
But you care about ontology only if it's irrelevant?
I don't follow your logic.
If ontology isn’t presupposed or irrelevant, then he doesn't care what it is. It is presupposed (or so he suggests), so it's not true that he doesn't care what it is.
Terrapin StationMarch 31, 2019 at 12:38#2710870 likes
Saying you don't care about ontology if it isn't presupposed or irrelevant suggests that you do care what it is if it is presupposed or irrelevant.
Yes, and the implication is that he does care what it is, because he thinks that it's presupposed. The "irrelevant" part is itself irrelevant in this case.
If I don't have work or I'm a kangaroo, then I'm not at my workplace. I don't have work. Therefore, I'm not at my workplace.
The "kangaroo" part is irrelevant and can be swapped with innumerable other things.
Terrapin StationMarch 31, 2019 at 12:56#2710990 likes
I think the "presupposed" part is stupid, too, by the way, but not as stupid as the "irrelevant" part, which is why I emphasized that.
I also think that saying "presupposed or irrelevant" in this context is stupid is the "irrelevant" part was irrelevant.
Terrapin StationMarch 31, 2019 at 13:10#2711040 likes
It's stupid, by the way, because it's a "pledge" propositional attitude, where the pledge is being offered if either a or b, but where b is supposedly irrelevant.
I think the "presupposed" part is stupid, too, by the way...
Well, you haven't said why that is, not that I'm particularly interested. I'm not particularly interested in what he has to say, because, for starters, as others have pointed out, much of whatever point he's trying to make is obscured behind bad writing.
I don't have much of a bone to pick with you over the rest of what you say. I won't go as far as saying that it was stupid, but it was kind of redundant.
You’re either really super smart or just plain bad at writing. I don’t understand a third to half of what you say in any given post.
There's no necessary link between being super smart and the excessive use of obscure language. Otherwise Hegel would surely be in the running for smartest philosopher of all time. If anything, it suggests the opposite. It requires a higher level of intelligence to be able to translate complex rhetoric into more readily understandable text. Bad writing suggests a lack of skill or a deliberate choice.
Terrapin StationMarch 31, 2019 at 14:02#2711140 likes
Well, you haven't said why that is, not that I'm particularly interested.
Re only being interested in presuppositions, it doesn't seem very much in the spirit of doing philosophy that we simply accept an assumption, and especially that we're only interested in something if we do that.
"Either we accept this assumption without question, or it's irrelevant, or I'm not interested."
Re only being interested in presuppositions, it doesn't seem very much in the spirit of doing philosophy that we simply accept an assumption, and especially that we're only interested in something if we do that.
"Either we accept this assumption without question, or it's irrelevant, or I'm not interested."
Ohhhhhhkay. :razz:
I think he was suggesting that ontology is redundant, as it is subsumed in some Kantian gibberish which needs translating back into normal human talk.
Consider this for a moment. (...) If thinking about thought/belief does not include thinking about the emotional aspects, then such considerations are not taking proper account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to the account.
— creativesoul
If I’m considering what color to paint the bedroom, if I fail to think about the starving children in Somalia, then it follows I’ll never decide what color to paint the bedroom because of it? Even if I’m a naturally emotional kinda guy, I don’t need to think an emotional aspect if what I’m thinking about has no emotional content.
The bedroom scenario is a false analogy.
The discussion is about so-called 'pure reason', which is called "pure" because it is supposedly empty of emotional content. Pure reason includes thinking about pre-reflective pre-existing thought/belief. All pre-reflective thought/belief has an emotional aspect. That which pure reason is thinking about always has emotional content.
Again, Kant's and Hume's failure to recognize this is a consequence of an utterly inadequate (mis)conception of thought/belief that neglects to draw and maintain the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. And again... they are not alone.
Reply to creativesoul What academic has ever interpreted or criticised either of those two great thinkers in those terms? Can you provide a citation or a source? Or will you admit that this is merely your own crackpottery?
A theory predicated on logic, internally consistent, and non-contradictory....can be wrong?
— Mww
Of course it can be. Coherency is insufficient for truth.
— creativesoul
True enough, but it doesn’t have to be; that’s logic’s job.
No, it's not. That is a huge mistake.
The job of logic is to preserve truth(correspondence). Truth(correspondence) is presupposed in logic by virtue of being presupposed in the premisses. That is precisely how it can be the case that a perfectly valid(coherent) argument and/or position can be wrong. It is based upon false premisses.
There's a problem here in recent meanderings. The terms "coherent" and "incoherent" have been being employed as a synonym for having sense, and/or being understandable. Being sensible simply means that the terms in use are being used in some commonly accepted way. Whereas being coherent and/or being incoherent is a matter of validity and/or lack of self-contradiction.
Terms can be perfectly sensible and lead to incoherence/self-contradiction. Terms can be perfectly sensible and utterly inadequate for taking proper account of whatever it is that they are attempting to take account of.
Definitions can be wrong when they are delineating and/or describing that which exists in it's entirety prior to being taken account of.
I don’t agree with direct apprehension of external phenomena.
— Noah Te Stroete
Nor do I. Direct perception, sure. No apprehension of external things is direct
This suspiciously looks like an equivocation of the term "perception". It doesn't seem to square with our earlier conversation regarding physiological sensory perception. If perception is direct, which I wholly agree with, then it cannot be linguistically informed/laden. It's the difference between perceiving a computer as a computer(not direct) and perceiving a computer as a part of a mental correlation where the creature has no language, such as when a cat is chasing something and that something runs behind a computer. The computer is perceived. There is a correlation drawn between it and the cat's operative thought/belief... chasing the prey. The cat looks behind the computer without ever perceiving it as a computer.
The notion of perception as being linguistically informed/laden - which is perhaps the most common usage - is yet another consequence of failing to drawn and maintain the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
The language-less creature touches fire for the first time...
It learns that touching fire causes pain.
It has correctly attributed/recognized causality. It draws a correlation between it's own behaviour(touching the fire) and the subsequent pain. No language is necessary here. Are we really going to say that the creature doesn't apprehend that the fire caused the pain by virtue of direct physiological sensory perception combined with mental correlation between the fire and the pain?
That is most certainly more than adequate for thought/belief. Rudimentary, but none-the-less thought/belief.
All rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour are first adopted via language acquisition. One's initial morality is thus subject to individual, familial, cultural, societal, and/or historical particulars. That is true of everyone. It is neither objective nor subjective, it is point of view invariant.
Does it follow that morality is relative? Sure. Does it also follow that conflicting statements about what's good/bad can be true as a result? Surely not.
"Good according to your morality", isn't about being good. It's about what you think/believe is good. It's the difference between being called "good" and being so, and we can most certainly be mistaken in that regard.
The discussion is about so-called 'pure reason', which is called "pure" because it is supposedly empty of emotional content.
No. Pure reason is empty of empirical content. The bedroom is empirical but incidental to the color, which cannot be related to the physical paint because the paint isn’t present. The palette of possibilities is a priori in my mind.
———————
That which pure reason is thinking about always has emotional content.
I reject that thesis as without sufficient warrant. It is patently obvious there are conditions where no feeling or emotion requires my attention.
———————
Lemme ask ya.....who does distinguish between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief? Other than you. Anybody whose name I’d recognize?
Guy going about his business, just living the life, being of sound mind and body, normal Everydayman stuff, thought/belief is operating in him.
Guy gets done with the day, or just done with whatever, thought/belief goes idle, he begins witnessing what had been thought/belief. What was thought/belief in the office inventory, e.g., is now thinking about what thought/belief was doing at the time of the office inventory.
All rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour are first adopted via language acquisition.
So little Joey's parents tell him that it's wrong to hit little Stevie just because Stevie won't give Joey a toy when Joey demands it. If Joey doesn't agree, so that he feels it's wrong to hit Stevie, just how does that amount to a moral stance for Joey?
Reply to creativesoul Well, are you not concerned that your peculiarly personal take on the matter is wildly off mark? What safeguards do you have? Do you think that you're some kind of genius who has figured it out all by himself? Do you know how many of those there are? They're called crackpots. A real genius is extremely rare, and besides, they usually have precursors who laid important groundwork. Einstein's confirmation of the atom, for example, stems thousands of years back to the Atomists. And his theories of general and special relativity relied heavily on the work of Newton. My criticism of Kant is influenced by Hume and by the philosophers of the linguistic turn, and of course by my readings on Kant. My meaning is almost always influenced by common language use, or specialist academic use, not idiosyncratic language use.
I take it that you accept that there are a number of intelligent and knowledgeable people on this forum. How many have adopted your peculiar views and your peculiar manner of speech? And why do you think that is?
I think you need a breakthrough moment. A moment when you realise that what you've been building and [I]incessantly repeating[/i] isn't as intellectually valuable as you think it is and would like it to be. I think you actually need to take on board some criticism and adapt. There is so much room for improvement. But you must lower your defences and lose the ego. Stop acting like a malfunctioning robot!
Reply to creativesoul There are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism! So of course that doesn't follow. It is designed to avoid conflicting statements! You have it completely backwards with regard to conflicting statements and moral truth! No two moral objectivists can both be correct about the same thing in an ethical disagreement, but there is no correctness under subjective moral relativism except the relativist kind, so they're never talking about exactly the same thing in any ethical disagreement, due to the relativist structure.
Why don't some people ever seem to learn from their errors in understanding, and instead continue to persist in making the same errors over and again?
You don't have to accept moral relativism, but if you reject it on dogmatic or unreasonable grounds, be explicit and honest about it! Just saying that there's a distinction between subjective morality and objective morality, and that you're certain of the latter is not a reasonable justification. It is private in part, which renders that part ineffective. What if I'm certain that there's a God and that miracles are real? Do you accept that? Is that being reasonable?
where the creature has no language, such as when a cat
Rationality belongs to a biological entity with the capacity to reason by means of conceptions, in accordance with logical laws of his own invention, AND, willfully act in discord with them.
Find me a cat with those attributes, and we can talk.
A theory predicated on logic, internally consistent, and non-contradictory....can be wrong?
— Mww
Of course it can be. Coherency is insufficient for truth.
— creativesoul
True enough, but it doesn’t have to be; that’s logic’s job.
— Mww
No, it's not. That is a huge mistake. The job of logic is to preserve truth(correspondence)
A theory predicated of internally consistent, non-contradictory tenets has truth as its possibility, regardless of its coherence. A theory can be perfectly coherent and be refutable to extinction.
The job of logic is to provide the conditions for truth, given the correct use of it, it is the means to an end. It is the form of correct reasoning, content be what it may. After truth is known, there is no need of logic to preserve it.
Rationality belongs to a biological entity with the capacity to reason by means of conceptions, in accordance with logical laws of his own invention, AND, willfully act in discord with them.
Find me a cat with those attributes, and we can talk.
What in the...? He was talking about sensory perception. Where did you get rationality from?
Reply to S Was he (@creativesoul) not anthropomorphizing and, it might be said, reifying the cat's sensory perception as (prelinguistic) thought/belief?
Was he (@creativesoul) not anthropomorphizing and, it might be said, reifying the cat's sensory perception as (prelinguistic) thought/belief?
Yes, I think so. I wouldn't call that thought or belief, and I also don't agree with the part about perceiving a computer as a computer, because I wouldn't call that perception. I would just call perceiving the computer perception, and the other part sounds like identification.
There is much I don't agree with when it comes to him. I didn't agree with his earlier interpretation of pure reason, and I don't agree with his comments about Kant and Hume, and I despise his confused and awkward and extremely repetitive manner of speech and his peculiar pet theories. And I don't agree with any of his arguments against subjective moral relativism.
Was he (@creativesoul) not anthropomorphizing and, it might be said, reifying the cat's sensory perception as (prelinguistic) thought/belief?
No. I was not. Cats are quite capable of thought/belief. The cat believed the prey went behind the computer without ever perceiving the computer as a computer. I've set this out more times than I can remember.
The point being made, however, was about the all too common notion of "perception"...
That which pure reason is thinking about always has emotional content.
— creativesoul
I reject that thesis as without sufficient warrant. It is patently obvious there are conditions where no feeling or emotion requires my attention.
That's irrelevant. I'm not claiming that every situation demands that we focus upon the emotional aspects.
The issue here is what all pre-reflective thought/belief consists in/of. What is the content? If it includes emotion, and it most certainly does, then thinking about it requires one to think about the emotional aspects of it. Pure reason is thinking about pre-existing thought/belief. A proper account would include all that that pre-existing thought/belief consists of.
The job of logic is to provide the conditions for truth, given the correct use of it, it is the means to an end. It is the form of correct reasoning, content be what it may. After truth is known, there is no need of logic to preserve it.
This is just plain wrong. Logic does not provide truth conditions. Logic presupposes truth. Truth is presupposed in premisses.
Do me a favor here...
Define the term "truth" in such a way that the reader could replace all your uses of it with it's definition and not suffer any loss of meaning and/or coherency. The last statement above makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me...
The rules of logic most certainly need to preserve truth.
Like everyone else in the world I've given this some thought. For the most part, what we consider right and wrong is considered wrong for a reason. Many moral questions are surrounding the topic of sex, incest is considered immoral due to it corrupting the gene pool and homosexual relations are often deemed undesirable due to its inability to produce offspring, much like most Christian views on pornography, essentially any discharge not for the purpose of reproduction is considered wrong or a sin. Many other moral questions go fairly without saying such as not murdering your fellow man and not stealing. The way I see it, morality is a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself. Without morality and a sense of right and wrong, the human race would collapse in a matter of days.
Insert The Great Moustache at this point. His life is a fine example of the sheer difficulty one has in 'shedding' one's first worldview when it is grounded upon such deeply held belief such as one in the God of Abraham.
Good/Evil
Reward/Punishment
Unfortunately the church did not do us any favors. The baby is hard to find in an opaque tub. She's there though.
God may be dead, but that God had nothing to do with an admirable moral code.
There’s as much distance between reason and instinct, as there is between apperception (by the mind) and perception (by the senses).
Are these meant to name two distinct kinds(modes) of perception? If so, what do they both have in common that makes them what they are... examples of perception. Surely it's more than just because we say so. Right?
What is the criterion, which when met by some candidate or other, counts as being a kind of perception. Clearly the difference is 'by the mind' and/or 'by the senses'. What makes them both perception though?
What exactly is it that you're saying is 'by the mind' and 'by the senses'?
There are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism! So of course that doesn't follow. It is designed to avoid conflicting statements! You have it completely backwards with regard to conflicting statements and moral truth! No two moral objectivists can both be correct about the same thing in an ethical disagreement, but there is no correctness under subjective moral relativism except the relativist kind, so they're never talking about exactly the same thing in any ethical disagreement, due to the relativist structure.
Why don't some people ever seem to learn from their errors in understanding, and instead continue to persist in making the same errors over and again?
I laughed... ...quite heartily.
If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.
That's what tends to occur when one throws truth out the window.
"'X' is good according to person A" is not about the goodness of X.
Agree?
No, obviously I don't agree. That's basically asserting without argument that moral relativism is not about right or wrong, and then asking a moral relativist if he agrees, which is extremely daft. You would have to be a fool to expect a different answer.
You need to support that without begging the question, which is a task that people like you seem to find impossible. You've had 57 pages to provide a sound argument, yet you've been unable to do so.
Like everyone else in the world I've given this some thought. For the most part, what we consider right and wrong is considered wrong for a reason. Many moral questions are surrounding the topic of sex, incest is considered immoral due to it corrupting the gene pool and homosexual relations are often deemed undesirable due to its inability to produce offspring, much like most Christian views on pornography, essentially any discharge not for the purpose of reproduction is considered wrong or a sin. Many other moral questions go fairly without saying such as not murdering your fellow man and not stealing. The way I see it, morality is a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself. Without morality and a sense of right and wrong, the human race would collapse in a matter of days.
But none of that addresses the topic. The topic is about morality itself, making this discussion a meta-ethical discussion. What you said is consistent with both of the main positions in the debate. The topic is not about whether there is right or wrong, or what you judge to be right or wrong, or whether there is a sense of right or wrong. Your qualifications like "I consider" and "the way I see it" render your statements useless as an argument against subjective moral relativism, if that was your intention. Was your intention to have a stake in the debate, or to say nothing controversial at all?
If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.
That's what tends to occur when one throws truth out the window.
Nope, that's still not even a valid argument. It's not as though you've had 57 pages to produce one or anything...
And once again, you succeed in demonstrating your lack of understanding of subjectivist moral relativism, which doesn't throw truth out of the window. On the contrary, it is a meta-ethical theory committed to moral truths, just like your meta-ethical theory is committed to moral truths, but there's a dispute over interpretation.
Once again, this is an example of the opposition naively assuming that they have dictatorship over the meaning of moral truth, and that anything that doesn't fit their own interpretation doesn't count. And he's predictably doing exactly the same thing with right and wrong. Anything that doesn't fit his interpretation doesn't count. Even though that's a clear example of begging the question, which is a logical fallacy. How far must your head be up your own backside to make that schoolboy error?
Learn the basic fallacies you're committing, and then come back when you're competent enough to stop committing them.
This is a philosophy forum, where the aim is to present reasonable arguments in support of a proper account of things, not merely to assert or assume that you're in possession of such an account, and that any one who disagrees with your account must be mistaken and "fail miserably". This is no place for empty rhetoric. It's either philosophical substance or don't waste your breath.
a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself.
A judicial system can protect humanity from itself, as well. Can the judicial fully contain the moral, or does morality need to be a system of its own?
Surely you agree that pure reason consists of thought/belief.
Your proclivity of conjoining disparate conceptions is off-putting. I understand thought, I understand belief. I understand thought is possible without a belief attached to it, I understand no belief is possible without being thought. I don’t have any reason to suppose conjoining them with the implication they are the same thing, would serve a purpose they couldn’t serve just as well by treating them as different conceptions, and as having different relations within a rational procedure.
Pure reason is a procedure, the method of exercising our intrinsic rationality, so of course it consists of thought and beliefs. There is no place in the procedure for thought/belief as a singular notion.
That which pure reason is thinking about always has emotional content.
— creativesoul
I reject that thesis as without sufficient warrant. It is patently obvious there are conditions where no feeling or emotion requires my attention.
— Mww
That's irrelevant. I'm not claiming that every situation demands that we focus upon the emotional aspects.
Your irrelevancy is misplaced. I reject the thesis because reason doesn’t think. I do. I am the thinker. By means of reason, imbued in me as a condition of being human, I do my thinking. That is why I am certain there are conditions where no emotional content is involved, for the simple fact I don’t think about them.
Are you familiar with “Cartesian theater”? Your “thinking about thought/belief” as it seems to me, demands one, which both speculative philosophy and cognitive neuroscience shows as unnecessary on the one hand or implausible on the other.
What exactly is it that you're saying is 'by the mind' and 'by the senses'?
Quickly.......
Perception: real objects are passed through the senses in order that we understand we are being affected by something outside us;
Apperception: representation of objects are passed to understanding a priori, so we are enabled to think an object without it being outside us.
If we didn’t have that ability, we wouldn’t have a memory. Perception is the energized neural pathway, the empirical aspect, apperception is the feedback loop such that the pathway is maintained, the rational aspect.
If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.
No one is debating the way things actually are and anyway, that isn't a problem for ethics it's just hard science and observation of an indifferent world.
Purely observing the world never offers an answer as to how humanity should behave. That's all ethics is concerned with, how humanity behaves.
So if we strip human psyche of emotion we're left with a cold, hard robot in a cold, hard world. How would such a machine react to the question, "perform a morally right action"?... It wouldn't inherently know what a morally right action is. It would require context, a goal and a motive.
Within a moral construction context is clearly subjective; We need to know what scenario we're talking about. The motive is also subjective; we make actions to fulfill our emotional needs. There is not one emotion, there's infinite hues. This concludes that the goal will be subjective; Subjective to our situation and motive.
All of the above is subjective. You can't apply objectivity to action.
Define the term "truth" in such a way that the reader could replace all your uses of it with it's definition and not suffer any loss of meaning and/or coherency.
Nahhh....I ain’t doin’ that. No matter how I did it, somebody could take exception. Especially you, methinks. It’s a fine line between truth being out there waiting for us to find it, in which case logic preserves it, or truth doesn’t exist until we determine what is true, in which case logic makes it possible. Historically, empiricists use the former to denounce the latter, rationalists use the latter to denounce the former. And the beat goes on.....
Like everyone else in the world I've given this some thought. For the most part, what we consider right and wrong is considered wrong for a reason. Many moral questions are surrounding the topic of sex, incest is considered immoral due to it corrupting the gene pool and homosexual relations are often deemed undesirable due to its inability to produce offspring, much like most Christian views on pornography, essentially any discharge not for the purpose of reproduction is considered wrong or a sin. Many other moral questions go fairly without saying such as not murdering your fellow man and not stealing. The way I see it, morality is a concept that exists to protect humanity from itself. Without morality and a sense of right and wrong, the human race would collapse in a matter of days.
At which point we ask, "Why is it (morally) wrong to corrupt the gene pool?" or "Why is it (morally) wrong to not have offspring?" etc.
Maybe people would also have answers to that, and then we'd ask "Why is it (morally) wrong to ?"
Before too long, they'd have to say, "Duh, it just is!" or "Duh, I just feel that way" or "Duh, it's just what I desire versus alternatives" or something like that.
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 14:45#2714720 likes
It's the difference between being called "good" and being so, and we can most certainly be mistaken in that regard.
Could you give an example and explain how we'd be mistaken?
For example, maybe you'd want to say that someone saying "It's morally permissible to rape others" would be mistaken and would be getting something incorrect, where you're not just saying that you feel differently than they do. So could you explain how that would be the case? (Or you can use another example to explain if you prefer--it doesn't matter to me, I was just suggesting one.)
True, but I think nsmith was just pointing out the evolutionary development of perceived common morality. It certainly explains why some actions are near universally frowned upon.
You could always offer a valid argument in support of your position. I've yet to have seen one from you. It's all gratuitous assertion, handwaving, and ad hom from you thus far.
"'X' is moral according to person A's morality, and/or worldview"
What is the above statement about?
I say person A's belief. My answer is obvious. X equals some behaviour. "Is moral" represents person A's thought/belief about the behaviour.
Your irrelevancy is misplaced. I reject the thesis because reason doesn’t think. I do. I am the thinker. By means of reason, imbued in me as a condition of being human, I do my thinking...
Poor wording on my part. Of course reason doesn't think.
We do. Reason is a method and/or means.
Here we have a disagreement that seems relevant.
Reason is imbued in us as a condition of being human?
...That is why I am certain there are conditions where no emotional content is involved, for the simple fact I don’t think about them.
Are you claiming that you, as a human, do not have any emotional content within your reasoning? No propositional attitude? Neither confidence nor lack thereof? Neither contentment nor discontentment. No certainty? No confusion?
You could always offer a valid argument in support of your position. I've yet to have seen one from you. It's all gratuitous assertion, handwaving, and ad hom from you thus far.
"'X' is moral according to person A's morality, and/or worldview"
What is the above statement about?
I say person A's belief. My answer is obvious. X equals some behaviour. "Is moral" represents person A's thought/belief about the behaviour.
No.
Again, [i]you[/I] can't just assert without argument that a disputed claim is true. And trying to shift your burden on to me or change the subject is fallacious. Do you understand that? I won't tolerate that. That's not doing philosophy properly.
So, before moving on to anything else, [I]you[/I] have a burden to support:
1. "If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are".
2. "That's what tends to occur when one throws truth out the window".
Or to explicitly concede that you're unwilling or unable to do so. And you should also address, and not rudely disregard, my criticism.
Where have you addressed my point which disputes your claim about throwing truth out the window? You haven't.
Once we've settled this matter, I will consider moving on to what you want to address, but not before.
Reply to tim wood When, if ever, do either of you intend to attempt to support any of that? After 100 pages? 200? 500? Do you understand that there's a big difference between stating your position and supporting it? Do you understand that the former doesn't achieve anything? It's redundant. We already know your position.
Just saying that it makes sense, or that there's a good independent of relativity, doesn't actually do anything philosophically. Nor does blowing your own trumpet by proclaiming your view to be virtuous.
Morality is relative, but it is relative to what is good for community, not what is good for the individual. There is obviously an objective 'what is the case' when it comes to what is good for community, and this is all the more obvious when it comes to extreme acts such as murder, rape, torture, theft, dishonesty and so on. It would be absurd to claim that these kinds of acts and dispositions could be generally approved within a community and that general approval would result in a healthy, thriving community. Even marauding tribes don't condone murdering, raping, torturing, stealing from or deceiving their own.
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 21:19#2715900 likes
There is obviously an objective 'what is the case' when it comes to what is good for community,
There obviously isn't, rather, because there's nothing at all in the vein of a "good" assessment in the extramental world. The extramental world simply is. It has no preference for one way it can be over another way it can be. The extramental world couldn't care less if humans survive or not, if they have continuing communities in whatever state. Humans care about that, and a human caring about something is subjective, not objective.
Reply to Terrapin Station A community is obviously not an "extramental world" ( whatever that could even be!) and yet there are obviously objective facts about whether it is healthy. thrives and so on.
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 21:28#2715950 likes
yet there are obviously objective facts about whether it is healthy. thrives and so on.
An objective fact is a fact that obtains extramentally.
There are extramental facts about bodies, the states that bodies are in, etc., but as I've noted many times, if we're using a term that has a normative connotation to it (for example, "healthy" as a normative) then there's nothing objective about that. There are no shoulds or preferences in the extramental world. There only is what IS.
And you can't get anywhere near morality if you avoid normatives.
If you don't buy that there's an extramental world, or you don't know what one would be, you have no business arguing that anything is objective.
There is no objectivity in human discourse beyond our ability to inter-subjectively agree that something is the case. What else could objectivity consist in?
And you can't get anywhere near morality if you avoid normatives.
Of course; normatives just are inter-subjective agreement; what else could they be? And by your own argument, since you reject inter-subjective agreement, "you can't get anywhere near morality".
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 21:35#2716010 likes
There is no objectivity in human discourse beyond our ability to inter-subjectively agree that something is the case. What else could objectivity consist in?
How many times did I ask you to explain just what "intersubjectivity" amounts to in your usage? You've never done so.
Reply to Janus The great irony in what you say there is that it is itself nothing other than an expression of your own individual judgement on what morality should be. (You say "is", but you really mean "should be". There's nothing stopping me or anyone else from interpreting morality differently. So you're tacitly sending out the message that this is what morality should be for us. I happen to disagree).
Reply to Terrapin Station That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. 'Inter-subjectivity' obviously refers to agreement or disagreement between subjects.
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 21:38#2716040 likes
That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. 'Inter-subjectivity' obviously refers to agreement or disagreement between subjects.
Different people use that term in different ways. If you simply mean agreement that's fine.
How in the world does agreement amout to objectivity?
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 21:41#2716050 likes
Or to put it another way, say that we have 100 people. 98 say "You should do x."
Well, so what? How does the fact that 98% of people say that make it right? And isn't the claim that that makes something right known as the argumentum ad populum fallacy?
Reply to S No, I'm saying that is what morality is as a social phenomenon; it obviously is that. Morality consists in social mores. You can interpret what you think morality is however you like, but if you don't think it consists in social mores as well as normatively mediated individual responses to those mores then you would be just plain wrong. Individuals cannot be totally separate from the communities in which they participate.
Reply to Terrapin Station Inter-subjectively shared attitudes to murder, rape etc. are not merely a matter of 'popular opinion', they are matters of life and death for communities and the individuals who comprise them. This is just your little willfully blind fetish.
Reply to Janus You say that morality is relative to the community. I say, no, it isn't. A morality is relative to the community, and that morality is called herd-morality. But individual morality is also a morality, that is, morality which is relative to the individual. Morality is the broader concept, encompassing both, not whatever you want it to be.
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 21:46#2716120 likes
Inter-subjectively shared attitudes to murder, rape etc. are not merely a matter of 'popular opinion', they are matters of life and death for communities and the individuals who comprise them.
What is that supposed to be a response to? It doesn't seem to be an answer or comment to any question I just asked you or any comment I just made in response to stuff you'd just said.
Are you saying that social behavior has nothing to do with the mental or that cultural attitudes have no actuality?
Definitely "cultural attitude" is only a very loose manner of speaking. Cultures don't literally have attitudes. Attitudes are mental phenomena, and only invidividuals have minds. Cultures do not.
Social behavior has something to do with mental stuff in that it can both reflect and influence mental stuff. We can't identify it with mental stuff if we want to speak at all precisely, though.
Reply to Janus And I never said that individuals can be totally separate from communities in which they participate. That's the kind of straw man that I've actively been disassociating with my position. For starters, obviously if "they participate", then...
Reply to S 'Herd morality' is what people believe is right because it is good for the herd. I am not claiming such attitudes are always right, but ti would seem that they are generally adapted to the flourishing of the herd, and without them there can obviously be no viable community. If a particular herd morality is to be judged to be wrong, it would be because it is detrimental to the flourishing of the herd. Then it might take an inspired individual to come up with a healthy alternative. Can you give an example of what you would think of as herd morality?
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 21:52#2716190 likes
'Herd morality' is what people believe is right because it is good for the herd. I an=m not claiming it is always right, but without it there can be no community. If herd morality is to be judged to be wrong it would be because it is detrimental to the flourishing of the herd. Then it might take an inspired individual to come up with a healthy alternative. Can you give an example of what you would think of as herd morality?
Only people care about communities continuing though, no?
Reply to Terrapin Station Most of the things you say are too simpleminded to bother responding to, because I know you will just come back with some more simpleminded shit, and it will never stop it seems. So what could be in it for me?
Reply to Terrapin Station Of course, but so what? Those people exist and share attitudes, don't they? Shared attitudes which will be more or less suitable to the flourishing of communities, no?
Are you claiming that you, as a human, do not have any emotional content within your reasoning?
No. I’m saying I can Reason with respect to emotion when it’s called for. Feelings are not cognitions, which is why they have no object of their own. The body supplies the object, re: tears, butterflies, sheer delight or sheer adrenaline rush....whatever. One never thinks......is this where I’m supposed put a smile on my face? Is this the right time to cuss the bad guy, applaud the good guy?
Reason with respect to emotion enters the stage when the response expected, or considered appropriate, doesn’t conform to the feeling, re: being punished (remorse) for something you didn’t do (anger), or, what’s worse, being given credit (pride) for something you didn’t do (shame).
Reply to Janus Community schcommunity. My flourishing is more important to me than the flourishing of the herd. I am a strong-minded individual, not a sheep. Herd-morality is wrong relative to my morality whenever it conflicts with what's good for me. It has nothing to do with what's detrimental to the flourishing of the herd. And herd-morality isn't whatever is beneficial to the flourishing of the herd, it is whatever the herd judges to be right or wrong. I was hoping earlier that historically factual examples of herd-morality would actually get you to think and to see the error in this type of thinking. What if, for example, you were a slave in a society where master-morality was predominant? The herd would go along with that, because slaves are good to have. They would see slaves as a lower class that aren't valuable except for their utility. If they disobey, it is justifiable to punish them harshly. How does that morality sit with your individual sense of right and wrong? Is the herd right or are you right?
Reply to S Right so morality consists in intersubjective participation. It exists for the purposes of the community; to protect individuals from harm so that there can be a community. That doesn't mean that individuals cannot have there own moral feelings and dispositions, but if those feelings and dispositions are at variance with the community to any significant extent, the individual will at best be a sociopath, clinging to the fringes of his or her community while secretly or not so secretly trying to undermine it, and at worst will be a criminal or an outcast with little or no community at all.
Reply to Janus Yes, I accept that that's your own personal romantic vision of an ideal end towards which morality should be directed. But that's all it is, and you can't force agreement.
Reply to S You're kidding yourself if you think you can survive without the community. What will you do for food and shelter, not to mention companionship? Nothing is stopping you from going to live as a hermit. This "strong-minded indivdiual" is just posturing!
Herd morality that doesn't benefit the herd will not last for long. Some brilliant individual(s) will come along and overthrow it. Human communal life is always a work in progress. The main point anyway is that when it comes to the central moral issues (murder, rape, torture, and so on) there is little to no variance within or across communities. That is because murder, rape, torture and so on cannot be generally approved of and widely practiced without destroying community. That is an objective fact. You allude to Nietzsche; where did he ever condone such acts?
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 22:15#2716320 likes
So that's what we're referring to by this being subjective rather than objective. And that's what makes it not factually correct or not (to prefer one thing to another).
Sure. But that's nothing objective, and nothing correct versus incorrect.
It is objectively so that they share the attitudes, and the effects such shared attitudes have on communities are objectively so, and communities are objectively more or less harmonious or riddled with conflict.
Per how they're defining "flourishing," sure. But what of it? That doesn't make anything objective or correct morally.
Flourishing versus declining is, when it comes to communities. equivalent to solidarity versus division, harmony versus conflict and these can be observed at work within communities, in other words they are empirically assessable. If some moral attitude increases conflict within community, then it is incorrect; it is the wrong strategy.
Reply to Janus It's obviously your personal vision. It's a vision, and it's coming from you personally. I don't even think that this discussion is about that sort of thing, I think you veer off-topic when you talk about what you think the purpose of morality should be.
And also, given that the "sociopath" dismissal has long since been exposed and refuted without any attempt at rebuttal, I don't know why you are repeating it: a) you're not qualified to make that diagnosis, and b) it's basically just an ad hom.
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 22:25#2716410 likes
It is objectively so that they share the attitudes, and the effects such shared attitudes have on communities are objectively so, and communities are objectively more or less harmonious or riddled with conflict.
But that's just changing the topic. The topic is whether moral stances themselves are subjective or objective, and whether moral stances qua moral stances can be correct/incorrect.
No one is arguing that people don't really share attitudes (etc.) when they do, or that behavior isn't what it is, or that the states of communities aren't what they are.
Reply to S These things are all perfectly obvious to anyone who allows themselves to see them, so, no, it's not just my "personal vision". Of course, it's coming from me personally, but so what? That sounds like Terrapin's stupid simplistic definition of "subjective" as being in or of minds. Of course subjectivity is that trivially, within a certain definition and set of presuppositions, but it is also much more than that, because individuals are embedded within their communities.
It's becoming tedious to argue with you, like it is with terrapin, because you both refuse to address any points as they are made, but instead distort them so that you can attack them within the context of your own inadequate presuppositions. No one can stop you from continuing to do that; so no matter waht I say you can always come back with some shit or other. But there's no point to that.
Terrapin StationApril 01, 2019 at 22:37#2716530 likes
Of course subjectivity is that trivially, within a certain definition and set of presuppositions, but it is also much more than that, because individuals are embedded within their communities.
Obviously I'm not saying anything like "individuals are not embedded within their communities." The only thing that would be simpleminded is thinking that I'm saying anything at all like that.
The problem is that being embedded in your community doesn't make mental phenomena communal phenomena. Mental phenomena, qua mental phenomena, still only occurs in individuals. And moral stances are mental phenomena.
It's just like, say, ice phenomena, qua ice phenomena, only occur in or "of" water. But obviously the water in question is embedded in a non-water environment, which has various influences on the ice phenomena in question. And it would be ridiculous to assume that anyone is supposing that the water in question isn't embedded in an environment. But guess what? Ice phenomena are still only in or "of" water. (Simplifying of course so that we're not talking about other types of ice.)
But that's just changing the topic. The topic is whether moral stances themselves are subjective or objective, and whether moral stances qua moral stances can be correct/incorrect.
I have never claimed that moral stances are "correct/ incorrect" in themselves. What could that even mean? You argue that they are correct or incorrect only in relation to individuals; and I say that is simplistic, because individuals are not isolated entities, but are embedded in communities, and that therefore moral stances are correct or incorrect, or more aptly suitable or unsuitable, relative to communities. I have also argued that there are central moral dispositions which are virtually universal within and across communities. If you don't agree all you need to do is provide some counterexamples; of communities that condoned murder, rape, torture and so on of their own citizens.
Mental phenomena, qua mental phenomena, still only occurs in individuals. And moral stances are mental phenomena.
This is simpleminded. It is based on seeing individuals as self-contained atoms, and ignoring the fact that everything we can say about individuals' mental lives is the result of culture; a shared phenomenon.
And the moral stance that says that it is only the individual that matters is itself an unsuitable disposition for the flourishing of community.
Ice phenomena are still only in or "of" water. (Simplifying of course so that we're not talking about other types of ice.)
Another example of simpleminded thinking! "Ice phenomena" are of the whole various sets of conditions that give rise to them. Water is not isolated from the environment any more than we are isolated form our communities and the wider world of nature. You would benefit from studying some ecology, it might provide some correctives to your simplistic nonsense.
You're kidding yourself if you think you can survive without the community. What will you do for food and shelter, not to mention companionship? Nothing is stopping you from going to live as a hermit. This "strong-minded indivdiual" is just posturing!
Straw man alert! I said nothing whatsoever about surviving without the community. Try again. I said "strong-minded individual", not "isolated hermit" or "Bear Grylls wannabe"!
Herd morality that doesn't benefit the herd will not last for long.
Again, herd-morality has nothing necessarily to do with what's beneficial or detrimental to the flourishing of the herd. It is just whatever the herd judges to be right or wrong.
And it's not true that a morality which doesn't benefit the herd won't last long. It has lasted since the very beginnings of humanity right up to the present day. Non-cooperative strategies have been around for about as long as cooperative strategies, and if the former had a zero success rate, then it would have disappeared a long, long time ago, but it very obviously hasn't. It's what capitalism is built on, for heavens sake! Competition. What you must mean instead is that it won't dominate, but that suggests an ignorance of history and of global affairs. There are countless examples of master-morality dominating a society, and holding on to the reins of power for significant periods of time. Do I even need to give examples?
I'm afraid your points about being overthrown, community goals being a work in progress, murder, rape, and so on, and about approval, and destroying a community, and what Nietzsche did or didn't condone, all completely miss my point.
My point is simple enough. It's about what matters to me, as an individual, in an ethical context. It's about what or who I am subservient to, and that is not the herd, not for my sense of right or wrong. They can only try to influence my morality, and either fail or succeed in doing so. They cannot dictate morality to me, because I am an autonomous moral agent and a strong-minded individual. I am neither sheep nor slave, but master of my own morality. You can deny and argue until the cows come home, but the fact of the matter is that I know myself better than you do. You're stuck on the outside, trying to peer in from a distance.
@Janus, by the way, you haven't answered the following:
[quote=S]And herd-morality isn't whatever is beneficial to the flourishing of the herd, it is whatever the herd judges to be right or wrong. I was hoping earlier that historically factual examples of herd-morality would actually get you to think and to see the error in this type of thinking. What if, for example, you were a slave in a society where master-morality was predominant? The herd would go along with that, because slaves are good to have. They would see slaves as a lower class that aren't valuable except for their utility. If they disobey, it is justifiable to punish them harshly. How does that morality sit with your individual sense of right and wrong? Is the herd right or are you right?[/quote]
Reply to Janus And...? You're not really saying anything ethically relevant until you add, "And this is good!", and that would be a subjective moral judgement from an individual subject. It is an expression which ties everything you just said to you and your moral judgement in a manner consistent with subjective moral relativism. In other words, it is good for you.
It seems futile to try to argue against that. What else could it be? Dogmatists, like Tim (nice, but...) and creativesoul, would of course merely assert something along the lines that it's simply, absolutely, objectively good, irrespective of all of that, but that's no argument and can rightly be dismissed. The less they say, the better, because there's rarely if ever any philosophical substance to it. And the latter seems frankly deluded that his crackpottery is the ultimate solution to all of philosophy.
Terrapin StationApril 02, 2019 at 00:04#2716780 likes
Reply to Janus It doesn't matter to me that your personal vision is shared by others or is influenced to some extent by the community in the context of what I'm getting at. Inter-subjectivity? Sure. Influenced by external factors, such as the community, to some extent? Sure. Please don't circle back to things I haven't denied and have already addressed. Yes, we are a bunch of subjects who have moral judgements in common. Yes, we live in communites, not in complete isolation. I don't think that anyone here is denying that, they're disputing the logical relevance of it to what we're getting at, as opposed to what you might want to talk about instead. We seem at cross-purposes, where you seem to want to talk about something besides the issue. The issue, as I see it, is not merely whether or not your personal vision is shared or popular or good for the herd. You know that I think that morality is much more than that, and I don't think that you've presented any successful argument for exclusively adopting your narrower way of looking at it. I'm talking about what morality fundamentally is, what it is that you and I and the herd are fundamentally doing when we do ethics. That is not about what you judge should be the purpose of morality or anything of that nature. How many times? You are creating your own problems by disregarding the strict context that participants such as myself and Terrapin are setting. This discussion is, after all, supposed to be about our positions: mine and Terrapin's, and largely Isaac's too, I think. The opening post quoted a passage of text from one of Terrapin's posts, and I agreed with it and have been arguing in support of my own similar position, although a great deal of my time has been spent correcting misunderstandings and identifying fallacies.
It matters a great deal that your personal vision isn't necessarily my personal vision. Two individual moral agents don't have to see eye-to-eye. That is precisely what normative ethics is for! We would hardly find much use for it otherwise. We are individual moral agents, each with our own unique sense of right and wrong, and what we should or shouldn't do, and what's important or what's more important, and so on. And this is true in spite of having things in common, and sharing certain judgements, and living in a community, and whatever other irrelevancies you've raised.
Remind me, what's your argument against this, again? If I recall correctly, I think it was something along the lines of: "You're a sociopath! You're not Bear Grylls! I value the community! My opinion is more popular than yours! But... but... the herd wouldn't flourish if...". It is pretty laughable stuff. And it does not indicate a critical approach akin to that of Nietzsche, which questions the very values which many of us so often take for granted, especially since the dominance of Christian morality.
But whatever, go ahead and throw your toys out of the pram.
Reply to Janus Both of the positions you describe are equally simplistic, and my position seems like the obvious synthesis:
a) Morality is relative to the individual.
b) Morality is relative to the community.
c) Morality is relative to the context, including both individual and community.
Of course, morality is - on a fundamental level - relative individually, because a community is just a group of individuals who happen to have certain things in common. That a morality is relative to a community is just to say that it is relative to this individual, and that individual, and this other individual, and that other individual...
I'm not looking to argue about it. Just want to see if you're talking about my position. I respect your opinion. Otherwise I wouldn't be asking. I deliberately try to avoid any sort of anthropomorphism. I do see how it is related, as a result of being about all thought/belief, and morality is a kind, but...
It certainly is tangential.
PM me... if you would. Just want to avoid being guilty of the charge is all... A decades worth of work ought not be guilty of such.
Since some seem to have trouble comprehending the painfully obvious... Cognitive dissonance rears it's ugly head again...
There are conflicting statements, including moral statements. That's just the way it is. We all know this to be true. That claim corresponds to what has happened, what is happening, and what will most certainly continue to happen barring an extinction event.
If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.
That's where I am at on a simple 'foundational' level wrt moral discourse. It makes the most sense on a simple to understand level. It can tolerate our fallibility. In fact, it uses it as part of the argument/position.
The difficulty, some say, is saying where goodness comes from, or some such...
It's the aim. It is discovered by virtue of trial and error. The fact that we can be wrong also refutes the idea that what is good is equivalent to our belief about it.
What does that mean? "Imbued in us"?
— creativesoul
An undeveloped albeit intrinsic quality present at birth.
Are you claiming that you, as a human, do not have any emotional content within your reasoning?
— creativesoul
No. I’m saying I can Reason with respect to emotion when it’s called for. Feelings are not cognitions, which is why they have no object of their own. The body supplies the object, re: tears, butterflies, sheer delight or sheer adrenaline rush....whatever. One never thinks......is this where I’m supposed put a smile on my face? Is this the right time to cuss the bad guy, applaud the good guy?
Reason with respect to emotion enters the stage when the response expected, or considered appropriate, doesn’t conform to the feeling, re: being punished (remorse) for something you didn’t do (anger), or, what’s worse, being given credit (pride) for something you didn’t do (shame).
This, I am fairly certain, highlights the remarkable differences between Kant's framework, and my own...
An undeveloped albeit intrinsic quality present at birth.
I wouldn't put it that way, but I also do not entirely disagree. Let's flesh this out a bit more.
I agree that neither physiological sensory perception nor emotions are equivalent to cognition(thought/belief). They are an irrevocable elemental constituent thereof. They are necessary for all thought/belief(all cognition is existentially dependent upon them both). I think we agree there, but I also think that that is where we part...
You want to separate complex thought/belief(about pre-existing thought/belief) from both it's content(what it's about) and it's own elemental constitution. There's also an aspect of existential dependency that is not being taking into proper account.
We are very close to talking past one another, and actually may already be doing so.
I am talking about what all thought/belief consists of and relating that to the fact that pure reason consists entirely of thought/belief. You're offering specific examples of situations where the thinker does not deliberately consider emotion. I'm not denying that. Grant it, without hesitation. It misses my point...
Pure reason is thinking about thought/belief(they are one in the same prior to metacognition, and even afterwards they consist of exactly the same core - mental correlations). So, for now at least, let this pass. I do distinguish between the two, particularly in cases where one is suspending one's judgment as a pre-requisite for entertaining another possible explanation/worldview/position. Prior to metacognition(thinking about thought/belief) there is no difference.
As best I can tell:We are unique in the animal world in that way. We are the one ones capable of isolating our mental ongoings and then considering them as a subject matter. Here is where the distinction between our report and what we're reporting upon is pivotal.
Reply to creativesoul Allow me to explain the problem. What do you think conflicting statements are? I think that you think of the following, for example:
"Abortion is morally permissible" and "Abortion is morally impermissible".
They can't both be true, by the law of noncontradiction. You assert that with statements of this sort, one is true and the other is false, and your argument for this is... you don't have one.
That is very much a problem.
My position begins with a recognition of the problem. It then resolves it through moral relativism, as follows:
In an ethical difference over abortion, interpret, "Abortion is morally permissible", as "In my judgement, abortion is morally permissible", and interpret, "Abortion is morally impermissible", as "In my judgement, abortion is morally impermissible".
Given that in the each statement above, "In my judgement", refers to a different thing, namely, in one case, the judgement of one person, and in the other case, the judgement of the other person, there is no contradiction. Both statements, assuming sincerity, are true. Meta-ethical problem resolved.
You always seem to have trouble with this, because either a) you don't present a supporting argument for your dogmatic moral absolutism, or b) you misrepresent moral relativism, or c) you misrepresent the law of noncontradiction, or d) a combination of the aforementioned.
We must have been over this a million times, but you've proven incapable of getting it. I think that I'm very good at explaining things like this, even if I do say so myself. I don't think that it's my explaining that's the problem. I mean, just compare the above post with mine. It should be clear to others which of the two of us is the better writer, clearer thinker, less of a crackpot...
I would never come out with something like "Pure reason is thinking about thought/belief". I would be far to embarrassed to say something like that in all seriousness. Seriously, stop trying so hard to be original. You're never going to be a famous philosopher. You are no where near being in the same league as the likes of Hume and Kant. None of us are, but least of all you. They aren't "utter failures", you are. That is very much an example of psychological projection. Please. Stop. For your own good. It's embarrassing. Just google "pure reason", and learn.
I wonder. This is too funny. What would a misinterpretation look like? What about all the different people and positions that acknowledge the fact that the majority of people, when saying "X is immoral" mean that X is immoral.
Under your position... everybody holds that being moral/immoral is just a matter of being about personal judgment, or we misattribute meaning to everyone who doesn't think like that.
Everyone does not think like that.
The position you're arguing for/from is utterly inadequate for taking account of the way things actually are.
Reply to creativesoul I am not trying to interpret the statements in accordance with moral objectivism, even under the assumption that that's what most people mean. I am trying to resolve a philosophical problem. Interpreting the statements in accordance with moral objectivism is the cause of the problem, in my assessment. If you think that you can resolve the problem which results from that interpretation, then go ahead. Present a reasonable argument. What do you think we've been waiting for? But you don't present a reasonable argument. Ever. Not once in 58 pages. So you're about a million light-years behind me. You are stuck on a problem that I've resolved.
Your answer: dogmatism. The problem? Dogmatism leads to all kinds of unfounded nonsense.
Reply to creativesoul Any arguable problem with what I present as a possible resolution involving interpretation is vastly overshadowed by your problem which results from an interpretation in accordance with moral objectivism, which is the far bigger problem of dogmatism, which is contrary to philosophy. I urge you to take a look at what this forum is named. Are you sure you're in the right place?
Allow me to explain the problem. What do you think conflicting statements are? I think that you think of the following, for example:
"Abortion is morally permissible" and "Abortion is morally impermissible".
They can't both be true, by the law of noncontradiction. You assert that with statements of this sort, one is true and the other is false, and your argument for this is... you don't have one.
I would only like to suggest that the reader actually compare what Sapientia claims about my thought/belief - in his report of my worldview - with anything and everything that I've actually claimed here and/or elsewhere, which is a much more reliable representation thereof. The two(his report of that which existed prior to his report, and that which he is reporting upon(that which existed prior to his report) do not correspond to one another. What he overtly claims and covertly implies about my words is chock full of falsehood.
His is wrong about my position in the exact same way that Western Philosophy has been wrong about what thought/belief consists of and/or how it all works. Being wrong about that which existed prior to our reports comes in a variety of ways.
Common use of language qualifies. Drawing mental correlations between different things qualifies.
My avatar's namesake hasn't changed except for the "soul" part. It's been lost and found a couple of times.
The only means of becoming aware of one's own mistake is by virtue of an other... I welcome valid criticism.
Reply to creativesoul We're still waiting. And if we stick around, we'll still just be waiting and waiting and waiting...
It has become clear that your psychological mechanisms have now taken over. Anything to escape having to actually deal with the problem rationally, right? Go ahead, blame your incompetence on me. It is my fault that you're too incompetent to deal with the problem I raised. It is my fault that you don't want to admit your shortcomings to such an extent that your own unconscious psychological mechanisms have kicked in to protect your fragile ego.
You always seem to have trouble with this, because either a) you don't present a supporting argument for your dogmatic moral absolutism, or b) you misrepresent moral relativism, or c) you misrepresent the law of noncontradiction, or d) a combination of the aforementioned.
I would only like to suggest that the reader actually compare what Sapientia claims about my thought/belief - in his report of my worldview - with anything and everything that I've actually claimed here and/or elsewhere, which is a much more reliable representation thereof. The two(his report of that which existed prior to his report, and that which he is reporting upon(that which existed prior to his report) do not correspond to one another. What he overtly claims and covertly implies about my words is chock full of falsehood.
Jesus H Christ. You are [i]really[/I] bad at writing. Just say that I misrepresented you.
His is wrong about my position in the exact same way that Western Philosophy has been wrong about what thought/belief consists of and/or how it all works.
There are probably upwards of five or ten or arguments I've given in this thread about various aspects of morality. I would be interested in having you copy at least one in it's entirety and then offer valid criticism of it.
The astute reader already knows that I've already satisfied that criterion. I've just completed doing so on this and the previous pages. I've levied clear concise and well-reasoned criticism based upon obvious true statements.
You've offered nothing more than grandstanding, gratuitous assertion, double standards, equivocation of terms, red herrings and non-sequiturs, the list goes on and on. This report of actual events that I'm asserting is true, because these things happened. Anyone can go look for themselves.
Your personal tirades against the author as compared/contrasted to being about the statements is not only automatic loss in formal rational and ethical rules of debate, but it is quite indicative of the 'larger' problem of ill-founded blatant disgust and/or obtuse disrespect for another person...
Any of you know what "argument" @creativesoul is referring to? No, me neither. It's alright, I'll just go on a wild goose chase through 60 pages of discussion.
And you're here to convince others that you have the best notion of morality?
:worry:
... and I'm being called "a crackpot".
Sigh....
Be well Sapientia.
A little off topic, but [i]yes![/I] If I was a crackpot, I would most certainly want people to do more or less whatever it takes to breakthrough to me that I am a crackpot, even if it shattered my false self-image. The first step is identifying the problem.
Always a nod to honesty. It takes more than that to be a decent human being.
You're a crackpot, but I love you? Let's hug it out? Am I a decent human being if I tell you comforting things you want to hear, in addition to the harsh truth? Or do you think it's better just to flat out lie? You're not a crackpot, you're a genius who has got it all figured out, unlike the entirety of Western philosophy? Oh, and you're really good at writing? Keep up the good work?
You're holding a number of false belief and I've given up on showing you. My personal self-worth is not influenced by your thought/belief about me. Your behaviour here is unacceptable, shameworthy. No wonder you seek to justify(rationalize) your own personal moral thought/belief by virtue of misinterpretation that makes all morality seem to be based upon the same rubbish. It's not.
Define the term "truth" in such a way that the reader could replace all your uses of it with it's definition and not suffer any loss of meaning and/or coherency.
— creativesoul
Nahhh....I ain’t doin’ that.
Do you not worry about equivocating and/or self-contradiction? Given the context, it seems to me that what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so matters...
Statements of thought/belief can be true. Can moral statements be true? If so, they ought be so by virtue of the same way that other statements are. Correspondence to what has happened.
The interesting aspects come out when one sets out exactly what they mean by the name("moral statement"). Clearly, it is a kind of statement. What makes it qualify for being of the moral variety?
The coherency of everything else claimed about moral thought/belief hinges upon this. No?
Is it helpful to parse morality in such terms? "Moral" not being a synonym for right, acceptable, and/or approval, but rather as a kind of thought/belief that everyone has; a kind that is determined the same way that all kinds of thought/belief are determined... by the content of their correlations.
I asked you, "Could you give an example and explain how we'd be mistaken? . . . "
Your response to that is "You've already admitted to having made that mistake." ????
And then you said to use my own example.
I suggested an example and asked you to explain how it would be mistaken rather than just being a different, far more unusual, moral stance that someone could have. How am I supposed to use that example? I have no idea how you'd believe it works that the person is supposed to be mistaken.
Terrapin StationApril 02, 2019 at 12:20#2718170 likes
Any of you know what "argument" creativesoul is referring to?
I'd say they were more his explanations or accounting of what's going on with morality than something like an argument with premises and a conclusion. I could find some examples of that, but it would take a bit because there are so many posts in this thread.
His explanations have been met with many objections that he hasn't really addressed.
If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably
No conflicting statements implies subjective infallibility, but otherwise normal humans are very far from infallible if it be granted it is impossible to have sufficient evidence to prevent being wrong universally, such that an agent’s statements and the world of his involvement immediately coincide regardless of circumstance. It follows that “fails miserably”, while perhaps being a rather harsh judgement, isn’t entirely misplaced.
On the other hand, in a broader sense, involving groups of subjects, there can be private statements among individuals which may not conflict internally but conflict inter-subjectively. This broader aspect entails a failure in the culture in which the SMR is operative, but not so much the individual. Either way, the implication is that subjective moral progress is very difficult and any rational criticism of his own or any other social climate is virtually non-existent.
All of which seems to indicate a problem with “conflicting statements” with regard to what is in conflict with what. Such problem with statements reduces to a problem with relativism, in which case the question becomes, what is it actually that is relative, and what is it relative to.
Where is the boundary on this side of which is right and wrong and the good; and on the other it's all relative? I think that depends on the good in question, and the age, maturity, experience, and circumstance of those asking.
I would have left out right and wrong, but otherwise, well said. The sense of “good” already contains right or wrong in it for the moral agent, and on the other side, the observing agent has no say in the moral agent’s determinations but may only make his own judgements relative to them.
Terrapin StationApril 02, 2019 at 12:57#2718260 likes
I shouldn't respond to something else because I want you to address "Let me ask you this. Would you say that what's suitable or not to a community hinges on what people desire with respect to the community?"
But re the other most recent comments to me, you're conflating things that I'm making pains to not conflate.
A precondition for x isn't identical to x. (Or x being the result of y doesn't imply that y is identical to x.)
So it's a precondition for me to awaken that I fall asleep or that I'm unconscious first. But falling asleep or being unconscious aren't identical to awakening.
It's a precondition for me to drive somewhere that I have access to a vehicle. But having access to a vehicle isn't identical to driving somewhere.
Also, me driving somewhere might be the result of someone asking or commanding me to drive somewhere, but someone asking or commanding me to drive somewhere isn't identical to me driving somewhere.
When I say that moral stances are mental phenomena, and only individuals have mental phenomena, I'm not saying that there aren't preconditions for having mental phenomena or moral stances, I'm not saying that the preconditions are (of) individuals qua individuals. But those preconditions aren't identical to mental phenomena or moral stances. (And likewise with ice states and the environmental, chemical, etc. preconditions of the same.)
No conflicting statements implies subjective infallibility...
Not really, because of the relativism. One can of course be wrong in the relative sense. In practice, it most certainly doesn't work as though we're infallible, so whatever's going on behind the scenes doesn't make a big difference in that sense. We can change our ethical views, and ethics is about competing moralities. There's no practical difference, from my perspective, between others being wrong relative to my morality, and others simply being wrong. It works that way for you and for everyone else, also.
All of which seems to indicate a problem with “conflicting statements” with regard to what is in conflict with what.
Nope, no problem. And there's a conflict between moralities. I would rather he conform with mine, he would rather I conform with his.
Such problem with statements reduces to a problem with relativism, in which case the question becomes, what is it actually that is relative, and what is it relative to.
There's no problem, and that question has been answered.
Do you not worry about equivocating and/or self-contradiction?
No. I’m sure of what I think. I know I’m not self-contradictory, but I certainly could be just plain wrong because I’m missing some experience which would alter my judgements. That being said, I’m as much subject to possible cognitive prejudice as the next guy. But if so, I came by it honestly, so I’m ok with it.
——————
I said I wasn’t going to define “truth”. That’s not to say I don’t accord with with a similar form of yours, insofar as...a-HEM!!!!.....truth is given when a cognition conforms to its object. While not a definition per se, it is an indication of a purely subjective condition which abides no internal controversy.
—————-
What’s a moral statement? From the agent’s perspective, is it a declaration of an interest (hunger is detrimental to good health), or, is it the representation of an interest in the form of an action (I go to the gospel mission every Tuesday to feed the hungry)? I don’t make linguistic moral statements when the occassion arises to formulate my morality (I can see it in my head) so the truth of that kind of statement is moot. If my action is considered a moral statement, and it derives explicitly from my moral law, then it is a true representation of a moral interest but not a linguistic statement. If I just outright tell you something I consider implicit in my moral agency, then that statement I make to you must be a statement about a true moral interest of mine. But you wouldn’t know if I actually held the moral principle from which the interest came anyway, so, again, the truth of that statement is moot.
Truth or non-truth is not sufficient for moral statements, but only for actions in compliance with a subjective principle. Only then is an agent is morally true to himself.
———————-
Is it helpful to parse morality in such terms? "Moral" not being a synonym for right, acceptable, and/or approval, but rather as a kind of thought/belief that everyone has; a kind that is determined the same way that all kinds of thought/belief are determined... by the content of their correlations.
Since this whole Chinese fire drill started, it has been my position that morality is one of two intrinsic conditions of being human, the other being rationality (I said reason, but that isn’t quite right). So, no, I do not consider it helpful at all to parse morality in terms of right or wrong, true or false. These are all subject to definite quantification, hence those dualities are reducible to something else, which is the foundation of relativism in general.
I think we need the term “right”, of a certain sense not negated by “wrong” but having to do with “harmonious”, in which relativism has no say, and we also need something irreducible to anything else but still relative in itself. We end up with.......doing the right thing because it is good to do it. Here, what is right is given by the rules the agent himself determines and has no relativism, what is good is relative to the separate agents’ sense of moral obligation with respect to each other.
Terrapin StationApril 02, 2019 at 14:55#2718500 likes
So, the idea is simply this. Normally, we say that something like "Man first landed on the Moon in 1969" can be true or false. Can "One should not murder" likewise be true or false in some way?
Superficially, man landing on the moon is empirically provable, carrying the implication of necessary truth in the statement. To say one should not murder is not the same kind of statement, insofar as no empirical proof arises from the commission of the act. Committing a murder doesn’t prove it true you shouldn’t have, but only proves it necessarily true that you did. And the negation is the same: not committing the murder proves you didn’t but doesn’t prove you shouldn’t.
If I say it is true my best interest is served by not committing murder, then I am tacitly admitting the statement “one should not murder” is true, but that admission is only with respect to my interest, not to the fact of the matter contained in the statement itself. Besides, how would I know with apodeitic certainty the statement is necessarily true without actually doing what the statement says I shouldn’t? Have you ever been aware of some mindset of yours, committed some act associated with that mindset, then been aware of your mindset post-act? Oh man...I should NEVER have done that!!! The difference in those two mindsets perfectly describes the truth of the statement, which manifests purely as a conflict of interest.
So....is there a sense? Sure. But we have no business in formulating our moral interests by having to actually do something beforehand, in order to then discover whether our moral condition is supported by it.
So, the idea is simply this. Normally, we say that something like "Man first landed on the Moon in 1969" can be true or false. Can "One should not murder" likewise be true or false in some way?
When you say “true in some way”, don’t you mean “true in the same way” as the moon landing? Something can be true in accordance with the “preferences” one has accepted can’t it, or do you use another word to describe that?
ie someone could say it is true that you should not murder if you do not want to go to jail. Thats not an objective fact statement as your opponents want to claim, but I would say its true, at least in “some” sense.
Reply to Terrapin Station My answer would be its morally wrong because it causes damage to humanity. A humans fundamental goal is to preserve their life, and to preserve the life of future generations. Thats why suicide is an interesting thing to look at as it goes against all reason.
Morality is relative, but it is relative to what is good for community, not what is good for the individual. There is obviously an objective 'what is the case' when it comes to what is good for community, and this is all the more obvious when it comes to extreme acts
True, for the morality of the individual is already determined, so what is good for him is given. The differences in already determined moralities of separate individuals, assuming there are any, and the matter and degree of those differences, is where the relativism resides. By association, what is good for the community is determined by the relative moralities of its individual inhabitants and how those differences manifest in public.
The obviously objective “what is the case” of the good of the community is given by how well it performs as a community. It is the case objectively that the community gets along well when the members do, and vice versa.
That which is thought but never expressed is an opinion. That which is opinion expressed is a belief. That belief of which a single instance of its natural occurrence is met in experience, is knowledge. Ever been in a community where some people exhibit moral differences but the community gets along? All righty then......thesis validated far FAR beyond mere opinion.
Reply to Mww Thats an interesting question, and I don't quite have an answer, I'll think on that. So essentially the question is "Should morality and law be one, or separate? and at what point should they be separate?"
Reply to S I didn't come here to debate at all and thats why I chose to use those phrases. I came here to discuss and hear the opinions of others. I use phrases like "I believe" because my ideas of morality are not set in stone by any means and if my ideas of morality can be changed I'm open too it.
The judicial system is an administrative code of conduct, in which rules or laws have a consequence associated with them. It works well to supervise public conduct, but it doesn’t speak to private conduct
Whether law grounds moral dispositions, the why and how of it, is the purview of deontological doctrine. If one doesn’t grant the validity of that doctrine and abide by it, moral dispositions in conjunction with moral law are meaningless.
What’s a moral statement? From the agent’s perspective, is it a declaration of an interest (hunger is detrimental to good health), or, is it the representation of an interest in the form of an action (I go to the gospel mission every Tuesday to feed the hungry)? I don’t make linguistic moral statements when the occassion arises to formulate my morality (I can see it in my head) so the truth of that kind of statement is moot. If my action is considered a moral statement, and it derives explicitly from my moral law, then it is a true representation of a moral interest but not a linguistic statement. If I just outright tell you something I consider implicit in my moral agency, then that statement I make to you must be a statement about a true moral interest of mine. But you wouldn’t know if I actually held the moral principle from which the interest came anyway, so, again, the truth of that statement is moot.
Truth or non-truth is not sufficient for moral statements, but only for actions in compliance with a subjective principle. Only then is an agent is morally true to himself.
That's a good example of a needlessly convoluted answer to a simple question. I say yes, like most of us, and then some of us argue over interpretation. There's only one person I know of here who says no. But seriously, what kind of answer is the above? We all know a moral statement, like "Murder is wrong", when we see one. Are they truth-apt or aren't they? Then, are there some which are true? Then, in what sense?
My answer would be its morally wrong because it causes damage to humanity. A humans fundamental goal is to preserve their life, and to preserve the life of future generations. Thats why suicide is an interesting thing to look at as it goes against all reason.
And how do you justify the leap from what seems to be nothing other than a personal judgement, to something more than that? It very much seems to me like one of those statements where you can add something like, "In my view...", or "In my opinion...", or "The way I see it...", and in fact you did this earlier. Yet, if one were to say something like, "In my view, there are 365 days in a year", or "In my opinion, we're in the Milky Way", or, "The way I see it, 2 + 2 = 4", then we'd find that very odd. I think that that's telling.
I didn't come here to debate at all and thats why I chose to use those phrases. I came here to discuss and hear the opinions of others. I use phrases like "I believe" because my ideas of morality are not set in stone by any means and if my ideas of morality can be changed I'm open too it.
You don't have to throw yourself into debate, but I think that it's important to keep in mind what's relevant to the topic and what doesn't really need to be said. I was curious about whether you have a view on what we're debating. And whether you take a position or lean more one way than the other. It was hard to tell from your comment. With due respect, I think that some of your statements seemed to miss the mark, a bit like saying something like, "I think that morality is important, and about right and wrong. And I think that murder is wrong", for example. That's not what's at issue here. Is morality relative, absolute, subjective, objective, primarily a matter of emotion, or of reason. Is it, or should it be, individualistic or collective? Those are the sort of things we've been discussing.
True, for the morality of the individual is already determined, so what is good for him is given. The differences in already determined moralities of separate individuals, assuming there are any, and the matter and degree of those differences, is where the relativism resides. By association, what is good for the community is determined by the relative moralities of its individual inhabitants and how those differences manifest in public.
The obviously objective “what is the case” of the good of the community is given by how well it performs as a community. It is the case objectively that the community gets along well when the members do, and vice versa.
That which is thought but never expressed is an opinion. That which is opinion expressed is a belief. That belief of which a single instance of its natural occurrence is met in experience, is knowledge. Ever been in a community where some people exhibit moral differences but the community gets along? All righty then......thesis validated far FAR beyond mere opinion.
Right, and I think the "differences in already determined moralities of separate individuals" are relatively insignificant when it comes to the central issues of morality, which involve the most obvious forms of harm that members of a community could inflict upon one another.
So, disagreements over issues like abortion, for example, revolve more around the definition of 'person' than over the question of whether it is right or wrong to wantonly harm persons.
I agree with your comment about the good of the community consisting in how well it performs as a community, just as with the human or animal body, where its fitness is equivalent to how good it is.
I also agree that healthy communities can, and probably should, exhibit a range of opinions about the more nuanced moral issues. But again these usually consist in differences of opinion over what constitutes harm.
So, I am a moral relativist in a sense apparently not too different form the sense in which you also seem to be. The frustration I am experiencing in responding to others here who claim to be championing a different kind of moral relativism is that I am not even sure as to exactly what that "difference" consists in, or exactly which points we are disagreeing about.
All they seem to be saying is that it is individuals who make moral choices and hold moral attitudes, but that seems to be trivially obvious, and I can't see how anyone could disagree with that. I would like to see clear statements from them as to what they think I am claiming and how that differs from what they want to claim, otherwise it seems like an endless talk-pastfest, which is a complete waste of time.
I am a moral relativist in a sense apparently not too different form the sense in which you also seem to be.
I guess I’m a moral relativist in the sense you gave here. I’m pretty sure I have different moral interests than many others hereabouts, and we all get along pretty well.
That being said, I think that notion of morality is reducible to something that, while I get along well here, I wouldn’t get along well at all in, say, Belltown in Seattle, or the South side in Chicago. Or, hell....anywhere in Saigon. Is it something that can be addressed by a shrink, to see if I’m simply a elitist, or would it be better addressed by an examination of my moral philosophy, to see if I live where I do because it is good for me to live here?
I think it means something if I can say my moral interests would change dramatically if I was forced to inhabit a community I didn’t like. If that is true, the influence of culture can explain the occassion of my moral relativism, but it can’t explain the relativism of my moral disposition itself.
endless talk-pastfest, which is a complete waste of time.
I go by the Lincoln-Douglas style. I take the first negative in opposition to whatever first positive I’m responding. The correct second positive reply to me should address what I said and nothing else whatsoever. If it doesn’t......I’m out. Patience is not my thing. Right before wasted effort.
I think it means something if I can say my moral interests would change dramatically if I was forced to inhabit a community I didn’t like. If that is true, the influence of culture can explain the occassion of my moral relativism, but it can’t explain the relativism of my moral disposition itself.
Mores can differ markedly between cultures, but I tend to see those more in terms of different forms of etiquette than of central moral differences. I don't know, perhaps we would need to examine actual examples.
The "relativism of (your) moral dispositon itself" I would see as a combination of enculturation and freely exercised rationality. And certainly there will be diversity of opinion over the finer points, which I can only see as a good thing.
The correct second positive reply to me should address what I said and nothing else whatsoever. If it doesn’t......I’m out.
I think that's the way to go...
I feel as though I have certainly participated in what I see as the useless parts of the overall discussion that comprises this thread; with some degree of frustration and not much sense of the satisfaction that comes with getting at the heart of issues. The only reason I can find for doing so is that I don't like to be misunderstood, and even less do I like being willfully misrepresented. but, there does come a point....
Reply to Janus Here's one potential difference you could feed back to me, that is, if you genuinely do want to engage, and are done ignoring me:
You give me the impression of an unwillingness to take things to their full logical conclusions for fear of giving up in some way on those very "central issues" of which you speak. You seem to have a lingering attachment to wanting your moral judgements to somehow impossibly amount to something greater than [i]your moral judgements[/I]. Any central issues are central only because we make them so, because we happen to feel a certain way about them. Now, let's say that we take away that feeling. What's left?
Do you think that the most obvious forms of harm that members of a community could inflict upon one another would mean anything, ethically, absent the way we feel about it?
There's an error here which I think that some people fall prey to, which is to try in vein to detach their own subjectivity from that which they subjectively judge. They think it is because harm is wrong that they judge it to be so, without realising that this is in fact backwards. This is just a story that people tell themselves and others. We do not believe that it's just a story because we do not [I]want[/I] to believe that it's just a story, just like how we believed in creation myths and our imagined centrality in the universe. But, just as the work of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and others, is capable of dispelling certain widespread and deeply ingrained myths, the work of Hume can do so also.
The good of the community consists of the good you judge of it, and that he judges of it, and that she judges of it, and that they judge of it, [i]and nothing more[/I].
Is a healthy community a good community? Well, a healthy community is just a healthy community, unless we judge it to be good, in which case we naturally say that it is so. If we were to judge it to be otherwise, then naturally we would say that it is otherwise. There is no litmus test here which can be appealed to. That is the challenge which is never overcome. Has anyone here provided such a test? No. Some have tried, but have failed to realise that it is not a test, but an act of faith. If you place your faith in Kant, He will show you The Way!
I go by the Lincoln-Douglas style. I take the first negative in opposition to whatever first positive I’m responding. The correct second positive reply to me should address what I said and nothing else whatsoever. If it doesn’t......I’m out. Patience is not my thing. Right before wasted effort.
Indeed, you've made your attitude clear. And I have made my feelings on the matter clear also. This too is a serious ethical disagreement between us. You think that you're above responding to me directly. You think it beneath you. I think that childish and arrogant. I lack the commitment to such pettiness, as you can see. If I see a point I feel like expressing my thoughts on, I generally do so. You have shown yourself to be very much the type to hold grudges to an extent that I struggle to match. I am more tolerant and forgiving in that regard. I have a different set of priorities.
Do you think that the most obvious forms of harm that members of a community could inflict upon one another would mean anything, ethically, absent the way we feel about it?
Yes, of course, they would have a detrimental effect on the life of the community. You might say that is because of how everyone feels about it; and of course this is a part of the overall true picture. Everyone dislikes being murdered, raped, stolen from, deceived and so on, and that is an objective fact about human nature.
The good of the community consists of the good you judge of it, and that he judges of it, and that she judges of it, and that they judge of it, and nothing more.
because it ignores the actual functionality or dysfunctionality of the community.
Is a healthy community a good community? Well, a healthy community is just a healthy community, unless we judge it to be good, in which case we naturally say that it is so.
No, this is nonsense. Of course a healthy community is a good community, just as a healthy body is a good body or a significantly damaged hammer is a bad hammer. It all comes down to functionality. If your life is a harmoniously functional life then it is a good life, if it is a conflicted and dysfunctional life, then it is a bad life. Insofar as we are and want to be social beings functioning well in relationship is an integral part of what constitutes a good life. And there are objective facts about what kinds of acts will and won't sustain your ability to do well in relationship.
You rant and cast aspersions too much; which makes you look defensive and as though you don't have any decent arguments, and makes replying to you more tedious than it should be. Just stick concisely to the salient points of arguments and you will do much better.
Yes, of course, they would have a detrimental effect on the life of the community.
Of course, he says! Yet he fails the challenge. No, that in itself is not meaningful ethically unless you associate that with being bad, which brings us right back around to the exact same problem I just explained to you. If you don't associate that with being bad, then how is it of any meaning, ethically?
The good of the community consists of the good you judge of it, and that he judges of it, and that she judges of it, and that they judge of it, and nothing more.
— S
because it ignores the actual functionality or dysfunctionality of the community.
There is no functionality or dysfunctionality of the community, except relative to some purpose someone or other ascribes to it. And [I]that[/I] is of [i]zero[/I] ethical relevance, unless we judge it to be so. But that we either judge it to be so or do not judge it to be so only really says anything about us and our judgement, whereas you seem to want to say something more than that.
If your life is a harmoniously functional life then it is a good life, if it is a conflicted and dysfunctional life, then it is a bad life.
Are you really so naive as to not realise the essential part that your own judgement plays in your expression of what you seem to mistake as some sort of objective fact? If we make a bunch of additional assumptions, then yes. But those additional assumptions just kick the can further down the road.
And if that's just your opinion, then fine. But be more explicit about it.
Insofar as we are and want to be social beings functioning well in relationship is an integral part of what constitutes a good life.
I don't think anyone here is questioning mere conditionals like that. If I want to get by in society, I'll make sure I fit in well enough. If I want to satiate my desire for murder, I'll murder people. If I want to be a good Samaritan, I'll set out to help others. If I want to be a good salesman, I'll learn to be manipulative.
Of course a healthy community is a good community... — Janus
Yes, of course it is, obviously so long as we judge healthy to be good, and obviously not otherwise.
If you don't judge health and functionality to be good and ill-health and dysfunctionality to be bad, then we have nothing to talk about. If you don't believe that the most fundamental aim of community is to live harmoniously together, then I will agree that of course you are entitled to that stupid opinion. But I see nothing to support such an opinion except "that is what I choose to believe"; it would be a perverse, and not a reasonable, opinion.
Okay, I will. I will say this, and only this, and then I will remain silent until I judge the situation differently: here is a spoonful of your own medicine. How does it taste?
What’s a moral statement? From the agent’s perspective, is it a declaration of an interest (hunger is detrimental to good health), or, is it the representation of an interest in the form of an action (I go to the gospel mission every Tuesday to feed the hungry)?
Will any interest do or does it require a specific kind of interest in order for it to qualify as being a moral one, as compared/contrasted to one that is not. I've all kinds of interests, from people watching to inventing, to rendering, to poetry, to non-fiction, etc.
I find it rather important to set these things out as clearly as possible, otherwise the line of thinking goes awry. That's what prompted the earlier definition of morality, although interestingly enough, I do not agree with that definition entirely. It is current convention though, so. No better place to start. However, it leads to morality being relative/subjective. The SEP article actually changed and mentioned that particular objection to it at one time, although I'm not sure if it still does. I do not remember. I'm also not sure if it was a result of my argument showing it at the time - a number of years back on another forum - or it was just chronological coincidence. I mean, there are number of paid professionals here and elsewhere, some of whom write and/or edit articles on the SEP website. Anyway... I do not find that focusing on the rules gets to the heart of focusing upon the thought/belief underwriting those rules. That's how knowledge of the matter at hand is acquired.
I aslo commend the direction you've taken here wrt the law and morality. On my view, the law is nothing more and nothing less than legitimized morality(legitimized moral belief).
Reply to S When I have all the facts, I'll make that leap to telling, but until then, its nothing more than personal judgement. Its essential that those on a philosophy forum understand when they have all the facts and when they don't and until they have all the facts, they have no right to be telling anybody anything.
We have a right to discuss our personal thought/belief on a public forum. Besides that, the sentiment itself is both self-contradictory and untenable. It sets an impossible criterion to meet. In other words, if what you say is true, then you have no right to say it. You see what I mean? You most certainly do. It is also literally, figuratively, physically, mentally, and practically impossible for anyone at all to have all the facts.
While there is also most certainly a need for us to curtail immoral behaviours, telling someone something is not one of them. How something is told matters much more. The level of respect that the telling is based upon matters. The telling itself is a necessary method. It is not only necessary but it is irrevocable to thinking/believing anything anew. It takes an other - in some way shape or form, so to speak - to show us our own mistakes. If no one told anyone else anything at all language would have never gotten off the ground.
Well, surely you see the need for telling people stuff.
It's all personal thought/belief being expressed here anyway. What matters most is whether or not it is true. What matters second most is whether or not it is well-grounded. Given that the topic is morality, and we all adopt our own initial worldview, we're all on equal grounds to that - being adopted - extent.
Moralities vary according to particular circumstances. Not all are on equal footing however. Some allow exceptions to the rules. Some do not. Some are based upon true claims, some are not. There are many aspects to consider when one is considering morality.
History shows us that our moral thought/belief changes. What we once thought/believed was good is no longer thought of as being such. Slavery is a prima facie example, although it has morphed more than being abolished. That's another topic altogether though. The point is that humans are the ones that make the rules for human behaviour, and those rules have changes dramatically over the last few centuries, right alongside the evolution of our thought/belief.
Morality has been called a necessary human condition. I think that that sort of thinking highlights one very important aspect of morality. We are all interdependent social creatures by physical and mental necessity. Our cooperation with one another has been instrumental in the survival of the human race. This is true of all long lasting communities.
With an ever-shrinking world filled by an ever-expanding power of personal expression, we're beginning to see more and more of not only our differences, but our similarities as well. The shrinking is due to computer technology. Easier access to information is not good in and of itself. The quality matters most. As a result of being able to access whatever one wants to by virtue of a couple of keyboard clicks, confirmation bias has never been so easy unless one already agrees with everyone around him/her.
Difference is irrevocably crucial for improvement.
The need for critical reasoning skills has never been more prevalent.
Reply to creativesoul That's very true, however, when it comes to topics such as morality, I don't believe that you can tell someone what is moral when the topic of morality is so heavily based on opinion. When someone criticizes you on the use of phrases such as "I think" and "I believe" it kind of defeats the purpose of a forum such as this.
That was extremely well thought out and well worded, to summarize would you say that cQuoting creativesoul
The point is that humans are the ones that make the rules for human behaviour, and those rules have changes dramatically over the last few centuries, right alongside the evolution of our thought/belief.
That's very true, however, when it comes to topics such as morality, I don't believe that you can tell someone what is moral when the topic of morality is so heavily based on opinion. When someone criticizes you on the use of phrases such as "I think" and "I believe" it kind of defeats the purpose of a forum such as this.
Such criticism is usually based upon an ill-conceived notion of thought/belief itself. Everything ever spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered consists of thought/belief.
Morality is tough because of the differences. Who is the standard bearer, so to speak. Who determines what is moral/immoral? Who determines what is acceptable/unacceptable? These are common questions...
We do, and thankfully more and more people across the world are coming to the agreement that blatant, willful, and underserved disrespect for another's person is unacceptable. Racism is dwindling. However, it is but one manifestation of the same fallacy. Gross overgeneralization. Unfortunately, it still underwrites soooo much 'Western' pop culture, not to mention the institutionalized racism still prevalent in American government at every level, federal, state, and local. However, that is also evolving moe and more into socio-economic prejudice/injustice as compared/contrasted to racial. There are some token pieces of diversity roaming about, and they are well-paid to do what they're asked.
Is it morally acceptable to literally pave a legitimate way for a foreign country, citizen, or group to have and freely express a much more powerful freedom of speech than the average American? I think not. However, that has actually already been done at the Supreme Court level. All of these directly involve morality.
There are things that can be said; things that are true of everyone regardless of one's individual circumstances. These things help to frame our thinking and understanding about how we ought act. Our behaviour has an effect/affect on other's. Keeping that in mind is crucial for determining which action to take.
The point is that humans are the ones that make the rules for human behaviour, and those rules have changed dramatically over the last few centuries, right alongside the evolution of our thought/belief. The changes in human morality are part of that evolution of thought/belief, alongside all the other changes.
Everyone dislikes being murdered, raped, stolen from, deceived and so on, and that is an objective fact about human nature.
But this is not a moral stance. Loads of people dislike broccoli, yet still eat it because they want to be healthy. Dislikes and behavioural proscriptions are not the same thing. I may dislike being stolen from, but dislike being unable to steal much more and therefore prefer a society where we all steal from each other. In many tribal cultures it is considered OK to just take someone else's possessions if you want them, so your concept of what everyone likes and dislikes just reveals your Western values, not anything about human nature.
it ignores the actual functionality or dysfunctionality of the community.
OK, let's follow your line of thinking and see where it goes. The actual functionality of a community is an objective fact, and that certain behaviours lead to or avoid such functionality is also an objective fact (or, I believe in your use of 'objective' something can be so on the grounds of being widely agreed on, so we'll go with your definition here).
So... Simply list those things. List all the behaviours which objectively (by your definition) lead to the dysfunctioning of a community. Or just a few, if there are too many to list. I ask because I'm struggling to think of any without further questions which make any central agreement pointless. I'll start you of with those issues I'm having trouble with.
Murder of innocents - who exactly is innocent, an adulterer (already carries a reduced burden of guilt in some countries), a slave (entire cultures considered this acceptable in the past) who is truly innocent in war, are we really at war (see Northern Ireland), what about the trolley problem, saving several lives by killing one innocent, how many lives make the killing of one innocent one OK, how far into the future do these saved lives have to be, how certain do you have to be about innocence...etc?
Rape - how has the MeToo movement evolved if everyone agrees (and always has) on the boundaries of what rape is?
Torture - Guantanamo Bay?
Stealing - I've just given examples of cultures where taking other people's possessions is considered OK. What about revolution, Marxism radical anarchism, all have very different ideas about what property is and who it belongs to.
Hurting innocent children - smacking?
So, you say our agreement on these matters is the objective fact, and our disagreements are of less importance, but all I see from an objective viewpoint is disagreement. So perhaps you could help me out with a quick list of some things you think we all agree on.
In many tribal cultures it is considered OK to just take someone else's possessions if you want them,
Show me. Many native American tribes had no concept of personal property. There is no such thing as stealing someone's possessions in a community where all property is gladly and happily considered communal to begin with.
Guys, I've just come up with a brilliant new argument. Are you ready for this?
If you don't agree with my opinion, then we have nothing to talk about. If you don't share my opinion, then you're a stupid head. If you disagree, then I choose to close my eyes to any support you've provided. If you disagree, then you're a pervert. (Which makes you a pervert sociopath stupid head!).
And say something I'll agree with, or else I'll ignore you.
When I have all the facts, I'll make that leap to telling, but until then, it's nothing more than personal judgement. It's essential that those on a philosophy forum understand when they have all the facts and when they don't and until they have all the facts, they have no right to be telling anybody anything.
Wow. That's astoundingly humble. @tim wood, @creativesoul, @Janus... did you hear that?
That's very true, however, when it comes to topics such as morality, I don't believe that you can tell someone what is moral when the topic of morality is so heavily based on opinion. When someone criticizes you on the use of phrases such as "I think" and "I believe" it kind of defeats the purpose of a forum such as this.
Okay, that's an interesting spin on what you said. Is that an indirect refernce to me? Reasonable criticism is encouraged in philosophy. It doesn't defeat the purpose of a forum such as this. On the contrary, it is very much in line with the purpose of a forum such as this. What's not in line with it, would be to indirectly refer to my criticism in such a manner without properly addressing it. I think that it's [i]generally[/I] fine to use such qualifiers. I believe that there's [i]generally[/I] nothing wrong with that. My [I]specific[/I] criticism was only applicable in a certain context, namely with regard to moral statements, and when intended as an argument against subjective moral relativism. They support subjectivity by their subjective nature, so it would be self-defeating.
Reply to Isaac Wait, how would acquiring a list of irrelevancies help? Surely, all it would really say is things like, "I judge murder to be wrong!". Forget the list, we should all collectively be seeking a reasonable demonstration, or a proper response to criticism of attempted demonstrations! And no, not that murder is wrong, as we're supposed to be doing meta-ethics, not normative ethics, and especially not normative ethics over things we all basically already agree on.
It's called Demand Sharing. It was first identified by Les Hiatt among the Arnhemland Aborigines, but it's since been recognised quite widely among hunter-gatherers.
What I'm hoping to show by this is that there are no objective facts of the matter even by Janus' definition of objective. I'm not particularly precious about my personal definitions, but I am precious about people confusing cultural superiority complex with objective fact.
Yes, we all agree with the very nebulous concept that "murder is wrong" and so by Janus' (rather idiosyncratic) definition of 'objective', such a concept could be considered an objective fact ('wrong' would also have to be quite weirdly defined as a class of behaviour, but as I said, I'm not precious about definitions).
My point is that this does not provide any useful insight because the concept is too nebulous to be of any normative utility. Hence he can safely leave the thing behind when investigating the meta-ethical issues.
I know it's a long way round, but the direct route didn't seem to be working.
Terrapin StationApril 03, 2019 at 11:33#2721660 likes
What I'm hoping to show by this is that there are no objective facts of the matter even by Janus' definition of objective. I'm not particularly precious about my personal definitions, but I am precious about people confusing cultural superiority complex with objective fact.
Yes, we all agree with the very nebulous concept that "murder is wrong" and so by Janus' (rather idiosyncratic) definition of 'objective', such a concept could be considered an objective fact ('wrong' would also have to be quite weirdly defined as a class of behaviour, but as I said, I'm not precious about definitions).
My point is that this does not provide any useful insight because the concept is too nebulous to be of any normative utility. Hence he can safely leave the thing behind when investigating the meta-ethical issues.
I know it's a long way round, but the direct route didn't seem to be working.
Yeah, if everyone feels that murder is wrong then surely it's a fact that everyone feels that murder is wrong and that fact implies . . . exactly nothing else. It certainly doesn't imply that any individual should feel that murder is wrong (if some odd individual happens to show up at any point and not feel the same as the rest of us), or that anyone has things incorrect if they don't feel that murder is wrong, or anything like that.
Terrapin StationApril 03, 2019 at 11:44#2721680 likes
If you don't judge health and functionality to be good and ill-health and dysfunctionality to be bad, then we have nothing to talk about. If you don't believe that the most fundamental aim of community is to live harmoniously together, then I will agree that of course you are entitled to that stupid opinion. But I see nothing to support such an opinion except "that is what I choose to believe"; it would be a perverse, and not a reasonable, opinion.
So presumably you believe that it's a non-opinion-oriented fact that "health and functionality are good" is reasonable, and you believe in general that "x is reasonable" can be a fact that in no way hinges on individual mental predispositions, habits, etc., right?
if everyone feels that murder is wrong then surely it's a fact that everyone feels that murder is wrong and that fact implies . . . exactly nothing else.
Yes, absolutely. But then what is to stop someone from saying that a collection of such things (things everyone thinks is wrong) is what we call "wrong" when it comes to moral-apt behaviour? "wrong" is just a word, words quite frequently mean different things in different contexts (and to different people). It's quite reasonable that "wrong" when we're talking about morality means {those behaviours which most people dislike}, whereas "wrong" when talking about the statement "the sky is made of jam" means {does not correspond with reality}. After all, we say 2+2=5 is "wrong" all the time, and by that we don't mean {does not correspond with reality}, we mean {does not correspond with the rules of maths}.
So, if "wrong" in the context of morality means {does not correspond with the rules of morality} that would be a completly normal use of "wrong", and if the rules of morality happen to be decided by consensus, then so be it. I don't complain that the rules of chess are derived without my input, nor do I cry foul when someone uses those rules to claim that I was objectively "wrong" to move the bishop perpendicularly.
What is not implied (which is where I agree with you) is that one then should behave a certain way. All those statements above can reasonably be correct uses of the word "wrong" but none mean that I should not murder, presume 2+2=5, or move a bishop perpendicularly.
The reason I bring this up is that I think there's a difference between the ultra-rationalist view that some moral behaviour is rationally right, and what seems to be Janus's view that some behaviour is right because that's what we use the word "right for in this context.
I disagree with both, but I disagree with them for different reasons because they are different propositions, and that's what I was trying to draw out.
Terrapin StationApril 03, 2019 at 12:15#2721740 likes
Yes, absolutely. But then what is to stop someone from saying that a collection of such things (things everyone thinks is wrong) is what we call "wrong" when it comes to moral-apt behaviour? "wrong" is just a word, words quite frequently mean different things in different contexts (and to different people). It's quite reasonable that "wrong" when we're talking about morality means {those behaviours which most people dislike}, whereas "wrong" when talking about the statement "the sky is made of jam" means {does not correspond with reality}. After all, we say 2+2=5 is "wrong" all the time, and by that we don't mean {does not correspond with reality}, we mean {does not correspond with the rules of maths}.
Sure, but there would be no way to support that using "right"/"wrong" in a particular way is the correct way to use it aside from just descriptively noting that it's the conventional or common way to use it. But that's not all that the other side here wants to say. They don't want to just say that such and such is the common moral view, or that such and such is the common way to use a term. If that's all that they wanted to say there would be no argument with us--or if there were, we could just settle any disagreement by doing a survey of beliefs, of word usage, etc.
People want to instead say that there's normative weight to what's common or conventional (or we could say that they want to support the notion of normative weight, period), they want to say that certain things are correct versus incorrect, reasonable versus not reasonable, etc.
People want to instead say that there's normative weight to what's common or conventional (or we could say that they want to support the notion of normative weight, period), they want to say that certain things are correct versus incorrect, reasonable versus not reasonable, etc.
Yeah, that's what I wasn't quite sure about from Janus's latest posts. Tim and the ultra-rationalists definitely are trying to say that, but arguing against them is a pointless waste of time if they're never going to address the actual issues.
@Janus, I thought was saying something slightly different. That, in the case of morality, some collection of behaviours can be objectively called "right" just and only because that's what the word "right" means in this context, and any normative weight is derived entirely from the fact that we probably do want to live in a harmonious society (and so anyone who doesn't need not pay attention, ie the normative weight is not exhaustive).
This is a form of relativism (in that the few who do not have a desire to live in a harmonious society are excluded from the normative value), but it is still one with which I disagree, because I think widespread agreement is merely fabricated or presumed in order to give cultural preferences more weight than they rightly have under their own system.
Terrapin StationApril 03, 2019 at 13:32#2721900 likes
Janus, I thought was saying something slightly different. That, in the case of morality, some collection of behaviours can be objectively called "right" just and only because that's what the word "right" means in this context, and any normative weight is derived entirely from the fact that we probably do want to live in a harmonious society (and so anyone who doesn't need not pay attention, ie the normative weight is not exhaustive).
If that's all he's saying, though, what exactly is he disagreeing with me about?
Yeah, if everyone feels that murder is wrong then surely it's a fact that everyone feels that murder is wrong and that fact implies . . . exactly nothing else.
Bingo. It is odd to me how certain otherwise logical thinkers, who I shan't name, somehow end up at a different conclusion. We can add in a premise that if everyone feels that way, then it's objectively true that murder is wrong, but that is, as you rightly point out, a fallacious appeal to the masses, so that just won't work, and there should be more recognition from the other side of the debate that this just won't work.
It certainly doesn't imply that any individual should feel that murder is wrong (if some odd individual happens to show up at any point and not feel the same as the rest of us), or that anyone has things incorrect if they don't feel that murder is wrong, or anything like that.
Exactly. At best, it implies only a mere conditional, which is totally ineffectual if you don't subscribe to the antecedent in the conditional. At best, it implies something along the lines that, if this is your measure of judgement on right and wrong, than it will be right or wrong for you on that basis. That's [i]totally consistent[/I] with subjective moral relativism, and no one [i]has[/I] to accept that [i]personal[/I] standard of judgement. One could simply go by a different standard of judgement. It's not as though there's a moral authority we can appeal to in order to settle this, or at least, this has not been successfully demonstrated, even after 60 pages worth of discussion.
Again, where is the recognition of this problem from the other side? Where are the attempted refutations? It seems we've reached a point where, for them, dogmatic bare assertions, handwaving, and flat out ignoring is the order of the day. What an abysmal state of affairs. This is a [I]philosophy forum[/I].
If that's all he's saying, though, what exactly is he disagreeing with me about?
Well, yes. As usual he'd be disagreeing with the usual straw man of relativism, that we all think murder is OK. Or a rather boring semantic argument about the use of the words "right" and "wrong" in this context. Or more likely just found himself on the wrong side of an argument with a little too much pride. I'm just trying to squeeze a little philosophical interest from this, and my previous tactic of pointing out the glaringly obvious ontological facts hasn't been doing it.
The main reason why I'm keen to support relativism is not because of its ontological truth (as I've said before, "truth" is not such a big deal for me) it's because I think objectivism is harmful, and I care about avoiding harms (at least to those people I choose to care about).
It is in this context I find the argument about near universality to be more fruitful to oppose than the one about absolute universality which would be required to prove objectivism (and which those on that side of the argument have so spectacularly failed to provide).
So presumably you believe that it's a non-opinion-oriented fact that "health and functionality are good" is reasonable, and you believe in general that "x is reasonable" can be a fact that in no way hinges on individual mental predispositions, habits, etc., right?
How would you attempt to support that?
Indeed, how would you support the claim that health and functionality are good in themselves, rather than conditionally so in accordance with our moral judgement?
It can't be done. Surely at this point we're justified in writing off such claims as unsupported.
We can add in a premise that if everyone feels that way, then it's objectively true that murder is wrong, but that is, as you rightly point out, a fallacious appeal to the masses, so that just won't work, and there should be more recognition from the other side of the debate that this just won't work.
This is where I disagree with you (and I have a feeling disagreeing with you is going to be a lot more fruitful than disagreeing with my previous interlocutors). I think it is an erroneous appeal to the masses, not a fallacious one. I don't think it is fallacious to appeal to the masses (or any other authority) as to what is "correct" in certain circumstances. It is "correct" to move the Bishop diagonally in chess, and this is entirely because the consensus of chess players think that. It is incorrect to say 2+2=5, and this is entirely because the consensus of mathematicians define the terms that way.
What I think the appeal to the masses is here is erroneous. It is a mistake (given what the proponents claim to want) to use the opinion of the masses as a normative force to guide behaviour in that way. Diversity is good, innovation is good (I also trust instinct quite a lot too). Reversion to the mean stifles these things and so is a mistake. It ends up back with something I think you and I spoke about right at the beginning. People imposing their own cultural values as if they were objectively right.
Terrapin StationApril 03, 2019 at 13:59#2722020 likes
I disagree with you on that, too. It's fallacious. That something is common never makes that thing correct or right or anything like that. It's simply the argumentum ad populum fallacy.
You could say "Well, people consider it correct if it's the standard or the norm," which is true, but the fact that people consider things to be correct in that case suffers from the same fallacy. It's not correct just because people consider it to be.
The only thing that commonality makes correct is the fact that it's common.
Reply to Isaac But I've shown the problems with such usage. It fails to work or adequately explain any incongruity when the herd-morality doesn't accord with an individual's sense of right and wrong. I have shown this with examples about racism and slavery, and he has proven unable to reasonably counter. At first he dismissed the thought experiment as impossible or unrealistic when it was about racism, then he decided to completely ignore it the second time around when it was about slavery. These are the last resorts of someone who can't think up a way out of the problem.
So how do you treat the use of the term "correct" when applied to a move in chess? Is it a misuse of the word for you? Because the way i see it, the moment the majority of chess players change their mind about the rules, a previously incorrect move becomes correct. It seems entirely based on what the majority think.
Terrapin StationApril 03, 2019 at 14:06#2722070 likes
So how do you treat the use of the term "correct" when applied to a move in chess?
As a sloppy manner of speaking. Yes, it's a misuse of the word to me. If you want to play by the widespread conventions, you can play by them, and have people monitor that, etc.--that's fine. But it's important to not conflate that with the notion that there's something "wrong" with it if you want to play differently. Whatever exact terms we use. This isn't about the terms, it's about the ideas. You can simply play in conformity with the conventions or you can do something more unusual. There's no inherent value to doing either.
But I've shown the problems with such usage. It fails to work or adequately explain any incongruity when the herd-morality doesn't accord with an individual's sense of right and wrong. I have shown this with examples about racism and slavery, and he has proven unable to reasonably counter. At first he dismissed the thought experiment as impossible or unrealistic when it was about racism, then he decided to completely ignore it the second time around when it was about slavery. These are the last resorts of someone who can't think up a way out of the problem.
I agree entirely with your successful refutation. Where I'm at odds is that if he had come back and said "in a racist society, racidm is morally" right" because that's what "right" means" - then, I think he would have had a reasonable position. We're free to define words that way and I'm not sure it would be too far from the way a lot of people use the term. They are just wrong about the behaviour of the they consequently advise.
Mores can differ markedly between cultures, but I tend to see those more in terms of different forms of etiquette than of central moral differences
I’m ok with that. Mores being a form of social etiquette, or an unwritten code of public conduct, as opposed to, say, taboos. The consequence of violation of a civil code of conduct is usually pre-determined as part and parcel of that code. The consequence of violation of social mores is usually something like being ostracized to some degree, or something like it, and isn’t usually pre-determined in form or degree. It’s like mores are an informal code, civil law is a formal code, both having to do with public conduct.
It is very much more the case that an outsider will find the mores of an extant community sufficient reason to join it, rather than the unambiguous, etched-in-stone civil code. Though I suppose it is possible a guy will come to a state where the penalty for bank robbery, e.g., is substantially less than some other state. Nevertheless, it seems rather significant that one’s sense of good conduct has precedence over one’s sense of right conduct.
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The "relativism of (your) moral dispositon itself" I would see as a combination of enculturation and freely exercised rationality.
Again, I concur, if I’m already in a social environment, but if I’m freely changing environments because of some arbitrary unhappiness with either myself or the community, to wit: my enculturation is insufficient, or even detrimental somehow, then my freely exercised rationality becomes the means by which I know what’s good for myself, and in turn justifies me packin’ up the kids and BBQ and hittin’ the road.
If it be true my moral relativism enables me to be well-adapted to a community, and my moral relativism enables me to be unhappy with a community, enculturation because of community can’t be the ground of my moral relativism. Cultural predicates can only serve as the means of exposing my freely excersiced rationality. In other words, I myself am common to both situations, therefore whatever the distinctions are, and however they manifest, absolutely must have their origin in me.
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Morality is relative, but it is relative to what is good for community, not what is good for the individual. There is obviously an objective 'what is the case' when it comes to what is good for community, and this is all the more obvious when it comes to extreme acts
— Janus
All my above is in relation to your assertion here. I voted it true, because I agree with that assertion in itself. I bring it up to exemplify the difference between your “morality is relative” with respect to the good of a community, and my “the relativism of morality” which I assert has nothing to do with community.
Is there any common ground?
Terrapin StationApril 03, 2019 at 14:30#2722160 likes
I think it's important that we avoid suggesting that anyone should be doing anything just because it's what everyone else is doing.
I completely agree. It's what is most fundamental to me about this discussion. What I'm trying to do is to demonstrate that this continues to be true even if one accepts the terminology of "correct" = accords with the rules the masses make.
The masses do not, in fact, agree on 'the rules' like they do in chess, or maths, and if any community were to devise some 'rules' with the objective of bringing about social harmony, it is my view that they would be well advised to proscribe something which acknowledged individual autonomy, diversity and innovation. Something very different from that which moral objectivists tend to think of as 'morality'.
In other words, I got bored of banging my head against a wall on meta-ethics and started talking about normative morality instead.
What’s a moral statement? From the agent’s perspective, is it a declaration of an interest (hunger is detrimental to good health), or, is it the representation of an interest in the form of an action (I go to the gospel mission every Tuesday to feed the hungry)?
— Mww
Will any interest do or does it require a specific kind of interest in order for it to qualify as being a moral one, as compared/contrasted to one that is not. I've all kinds of interests, from people watching to inventing, to rendering, to poetry, to non-fiction, etc.
Excellent question, and well-thought. There are two kinds of interests. An interest which is the object of desire is an interest of empirical reason and is subjectively pathological; an interest which is the object of will is an interest of morality and is purely subjectively practical. It is here that it becomes clear objective examples, re: external to the moral agent, of moral conditions are not sufficient for moral judgements.
In the former it is the object itself that is good because it satisfies a desire, in the latter it is the willful determination of a volition in order to attain to an object that is good because it satisfies a moral disposition.
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On my view, the law is nothing more and nothing less than legitimized morality(legitimized moral belief).
Absolutely. As long as we agree it is a moral law, not a law in general. And it must have the form of law, because laws are the only possible manifestations of universality and necessity, with respect to human rationality. And it must be those in order to be non-contradictory. And it must be non-contradictory in order for the moral agent to know with certainty what his moral dispositions are. He cannot go through life constantly asking himself what the right thing to do is, or, more importantly, what the good thing to do is. Here is where the intrinsic circularity of human rationality arises, insofar as he must reason to a law, which must then be used to reason to his lawful actions. Enter.......yeah....that’s right......moral subjective relativism. Proof positive moral relativism has no place in the world. An agent needs to determine his laws relative to his sense of good. THAT is the name of the moral game.
Even so, given the necessary conditions of law, it still must be determined how a moral law is possible.
“....a survey of 73 professors with a PhD in philosophy and primary area of specialization in ethics revealed that 37% endorse deontological principles, 27% endorse utilitarian principles, 22% endorse virtue ethics, and 14% endorse none of the above....”
(reported in Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2012)
The main reason why I'm keen to support relativism is not because of its ontological truth (as I've said before, "truth" is not such a big deal for me) it's because I think objectivism is harmful, and I care about avoiding harms (at least to those people I choose to care about).
Interesting take on it. I'm very much with Terrapin in that it's first of all a disinterested approach about what's the case regarding morality, ontologically. But in addition to that, for me, it then becomes pragmatic in the sense of which interpretation is most useful or least problematic philosophically, and I argue that that's subjective moral relativism, in spite of the clear prejudice and misconceptions some people have about it.
If I didn't take that pragmatic approach, I would've stopped at error theory. I think we can actually order meta-ethical positions in terms of how sophisticated they are. I would roughly place dogmatic moral objectivism at the bottom, with error theory somewhere in the middle, and my pragmatic subjective moral relativism at the top.
I would place emotivism and error theory below my position, because the former is problematic in terms of moral truth-aptness, and the latter in terms of moral truth.
It is in this context I find the argument about near universality to be more fruitful to oppose than the one about absolute universality which would be required to prove objectivism (and which those on that side of the argument have so spectacularly failed to provide).
It was clear to me from the start that Janus would put forward a position with more going for it than that of Tim, creativesoul, or Rank Amateur. I think that's likely true in general, whatever the topic.
My recent quarrel with him hasn't changed my assessment in that regard. The truth is, we aren't all intellectual equals.
This is where I disagree with you (and I have a feeling disagreeing with you is going to be a lot more fruitful than disagreeing with my previous interlocutors). I think it is an erroneous appeal to the masses, not a fallacious one. I don't think it is fallacious to appeal to the masses (or any other authority) as to what is "correct" in certain circumstances. It is "correct" to move the Bishop diagonally in chess, and this is entirely because the consensus of chess players think that. It is incorrect to say 2+2=5, and this is entirely because the consensus of mathematicians define the terms that way.
What I think the appeal to the masses is here is erroneous. It is a mistake (given what the proponents claim to want) to use the opinion of the masses as a normative force to guide behaviour in that way. Diversity is good, innovation is good (I also trust instinct quite a lot too). Reversion to the mean stifles these things and so is a mistake. It ends up back with something I think you and I spoke about right at the beginning. People imposing their own cultural values as if they were objectively right.
I consider it a very minor difference, if it is even a real difference at all, whether we say erroneous appeal to the masses or fallacious appeal to the masses. I agree that not every such appeal is erroneous or fallacious. When it is a consensus-based thing, it is more of an appeal to authority. I don't think that his claim would be a valid appeal to authority, because he's not actually appealing to an authority. They are an authority on herd-morality, not on morality. If you want to know about herd-morality, obviously it makes sense to consult the herd.
I agree entirely with your successful refutation. Where I'm at odds is that if he had come back and said "in a racist society, racidm is morally" right" because that's what "right" means" - then, I think he would have had a reasonable position. We're free to define words that way and I'm not sure it would be too far from the way a lot of people use the term. They are just wrong about the behaviour of the they consequently advise.
Yes, I agree that that would have been a considerably better response: bite the bullet, stick to your guns. That's better than handwaving and ignoring at least. But I think that that just doesn't feel right. And I prioritise what your gut is telling you here. It seems pretty damn wrong and crazy to appear to be siding against your own moral judgement with the racists and the slavery supporters by affirming that they're morally right in these scenarios. To me, that indicates a problem, even if only semantic. It's really weird not to give your own moral judgement priority, and say that they're wrong. I think he's like pretty much everyone else when faced with this thought experiment: he instinctively wants to say that they're wrong. But he can't do that without seriously undermining his broader position.
Riddle me this. Throughout this thread I've represented that some things are absolutely wrong, with reference to Kantian ethics to try to give some meaning to "absolute." And basically - if I've understood correctly - you and yours have beat that notion with a stick at every opportunity and then some. As if to say it just absolutely ain't so, but that moral propositions are simply expressions of personal preference - absolutely. I haven't seen where you actually wrote that it was all absolutely relative, but I'm comfortable affirming that "absolute" as at the apparent core of your relativity.
But it does seem to me a fatal contradiction. Maybe a relativist like you can get through the day without resolving the contradiction, but while that may have utility, it's not very honest.
So. Contradiction? Yes? No? If so, resolve it? Or is it personal preference all the way down, even into the deep abyss of self-contradiction? And if this latter, on what basis other then mere personal preference do you object to anyone else's beliefs? There's an answer to that, too, but it's unkind. But it's up to you to show that it's unwarranted.
This objection is a slight variation in wording from your earlier objection, and it has been dealt with. But I will generously remind you of the answer.
As you know, I am a moral relativist. That means that I consider normative moral statements, like "Murder is wrong", to be true in a relative sense.
As you [I]should[/I] know, I haven't committed to relativism more broadly. I actually just consider meta-ethical statements about morality to be either true or false in the normal way we treat such statements. There's no contradiction there at all. These are two distinct positions about two distinct types of statement.
This has been explained to you multiple times, by myself and by others. The real question is, why do you persist with this stuff? Is it that you just don't get it, or that you deliberately disregard the explanations? Either way, it makes you look bad.
I think that that just doesn't feel right. And I prioritise what your gut is telling you here. It seems pretty damn wrong and crazy to appear to be siding against your own moral judgement with the racists and the slavery supporters by affirming that they're morally right in these scenarios. To me, that indicates a problem, even if only semantic. It's really weird not to give your own moral judgement priority, and say that they're wrong.
Yes, me too. Again, this is kind of the point I'm trying to make here. If (not an if I would agree with) one were to say "morality" just is the rules set by the masses, and if one somehow took the edge off the 'mob rule' that would allow by claiming some notion of humanity as the universal belief, even then, one would have little by way of answers because the 'rules' thereby created would barely answer a single real question. Questions you and I could answer in an instant by consulting our gut.
Yes, me too. Again, this is kind of the point I'm trying to make here. If (not an if I would agree with) one were to say "morality" just is the rules set by the masses, and if one somehow took the edge off the 'mob rule' that would allow by claiming some notion of humanity as the universal belief, even then, one would have little by way of answers because the 'rules' thereby created would barely answer a single real question. Questions you and I could answer in an instant by consulting our gut.
I’m ok with that. Mores being a form of social etiquette, or an unwritten code of public conduct, as opposed to, say, taboos.
I'm not sure about your distinction here. There are more or less serious taboos, just as there are more or less serious mores. Taboos are the kinds of mores that tell us what not to do and there is another class of positive mores which tell us what to do. I don't believe it is terribly important for the health, harmony and stability of societies that their members adhere to the less serious mores, although it might be so in very tradition oriented societies.
Modern societies thrive on difference, so it might be worse for such societies, societies that are based on change and growth, if everyone obediently adheres to less serious mores. If everyone began practicing incest on the other hand, I think that would certainly be deleterious to modern societies, but perhaps not to societies in which the practice had somehow become sanctified. Although it seems that there have been very few, if any societies which did not proscribe incest.
If it be true my moral relativism enables me to be well-adapted to a community, and my moral relativism enables me to be unhappy with a community, enculturation because of community can’t be the ground of my moral relativism.
OK, but I was referring to your enculturation as a child being the foundation of your moral attitudes. Of course you can think about and modify those attitudes however you want to, or are capable of, by freely thinking about them. One aspect of the kind of moral relativism that says it's all about the individual is right; the individual is certainly in principle free to change his or her mind about any moral prescription or proscription whatsoever. The individual can do whatever they want to within the limits of what their enculturation, and of course the law, will allow.
My position is just that acts which foster flourishing, peace and harmony for individuals and for their (whole) communities are morally right, and acts which bring about decline, conflict and disharmony within individuals and their communities are morally wrong. Different mores may suit different communities, but as I have repeated many times, I believe that when it comes to the big central moral issues there is little variation within and across communities. I also believe that if egregious acts like murder, rape and so on were widely approved it would be fatal to the community in which it was approved. So there is plenty of room for diversity when it comes to the less serious mores, but not when it comes to the serious ones.
I am curious about one thing; which is that, although you apparently consider yourself a moral relativist, you seem to be in favor of Kant's categorical imperative. That would seem to be a difficult if not impossible reconciliation.
I’m ok with that. Mores being a form of social etiquette, or an unwritten code of public conduct, as opposed to, say, taboos.
— Mww
I'm not sure about your distinction here.
You know...the human complement system: Yes, no; left, right; front, back; up,down.....mores, taboos.
But you think of a taboo more as a negative more? That’s fine. I can do that, if it ever comes up again.
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OK, but I was referring to your enculturation as a child being the foundation of your moral attitudes.
So you use enculturation that way, from a child-rearing perspective. I was attributing more to it than that, looks like. It relates because I treat morality from the perspective of a fully developed rational system. As such, I don’t think morality is given to me by parents or society or environment. I figure if I’m responsible for my actions, I get to say what they’re going to be.
All the rest of your comment.....all good.
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although you apparently consider yourself a moral relativist, you seem to be in favor of Kant's categorical imperative. That would seem to be a difficult if not impossible reconciliation.
Moral relativism is only recently prominent, sorta like when science divorced itself from philosophy, so too did relativism divorce itself from anthropology, and has since sliced and diced itself up into so many separate denominations....it’s ridiculous. If morality is a study of personal conduct, then there are only two sources of what would stand as a guide for it. Either the code is external, as religious, tribal or administrative doctrine, and is called descriptive ethics, or it is internal, called normative ethics, as a function of personal character, called virtue ethics, or as a function of will, called deontological ethics. That’s it...ain’t no mo’.
I am a relativist in the common sense only insofar as my moral interests are certainly not going to be identical to everybody else’s, I’m a subjectivist simply by nature, and I’m a deontologist because the idea of moral law appeals to me.
The C.I. is the formula for a moral law, it says act strictly in accordance with a principle and whatever that principle is, which I am free to choose, treat it as if it were a law on which everybody else acted the same way. Although this is not a realistic “ought”, it is a very substantial guide to private conduct, to being morally disposed. And that’s all it was ever supposed to be. Murder is a moral interest of mine, because from it I can hold with a principle (murder is contrary to the purpose of life), therefore I ought to act (never commit murder) as if it is indeed a fact murder is contrary to the purpose of life.
As an aside, this formulation also solves the “is-ought” problem. Turns out, it ain’t all that difficult to reason from an “is” (murder is contrary to the purpose of life), to an “ought” (don’t do it, man).
Kant's CI is the best standard to use as a guiding principle of our behaviour if we already care about others. However, it is neither magic, nor flawless. It is not perfect by any reasonable standard of perfection, nor need it be; for perfection - while being fine as an aim to strive for - is an impossible criterion to meet. We're much more reasonable than that. A moral code need not be perfect to be the best one readily available as a means for immediate, long-lasting improvement.
It's not flawless...
Someone who does not care about others could use the CI as a rule of thumb and arrive at unwanted, unexpected, and harmful consequences regardless. Someone could use the CI, in some logically possible scenario, as a means to intentionally harm others(steal and wish that everybody else would as well). Isaac argued something quite similar earlier. It could be used as a means to an end. Goodness is an end in itself. A method is only as successful as it's implementation.
How much does this logically possible situation actually matter though? Not much if we also recognize that all such guiding principles of behaviour are prone to the exact same thing.
We do what is good for the sake of doing good.
Kant's CI is a fantastic starting point for helping all youth develop a greater sense of the actual part we play in our own lives including the actual influence that our thought, belief, and/or behaviour has upon the world. It couldn't be more realistic and practical. It also gives it's user the best possible chance to discover, release, and/or further perpetuate goodness. Kant's CI is quite easily taught despite Kant's unnecessarily complex taxonomy/linguistic framework.
Certainly the best moral belief can be taught to everyone first acquiring language, regardless of individual particulars.
"What if everyone acted like that?"
Easy to understand. Easy to further develop.
With simple reasonable follow-up focusing upon the obvious negative consequences, it helps to further develop critical thinking skills and it begins and/or continues to promote active conscious deliberation regarding how our actions affect/effect others. <---------That is the very heart of all that is morally relevant.
Bring it to the forefront of the child's thought at the appropriate time, and it can leave quite the good impression. Teaching children how to come to such terms promotes goodness for it helps nurture a worldview built upon how important it is to consider others as well as considering the efficacy of their own thought, belief, and/or behaviour.
It fosters goodwill.
It teaches a well-grounded sense of responsibility based upon considering how one's own behaviour effects/affects the world. It is easily understood with simple terms at first. It is also easily amenable to further nuance. After it is introduced as a way to come to terms with everyday situations and is being actively employed by someone, it can be used as the sole means for helping them to finally determine what they ought do in any actual situation that they find themselves in. It will not eliminate the possibility of being mistaken.
Not everyone likes being treated the same way. Everyone likes being respected, accepted, and valued. Thinking about everyone in such terms promotes goodness. Our honourable use of Kant's CI can help pave the way.
It provides a foundation upon which to discover, release, and/or further perpetuate goodness.
If someone already respects others it is a fantastic tool for honing the will. If someone does not already respect others, say someone has a long history of not giving a fuck what sort of harm she/he/they do to others, then Kant's CI is much less affective/effective. Certainly we all agree that that sort of behaviour is not the best.
The best possible results stem from early teaching and constant reminding. It fosters good habits of mind.
Thinking about the affects/effects that our own behaviour has upon others is the very best foundation. It is easily administered, taught, and/or otherwise initially implemented. It provides a baseline from which to judge. It supports the idea of doing what is good for it's own sake. It provides the best practical and realistic possibility for increasing happiness and livelihood while decreasing unnecessary suffering.
We're not seeking perfection. We're setting out which is the most likely to increase goodness while decrease unnecessary suffering. If everyone did this, there is no doubt that the world world be a much better place than if not. So, it also consistent.
What more could one ask for?
My vote is Kant's CI, and you've just read my off the cuff meandering.
I believe that when it comes to the big central moral issues there is little variation within and across communities.
You're talking like a religious zealot. You keep repeating this belief without any justification.
What are these big central moral issues about which there is little variation within and across communities? You haven't answered any challenge to a single one yet.
It's all very well ignoring anyone who opposes your position, but this is a philosophy discussion site, not a personal blog. It's not here for you to just declare what you believe to the Internet at large, its here for you to engage with the views of others who may think differently to you.
If all utterances of ought are moral statements, then I know of at least one variety that is most certainly true and it follows from what is(what happened) without presupposing another ought. Arguments to the contrary are based upon the misattribution of meaning.
If person A promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday, then it follows that there ought be a rose garden the day after, not because one ought keep his/her promise, but rather because that is exactly what the promise means. It means nothing else.
The Speech Act theorists used the notion of 'direction of fit'. To make a promise is to voluntarily obligate oneself to make the world match one's words. That is what a promise means. That is all that it means. This is not about my approval. I'm not saying that someone should keep their promise.
Either not all utterances of ought are moral utterances, or Hume is wrong.
You're talking like a religious zealot. You keep repeating this belief without any justification.
What are these big central moral issues about which there is little variation within and across communities? You haven't answered any challenge to a single one yet.
It's all very well ignoring anyone who opposes your position, but this is a philosophy discussion site, not a personal blog. It's not here for you to just declare what you believe to the Internet at large, its here for you to engage with the views of others who may think differently to you.
Yeah, it's gone down hill, unfortunately. I think this is actually [i]far worse[/I] than when we were getting frustrated with people who were presenting criticism of a position based on misunderstandings of it. At least that was an attempt to [i]engage[/I].
I also don't think it helps that Janus is confused about what counts as relevant to the topic and what doesn't, given that he considers normative ethical points, like "a harmonious society is good" to be of relevance in meta-ethics, which is about morality itself. It is about statements like the aforementioned. You're not supposed to just be [i]saying[/I] them.
To make a promise is to voluntarily obligate oneself to make the world match one's words.
No it isn't.
Well isn't this fun and engaging philosophical debate! We all just state arguable positions as if they were absolutely true without any support whatsoever. I don't know why philosophy papers are so long, this is much easier.
You haven't answered any challenge to a single one yet.
Fuck, man, how many times? Murder, rape, torture, exploitation...basically anything which treats the other as means, and fails to recognize the inherent value of life. Name a culture where such acts committed by one citizen upon another has been approved or even condoned by the members of the community.
No, no, no. That's impossible. He's a genius. It is Hume and the rest of Western philosophy who is wrong. They have utterly and miserably failed to distinguish between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. That which is prior to thought/belief isn't existentially dependent on language.
Fuck, man, how many times? Murder, rape, torture, exploitation...basically anything which treats the other as means, and fails to recognize the inherent value of life.
That doesn't even [i]begin[/I] to engage the challenge. Meta-ethics isn't about asserting normative judgements or the normative framework you use. And proper philosophical dialogue isn't about just asserting that your interlocutor fails to recognise something you ardently believe, but haven't proven capable of reasonably supporting.
Murder, rape, torture, exploitation...basically anything which treats the other as means, and fails to recognize the inherent value of life.
Yes, all of which I have raised a challenge to, all of which you have ignored.
People absolutely and evidently do not all agree that murder is wrong across all communities.
In Nazi Germany murder of Jews was commonplace and ordinary citizens were entirely complicit. Columbus murder hundreds of natives on arrival in America and that was considered perfectly acceptable. Murdering slaves for most of modern civilisation was seen as merely regrettable.
All wars are murder to those who don't agree with the justification for the war.
Rape was considered a legitimate 'spoil of war' for the best part of 200 years during both the viking and the Mongol expansions.
Torture is used today by one of the world's largest democracies.
The whole fucking third world is exploited to save a few pence on our commodities and no one gives a shit.
No, no, no. That's impossible. He's a genius. It is Hume and the rest of Western philosophy who is wrong. They have utterly and miserably failed to distinguish between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. That which is prior to thought/belief isn't existentially dependent on language.
Reply to Isaac Dude, you don't even need to be getting into details like that, and I think that it's counterproductive. What that does is to play into his hand by shifting focus away from meta-ethics and towards normative ethics. The big problem here is that if we assume a shared normative judgement on the stuff you two are talking about, like murder, rape, and torture, then there's still the meta-ethical challenge of supporting his meta-ethical interpretation of these moral judgements. He hasn't reasonably met that challenge. Don't let him off the hook or allow him to lead you down the garden path.
Reply to S I am not asserting normative judgements; I am saying that what is near universally valued and dis-valued reflects the reality of the human situation and is the only guide to working out what is generally right and wrong for human life. And of course our moral feelings accord with what is most generally valued and dis-valued; there is such a thing as human nature!
Of course in actual situations there are moral issues which are not so clear cut; the underlying principles are the same, but it is not always so easy to determine right and wrong, and there is thus, especially in our modern individualistic culture, some diversity of opinion. But I don't think the general diversity, even on these more nuanced issues is all that significant.
I gave the example of abortion before, Virtually no one questions the sanctity of the individual person's life, if not every person, then at least members of their own culture, so attitudes that are pro or anti-abortion turn on the definition of personhood.
On the central issues there is little or no variance across cultures. If you think there is then give an example. If you want to reply then directly address what I say here with some interesting or relevant comment. It doesn't have to agree with what I have said, but if you want to disagree then you should disagree with what I have actually said, and give good reasons why If you go off on a stupid rant. claiming that I am sounding like a "religious zealot, or some such shit, then I won't respond. If you genuinely want to discuss then you should be able to do so civilly without getting all defensive,casting aspersions and ranting and so on. I don't think you realize how boring that is.
In Nazi Germany murder of Jews was commonplace and ordinary citizens were entirely complicit.
They had little choice but to be complicit, and it was not considered murder because the Jews were not accorded status as properly human by the Nazis; they were considered to be a disease to be eradicated.
The example remains about meta-ethics. There is an argument in moral realism for various forms of ethical naturalism such as these. They are still meta-ethical positions. The meta-ethical argument is that the universality of concepts creates an abstractly real truth. It ignores any normative instruction aside from that which comes along with the weight of authority. I don't agree with that, but I don't think we could sustain an argument that it isn't even a meta-ethical position. It is one, just not a well supported one.
If we require him to support his interpretation of these moral judgements, then we run the risk of committing the same fallacy as Tim, that were asking him to support his position, but from our understanding of what morality is.
As I said before, what 'morality' is, is still an open question. For us it is the preferences which guide a certain class of actions and that seems to well describe the situations in which we use the term. For others though, 'morality' just is a set of rules. Rules that we are not actually obliged to stick to (thus avoiding the is/ought problem)
I haven't yet read Janus say that we ought to adhere to these rules (without the accompanying if we want a harmonious society).
Maybe I've just missed it (or forgotten it). Possible in this meandering thread, but I'm currently reading his argument as saying that morality is a set of rules a culture creates (much like the rules of chess) and just as certain moves in the chess are objectively incorrect, by those rules, certain behaviours ae objectively immoral, by those rules.
This far, I see nothing normative about all that. It is not saying that the 'ought' is universal, only the rules. We can ignore those rules as we see fit, but doing so would be 'incorrect' in the same way as moving a bishop perpendiculaly is 'incorrect'.
For those people I believe the universality of those rules can challenged, even from within their own paradigm. But if I've missed a glaring claim to universality of an 'ought' (a normative claim), then by all means set me right. Its been a long thread and I wouldn't be surprised if I missed it.
They had little choice but to be complicit, and it was not considered murder because the Jews were not accorded status as properly human by the Nazis; they were considered to be a disease to be eradicated.
Exactly. So what use is the universality of proscription against 'murder' if the meaning of 'murder' is just redefined to suit whatever objective society had at the time. If 'murder' does not have a consistent meaning, then its proscription is not a universal belief.
Basically, it's meaningless to say everyone agrees we shouldn't kill X, but we all disagree on what X is.
I am not asserting normative judgements; I am saying that what is near universally valued and dis-valued reflects the reality of the human situation and is the only guide to working out what is generally right and wrong for human life.
First of all, thank you for engaging. :up:
I think that there's a massive problem with logical relevance here.
The first part of what you say, that "what is near universally valued and dis-valued reflects the reality of the human situation", seems logically impotent, although the "human situation" part is ambiguous, which is a bit of a problem. If this is just a descriptive fact about moral judgements, then okay, but we need to take it further to make it logically relevant.
The second part of what you say, as far as I can make out, is either descriptive and quite clearly false, or normative and irrelevant, depending on what you really mean. If you mean exactly what you said, that this is "the only guide to working out what is generally right and wrong for human life" then that's false, because, for example, Isaac and I have just been discussing our shared method of going by your gut. And if it's normative, in other words if you really mean that it [i]should[/I] be the only guide, then that's missing the point.
Of course in actual situations there are moral issues which are not so clear cut; the underlying principle is the same, but it is not always so easy to determine right and wrong, and there is thus, especially in our modern individualistic culture, some diversity of opinion. But I don't think the general diversity, even on these more nuanced issues is all that significant.
Significance is the key word. I actually agree - or [I]would[/i] agree - with you on much about this, at least under the right conditions. The exceptions to what you and I both judge to be the most important moral judgements, like that murder and rape are wrong, are indeed insignificant in important respects. Herd-morality is king in these respects, and my own morality doesn't clash with it. Herd-morality, in practice, or in a certain sense, dictates right and wrong. But it is extremely important to remember your history here, because it shows that this hasn't always worked out too well.
But herd-morality can never override my morality in any conflict, so ultimately my morality is king.
Where I would strongly disagree is if you assert meta-ethical significance. If you draw a logical link between the descriptive and normative on the one hand, and the meta-ethical on the other, such that you reach an unwarranted conclusion about the latter. The premises do not reasonably lead to the conclusion. It always seems to come back to, "Morality is herd-morality, so anything that differs from herd-morality is insignificant!", but that is begging the question. I reject your implicit premise, so the logical consequences of your premise are themselves irrelevant in the bigger picture of this debate.
I gave the example of abortion before, Virtually no one questions the sanctity of the individual lives of, if not everyone, then at least members of their own culture, so attitudes that are pro or anti-abortion turn on the definition.
Isn't that just suggesting something along the lines that we can find resolutions over normative ethical issues which are considered to be controversial, like abortion? Yes, that's true. We can go by some method whereby we accordingly reach a resolution. But that doesn't seem to say much if anything about meta-ethics, so again, it seems there's a problem of logical irrelevance.
This is the massive problem with what the Kantians here are wasting so much time doing. Like I said earlier, the categorical imperative is itself effectively a logical conditional or a demand, which is a giant problem in this meta-ethical context. Where has been the response to this? Granted, this was mostly directed at Tim, but it was made in public, and I suspect that it was read by multiple people, yet ignored or dismissed. Isn't it a giant problem in this context to merely say, "Well, IF you were to treat this as a universal maxim...", or to merely DEMAND that we act as though something were a universal maxim?
It doesn't have to agree with what I have said, but if you want to disagree then you should disagree with what I have actually said, and give good reasons why If you go off on a stupid rant. claiming that I am sounding like a "religious zealot, or some such shit, then I won't respond. If you genuinely want to discuss then you should be able to do so civilly without getting all defensive, and casting aspersions and so on. I don't think you realize how boring that it.
Yes, fair point, but you've been guilty of this sort of behaviour also. We should both try harder to avoid that kind of thing. On my part, I will try, at least with you, because I have more respect for you than I have for certain others. But it will have to be a [I]quid pro quo[/I] thing.
And you know my stance on this sort of thing, I think. I am very capable of setting aside the pettiness, the insults, the ad homs, the things which don't really need to be said, but are said anyway. I am quite extreme on that, I think. It is against the guidelines here, but if you were to call me a cunt or a fucking idiot after every single sentence, I could still address whatever substantial point you made alongside that. It's about getting your priorities straight.
Also, I want to add following here, because I think it was salient:
I don't think that his claim would be a valid appeal to authority, because he's not actually appealing to an authority. They are an authority on herd-morality, not on morality. If you want to know about herd-morality, obviously it makes sense to consult the herd.
In Nazi Germany murder of Jews was commonplace and ordinary citizens were entirely complicit.
— Isaac
They had little choice but to be complicit, and it was not considered murder because the Jews were not accorded status as properly human by the Nazis; they were considered to be a disease to be eradicated.
That book I referenced earlier, [I]Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust[/I] by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
I haven't yet read Janus say that we ought to adhere to these rules (without the accompanying if we want a harmonious society).
I've argued that that's trivial in a strict sense, not generally speaking. I see it as trivial because we could agree or disagree over what we ought to do, or over the antecedent in the conditional properly ordered (the part about a harmonious society), disagree over the aim, or differ in what we want, because that leaves meta-ethics behind. It neglects it.
Maybe I've just missed it (or forgotten it). Possible in this meandering thread, but I'm currently reading his argument as saying that morality is a set of rules a culture creates (much like the rules of chess) and just as certain moves in the chess are objectively incorrect, by those rules, certain behaviours ae objectively immoral, by those rules.
Okay, but then my point against that is that it rules out our morality determined by appealing directly to our respective guts. That doesn't count? It seems his position is far too rigid and narrow.
I don't rely on a rulebook, and like you have argued, and I have argued, there's a strong case against this. Imagine if we applied the rulebook method in a different time and place. That is a horrifying thought. That certainly counts as "doing morality", but to call that morality itself is strongly objectionable.
My understanding is that Janus wants to set aside certain statements which he considers of central importance, and that many others consider of central importance, like that murder and rape are wrong, but I question the assumed meta-ethical support of suggesting that they're anything other or more than exactly what I've said they are.
I see it as trivial because we could agree or disagree over the antecedent in the conditional, over the aim, whilst meta-ethics is left behind, neglected.
I get what you're saying, I think we just have a different focus and I'm willing to concede that mine might not be right for this thread. I'm a fairly thorough-going quietist, for me philosophical questions aren't about finding out what actually is the case, I'm actually very uninterested in what actually is the case. I'm more interested in how different ways we can model 'what is the case' are useful to us for whatever we personally want them for.
Obviously models which are wildly out of sync with 'what is the case' are going to be next to useless, and so correspondence with reality matters, but it only matters to the extent that it makes the model useless.
Anyway, all that is to say that what interests me here is how someone like Janus supports their argument, what the scaffolding looks like from my perspective on the ground. I have to ask "what's that piece there for?" and "why doesn't that bit actually support the thing it's supposed to be holding up?". People, in my experience, don't like questioning their own scaffolding, so if I want answers I usually have to be quite harsh in my persuit.
But ultimately, no matter how harsh I am, it's his scaffolding I'm interested in, not the 'actual way the world is'.
Maybe that's not a very good fit for this site either, in which case I apologise for derailing the thread, but I hope the two approaches can co-exist.
I'm a fairly thorough-going quietist, for me philosophical questions aren't about finding out what actually is the case, I'm actually very uninterested in what actually is the case.
Obviously models which are wildly out of sync with 'what is the case' are going to be next to useless, and so correspondence with reality matters, but it only matters to the extent that it makes the model useless.
Anyway, all that is to say that what interests me here is how someone like Janus supports their argument, what the scaffolding looks like from my perspective on the ground. I have to ask "what's that piece there for?" and "why doesn't that bit actually support the thing it's supposed to be holding up?". People, in my experience, don't like questioning their own scaffolding, so if I want answers I usually have to be quite harsh in my persuit.
Maybe that's not a very good fit for this site either, in which case I apologise for derailing the thread, but I hope the two approaches can co-exist.
No, that's perfectly fine, in a sense. It is just that it is fundamentally different from how I see it. I agree with you only in part, and the other part is wildly different from how I see it. I'm a moral anti-realist, but not a metaphysical anti-realist.
I'm quietly pleased I shocked you! It would certainly be good to co-exist as your persistence compliments my interests. There's no better check of how the scaffolding works than to give it a good kicking, and you certainly deliver a good kick.
It would certainly be good to co-exist as your persistence compliments my interests. There's no better check of how the scaffolding works than to give it a good kicking, and you certainly deliver a good kick.
That would be a very interesting discussion to have some time.
Agreed. But you better not make me any more sceptical than I already am! I'm trying to build something, lol. Please don't collapse my scaffolding! :lol:
Either not all utterances of ought are moral utterances, or Hume is wrong.
The first is true, the second theoretically true, depending on one’s metaphysical bent. But there’s also a third, in which Hume never said no ought can be derived from any is, but only that if some moral theory adventurist wanders thereupon he should show his work. Of course, Hume then presumes such efforts to be ill-founded. Leave it to those wishing to make mountains out of molehills, in a rush to publish any old thing with his name attached, and we end up with a philosophical dilemma that never was. Also, it should be noted that Kant didn’t address this false dilemma in his moral philosophy, because it didn’t exist (Black, 1964). And conceding that Kant read and understood Hume very well indeed, it is easy to suppose no import should have been given to it even if it now does.
First of all is the exposition of the “problem”. For context, from the book itself, this is easy to find at the very end of the reference pagination, so one doesn’t have to scroll or thumb page after page for the backdrop on what he’s saying here:
“.....I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason....”
(THN 3.1.1.,1739)
Make of it as you wish. If you don’t already have a full text, and if you’re at all interested, especially in the context, and if you’re on an IPad, maybe any device....dunno.....you can highlight and go right to the reference pagination.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-a-treatise-of-human-nature
All that to say this: Hume was wrong, but only with respect to the very last sentence of the passage, insofar as we do see that the distinction between vice and virtue is founded on the relations of objects and is most certainly “perceived” by reason.
And all that is to say that he doesn't actually offer up an argument in support of his claim which contradicts that of Hume. Not even yet another regurgitation of Kant.
What I find interesting is that he is willing to entertain the thought that Hume was wrong about something or other, but not apparently Kant. Kant, it seems, was infallible. If the Word of Kant says nothing of the problem, 'tis no problem. So sayeth the prophet, Mww.
Terrapin StationApril 04, 2019 at 13:49#2725600 likes
This is a big aside, but don't people realize that when they write so many long posts in such a short period of time that most of what they're writing isn't going to be addressed or even digested very well (if read at all)?
This is a big aside, but don't people realize that when they write so many long posts in such a short period of time that most of what they're writing isn't going to be addressed or even digested very well (if read at all)?
This is an even bigger aside, but I once wrote a post [I]so[/I] long that I would fall asleep whilst writing it, and I would continue to write it whilst I was asleep. Back then, posts were called "books". It ended up being published in the year 1807. I wrote it under a pseudonym, and I gave it the title, [I]The Phenomenology of Spirit[/I].
It now exists solely as a warning never to fall asleep whilst writing a book on philosophy.
Nope, it isn’t. It’s philosophy, which presents an inherently logical possibility, which experience will either confirm, deny or not address at all.
——————
A method is only as successful as it's implementation.
Exactly. Under this paradigm, to be moral is to choose a worthy principle and act accordingly; to be immoral is to choose a worthy principle and act contrary to it. Humans always have choice, but they also have choice to disregard their own best interests. Like...it is morally good to let an ex-girlfriend have her own life; it is immoral to let and ex-girlfriend have her own life yet key the new boyfriend’s brand new Mustang.
——————-
We're not seeking perfection. We're setting out which is the most likely to increase goodness while decrease unnecessary suffering. If everyone did this, there is no doubt that the world world be a much better place than if not. So, it also consistent.
Well said. I might say we do set out to find perfection, but recognize our own imperfections which naturally prohibit exemplifying what we find.
“The first rule of culture: let each man be the best he was created capable of being”- Carlyle
"Under this paradigm...". And there, ladies and gentleman, lies the inherent weakness. Also, what's worthy or not is obviously a matter of subjective judgement, not a matter of deferring to the Word of Kant. I don't subscribe to a version of divine command theory where Kant is God.
When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.
You disagree, apparently.
I say, given those conditions, "there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday" is a true statement in the same way that all true statements are. Correspondence to what has happened.
When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.
You disagree, apparently.
Of course. How does the statement of one person's subjective intention become an objective requirement on the world at large? Why ought they keep their promise? By what mechanism does their promise impose a requirement on the objective world? It makes no sense. It's basically still making the mistake that is at the heart of this thread, you've made a jump from the subjective intention within someone's mind to an objective state of affairs in the world at large without justifying that step.
When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that if that person thinks making a promise confers a duty to satisfy that promise, then they will believe there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.
How do you justify removing the bolded sections?
Terrapin StationApril 04, 2019 at 19:36#2726670 likes
When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.
You disagree, apparently.
I say, given those conditions, "there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday" is a true statement in the same way that all true statements are. Correspondence to what has happened.
You disagree apparently.
I disagree, too, if you're saying that the ought is anything like a fact.
If person A promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday, then it follows that there ought be a rose garden the day after, not because one ought keep his/her promise, but rather because that is exactly what the promise means. It means nothing else.
Yes, there ought to be a garden; that is all the consistency between a promise made and an obligation to it, by the same person, means. Whether or not the ever is, or ever was going to be, a garden, is irrelevant with respect to the relationship between a promise and the obligation presupposed by it.
He said that [i]it follows[/I]. That is logical terminology. Surely he recognises that and knows that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, yet he replies with, "Yes, there ought to be a garden".
Facepalm.
The original claim is a matter of basic logic, specifically logical validity. He presented an argument that is incomplete, and, as presented, is a [I]non sequitur[/I]. So no, it doesn't follow. That is the meaning of the Latin phrase, and it means that the argument is invalid.
It simply won't do to apply common sense assumptions about what the promise suggests if that doesn't work as a valid argument. Don't use logical terminology if you can't back it up or don't understand what you're talking about.
If he is capable of putting together a complete and valid argument, then he should stop wasting time and do so, and then we can move forward to discussing soundness.
Yes, all of which I have raised a challenge to, all of which you have ignored.
People absolutely and evidently do not all agree that murder is wrong across all communities.
In Nazi Germany murder of Jews was commonplace and ordinary citizens were entirely complicit. Columbus murder hundreds of natives on arrival in America and that was considered perfectly acceptable. Murdering slaves for most of modern civilisation was seen as merely regrettable.
All wars are murder to those who don't agree with the justification for the war.
Rape was considered a legitimate 'spoil of war' for the best part of 200 years during both the viking and the Mongol expansions.
Torture is used today by one of the world's largest democracies.
The whole fucking third world is exploited to save a few pence on our commodities and no one gives a shit.
I was very busy yesterday when I responded briefly to this. Today I have a little more time to read and respond more thoroughly to some points which I think do warrant it.
What I have said is that within and across cultures it is generally agreed that murder, rape, torture etc. of their own people is wrong, and I think, absent any evidence to the contrary, that this is so is justifiably believed. It is a matter of life and death for communities, particularly those which are in conflict with other communities (and that is characteristic of most of human history) to be able to trust the good will of their own members towards one another ("there is honour among thieves").
The fact that marauding tribes wantonly murder and rape those they see as their enemies I don't consider as being relevant, because they do not accord any important human status to those enemies. Often it is a matter of survival; kill you enemies now or be killed later by them, and if you don't see them as human in any important sense, then why not exploit them for your own pleasure before killing them? Now, of course I am not saying that such attitudes are rationally informed.
For sure some German citizens may have been complicit with the Nazi regime in order to acquire Jewish wealth or property, or even simply because they were brainwashed into thinking the Jews were less than human. In any case, the fact that some German citizens were complicit, does not entail that they could not have had to comply regardless of whether they were complicit or not.
I haven't said that every individual thinks for themselves or is capable of freeing themselves from nationalistic or tribalistic ethea. The point is that murder and other extremely violent and violating acts committed by members of a community against others members of the community are generally condemned.
It seems to me that ethea have evolved, and are evolving within the existential constraints of what it takes for communities to survive and thrive. The modern ethos of individualism is really a luxury which has been made possible by the exploitation of fossil fuels and the less developed cultures and their resources.
And it is a mixed blessing, because although it has resulted in unprecedented prosperity for great numbers of people, it destroys the livelihoods and lives of others, and it also promotes a culture of selfishness, hedonism, exploitation of the self and others and the environment for momentary pleasures, and all this it would seem is definitely going to end badly, more particularly for the exploiters, when the shit hits the fan, because they will be so much less capable of coping with the deprivations that are to come than those who are already suffering deprivation are.
Economic exigencies have forced us to be global citizens before we have developed the intellectual and emotional wherewithal to think outside our tribalistic and nationalistic prejudices. And of course once hardship begins to be felt the masses push back against globalization (just look at the phenomena of Trump and Brexit, for example). And yet within our our unprecedentedly prosperous societies all sense of real community has been lost.
The biggest problem I see with the crudest form of moral relativism ( morality relative to individual preference only) is that it is really a symptom of our modern, self-centred, exploitative culture. Is it really sensible to think that everyone should be ruled by their passions? It might be OK for highly emotionally and intellectually cultivated and responsive people to consult their moral feelings, but what of those whose moral feelings are underdeveloped, atrophied or whose feelings are just not moral at all?
It's obviously a huge, complex, nuanced topic (which is a situation that I think moral relativism in it's crudest form that says its all about the individual moral response cannot begin to address) and we're never going to do more than scratch the surface in these forums, but in any case that's all I have time for now; and I'll have to leave responding to others later.
Is it really sensible to think that everyone should be ruled by their passions?
Questions of what "should be" are not even on the set agenda here. Nor are questions such as whether moral relativism is bad ("exploitative", "selfish", etc.), as opposed to whether it is true. That would be normative ethics, and would be for a [i]different[/I] discussion.
I don't understand why people cannot, or choose not to, stick to the original topic. That entire post was either descriptive (e.g. people generally believe such-and-such is wrong) or normative (as indicated above for example). I know that your reply wasn't a reply to me, but rather to Isaac, and maybe the two of you want to discuss something else, but I still find it frustrating that so much time and effort is going into producing lengthy posts about that sort of thing, when it is off topic.
Remember that this discussion is about morality itself, as the title indicates, and that it began with a quoted passage which made a claim about what morality is, namely that it isn't anything other than how people feel, whether they approve or disapprove, etc. of interpersonal behaviour that they consider more significant than etiquette. [I]What[/I] people approve or disapprove of in ethics is not at all helpful in this context.
That is an example of what meta-ethics looks like. Take note.
Reply to S I should have amplified the question to not only ask whether it is sensible to think that people should follow their passions, but also to ask whether it is sensible to believe that they do follow their passions and only their passions.
My view is that meta-ethics is concerned with what ethics consists in. So, the descriptive gives a phenomenological account of how people's moral beliefs and dispositions are mediated by the community and the normative gives an account of why the communal origins of moral beliefs and dispositions are relevant to an individual's moral choices. Ethics just does consist in "what should be"; what else could it consist in?
So. I am not doing ethics, which would be to make specific claims about specific acts or situations; I am doing meta-ethics, making claims about what ethics really consists in. I just don't think the idea that ethics consists in individual's feelings alone is adequate to give a comprehensive account.
The point is, from my perspective, that there is no "how people feel" which is separable from their communal conditioning. The purpose of ethics is to understand how best to live, and to practice in accordance with that understanding. So, the first principle for anyone who wants to live in a community is how best to harmonize with the other members of the community. It seems obvious that dis-valuing them, exploiting them, harming them or even deceiving them cannot be the best ethical strategies.
If you want to participate in a community then you should care, not only about yourself, but about the community; otherwise you are not really participating, but exploiting. If you want to benefit from the community without giving anything in return, without caring about the other members or the welfare of the whole community, then you are basically a disingenuous, even dishonest, individual. This is on account of the fact that you could not be honest about your intentions, because if you were you would be shunned. That might work for you for a while but it cannot but end badly. Also I think it is an ethical truth that if you exploit others you also exploit yourself. This cannot be the best way to live, and if ethics is about how best to live, then it cannot be ethical at all, by any measure.
I also can't understand why you don't acknowledge that there is a third category beyond what is considered to be mere etiquette, and what is considered to be interpersonal behavior that is more morally significant than etiquette. The third category I refer to is interpersonal behavior which involves matter of "life and death".
The whole fucking third world is exploited to save a few pence on our commodities and no one gives a shit.
This in particular warrants some more attention. I do agree with you about this exploitation, and I think it is lamentable, but I don't think it is true that we don't, at least in principle, "give a shit". I don't think we are generally ethically advanced enough to genuinely care about those who are strangers to us, but I think most people if asked whether it is ethically right to exploit third world people for our own convenience and prosperity would say "no". But they would probably add that they are better off than is we completely left them alone, and that because their conditions are being improved by us, then they are not really being exploited and so on. So, I think they would not condone exploitation of third world people per se, but would instead rationalize it, make some excuse for it.
The reality is that most of us prosperous first worlders are just too spoiled and indulgent to have the ethical fibre to give up even the smallest part of our precious lifestyles in order to help people who are members of our community but whom we don't know personally, and I'm not even sure how much most of us would give up to help anyone who isn't family or close friend, or for that matter, even how much we would give up for those close to us.
But probably most of us would at least say we should sacrifice our own prosperity and comforts to help others close to us, and even people in general, including those of other communities; the question is whether we actually would make sacrifices when it came down to it, or whether we would instead start making excuses for not doing so.
[quote=Wikipedia]Meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", evaluating specific practices and principles of action, meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.
Some theorists argue that a metaphysical account of morality is necessary for the proper evaluation of actual moral theories and for making practical moral decisions; others reason from opposite premises and suggest that studying moral judgments about proper actions can guide us to a true account of the nature of morality.
According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen,[1] there are three kinds of meta-ethical problems, or three general questions:
What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments? (moral semantics)
What is the nature of moral judgments? (moral ontology)
How may moral judgments be supported or defended? (moral epistemology)
A question of the first type might be, "What do the words 'good', 'bad', 'right' and 'wrong' mean?" (see value theory). The second category includes questions of whether moral judgments are universal or relative, of one kind or many kinds, etc. Questions of the third kind ask, for example, how we can know if something is right or wrong, if at all. Garner and Rosen say that answers to the three basic questions "are not unrelated, and sometimes an answer to one will strongly suggest, or perhaps even entail, an answer to another."[1]
A meta-ethical theory, unlike a normative ethical theory, does not attempt to evaluate specific choices as being better, worse, good, bad, or evil; although it may have profound implications as to the validity and meaning of normative ethical claims. An answer to any of the three example questions above would not itself be a normative ethical statement.[/quote]
I should have amplified the question to not only ask whether it is sensible to think that people should follow their passions, but also to ask whether it is sensible to believe that they do follow their passions and only their passions.
The purpose of ethics is to understand how best to live, and to practice in accordance with that understanding. So, the first principle for anyone who wants to live in a community is how best to harmonize with the other members of the community.
The question of how best to live is a question in normative ethics, so it should not be addressed here. The primary question which began the discussion was that of what morality is, not what the purpose of ethics is, or should be. The latter was a red herring that was introduced later, and whoever introduced it has earned my scorn, as I am very stern about sticking to the topic and remaining on point, and this really didn't help.
If you want to participate in a community then you should care, not only about yourself, but about the community; otherwise you are not really participating, but exploiting. If you want to benefit from the community without giving anything in return, without caring about the other members or the welfare of the whole community, then you are basically a disingenuous, even dishonest, individual. This is on account of the fact that you could not be honest about your intentions, because if you were you would be shunned. That might work for you for a while but it cannot but end badly.
Also I think it is an ethical truth that if you exploit others you also exploit yourself.
That is moving more in the right direction. Talking about whether there are any moral truths, and if so, in what sense they are moral truths, and how they are known to be so, is meta-ethics. So these are the kind of follow-up questions which you should be addressing.
This cannot be the best way to live, and if ethics is about how best to live, then it cannot be ethical at all, by any measure.
No! That is basically saying that it is wrong. This isn't simply about what you or I think is wrong. Do you understand that? It is about a deeper philosophical examination. It is a sort of "one step removed" thing, hence the "meta".
Reply to S All your disagreements here seem to consist in what I see as a misunderstanding. Ethics is about how best to live; that is what it consists in. Obviously though this will be context-based. If you want to live alone, then nothing I have said about participating in community applies to you. (Having said that an argument could be made that a solitary life can never be the best life for a human being, given that we are social creatures).
So, to repeat what I have said in other posts, if you want to participate in community then exploitation is going to be a stumbling block to your aim. Most people do want to participate, so exploitation is ethically wrong for them. If you are a criminal who lives on the fringes, then this will not apply to you, except that if you want to participate in a criminal sub-culture it will apply in that context, but not in the larger context of the whole society.
Ethics and moral philosophy are not really much different except that moral philosophy is usually taken to involve others; whereas ethics does not necessarily by definition do so. There's no point trying to browbeat me into agreeing that I am not doing meta-ethics and that I am thus "off-topic" because that would only be so on your interpretation of a definition, which I don't accept. I see nothing in the wiki article you quoted which is out of accordance with what I am doing here.
To go back to what I have said earlier in this thread; the is/ ought distinction, and Hume';s idea that you cannot get an ought form an is is not the relevant one; it is a kind of category error,as though there could be some empirically observable object which could definitively confirm of diconfirm ethical claims. The relevant distinction is "if/ ought"; 'if I want X, then I ought to do Y". This should be coupled with the realization that there are in fact some things which almost all people do want; which means that there are some things which almost all people ought to do.
If we are social beings, if that is we desire society, then ethics is about how to live the best life harmoniously with the others of our community. It would be absurd to say that it could be about how to live the worst life in conflict with others of our community. Do you not see the difference, and that it has nothing to do with personal preferences except in the first instance of what it is that we really want; to be or not to be social beings?
All your disagreements here seem to consist in one what I would see as a misunderstanding. Ethics is about how best to live; that is what it consists in. Obviously though this will be context-based. If you want to live alone, then nothing I have said about participating in community applies to you. (Having said that an argument could be made that a solitary life can never be the best life for a human being, given that we are social creatures).
You do not need to explain to me what ethics is about, nor do you need to be doing ethics. That is not helping at all. My objection is that that is off topic. We should be doing meta-ethics instead.
So, to repeat what I have said in other posts, if you want to participate in community then exploitation is going to be a stumbling block to your aim. Most people do want to participate, so exploitation is ethically wrong for them. If you are a criminal who lives on the fringes, then this will not apply to you, except that if you want participate in a criminal sub-culture it will apply in that context, but not in the larger context of the whole society.
No, repeating your problematic comments won't help either. I have no interest in agreeing or disagreeing with content I judge to be off topic.
To get back on topic, tell me in what sense this is a moral truth, and how you know it to be true. That would be meta-ethics, as confirmed by the Wikipedia article.
Ethics and moral philosophy are not really much different except that moral philosophy is usually taken to involve others; whereas ethics does not necessarily by definition do so. There's no point trying to browbeat me into agreeing that I am not doing meta-ethics and that I am thus "off-topic" because that would only be so on your interpretation of a definition, which I don't accept. I see nothing in the wiki article you quoted which is out of accordance with what I am doing here.
Sigh. Explain to me how your conditionals are in any way relevant to the sort of meta-ethical questions on the set agenda of this discussion, as opposed to those on your own agenda, which seems largely descriptive and normative. How does saying that if you want to work towards a harmonious society, then you should be a virtuous person, address any meta-ethical problem set out in the Wikipedia article that has been on the set agenda here. It doesn't tell us what morality is, it doesn't tell us about moral truths, or moral truth theories, or the meaning of moral statements, or how a moral truth is known, or anything about moral relativism or universalism or objectivism or absolutism. It seems frankly useless and irrelevant.
Reply to S Judging from your last reply you continue to totally misunderstand what I have been saying, and it seems that our interpretations of what ethics consists in are too divergent to allow for any productive discussion; so I think I will leave it there.
Judging from your last reply you continue to totally misunderstand what I have been saying, and it seems that our interpretations of what ethics consists in are too divergent to allow for any productive discussion; so I think I will leave it there.
Yes, fine. But it's very annoying that you refuse to cooperate and are adamant about talking about what you want to talk about, in spite of my objections.
But I hope you still get around to addressing my lengthy post from earlier. I put quite a bit of effort into that, and you've already done me an injustice by ignoring or being very short and dismissive of a number of my earlier comments, although I have set that aside and moved on.
Also I think it is an ethical truth that if you exploit others you also exploit yourself.
— Janus
That is moving more in the right direction. Talking about whether there are any moral truths, and if so, in what sense they are moral truths, and how they are known to be so, is meta-ethics. So these are the kind of follow-up questions which you should be addressing.
And if you're interested in furthering this meta-ethical discussion at some point, then let me know.
Reply to S Don't we all "talk about what we want to talk about"? Whether something is or is not relevant to a whole field such as meta-ethics is largely a matter of interpretation; it will depend on your founding assumptions and problematics. If we both want to talk about the same kinds of things then there is a chance that we could have a fruitful discussion. I don't think I have done you any more injustice to you than you have done to me; the way I see it is that perhaps we have done each other the injustice of talking past one another.
But that would only be an injustice (i.e. morally wrong) if both our aims are to have a free discussion with full acknowledgement of, although not necessarily agreement to, each other's founding assumptions and problematics. That said, if you want to enumerate some definitive points I will attempt to address them.
And if you're interested in furthering this meta-ethical discussion at some point, then let me know.
I don't understand why you single this out. If exploiting others equals exploiting ourselves that will be so on the basis of some facts about human nature. I could say the same about murder, rape, torture and so on, too.
Don't we all "talk about what we want to talk about"? Whether something is or is not relevant to a whole field such as meta-ethics is largely a matter of interpretation; it will depend on your founding assumptions and problematics. If we both want to talk about the same kinds of things then there is a chance that we could have a fruitful discussion. I don't think I have done you any more injustice to you than you have done to me; the way I see it is that perhaps we have done each other the injustice of talking past one another.
But that would only be an injustice (i.e. morally wrong) if both our aims are to have a free discussion with full acknowledgement of, although not necessarily agreement to, each other's founding assumptions and problematics. That said, if you want to enumerate some definitive points I will attempt to address them.
I don't recall deliberately ignoring several of your replies, as you have done to me, which is, in my judgement, a greater injustice than name-calling, ad hominems, and whatnot. And it is a bit of affront to expect me to do more work than I've already put in by putting together an enumerated list for you. Remember [I]quid pro quo[/I].
I don't understand why you single this out. If exploiting others equals exploiting ourselves that will be so on the basis of some facts about human nature. I could say the same about murder, rape, torture and so on, too.
Exactly: the specifics don't matter. It doesn't matter whether it is murder, rape, torture, and so on. I only singled that out because you explicitly spoke of it as a moral truth, which, as I said, is heading in the right direction in my assessment. I am interested in talking in general about the questions I raised there, or by doing so in relation to any example of your choosing. That is, talking about whether there are any moral truths, and if so, in what sense they are moral truths, and how they are known to be so, and that sort of thing. This is meta-ethics. It is like the metaphysics, epistemology and semantics of ethics itself, not how we should live and whatnot, which is just to [I]do[/I] ethics.
I don't recall deliberately ignoring several of your replies, as you have done to me, which is, in my judgement, a greater injustice than name-calling, ad hominems, and whatnot.
I haven't had time, apart form any other considerations, to respond to every 'mention', and have not deliberately ignored anything which in my judgement is an apposite reply, and does not rely on distorting what I have said or not acknowledging its basic assumptions. If you showed that what I said was inconsistent, not with your basic assumptions, but with my own; or if you could show that my basic assumptions were wrong, then that would be fine. I don't care about 'name-calling, ad hominems and what-not"; my skin is too thick for that. I see things the way I see them, as I have no doubt you do too; but I am open to being convinced otherwise.
From your standpoint there is no way to judge the relative merits of our different viewpoints, because what matters is personal preference; and we would be seen to simply have different personal preferences. From my viewpoint some personal preferences are more generally workable in the communal context than others. Of course, I can try to convince you till the cows come home that I am right and you are wrong, that there are objective (in the sense of inter-subjectively validated) moral truths, but as long as you do not acknowledge any independent measure, meaning 'beyond both of our, or any other, viewpoints' it won't matter what I say, and I would most likely be wasting my breath. I don't want to do that; it's nothing personal.
For me, in the ethical context, to be right simply means being effective in promoting what nearly all of us want; to live in harmony, and being wrong simply means being defective in promoting it.
Reply to Janus I don't see that as reflective of a productive, cooperative, philosophical attitude. I see that as shutting down philosophical discussion and demonstrating an unjustified unwillingness to engage.
I don't believe we've reached a stage where there's nothing left but to simply agree to disagree. There are unresolved and unaddressed problems, and the ball is in your court.
I've tried multiple times now to kick-start a discussion with you over these issues.
Reply to S OK, you're entitled to your viewpoint; however mistaken it may be. That is one thing upon which I have no doubt we agree. I honestly don't believe I have "shut down any philosophical discussion" I've just tried to avoid engaging where it has proven,and seems it will continue, to be fruitless. I am not a religious person, and I reject any notion of a divine, transcendent lawgiver, so I have no faith to defend here; I am just calling things the way I see them. I see moral behavior as being a part of the natural and cultural order.
Reply to Janus Why are you judging that it would be fruitless? If it is not akin to religious faith, then why won't you elaborate where appropriate and attempt to meet your burden of justification or concede? Don't make this a circumstantial ad hominem about me, effectively suggesting that I'm closed-minded and predisposed to reject whatever you come up with, so it would be pointless.
When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that if that person thinks making a promise confers a duty to satisfy that promise, then they will believe there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.
How do you justify removing the bolded sections?
If the person making the promise does not think doing so confers a duty to keep their word, then either they are ignorant of what a promise means, or it is an insincere speech act.
I specified sincerity intentionally. It matters. I admit that the use of "follows" is off-putting, particularly given the brevity.
This approach to promises isn't about anyone's approval. It's about meaning. It's relevant because one can most certainly derive an ought from an is without presupposing another ought. Facts, on my view, are what has happened. The kind of fact depends upon the content of the events. Moral facts would be actual circumstances/situations involving acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Making a promise is a moral fact. Note here that I am not, nor have I, been using the term "moral" as a synonym for "good" or "acceptable". I am not arguing that one ought keep their promise.
I'm simply pointing out what making a promise means, and then further pointing out how just simply understanding the language use causes expectation that is only taken into proper account with an ought.
This could be shown with nearly anything said...
The only point being that one can most certainly derive an ought from an is. Seeing how the text offered earlier doesn't have Hume saying that it cannot be done, perhaps this is a waste of time anyway.
Reply to S As I see it I have already elaborated ad nauseum. What could be gained by further elaborations? It would just be more repetition of the same. I don't need to justify my viewpoint to you unless you can show that it could be thought to be inconsistent with its own presuppositions in some way.
I haven't claimed your viewpoint is internally inconsistent; but I have claimed that it is, along with Terrapin's, inconsistent with a general phenomenological account of human life and hence inadequate and I have given my reasons for that contention. You don't have to agree, in fact I doubt you will ever agree, so I have little motivation, beyond a general respect for you, to respond at all, since there is no way to prove which of us is right given that we will interpret the evidence differently.
As I said if you want to focus on some specific points I have made that you disagree with and you lay our your reasons for disagreeing then I will respond, provided I judge that you haven't distorted the point in order to disagree with it.
I admit that the use of "follows" is off-putting, particularly given the brevity.
Off putting? A very poor choice of words, more like, if you didn't mean it in the logical sense. You're on a philosophy forum. [I]Think[/I] before you speak. How could you not have foreseen the problem of a misunderstanding arising as a result of this?
And besides, if you weren't talking about logic, then you've missed Hume's point, as he was. He was saying you can't logically get from an "is" to an "ought". He wasn't merely rejecting common sense assumptions about promises being kept, or common sense assumptions about an "ought" from an "is". His point was about logic, about the limits of reason.
If person A promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday, then it follows that there ought be a rose garden the day after, not because one ought keep his/her promise, but rather because that is exactly what the promise means. It means nothing else.
— creativesoul
Yes, there ought to be a garden; that is all the consistency between a promise made and an obligation to it, by the same person, means. Whether or not the ever is, or ever was going to be, a garden, is irrelevant with respect to the relationship between a promise and the obligation presupposed by it.
I'm always baffled by what could possibly motivate someone to argue against these... some of the simplest utterances to understand. Very young children know exactly what making a promise means. It's a convention, no doubt.
As I see it I have already elaborated ad nauseum. What could be gained by further elaborations? It would just be more repetition of the same. I don't need to justify my viewpoint to you unless you can show that it could be thought to be inconsistent with its own presuppositions in some way.
I haven't claimed your viewpoint is internally inconsistent; but I have claimed that it is, along with Terrapin's, inconsistent with a general phenomenological account of human life and hence inadequate and I have given my reasons for that contention. You don't have to agree, in fact I doubt you will ever agree, so I have little motivation, beyond a general respect for you, to respond at all, since there is no way to prove which of us is right given that we will interpret the evidence differently.
As I said if you want to focus on some specific points I have made that you disagree with and you lay our your reasons for disagreeing then I will respond, provided I judge that you haven't distorted the point in order to disagree with it.
Sigh. More work. Great.
I don't want you to repeat yourself. It is the parts which we've already explored up until I think you've encountered an obstacle which is still causing a problem which I want to deal with. But since you shut things down at the time, it would now require me to go to the efforts of going back through the discussion to find what exactly the problems were, and present them to you again, and I don't know if I want to go through that, especially since you haven't reassured me of your cooperation. You expect me to go through all of that, only for you to potentially dismiss it or ignore it altogether like you've done before? Again, it would have to be [I]quid pro quo[/I]. That's essential. I would need your assurance that it would be worth my time and effort.
Reply to creativesoul "If person A promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday, then it follows that there ought be a rose garden the day after, not because one ought keep his/her promise, but rather because that is exactly what the promise means. It means nothing else."
I don't understand this. If a promise means that what it says ought to done, is this not the same as to say that promises should be kept? You might say that is only if the person making the promise is sincere, in which case the promise will be kept, to the best of their ability to keep it. But something made by and insincere person, which appears to be a promise, is not actually a promise.
If a promise means that what it says ought to done, is this not the same as to say that promises should be kept? You might say that is only if the person making the promise is sincere, in which case the promise will be kept, to the best of their ability to keep it. But something made by and insincere person, which appears to be a promise, is not actually a promise.
A promise is when one voluntarily enters themselves into an obligation - to the very best of their ability - to make the world match their words.
I'm not arguing that a promise means that what it says ought to be done.
I'm always baffled by what could possibly motivate someone to argue against these... some of the simplest utterances to understand. Very young children know exactly what making a promise means. It's a convention, no doubt.
Your bafflement must be because you misunderstand Hume's point. He wasn't an idiot, and nor is anyone arguing his point here. Of course he knew what a promise meant, as does everyone here. That doesn't even begin to address the problem. You insult his intelligence, and that of others. You act as though you're a genius. That illusion still needs to be shattered, but your psychological defences are strong.
Reply to S I'm running a bit short of time now today; so I am going to have to stop. I don't recall "shutting down' on any objections you presented which were not either distortions or made through the lens of presuppositions which I don't share. I will (always subject to available time) answer any objections which seem to show that my position could be thought to be to be inconsistent with its own presuppositions; that's the best I can offer.
A promise is when one voluntarily enters themselves into an obligation - to the very best of their ability - to make the world match their words.
I'm not arguing that a promise means that what it says ought to be done.
I am running out of time, but I can't let this go! Is it not the case that to say that sincerely promising or "voluntarily entering into an obligation- to the very best of their ability- to make the world match their words" is the same as to say that what is sincerely promised ought to be done? I can't see any difference there.
A promise is when one voluntarily enters themselves into an obligation - to the very best of their ability - to make the world match their words.
I'm not arguing that a promise means that what it says ought to be done.
— creativesoul
I am running out of time, but I can't let this go! Is it not the case that to say that sincerely promising or "voluntarily entering into an obligation- to the very best of their ability- to make the world match their words" is the same as to say that what is sincerely promised ought to be done? I can't see any difference there.
This is the very best question that has been asked.
A promise is when one voluntarily enters themselves into an obligation - to the very best of their ability - to make the world match their words.
I'm not arguing that a promise means that what it says ought to be done.
— creativesoul
I am running out of time, but I can't let this go! Is it not the case that to say that sincerely promising or "voluntarily entering into an obligation- to the very best of their ability- to make the world match their words" is the same as to say that what is sincerely promised ought to be done? I can't see any difference there.
Making a promise is a meaningful act with tremendous social significance. It means that the speaker has given their word. This aims to rest uncertainty, and build trust and confidence. It is to assure the listener that the speaker is going to do what they say that they are going to do. It is harmoniously used everyday involving situations where there is an immediate and/or urgent need for the speaker to reassure the listener that what's promised to be done will get done.
Looking at another situation where promises are made...
Imagine that a guy owes some very unsavory characters a large amount of cash that he does not have. He cannot pay. He knows that these are dangerous people:Eyewitness style. Further envision a promise being made to the guy from the unsavory ones to harm the guys family if the guy didn't pay up.
If the guy doesn't pay, then his family ought be dead. I'm not condoning the act. I'm saying that knowing the meaning of a sincerely made promise creates expectation.
I am not saying that all promises ought be kept.
I'm saying because the guy knows what a promise means, then if he could neither pay nor warn his family, he would expect them to die.
Let five years go by without him ever having the ability to check and see. He gets asked by someone who knows, "So, Joe. What going on with your family? What do you think happened?"
"They ought be dead by now" would be quite the appropriate response.
I would not say that he was voicing his approval, but rather his expectation based upon his knowledge of what making a promise means and believing that the speaker was sincere.
Lots to reply to and not much time today, so I might expand on some of this later.
First I think I ought to justify and circumscribe the discussion. @S is right to restrict it to meta-ethics, otherwise we get wildy off-topic, but I feel differently to him about the extent to which your comments are meta-ethical. The way I understand your argument in the terms S provided is this;
What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments? (moral semantics) - Moral judgements mean that an action is or is not in accord with the rules devised by that community to promote their continued harmonious existence. Your evidence for this is that all such judgements seem to be aimed at achieving this goal, and therefore it is likely that this is what moral terms mean.
What is the nature of moral judgments? (moral ontology) - Moral judgements do not have any real existence in an ontological sense, that would require a religious text, or divine command to which you do not ascribe. Moral judgements are contained within people's minds, but they are not expressions of mere preference, they are expressions of a very specific type of preference which is always mediated through the community rules. Your evidence for this is the similarity in the properties of those judgements we call 'moral' which you feel any definition needs to take account of.
How may moral judgments be supported or defended? (moral epistemology) - Initially moral judgements may be supported by adherence to the community rules (like an incorrect move in chess) but those rules themselves may be questioned by their own objective of community harmony, and your evidence for this is the fact that all moral rules have this aim, therefore anything which doesn't is not a moral rule, but simply some other kind of rule.
Have I made any massive error understanding you there? If not, then it is those aspects (the meta-ethical argument) and those alone that I'd like to discuss, if that's OK with everyone involved.
What I have said is that within and across cultures it is generally agreed that murder, rape, torture etc. of their own people is wrong, and I think, absent any evidence to the contrary, that this is so is justifiably believed.
I've bolded the important bit. If I have your meta-ethical argument right, then quite a lot of it hangs on the universality of community harmony. Your claim seems to be that ethical questions are those related to promoting community harmony because that seems to be the common factor in all things ethical. My counter to that, is that something individual precedes such judgements and that something is a universal component of ethical judgement which (being antecedent) has the better claim to be what morality is.
The antecedent stage is evident in the decision about who is and who is not a 'member of the community'. Take the witch trials of the late middle ages. It is documented that women, for all sorts of personal reasons (grudges, debts, politics) were declared 'witches' and therefore outside of the community, and so murdered. As with the Jews in Nazi Germany, the intention to murder came first, second came the ostracisation necessary to make that murder acceptable. So the intention was to murder someone who was (at the time of the intention) very much a member of the community.
This repeats itself through most of modern human history. People are not seen as outsiders first and then second treated by some moral rule based on community membership. People decide they are going to commit some act of murder, theft, torture, whatever first, and then ostracise the person to whom they intend to do these acts, in order to make them more socially acceptable.
So, the best you can say is that people do tend to describe behaviours that promote social harmony as 'moral' and those that don't as 'immoral', but I don't see there being any universal agreement at all on what behaviours do, in fact, promote social harmony and which do not.
Absent of this agreement, I don't think you can support the meta-ethical theory that moral judgements consist of a conference with inter-subjectively agreed rules. Something which we still call 'moral' seems to come before that, and is entirely subjective.
most of us would at least say we should sacrifice our own prosperity and comforts to help others close to us, and even people in general, including those of other communities; the question is whether we actually would make sacrifices when it came down to it, or whether we would instead start making excuses for not doing so.
All of which supports the argument that some entirely subjective decision is being made, first about what we are actually going to do, and second about what we are going to say to make our actions seem socially acceptable. The second part seems only to be acting on a desire to seem more of a socially useful person than one actually is.
If 'moral' judgements are toe defined as that sub-set of all judgements which relate to promoting social harmony, then the persons actual moral judgement is the one defining their actions. The concurrence with social rules seems entirely a secondary pragmatic matter, otherwise it wouldn't be so appealing to merely fake agreement.
For me, in the ethical context, to be right simply means being effective in promoting what nearly all of us want; to live in harmony, and being wrong simply means being defective in promoting it.
So this, for example, is a semantic disagreement between us which I don't think you've properly dealt with. You're not interested in any problems I see with it, just because you can maintain internal consistency, which almost anyone can do without great difficulty? How hard can it be not to contradict yourself? Internal consistency ain't the be-all and end-all.
My objection wouldn't merely be that I go by a different semantics. It would be criticism along the lines that mine makes more sense or is less problematic. If yours cannot account for a number of situations about what is right or wrong supported by strong intuitive appeal or experience or common usage of moral language, then that is evidence against your semantics. Are you not interested in that?
I suspect that you're defining these terms how you want them to be defined, so that they fit your preexisting moral principles. I am not doing that. I am thinking about how it is used, how people reach moral judgements, what they mean. Mine is more of a disinterested approach to ascertain the truth, not to make the truth fit my agenda like you seem to be doing.
If the person making the promise does not think doing so confers a duty to keep their word, then either they are ignorant of what a promise means, or it is an insincere speech act.
Or they don't agree with you about what a promise means. Your arrogance is restraining your philosophical investigations. If you continue to simply presume that however things seem to you to be, that must be how they are, you're never going to reach any more interesting conclusion than that you were right all along. In which case there's very little point posting here.
I'm simply pointing out what making a promise means, and then further pointing out how just simply understanding the language use causes expectation that is only taken into proper account with an ought.
No, you are not 'pointing' either of these things out, like a tour guide might 'point out' the incontrovertible existence of the Eiffel Tower. You are asserting these things, and in philosophical discussion it is reasonable to expect assertions to be accompanied by justification, otherwise, what's the point of asserting them to a discussion forum?
When you ae ready to discuss your reasons for believing these things to be the case, then we will have something to talk about.
Reply to Isaac I see a different problem there. It's not so much that he hasn't provided support, although you're right about that. There's very clearly a pattern with him in that regard. That's why we call him the Oracle.
The problem I see is one of logical irrelevance. He wants to refute Hume, but he is missing the target. Even if we were to grant his point, it misses Hume's point. It actually just tries to unphilosophically reinforce the pre-Hume sort of thinking.
Terrapin StationApril 05, 2019 at 14:30#2729050 likes
The biggest problem I see with the crudest form of moral relativism ( morality relative to individual preference only) is that it is really a symptom of our modern, self-centred, exploitative culture. Is it really sensible to think that everyone should be ruled by their passions?
There's nothing modern at all about it. Morality relative to individual preferences is what morality IS, ontologically, and it's what it always has been--errant, confused, mistaken beliefs that it's something else aside. "Shoulds" are just as well individual preferences (re "should be ruled by their passions.") The fact that morality is individual preferences in no way implies what morality should be. It's just a fact about what it is.
So, the descriptive gives a phenomenological account of how people's moral beliefs and dispositions are mediated by the community
That would have to hinge on claims that things like meaning as well as preferences can literally, wholesale be given to someone from something outside of themselves.
Hume has been refuted. It had nothing to do with promises. Your belief is not necessary.
You also conflate belief and truth, but I do not expect you to see it. Keep on riding shotgun with one who does not care about truth. Confirmation bias feels good.
A promise is when one voluntarily enters themselves into an obligation
A promise, in and of itself, or any affirmative token with a moral interest, regardless of it’s object, implies something a whole lot more fundamental than mere intentionality. Without these fundamentals, the object might as well not even be included in the predicate of a promise proposition.
—————————
There is an actual distinction between making a promise and making a statement about that promise.
Certainly. Statements, at least explications about promise, should include those aforementioned fundamentals. Any decent meta-ethicist is already well aware of them.
————————-
I am not arguing that one ought keep their promise.
Maybe not within the context of promise, but you’d argue that one ought to kee a promise if the context was about “ought”. I mean, one ought to keep his promise is a valid argument to make, right?
ou know...the human complement system: Yes, no; left, right; front, back; up,down.....mores, taboos.
But you think of a taboo more as a negative more? That’s fine. I can do that, if it ever comes up again.
I just saw this reply of yours...somehow slipped through the cracks...
Could it reasonably be said that taboos (proscriptions) are generally stronger than mores (prescriptions)? I don't know. It seems that every proscription could be reframed as a prescription in any case.
So you use enculturation that way, from a child-rearing perspective. I was attributing more to it than that, looks like. It relates because I treat morality from the perspective of a fully developed rational system. As such, I don’t think morality is given to me by parents or society or environment. I figure if I’m responsible for my actions, I get to say what they’re going to be.
Yes, I agree that your moral responsibility entails your saying what your actions are to be. There could be no morality without that, just enforced law.
I am a relativist in the common sense only insofar as my moral interests are certainly not going to be identical to everybody else’s, I’m a subjectivist simply by nature, and I’m a deontologist because the idea of moral law appeals to me.
I am also a relativist in that sense, because it seems obvious that no two people's moral intersts are ever going to be identical. I lean towards deontologism and virtue ethics and away from consequentialism, at least in so far as it consists in any form of hedonic calculus. I also favor an approach which might be called 'intentionalism'; the idea that one's intentions as sincerely enacted determine whether actions are good or bad; or in other words if my intention is to act in the interests of others rather than self-interestedly then my acts will be morally good. This also seems in some ways to be close to virtue ethics, in others close to deontology, and in yet others close to consequentialism. There are bound to be overlaps, and it seems "isms" are not as hermetically sealed from one another as might generally be thought.
The C.I. is the formula for a moral law, it says act strictly in accordance with a principle and whatever that principle is, which I am free to choose, treat it as if it were a law on which everybody else acted the same way. Although this is not a realistic “ought”, it is a very substantial guide to private conduct, to being morally disposed. And that’s all it was ever supposed to be. Murder is a moral interest of mine, because from it I can hold with a principle (murder is contrary to the purpose of life), therefore I ought to act (never commit murder) as if it is indeed a fact murder is contrary to the purpose of life.
I think I would rather say that murder is contrary to the universal desire for life, rather than that it is contrary to the "purpose" of life, though. I wonder what difference that makes...
It just occurred to me that, in a way, the C.I. is a reformulation of the Golden Rule.
All my above is in relation to your assertion here. I voted it true, because I agree with that assertion in itself. I bring it up to exemplify the difference between your “morality is relative” with respect to the good of a community, and my “the relativism of morality” which I assert has nothing to do with community.
Is there any common ground?
Could you explain some more how you see the difference between ""morality is relative" with respect to the good of a community" and ""the relativism of morality" which has nothing to do with community"? If I clearly understand the distinction then I may be able to say whether I think there is any common ground.
Imagine that a guy owes some very unsavory characters a large amount of cash that he does not have. He cannot pay. He knows that these are dangerous people:Eyewitness style. Further envision a promise being made to the guy from the unsavory ones to harm the guys family if the guy didn't pay up.
If the guy doesn't pay, then his family ought be dead. I'm not condoning the act. I'm saying that knowing the meaning of a sincerely made promise creates expectation.
I am not saying that all promises ought be kept.
I think I would call that a threat rather than a promise. To me a promise is something you sincerely state and sincerely intend to act upon, and it also must be something that will be of benefit to the other, such that if you don't hold to it the other will be let down, and feel deceived or betrayed.
So, I would say that, in principle at least, promises should be kept and threats should not be carried out, which would mean that they are kind of opposites. Perhaps threats could be classed as "negative" promises.
It just occurred to me that, in a way, the C.I. is a reformulation of the Golden Rule.
That has been the case since its inception, and the literature is abundant both pro and con. Skipping all the theoretics, the bottom line is.....the second formulation of the C.I. we all know and love in effect says never treat another rational agent as a means to your own ends, whereas the G.R. explicitly requires a rational agent to do just that. In addition, by that same requirement, the other person is relieved of both his freely autonomous will, and his duty.
On the other hand, there’s nothing untoward in treating someone a certain way for no other reason than it would be good for you to be treated that way. Problem is of course, this system only works with non-deviant rationalities. I mean, you wouldn’t gain much if you went around robbing people because you want them to rob you.
But no, the C.I. prime doesn’t relate to the G.R. It doesn’t obligate anyone to treat you any way at all. It only obligates individual agents to act as if everyone else was obligated the same way.
————————-
Could you explain some more how you see the difference between ""morality is relative" with respect to the good of a community" and ""the relativism of morality" which has nothing to do with community"?
Nahhh........I lost my chain of thought on that. Reading back through all your stuff, I couldn’t pick it back up.
Imagine that a guy owes some very unsavory characters a large amount of cash that he does not have. He cannot pay. He knows that these are dangerous people:Eyewitness style. Further envision a promise being made to the guy from the unsavory ones to harm the guys family if the guy didn't pay up.
If the guy doesn't pay, then his family ought be dead. I'm not condoning the act. I'm saying that knowing the meaning of a sincerely made promise creates expectation.
I am not saying that all promises ought be kept.
— creativesoul
I think I would call that a threat rather than a promise
...and it also must be something that will be of benefit to the other, such that if you don't hold to it the other will be let down, and feel deceived or betrayed.
So, I would say that, in principle at least, promises should be kept and threats should not be carried out, which would mean that they are kind of opposites. Perhaps threats could be classed as "negative" promises.
I'm having significant difficulty here...
Hot and not. True and false. Open and closed. Meaningful and meaningless. Caring and not caring. Speaking honestly and speaking dishonestly. Deliberately misrepresenting one's own thought/belief and not. These are the sort of things that it makes sense to me to call "opposites".
None can be a kind of the other.
A promise to cause bodily harm is a threat, there can be no doubt. It is still a promise none-the-less. Clearly. Some promises are a kind of threat.
All promises understood and believed by the listener create and build the listener's expectation that the world will be made to match the words. That holds good from promising to plant a rose garden to promising to cause harm. All expectation about what will one day happen is thought/belief about what has not happened but is expected to. Knowing what a promise means in addition to believing that it was sincerely uttered(or not) is more than sufficient/adequate reason to believe that it will be kept(or not).
I cannot agree with saying that all promises ought be kept.
The problem I see is one of logical irrelevance. He wants to refute Hume, but he is missing the target. Even if we were to grant his point, it misses Hume's point. It actually just tries to unphilosophically reinforce the pre-Hume sort of thinking.
This is interesting, but I'm not seeing the link yet. Could you lay it out a bit more.
Really. What is the point in you posting if all you're going to do is just tell us what is and is not the case? I honestly want to know what you post here for.
Reply to Isaac My understanding of Hume was that he was talking about reason in a strict sense, not just what seems to make sense on the surface. If we go by the latter, then it doesn't seem to be a problem to say something like, "If you promised to do it, then you ought to do so". But anyone who knows anything about logic knows that it doesn't work quite like that. What can seem reasonable to a layperson can be otherwise in logic. And this is just one example of that. When he brought up this point a couple of months ago, I told him that he would need an additional premise, but has he adapted his argument? No. He rarely if ever adapts, he merely repeats. It would become a valid argument if we included the premise that you should always keep your promises, but I don't think that that's true without exception, and if there's a single exception, then the premise is false, which would make the argument unsound.
You also conflate belief and truth, but I do not expect you to see it. Keep on riding shotgun with one who does not care about truth. Confirmation bias feels good.
I know you would rather attack a straw man. That is perfectly clear.
it would become a valid argument if we included the premise that you should always keep your promises, but I don't think that that's true without exception, and if there's a single exception, then the premise is false, which would make the argument unsound.
Agreed. I was going to make the same point myself, but was more annoyed by his style than by the substance of his argument at the time, so didn't tackle the glaring error in it. I don't think anyone sane would agree that if someone promised to eat a meal, but subsequently found out the meal was poisoned, that somehow they still ought to eat the meal. I think tacit within every promise is "all things being equal, and unforeseen changes of circumstances aside...".
To me, it's like there's a load of small print attached to each word, we all know it's there, we're none of us exactly sure what the other person's small print is, but we fully expect there to be some.
The idea that a promise leads to an ought on the basis of its meaning is a classic example of philosophy constructing castles in the air by attempting to make logical deductions from words. It's a bit like trying to deduce the structure of a bridge from the facade alone, there's a lot more going on underneath that needs to be factored in if one is going to attempt something like that.
Though why they would bother when we all know already what a 'promise' means from years of experience using the word, is beyond me.
A promise is when one voluntarily enters themselves into an obligation
— creativesoul
A promise, in and of itself, or any affirmative token with a moral interest, regardless of it’s object, implies something a whole lot more fundamental than mere intentionality. Without these fundamentals, the object might as well not even be included in the predicate of a promise proposition.
I'm not even sure what the notion/idea of "a promise's object" is picking out and/or referring to. I know what a promise is. I know what an object is. I do not know how an object can belong to a promise.
Promises include/contain predicates. If there is an object in the predicate of a promise it is but one part of the whole promise. Roses and family are objects mentioned in the predicate of the promises under current consideration.
There is an actual distinction between making a promise and making a statement about that promise.
— creativesoul
Certainly. Statements, at least explications about promise, should include those aforementioned fundamentals. Any decent meta-ethicist is already well aware of them.
I was thinking more along the lines of existential dependency.
I'm not arguing that a promise means that what it says ought to be done.
— creativesoul
I know you would rather attack a straw man. That is perfectly clear...
The irony is thick when the above comes from one that mischaracterizes an argument about how an utterance of ought can be derived as an argument of/for moral approval despite the author's obvious rejection of exactly that.
:yikes:
It is a semantically blind reader who mistranslates claims like "I am not, will not, and cannot argue that one ought keep one's promises" as "if you promised to do it, then you ought to do so"... and then goes on and on and on and on and on... all about the imaginary opponent.
I was thinking more along the lines of existential dependency.
Ok. Promise has it, sure. Promise is existentially dependent on some a priori abstract concepts the understanding thinks as belonging to it necessarily, re: in descending order of power, obligation, duty, respect. No promise as the meaningful subject of a synthetic proposition is possible without these a priori conditions.
We don’t think a promise to ourselves alone. Knowledge of those necessary fundamentals is given a priori in a subject, therefore he has no need to represent them to himself in the form of a promise. Thus, promise has the existential dependency of being represented in the world by the subject who understands the a priori conditions for it.
What does existential dependency mean to you?
———————-
I cannot agree with saying that all promises ought be kept.
Under the assumption that all promises have moral implications, can you agree with thinking that all promises ought to be kept? Or, upon the making of a promise, the ought to keep belongs to it necessarily? I wouldn’t even make a promise, given a certain set of conditions, unless I knew beforehand I would keep it, within that same set of conditions. My contention would be, the fact I am relieved of my moral obligation immediately upon discovery of false representation of the predicate under which the promissory proposition was made, is insufficient to relieve me of my moral obligation otherwise.
Wait....maybe you mean a promise made by some other person that would not be in your best interest ought not be kept. Even so, you’d still be forced to admit his obligation to keep it despite your being ill-disposed because of his moral integrity. Seems odd, although nonetheless morally worthy, to credit his moral worthiness in keeping a promise at the same time he ends you.
I was thinking more along the lines of existential dependency.
— creativesoul
Ok. Promise has it, sure. Promise is existentially dependent on some a priori abstract concepts the understanding thinks as belonging to it necessarily, re: in descending order of power, obligation, duty, respect. No promise as the meaningful subject of a synthetic proposition is possible without these a priori conditions.
We don’t think a promise to ourselves alone. Knowledge of those necessary fundamentals is given a priori in a subject, therefore he has no need to represent them to himself in the form of a promise. Thus, promise has the existential dependency of being represented in the world by the subject who understands the a priori conditions for it.
What does existential dependency mean to you?
Existential dependency is a relationship between different things. When something is existentially dependent upon something else it cannot exist prior to that something else. When something exists in it's entirety prior to something else, it cannot be existentially dependent upon that something else. That's a rough basis/outline of the paradigm. The simplicity is remarkable. The scope of rightful application... quite broad.
In the context of this conversation...
There is an actual distinction between making a promise and making a statement about that promise. A difference that can only be discovered by understanding existential dependency. The latter is existentially dependent upon the former. The former existed in it's entirety prior to the latter.
Voluntarily entering into an obligation to make the world match one's words is what one does when making a promise. That is determined wholly by a community of language speakers who understand the crucial importance of the role that trust and truth play in interdependence. The preceding two statements report upon and/or take account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to my account of it. It is about promise making. It is a report about what has happened, what is happening, and barring an extinction event of humankind, will continue happening.
Saying that one ought keep their promise is about what has not happened.
It's not about approval/disapproval of how the world was promised to be changed, or what was promised to be done. Rather, saying that one ought keep their promise is about the reliability, dependability, and/or trustworthiness of the speaker. Such character traits are crucial for the survival and over-all well-being of interdependent groups.
Yes (for my views, at least. I can't speak authoritatively for anyone else. Also, technically the "yes" is assuming that we're talking about a foundational moral stance, but let's keep it simple for now.)
I cannot agree with saying that all promises ought be kept.
— creativesoul
Under the assumption that all promises have moral implications, can you agree with thinking that all promises ought to be kept?
No. All promises do have moral implications according to my position, but as I've noted and asked of several different participants, even going to the extent of asking an 'at large' question...
What counts as being moral in kind???
Earlier you elaborated upon what counts as a moral kind of interest, as compared/contrasted to other kinds. I was left with no greater understanding than before I asked the question. Here's the answer again...
An interest which is the object of desire is an interest of empirical reason and is subjectively pathological; an interest which is the object of will is an interest of morality and is purely subjectively practical. It is here that it becomes clear objective examples, re: external to the moral agent, of moral conditions are not sufficient for moral judgements.
In the former it is the object itself that is good because it satisfies a desire, in the latter it is the willful determination of a volition in order to attain to an object that is good because it satisfies a moral disposition.
If an interest which is the object of will is an interest of morality, and being an interest of morality is what counts as being moral, then moral agents are agents of morality, conditions of morality are moral conditions, and judgments of morality are moral judgments. Applying this to what counts as 'moral' implications, we would be saying that implications of morality are moral implications. The obvious next question would be what is morality?
If an interest which is the object of will is an interest of morality, and being an object of the will is what counts as being moral, then moral agents are objects of will, moral conditions are objects of will, and moral judgments are objects of will. Applying this to what counts as 'moral' implications, we would be saying that moral implications are objects of will. What is will?
I do not actually think/believe that either one of the above elaborations align with your position, but the answer you offered was not not at all helpful. Could you set it all out in as clear and simple terms as the position you argue for/from will allow?
What counts as being moral in kind, such that all things satisfying the criterion are sensibly and rightfully called "moral" things?
Terrapin StationApril 06, 2019 at 19:37#2732720 likes
It's an opinion about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette.
It's an opinion about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette.
So, if person A has an opinion that they must act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth and they feel that this is more significant than table manners, whatever they do is moral?
It's an opinion about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette.
Saying that one ought keep their promise is about what has not happened.
True enough. But a thing has happened. Would you concur with my description, or conceptual itemization, of the existential dependency of the promise itself?
I wouldn’t even make a promise, given a certain set of conditions, unless I knew beforehand I would keep it, within that same set of conditions. My contention would be, the fact I am relieved of my moral obligation immediately upon discovery of false representation of the predicate under which the promissory proposition was made, is insufficient to relieve me of my moral obligation otherwise.
So, on your view, no matter what unforeseen circumstances may arise, no matter what false pretense led to the promise... if one promises to do something, then they ought do it out of moral obligation alone.
If keeping a promise would knowingly cause unnecessary harm, and that consequence was unforeseen at the time the promise was made...
Promises to cause harm...
I think that there are a number of different situations/circumstances in which I would not say that one ought keep one's promise.
Terrapin StationApril 06, 2019 at 20:20#2732890 likes
So, if person A has an opinion that they must act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth and they feel that this is more significant than table manners, whatever they do is moral?
Yes, relative to them. In other words, to that particular person, it's moral to act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth.
Would you concur with my description, or conceptual itemization, of the existential dependency of the promise itself?
Otherwise....d’accord.
If you mean this...
Promise is existentially dependent on some a priori abstract concepts the understanding thinks as belonging to it necessarily, re: in descending order of power, obligation, duty, respect. No promise as the meaningful subject of a synthetic proposition is possible without these a priori conditions.
We don’t think a promise to ourselves alone. Knowledge of those necessary fundamentals is given a priori in a subject, therefore he has no need to represent them to himself in the form of a promise. Thus, promise has the existential dependency of being represented in the world by the subject who understands the a priori conditions for it.
I'm uncertain whether or not I understand.
I'd be interested in your setting out of the a priori concepts...
It's an opinion about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette.
So, if person A has an opinion that they must act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth and they feel that this is more significant than table manners, whatever they do is moral?
— creativesoul
Yes, relative to them.
So, it would follow that all opinions about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette are moral.
What counts as being moral in kind, such that all things satisfying the criterion are sensibly and rightfully called "moral" things as compared/contrasted to things that are not?
What counts as being moral is the tripartite correspondence between that which is freely determined as good in itself, the will which authorizes an action in accordance with it, and the duty to execute that action.
What counts as not moral is everything else. The metaphysical description might read....that which has freedom as its causality is moral, that which does not invoke freedom as its causality is merely rational.
christian2017April 06, 2019 at 20:51#2733050 likes
I like how ants and bees both take care of their queen and they both have very small brains. It just goes to show you that alot of processing power can be packed into a small space. I do believe complex morality in combination with people having their own personalities does require a highly evolved creature or at the very least a very complex creator and i add that last part because i have a religion.
I'd be interested in your setting out of the a priori concepts...
From deontological metaphysics, the key is understanding there is a freely determinant will that both prescribes a law and subjects itself to it. For that to have any sustainable power, a moral agent must hold with respect for law in itself. Otherwise, morality can never be grounded in that which is universal and necessary, which are the criteria of law, and our private conduct would know no ground. Duty is the consciousness of respect for law, and consciousness of the will that determines it. Obligation is acknowledgement of duty in the form of judgement, when it comes to acting in conformity to an imperative.
A promise is, as you say, when one enters himself into an obligation. If one obliges himself, in this case oblige himself with making the world conform to his word, he has already done his duty out of respect for the law which says it is never a moral interest to issue false intent.
Metaphysics. Where one is allowed to theorize without having to actually prove anything, while still maintaining internal consistency.
Terrapin StationApril 06, 2019 at 21:48#2733270 likes
So, it would follow that all opinions about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette are moral.
[quote=creativesoul]I was thinking more along the lines of existential dependency.
— creativesoul
Ok. Promise has it, sure. Promise is existentially dependent on some a priori abstract concepts the understanding thinks as belonging to it necessarily, re: in descending order of power, obligation, duty, respect. No promise as the meaningful subject of a synthetic proposition is possible without these a priori conditions.
We don’t think a promise to ourselves alone. Knowledge of those necessary fundamentals is given a priori in a subject, therefore he has no need to represent them to himself in the form of a promise. Thus, promise has the existential dependency of being represented in the world by the subject who understands the a priori conditions for it.
What does existential dependency mean to you?
— Mww
Existential dependency is a relationship between different things. When something is existentially dependent upon something else it cannot exist prior to that something else. When something exists in it's entirety prior to something else, it cannot be existentially dependent upon that something else. That's a rough basis/outline of the paradigm. The simplicity is remarkable. The scope of rightful application... quite broad.
In the context of this conversation...
There is an actual distinction between making a promise and making a statement about that promise. A difference that can only be discovered by understanding existential dependency. The latter is existentially dependent upon the former. The former existed in it's entirety prior to the latter.
Voluntarily entering into an obligation to make the world match one's words is what one does when making a promise. That is determined wholly by a community of language speakers who understand the crucial importance of the role that trust and truth play in interdependence. The preceding two statements report upon and/or take account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to my account of it. It is about promise making. It is a report about what has happened, what is happening, and barring an extinction event of humankind, will continue happening.
Saying that one ought keep their promise is about what has not happened.
It's not about approval/disapproval of how the world was promised to be changed, or what was promised to be done. Rather, saying that one ought keep their promise is about the reliability, dependability, and/or trustworthiness of the speaker. Such character traits are crucial for the survival and over-all well-being of interdependent groups.
A complete lack of trust is unsustainable.[/quote]
That has got to be one of the worst conversations I have ever read in my life. Two people going on an irrelevant and badly written tangent.
So, on your view, no matter what unforeseen circumstances may arise, no matter what false pretense led to the promise... if one promises to do something, then they ought do it out of moral obligation alone.
I did say I am relieved of my moral obligation immediately upon discovery of false representation of the predicate under which the promissory proposition was made. Otherwise, yes, to be morally worthy one ought to act in accord with his moral obligation, in this case do what he promised. Won’t be long before he becomes quite careful in what he promises.
—————————
I think that there are a number of different situations/circumstances in which I would not say that one ought keep one's promise.
Then he has no business making one. Remember, you said....voluntarily obligates himself. A guy promising to commit murder, again, as you say, hasn’t actually done it, so he is just speaking threateningly.
So the question: is this a fair summary of the relativists' view on this thread?
That's the gist of it, although if you read and take in what I say in discussions like this, you should know that I don't even use terms like "personal preference". I would say "individual moral judgement".
So, if person A has an opinion that they must act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth and they feel that this is more significant than table manners, whatever they do is moral?
Moral relative to who's judgement? If you had any real understanding of moral relativism, then one would expect that to be reflected in the wording of your question. Yet it isn't.
That has been the case since its inception, and the literature is abundant both pro and con. Skipping all the theoretics, the bottom line is.....the second formulation of the C.I. we all know and love in effect says never treat another rational agent as a means to your own ends, whereas the G.R. explicitly requires a rational agent to do just that. In addition, by that same requirement, the other person is relieved of both his freely autonomous will, and his duty.
On the other hand, there’s nothing untoward in treating someone a certain way for no other reason than it would be good for you to be treated that way. Problem is of course, this system only works with non-deviant rationalities. I mean, you wouldn’t gain much if you went around robbing people because you want them to rob you.
But no, the C.I. prime doesn’t relate to the G.R. It doesn’t obligate anyone to treat you any way at all. It only obligates individual agents to act as if everyone else was obligated the same way.
Serendipitously, just this morning I read a passage in Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein which says "Jesus's Golden Rule has been misconstrued and should read. "As you do unto others, so also you do unto yourself". I made a similar point to @S earlier in this thread when I said that if you exploit another you also exploit yourself. I think this speaks to a commonality, an integrality, a communality in and between human beings. And as I see it it is this that motivates the idea of universalizing moral maxims.
I would paraphrase the Golden Rule in another way also, which brings out the inevitably reciprocal, as opposed to calculative, nature of ethics and moral thought and feeling: "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them". I don't think examples like robbing people because you would like to be robbed are apposite to the intent of the Golden Rule. No one wants to be robbed unless they are mentally ill and totally confused.
The salient point would be similar to the salient point of the C.I.: that the universalization requirement for any maxim will show you if an act contradicts the general moral requirements for harmonious human community.
So per the example of lying: it is wrong because if you universalized it as a maxim "Everyone should lie" it would contradict and render meaningless the notion and requirement of trust which is so essential to human life. If humans had been creatures who preferred to live in a context of universal distrust, a hard thing to imagine to be sure, but not logically impossible, lying would then be a good thing. In this context of universally desired universal distrust regarding the conventional formulation, Eisenstein's and my own reformulations of the G.R. lying would then be in accordance.
On the other hand, no formulation can, when considered as the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law, cover all cases; and that is just where intention, conscience, good will, come into play as criteria of what counts as moral (as opposed to immoral and amoral) thought and action. So, as I said earlier I conclude that ethics and moral philosophy is more of an art than it is a precise science.
That's the gist of it, although if you read and take in what I say in discussions like this, you should know that I don't even use terms like "personal preference". I would say "individual moral judgement".
Terrapin uses the term "personal preference". Are you prepared to say that 'individual moral judgement' is anything more than personal preference? Terrapin apparently doesn't believe it is anything more. If you think it is more, then what does that "more" consist in?
Comments (2226)
if you don't think it would matter to the subjective vs objective argument if 99% of the people in the world held the same moral view - You are right there is no need to keep chatting -
But if you don't see that there are probably a few {questions about the solar system} that 99% of the people in the world, if they honestly answered what their conscience said, would have the same {view that the sun revolves around the earth} is not an argument against {the earth revolves around the sun} - then you are wed to proposition in conflict with that - sounds like religion to me.
I'm not seeing the difference, yet you would not argue that the sun does indeed revolve around the earth.
Physical facts about the universe are not matters of conscience, they are matters of reason. There is a difference. Your conscience does not tell you there is a cat on the chair, your reason does. Your conscience tell you it would be wrong to torture the cat for fun.
But I am happy to go down a road where you think there are absolute moral truths, no matter what we think about them - but that is not where you want to go.
What do you mean by "same moral view". All you've established is acceptance here that a large majority of people will have similar moral views about one specific issue - 'child torture'. There are very many contentious moral issues facing us today which are far less clear cut and in my view it would be profoundly unhelpful for either side of these disputes to claim objective truth for their views.
No where did I say all moral judgments are objective - only some, and maybe only a handful.
And I repeat that if as i think. and it think you would, agree 99% of the people in the world could hold the same moral view on a handful of moral judgments, and that has no bearing on if morality is always relative or not - I would have to respectfully disagree
Why would you assume I'm not giving you my honest guess?
Quoting Rank Amateur
Relevant to what? (Other than itself)
Yes, of course. The pragmatic difference is that the two are two completely different things. Agreement, commonality has nothing whatsoever to do with objectivity.
well, the
Quoting Terrapin Station
was kind of a big clue
Quoting Terrapin Station
if you don't think that if 99% of the people in the world could hold the same moral view and it not be relative to a discussion of relative - vs objective morality - we will just have to disagree
Yes and I attempted to explain to you that the notion that only some moral judgements are objective (and others may not be) makes no sense.
just some amazing coincidence that on some issues, there is probably a near uniformity of all human conscience judgement. Just a tail on the bell curve of moral judgments.
How is that a big clue? The two things don't have anything to do with each other. How in the world would I know just how common some relatively unusual stance might be? That has no impact on being able to guess that there might be some people with that stance.
Quoting Rank Amateur
How would it have anything to do with "relative vs objective morality" unless you were doing what I noted before that you objective to--my pet peeve, re the apparent assumption that it goes without saying that the popularity of something has some significance for its normative merit.
I must have missed the explanation of this - can you follow up that statement with an explanation
now you are just wasting time just repeating back the same point - and making declarations without support or reason.
going down this whole line of reason with you, and has turned into, is you guys are right and i am all wrong because morality is relative because you all say so. Not one of you has directly addressed the issue. It is all tactic and repeat - like , i think we have reached a point of diminished returns on this line of reason -
good news is i might have another one
You could try just telling me what the percentage of people with some stance has to do with relative/subjective vs objective morality in your view.
How do you go from the instinctive avoidance of pain (which I don't actually agree is a fact as anything that simple, but we can ignore that for now) and the cooperative society fact to "one has a duty to do not harm"? That would need to be supported.
You all believe that all moral judgments in one degree or another are relative. But due to the fact they are moral judgments they involve making some qualitative statement about their nature they have to be good or bad, right or wrong.
Are we ok so far with this so far ?
I don't quite understand the way you worded that, but if you're just saying that moral judgments are judgments that interpersonal behavior (that one considers more significant than etiquette) is morally good bad, right or wrong, etc., that's fine, yes.
I outlined an argument for this several pages ago. I also described how morality works in a cooperative society. It was an exchange with S.
I have, a few times, in a few forms. but once again- other than in a smoke filled dorm room - near unanimity of a particular view would clearly cause a problem with a view they all reached that conclusion independently and it was just an amazing coincidence -
Too bad we don't have post #s here, but can you give me at least a small text string that I can identify the post by? That way I can quickly search for it.
Ah--yeah, I addressed that, but aside from that, do you think that relativism/subjectivism vs objectivism somehow amounts to saying that people arrive at stances arbitrarily, so that it's like rolling dice and it would just have to be a coincidence that they have the same stance?
If there were no moral truths, then there would be no need for socialization.
I think I said something like that. I forget now.
If someone uses the terms in anything like the conventional senses, which we can assume, then sure, if they feel that x is good they're not going to feel that x is bad, and if they feel that x is right they're not going to feel that x is wrong.
Was it this:
We'd have to go over that piece by piece.
The first premise seems kind of arbitrary to me. How are you figuring "If morality came from the individual, then there would be no need for socialization" to start?
How does moral relativity deal with the issue that it needs some objective understanding of good or bad right or wrong - for their moral judgments to have any meaning ?
On my view neither understanding nor meaning are objective, so obviously I'm going to have a problem with this part.
you just agreed a sec ago that good cant equal bad, and right cant equal wrong on a specific issue - that means they have objective meaning.
I said "If someone uses the terms in anything like the conventional senses, which we can assume, then sure, if they feel that x is good they're not going to feel that x is bad, and if they feel that x is right they're not going to feel that x is wrong."
That doesn't imply "objective meaning." I dont believe there is any such thing. I think that's as much of a category error as "objective morality."
I feel exactly the same way. Good thing this stuff about a harmonious society is a load of codswallop, so we don't ever have to worry about that. Phew!
Why would anyone care about such a judgement ?
Yes, it's a slave to the passions.
You got him good there.
No, I'm a moral relativist and I don't define my view as absent reason. I for one have explicitly spoken of the role that reason plays.
Goodness, in the moral sense, is a feeling, badness is a feeling. I can quite easily say that the pain is bad without any objective measure. I can say this apple tastes good without any objective measure. Why does it suddenly become a problem when describing moral feelings?
As to right and wrong, I understand it's often used as a reasonably well understood shorthand, but it really doesn't make any sense in a rigorous argument. 2+2=4 is 'right' (when following peano axioms), but that's just the same as asserting that 2+2=4. 2+2=5 is 'wrong' (by the same method), but that's just the same as asserting 2+2 does not equal 5. "The cup is blue" is right, if and only if the cup is blue. "Murder is wrong" doesn't make any sense in either of these ways of speaking. We can't say it's the same as asserting "Murder isn't" and if it's like the cup example, the murder is wrong if and only if...what?
We could say that 'good' is just a class of actions, like 'blue' is a class of colours. Then you'd be right to say that if the majority of language users are using the word that way then that's the right way to use it. By that approach we can say that murder is objectively a 'bad' action, because that's what the word 'bad' means in that context, it means "things like murder". But then why shouldn't I do any of the actions in the 'bad' class? You're missing the compulsion to act/avoid which is a part of morality.
We're obviously not simply compelled to act in whatever way the majority want, so from where are you getting the compulsion? How are you getting your 'ought' from your 'is'?
But you can’t bite the apple and tell someone it tastes both good and bad at the same time. In order to communicate your view of the taste of the apple you have to use adjectives with some degree of objective meaning. If we have widely varied subjective views on goodness or badness as it relates to apple taste we can’t effectively communicate. Your view of the apple is now meaningless to me.
If you murder someone because that action is the lesser of two evils how is that relevant to the point that an act is moral if its intent is to do the least harm possible to social harmony? Of course "something still tells you murder is wrong"; the very fact that you generalize that statement is pointing you away from moral relativism. So, what you say here only seems to support what I have been arguing, against the notion that morality is merely a matter of personal preference.
It's not the case for all decisions... Positive moral claims (claims pertaining to positive moral obligations) are notoriously disagreeable, and there seems to only be a few of them that we're able to coherently conclude upon. Even where we can have these kinds of conclusions, they're at best tentative (they're waiting for something better to come along). The vast majority of our applied moral knowledge takes the form of negative claims (negative moral obligations) because empirically/epistemically, they're low hanging moral fruit.
I'm not saying that we may always access the evidence required for strong induction (or are always capable of interpreting it), I'm saying that in some situations we can do so sufficiently, especially with regard to negative moral claims.
The only difference between us might be our epistemic position. We agree that objectively certain knowledge is incoherent or is a misleading misnomer, where what we're actually doing is using observation and inductive reasoning to approach or approximate truth. The basic principles of the scientific approach, such as falsification and seeking descriptive+predictive power, are the semi-formal guides of induction: when we falsify propositions through sound trials and testing, we can, with very high confidence, eliminate them as a possible truth; but when we positively demonstrate the consistency or predictive power of a given model or proposition (which might always be relative to the predictive power of our next best models), we may still gain some rational confidence for it, but it is never on the same order of magnitude as the confidence we have that "well falsified" claims are indeed false.
We could pretty much divide all human "knowledge" into two categories: things we think are true, and things we think are false. To parallel this in the realm of moral knowledge, we have things we think we should do, and things we think we should not do. With both general and moral knowledge, both our positive and negative propositions have their utility. We can really only (with high epistemic confidence) avoid bad moral outcomes by subscribing only to negative moral propositions; and where morality in practice vaguely drifts from "avoid harm" into "promote good", negative moral claims become less useful while positive moral claims become essential. In practice we cannot avoid forming positive beliefs about the world, uncertain though [s]it[/s] we may be; planning for the future can be as much about where we do want to go as where we don't want to go, it might just depend on the risks and the stakes. We're still left with reason and observation as our main tools for treating positive moral claims, and though situational complexity can sometimes give human intuition the advantage, it is woefully under-equipped for many areas of specific decision making. The effectiveness and relative risks of vaccines are an example of something that intuition would have a very hard time accurately guesstimating; the more actual observation and evidence we gather around the subject (the better we model it), the more confidence we can have in our predictions of outcomes. All we necessarily disagree about regarding vaccines is our ability to predict its outcomes with reasonable confidence (either you have a higher bar for reasonable confidence (the intuition beating kind), or you believe that evidence pertaining to the effects of vaccines is too hard to come by, or to interpret (even for teams of preeminent experts) (or a combination of the two, along with other factors such as perverse incentives which pollute the field of knowledge).
Any disagreements with the above?Quoting Isaac
You will almost certainly find this controversial, but Bill and Melinda Gates are under the belief that by delivering basic medicines, including well proven and highly statistically effective vaccines, that they've turned 10 billion dollars of charitable investment into 200 billion dollars of created wealth (wealth created by the saving of lives).
When it comes to big pharma, I really am with you in the "let's not just blindly trust profit chasing corporations" boat (I would really not want to roll the dice with any psychotropic medication, especially anything with a recent patent). But not all vaccines are inherently profit driven, though in many cases we do allow the free market to produce them for us. There's a difference between a seasonal flu shot and a standard MMR vaccine. The flu is deadly in rare cases, but mostly people are just trying to avoid getting sick because of the discomfort. Comparing this to something like an MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine, the motives are completely different. One product is actually produced and marketed for profit, while the other is made cheap or free because it has been so effective at preventing deaths.
Sometimes the free-market does create philanthropic incentives. Many scientists and researchers in medical fields genuinely are trying to create things to improve life rather than improve corporate profits. Sometimes corporations, even for greedy reasons, do good things. The list of essential vaccines that have saved millions of lives since their inception are among them.
Quoting Isaac
Aren't you on some level treating people like children in doing so?
I'm with you about the existential and psychological need for happiness, but what if someone is unhappy because they cannot get their own (ridiculous) way? (Or maybe more to the point, what happens when they're unhappy precisely because they've gotten their own way?). Our expectations do not always conform to reality, and in so far as we can inform our expectations (and hence the way we feel about the related action) with reason and evidence, we can tend toward more accurate and consistent feelings about actions.
Quoting Isaac
A preponderance of good evidence! Morality is the name; cumulative induction is the game!
All we can ever do is try/continue to improve.
I'd love to reply, but I have almost literally no idea what any of what you've written means in the context of our discussion.
" in its just-is-ness, it is."?
"And in such a way that it is not and never can be not as it is."?
I'm not sure either of those are even sentences.
Quoting tim wood
But that is not a test for whether murder is wrong, its a test for whether I'd want it done to me. If 'wrong is just the word we use to describe things we like don't want done to us, then fine, but now why shouldn't I do it? Quoting tim wood
And...back to the word salad again I'm afraid.
That was a VERY good post. It was much better stylistically than your last, and I mostly agreed with it.
Quoting Isaac
Good faith means that when you point out inconsistencies or inadequacies in the other's position they provide a cogent argument to show that it is not in fact an inconsistency, or if they can't, then admit that iit is an inconsistency. As I read this thread (and others) Terrapin never does that, but introduces any red herring he can find, or pretends not to comprehend what is being said, that is he dishonestly uses any strategy to avoid admitting that his position is inconsistent, mistaken or explanatorily inadequate. And S, although not as bad as Terrapin, is also tending that way. Sure you might say that is just my opinion, but it is my honest opinion, so I call it as i see it.
An example is that Terrapin will counter any argument that appeals to the prevalence of shared values on the most central moral issues (murder, rape, torture, theft and so on) with the objection that the almost universally cross-culturally prevalent attitudes that condemn those is merely a matter of those attitudes being more "popular", which basically gives them no more inter-subjective weight than personal culinary preferences.
And yet when I say that from the perspective of someone who is morally neutral, who is amoral, assuming moral relativism, all moral stances are equal, and that there is thus no inter-subjective rational warrant to prefer one stance over the other, he claims that no one is in fact morally neutral and that this is demonstrated by statistics involving studying "hundreds, even thousands" of people.
Even if it were accepted that those statistics are accurate and that they reflect what is the case with billions of people, his own position should dismiss it on the basis that it is an appeal to populism. Because there is no objective (on his view of objectivity) reason why people should not be morally neutral, just as some people are indifferent to some foods or art works.
But he says, Quoting Terrapin Station and the relevant question is 'on what basis could one think that some interpersonal behaviors are "more significant than etiquette"?'. Not just because it is popular to think that way surely?
No, it seems obvious that matters that are considered matters of morality and not matters of mere preference or popularity are 'life and death' matters, and such matters are profoundly important to almost all of us because life and death is profoundly important to almost all of us, and that is the "objective" element of commonality that operates in moral thought and feeling, makes it more than a matter of popularity or mere personal preference, and which moral relativism cannot even begin to explain.
I agree.
It seems odd to me to ask why someone would care about how they think about things, how they conceptualize things, their feelings, their perceptions, etc. It shouldn't be a surprise that people care about themselves.
Alternate views of what communication is/how it works are possible, but it would be a huge tangent to get into.
Why would that be a mystery? It's a matter of personal judgment--an individual considers x more significant/important than y.
Quoting Janus
Can you simply state some P that I'm both asserting and denying?
Quoting Janus
The argument that some P is correct (or "more correct" or whatever you might like to say) because it's more prevalent is the argumentum ad populum fallacy.
Maybe you personally put a lot more weight on something because it's more prevalent, and you're not claiming that the prevalence has anything to do with it being correct, so that it's just a pledge to conformity, essentially, and that's fine. But not everyone is so rah rah conformity. If you want to jump off of a bridge just because everyone else is, be my guest.
Quoting Janus
Right, no one is in fact morally neutral, but I said:
[i]"A hypothetical person with no preferences would indeed not be able to find a reason to prefer one moral stance over the other, no matter what the person were to look at. The very idea of that doesn't make any sense. We'd be wondering if a person who has no preferences in domain D might gain preferences in domain D as an implication or upshot of examining some set of facts (such as the fact that J prefers m, K prefers n, etc.), or the fact that A causes B. They wouldn't, because no set of facts implies any preference. That's just the point. So it's an argument in favor of the relativist position, not an argument against it.
"The person might develop preferences based on simple exposure to something they weren't previously familiar with (if John never heard jazz before and then starts listening to a lot of jazz, he might develop (or learn he had) preferences for some of it), but that's a factor of how their brain works, and then it would turn out that it's not true that the person has no preferences after all."[/i]
I don't know if you bothered to read that reply to you.
Quoting Janus
I wasn't saying that anything was correct/incorrect because it was popular/prevalent. I wasn't saying anything about conforming to what's popular/prevalent. I merely said that it's a contingent fact that there are no conscious morally neutral people. If that weren't a fact that would be fine. But we can't find any conscious morally neutral people when we look for them.
Quoting Janus
Correct. The fact that there are no conscious morally neutral people has zero implication for what should be the case. It's just contingently the case.
Quoting Janus
Commonality has nothing to do with whether something is objective.
And commonality has no normative weight except for people who happen to be rah rah conformity.
Oh, it's "fine" is it, really?
This is a prime example of how you twist what is said to suit your purposes. As I have already explained many times, I don't put more weight on the almost universally shared moral values merely because they are more prevalent, To the contrary, they are more prevalent on account of the fact that almost everyone puts more weight on them because they involve the most basic questions of life and death, and that's precisely why it is obvious that, contra your one-dimensional view, 'life and death' moral dispositions are not anything like mere personal preferences.
But of course I believe this would be a wasted reply if it were actually addressed to you, since I predict you won't acknowledge and directly address this obvious difference, because it is fatal to your simple-minded moral relativism. And you will never admit you are inconsistent and that your position is explanatorily inadequate; instead you will probably just distort what I said here again to produce more red herrings, to try to make it look like I am indulging in populism or whatever you can think up to try to deflect attention away from the intellectual poverty of your position. So, this reply is really not for you, but for others to make clear to them how I view your tactics. I won't reply to you unless you lift your game, and actually address what is being said without attempting your usual tendentious distortions and professions of incomprehension.
None of us can doubt the truthfulness of our first worldview. That is true of everyone. We are all borne with the inability to doubt the veracity of our own worldview. Then we all have a sudden, sometimes quite uncomfortable reality check. What happens differs from expectations. We become painfully aware of our own fallibility, assuming one is capable of such a thing. Those who do not better have a fairly accurate understanding of themselves and the world around them, and be fortunate enough to pursue their own happiness. Not everyone can.
War-torn... Abject poverty... Powerless...
Those people have no ability to doubt their own worldview either, until they have one that is... just like everyone else.
The reason for all this is clear enough for all to understand:One cannot doubt the rules of socially acceptable behaviour unless s/he has a baseline from which to do so. That baseline is one's first/initial/original world-view. Those primary baselines are all replete with the language community's moral sensibilities.
All reasonable doubt is belief-based. All doubting is doubting the truth of something or other that has been heard and/or read. All doubting of morality comes via common language use. All language acquisition has universal common denominators. The students' utterly complete inability to doubt the truthfulness of what's being learned about the world and/or him/herself. This holds good regardless of that which is subject to the influence of individual, societal, familial, historical. and/or cultural particulars.
All morality is first adopted.
That which is common to all is universal. There are some things common to all moralities. Those things warrant careful thought experiments. Preferably, this special kind of thought experiment will have some falsifiable/verifiable foundation.
Next?
Yet?
All adoption of one's first world-view is accompanied by an inherent incapability to doubt.
Thought/belief is prior to doubt. Some of that is thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. All thought/belief presupposes it's own truth somewhere along the line. All thought/belief is meaningful to the thinking/believing creature. Some thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour comes prior to learning the social code. I would posit that some thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour is formed and/or held by everyone, regardless of that which is subject to particulars. That is...
Some moral thought/belief is prior to language acquisition and held on a universal basis by everyone.
Absolutely, but I don't understand what this point has to do with the objectivity of morality. If I say "this apple tastes good", I have to be referring to at least what I hope is some common feeling 'good' in order for my interlocutor to know what I mean.
So 'good', in that context, has a shared meaning, in that we use it to describe states of mind we think we share.
So when I say "murder makes me feel good" everyone knows what the feeling is that murder gives me. When I say "murder makes me feel 'bad' I everyone also knows what the feeling is that murder gives me. These are completely objective meanings of 'good' and 'bad'. None of this has any bearing on proving that" murder is bad" is an objective fact.
No one has yet describe what "murder is bad" even means for the objectivist.
I take it to mean "murdering someone (or the thought of doing so, or the thought of associating with someone who does) makes me feel bad".
"Bad", in this sense has a perfectly objective meaning, but which actions make me feel it is entirely subjective.
What is the equivalent definition of "murder is bad/wrong" for the objectivist?
We tried "Murder is something which most people feel one shouldn't do" but that directly replaces 'thing most people feel one shouldn't do' with 'wrong/bad'. This would make women voting wrong/bad in the 19th century.
We tried "murder is something which does not bring about social harmony" - fine, I'd agree with that, but it does not capture any obligation not to do it. What compels me to care about social harmony?
We tried "murder is something one wouldn't do if one intended to bring about social harmony" - again, a fact I pretty much agree with, but doesn't explain why murder would still feel awful even if it were being done with the intention of bringing about social harmony, and it still suffers from the problem of just kicking the can. Why must anyone care about social harmony? We've had the argument that the vast majority of people simply do care about social harmony, so we can presume it to be a fact and follow from there. But again, this still ends up relative. It still ends up with "for all those who care about social harmony (the vast majority), murder is wrong" ("for those who don't, it isn't").
We tried "murder is irrational", but I'm afraid I've still yet to understand how rationality alone, absent of any objective makes any sense. It's like just having peano's axioms and an equals sign and expecting to get the correct answer. No one has even set the sum yet.
So I'm still waiting. Could some objectivist please translate for me, from their point of view "murder is wrong/bad" without reusing the terms "wrong/bad" because those are the ones whose use I'm struggling to understand.
Because I want to know what your definition/explanation is for that feeling under your system. By your definition, if murder is being carried out with the intent to bring about social harmony, then it is moral. If it is moral, then what prevents someone from undertaking it with great pleasure. What name do you give, and preferably explanation of, the fact that most of us would still find murder abominable even if it was being done to bring about social harmony.
You still haven't explained my basic emotion. I think torturing a child is monstrous and I have no intention of ever doing it. Full stop. I have not had to carry out any rational calculations to arrive at this decision. I have not gone through all the consequences of doing so to check whether or not social harmony will be brought about in the long term. The feeling of abomination is already there, it always has been. I don't recall ever giving long term social harmony a second thought.
Long term social harmony may very well be the reason evolution put that feeling in my brain. I think that's a very sound explanation. But evolution is a natural force, it doesn't make 'mistakes' because it doesn't have any intentions. So if, for whatever reason, evolution did not put that feeling in someone's brain, on what grounds do we say that they are 'wrong'?
Quoting Janus
You'll have to explain that, I don't get the link at all.
Yes, I'd agree with you here. Given equal objectives, there are definitely some situations where the evidence is sufficiently overwhelming that I think it a reasonable strategy against those who follow a different route, to simply point this fact out of in the hope that they too will be overwhelmed by the inductive certainty of the conclusion.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, basically I think you've captured it. I think the only point you may have overemphasised is that I'm not really arguing that intuition is a good (or better) guide than reason in terms of getting the right answer (meeting our long term objective).
I think it can be sometimes, with regards to vaccination, for example, the intuition that we do not simply inject healthy children with an unknown (to the decision-maker) chemical for some advantage we've simply been told will accrue t later down the line, is one which certainly should require a high degree of evidence to overcome.
The more important point, to me, though, is that following intuition simply feels better and so automatically has a higher weight in those situations where the right course of action is being weighed merely on a preponderance of evidence.
In other cases, where the evidence is overwhelming, them yes, intuition can be cast aside.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, I understand. I'm only talking about the risk inherent in the uncertainty about whether the actual vaccine in question (or just one of its ingredients) is profit driven, and the extent to which an individual parent can ever know this. Its not as if the doctor, when asked, is going to say "oh yes, this one is profit driven".
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't doubt this, and I hope I haven't given the impression that I do, simply in my attempt to play devil's advocate. It's the uncertainty about which any particular vaccine is that I'm wanting to highlight with regards to the effect that uncertainty has on moral decisions.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing here. My point was that merely "saving lives" cannot be presumed to be a goal above all others, such that any technology or lifestyle change which brings about this goal can be given objective superiority over one's that do less well in this regard. People have goals other than staying alive for as long as possible.
Im not, in any sense suggesting that society as a whole has a duty to make everyone happy, but I think we're really straying too far from our objective common ground when we start deciding that someone's happiness is not 'good enough' type of happiness. Yes, I personally think that getting your own way shouldn't be something that always makes you happy. I personally feel that some of the things people claim to want are 'ridiculous'. But I have absolutely no grounds whatsoever to tell them that they are objectively wrong to feel that way.
Fair enough, but can't you see, that's exactly what our side think your side aren't doing either? If we all agreed on what an inconsistency or inadequacy was, this matter would have been solved hundreds of years ago.
Quoting Janus
But this is all just from your perspective, and differing perspectives are what constitute an argument in the first place. Of course you think his retorts are red herrings, of course you think his strategy is dishonest and his position inconsistent. If you didn't you'd agree with him. You don't, so you evidently need some reason why that is the case.
You talk as if 'red herrings', 'pretending', 'dishonesty', 'consistency' and 'explanational adequacy' were matters on which some conclusive judgement could be made when 2000 years of philosophical argument stands as glaring evidence that they are not.
Philosophy well done. Put it out there, avail it to proper critique.
The general theme of your series of comments seems to focus on the pre-rational or early rational chronology of moral agency. If such chronology is more reactive to outside influence from which experiences are attained, yet moral philosophy in and of itself is predicated on active determinations, which presupposes fully developed rational capacity with its set of experiences already attained, then it is reasonable to suppose the former is merely forms of consequential inclination, rather than a true system of morality, which is just as reasonably supposed to incorporate a form of antecedent obligation that a psychologically incomplete rationality cannot abide.
———————-
Quoting creativesoul
Absolutely. Now all that’s required is a logically and experientially verifiable reduction to that which serves as a rock-solid dependable foundation which is true of everyone. I shall submit, there are but two.Quoting creativesoul, is one. May we agree reason is the other? Reason the human constituency first, reason the human natural activity second.
Next?
What's
What in the world would the argument be for this claim:
Iff moral stance M is prevalent to at least r extent (I don't know just how prevalent it has to be in your view, hence the variable), then moral stance M is not anything like a mere personal preference.
?
If I were both asserting and denying the same P, sure I would.
What's the P I'm both asserting and denying? This is the second time I'm asking you.
Exactly. There's a weird bias against things that are mental phenomena, where the bias has it that something is far less valuable, worthwhile, worth talking about, etc. if that's the case.
Given how important love is to most of humanity, you'd expect this bias to lead to people claiming that love can't be just a mental phenomenon--and maybe some folks do claim that, I don't know.
In my view it doesn't at all depend on language-acquisition. A baby, from the start, is going to be okay versus not be okay with some things that you do to it, and that's all that morality is--those sorts of dispositions. It takes a bit more time/development for the baby to extend those reactions to behavior not directly involving itself--in other words, it takes a bit more time for empathy to develop, but it doesn't take very long, and it certainly precedes language acquisition.
If you know why Hume said that, then you'll know why I said that. You are unfamiliar with Hume, I take it? There are some good online resources to help you understand what his point was. Otherwise, why do we need to start from scratch as if you have no background knowledge, or as though you can't get yourself up to speed?
As for your view, good for you, but what are your arguments against Hume?
Indeed. Moral agency requires thinking about thought/belief. A language-less creature cannot do this. I'm after what grounds all morality in order to compare it with conventional moral discourse.
Because?
(Mww seemed to suggest the equivalent of a "true metal" argument--is that what you'd shoot for here?)
Okay, go ahead and reason me out of my passionate belief that murder is wrong.
Unless you bring it with you, other than my brief and scattered remarks, and perhaps not even then, you won’t find what you’re after here. People are too bound up in projecting outward to demonstrate, rather than retreating inward to discover, those grounds.
Does it?
Quoting creativesoul
Can't they?
Quoting creativesoul
Strange... You seemed to just somehow know all the other facts, what's eluding you about this one, have you lost your direct line to God?
Why on earth would I consent to have one if I didn't want one?
Quoting tim wood
Again, you've completely lost me here. I don't consent to be murdered because I don't want to be murdered. I like my life and I don't want it to end. I can't say the goodness or badness of the thing itself really enters into it.
Quoting tim wood
Yes. As I've said before. As far as I'm concerned, there are two types of propositions that (or two ways of looking at the same proposition). In the first one might say "Dogs exist" and look at it linguistically. In this sense the statement is made true by agreement. If most people say dogs exist, then dogs exist. If they say it of unicorns and you can't find any, then you're just using "exist" wrongly.
But the other way of looking at a proposition such a "x is", is to see what verifying behaviour is associated with treating x as if it is.
But I can't make sense of a proposition such as "murder is wrong" in either of those senses. I've explained why to Rank above, so if you don't mind I'll refer you to that, it's only a couple of posts above.
It's here
It is first and foremost a matter of moral feelings. If most people felt differently about it, then they would reason differently about it. Perhaps now you can see why reason is the slave of the passions. But I doubt it. You seem to have made your mind up to argue against it no matter what. For you, reason [i]simply must[/I] play a much more vital role, or else [I]all is lost![/I] Really, this has more to do with psychology than philosophy. You're actually not being reasonable at all, except perhaps in a more superficial sense. Underneath the visard, you're being emotional and alarmist. That has been quite clear from the start, actually. Clear to me at least. The first step for yourself and others who match your psychological profile is to come to the realisation that all will not be lost.
Hear, hear. How many times have we seen this? In how many discussions? And over and over again. Forgive me for being pessimistic, but it is hard not to be when you witness stuff like this.
This loaded language was what my very first objection was about. And "mere" preference is but one example of it in this discussion.
Morality is codified rules of behaviour. Code is language.
Moral agency is thinking about morality. Morality is thought/belief about the rules of bahaviour.
An exception negates the claim. If all reason were a slave to one's passions, then reason could not be used as a means to change one's passions, but it most certainly is. Therefore, reason is not always a slave to the passions...
Moreover...
The inherent issue with Hume(and he's not alone) is that his notion/conception of "passions" conflates all sorts of different things. Desires, wants, needs, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, etc. Reason is not distinct from any of these things. Reason is thinking about thought/belief. Thought/belief is chock full of emotional meaning, wants, needs, and desires...
We can try. We ought try.
Rhetoric is a sure sign that one's position/argument is sorely lacking. I'm no theist. That's a funny thing to say about someone like me... you clearly haven't read much of my writing.
I'm of the very strong belief that we can acquire knowledge of that which existed prior to our awareness and/or naming it.
Aren't you?
You know, while I am sympathetic to the above, I would like to note that no one can do that alone. No one. No how. No way.
It always take an other. We are interdependent social creatures by our very nature. No one makes a mistake on purpose. Everyone's thought/belief system(worldview) is self-contained. We cannot see our own shortcomings. That takes an other... along with a certain humility... and a bit of shared meaning of course.
What's weird about it? The bias is rightfully justified given the historical accounts ranging from Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hume through modern day snake oil sales people, many of whom get paid quite handsomely for spouting rubbish...
Those accounts are bunk. The mental/physical distinction is bunk when it comes to taking adequate account of anything thought, believed, spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered. I'm biased against them as well, and yet on my view nothing is more important than having a good grasp upon what thought/belief is and how it works... If one gets that wrong, then they've gotten all sorts of other things wrong as a result.
Morality consists of and/or is codified thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
This is interesting, to say the least. Did you come up with emotivism? Except for those who happen to be rah rah conformity, you say? Why should we equate what's right with what feels right, and vice versa?
:yum:
A little tongue-in-cheek...
:wink:
Haven't you ever taken an action that you thought/believed and/or strongly felt was good, right. and/or moral at the time only to later find out that you were sorely mistaken?
If so, I suggest you re-think the emotivism aspect of your position... clearly there's an issue.
And there is no exception to [i]Hume's[/I] claim that reason is the slave of the passions, as opposed to [i]your own[/I] claim, which only [I]thinks[/I] it is attacking Hume's claim.
If the passion changes, then reason follows like a slave. If you could somehow succeed in changing my passionate belief that murder is wrong, even though that is practically impossible, reason would then do the bidding of my newfound passion like an obedient slave.
His point was not that passions can never change under any circumstances, including being reasoned with, although it is certainly true of innumerable cases that reason is weak or powerless. Reason is, and remains, a slave to the passions. It is our passions which are primary, as you tacitly acknowledge with your own failed attempt to attack Hume, since you tacitly acknowledge that it is the passions which we must get through to in order to have any hope of altering a moral judgement.
Quoting creativesoul
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason
My points was just to stress that even given a specific subjective feeling (pertaining to the inherent virtue of a given action, for instance) reason and evidence might still be of some persuasive and bias-escaping use (re: internal values consistency and consistency with foreseeable outcomes). All I'm really saying is that in some cases even when people make a direct appeal to feelings, we can still sometimes persuasively call a kind of bull-shit. I'm thinking of cases of naive risk-taking or naive risk avoidance. Some extreme sports give their practitioners an incredible rush (the kind of rush that makes life more worthwhile), but some of those sports are also extremely deadly. Wing-suit gliding is one such dangerous sport, so much so that there are no established long-time professionals (their death rate is too high). At some relative level of risk for each individual it becomes statistically likely that the utility loss of their shortened lifespan outweighs the extra hedons they gain from doing the sport (average hours before death is a good way to conceptualize the overall risk and reward ratio).
I'm definitely not saying we should forbid people from practicing this sport (although we should probably regulate it for safety reasons); to forbid it would be naive risk avoidance. But in reality, for many people, they're not getting the kind of long term hedonic quality and quantity that they would otherwise get (because of the high risk of death)./ It's not an example with a clear-ish answer either way, but it helps to expose the kinds of reasonable considerations we can make against our own feelings and the feelings of others. There are probably wing-suiters out there who aren't actually aware of the statistical likelihood of accidental death (maybe not many). All it might take to persuade them is a bit of data.
The "treating them like children" comes from the archetypal scenario that comes to mind when we resign that we cannot reasonably persuade our way through specific emotional whims, which is that of a parent trying to correct the behavior of an emotional and rationally naive child. Sometimes we must inevitably differ due to strong and immovable emotions, but sometimes our emotions are downright misinformed, and can be dislodged with the right leverage.
I don't think I can point-point any remaining significant disagreement between us, if any at all. The major sources of our earlier disagreement seems to have been the result of semantic interpretation (and maybe a bit of epistemic optimism vs epistemic pessimism)
Quoting Isaac
I'm also interested in the value of intuition, and under my meta-ethical view its place is as a kind of intelligent decision maker (Ultimately a heuristic) that serves as a functional method-in-practice to help us make complicated decisions; emotion and feeling is its compass. Intuition can be entirely persuasive on the individual level, and in cases where intuitive knowledge is fundamentally malformed or mistaken, it can keep individuals in long-term patterns of behavior that are destructive toward their own moral goals and values.
The peculiar thing about intuition is that it is more directly the result of evolution and natural selection than are our conscious thoughts (intuition largely operates subconsciously (through evolution-endowed emotions), while the conscious mind is able to learn and react in real time to our immediate environments). Intuition is well equipped to keep us safe and help us reproduce across a range of typical environments that humans happened to find themselves in, in the distant past. Modernity being so very novel (a downright freak-show from an evolutionary stand-point), we're being faced with situations containing layers of complex relationships which human intuition has never before had to contend with. More than ever our actions can ripple across time and space in surprising ways which can affect other people, and the ramifications of the actions of others are harder than ever to escape by any means (pollution is a relevant example). No longer can we go our separate ways when we come to strong disagreement (which interestingly is the primary method of resolving severe conflicts among nomadic hunter-gatherers, obviously because the environment allowed for it). Our instinct for fight or flight actually poisons our conscious thought when it becomes a factor in situations for which both fight and flight are sub-optimal options. This view is why I approach the persuasive component of methods, frameworks, and arguments as so fundamentally important. The most universally persuasive argument becomes the most true in practice, and in terms of reaching our moral goals it becomes the most morally useful. The only caveat is that the persuasive vectors we choose must somehow we based in reason, observation, and evidence, else we're just a bunch of moral sophists who run the risk of succumbing to and promoting bad moral propositions.
No, rhetoric is a sure sign that one is a human being who's capable of expressing themselves in ways more diverse than making a series of barely connected assertions.
Quoting creativesoul
No you're right, on reflection I'd go with messianic. Still, save that one for next time.
Quoting creativesoul
I have no idea what this means. There seems to be a tendency on this site for people to just string words together without any thought given to what they effectively communicate. It's like reading the dictionary at random.
What on earth is "that which existed prior to our awareness and/or naming it."?
I think your point about optimism vs pessimism was very salient, perhaps explaining more about our disagreement than you even intended by it.
You talk about using reason to persuade people of both methods and perhaps moral values they might actually prefer if only they tried them (I hope I've paraphrased reasonably accurately). I agree with both objectives, but am more pessimistic than you about the likelihood that something as complex as reason will ever do such a job. Get a famous actor to say it, and you're on to a winner. Stand on your podium and make a reasoned argument and I'm afraid I rate your chances of success very low.
You talk about the good people of the scientific research establishments who work pretty hard to try and improve our lives. I just see the increasing "publish or perish" pressures, the financial influence of corporations increasing, the quality of teaching falling as workloads become increasingly untenable, a generation of students more interested in career climbing than curiosity...
We could go on... It doesn't seem to me that you've disagreed with the existence of any of the factors I've raised, and I certainly haven't disagreed with any you have. It just seems to be a matter of the weight we give them.
For me, your wing-suiters are a great example. Yes, maybe one or two might be unaware of the actual statistics and rational enough to change their minds if enlightened, but I'd stake my next paycheck on the fact that the motives of the vast majority can be explained (and indeed manipulated) better by basic psychology, than by reason.
(1) that would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.,
(2) it either ignores or gets wrong what meaning is/how meaning works,
and
(3) it ignores that someone feeling one way or the other about interpersonal behavior--assessments of permissibility, etc. is a unique phenomenon, contra for example behaving in a way that doesn't upset the apple cart in relation to other persons' behavior precipitated by their feelings about interpersonal behavior. In other words, there's an important difference between Joe feeling that it's wrong for him as a 40 year-old to have sex with eager 13 year-olds and Joe behaving in accordance with the prohibition of such sex because of the social repercussions of it should he engage in that activity and be found out.
Sure, but only to the extent of patience, re: when barking at the moon and Wiki have equal dialectical authority, I find myself with nothing to say.
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Quoting creativesoul
Quite so. As we can see here........
“Since morals, therefore, have an influence on the actions and affections, it follows, that they cannot be deriv’d from reason; and that because reason alone, as we have already prov’d, can never have any such influence. Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.”
......passions presuppose morals, by Dave’s own words (THN, 3.1.1., 1739), and furthermore serve as causality for actions, so it is reasonable to suppose an underlying stratum with respect to the myriad styles of passion themselves. By relegating reason to an inactive participant in mental operations outside logic and scientific truths, and pissin’ all over the very idea of a priori knowledge, all he had left to work with was the various and sundry sentiments as an inherent objective reality in humans. Which is really a shame, because he did acknowledge that on which Kant built his entire tripartite critique, the distinction between speculative and practical metaphysics.
So close he was.....
“Tis impossible to tell what changes and improvements we might make in these sciences were we thoroughly acquainted with the extent and force of human understanding, and cou’d explain the nature of the ideas we employ, and of the operations we perform in our reasonings.” (THN, intro)
.......but missed by a Scottish country mile he did.
But we can’t blame anybody for operating under the cultural influences of his day, just as we all do, and his day was governed almost entirely by the amazing advances in science and technology, seen in the birth pangs of the British Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, all he had to work against was the foolishness of pure subjective idealism of the clergy. So...empiricism ruled the philosophical roost because everything having to do with anything had an empirical foundation.
Hume is credited in some pertinent literature for initiating a formal moral relativism. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that those who followed would seize on the following, yet drop out completely the very notion of the sentiment in general and particular forms of passion specifically, as the ground of morals. Becoming colloquially seen as a version of “Hume’s Guillotine” (not the is-ought kind) because it in effect chopped off his own philosophy: if a passion is accompanied by a false judgement, and if it isn’t passion that causes a false judgement, then that which does, absolutely must be the only thing left in what Hume calls “the disquisitions of all philosophy”........reason.
“....Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ’Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ’Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. A trivial good may, from certain circumstances, produce a desire superior to what arises from the greatest and most valuable enjoyment. (...) In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ’tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment....” (THN 2.2.3.3. 1740)
I understand modern moral philosophy frowns on that which came to be when there wasn’t such a thing even as a telephone, and barely an indoor toilet, where now some wannabe with letters after his name manufactures a solution for which he then needs to create a problem. (Sigh)
Have I ever suggested that any view should be adopted because it's popular?
You should adopt a view akin to emotivism because it's factually correct, it's what the world is like.
Quoting creativesoul
Aren't you using the "capacity to act" definition of "agency"?
Quoting creativesoul
What's weird about it is that it's difficult to understand where anyone got the idea that there's something inherently inferior about mental phenomena. Especially since mental phenomena are so central to us as sentient beings. The need to place (almost) all phenomena outside of us, so that mentality is, at best, always just perception, is ridiculous. (And in fact, some people want to even do away with perception being mental, or want to do away with minds altogether.)
Quoting creativesoul
I've had different views at different times, sure. That's one thing that moral stances are relative to--time.
Reason is important in figuring out how to appeal to someone, but re the present topic, you have to know the moral stances that person already holds, especially their core/foundational stances. Particularly if you can find some apparent conflict with other stances they hold, you can try to persuade them to another stance via an appeal to consistency. That might not work, but it can, and does often enough, that it can be worth trying.
Maybe. I'm not too beholden to my negativity about the effectiveness of reason to want to dismiss the idea entirely, though I might have sounded that way.
My experience with trying to communicate conflict and inconsistencies within positions (moral or otherwise) has been none too dissimilar to that of this thread. What seems to me to be a clear and reasonable explanation of such is treated as if I were speaking Greek, and what I get in return, by way of rebuttal might as well be randomly selected words from a dictionary for all the sense they make. I'm afraid it's all made me perhaps a little too cynical about the whole process. It is, however, quite useful for honing one's own position, so I can't dismiss the whole thing.
Why on earth would we have no complaint? I think I speak for all the relativists who've posted here in saying that we do not want to be murdered. The Lord wants to murder us, we do not want to be murdered. What is there not to get about that?
:smile:
Are you voluntarily trying to come across as stupid?
It would be possible to have a good discussion about this sort of stuff where the discussion isn't solely fueled by straw men and playing stupid.
You really should read the responses from the relativists on this thread. If you did, you wouldn't ask such absurd questions.
I think the idea is that mental phenomena are subject to bias and subjective limitations which weaken conclusions while if something can be confirmed seperate from those bias’s and subjective limitations then its a stronger conclusion.
Even if you disagree with that, is it really that strange?
The whole notion that we'd be confirming everything independently of mentality is already the bias though.
In other words, if something exists only as mental phenomena, then all we need to confirm is that someone has whatever mental phenomenon. The notion that it should be (or needs to be or whatever) something additional is already the bias against mental phenomena.
You'd think that we'd simply want to peg what things really are, and not be biased against simple facts.
Yeah, some people do, some care only to have a set of beliefs about the world which make them happy enough to get through the day. I can get on with either type. What happens in ethics though is we get a third type, the ones that want a stick to beat everyone else with. That's what the objectivists are looking for, and that I don't get on with at all.
Well, Im not sure why you are talking about “everything independently of mentality”, I may have missed parts(s) of the conversation I so rudely interjected myself into.
Anyway, you see an error or have disagreement...im just wondering why this particular error is strange to you? Why is it more weird than other errors you might take issue with?
Cuz its so obvious to you I take it? Its weird becuase its so simple to understand why its erroneous?
All the good ones do that, to be sure, and we shouldn’t chastise them for wishing the integrity of their respective philosophies be maintained. Both Hume and Kant reminded the reader to stay within the theory in order to get the most out of it, and if the reader was sufficiently qualified to rebuke it....have at it.
Both even when so far as to say the only way to rebuke either theory was to change the definitions or rearrange the system itself. Egos at work, both of ‘em.
I think the bemusement stems from the fact that human emotional responses are dismissed so casually ("mere preferences"), in the context of morality, when emotional dispositions must surely be central to any test of 'well being' (or whatever you think is the purpose of morality).
I guess I just dont see it. Its exactly what you would expect from someone who thinks morality is somehow objective, just as you would expect someone who views morality as about feelings about things to NOT have this bias against mental phenomenon.
Well, I expect my wife cares (sometimes). I don't understand why you're asking these weird questions. Of course other people care if I'm murdered.
Quoting tim wood
There is no reason why they should care, not one that I can make any sense of. I don't get why you think that means no one will. We do not only do that which we are compelled by reason to do.
Quoting tim wood
No, I've got nothing. You reckon you've got a better chance? You seriously think you've got a chance reciting Kant to a murderous aristocrat?
I think, whether or not the are conscious of it or not, the rope the relativists can not let go off, is a question of source. Like you, I tried to show on some moral questions there would be a near universal view. The only relativinist answer to this is an amazing coincidence, or pointing to some incredibly rare outlier and say, " see he doesn't think so, so it is relative". All other answers require a source outside the individual, a source for a common belief or thought. That is a hard rope to let go of for some.
Good point, and in keeping with Quoting tim wood
....it may do well to understand just what a passion, Hume style, really is:
“As all the perceptions of the mind may be divided into impressions and ideas, so the impressions admit of another division into original and secondary. (...) Original impressions or impressions of sensation are such as without any antecedent perception arise in the soul, from the constitution of the body, from the animal spirits, or from the application of objects to the external organs. Secondary, or reflective impressions are such as proceed from some of these original ones, either immediately or by the interposition of its idea. Of the first kind are all the impressions of the senses, and all bodily pains and pleasures: Of the second are the passions, and other emotions resembling them.”
While Hume relates passions to emotions, as we would do, he does not relate emotions to feelings as we would do. Hume calls them all perceptions of the mind, but modern thinkers do not attribute perception to anything but the senses. Kant removes emotions, or feelings in general, in his moral theory in order to get rid of passions and make room for practical reason alone, because (he says) no feeling allow us to arrive at a cognition, which any moral judgement must do.
We're explained to you many times that the fact that moral stances are preference-based doesn't imply that one doesn't have preferences--that's pretty obvious, isn't it? They wouldn't be preferences otherwise.
If you're strictly focusing on "reasons that might persuade someone else," how in the world are you arriving at a notion that just in case something is an extramental fact and can be supported with non-personal reason(s), then other people have to be persuaded by it? You could only think something like that if you've been living in a bubble all your life.
I actually explained this to you a couple times already. It's no more a coincidence than the fact that we all have noses above our mouths. We don't have to say that noses above our mouths are NOT something that our bodies do, do we?
Philosophy can't be just about pretending to be learning disabled.
I think our passions (what we desire), impacts our thoughts, and ordering and evaluating our thoughts against our passions, and our values, and against the things we hold as true impact our reason, and our reason impacts what we desire, and so on and so on. And I can think of no way you could isolate any part of that system as being before the other. It all seems so interdependent to me.
But again, happy to call it human nature, or evolution, or what ever you like. It is as near a fact as I can think of, that on more then a handful of moral choices, nearly every human conscience on the planet would evaluate it the same. That is difficult to reconcile without allowing for some degree of objective morality on some issues.
Exactly.
I'm always amazed by the sheer amount of - apparently - unrecognized double standards underwriting your rhetorical drivel. A well-considered measure of rhetorical power is and always will be accompanied by an argument with the strongest possible justificatory ground. You wield the rhetoric. The argument remains unseen.
Being a parrot doesn't count as good philosophy.
I cannot help your lack of understanding. If you have an argument of your own, I'll be glad to put it to the same tests that I use for determining the value of my own. If not, I doubt you'll receive much more of my attention. Some folk here know what I'm talking about. It's a reading comprehension thing, you might not understand.
Non-sequiturs won't do here.
There's an argument. You are objecting to the primary premiss. The primary premiss is both true and verifiable. I'll have nothing more to do with this conversation unless your tack takes a 180.
The above is clearly false. It stands in direct conflict with everyday observable events. It may well be consistent, coherent, and/or otherwise lacking self-contradiction. It may well be a valid conclusion. It is false nonetheless. False conclusions cannot be arrived at by logical means/valid argument. Hume's argument is valid(I'm granting that without prejudice). Therefore, at least one of the premisses is false.
The argument supporting the objection is as follows: The rules of morality are written in and/or reported upon and/or taken account of with common language. All of them. There is no better place to 'look' for empirical evidence to be used to help us consider Hume's position on morality. The rules of morality are the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. The rules of morality have evolved over time. Written history will attest to this. This evolution is the result of people changing their minds about what counts as acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
Slavery. Reason changed minds all over the world. Thankfully.
The above conclusion is false.
Nice post. There's a number of different facets of understanding to be discussed. I have my own copy of the Enquiry. May be worth a reading group thread. Let some flies out of the bottle.
Moral agency is existentially dependent upon thinking about the rules of behaviour. The rules of behaviour are statements of thought/belief. Moral agency is what's happening when one is carefully considering what sorts of behaviours are good and what sorts of behaviours are not; what one ought do, and what one ought not, etc.
All observable and thus undeniable moral agency includes a creature which adopts, and thus must begin working from, it's initial worldview. The adoption of world-views replete with moral thought/belief is existentially dependent upon common language replete with codes of conduct.
Yes, we know what apodeictic means. What we're missing is your argument for why moral position are such truths. You just keep re-stating your belief that they are with increasing incredulity. I'll start you off. Murder is universally and objectively wrong because...
Quoting Rank Amateur
Why? You've repeated this argument several times without answering the key question about it. If the vast majority of people evaluate the earth to be flat, or the vast majority of people evaluate black people to be of lesser worth than white people (both of which have definitely been the case in some closed communities), then do we have to accept those evaluations as objective truths. If not why is the majority opinion on murder different. All you've given me so far is that murder is a matter conscience (I think the worth of black people is a matter of conscience too, but we'll deal with that later). What you've not provided is your reason why being a matter of conscience suddenly make the majority belief into objective fact. If I argued that all 'purple apples could fly' and you retorted that apples can't fly, it would not be a suitable counter argument to simply point out that purple apples are different because they're purple. You'd expect an argument as to why being purple caused this difference.
So why does the fact that moral rules occur in the conscience mean that, unlike all other beliefs, what the majority think makes a belief into objective fact?
Quoting creativesoul
If the best you can manage is just to say that every counter-argument to your Delphic declarations is either a red-herring, a non-sequitur or the result of a failure in understanding then you might as well not bother writing anything. This is a philosophy discussion forum, not a podium from which to pronounce to your followers. Pathetic.
Philosophy discussions include calling out fallacious reasoning when and where it happens. It is happening here and now. The best I can do is call it out. An astute reader will notice the sheer lack of valid rebuttal coming from folks like you.
Do you have a valid counterargument? Do you have a valid argument? We all know you are rhetorically talented. Rhetoric alone doesn't cut it. Shut up and learn.
Again, exactly.
So. I'm arguing with your approach of presuming that because you think it is fallacious, it is therefore fallacious and no further argument is required. Its unpleasantly arrogant.
Quoting creativesoul
No, you can provide reasoning as to why you think it is fallacious. Do you really think that responding to an entire post with "Non-sequiturs won't do here" followed by a bare assertion that what you said is true, is a quality philosophical argument?
Quoting creativesoul
Really? Is that the best you can do? No actual argument just "anyone clever enough would agree with me".
Quoting creativesoul
Yes and yes. Both have been presented. The fact that you do not agree with them does not make them invalid.
Quoting creativesoul
Arrogant and rude, who the hell do you think you are that you can tell others to shut up and learn as if we were your students? I thought this thread had become unpleasantly ad hominem on a number of occasions before but it has managed to at least return to the actual arguments. If all you want to do is declare your edicts and tell your interlocutors to "shut up and learn" then you have no place on a philosophy forum.
You can't make an argument by exception to a point I acknowledge at the outset is not for all, but for some judgments. Comparing judgments about the nature of physical things to moral judgments is a category error. One has nothing to do with the other. Let me break down my argument and you tell me what part is false.
P1 - such a thing as human conscience exists ( please no semantic "exists" arguments)
P2 - I propose that on some moral judgments, an overwhelming number of human consciences would have the same moral judgment.
Conclusion: Some moral judgments are for all practical purpose appear to be objectively true or false regardless of person, culture, time, or place.
What I have been asking for, which has not been answered yet, is how moral relativism explains this phenomenon. Lots of you have typed lots of stuff after I raise this point, none of it in anyway is close to answer.
Yet you and others continually suppose that per relativist ethics, when an individual is confronted with a different moral stance than their own, they will suddenly be incapable of having or expressing a preference. So how do we explain your cognitive difficulties here?
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. The fact that "an overwhelming number of human consciences would have the same moral judgment." does not automatically lead to "Some moral judgments are for all practical purpose appear to be objectively true or false regardless of person, culture, time, or place."
This is exactly why I asked you about what you think makes conscience special in this regard.
We've been through all this before, so let's try not to repeat ourselves.
You say "because some x (human conscience) results in some y (the conclusion/feeling that murder is wrong) the majority of the time, we can take it as objective fact that y is true.
I say that if we apply that logic to other conclusions/feelings which the majority hold, it leads to unsavory conclusions (such as that black people are inferior).
You say it's different because the conclusions resulting from conscience are not the same as other conclusions.
I say, I agree, but like with my example of purple apples, simply because they're not the same doesn't mean the dissimilar thing has the properties you claim it has.
So, one more time. Why does the fact that human conscience leads to these conclusions mean that we can treat the majority conclusion as objective fact, whereas with other types of conclusion (such as that black people are inferior) we do not treat the majority view as objective fact.
I understand the two are different, so please don't just repeat that, I'm asking you why that difference has the effect you're claiming it has.
What I keep asking for, and have not seen yet is how this is explained by relative morality. You all keep telling me I am wrong, without any explanation how moral relativism addresses this.
Someone please make a coherent argument how moral relativism explains that near every human being on the planet would think torturing babies for amusement is morally wrong.
How would a rational system so hopelessly circular ever get us anywhere?
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Quoting Rank Amateur
If this is the case, and given the choice of deciding whether or not, e.g., is courage worthy of honor, which would seem to suffice for part of a handful of thoroughly objective considerations, it would have to be shown the choice is a moral choice, and, that conscience is responsible for its evaluation. Cases in which the considerations are reversed, yet still fulfil the criterion of objective consideration, re: is arbitrarily taking a human life good, it should be asked whether the choice is predicated on actually taking one, which is indeed a very moral choice, or witnessing the taking of one, which is merely an observation resulting in criticizing a choice without any knowledge whatsoever of its moral circumstance.
Obviously, there are agreements common to humanity in general. But morality is not found in agreements, that being no more than cultural suitability, sustainability, or simply allegiance, but rather, morality is always found in disagreements, and moral philosophy has to do with the reduction to the explanations for them. Its awful hard to say one is acting morally when in fact he acting as is expected of him, in which case his particular humanity (it is not honorable to prosecute a young Muslim American for learning to speak Farsi) couldn’t be distinguished from his general complicity (if you’re America you will speak English, dammit!!!)
If (iff) one thinks morality a fundamental, that is to say, a singular, constituent, human condition, it follows necessarily that objective morality is at best a categorical error and at worst self-contradictory.
You mean that you do not believe that noses are "of bodies"?
Do they grow behind rocks and then travel to your face?
Quoting Rank Amateur
You're probably reading "Morality is subjective" as me saying something other than "Morality is of bodies" in the sense that "Noses are of bodies," despite the fact that I've tried to correct that misunderstanding tens of times (if not hundreds in general on the board)
Aren't non-sequiturs only pertinent to arguments? I wasn't forwarding an argument in what you quoted relative to this response. I was simply making some comments.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't know what argument you're talking about there, but it must be obvious that I don't agree that the primary premise of whatever argument is true.
Quoting creativesoul
Wait so insofar as my ontology of ethics/morality goes, where exactly do you disagree with me?
Such systems of desire, thought, evaluation of thought, re visit desire, think again have got us all kind of places
Quoting Mww
I don't see how any of that says anything that shows relative morality is a better explanation of near unanimous moral judgments on some issues than some degree of objective morality.
I want you all to leave your beer fueled smoke filled dorm room esoteric philosophy chat, and apply it.
Why do you believe that if something is a "product" of our bodies, then it would be inexplicable for that thing to be significantly similar from person to person?
This point is nonsense.
I have given you all a challenge, show that relative morality is a better explanation than some degree of objective morality for the near universal moral judgments on some actions.
That has not been done yet.
It doesn't. Moral relativism explains how some humans do think torturing babies for fun is OK (by positing that there must therefore be no objective moral fact). Evolution is what explains why near every human being on the planet does think torturing babies for amusement is morally wrong (because it would be difficult to raise the next generation if we didn't).
Why must moral relativism explain what you want it to? Moral objectivism doesn't explain why most people have noses, but that isn't an argument against it.
I really wish you'd read it and remember it, though. That you and others won't is why I have to explain it tens, if not hundreds of times, and why I'll continue to have to do so.
Quoting Rank Amateur
Here's a very simple reason why:
Under subjectivist morality, the only explanation that we need for near-universal moral judgments is that our bodies develop in similar ways--a notion that's quite uncontroversial for most things (otherwise medicine wouldn't work, we'd not be able to explain why almost everyone has ten fingers and ten toes, etc.).
Under objectivist morality, we need to both posit (1) that moral stances somehow occur independently of us, and (2) that we perceive them, cognize them, etc. significantly similarly, which we'd still only solve by positing that our bodies develop in similar ways (due to genetics, environmental influences, etc., just as above).
So per Occam's razor, subjectivist morality is the simpler approach; it doesn't posit unnecessary (and frankly unsupportable) entities. Objectivist morality has to posit the same thing that subjectivist morality posits (bodies thinking things, expressing moral stances, etc.), and it would have to explain commonality on that end via the same approach (bodies developing similarly, with similar abilities, etc., due to genetics, common environmental factors, etc.); but it posits things additional to that, too. The only way it could avoid doing this is by attempting to take bodies out of the equation, but I don't know how you'd do that and still talk about people agreeing on moral stances, people behaving morally, etc.
By the way, I'm saying "subjective" above, not "relative," because we keep using "relative" in contexts where that's not really what we're saying (and I really mean "we" there--I've done this many times, too, in the guise of going with the flow of the thread). Relative ethics/morality is broader than subjectivist ethics/morality (and not even necessarily overlapping with it). Relativists can be objectivists. They can believe that something occurs independently of persons. They'd just say that the thing in question can differ due to differing relations. All of that can be independent of persons on a relativist view. It's subjectivists who say that the thing in question is dependent on persons. Also, subjectivists are usually relativists (as I am), but they wouldn't have to be. A subjectivist could say that something depends on persons, but that it's invariable as such, and thus not relative at all.
An easy way to remember that relativists can be objectivists is to think of physics. Special and general relativity in physics aren't conventionally positing subjective phenomena. They're conventionally seen as claims about objective reality--ways that objective reality is relativistic.
What we still need to figure out, but you won't answer is why you believe that if something is a "product" of our bodies, then it would be inexplicable for that thing to be significantly similar from person to person.
Not to mention that you seem to be inconsistent in your belief about this, because you think that we all significantly similarly perceive objective moral stances . . . unless somehow you believe that perception is not of our bodies. But then how do you get to acknowledgement of objective moral stances, etc.? At some point I'd think you'd have to involve our bodies.
Good.
Although I’ve been burned by commenting to people to whom I’ve erroneously attributed philosophical maturity, I feel I’m on solid ground here. I’m almost positive you’ll never criticize me for failure to approve a thing, when all I had intended was to disapprove some other thing unrelated to it.
I can't help but think that some of this stems from misunderstandings--namely, believing that relativists and/or subjectivists are more or less saying that morality is wildly divergent from person to person, and that it's essentially arbitrary. But no one is actually claiming anything like that.
What I'm saying is that morality/moral stances are something that occurs in minds only (which I believe are brains functioning in particular ways). I'm saying that moral stances do not occur outside of minds. I'm not saying anything suggestive of moral stances being arbitrary, being necessarily widlly divergent, etc.
I'm essentially making a claim about the location of a phenomenon.
There are upshots to what I'm saying, upshots where it makes a difference if we're saying that something only occurs in brains functioning in mental ways versus elsewhere, but the core idea is that moral stances only occur in brains functioning in mental ways.
This, by the way, shows that @creativesoul didn't understand the claim that he was attempting to refute.
Now, what is your argument against this, assuming you have one?
Haven't you ever typed up a sentence which doesn't so abuse the English language?
Quoting Isaac
It's his crazy pet tangent.
Quoting Terrapin Station
At least you're thinking about it properly, contrary to @Janus. Meta-ethics is about what the world is like with regards to morality. It is not about how the world ought to be. His point that our moral philosophy should aim towards a harmonious society completely misses the point, and he doesn't seem to realise that that is merely an expression of his own personal moral feelings on the matter, nothing more. It is but a projection.
"If you deny reason..."
I don't. It has a role. A subservient role.
This discussion is not a discussion of equals. This discussion is a teacher-pupil sort of discussion, where Tim (nice, but...) is very much the pupil and myself and others are very much the teachers.
I think/believe that maybe/possibly you could be right and/or astute in thinking/asking this question, inquiry and/or expostulation.
And yes, obviously murder is wrong in some sense, and that sense is the sense of wrong that is explained by moral relativism, not the sense of wrong which moral absolutism fails to properly explain and thus resorts to dogmatism and bad logic. Bad logic like your fallacious appeal to absurdity: "But murder is (absolutely) wrong! Superficially, and by my narrow judgement, the contrary seems absurd. Therefore the contrary is false". That seems to be your implicit logic.
Feel free to try again, but philosophy is like shaving, and if you keep ending up with cuts all over your face, then that suggests that you're not good at shaving. You are no match for Hume. Not even remotely close.
I think I understand your point, let me try and paraphrase it back. The moral judgment we as individuals communicate, has an origin in our individual thoughts and reasoning on the issue. And since its origin is internal to each individual, all of them are unique individual judgments.
And there is no more reason to give then that for subjective morality, it is my thought and I am the origin of all my thoughts.
If I have that right, then I say poppy cock that it in anyway answers the question of why all these unique and self determined evaluations are nearly universal on some issues.
You want to brush that off, as well that is just the way we are made, like noses. But that is the entire crux of the issue. We all didn't independently decide we wanted noses and we would put them between our eyes. Something outside the individual decided that we would get a nose and where it would go.
The crux of the issue is source.
Call it evolution or human nature, but the reason there is near universal moral agreement on some issues is, there is some agency that is more universal than the individual that internally demands we have that view. We universally could no more disagree with on conscience on some points then individually decide where we would want to place our individual nose.
It is objective biology and outside individual human desire or judgment where our nose goes, and it is to a high degree outside individual thought and reason what our human conscience tell us is right or wrong about certain issues.
"It doesn't " is the best explanation so far
Is it really moral relativism or some form of mental illness that is a better explanation of why some incredibly small number of individuals would think baby torture for fun is morally permissible
evolution is what explains .....
I have said that exact thing, and we are in complete agreement - so by our very nature as it has evolved as species, we all hold near universal views on the morality of some issues - I call that highly objective, don't you?
It seems to me, when Hume said....
“Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions”
.....he should have realized his own words suggest morals are antecedent to passions. And when combined with......
“a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ’tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment”
.....suggests an undefined chronology between an unreasonable passion and the false judgement that goes with it. Is the passion unreasonable because of the false judgement or is there a false judgement because the passion is unreasonable?
And another thing. Hume says what reason is good for, re: science and logic and other relational categories, where it has power and authority, “as it’s proper province is the world of ideas“, but “as the will always places us in that of realities” and “a passion is an original existence”, we are to suppose it is these disparities which prohibit reason from factoring into moral decisions.
If Hume had only recognized the duality of reason itself, the pure and the practical, Kant would have had nothing with which to set the world on fire. Or, more probably, he would have had to find something else with which to set the world on fire.
You understand that on my view it's biology that produces our moral stances, too, right?
Yeah, and it's frustrating to me that it's apparently so difficult to get across to some folks.
I'm kind of an "irrational optimist," though, so I keep trying, lol
Why wouldn't not wanting to be murdered be sufficient? Additionally most people don't want people to murder other people in general.
And I steadfastly refuse to address what the Kantian in the background has said if he hasn't the decency to even speak to me. He who has the nerve to suggest that I lack philosophical maturity. I think they call that projection.
Why am I failing against Ockham’s razor.
I explained that in detail in a post to you above.
I never argued this near universal agreement was not biological, I have said a few times said it could be evolved. It is just not a individually unique biology.
Lots of rhetoric on my challenge- just no reasonable answers
Re "individually unique" that's irrelevant to this discussion. (I have a view on that, but it has to do with nominalism, and we can leave that out of this discussion.)
"Individually unique" seems pertinent to something I wrote earlier today: "I can't help but think that some of this stems from misunderstandings--namely, believing that relativists and/or subjectivists are more or less saying that morality is wildly divergent from person to person, and that it's essentially arbitrary. But no one is actually claiming anything like that."
It was a relatively long post. Here's a direct link to it: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/267821
Light is electromagnetic radiation within a certain portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and it appears to have wave-like properties. Therefore, luminiferous aether.
The world contains people who live meaningful lives, and who are capable of judging right from wrong. Therefore, God exists.
Lots of people have in common the judgement that murdering children is wrong. Humans are such that they tend to feel a certain way about it which leads to that conclusion. Therefore, objective morality.
No I don’t you just have not come up with any reason why on some issues it is near universal. If you want to say we have all evolved as humans to feel that way, I will agree but that seems quite objective to me with the source being a shared human evolution.
The post I just linked you to explained it yet again. It's about the fifth or sixth time in this thread that I've explained it: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/267821
Quoting Rank Amateur
Re this, for the umpteenth time, ALL that I'm saying by the term "subjective" is that we're referring to a mental phenomenon. We can just drop the terms "subjective/objective" and I can just say that "moral stances do not occur outside of persons thinking them." The reason that they think them is biological. Biology is as it is because of evolution and common environmental factors, which lead to near-universal agreement on some things.
You also have persistent problematic misunderstandings about the logical consequences of moral relativism which seem practically irresolvable for you, in spite of valiant efforts. I mean, look, we've reached [I]forty[/i] pages now, and you seem none the wiser. As I've said before, and of others, the real problem here seems psychological. You have a psychological problem with moral relativism, such that you simply must defeat it, no matter what.
You can lead a horse to water...
Absolutely and fundamentally not, no. And I've already explained why.
We do not normally treat things most people feel as objective truth and with very good reason. It would make it at one time objectively true that black people are inferior, for example.
You've said thoughts arising from conscience are different, and I agree, they are different.
What you continue to avoid answering is why you think that difference causes us to consider majority thoughts on morality as objective truths when not only do we not do this for any other class of thought, but we take great pains to avoid doing so.
I do not understand your link between our near general agreement agreement about some things, and our biological development. If you include some near universal evolutionary dispositions I am there. But I don't get the link between we all have a nose and 10 toes so we all think the same about a specific thing and it is subjective.
Can you give me the full logic of this link please.
I have never called this near universal moral judgment on some issues a "objective truth". I said it points to their is an objective moral judgment on some actions. Meaning there is some source of this judgment that is not relative or subjective to the person, the culture or the time.
I understand it because I have a certain level of intelligence. Just putting that out there.
Why, simply because it is a moral judgment, by an individual thought, makes that thought by definition subjective. People in that same mental phenomenon make a moral judgment, that the sorce of that thought is nearly universal, inherent in being human. Call it human nature or evolution- but if you agree such judgments exist they would seem to be much much more objective than subjective.
The biology of our brains is what he means, the chemistry of our minds. For example, empathy comes from our evolution. It shouldnt be controversial that empathy is at least related to “near universal” moral agreements. The 10 toes was part of an example about something else (medicine) besides morality where we make “near universal” judgements based on our bodies developing in certain ways.
Correct me if im wrong on that Terrapin.
Not only the ownership, or possession of it, but included is the principle of its preservation. If we have a truth the negation of which is impossible, we have a law. If we have a law, we have the ground of a moral philosophy. Because the law is a priori, it is neither relative nor objective. It is, instead, a good place to start.
This what subjective means. You referenced a thought...thats the domain of subjectivity. Morals are not found under rocks, or anywhere in the physical world. You find them in minds, and of course those minds manifest in the physical world, in this case they manifest as actions concerned with morality. The moral agreement you speak of doesnt make those notions of morality as happening somewhere else besides in our minds excepting as I described above as manifested in our world by humans. As usual when dubjectivity and objectivity are being used in discussion, the disagreement is almost (dare I say) illusiory, a matter of semantics and categories.
So exactly how many does it take in your world to shift it from objective to subjective 1 in 7.5 Billion, 10, 1000, 1%. ? Rare exceptions does not proof subjectivity.
They are subjective because they are mental notions. Again, thats what the subjective realm is. No minds, no subjectivity.
It actually has been addressed, I think whats tripping you up perhaps is that there is an interaction between objective stuff and subjective stuff. Draw a distinction between morality and moral acts. These happen in different domains so the source of moral judgements is seperate from the morality people live in accordance with. The latter are acts of morality, the objective manifestation of subjective judgements.
Not being obstinate or argumentative. Maybe just ignorant. I just don't see the logic in the biology argument, as defacto proof of subjective morality. Again it well could be my ignorance of the topic. But we just at a point now where we are just repeating the same thing. I'll do some reading on your position and see if I can get the logic.
Have to get back to real life.
And there is no need to prove the obvious subjectivity in moral matters. That is not controversial at all, and is accepted on both sides. But you have a massive burden to prove that morality is objective. Do not try to shift the burden again or you'll trigger my wrath. There are rules about this for a reason. You don't get to just assume something controversial and sit back whilst goading others to argue against it. That is dishonorable. It is immoral. It is a vice. Please don't be a bad pupil. Learn from our previous encounters. You should explicitly state that you're either unable or unwilling to meet your burden if that is the case. That would be the intellectually honest thing to do. That would be the right thing to do. I am very strict on things like this, because it is very important. Far more important than relatively petty complaints about tone or insults. You can call me a cunt, but don't dare break my rules about intellectual honesty, the burden of proof, remaining on point, and so on. That's a cardinal sin. And I hope the Kantian in the background is taking note, because this is what philosophical maturity looks like.
I like the way your expressions land. Worthy of copying.
Quoting Mww
This presupposes that nothing and/or no things that has/have/had an influence on actions and affections can be derived using reason. As if these possibilities are mutually exclusive and/or incompatible with one another. That is a very dubious presupposition that quite simply does not correspond to that which happened yesterday, is happening today, and will most likely be happening again tomorrow..
Some political/financial powers have world-views that are so heavily laden with thinking about thought/belief that one could sink a ship with them. Those belief systems are operative and derived from thinking about thought/belief. Some people have tremendous power over other folks' lives and/or financial livelihood. Some of those people write the morality which not only governs lives, but also affects/effects an overwhelming number of the citizens living in the world.
That which influences actions and affections can be derived from reason. Hume's mistake is conflating simple, rudimentary, and/or basic thought/belief with the linguistically informed/ladened. He was not alone.
I'm confused then, I suppose. Did you not quote me and charge the excerpt with ignoring and/or neglect?
Yes, that actually happened.
Three charges of neglect. None true.
When I wrote "non-sequitur" I was drawing your attention to the situation at hand. None of those charges follow from my position. You quoted me, and then aimlessly opened fire. "Non sequitur" was not about your argument, it was about the fallaciousness of your inquiry.
Hume is washing down Heraclitus' river...
And yet you've been handed more than adequate reason on a silver platter.
It leads to false conclusions; they do not square with fact. Validity is utterly inadequate for truth. A position can be very complex, very coherent/valid, and arrive at falsehood.
That's just the way it is. I'm not making it up. I'm just pointing it out.
Yes, maybe. What you're adding to that without due cause is that this 'source' is only the source of the majority. Why is it not also the source of the minority. What support do you have for the notion that the 'source' must deliver a single proposition? Why can this 'source' not hand out to most people the idea that murder is wrong, but to a small minority hand out the notion that murder is OK?
No problem. I too will have to duck out for a while because I'm afraid CS's writing makes me want to smash my phone and I can't really afford to do that.
That's just the way it is. The Oracle has spoken. Turns out that wisdom sounds a lot like gibberish.
"Non sequitur" refers to something being stated in the context of an argument as if it follows--that is, as if it is valid, but it actually does not follow, it is not valid.
All you're saying really is that you disagree with me that "Morality is codified rules of behaviour. Code is language" "amounts to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc"--well, we should hope you disagree with that, otherwise you'd be forwarding stances more or less dishonestly, because you'd think that you're ignoring something but you'd not care.
Nevertheless, what you stated amounts to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.
Your brain is part of your biology. Your brain is as it is due to a combo of genetics (which have an evolutionary history) and environmental factors. From person to person, brains have a lot of similarities because of this.
Well, what it is to have mental phenomena is for a brain to be in a particular state.
I use the term "subjective" to denote mental phenomena.
Quoting Rank Amateur
The link is simply that your nose and fingers and brain are all part of your body. Your body is as it is due to genetics (with an evolutionary history again) and environment. Nature and nurture. Your brain, part of your biology, is what functions as a mind. The term I use for mental phenomena is "subjective." It's just another way of saying that we're refering to mental phenomena, and not other sorts of things that aren't mental phenomena.
Quoting Rank Amateur
Why? Because I'm using the term to denote mental phenomena. It's basically a synonym for that in my usage.
Quoting Rank Amateur
Since I'm calling mental phenomena "subjective" and I'm reserving "objective" for things that aren't mental phenomena, then if we're talking about people making a moral judgment as mental phenomena--we're saying that what it is to make a moral judgment is to be in a particular mental state, then even if 100% of everyone, throughout all of history, has that same exact moral judgment, because of how humans have evolutionarily developed, and that led to their brain working a particular way so that they all make that same moral judgment, then I'm calling that moral judgment "subjective," solely because/only because we're talking about mental phenomena, and "subjective" is a term I use to refer to mental phenomena.
It seems to me like I'm explaining this in a way that anyone should be able to understand (not necessarily agree with, but simply understand). But people are responding as if it's very difficult to understand for some reason. I don't know how to explain it so that it's simpler or more straightforward.
You keep repeating this, and it's why I've used the analogies to things that should be less controversial.
Unless you think that we're not the sources of our noses, for example, you'd have to explain why the fact that we're the individual source of our own noses makes it a coincidence that there are such similarlties in them re placement, function, shape, etc.
If you think that we're not the sources of our noses, then you'd have to explain what you believe the source to be.
Part of the issue here might be confusion over whether we're talking about x as x--noses as noses, versus things that are prerequisites for x, preconditions for x, things that contribute to x being what it is, without actually being x itself. So, for example, genetics contributing to nose development, while the genetics in question aren't actually a nose.
I'm not going off on this tangent to be silly. I'm trying to understand what seems to be a perplexing viewpoint--the fact that you seem to think that if something is "of us"--it only occurs in or of our bodies, then it must be an odd coincidence that there would be any similarities in it.
Not a judgment about. It's something that is a part of our body, that has a lot of similarities from body to body (almost everyone has 10 of them, etc.), but that we're not stumped about regarding how there can be such similarities if it's something that's simply a development of our bodies.
Because on your view, we'd not be able to explain the similarity unless we receive the judgment from somewhere else, right?
This was clear, I understand. And just disagree. Which is fine.
No number can do it. It's not a term about how common something is, or how universal it is. It's a term denoting whether something is a mental phenomenon or not. If 50 trillion people, always, for all time, in the past, now, and for all of the future, think exactly the same thing, it's still something they think. That's all I'm saying. It's something they think, and not something other than what they think.
The most important aspect of this is the belief that there's some significance to something being very common, being near-universal, aside from the fact that it's very common or near-universal.
We need to explore the belief that there's some other significance to it.
I see. I used “judgement” to try and put things in a way Rank would easier digest but if that twisted what you meant then apologies. It should teach me not to speak for others but it wont ;)
You have an unassailable argument.
You define all things we think as subjective
Moral judgments are things we think
Moral judgments are subjective
Understand the logic, disagree that all mental process are subjective
My definition of subjective morality is a moral judgment that has no inherent truth value. That the truth value of the statement, or the mental phenomena , is dependent on or subject to something else. It is not always true, it is only true if (fill in the blank)
As I've said a number of times, I don't think the terms are important. I'm fine with dropping the terms "objective" and "subjective." I've suggested dropping them a number of times, including earlier in this thread.
So I'm just saying that moral judgments are things we think.
Do you agree with that?
And on my view, I don't believe that moral judgments (or whatever else we might want to call them--moral whatevers) occur, as moral judgments (whatevers) other than as things we think.
And then what matters are the upshots of the fact that moral judgments are things we think.
Trying to avoid getting too much into truth theory, because my views on that are a big can of worms that require getting into a bunch of "technical" analytic philosophy stuff, we can just ask what it would amount to for something that exists only as a mental phenomenon to be "true"
There is nothing there to disagree with. But it just does not say anything of value about the utility of moral judgments
That is most certainly an idiosyncratic way of viewing subjectivity, but it doesnt matter, just drop the term then.
Well, so for value, I'd also say that that is only something we think.
Re utility, I'm not sure what you'd be looking for. My approach would typically be descriptive, but that may not do anything for you.
Re the upshots of something only being something we think, one of the important issues is whether we can get such a thing correct or not. If we say we can get something that's only mental correct, then we need to be able to say just how that would be the case.
Yes, the keyword being affections, which Hume specifically names as “...perceptions of the mind...”. Thus, if reason cannot tell us of affections, it cannot tell us of the mind, which is, as Kant called it, “a wretched subterfuge”, strictly due to Hume’s rabid anti-rationalism. (CpR 1.3.45., 1788)
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Quoting creativesoul
Might this hold some relevance to your thought/belief characterization? I’m still working on it, how I might find something comparable in my own mind. (I still need to separate them; it’s my cognitive bias at work....sorry)
“....Certain statements have strong existential implications; we might say that they are 'ontologically loaded." There is a tendency to equate the making of these statements with the making of an ontological commitment. But to do so would be a mistake, one that has prompted Quine to devise a formula to help keep our tendency in check. Quine draws a distinction between linguistic facts and ontological attitudes. The fact is, as Russell and Quine have pointed out, that statements can be meaningful without referring to anything. A person can play with linguistic objects to his or her heart's content without embracing any ontology that might be said to be "included" or "inherent" in the objects. We can tell stories about Pegasus without committing ourselves to its existence. Of course, with certain linguistic entities, the ontological implication can be strong, and the game can be dangerous. These days, we have quite happily accepted the Russell-Quine doctrine, and do not see ontological commitments in statements employing certain linguistic entities. We now accept that we only commit ourselves when we specifically give the variable a value....”
(A. T. Nuyen, 1985)
The right or wrong of something like "Murder is bad" or "One should not murder" is a moral right/wrong, and it's identical to the preferences "Murder is bad" or "One should not murder." The grounds of determination is someone having those preferences.
Moral stances are preferences of interpersonal behavior, not just with respect to oneself. "No one should murder anyone" is a preference that many people have.
The problem I have is that I have no idea how anything qualifies as 'wrong in itself' (i.e. wrong even if no one believed it was wrong)?
Correct.
Quoting tim wood
Sure, they may have.
At least you're getting it now. :grin:
p1.Morality is the codified rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
p2.Codes consist of common language.
C1.Morality consists of common language.
p3.Common language is existentially dependent upon shared meaning.
C2.Morality is existentially dependent upon shared meaning.
Agree or disagree?
I disagree, starting with the first premise, for the reasons I gave in the post of mine that this tangent is stemming from.
Cool. From real world observation to the a priori reduction to a principle, hence the possibility of a law, is only good for something else, just as in logic, with just as much power. Can’t just stop there, though; gotta use that undeniability to build on, like the ownership of one’s life and what we can induce from that. Even so, anything new to think about can’t hurt.
Yes. Hume worked from an utterly inadequate framework, including a sore lack of understanding existential dependency. Again. He was/is not alone.
The first premiss is both true and verifiable. How do you reconcile ignoring truth and/or holding a position that does not square with the way things are?
Obviously I don't agree that it's true. In what way would you say that it's verifiable? In other words, explain how we'd verify it.
So the verification is "That's how Bernard Gert defines it"?
(And even if you're going by that, you don't seem to be acknowledging the "or accepted by an individual for her own behavior" part for example)
The verification of what we're talking about when we are talking about morality is provided by how current and past convention used the term...
If you want to talk about something other than the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour, then I suggest that you quit using the term "morality" as a means for doing so. No one will know what you're on about.
Intellectual honesty starts with the ability to admit it when we're wrong.
But I disagree with you that your definition covers the conventional usages of the term. That was just the point I made. It's exactly why I wrote, "(1) that would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc.,"
So how do we verify who is right there?
Sorry, but nothing in your response appears, to me, to address my concern.
Read the link...
Two ways to use "morality". Both refer to codes of conduct.
Gert doesn't even define morality as narrowly as you defined it. I've already pointed that out.
Anyway, if he did, it would simply be a case of me not agreeing with Gert's definition, either.
A verification that some widespread, common phenomenon is exhaustively defined by x wouldn't be that some arbitrary person who has an academic background in the phenomenon has defined it as x.
I swear, sometimes I get the impression here that I'm talking with basement dwellers who think that reading a single web page--like an SEP page on something--makes them an expert in something they never experienced, even though they also quickly reveal that they aren't even really grokking the page about the stuff they otherwise have zero real world experience with.
Are you asserting that it's necessary to agree with Gert, by the way?
Is this really how you do philosophy as a "creative soul"--you find someone who you can verify is a professional in the field, read what they said, then treat it like gospel that everyone has to agree with?
Wonderful.
I wasn't saying anything merely rhetorical. I was hoping you'd address all of that. The goal is to get your noggin working a bit better. To really do philosophy you need to think critically about stuff. That's what I'm trying to kickstart.
If it goes something like this:
If the categorical imperative...
Then it will instantly fail for begging the question, because we most certainly are not all Kantians, and we most certainly do not all accept the categorical imperative, and Kant is most certainly not God, and his writings on the subject are most certainly not Biblical.
This, in conjunction with your “my ownership of my life is absolute”, is the proof of the law serving the fundamental ground of moral interest. Murder, the thing itself, is properly understood as revoking the principle of ownership; some other rational agency has usurped the given right to exist. Revoking the ownership principle is logically equivalent to contradicting the law, and all contradictions are false if the affirmative is true. Therefore murder absolutely cannot be a positive moral interest to any rational agency, which makes yourself included explicit.
No objectivity, no relativity needed here, for it is absurd to consider any otherwise rationally competent agency would reject the ownership principle.
Yes. No apology necessary. The position I argue from/for is not a conventional one.
The very conceptions of 'pure reason' and 'passions' that Hume employs stem from a gross misunderstanding of what all thought/belief consists of and how it all works. The result is clear. His conclusions are false.
I personally find the categorization of philosophical subject matters much more of a problem than not. Talking about "ontological implications" is to identify that which is relevant to our classification of certain kinds of thought/belief. It leads nowhere useful if those classifications are grounded upon an inherently inadequate notion of thought/belief.
If one cannot replace the namesake with it's referent and carry on, then one doesn't know what s/he is talking about.
All correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content.
It's your nonsense. You explain it.
:wink:
Agreed. I’ve yet to experience ontological conditionals as anything but complicating, rather than clarifying. I mean...whatever I’m talking about must already be somehow, and must already relate to what I’m talking about....or I wouldn’t have anything to talk about. AAARRRGGGGG!!!!!!
As to Hume, given that we understand things better nowadays, can we say he did the best with what he had to work with? Even without admitting that it only took 50 years to blow his whole scheme out of the water......still.....
SLAM DUNK!!!!
(Sorry....UDub just got smacked by UNC in March Madness....so I’m a little under the influence.)
Again, in my opinion the definition is too narrow, because it would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc. It's the case that people commonly refer to other things, too, by those terms. I'm not saying that we have to go with what folks explicitly have in mind regarding what they're referring to--especially because many people believe fictions, believe things that are incoherent, etc., and we want to talk about what's really going on, the phenomena that are actually occurring, but a definition of a term like this should be able to cover what most folks are functionally doing with the term in this regard. The suggested definition is far too narrow for that.
Quoting tim wood
That's not at all my view.
That it's not my view doesn't imply that I think there is something that is correct and incorrect for everything we can mention/talk about. I'm able to look at things a bit more nuanced than thinking that if one thing has a property, everything extant must have the same property. You should be able to do this, too, unless you think, for example, that ice cubes must be able to make toast just because a toaster can.
Are you saying anything different ontologically with "intersubjective" other than the fact that people can interact with each other behaviorally, including that they can utter agreements, they can cooperate, etc.?
I'm fine with it, too, depending on how we define it, but the definition I'm fine with doesn't amount to much, and the definition I'm fine with doesn't actually cover moral judgments qua judgments. Third-person observable behavioral stuff isn't identical to mental stuff. Judgments are incorrigibly mental stuff.
More like an own goal.
Again, it depends on what you're saying intersubjectivity amounts to, exactly.
I'm the sort of moral relativist who says that there are no moral truths, period. Subjective, intersubjective, objective, whatever. Truth value is a category error here.
And obviously, inter-subjectivity is just a bunch of individual subjectivities grouped together with subjective elements in common. Nothing much to do with objectivity. Yes, obviously a whole bunch of us feel the same way about murder. What of it? And please don't bring up a harmonious society, as that misses the point.
Interesting to find someone who actually subscribes to a consensus theory of truth . . . interesting because it's rare. Rare because it's pretty clearly wacky, unless it's simply borne out of a passion for sociological phenomena at the expense of describing other phenomena.
And I'm most obviously arguing against anyone who is a moral objectivist or a moral absolutist, but it's not that simple. I also disagree with Terrapin over his noncognitivism, T Clark over cultural relativism, yourself and T Clark over individualism...
I'll argue with anyone who disagrees with me over anything.
Inter-subjectivity seems like a red herring.
So is this trolling, or are you really dim enough to not even realize that I consider anything morally bad? One thing I might consider morally bad is continually trolling straw men.
There's no sense of the word "opinion" that I use, or that's in common use, that I would say fits that. You could suggest a definition, though, I guess.
What else do you think truth could be? Are you wanting to propose that there are some absolute truths 'out there'? Perhaps there are, but what could they possibly be to us?
Ah--maybe I have to take that back. Here's one supposedly common definition of "opinion:" "the beliefs or views of a large number or majority of people about a particular thing"
Given that definition, it would be very strange to say that one doesn't think that 2+2=4 is an opinion that people have.
Do you not realize that people use "truth" in a way that doesn't at all hinge on (the possibility of) communal agreement?
In any case it would be helpful if you gave an example of such usage.
Would you not be able to make sense of "It was true a moment ago that I thought of eating ice cream"?
The fact that it was true a moment ago involved no one else in any manner, and it couldn't have--since I didn't tell anyone what I thought at the time. Yet it still was true at that time.
On your view, you should not be able to make sense of that usage of "true."
There is a truth value there, but one that we've designed so that no one else at all can corroborate, unless we unseal the envelope at some future time.
On a consensus view of truth, the above can't make sense. Yet it's a common sense in which truth value is used. So a consensus theory of truth winds up ignoring common usage of the term it's supposed to be defining.
Quoting S
It would be wrong for you to think that some moral claim is not wrong if everyone agrees that it is wrong. If you did you would be a sociopath and not fit for human society. In any case, if you are "switching to a group context" that means you are taking into account what the group thinks, so it cannot be a matter of mere personal preference, as tastes for certain kinds of foods are. You just don't want to admit that your moral dispositions are enculturated, and are nothing special.
You're also ignoring the fact that your belief that you were thinking of some particular thing an hour ago is itself a relative truth insofar as it relies on your memory.
Quoting S I'm not sure if Tim has used that term but I certainly have. What is your problem with it? It's use (by me at least) just denotes the fact that some kinds of moral relativists want to say to say that moral dispositions are nothing but personal preferences. And of course I haven't anywhere said that they are not also personal preferences; it is trivially true that they are.
And obviously my judgement didn't come from my racist society. So again, you're trapped.
And omfg, please stop with the mere food preference bullshit. You're better than that, or so I thought.
Everyone doesn't think that racism is right, anyone who thinks about it will soon see that it is not. Surely you can do better than that.
This is a rather pathetic attempt to shift the argument away from the overarching moral principles that everyone does agree upon, so it is just another red herring. You simply don't want to admit that your view is inadequate and inconsistent with human experience. Your ego is getting in the way of your understanding and will ruin your philosophical development if you are not more careful.
You aren't properly responding, because you don't have a leg to stand on, and you've begun to resort to name-calling and evasion, which is tantamount to throwing in the towel.
So such a thing would be on account of poor reasoning (maybe bolstered by irrational fears) and nothing more; and it is consequently irrelevant to the argument. You're doing a Terrapin and trying to shift the argument because you can't win it in the relevant context.
And if you aren't disagreeing with what I said, but instead with something I didn't say, then you're missing the point. I recommend reviewing what I actually said. The thought experiment resembles our history to a certain degree, I didn't intend to suggest that it replicates it exactly. It doesn't need to. It isn't totally incomprehensible. It is a possible world scenario. But if you are petty enough to object to the "everyone else" part, then just swap it for "most others in my society". In the thought experiment, I am white, and so is everyone else in my village. I've never even seen anyone of a different skin colour in person. My culture is very much racist. My parents are racist. But I am not.
You'll probably just try to cheat by altering the thought experiment, which results in failure. Or you'll refuse to even engage it, which results in failure.
Not to mention the rest of society; for example there is no evidence that anyone who was not an aristocrat agreed with slavery, and it is not even plausible that even all the aristocrats believed that slavery was a good thing.
In Australia, for example, the aboriginals were treated abominably, including often being summarily murdered, by the early settlers, and if you think that, at the time, everyone who was not an aboriginal would have agreed with that treatment, then you'd be wrong; there is documentary evidence that it was a contentious issue at the time.
And the issue that was contended was not whether or not it is right to murder humans, but rather whether or not aboriginals qualified as humans. So your attempt to shift the argument away from the overarching moral truths is misguided at best and disingenuous at worst.
You're ridiculously blinkered to the "everyone else" bit. I have tried to resolve this problem. Please review what I've said. I often edit my posts too late, so things can be missed. I would apologise for that, but you're acting like a jerk, so an apology from me to you over anything at all is out of the question right now.
If you want a historical example of what I'm getting at, with plenty of evidence in support of it, read Hiter's Willing Executionors: Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
What matters is existential dependency...
The distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief is imperative. All philosophical positions are existentially dependent upon the latter. Some of them take proper account of that which is not.
Secondly it is not based on anything which it would be plausible to think has ever happened.
I'm glad we ended this on an amicable note. :up:
I think you just won.
Yeah, why not; I'm not personally invested in what you do or don't think.
Quoting Brett
Maybe, but I'm not sure what the prize is. :roll:
Never mind, you did well.
If you want to claim it was an intellectual judgement, then set out your reasoning. What, according to you, does morality have to do with reason beyond giving reasons after the fact for your emotional preferences?
I mean, if your emotional responses are all that is required to justify your moral beliefs, why do you need to give reasons for them at all? And how, without appealing to inter-subjectively shared values could you possibly rationally justify your emotional responses?
Your arguments constantly take the form of more or less veiled insults and bare assertions; which makes you look very uncertain of your position, bombastic bluster notwithstanding.
Anyway, I'm probably wasting my time responding to you, because I have little confidence that you will engage in any discussion in good faith, but today it's not so bad since it rained here and I was not able to work on the current landscaping project. :smile:
I don't understand what you're getting at here. I'd have thought a moral stance requires explanation (reasons) regardless of what they're based on.
Why would my moral stance on something not require explanation if it were based on an emotional response?
If you want to know what I think about the role that reason has to play, then you should review what I've said already about that, rather than expecting me to repeat myself. I stand by my objection that I didn't claim, as you said, that reason has nothing to do with morality. The irony of your moving the goalposts, in spite of accusing me of doing that, has not been lost on me. Nor has your projection about insults, bombastic bluster, bare assertions and the like.
I just want to address one thing first: I wasn't introducing an analogy. I was explaining a common way that true/false are used that the consensus theory of truth can't make sense of. It's an objection to the consensus theory of truth based on there being phenomena that the theory is supposed to address that the theory can't make sense of.
I know I shouldn't address more than one thing because the other will be overlooked, but I can't bypass this. As a response to my example of a common way to use the concept of truth, your response shows that even you, as someone forwarding a consensus theory of truth, do not actually use the word "true" to refer to a consensus.
How do we know this? Well, because saying "You believe it was true," in response to the example, would make absolutely no sense if you were referring to something that a consensus of people are doing. If the scenario is to write down whether something is true or false that only that individual can know, then obviously it's not a question of whether a consensus of people is doing/saying something.
The whole point of the example is to show that if "true" refers to something that a consensus is doing, then no sense can be made of "true" in the context I presented. But you seem to have made sense of it just fine. So you're not actually using "true," intuitively, to refer to something a consensus is doing.
Now maybe you're not actually forwarding a consensus theory of truth, but you're doing the old "A consensus that P is true makes it more likely that P is true," but in that case a consensus that P is true isn't identical to what it is for P to be true, so the fact that there's a consensus about some moral stance wouldn't amount to that moral stance being true by virtue of the consensus. In other words, what it would "mean" for a moral stance to be true wouldn't be identical to there being a consensus on the stance. What it would "mean" for a consensus to be true would have to be something aside from that. Well, what would it be aside from that?
If it be granted scientific truths, not as such but in themselves, are empirical, and moral truths, not as such but in themselves, are thought, we arrive at a distinction between the former truth as sufficient and the latter truth as necessary. The former from the principle of induction which can never suffice for a totality of possible conditions, any one un-met of which is possibly capable of falsifying a truth, and the latter from the principle of deduction which has the power of proof but not the availability of verifying a truth. Induction starts with observation and expands its conclusions into the world of objects in general; deduction starts with observation and reduces its conclusions into a singular object of the objects of the world in general.
A truth as such as it relates to inter-subjective agreement has to do with the direction of its dissemination, which is the opposite of its origination. Empirical truths are already extant in the world, merely being discovered, hence disseminated inward to the subjects, moral truths are extant in the subject, being determinations of will, and disseminated outward to like subjects. It follows that empirical truths are objective and the agreement with them is a condition of agreement with the state of affairs of the real world, and moral truths are subjective and agreeing with them is a condition of the state of affairs of the moral world, the qualitative difference being disagreement with the former is necessarily irrational because this kind of truth represents a fact, but disagreement with the latter is not necessarily irrational because this kind of truth merely represents an interest.
Therefore, a truth in itself has no need of inter-subjective agreement, whereas a truth as such, does.
I for one appreciate the inclusion of the qualifier “as such”, but you are aware of the catastrophic flaw in both our comments, right?
Impossible.
I am not us.
Silly monkey.
Here we have yet again another position based upon a sore lack of understanding what thought/belief is and how it all works.
All world-views are adopted via language acquisition. Those include morality. Racist morality is adopted. During the initial adoption process(language acquisition), one cannot doubt what they're being taught. Doubt is belief based, and one's first worldview is the ground of doubt. A child borne into a village/culture where everyone is racist cannot doubt what they're being taught.
Doubting that requires being exposed to something different. Sapientia's hypothetical is impossible, despite his certainty.
And no, it isn't impossible, and the thought experiment doesn't preclude something as vague and infinitely broad as exposure to "something different", anyway. As usual, you're criticising something you don't properly understand.
I would not put it quite like that. I would say that empirical truths are real relational potentialities that become actualized (discovered) in our embedded experience within the world. Likewise moral truths are real relational potentialities that become actualized in our embedded experience within community.
Neither, as truths, are merely matters of personal opinion or preference.
Quoting Mww
When it comes to the universal moral truths, I think disagreement is irrational. For example I don't believe it is possible to rationally disagree with the moral truths that murder, rape, torture and so on are wrong. Can you think of any examples of disagreements with those moral truths that you would consider to be rational?
Quoting Mww
We have a notion of truth in itself, just as we have notions of actuality in itself, things in themselves, and so on: basically noumena, but these 'truths' cannot be anything for us, all our truths are relative to our own experience; they are relational, not absolute.
I'm interested to hear more about the 'catastrophic flaw" though.
If moral stances are merely personal emotional responses then they would have no need of inter-subjective justification, and if they are in no need of inter-subjective justification then they are in no need of explanation.
Of course I don't believe moral stances are merely personal emotional responses or preferences. They are inter-subjectively acquired, sustained and justified, so they are relative not merely to individual subjects.
Objectively, language is only sounds, marks, gestures, etc.
The idea of a moral stance that has no meaning or judgment attached to it is incoherent.
I’m ok with everything after the dot dot dot. Six of one, half dozen of the other?
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Quoting Janus
Agreed, unequivocally. Opinion has no logical validity, and preference can imply a relativism whereas a truth can not.
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Quoting Janus
Agreed, in principle. Disagreement would be irrational iff universal moral truths are established by means of an antecedent law. I presented Tim with a logical proof for establishing the universality of murder being immoral, so I think each instance of such establishment would require a proof of its own. But that being given, disagreement would indeed be irrational.
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Awww......I was hoping you’d offer a possibility for the flaw. But never mind......we both gave all sortsa stuff about truth, but neither of us reduced the concept to something relevant to the stuff we said. In other words, what is truth? Or, even better, is there any sense of truth at all, that would falsify the stuff we said.
I like your “notion of truth”, but doesn’t analytic philosophy demand more than a notion?
I’ll go first: truth is the non-contradiction of a conception with its object.
Why? (the logic may seem obvious to you but it's not to me)
Careful.
Quoting creativesoul
If this is indubitably the case, you’d have to either find or assume something different in order for the doubt necessary to counter the societal norm to manifest. You won’t be able to find it, because it wasn’t given, and if you assume it, you’re open to accusations of assuming the antecedent.
It should be the case that an offset for the norm is impossible, but you’ll never be granted a successful argument.
A logical proof! It doesn't establish anything unless it is logically sound. And likely, out of those of us who have already developed a meta-ethical position on such matters, only those of us who are already moral universalists on murder being wrong will accept that it's logically sound.
I'll concede this...
Your wording is misleading. To claim that they couldn't 'find' anything wrong presumes in its expression that wrongness is something one could potentially find in a universal sense, yet that is the very point in question. This is just sophistry.
Quoting tim wood
More sophistry. "Enough" for what? Again, your language use deliberately implies that which is the matter in question, that there is some task of universal judgement to be done and that S and TS are satisfied they have completed that task. The meaningfulness of such a task is the very matter in question.
Quoting tim wood
No. This has been repeatedly explained to you and your refusal to acknowledge this is nothing but bad faith. To a relativist, 'wrong' is that which they feel is wrong, so it doesn't even make sense to say an action isn't wrong which they feel is wrong. Again you're simply presuming your world view is true and then showing how relativism doesn't work from that perspective. Well, obviously it doesn't, but it's the perspective that is in question.
Quoting tim wood
Fine, why must we do unto others...
Quoting tim wood
No problem. It is good for all people calked Jim (who live at 23 The Boulevard, born 23/01/1960) to commit murder. Would Jim the psychopath rationally want that rule be universalised? Yes.
Quoting tim wood
Authorised by whom, just according to whom? You're just begging the question again.
Quoting tim wood
Aside from the unpleasant arrogance that accompanies this question. If you were to argue that relativism was relative, I would expect the same support as has been presented here. Is it universally true that relativism is the case? Is there a mechanism by which this truths is made universal? Which is the simpler explanation?
Quoting tim wood
Valid arguments are worthless normatively when their premises are false.
Quoting tim wood
Honestly, is this what you think passes for quality debate? You offer a circumlocutory way of saying "I don't agree with you" and then accuse your interlocutors of hand-waiving and lack of substance.
So it's not true that physical phenomena are reference-frame relative per the theory of relativity?
Could you reference that post somehow if it's not too much trouble? Maybe link to it, or at least retype or paste a brief text string that's unique to it?
No one has ever said anything like "therefore it isn't wrong," and in fact we've explicitly explained, in some detail, in quite a few different posts, why and how such a "therefore" doesn't work, is absurd, depends on a category error, etc.
About a third of the way down, pg 43.
Thanks.
Quoting Mww
If so, I'd say that first premise already has a problem, because of the idea of "properly understanding" a concept.
Correct. It is not true that physical phenomena are reference-frame relative. It’s an isotopic universe which means there is no preferred reference frame for the occurrence of phenomena. But I understand what you were driving at, so yes, per SR, the observations of phenomena show reference frame relativity.
Still, I think I will invoke the dreaded categorical error, insofar as my “preference can imply a relativism whereas a truth can not” predicated on logical thought, is very far removed from SR, predicated on metaphysical naturalism.
As an aside, metaethical moral relativism didn’t come into vogue until the early 20th century, about the same time as the paradigm shift in natural science. I wonder....did one chose “relativism” because the other chose “relativity”? Or the other way around?
I'm not clear on the distinction you're making there, and in particular, I'm not sure why you're bringing up the idea of a preferred reference frame.
Of course. Anything can be found problematic if one tries hard enough. In any speculative philosophy with syllogistic arguments, the author can only advance valid conclusions, consistent with the premises the philosophy expounds.
It then becomes incumbent on the dialectical opponent to prove the premise false.....not problematic or merely inconclusive or irrelevant.....but false, in order to falsify the conclusion.
We’re even then. I wasn’t clear on why you brought up physical phenomena when what you were responding to was mental preference. So I just ran with it, trying to connect them somehow.
I had no way of knowing you scope for saying "'Truth' can't be relative," and especially given that most folks on this board use "truth" to refer to objective facts in some manner, I figured your scope was one of maximum generality.
Tim used “ownership of my life is absolute”, and I used that as a condition for the argument. So no, in this case the alluded truth was a reduction to a minimum particular, not an induction to maximum generality.
And I didn’t say, and I didn’t mean to imply, that truth can’t be relative, but only that the truth of murder being immoral can’t be relative, and then iff one accepts the conditions given in the syllogism.
Agreed, most folks do use truth to refer to objective facts in some manner. But moral philosophy doesn’t deal in a posteriori facts, but moreso a priori practical reason. Anthropology and empirical psychology may deal in objective moral facts, but, being a transcendental reductionist, I’m not impressed with them.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Are you ok with it? Dissenting or affirming opinion?
"nothing whatsoever wrong in themselves."
"those persons thought their actions were acceptable..."
Both of those are about what those individuals think. What they think implies nothing outside of the context of what they think.
Actually, I should clarify that. The second is about what they think, and the first is a statement that actions aren't right/wrong outside of what people think.
It's not impossible. It does require something new. New correlations between some old things and some new things. Not worth getting into here, but it cannot happen until one first has a baseline from which to doubt/question.
This recent talk about 'universal' and 'truth' and 'moral truth' seems misguided to me.
What about relativism prevents two people from seeing if they agree about some fundamental preferences? Relativism does not argue (and has not been in this thread) that there is no room for any rational argument. If two people agree that they both wish to avoid killing innocent people, then an argument could be had about how best to achieve that goal. Relativism is just acknowledging that there has to at least be a goal in the first place, that not amount of application of rationality to facts can tell you what you ought to do. Once a goal is present and agreed on, any amount of rational argument can take place as to how to achieve it. Although if this thread is anything to go by, that is of almost no use whatsoever.
Quoting tim wood
You keep going on about this and it's very disingenuous of you. No one is refraining from judgement about other people murdering, no one is forced to let others murder them without complaint.
Quoting tim wood
What does this even mean, and why does it make relativism inconsistent?
Quoting tim wood
Firstly, reason is clearly far from universal. You think you're applying it here, I'm convinced you're not. How does that happen if reason is universal? Secondly, even if reason is universal, relativism makes no comment on that, relativism is a statement about the motives on which reason acts, not reason itself.
Quoting tim wood
Can you please try to act like a grown up. Anyone who's spent any serious time debating will know there are differences of opinion. What seems clear to you is a mystery to me, and what seems obvious to me is opaque to you. If all you're going to to is bluster about how anything that doesn't make sense to you must therefore not be an argument, and anything which is opposed to your world view is disgusting and toxic, then what the hell are you doing on a discussion forum?
You’re right, it’s not impossible, if something new is available. But in the case at hand, there was posited a non-compliance, an offset of the norm, but with nothing new justifying it. I must say I had secret hopes as to why you conceded, but I’ll probably never know, other than, as you say.....not worth getting into.
Misguided. Care to elaborate?
Demonstrate why it's not.
Please demonstrate anytime in history where any one group of people have made a collective decision that appeals to any type of provable objective code.
If you can't, then how can you manage to type out paragraph after paragraph pertaining to, effectively, nothing? It's very straightforward. Any extended dialogue develops in the nuances of believing in an objective reality. If you can't first perceive and demonstrate that objective reality then stop waffling.
Secondly, I read as far as your straw man that I cannot find anything at all wrong with the actions of the infamous mass murdering humans (I strongly believe that it is counterproductive to dehumanise them by calling them monsters. That they were human is extremely important to explicitly acknowledge) of the 20th century, and I decided not to read any further as result.
The best definition of truth that one hundred years of analytical philosophy was able to produce would seem to be Tarski's deflationary T-sentence: “'Snow is white' is true iff snow is white”.
It reminds me of Aristotle's: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” Apparently not much progress with a definition! But we do have a notion of truth which is in accordance with those two formulations, I would say.
And I think your formulation exemplifies the same basic logic of correspondence.
Expressed in the terms of your formulation, for me the object of moral thinking is harmonious community. So, to say that murder is good is a contradiction with its object, because, as Kant pointed out, murder cannot be a general moral good if the object of any moral good is social harmony. "Murder is good" thus cannot be true.
The objection that some have raised that murder might be good for say a serial killer is inapt, because the question is whether murder can be a general good, and not merely whether it could be a good for a few psychopaths.
Because I don't want to claim that the world is some way that it isn't ontologically. The idea of something being morally wrong simpliciter is false in terms of what the world is like ontologically. I see our job as philosophers as being to analyze, observe, report what the world is factually like. It's the same thing that scientists should be doing. We're just using a different methodology.
Quoting tim wood
They're wrong subjectively, when we make the subjective judgment in question. They're not wrong objectively.
Quoting tim wood
Nope. I'm reporting what the world is factually like.
Quoting tim wood
Things are morally wrong or right from subjective perspectives. Subjectivity is the correct realm for moral judgments. We need to talk about them in the context of the correct domain. Not a domain that makes no sense for them, because it's not what the world is like.
Quoting tim wood
I'm not saying anything like this. I'm saying that moral judgments are something that individuals do, and that's all they are--something that individuals do. That's the correct domain for them. Every individual could do some moral judgment identically (ignoring nominalism for a moment). We could all have the same criteria. Nonetheless, it's still just something that we do as individuals. We can't get correct or incorrect a "non-personal moral judgment" because there is no such thing.
Quoting tim wood
Again, and again, and again, and again . . . we've tried to correct this misunderstanding of yours. NO ONE IS SAYING WHAT YOU JUST SAID ABOVE. No one. The correct domain for moral judgments is what we think as individuals. What we think as individuals in this case, for most of us, happens to be that we condemn people who murder. We don't say this because the universe outside of people says that there's a problem with murder. We, as individual people operating in the world, thinking about it, etc. feel that there's a problem with murder. Hence we condemn it.
What's the tl;dr version?
Sometimes it seems like we should rename this place the logorrhea forum.
OK, I guess. I’m not happy with tautological truths myself, but ehhhh.....I’ll never be famous.
Agreed on harmonious community, if one thinks of morality as an act, or a set of actions.
I gotta say, being an unabashed transcendentalist, if ANYBODY had said he’d said anything about Kant in general and the CI in particular, I would have known about it. I would have researched the crap out of it just to see where it was right or wrong. Like you, I went back through the entire thread, and found not a gawddamn thing about anybody telling you anything about the CI, joke or otherwise.
So I’m with you, for whatever that’s worth. I wouldn’t have gone through the same trouble as you, just to find out the same thing and come to the same conclusion. There’s dishonesty in the building, dishonorable and disrespectful, herein never to be taken seriously.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/265816
It wasn't hard to find at all. I used the advanced search function and found it with ease in a matter of minutes. Yes, I know, he now has egg all over his face, and I can't think of anyone more deserving.
He owes me an apology, but this has gone so far that I think that I would throw it right back in his face, even if he did offer me an apology.
And yes, you don't see reason in meta-ethical moral relativism. You don't see reason in it largely because you still don't even understand it, 47 pages later, in spite of reasonable efforts. And you don't even understand that you don't even understand it. You persist in attacking your own misunderstanding, and you seemingly have no qualms in resorting to unreasonable and underhanded tactics in pursuit your narrow-minded goal to "defeat" meta-ethical moral relativism, or amoralism, or moral nihilism, or chaos, or doom, or destruction, or Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Trump, disgusting, evil, toxic monster! (They're all one and the same to you, right?).
And as for Kant and his categorical imperative, you haven't said anything at all which would give me reason to withdraw or rethink my criticism. Merely saying that I don't understand him and suchlike is not a valid response, and don't even think about giving me a "You too!" style response, because I have put great effort into explaining moral relativism to the likes of you and Rank Amateur, even though it has been a thankless task, yet you've shown very little improvement, if any. We're still having to correct the same basic misunderstandings 47 pages later.
Secondly, I don't think that quoting from the SEP, or worse, directly from Kant, is the best way to get his point across. I think, generally, the best way to get a point across is to be clear and to simplify and avoid jargon where possible.
What I find annoying about Kant, and this is especially true of Kant, is the amount of jargon he coined, which needs to be translated in order to be understood. I already knew about "hypothetical imperatives". I wasn't too clear on "practical reason". One online source states that he defined it as the capacity of rational agents to act according to principles (i.e. the conception of laws). And this stuff about "rational agency" and "autonomous will" and the like is similarly obscure unless you are already fluent in Kantanese, which I'm not. I'm not fluent in Hegelese or Heideggerese either, although Kant isn't half as bad as those two. And it annoys me that that's even a problem in the first place, because I doubt the supposed necessity of it.
But anyway, yes, of course I disagree with Kant's categorical imperative. That much is surely obvious. Though, evidently, I haven't just dismissed it as a joke, in spite of doing so initially, and justifiably in response to your bare assertion which it was replying to, in accordance with Hitchen's razor. I've submitted criticism, and I stand by that criticism.
Bringing up hypothetical imperatives seems to miss the point of my criticism. Kant might well have had them in his sights, but so what? They make way more sense, and are way more relatable than his categorical imperative. I am criticising his categorical imperative. I am asserting that he largely failed, because the categorical imperative is largely alien and useless and ineffectual. I know enough about logic to recognise a logical conditional when I see one, and that is how it is commonly argued. I'm just skipping ahead to that key bit. One can ask, "Why should I act only according to that maxim whereby I can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law?". And that's when the conditional kicks in. "Well, if you were to...". But I don't. And my morality is just fine, thanks. I know that intuitively. The categorical imperative is redundant and artificial. I am not subservient to any supposed universal moral laws. That is not my measure of right and wrong. My own conscience is sufficient for the job. How can that objection be overcome? I don't think that it can. That's what I meant when I said that it has no force over myself and others. It cannot override my moral foundation in moral feelings. It is just a curious little thought experiment, but it isn't at all practical or realistic. What's practical and realistic is simply appealing to your conscience without any need for Kant's abstract and rationalist way of thinking.
New thought/belief.
All new moral thought/belief that knowingly and deliberately goes against the societal grain begins by questioning the truth, veracity, and/or dependability of the morality that one already has.
The ability to do that takes something else. Something aside from the rules we first learn to live by.
In Sapientia's candidate, we could very well have all this and more. So, yeah...
It is possible for one to learn to how to disagree with the morality adopted within his/her/their original worldview.
Thinking in such terms requires being able to use such terms in some acceptable form or other.
Something original would be a novel correlation. Something new could be a novel correlation to the individual, but it also could have already been made by someone else.
Is that more what you're looking for?
I've no idea what purported sense of 'universal' is being put to use here?
One cannot doubt unless one already has/holds some pre-existing thought/belief upon which the doubt is grounded. Early on during initial language acquisition, there is no such baseline.
Can one of the participants here that is using the notion of moral truth offer a criterion for truth, and then one for a kind of truth called "moral", and then again for a 'universal' and 'moral' truth?
:smile:
Sometimes people from all walks of life do things that are not good. One of those things is judging a whole group of people without adequate ground to make that judgment. Not all judging of a group of people is to be avoided. To quite the contrary, sometimes it is necessary.
I do not care that someone is black in any other way that I care that anyone is any 'race'. The scare-quotes are a nod to the guys that argue dna based objections to race. Rather, I care that there are people from all walks of life who are assholes as a result of not giving a fuck about others. Sometimes those not cared for can be other races, religions, ethnicities, families, cultures, etc., as a group.
The fallacy is gross overgeneralization. Sometimes, the product is racism. Sometimes those committing the fallacy of thought about a group of people can wield tremendous power over the very groups that they do not give a fuck about.
That power is governed by the perpetrators moral thought/belief.
How does that happen?
I mean... WTF?
All codes of conduct do as well.
What is the term 'objective' doing here aside from putting an utterly inadequate framework to use and creating unnecessary complexity? Not all complexity is admirable.
:wink:
What is it that you keeping referring to? Oh yeah, now I remember. The Oracle.
Please. Mythology?
That's as far as moral relativity can take us.
One cannot bring about the desire to maintain social harmony, for example, simply by desiring it. We live in, and interact with, an environment and a diversity of relatively autonomous actors. As such the fulfillment of any desire is going to require significant rational analysis of one's environment to assess how best it can be delivered.
So...can we move on to your response to the rest of my arguments?
Thanks, I appreciate the support. Is it worth it? Probably not to be honest. It's a strange place here, billed as a discussion forum, but very much comes across as a personal blog for a few people to simply declare what they 'reckon' and keep doing so in the face of any contrary position.
I enjoy engaging with people who have a different opinion to me as I find it helps to hone my own arguments, but there's only so many times I can say the same thing in slightly different ways.
But to be honest, the biggest reason I keep reading is that some of the nonsense people write is hilarious...
(By the way, I'm not being notified properly when you tag me, so if I miss anything, apologies in advance.)
As I've repeatedly pointed out (with no response, and this goes for @tim wood too) this is only true of any particular level of granularity you choose. Murder is a subset of killing, it is a type of killing. So if you can't say "all killing is OK (you can't generalise the rule" it's OK to kill"), then does that make all killing bad?
Obviously it can't, and having this pre-defined answer in mind you move the goalposts such that you're able to change the question until it matches the answer you were looking for all along.
But why stop there? Killing by psychopaths is a subset of all murder, murder by people called Dave on a Tuesday at 6:00 is a subset of all murdering. Could it be rationally universalised by Dave, that such killing was OK? Yes it certainly could.
And how did Kant get around this problem? He fudged it with some waffle about having to be honest with yourself about what it is you're universalising. Which makes the whole thing subjective again since the satisfaction with one's self-honesty is a subjective judgement.
Come on. Just re read your own previous comments. The whole thing has been a street fight from start to finish and you're just as responsible for that state of affairs as anyone else. You've barely presented an argument beyond your own incredulity and you've basically spent more time accusing the other side of being "toxic" and trying to imply that we have no feeling about Hitler, than you have actually addressing any of the points raised.
If you want want to raise the tone of the debate (and God knows it needs raising), then lead by example, not by slander.
For fuck's sake man. You've written twelve posts in a row and none but one of them address anyone here directly by quote. More than half of them are just trivial truths and the rest statements of what I presume you think are 'facts' without any argument to support them.
This is supposed to be a discussion not your personal blog, will you please stop spamming and try to engage with one of the actual threads of discussion going on here.
Hear, hear.
If you had it then you wouldn't say that anyone's view amounts to "if S thinks that m isn't wrong, then R says that fact implies that m isn't wrong simpliciter"
Yes, but there is still the question about a possible instantiation for it. If a society is of a certain moral persuasion, and a fully inculcated member is nonetheless subsequently in moral opposition to some part of it, the question is raised as to where the opposition came from. Without experience, without some external influence, he is subject to his own a priori practical reason as the source of his opposition. But where did reason get the idea the societal norm should be opposed in the first place? What enables a subject to declare that whatever some norm might be, he is opposed to it? If it be supposed the opposition arose from mere feeling, for lacking experience reduces the means to nothing else, then it becomes manifest that feelings have the power over reason, which is impossible because feelings have no object until reason cognizes one as belonging to it necessarily.
“This just doesn’t feel right” may be at the attention of conscious awareness of a subject as a relevant feeling, and it should be given he understands both the “this” and the “not right”, otherwise he would have no ground for the feeling to begin with, but that in itself does not enable its negation. The most he is rationally allowed to conclude, is whatever sustains racism, he opposes. Or, which is the same thing, whatever feelings the majority hold in the form of a social norm, he does not. But to declare from that alone that he is in fact a non-racist, without the experience with which to connect the declaration, and without the cognition of some object that belongs necessarily to the feeling he has but the other members do not, he is admitting to an irrational cognition.
In short, one merely saying he is non-racist with respect to an entire society of normalized racists, doesn’t make him so. He may think himself non-racist, but without the experience of being in the proximity of the conditions by which the racism is distinguished, he wouldn’t know whether he was or not.
See, here is an example that you do not have it. No one is saying "not only does that not make it bad." What makes something bad morally is that an individual has the disposition that it's bad morally. That's what making something bad morally is. Things are morally good or bad to someone. The only way "does not make it bad" follows from any set of facts is if no one has the disposition that it's morally bad.
We do not agree with "do not acknowledge it as badness," because we say that what badness is is a personal disposition against something.
So the disagreement is over the ontological nature of badness. Just what it is ontologically.
Quoting tim wood
Which is simply saying that from their perspective, it's not bad if they do not think it's bad.
Quoting tim wood
I'm a subjectivist on reason/rationality, too. You know my view on mathematics.
On my view, there's a tendency that people have to project at least aspects of their mental phenomena "into the world at large"--to project it outside of their heads, and figure that it must be present in the outside world just the way that a rock is present in the outside world . . . only they make an even worse move and figure that it must be present in the outside world in some abstract manner, where it doesn't really have a location, but it also doesn't have "no location," and so on. People tend to do this with the things they feel strongest about, that they can't imagine thinking otherwise about, as if, for some reason, their own minds could not be capable of being that firmly convinced of anything--the idea basically amounts to people thinking that the source of the content (moral judgments, principles of reason, etc.) must be something outside of themselves, so that there's basically an implication that brains can't work that way by themselves.
"Did he do bad things," then, is necessarily asking for someone's opinion about this. "Bad" is always "to whom"?
Quoting tim wood
The ground of any standards, for anything, is always persons' preferences.
Ironic, isn’t it, that conceptions or ideas or even mere notions, intended to be so all-inclusive the induction principle cannot falsify them, can only be derived from the reduction to a single instance?
Here, if I ever use the term “universal”, I mean it to stand for a circumstance that would be constant for a rational agent no matter where he is or the conditions under which he finds himself. Otherwise, I don’t think the term should be used at all.
Agreed. Please, among these historical agreements, demonstrate what objective reality was discovered.
Yes, they made an appeal but I asked for provable appeal. Historically, we have always made appeals to objective moral law, this doesn't mean they were successful. It also doesn't mean that the decisions made did not benefit for more social cohesion.
For an objective moral law, you first need to demonstrate that social cohesion is an objective "right" or desire.
You're right, but this is because it's assumed that what people desire is social cohesion. It's convoluted to first consider whether the majority of people desire freedom from pain and misery.
Consulting the relativity of morality doesn't aid the emotive momentum of civil rights movements. People are happy to roll with the prerequisite that murder is "wrong"; Most don't question relativity.
Importantly, (and please acknowledge this point) there is no functionality to an objective morality, even if it exists; We are free to ignore it, should we feel differently.
Some people would dictate that the bible objectively states that homosexuality is wrong. Even if they could (they can't) objectively demonstrate this, it doesn't benefit anyone; We can ignore it, save for the punishment of hellfire, should they be able to prove it (they can't).
The problem is that, semantically, the terms "morality, right and wrong" have connotations of objectivity.
When there are mistaken beliefs about what morality is ontologically, sure.
Yes, which is most of the time, I'd say.
My experience is different, but I don't suppose that I'm interacting with most of the people in the world. :wink:
Just curious if on your experience a lot of people are also objectivists on aesthetic value.
Lucky you!
Perhaps I'm being presumptuous about most of the world, but certainly your average person on the street would be mistaken. Not necessarily mistaken... but ignorant to the concept.
Hmm... I suppose that most wouldn't be objectivists when it comes to aesthetics, but most wouldn't be inclined to draw comparisons between aesthetics and morality.
I understand what you are saying, and if I have missed it mea culpa ahead of time. But has this point actually been supported here. Again - not being difficult - but trying to understand.
This view that moral judgments are individual metal phenomena - and therefore by definition subjective.
is, i think at the core of the disagreement. But I have not seen this, or if i did, i did not recognize it as such, supported in any way.
I think there is some reasonable evidence to question the underlying assumption of de facto subjectivity simply because it is an individual metal phenomena.
I can think 2 + 2 = 5, and most would say that i was in error, it is objectively true it = 4, and so on for many physical and verifiable things. So I would say there is evidence that I can think things that are in conflict with objective and verifiable reality.
Both and myself have pointed to near universal moral judgments, and at least my underlying question on these is, as above, does it not show that there can be objectively moral views that individual thoughts can be in error of.
It seem the majority of your argument, at least to me rests on an assumption that has not been support yet as far as i can see.
Is there some support for: all moral judgments are individual mental phenomena and therefor subjective. ?
with out support the argument seems circular to me.
P1 - all individual mental phenomena are subjective
P2 - Moral judgments are individual mental phenomena
C - moral judgments are subjective
again - truly trying to understand
Quoting Rank Amateur
How would it show that, though? Why wouldn't it just show that (almost) everyone thinks in the same way?
Quoting Rank Amateur
Definitely. And what do we need in those cases? We need some evidence of the thing in question occurring extramentally. That's all we need to do. If we can provide some evidence of moral judgments occurring extramentally, then cool. Insofar as we're making a claim about those extramental moral judgments that we've provided evidence of, we'd be able to get correct or incorrect what those extramental moral judgments say.
I'm assuming you'd want to include an "only" at the end of that--presumably that's what's at issue. The support is this: there's a complete lack of evidence of moral judgments occurring outside of minds.
Quoting Rank Amateur
"Therefore subjective" is just a stipulation of definition. We're using "subjective" to refer to "occurs only in minds." That doesn't need any support. It's just a stipulation about how we're going to use a term.
and as on many many many other things - lack of evidence, is just lack of evidence. And even that is in dispute. And at the core of point all along. Near universal moral judgments on some issues is evidence that the source of some moral judgments could have a source outside individual mental phenomena.
We will disagree here which is fine - just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I know it is sufficient to you and yours, but to me at least the core basis for your entire argument is poorly supported at best, and in a very real way begs the entire question.
but thanks so much for a good and understandable reply.
Again, how would that be evidence of that? You're not explaining this idea. You're just stating it, but it seems completely arbitrary to me.
I don't want to write anything else for a moment, because I want the only response to be asking you HOW that would be evidence of objectivity.
The question is not absurd *because* it removes the answer from psychology, which is the empirical doctrine of inclinations, and installs it into metaphysical doctrine of good. Does an action occur because it is good for something, in which case the means informs the good as a preferred end, or does an action occur because it is good in itself, in which case the means informs itself. Acting from preference is a means to an end which may be self-contradictory, hence immoral; acting from good in itself is a means entirely consistent with its ends and cannot be immoral.
The question may be asked, did he do bad things, but the question reduces to, did he think he did good things because he thought they were things good in itself to do? Such being the case, any semblance of preference immediately factors out of the moral equation, because if he acts from good in itself, he is acting on a subjective principle, the deviation from which is immoral for him.
Being not much more than merely kicking necessity can down the metaphysical road, and given the inherent imperfection of humans in general......there might not be a final answer to “is there a standard?”
firstly, this is your flying teapot, not mine. It should not be my job to prove your point is false. In pure argument form - I can just remain unconvinced that you have provided sufficient support for your position and remain skeptical. But being an agreeable sort -
Observation:
Almost all human beings on the entire planet have the same moral judgment on a particular action.
Possible explanations:
1. billions upon billions of individual mental phenomena all independently reach the same moral judgment.
2. there is some reason or basis external to individual and independent mental phenomena that is the source of the near universal judgment. Call it instinct, human nature, evolution, God, or what you please.
I find 2 a more logical explanation than 1.
We could just as well say that "every single person having a different moral stance on x" could have an outside source--and sure, it could. It's not impossible.
But how is that evidence of there being an outside source?
Mere possibility isn't sufficient to believe anything, because the contradictory is usually possible, too.
I'm not asking you to prove anything. I'm asking you "Could you please explain what the heck you're thinking here, because it just seems completely mysterious to me."
Quoting Rank Amateur
It seems to me like "logical" is the same as you telling me that you find it more intuitively plausible. Would you agree with that?
Quoting Rank Amateur
Re this, do you find it plausible that billions of individuals have other bodily similarities, where the similar things are not given wholesale to the individuals from outside of themselves?
By the way friend sent me a text reminding me yesterday was the anniversary of the Wall of Sound - thanks bear
Wall of Sound.....as in Phil Specter? And his all-girl groups of the 60’s?
https://livemusicblog.com/features/grateful-dead-wall-of-sound/
Cool. Wasn’t aware of that. Thanks.
I think the problem lies in the fact that "objective morality", whatever it actually means, doesn't provide a function. You may as well state that there's a metaphysical shit on a wall that we all have an unconscious relation to.
Morality is about functionality and problem solving.
By definition, because this objective morality is supposedly independent of the individual, it is subjective in itself. It is meaningless to try to obtain guidance, if that is the aim, because we all have contextual desires.
Any instinctual agreements over moral action can be explained via evolution; But it's just an observation of what is, it doesn't hold relevance to how it should be.
Yeah, either they already have the same moral preferences, or you have to try to "talk them into them" by appealing to other preferences they have, other things they believe, or you're out of luck. As it is, there are many moral stances that I'm simply out of luck on re having anything done about them. My stances in those regards are too unusual. Unusual enough that there's no way I'm going to be persuading anyone to them, at least without far more time and energy than I'm willing to put into it.
Believing in objective morality makes no difference in this regard, by the way. If the right other people (read "people with the power to do anything about it") don't share your beliefs about which moral stances are the objectively correct ones, you have to try to talk them into your view or you're out of luck.
No, you state that "the monstrousness of these bad actors is bad in itself". Haven't actually heard an argument yet.
Quoting tim wood
No. Reason cannot 'produce' anything on its own and therefore its products are only applicable to its factors.
Quoting tim wood
No it isn't. It is a description of a rule, or the application of reason to a set of axioms. This is basic mathematics. Maths is based on axioms. The Peano axioms, if assumed, for example, will lead to 2+2=4,but nothing in the world simply makes it the case by reason alone, how could it possibly?
Quoting tim wood
No I didn't, that's exactly the point I was making. You distinguish between murder and other killing. Murder is different. Jealous murder is different from all other murder (even carrying a different sentence in some countries). Jealous murder committed by men is different from all other jealous murder...and so on.
Quoting tim wood
And we're back to this childish shit again, didn't take long. Is this your counter argument to everyone who disagrees with you "you obviously don't understand..."? My argument is exactly that of Elizabeth Anscombe in "Modern Moral Philosophy" where she argues that Kant's Categorical Imperetive "... is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it.”. So unless you're also claiming that your understanding of Kant is better than hers, then can we just try to have an adult discussion about the issues rather than waive criticism away with a vague claim of misunderstanding?
Morality is subjective. But morality isn't the entirety of the world. There are plenty of objective things. Morality just ain't one of them.
Collective community wisdom is evidence of what the consensus is in a community, right?
I don't understand what you mean by supported. I presume you don't deny that "Things are morally good or bad to someone.". It is a given that moral views are the property of people right? So what you're trying to argue is that in addition to being something people experience, moral views come from somewhere.
So the relativists, not believing that to be the case, have nothing to support. We are saying only that with which we all agree "people have moral views". It is the objdctivists who are positing some additional thing. Now if you want to just say "I believe this additional thing exists, can you prove overwhelmingly that it doesn't" then I have no issue with you. The answer is, no, I cannot prove to you overwhelming that it doesn't.
If, however, you're saying that it is a fact that this additional thing exists and I must prove it doesn't in order to sustain my position, then I'd take issue with that.
I also believe that Occam's Razor has proven itself to be a useful technique, which make my presumption of no additional factor a better argument to start with, but if you don't believe that, then we must simply disagree on the matter.
I meant what is the basis of TS's and I think your core belief that all mental phenomena is by definition subjective.
TS has already acknowledged and I think you would agree that the "all" is not correct. Things that can be shown to have objective truth outside this, such as physical reality, are not subjective by the definition above. The cat is on the chair is objectively true no matter the mental phenomena of an individual who says otherwise. So we are capable of objective thought and about thinking incorrectly about things that are objectively true. But to TS and you this does not apply to moral judgments. And as best I can tell the reason for this, just is, and has no support. TS's case is a pure no seeum argument - I don't see any evidence that there is any other way, so there is not any other way. Yours seems to be pure denial that such a thing is possible.
Quoting Isaac
And you do understand how completely circular that is.
Cutting to the chase - I do think it is very possible as I have said a few times, that it is very possible that there is an outside source to some moral judgments. Call it human nature, instinct, evolution or God.
And I find this a better explanation of the near universal moral judgments on some issues than your explanation.
I don't feel either of us has any certain advantage one over the other with the basis of our core beliefs and that is what I wanted to check. And with that the case, I am happy to agree to disagree.
I don't think all mental phenomena are subjective. Terrapin and I differ on this significantly. Personally I find the most successful definition of the subjective/objective divide is that subjective refers to truths which others cannot possibly verify to their satisfaction, and objective are truths which others can verify.
"I like this pizza" is subjective because nobody could possibly verify that I do (I might only be pretending to enjoy it). There's no external evidence which proves the matter.
"The cat is on the chair" is objective because generally if someone else looks, finds the cat to be on the chair, they are satisfied.
This division is a of course, not always clear. If, in theory, we could mri scan somebody and neuroscience had advanced to a level where we can identify likes and dislikes, "I like pizza" might one day become objective.
Anyway, that aside the issue with morality is about relativism, not subjective Ness. I believe moral statements are only relatively true. It is true that I think murder is wrong (generally), but it is nonsensical to ask if murder is wrong absent of any person thinking it.
This has nothing to do with subjectiveness and everything to do with the location of the 'wrongness'. The idea that murder is wrong is contained within the minds of individual people. That much I presume we agree on. I see no reason to presume it is also contained elsewhere. As Terrapin has said, noses are contained within people too, we are not surprised that they are all similar. The 'blueprint' for noses is contained within DNA which has been inherited from a common ancestors, so it's obvious why they're all much the same.
Again, I'm just saying that moral sentiments are contained within minds, and everyone already agrees with that so I feel no need to support it. I don't see any reason to think they also occur elsewhere.
Quoting Rank Amateur
Evolution is not an outside source. The means by which evolution acts is by inheritance of genetic material, mutation in an individual and environmental selection. There is no mechanism by which it ensures we all have the same moral sentiments, and even if there were, I don't understand how that would make a person without those sentiments 'wrong'. Are people who are born without a nose 'wrong' for not having one?
that could actually be the worst philosophic argument I have ever heard.
Isaac - I completely understand your point, and I completely disagree. Nothing wrong with that. The core base of your belief is on as shaky ground as mine. That is the reason there is so many different views on the basis of morality. If that was not the case - we wouldn't be disagreeing, and we would not be at 49 pages.
Really? Are you saying that moral sentiments are not in people's minds? That when I think "murder is wrong" that thought is not taking place in my mind? That's all I mean by it.
Anscombe MMP, 1958)
The categorical imperative is a misrepresentation. Anscombe actually said “...his rule on universalized maxims is useless without stipulations....”.
“....A maxim is the subjective principle of volition...”
(Kant FPMM, 1785)
"...Act always on such a maxim as thou canst at the same time will it to be a universal law"; this is the sole condition under which a will can never contradict itself; and such an imperative is categorical....”
(ibid)
It is clear the maxim, the subjective principle, being universalized is antecedent to an imperative behavior. It is the rule that’s claimed to be useless, and the categorical imperative is not a rule. It is a law. The difference is critical to deontological moral philosophy in general, and Kant’s mandate for pure practical reason, the concept of an autonomous, freely determinant will, in particular.
“....there is an imperative which commands a certain conduct immediately, (...) and commands are laws which must be obeyed, that is, must be followed, even in opposition to inclination. (...) the categorical imperative, is not limited by any condition, and as being absolutely, although practically, necessary, may be quite properly called a command....”
(ibid)
Hypothetical imperatives are rules, and if Anscombe’s thesis is to have power, she must only refer to these alone, in which case the they would be useless without a stipulation, which is not necessarily given:
“....When I conceive a hypothetical imperative, in general I do not know beforehand what it will contain until I am given the condition...”
(ibid)
The view to constructing a maxim, with respect to hypothetical imperatives, is nothing more than addressing whatever arbitrary want the description of the action provides. The view to constructing a maxim, with respect to a categorical imperative, involves a command of will, by which the description of the action must abide without exception.
Furthermore, there are as many hypothetical imperatives as there as circumstances that call for a moral determination and their respective maxims are just as many, as suits the mood of the will determining them. But there is one and only one categorical imperative, which demands the maxim one wills to become universal law, from which a certain act must follow necessarily by rule of law such that the act and the law do not contradict themselves, be chosen wisely. This proposition reduces to the proposition that the determinant will (the law) and the judgement of volition (the act) do not contradict themselves.
Is there remaining a question as to what form a relevant description of an action corresponding to a universalized maxim would have? While it is true Kant does not include a description per se, he makes it quite clear what the action is doesn’t matter. If one acts as if the maxim to which the imperative relates were a universal law, he is justified in calling himself morally worthy.
But, as I said before, I’ll never be famous, so....who cares.
Which makes it, in principle, objective.
True dat. :lol:
No problem.
... Or you could have just said "did you mean Categorical Imperetive, or did you mean maxim?"
Yes, I suppose it does, but what's important to me in the use of the terms is the pragmatic meaning, the reason why the distinction is of use to me. But I take your point.
There's nothing about your post which hasn't already been addressed. What is the point of this crazy merry-go-round? Serious question.
It's a relief to see someone who gets it, amongst others who simply don't. These are very good points. I have made them myself a number of times, and in a number of different discussions.
Some people fail to see the logic of this, and are guilty of special pleading, e.g. "Yes, but with murder it's different!".
It is a characteristically religious mindset, actually. Not like the open-mindedness of Hinduism, which is more accepting of other religions, but like the mindset of "My religion is the One True Religion, and only My Religion has authority over what's right and wrong!".
"If you don't accept my religion, then you're a heathen!"
"If you don't accept my morality, then you're a psychopath!"
And what are your qualifications for making that diagnosis? And why don't I recall undergoing a professional assessment conducted by you?
Again, that isn't a belief. It's simply a stipulation about how I use a term. Different people use the same terms in different ways. I use that term to refer to mental phenomena.
Yeah, I could have, but I was more interested in what she said.
That's a pretty obvious double standard.
Indeed, and that's what his argument boils down to. It is easily refuted. It isn't able to rule out competing explanations. Maybe there's an outside source. Maybe there isn't. It isn't difficult to imagine a possible world with either scenario. You're right to press him on [i]how[/I] near universal judgement is evidence of what he asserts (without supporting argument) that it is evidence of, but if you expect a proper response, you'll probably end up disappointed. He is intellectually dishonest and will refuse his burden of proof, yet he also won't concede. Instead, he'll respond with red herring after red herring, until you get distracted or grow sick and tired.
Except, wait a minute. Does an outside source even make any sense in the context of morality? Maybe it's not even possible, because it's a category error.
Yes, for Christ's sake, this [i]really[/I] shouldn't have to be clarified, let alone over and over again. I am also a moral subjectivist, but would anyone here in their right mind accuse me of idealism? Just look at my recent discussions. Look at the sheer number of criticisms I have made of it.
It beggars belief that anyone could struggle so much with such an elementary distinction.
Yeah, it's frustrating to have to keep correcting such simple things against straw men.
And why is it only people like us who are doing so? That is telling. The people on the other side of the debate either do not detect these problems or keep silent about them. With bad arguments like that, if I was on the other side of this debate, I would actively set out to dissociate myself with them. But instead, we see a lot of back patting. "Well said!", "Good point, Tim!", "Let's jerk off to Kant together, Tim!".
This is a general problem with him which spills over into other discussions. He either doesn't get how the burden of proof works or he deliberately disregards it. He only cares about trying to deflect attention away from his weaknesses and trying to manipulate his interlocutor into presenting justification after justification after justification, hoping to catch him out on something.
Is that an honourable way to engage in philosophical discussion?
If you were interested in what she said, then you wouldn't need to post it on a public forum. Just read the book.
If you thought other people in this discussion might be interested, then perhaps you could explain the relevance. I raised her argument as a position against the potential granularity of statements like "murder is wrong, one should not murder", which is exactly what her argument is against, so if you have any response to that line of argument perhaps you could post that instead of the playing childish games of one-upmanship with terminology.
As Tim said, this isn't a discussion its a street fight.
I don't see those formulations as "tautologous" so much as expressing the logical relation between actuality and truth. I agree that morality, if it is to have any communal significance, cannot but consist in acts. As principled intention it has significance for individuals to be sure; but where individuals do not transform intention into action I would say there can be no communal significance.
Quoting Mww
I think your explication of Kant here is very good. It highlights the question as to whether Kant's CI is really categorical in relation to all acts of moral significance, or maybe rather whether it is instead the general maxim and not any specific prescriptions which is categorical in cases such as lying. As you no doubt know, one of the main objections to Kant's CI is that he is taken to claim that certain actions, for example lying, are always wrong in every situation and ought never be done under any circumstances. (What I say here would obviously not apply to acts such as murder, rape and torture).
So you have the well-worn thought experiments like what if you were in Warsaw and you had Jews hidden in your cellar, and Nazi soldiers knocked on your door and asked if you were harbouring any Jews? If the usual interpretation of Kant is assumed, then according to that you should tell the soldiers that there are Jews in your basement.
Now if you wanted to say that you should not tell them about the Jews, and were challenged to universalize that determination as a maxim it would be something like "Never lie unless Nazi soldiers are asking if you are harbouring Jews when you are harbouring Jews". That seems way too specific for a universal maxim, so perhaps we could make it less specific and say something like "Never lie except to protect the innocent from unjust harm". The problem is that it would seem to be impossible to construct an unambiguous maxim which does not consist in a treatment of morally relevant actions such as lying simpliciter which says they are just always wrong.
In one of his replies to me, @Isaac (I believe deliberately) conflates murder with killing. I think what he wrote there was a red herring, it was irrelevant to the points I had made and consisted in an attempt to undermine them by sophistry, and so I didn't think it was worth responding to. (Life is too short to waste!) The reason I bring that up is because Kant did condone capital punishment, but only as punishment for committing murder. He asserted that a convicted murderer should be killed and that it is actually our moral duty to kill him or her. (Not saying I do or don't agree with that, by the way). In any case the point is that for Kant murder is always wrong and killing is not always wrong.
Apart from Kant's requirement for an unambiguous maxim, we also have his notion of intention. If your intention is always to do what is right, according to a conscience unfettered by self-interest, and that is translated into the basis of your actions, then perhaps Kant would say that you are behaving morally.
By the way you have said "I'll never be famous" at least a couple of times now. I'm just wondering what the significance of that is. Do you want to be famous? Or do you think you ought to be famous? No criticism here; I'm just curious.
I’m aware, and I’ve already covered murder.
Call it whatever you like, directly or indirectly, but you can bet your ass Tim wasn’t talking about me when he said it. Nevertheless, I call it passing on an instruction. I’m not qualified to refute her, only to present him. Let the chips fall where they may.
Anything else?
Yeah, The Good Professor took some serious flak for his conditions for maxims on lying. There are several references for the topic, and in typical Kantian fashion, one doesn’t say exactly the same as any other. But in an essay to the Frenchman Benjamin Constant,** he was pretty adamant in defending the subjective principle of absolute truthfulness. He justified it by changing the doing of harm to the doing of wrong, and it is always a violation of duty to do wrong. One must bring plenty of his own salt in cases like this.
Still, mass casualty events in Kant’s time were natural. I’d have to think he’d have done a little different job on this lying thing, if he’d witnessed WW1 or the Holocaust.....Hiroshima.......or some such man’s inhumanity to man thing. We are much less susceptible to perfection than his philosophy suggests for us.
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Quoting Janus
Absolutely. But it still raises the question as to whether one can still be a worthy moral agent if he is the only human around. He might be, but what would it matter sans community to be moral in. Nobody ever stipulated empty environment for a location of morality, over a communal social environment.
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Quoting Janus
Agreed.
**http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/KANTsupposedRightToLie.pdf
Moral agency, intention or action would seem to be pretty meaningless without community. If one were alone in the natural world one might form worthy moral intentions and commit to worthy moral actions in relation to animals and plants; a form of community!
Thanks for the link.
Where do you see intention in Kantian moral philosophy? Or any brand, for that matter. I never gave it much thought, myself.
Any understanding may be, by Kant's or any other lights, not up to it, but if our intention is pure, then we would still be acting morally, it seems to me. The question is whether any understanding of duty can be comprehensive enough to cover all situations, or whether we could know that our understanding of duty is the best possible understanding of it. Of course, there is also the question of whether pure intention is possible at all.
Indeed. We must know how deliberate change in one's deeply inculcated moral belief happens; what it takes in order to happen; what is required; etc. We need to know what the event itself needs to have already happened, in order for it to be able to. Otherwise, there is no way to know what it is that we're looking for and no way to know when we've found it.
We know it happens.
Indeed.
See, that's far too entrenched in the mistake of a brilliant man. If he did not deliberately misrepresent his own thought/belief, then I would be quite confident in saying that he was a good man. With that in mind, good men make mistakes just like bad men. In Kant's case, his categories of thought cannot take the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief into consideration.
What is the notion of a priori doing here?
I'm not entirely certain of Kant's actual stance. Seems to me though, that conventional understanding of a priori ought at least be capable of clearly and accurately setting out Kant's delineation. Correct me if I'm off here, but isn't a priori the name of a very particular kind of thought/belief; one of which Kant himself claims is existentially independent of all experience:That which we can deduce and/or induce while sitting in a chair? That which must be presupposed within all experience. I've also entertained that notion. That which is necessary for all experience. I've thought in those terms as well. I find none of them reliable for taking proper account of the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
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Deliberate oppositional change to one's morality always happen through complex common language use. There are no exceptions and/or actual examples to the contrary. It is a series of connected events. Undoubtedly one's morality must already be an operative element within one's thought/belief system(world-view). Otherwise, one one cannot question it. One must already be following some set of behavioural rules in order to place them under suspicion.
These things are true of everyone who is placing their initial worldview under suspicion, regardless of the particulars.
If the only way to question a certain kind of thinking is by virtue of using a specific well-defined set of linguistic terms in a conventionally accepted manner, then it only follows that that particular kind of thinking is itself existentially dependent upon complex language acquisition replete with the terminology. Some accounts of morality pride themselves upon such complexity. Questioning such an inculcated morality is existentially dependent upon thinking about one's own pre-existing thought/belief. All thought/belief about the rules of conduct requires first isolating the rules as a means for subsequent consideration.
Some thought/belief does not have such existential dependence. Some moral thought/belief is not existentially dependent upon language.
Prior to common language no one approves of another harming them. Everyone disapproves.
Of course, because he's biased in your favour. When he said the street fight comment, he most likely excluded himself and people like you. Even though you lot are as guilty as the rest.
Well yes... The entire rest of the debate. Your response to the fact that we do not say that 'killing' is wrong. We'll start there. Why do you think, from a purely rational perspective that the maxim "one should not kill another" is not rational?
LOL. Oh hell no, I don’t want to be famous. I use authority to make some points, but I grant that what I say of my own accord has no kind of authority. Opinion, no matter the pretty prose and precise grammar, is nonetheless mere opinion.
I mean it as sort of an anticipatory, “well who the hell are you? What makes you any better than me?” kinda thing.
Yikes!! That’s a tough one, right there. Lemme see if I understand this the way you intended:
......too entrenched.....that’s me, in the writing of the scenario;
......if he did not deliberately, his own thought/belief, he was a good man.....he being the subject of the scenario, the guy In moral opposition to the norm....
Good men make mistakes just like bad men, sure, but there’s no sense of good/bad anywhere here. The scenario has to do with racist norm vs. non-racist exception to the norm. Adding in good/bad doesn’t address the origin of the moral divide. Is the good man and/or the bad man in the scenario, or is that a general provision for all scenarios? You say if he had not misrepresented his own thought/belief, he would be a good man, but where in the scenario was it ever presented that he was a bad man? If all he’s doing is morally opposing the extant racist norm of his society, why isn’t he automatically a good man? Not from your or my point of view because *WE* think racism ugly from a distance, but from *HIS* point of view, because he’s in the midst of it experientially?
I shall take your word that Kant’s categories of thought cannot take the actual distinction... into account. I’m sure such failure has something to do with all that said beforehand.
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Quoting creativesoul
1.) OK, granting that complex language use does not necessarily include actual speech.
2.) OK, but the problem remains, in the given scenario of a completely racially entrenched society, there shouldn’t be any set of linguistic terms contrary to the terms of the inculcation. Sorta like a minor Mary’s Room, insofar as all this guy has ever heard are racist terms and conditions, so supposing he will understand non-racist terms and conditions when there aren’t any.....well, how would that even happen?
3.) Absolutely. Herein lies the employment of a priori practical reason.
4.) Yes, agreed. Morality itself, or some ground for it, or the means for its possibility, reside in humans as a intrinsic condition. If not language, then what? Feeling or reason are the only choices.
Nice street fighting with you, mon amie. May the Gods of Proper Dialectic smile upon your countenance and bring you a vast array of Plato/Platypus jokes and Andy Warhol reprints.
I doubt I ever presented my thought “one should not kill” is not rational. Don’t know why I would, especially when it seems perfectly rational to me.
How do you propose an army work? You think opposing Hitler with military force was not rational, because a lot of people got killed?
One ideology in conflict with another doesn’t negate the rationality of the given maxim. It may be irrational to even have a conflict, but that is not under consideration. One can hold the maxim “one should not kill”, and still go about his business as a soldier in the combat field with his morality intact.
“thou shall not kill”, an absolute declarative statement per the Ten Commandments, e.g., is irrational, because it is impossible in all cases to avoid it and simultaneously hold with a more valuable maxim “the wonton violation of ownership of life is wrong”. Wherein lies the distinction between the should not of killing and the shall not of murder, insofar as the former may be forgivable but the latter is may never.
Technically speaking, in deontological moral philosophy, “one should not kill” is not a maxim, it is a directive. The maxim proper would be, in the correct form of a subjective principle which prescribes a possible volition, “no life has preference over another”, and the hypothetical imperative standing for what the possible volition actually becomes, “ therefore one has no right to kill”. Because killing is not always avoidable, this hypothetical, while not tacit permission to kill, maintains an agent’s sense of personal moral worthiness if he should be put in a position where he must exercise his prerogatives.
If that is the case, then n as a prerequisite for m contradicts m being an effectively foundational stance. N can’t be both before and after m if m is the foundation.
I’d say being rational means no more than being non-contradictory. If so, n is rational in relation to m as long as n doesn’t contradict m. ‘Course, that doesn’t say squat about the rationality of m, but if it is a effectively foundational stance, it better not be self-contradictory.
Right? Maybe?
I think that because Kant stipulates that morality is a fundamental human condition, and such morality in human form at least, is claimed to be predicated on the principle of duty, intentionality is given automatically. I mean...we couldn’t be not moral, so not matter what we actually do with respect to it, we are going to do something. We intend to do something in conjunction with the being of moral agency. That is not to say that other theories in moral philosophy doesn't or shouldn’t attribute more value to intentionality, so you might be quite right in stating our need.
Intentionality maybe arises from the connection of an imperative with its result. I judge an imperative as an action with the intent that the end to which the imperative aims is actually attained. But I might have misjudged, in which case my intentionality, while still there, was not met.
I understand philosophy in general makes a big deal out of intentionality, but like the language thing, I don’t see much power in it.
So morality is something more than sticking to a rule, or are you saying here, as below that one determines what is a moral action by reference to its objective "one shouldn't kill, but sometimes one must and that is then moral as long as one has tried hard enough not to kill? I'm struggling to understand what" one should not kill" could possibly mean in terms of rationally determining that which is moral.
Quoting Mww
OK, so how is the relative value of these two conflicting maxims judged? How does rationality alone determine which should be abandoned in favour of the other?
Quoting Mww
Right, so this is Anscombe's argument (and others). All this comes down to is the tail wagging the dog. "Why did you kill that person?", "Well...it was one of those special circumstances where I exercised my prerogative"
Not to mention of course the fact that "no life has preference over another" remains just an opinion, unless you support it with rational argument, the only version of which that has so far been advanced is universalisation, which is the very thing you're now saying doesn't apply to murder - the example we've been working with from the start.
The "too entrenched" bit was about your answer being in Kant's framework. The good man bit was about Kant.
How can one overcome racism in the example provided s/he has no external source aside from the racist imbedded language use s/he learns?
That is our focus, right?
I see it that way, yes. Morality is a fundamental condition of being human. It’s not a thing; it’s the name given to one of the things that makes us human, separates us from any other biological agent.
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Quoting Isaac
I see it as one determines what is a moral action by reference to its law. Here is is where relativism enters; a law is determined by the will so can be variable by the will determining what it is. One is free to choose that which defines him. It’s what makes all the same (we’re moral) but different (we’re free).
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Quoting Isaac
That which is moral is always a rational determination, so “one should not kill” is just one more in an constant barrage of them.
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Quoting Isaac
I can’t unpack what you’re calling these two conflicting maxims. “Thou shall not kill” is not a maxim, and being a command, doesn’t require any rationality in response to it anyway. Why would it, if under any possible circumstance, the agent holding with this command isn’t going to kill anything. Period.
The maxim is “the wanton violation of ownership of life is wrong”, and the relative value in that relates solely to the will that determines it, the will which could have just as permissibly determined some other maxim. Or, it’s relative value could be with respect to some other freely determinant will inhering in some other moral agency, which is free to determine a completely different maxim. Then I guess the relative value would manifest in whether or not the one guy gets along with himself, or whether those two agents get along with each other.
Bear in mind, this “wanton violation.....” is just an example of what a maxim might look like. It is the correct form, but the idea it presents could be anything.
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Quoting Isaac
I don’t understand. The idiom means some small thing overriding some big thing. Cart before the horse, and the like. How does this relate to anything? Are you saying a guy who kills for fun, while not admitting any immorality whatsoever, does so because he’s thinking he’s merely doing what feels good and therefore can’t be held liable? Yeah, so? What else would you expect? If that’s what you mean, all you’re doing is superimposing your morality where it doesn't belong. You get to judge his actions using your morality as a baseline, so to you his actions are atrocious, but you don’t get to judge his moral agency because his agency is exactly the same as yours. Hence.....subjective relativism in its proper sense.
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Quoting Isaac
Yes, it is an opinion. Any maxim is a product of reason, given from one mind, and internally maintained, which is the very definition of opinion. That opinion may be grounded in experience, teachings, culture, whatever, but the formulation of it is entirely a subjective enterprise. Similarly, the support is a product of reason antecedent to the formulation; reason is the means, opinion is the ends. When the opinion is expressed as a hypothesis in a theory, or a tenet of a philosophy, the rational argument is already given in order for the hypothesis or tenet to even exist. Although, I suppose a guy could advance a theory by just saying “x....” without saying why, but that’s pretty crappy theorizing and he probably doesn’t care about the seriousness with which it is received. Nevertheless, I, as a moral agent, am only concerned with the “life” part, not the content of it. No LIFE has preference, but certainly some life contents....what one has done with his....have greater value than others. But we don’t judge morality on content of life, but rather on content of self.
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Quoting Isaac
Again...I’m not understanding this. If universalization means the end result of a maxim, then if I held the maxim “wanton violation of ownership of life” I would be happy if every single moral agent ever acted as if that were indeed a universal law that the ownership of no life be ever wantonly violated. Or, in short....conventionally spoken.....don’t murder anybody.
Yes. On here someplace was presented a scenario of a fully racist culture, with a single member’s instance of avowed non-racism, but without any visual experience of a non-racist conditions given in the scenario.
I agree with you that the instance of contrariness to a norm can only arise from some kind of doubt about that norm, which in turn can only arise from either experience, including language use, or feelings. I’m saying feelings are not sufficient for negating a norm, such that one is justified in claiming to be its opposite, even while feeling a dissatisfaction with it.
Well, I agree with the first part. I'm not sure where you're getting your data from to support the second part, but that's probably a whole other discussion.
Quoting Mww
I completely agree with this, but this is really the whole of moral relativism as it's being presented here. No one is saying that morals are fished out of thin air at random. So the argument that rational thought is required to determine a course of action is never opposed. What is opposed is the presentation of objectivism here which states that, for example, murder is objectively wrong for all people at all times, which it appeared at first you were supporting.
Quoting Mww
Fine, but not only a rational determination, the subjective feeling that some law exists (I wouldn't put it that way myself, but I'm trying to use your terminology), must come first, and it is this which makes morality relative.
Quoting Mww
Don't worry, I had a completely different interpretation of what your paragraph here evidently meant, so my reply will make little sense in that context. I presumed you were referring to the circumstance of conflicting laws (where both states do not appear possible to bring about simultaneously. The trouble is, your deontological language just doesn't translate well into normal usage.
Quoting Mww
The idiom refers to the wrong part of a duality being in charge (the dog should be the one wagging it's tail, not the other way round). What I'm saying here is that from my position people tend to justify, post hoc, that which they desire to do anyway. The complexity and flexibility of deontology in the regard you mention is exactly how this happens. I think it's a mistake to hide behind a woven rationalisation.
Quoting Mww
We seem to have come from possible agreement back round to this absolutism. If you don't want to murder anyone, or live in a world where people do, then that's great, by me. But there's nothing irrational about saying I don't want anyone to murder me, but I shall murder whomever I please. Most of us do not need any rational calculation whatsoever to know that murder is wrong, and that's a good thing, it saves a lot of time and reduces errors.
I have no truck with moral objectivism; it’s actually an impossible view, simply because humans are fundamentally all the same, but our entire evolution has been predicated on territory and culture, rather than uniting as a species. Some here have, nevertheless, advanced propositions favoring the possibility of specific inclinations in which murder, slavery, racism and such, are very close to being abhorant to all humans, which I don’t have any problem with. But inclinations are very far from moral interests, and are provably absent any aspect of universality whatsoever. What I do support, is if all humans held the categorical imperative, act only in such a way that the ownership of life be never violated.
Hopefully you recognize that while a categorical imperative describes one agent, the universality of it only has any relevance as if the same categorical imperative operates in all minds. You could say it is the hope of absolutism, or objective universality, but no one ever expects it as a result. It’s just a high-falootin’ way of saying, if you want to be the best you can possibly be, this is how.
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Quoting Isaac
Deontology allows for this, because of the fragility and inconsistency in human activities. The categorical imperative is one thing, very strict, the bottom line, that which is the end game. But end games don’t permit inconsistencies, so if categorical imperatives were all there was, morality would always be contradicting itself. Hypothetical imperatives, as those with “should” as the actuator, as opposed to “shall”, only pronounce those acts which permit acquiescence to desires, wants, that for which the ends are always something else. Yes, the flexibility of deontology grants this, but it is not thereby post hoc, nor a woven rationalization. It is just weak, permissive....like us.
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Quoting Isaac
You know, just these words, even in context, can only be understood as the epitome of irrational. I’m going to leave it alone until it becomes clearer to me exactly what you mean. Somehow I don’t think you meant what the words say.
My understanding is that Kant grounds the practical belief in human freedom on the universal fact of moral responsibility. You cannot live in any society and not be considered responsible for your actions towards others. Others may be inadvertently affected by your actions, but that is not generally considered to be a matter of moral responsibility unless it involves some definite negligence. I think the idea of deliberately acting towards others and being responsible for those actions is where the intentional dimension comes into play.
I might be concerned, for example, with appearing to do my duty, however that duty might be inter-subjectively conceived rather, than with actually doing it, and I might, on the strength of that concern, despite my lack of intention to do anything beyond keeping up the appearances, actually do my duty superlatively. Kant will not praise me for that!
Kant actually accords greater moral merit to one who does something that they really don't want to do out of a sense of duty, than someone who does their duty because that is what they love to do. Although I must say that seems perverse to me.
Quoting Mww
I don't think it is merely an opinion. Considered in the absence of emotional bias, no life does have preference over any other, and that is precisely because there is no purely rational justification for preferring one life over another. There may be practically rational justifications for doing so such as 'her life is more important because she is the queen' and so on.
On the other hand, of course anyone is going to prefer the lives of their family over the lives of strangers, but that preference is exactly what the Kantian notion of duty would exhort you to ignore in determining where your duty lies.
It’s a never ending reduction, seems like, doesn’t it? One does his duty when he doesn’t really want to, which is much more morally meritorious because it’s more painful than pleasurable, out of respect for the law to which duty requires your adherence. Coincidentally enough, respect is what Kant uses to replace the prevalent atttitude of his day, feelings. We normal people don’t usually consider respect a feeling, so it fits well as a replacement for it. That he was Prussian certainly didn’t hurt.
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Quoting Janus
I’ll go ahead and disagree with this. Her actions may be more important because she must do queenly things, but her life, irrespective of Her Highness, still occupies space and time, is created, suffers, and belongs to her alone, just like mine. Just as in your “On the other hand.....”
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Quoting Janus
You know.....nobody talks too much about the responsibility side, do they. I know I’m more into the causation rather than the correlation, but one does necessarily follow from the other, true enough.
That's an interesting question; is respect a feeling? We may respect others, which if it were a feeling, would be a positive feeling, even if we don't like them, which is a negative feeling. I think this, inter alia, shows that feeling is not the primary element in moral dispositions. So for me the separation of thought from feeling and the privileging of one over the other, as expressed in formulas like "Reason is, and ought to be, slave to the passions" betrays somewhat simpleminded thinking.
Quoting Mww
I agree, and I was not intending to support any kind of general claim that some people's lives could have, on account of their greater importance to the community, greater ethical value than the lives of others. On the other hand (as with my other "On the other hand") would we not think there was something wrong with a person who did not value the lives of his friends and family more than those of acquaintances, not to mention strangers? From a deontological perspective valuing your family over strangers could not be a virtue; but from the perspective of virtue ethics it might be.
I tend take some things from deontological ethics and some from virtue ethics; but I don't tend to take utilitarian ethics into general account (although I can imagine that it might have a place in some special circumstances).
Yes. I'd like to confirm points of agreement and/or mutual understanding.
One can change one's mind about what counts as acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. Everyday fact bears witness to this. We can look for ourselves. There are accounts/reports of it all over the place. We can look at those. We can be a part of it, and/or watch another go through it. We can - as a matter of everyday fact - help another go through it iff we know what it takes, want to do what it takes, and circumstances do not stand in the way.
That's a bit of our agreement, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If all the above is acceptable enough...
So, one can doubt their original morality. It happens. How does it happen was the question I then sought answer for. You and I gave differing answers. I do not think/believe that they are utterly incommensurate/incompatible with one another. There seems to be much agreement. Although, I do think that there is a choice to made between which account is more reliable, truthful, dependable, trustworthy, etc.
We're talking about the same events. We're talking about the necessary preconditions of those events. The notion of a priori reason may well be capable of taking account of such an event. Everyone can understand the event despite not being able to use Kant's terminological framework as he did. So, neither the event nor understanding the event requires Kant's framework.
What is it doing here?
When I use the term "moral belief", it refers to belief about the aforementioned rules(belief about morality). It is a kind of belief that is determined solely by virtue of it's content. All kind of thought/belief is determined by virtue of what it's about.
What counts as "moral" behaviour follows from one's notion of morality. Here I've not used the term "moral" as a synonym for good and/or acceptable. It is not being used to indicate my approval.
If we follow current convention, it cannot, unless the written rules for acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour are not existentially dependent upon common language. They are by definition existentially dependent upon common language use.
So, according to current convention. No. Morality cannot exist in it's entirety prior to common language.
This comes up against my own understanding of what counts as moral thought/belief. If moral thought/belief is about codes of conduct, then it only follows that moral thought/belief is itself existentially dependent upon common language. Moral thought/belief then, it must be admitted, is a product of thinking about one's own pre-existing thought/belief.
That would fail to draw the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. It would relegate all moral thought/belief as metacognitive in it's nature. But it's not. All deliberate oppositional change in one's original adopted morality is.
Something is wrong here... Clearly.
Interesting things happen when considering this; language is not required for thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. It is required for thought/belief about unacceptable thought, and/or belief.
So here we must make some sort of decisions.. Some may include...
1. Deny that a non-linguistic and/or pre-linguistic creature can form and/or hold meaningful thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour
2. Deny that all thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour counts as moral belief
3. Admit that current convention is found to be lacking explanatory power in this regard
4. Reject the framework(my method or convention's definition of "morality")
Or...
5. Come to the realization that the written rules of conduct consist entirely of and/or are otherwise underwritten by thought/belief statements:Thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour.
If all thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour counts as morality, then morality - in rudimentary form - is not existentially dependent upon common language.
Double standard hard at work.
During the formation of one's first world-view, the teachers can be many, and the teachers can be few. It is entirely possible to doubt the truthfulness of what is being taught in all those cases, if the student has pre-existing thought/belief that is contrary and/or otherwise places the teaching under scrutiny. If one attempts to teach a child that all people of a certain group are this or that, and the student knows someone of that group that is not, then the student already has the black swan in mind.
Sapientia's candidate does not preclude this.
If the candidate had but one teacher or set of teachers all of whom held the same sort of unshakable certainty, and whose belief system actually glorified and looked fondly upon continuing to hold that belief even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary...
In these cases it ain't so easy to change one's mind.
That's what certain rationalist philosophers and their fanboys either miss or try in vain to overcome. This was Hume's great contribution to moral philosophy. From what I know of Kantian philosophy, and from what I've seen presented here, nothing in the aforementioned even comes close to a refutation of this point. It is just words on a screen which achieve nothing. Those continually submitting this text seem to be under the illusion that they've actually achieved something of substance. It is quite absurdly humorous.
First of all, you've made a very important change to what I actually said which makes all the difference. I said "I shall murder whomever I please" and you re-quoted it as "you can yourself murder as you desire".
The use of the word 'can' begs the question because it presumes a priori that there is a universal moral code that one might consult to see if I 'can' murder someone, otherwise what would the opposite mean? So the first problem is that the proposition you're asking me to counter makes no sense unless I already presume moral objectivism (we've been here before). I mean, what else would "I can murder" mean without presuming there is a universal moral law? - I'm physically capable of murder? - Well, that definitely could be the case for some and not others.
Secondly, even if one were to get around the 'can' issue. Let's say hypothetically that the whole world is sat round a table deciding what 'The Law' should be, and I propose "No one can murder me, but I can murder whomever I choose". You might say then that is not a very rational suggestion because if everyone adopted it, my first desire (to not be murdered) would be logically frustrated by my second (that I may murder whomever I choose). But this being the case relies not on pure reason, but on a fact about the world. If I behave some way, others are likely to copy. If I think it reasonable that I can murder whomever I please, others may too. Again here you're begging the question with regards to reason being universal. In reality, I have no reason at all to think that, just because I propose to murder whomever I please, that other people will reach the same conclusion (note will reach, not may reach, because without already assuming a universal moral law, 'may reach', as in 'allowed to' doesn't make any sense). I actually observe a world in which most people refrain from murder even when they can get away with it, so I've no reason not to presume they will continue to do so despite my new law.
Thirdly, the desire to avoid being murdered, and the desire to murder are not necessarily equal, so to say that the second part irrationally frustrates the first is incorrect. It may frustrate the first (in specific social environments, as mentioned above), but that is often entirely necessary of two conflicting desires. Saying "I may eat as much chocolate as I like, and others may restrict my access to chocolate" is not irrational, its a sensible diet plan. There is the desire to eat chocolate, and the desire to stay thin, and they conflict with one another.
Fourthly, there is the issue of granularity. Even if, despite all that, we remain committed deontologists, but nonetheless psychopaths. We can simply re-write our law. I {people called Jim born on 15th July 1965, with brown hair, blue eyes and an evil mustache} may murder whomever I please, but no one without those credentials may murder me. Now, if I presume that is rational, then I may presume everyone else would reach the same conclusion, which is fine by me.
I see what you're saying, but think you're fixing something which isn't broken. I don't think there is any evidence at all that people need guidance rationally through such a vague mechanism. Ask a five year old if they think it's OK to kill another person, or steal. They've already picked up that it isn't and they're hardly masters of rational thought. Our biology is far more powerful than our rationality and is, by weight of overwhelming evidence, very obviously the thing in charge. Luckily, for our rapidly changing environment, we come built in with a mechanism to adapt, we copy others. We behave the way we see others behave. We induct rules from those observations in the same way we learn the rules of language. So we don't need complex deontology. Basic functional society is enough and that requires that we get the social environment right, not moralise. It's like trying to talk a cog into playing the right role in a machine rather than just putting it in the right place for it to do so.
Quoting Mww
Please see my reply to Tim above.
What are you even doing with the thought experiment I introduced? Must you take everything on one of your peculiar tangents? The point I was making was simple enough and seems uncontroversial. People are only resisting it because they don't want to concede.
Allow me to get you back on track:
There's nothing which makes it impossible for one to deviate from the herd-morality prevalent in a society, and to deviate [i]in a good way[/I]. The adherents of herd-morality commit the fallacy of only considering scenarios where the herd-morality conforms with their own morality, and so they naturally judge deviation as bad. But when they're confronted with a scenario where the herd-morality doesn't conform with their own morality, as with the racism example, they don't know how to reasonably justify their stance, which explains the irrational dismissiveness I have received. Special pleading and irrational denial is no reasonable justification.
These denialists don't even realise that they're tacitly appealing to their own individual sense of morality here, which is evidently primary.
And again, to be clear, I have not once suggested any sort of absolute isolation or immunity of any external influential factors. Nonconformity is very much possible, and very much not attributable to the herd. Though it can be somewhat rare for an individual to stand out from the herd, to deviate from a dominant culture, it can and does happen, and that is because we are individual moral agents and not Borg.
This is the nail in the coffin. The responses, if there are any, will probably just be more words on a screen which achieve nothing. And one thing is certain, ramblings about "thought/belief" and "existential dependency" and "prior to language acquisition" won't do anything except provide those of us in the know with entertainment. It is even more entertaining when someone actually takes it seriously and tries to make sense out of nonsense. (Perhaps by "all mimsy were the borogoves", he meant...). So by all means, please continue down this route, and I'll grab some more popcorn.
I remember when @Mww was still sensible enough to side with me over @creativesoul. Now those two are all chummy and he is bitterly set against me, even though I talk [i]way[/I] more sense.
Well they are in my case. If you were to take me to a time and place where racism was very much the norm, then I assure you I would stand by my feelings against it. I'm not that fickle or sheeplike.
Yes, and again, this relates to Hume. It was he who made these brilliant points revealing the fundamental nature of morality. The subjective feeling comes first, and is primary, and then the rational determination follows suit. Or, as Hume famously put it, reason is the slave of the passions.
Kant is mostly known in ethics for introducing a novel way of going about morality, how to determine right and wrong, which pales in comparison to what Hume did in this branch of philosophy, in my opinion.
Quoting Isaac
Yes!
Quoting Isaac
Yes, and "tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger".
For example, let's say that Joe has a love of a particular part of the Amazon and really wants to live there, so he wants to build a house there. It turns out that he won't be able to do that without the approval and assistance of a nearby tribe. But the nearby tribe won't cooperate unless Joe, who is a doctor, agrees to provide free medical care for the tribe in emergencies, and free checkups every year. So it's a prerequisite for meeting Joe's desire to build his house that he agrees with the moral stance that he should provide free medical care to the tribe in exchange for their cooperation. So a moral stance that's a prerequisite to a foundational desire for Joe is rational to adopt.
It's easy to set up a foundational moral stance example in a similar vein.
Struggling to see what any of this has to do with morality, but my best attempt at piecing together your line of argument is to something like -
Morality is a set of rules we learn by observation and we cannot doubt the rules we first learn unless we have cause to doubt. We must be presented with some alternative belief system to weigh against the baseline one.
But if I have your line of argument right, then how does it explain the fact that lesions in the medial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, and different locations within the bilateral temporal lobes, can cause people previously disposed to sociable behaviour to become prone to violence, theft and even murder. If the proscription against those things is a linguistic, or learned one which can only be changed by doubt, why would specific brain damage have an effect on moral behaviour?
Indeed, we have. How many times now? A hundred? A thousand? I lost count a long time ago. We have over fifty pages of this now. Pretty crazy.
Yes! I agree. The gist of that criticism of the categorical imperative is what I was getting at in my criticism of it in the last paragraph here, though we come at it from slightly different angles. You're good at explaining things. You have a way with words. Here's what I said of it earlier:
Yes. Half the arguments in this thread could be summed up as "if we presume moral universals, then morality must be universal". The issue at stake is really what it is reasonable to presume, not what is the case once we have made certain presumptions.
Quoting S
Yes, I see you've already covered this. I particularly liked your "I am not subservient to any supposed universal moral laws". Its hard to keep track of all everyone's said as I think everyone has said everything at least ten times by now.
Still... Once more unto the breach...
He's just running off on a pet tangent like he usually does. This time it began by picking up on my thought experiment directed against Janus's weak position, where I contrasted individual morality with herd-morality regarding racism. I accept that it can work both ways: that the individual can be wrong or that the herd can be wrong, but Janus seemed to be suggesting that the herd is right by default and individual morality doesn't matter, which is easily refuted by multiple examples, racism being just one of them.
Yes!!! That's their argument exposed in true form! Yet there's over fifty pages of text! Unbelievable.
Quoting Isaac
Haha, I remember about thirty pages ago predicting that the same problems would just reoccur over another twenty pages.
[I]Lo and behold![/I] :lol:
Are you ready for this? Drumroll please.
Moral relativism treats every moral judgement as equal. If you're a moral relativist, and someone attempts to murder you, you just have to say, "Okie dokie! Go ahead and murder me!".
Also, you're basically condoning the holocaust. Why would you do that? You vile bastard.
:rofl:
lol
Quoting S
What original philosophical insights, wherever did you find them! Best not let the opposition get a hold of such damning arguments as those, they'd have us beat in no time!
Last things first. Kant is how all the above even happened. You couldn’t have thought any of that without the machinations in your head. The ideas are yours, the words are yours, the very thesis is yours, and very well may have nothing whatsoever to do with Kantian philosophy. The formulation from one to the other to the other are......ooooo yeah........necessarily a product of Kantian a priori practical reason. Can I get an a-MEN, BROTHER!!!!!
Sorry for butchering your well-written thesis, and hopefully I pulled the pertinent bullet points. I understand the keywords as morality as a rigid designator, morality in its ENTIRETY, and the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable. Morality isn’t about our agreements; it’s always about our disagreements.
This gives me the most trouble: Language is not required for thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behavior because behavior follows from one’s notion of morality, granted. However, to say language is required for thought/belief about unacceptable thought, and/or belief (without recourse to behavior), still leaves unexplained what that language would be. Could it be because one can witness behavior in another so needs no language to judge it, but if all there is, is thought/belief there is no behavior to witness, hence nothing to judge. If there’s nothing to judge, what use would language have? I’d have to talk to somebody about what he’s thinking, but without any reason to talk to him in the first place? The only conditions under which this would work is in a dialogue about possible behavior, about possible relative notions of a set of rules, about morality itself.
Anyway.....well done; it was fun. Hope I did you justice.
If that is true, then it follows necessarily that lacking any evidence whatsoever, what was not so easy becomes impossible.
[quote="Isaac;270170"]Let's say hypothetically that the whole world is sat round a table deciding what 'The Law' should be........
(Herein is the groundwork for universality, re: the whole world, implying each and every moral agent)
.......and I propose "No one can murder me, but I can murder whomever I choose". You might say then that is not a very rational suggestion because if everyone adopted it my first desire.....
(It is not a desire, it is to be a law. If adopted, there is no possible desire to do anything but what the law demands)
..... (to not be murdered) would be logically frustrated by my second (that I may murder whomever I choose).
OK. The irrationality lies in the inherent contradiction. If the law became universal, was adopted as spoken by the whole world, the second part of the law is moot, because every single member adopts that no one can murder me. Therefore, you could never murder anybody.
I suppose the notion of universality incorporated in the maxim is in itself not irrational, but it is so improbable in its adoption that rather than irrational, it is the more rationally negligible.
Yes? No?
True enough. Rather Utopian, though, isn’t it? Idealistic? You’re asking for something history has never given, except in small pockets the rest of humanity failed to value properly. If all we have is social environment and moralizing about social environment, and social environment hasn’t sufficed to render moralizing of no import........why not moralize? Even if dialectic on how to improve social environment so it becomes right, what is that besides moralizing? If it isn’t moralizing, then we’re open to arguing such things as economy, boundaries, relative judicial systems, etc., in order to arrive at social environment right-ness. And all those have at their base, morality.
Since you keep mentioning rules/codes, and especially since you're mentioning written rules here, can I ask just where these rules/codes are recorded?
I see what you mean, wherein the realms of anthropology and morality tend to overlap, something like Janus’ civil intentionality. Virtue ethics. That’s ok, it’s a viable consideration. My objection stems explicitly from the distinction I hold between morality the “rigid designator” and anthropology the subjective interaction.
To make it more generalized, the idea is just that someone has a preference of x that's not based on something else, but to make x obtain, some (other) moral stance is required, otherwise x won't come to be.
Re "rigid designation," the whole idea of that isn't really worth bothering with in my opinion.
Interesting. How would you put it, and how does it make morality relative?
That’s fine. I think it worth bearing in mind, nevertheless, that any discipline predicated on non-contradiction demands something like it.
You're not going to have contradictions across possible worlds, because then we're not saying the same thing, in the same respect, etc.
Agreed. Good thing about Hume...he wrote in good ol’ English, no translational ambiguities. What he wrote is what you get, and of no great difficulty to understand. We know what he meant by reason, we know what he thought its limitations were which regulates its employment. Add in the conditions of the day, his empiricist bent, gives us what we see as simple-minded thinking. Still, it only took 50 years for his moral theory to be shown incomplete and thus sufficiently refuted.
I think his biggest detriment to moral philosophy was....plain and simple....he worked backwards, insofar as he tried to synthesize modern empirical thought to ancient virtue ethics. Which just doesn’t work. You can’t get Greek virtue utilitarianism to inform British Enlightenment sentimentalist plurality.
Kinda funny, if you ask me. People are so much more apt to think themselves as sentimental entities, than to think themselves rational entities.
OK, so I should have said any discipline having to do with humans in this world demands something like it.
Another good point, and relates to what you said about Hume’s simplistic thinking. Hume was an empiricist, which makes explicit the principle of cause and effect be paramount in his thinking. From that, comes this:
“....It appears that, in single instances of the operation of bodies, we never can, by our utmost scrutiny, discover any thing but one event following another, without being able to comprehend any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connexion between it and its supposed effect. The same difficulty occurs in contemplating the operations of mind on body- where we observe the motion of the latter to follow upon the volition of the former, but are not able to observe or conceive the tie which binds together the motion and volition, or the energy by which the mind produces this effect. The authority of the will over its own faculties and ideas is not a whit more comprehensible: So that, upon the whole, there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexion which is conceivable by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seemed conjoined, but never connected. And as we can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or force at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in philosophical reasonings or common life....”
(WSM, 1737)
“.....It is God himself, who is pleased to second our will, in itself impotent, and to command that motion which we erroneously attribute to our own power and efficacy....”
(EHU, VIII, 1748)
Hume couldn’t conceive a natural connection between the “authority of the will over its own faculties”, therefore he was left without a cause for a given effect, anathema to an empiricist but sufficient for a sentimentalist. We don’t know whether he threw out the concept of freedom, or never even thought of it to begin with, but the point is, he stopped short, philosophically. Perhaps the shadowy ghost of infinite regress curtailed his intelligence....dunno. Left it to the heavens, he did.
Kant, an the other hand, granting Humian cause and effect in the physical world as given, thus recognizing the need for consistency of the principle with respect to the authority of the will in a possible metaphysical context wherein your “universal fact of human responsibility” is an effect and presupposes a necessary cause. But he was still at the mercy of infinite regress, for to suppose freedom as a cause necessitates it be at the same time an effect. What Hume didn’t consider is this:
“....I adopt this method of assuming freedom merely as an idea which rational beings suppose in their actions, in order to avoid the necessity of proving it in its theoretical aspect also. The former is sufficient for my purpose; for even though the speculative proof should not be made out, yet a being that cannot act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here from the onus which presses on the theory. We have finally reduced the definite conception of morality to the idea of freedom. This latter, however, we could not prove to be actually a property of ourselves or of human nature; only we saw that it must be presupposed if we would conceive a being as rational and conscious of its causality in respect of its actions, i.e., as endowed with a will; and so we find that on just the same grounds we must ascribe to every being endowed with reason and will this attribute of determining itself to action under the idea of its freedom...”
In short, Hume couldn’t prove a cause, Kant showed no proof was necessary. We couldn’t tell the difference between a rational being with freedom theoretically proven as cause for the authority of the will, from a rational being with merely the presupposed idea of freedom as the means for the authority of the will.
TA-DAAAAAA!!!!
Yes, but now I've got your quote inside my quote... Too meta! Anyway
Quoting Mww
It's hard to fit my world view into the language of your deontology. I talk about numerous desires, within a particular social dynamic leading to rules, but rules no more strict than the rules of grammar. I'm trying to translate that into your language so we can see if there's any common ground, but you might have to meet me in the middle, it's not going to work if you want every proposition translated into Kantese, some just don't translate, there are presumption contained within the language that I just don't hold to.
Quoting Mww
Well, this bit is what the rest of my paragraph was supposed to address. It is only irrational if you take laws as absolute, rather than as signposts, and that is a premise I don't accept. Even laws in the strictly legal sense sometimes contradict one another and it is necessary to find a route through. So "no one may murder me" is one law, but "I may murder whomever I choose" is a law, the following of which would constitute a breach of the first law but, crucially, not for me. It would be my victim who would claim the breach. "someone has murdered me! And this is against the rule we all agreed to" (their ghost might exclaim). But I would respond "no, the law we all agreed to was that no one can murder me, and as no one has, all is well".
I don't agree with that premise, but I think, again, we do not want to get too sidetracked. Suffice to say I'm something of a Rousseauean when it comes to paleoanthropology.
Quoting Mww
You could call it moralising, I suppose, but that seems rather a broad definition. Is surgery really moralising because at it's base is the desire to protect human life? Humans seem to function in a way they themselves report as 'well' in particular social and physical environments, and significantly less well outside of them. Maintaining these environments is often a dynamic feedback from the very social interactions they maintain, much like a thermostat responds to the heat it itself was responsible for generating. Morals, set out as a single, universal set of rules which every person is somehow compelled to follow does not fit this dynamic model.
As above. I see moral rules as emerging dynamically from hundreds of independent social interactions between individuals, many of whom want different things. The rules change, adapting to different environments and different groups of people. It's hard to parse all that in terms of universal 'laws'.
Now that I understand your world-view having a Rouseauan flavor, I can see why not. Wouldn’t work at all, would it? I’m willing to meet in the middle, so use your own language, but first let it be known what we are meeting in the middle of. Me as a transcendental Kantian on the one hand and you as a...what, virtue ethicist?....on the other. You tell me, keeping in mind this is a thread on morality.
You know, Kant acknowledged Rouseau’s major influence on his political and civil philosophy. In “Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime”, 1764, Kant says “...I am by natural inclination a researcher ... and I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of man. (...) Rousseau set me upright. And I would consider myself more useless than the ordinary worker if everything I did did not contribute to securing the rights of man....”. There are also references to Rousseau in “Anthropology From A Practical Point of View”.
Re rigid designators, by the way, this is a good thread to introduce some of the problems I have with the idea:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/814/a-challenge-and-query-re-rigid-designators/p1
"Herd mentality" and "herd morality". Are these real things? Sure. How? They have an effect/affect.
They are ideas. Nothing more. Their effect/affect is confusion.
I've not proscribed any behaviour...
Yet.
Broken things don't work right.
My report of Kant's shortcomings are existentially dependent upon Kant's words.
Kant's linguistic framework is utterly incapable of taking proper account of the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
He and Hume are equivalent in that regard, as is all of Western philosophy that I'm aware of.
Funny thing is, that that difference is undeniable.
If one gets thought/belief wrong, then one gets something or other wrong in their report/account of anything and everything ever thought, believed, spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered.
Kant's CI...
Now that remains more than admirable. His staunch rigidness against not being honest in one's testimony. His demand of always testifying honestly and sincerely. That remains admirable.
Any and all evidence to the contrary of one's belief system becomes such as a result of it's being used as such. Prior to the use, what becomes evidence is not yet... evidence.
In light of that, your response doesn't make much sense to me.
They are recorded wherever paper meets pen during the recording...
The two are inseparable.
Pure reason consists of thinking about one's own thought/belief. All thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon something to be thinking about. Thought/belief exists prior to thinking about thought/belief.
Pure reason is existentially dependent upon a much more rudimentary kind of thought/belief. Pre-reflective, one might say. The kind of thought/belief that is later named, isolated, and thus further considered must exist prior to it's being reported upon. All examples of doing this show it's being done with written language replete with names for mental ongoings.
That which is being reported upon exists in it's entirety prior to our report. Prelinguistic thought/belief exist in their entirety prior to being reported upon.
All thought/belief consists entirely of mental correlations drawn between things. The first place we look and see this would be language use itself. Our reports, all of them, consist entirely of predication. All predication is correlation.
Is mental correlation adequate? Is it both, necessary and sufficient, such that all predication counts as being thought/belief? I can't imagine a good argument against it. Without a creature capable of drawing mental correlations between different things, there could be no such thing as predication of any kind. So, predication is itself existentially dependent upon mental correlations.
Can mental correlations between different things exist prior to predication?
Of course!
What would those things be? What things would become a part of the creature's mental correlations? In this early stage, of course, the creature has no language. So the pre-linguistic mental correlations could not include linguistic tokens, characters, signs, marks, and/or symbols.
Physiological sensory perception doesn't need turned on. That happens autonomously. Fear doesn't need turned on. That happens autonomously. Contentment need not be turned on. That is the simplest of mind states along with it's counterpart... discontentment.
Hunger pangs and the visceral satisfaction thereof...
...and the things connected to these.
The sheer quantity of possible combinations is more than adequate to account for all the different kinds of thought/belief. The complexity of thought/belief is established and/or determined solely by virtue of complexity of the correlations. The kind is reflected by it's content.
Kant named some kinds that would be possible if things were not the way they are. If the emotional aspect of all mental correlation were non-existent... things would be a different way. As it stands however, emotion and thinking about thought/belief are inseparable, despite lots of folk thinking/believing otherwise.
But why did you write that then? Why write a different thing that has nothing to do with the post you're responding to?
Quoting tim wood
Well then the answer to your question is obviously yes. Unless you are suggesting that the laws of physics intervene in order to make Kant right (and God knows at this stage I wouldn't put it passed you), then it is obviously reasonable to say "a) you don't want to be murdered, but b) you can yourself murder as you desire,". How could it possibly not be? The first is a statement about your preferences and the second is a statement about the lack of physical limitations on some action you may take.
Quoting tim wood
No, I saw both. I've just dealt with the reasonable, I don't understand why you think 'if' makes my response less comprehensible.
Quoting tim wood
No, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. You've yet to explain how one can derive an action from reason alone. Absent any desire, the application of reason has nothing to work with. What 'reason' is there to do anything without the desire to do it?
Yes, by and large a virtue ethicist. I think that large decisions such as those made by governments and corporations, should probably be made on utilitarian grounds, but at a personal level, I trust my instincts most. I'm also an ethical naturalist in that I believe the source of moral thought is biology.
Sure. Such as?
Thanks. Read most of the ten pages.
I’m comfortable allowing rigid designator to stand as a distinctive representation of a concept. A stop sign can be a rigid designator. I don’t intend anyone should also agree with and use my terminology, but he should understand without complication what I mean when I use it.
Nothing too deep or troubling about that, I wouldn’t think.
Quoting creativesoul
So.....Kant, because your report informs me that his “linguistic framework is utterly incapable of taking proper account of the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief”, must have something or other wrong in his reporting, in some or all of his various essays, manuscripts, theoretical speculations, etc.
If that is the shortcoming you’re reporting on, this incapable accounting, what makes your thought/belief not wrong? Is it even possible to show his linguistic framework and the intrinsic incapacity attributed to it, to someone else?
I don't understand a lot of the content of Mww's posts, either, but so far I'm just attributing it to very different paradigms than my own that I figure would be impossible to sort out in this context.
I just can't make any sense out of saying/supposing that anything would be rigid. To me that is not at all how reference, meaning, etc. work, and it's very obvious that it's not how they work.
And if it's otherwise just supposed to be saying something about identity, then it's a very convoluted, confused, misleading way to say something so simple that it's not worth saying.
I’ve lost interest in this. The reductionism necessary to validate my argument is so far down in the weeds it couldn’t possibly pass the wtf test.
Ah, I get you. You really are too smart for us. Try talking to us as if you were explaining something to children.
“...The capacity of experiencing Pleasure or Pain on the occasion of a mental representation, is called ‘Feeling,’ because Pleasure and Pain contain only what is subjective in the relations of our mental activity. They do not involve any relation to an object that could possibly furnish a knowledge of it as such; they cannot even give us a knowledge of our own mental state. For even Sensations, considered apart from the qualities which attach to them on account of the modifications of the Subject, as, for instance, in reference to Red, Sweet, and such like, are referred as constituent elements of knowledge to Objects, whereas Pleasure or Pain felt in connection with what is red or sweet, express absolutely nothing that is in the Object, but merely a relation to the Subject. And for the reason just stated, Pleasure and Pain considered in themselves cannot be more precisely defined. All that can be further done with regard to them is merely to point out what consequences they may have in certain relations, in order to make the knowledge of them available practically...”
Available practically. The practical and the pure are very different. Pure reason has nothing to do with emotion, for emotion, reducible to none other than feelings of pain and pleasure, can provide us with no knowledgeable object, but merely a subjective condition. The separation of emotion from pure reason is very clear.
—————————-
Quoting creativesoul
Such that predication counts as thought belief? It does not follow necessarily from mental correlation being both necessary and sufficient, that such counts as thought/belief. Mental correlation *IS* predication itself, and could count as pure reason with as much validity as counting as thought/belief.
——————————
Quoting creativesoul
Physiological sensory apparatus doesn’t need turned on; it is available for perceiving autonomously, all else being given. Sensory perception requires an affectation, therefore is not autonomous.
Quoting creativesoul
Contentment = pleasure; discontentment = pain. Absolute most basic human emotional states, granted. Innumerable objects responsible for one or the other of these emotional states, sure. Do we need to reason between the state and the object that informs it? No, we don’t. After the fact, we may reason as to the effect (sorrow) with respect to its cause (forgot my anniversary). Be that as it may, for an emotion to manifest as either pain or pleasure requires an object to turn it on. It is required the wavefunction collapse to a probability density of 1, in order to recognize a certainty.
(Sorry.......that just popped in out of nowhere. Disregard)
————————-
Quoting creativesoul
Theoretically, right?
What is this from?
:lol: smartass
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-the-philosophy-of-law
It’s long and drawn out, but the part you’re asking about is at the beginning.
Hmmm.......with only those two choices, guess which I’d pick. (Grin)
If you stopped at the stop sign, the rigidity of the designator is validated. If you didn’t, the designator is no less rigid, but you disregarded it for whatever reason. All the designator needs, is for what it represents to be understood, not necessarily agreed with.
Very good explanation, teacher. :smile:
Nope, just an interest, from Maxwell to Hawking, mostly. The really old and the really new, not so much.
There’s a lot of them, that’s for sure. Pick one, run with it.
Nope. Lots of books, lots of RAM.
I didn’t dumb it down, which means you’re just as smart in understanding it as I am in writing it.
Yeah, and some stuff of genius can’t be taught.
There's zero rigidity to "what it represents" though.
It's from his Bible. He likes to quote from his Bible.
So there is a possible world where “stop” means “go” or “smoke a cigarette”?
Because the designator is not universal and necessary with respect to its representation, it isn’t rigid? The world ends if you don’t stop at the stop sign? We both know that’s not true, so those can’t be the criteria for rigid.
Right. What the heck would "rigid" amount to if a designator is variable?
Quoting Mww
That part doesn't make sense to me. Supposedly one of the criteria is that a term always refers to the same thing, in all possible worlds, but a term that doesn't always refer to the same thing isn't going to meet that criterion.
All you gotta do is ask yourself.....how many other worlds have I been to? None....probably....so universality is irrelevant. That leaves necessity.
In this particular case, no other sign, of this given color, shape and location, ever has any other purpose than to signal an action with respect to what the sign represents. Therefore, necessity is satisfied, and the designation is rigid. Sorta like....if this is all it can be, it must be necessary for it to be that. If sufficient compliance is attained, universality is possible.
On this thread, the original rendering of a rigid designator representing morality, forwarded by creativesoul.
I don’t know about rigid designator as a term in general. Is that where other worlds are stipulated?
And why would anybody do that? Use a mere possibility to cast suspicion on an otherwise perfectly valid Earthly conception.
Oh. One of those New Age types, huh. Too modern for me.
What do you think makes distinguishing necessary from contingent truths important? Like....why are there two of them anyway?
I don’t really know the import of it besides having different epistemic value. Also, I don’t know how creativesoul was using it.
Page 51, towards the bottom, part of his string of posts. Seemed quite apropos.
There's no purpose period except for an individual thinking about something in terms of purposes. Same with representation. Since different individuals can and do think about things differently, as well as potentially the same individual on different occasions, there is no rigidity.
I think that’s how he uses the word, yes. But it works just as well for me, when I say it is a rigid designator which must refer to, or represents, one of the two fundamental conditions of being human, which just happens to use the same word.....morality. I think his is use much more general than mine.
Yes, without a doubt. There is no source other than ourselves for anything whatsoever. That we’re conscious of, anyway.
I don’t think Terrapin is going to agree to that, but we’ll see what he says.
Cool. Fuel for Terrapin’s fire.
That's like saying "There's no source for anything whatsoever other than suspended pigments applied to canvases. That we can paint, anyway."
JINX!!!!!
I don’t understand this. It seems like a category error or something.
Out of bounds.
What I said must relate to what you said. You spoke of sources relevant to human thinking which means my response has to be relevant to human thinking. Not paint or canvass.
DOUBLE JINX!!!!!
So, you start out by saying that there is no x aside from F, where the scope seems to be universal, and the claim thus controversial . . . But then you suddenly clarify that you're restricting the scope to y, which is definitionally F.
In the case at hand, the phenomena only occur as thought.
That only applies to all phenomena if we restrict our context to thinking about things.
Hmm . . . I wasn't even talking (or thinking about) ethics there.
Our context is always restricted to thinking about things. What could possibly occur to us except as thought?
Phenomena may very well exist regardless of thought, but they will never occur to us without it.
Where did you go?
Nor do I. Direct perception, sure. No apprehension of external things is direct. The external thing has to become a representation. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff. Scientifically or metaphysically, doesn’t matter.
So we got into a tangent about so-called "rigid designators." I said I don't believe the distinction holds any water, because of the subjectivity of representation, reference, etc. Then Mww wound up saying, "There is no source other than ourselves for anything whatsoever," which I don't at all agree with, but then added, "That we’re conscious of, anyway," which I read as saying "In terms of consciousness qua consciousness."
They can’t be, they are purely speculative. Nothing about either of those is subject to the scientific method. But they can still be logical.
Kant clearly claims that there is a distinction between emotion and thinking about thought/belief. His conceptions support this idea. He defined all his different notions accordingly. I've granted his coherency.
He was still quite wrong.
Quoting Mww
Not quite.
All predication is mental correlation. Not all mental correlation is predication. I completely agree that Kant's notion of pure reason consists entirely of mental correlations. It consists of the all the different rational connections/relations he drew between different things, nearly or mostly all of which are existentially dependent upon language to begin with. That's the bulk of the problem.
It does not follow from the fact that emotion - alone - cannot furnish us with knowledge about objects that pure reason does not include and/or consist of emotion - at least in part.
Consider this for a moment.
If all thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon pre-existing thought/belief, and all pre-existing thought/belief is existentially dependent upon emotion, then it only follows that all thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon emotion.
If all thinking about thought/belief is existentially dependent upon pre-existing thought/belief, and all pre-existing thought/belief has emotion as an elementary constituent therein, then it only follows that all thinking about thought/belief has emotion as an elementary constituent therein.
If thinking about thought/belief does not include thinking about the emotional aspects of thought/belief, then such considerations are not taking proper account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to the account.
I don't do ontology by speculation or purely by logic.
Salva veritate is quite the helpful tool around these parts...
Cool. You can do ontology without using language? That would be fun to watch.
Sure. It's a bit harder to communicate it without language, though--at least to communicate it very precisely.
On Kant's view, perhaps. Not on mine. I see no reason whatsoever to conclude that physiological sensory perception does not happen autonomously simply because there needs to be 'something' perceived.
Happening autonomously simply means that it is not the result of an intentional, deliberate, and/or purposeful conscious effort.
All pleasure may qualify as contentment on your view, and all pain may qualify as discontentment as well. I would not disagree with that. There is no equivalence however. Not all contentment is pleasure. Not all discontentment is pain.
Yes, I agree; it would be anachronistic to say that Hume was simpleminded just because his views seem simpleminded today.
Quoting Mww
I'm not sure what you mean by "he tried to synthesize modern empirical thought to ancient virtue ethics.". Would you mind elaborating on that? Also I don't see virtue ethics as any form of utilitarianism, so that is puzzling as well!
Quoting Mww
For me, in the ethical, moral and practical spheres (at least!) rationality and sentiment (I prefer 'feeling' because of the connotations of 'sentiment') are inseparable. So, I would say that morality is not reducible to feeling, but that feeling is an inextricable element of morality (as is rationality). I would go on to say that because rationality is ineluctably inter-subjective, then so is morality. So, morality is not a mere matter of individual feelings and responses (although it is obviously and truistically also that). Moral dispositions are syntheses of thought and feeling which cannot occur in the "vacuum" of the mere lone individual; to think that is to indulge a romantic fantasy which ironically ("ironically" because it is such an unromantic notion) originates in the idea of the atomistic separation of the individual.
You mean your philosophy is more right, right? A theory predicated on logic, internally consistent, and non-contradictory....can be wrong?
——————
Quoting creativesoul
No, it doesn’t. Emotion cannot furnish knowledge at all, we allow ourselves as having knowledge, therefore, with respect to knowledge, emotion and pure reason are mutually exclusive. If one wishes to claim reason has an emotional component, he’s welcome to enunciate and sustain it somehow.
——————-
Quoting creativesoul
If I’m considering what color to paint the bedroom, if I fail to think about the starving children in Somalia, then it follows I’ll never decide what color to paint the bedroom because of it? Even if I’m a naturally emotional kinda guy, I don’t need to think an emotional aspect if what I’m thinking about has no emotional content.
Another good post. You’re fun to read...makes me critique both of us.
If ontology isn’t presupposed or irrelevant, I don’t care what it is.
This is a nice analysis, and a very apt quote from Kant. I have also long thought that we think freedom of the will because that is what our experience of action and responsibility, and most specifically moral responsibility, seems to show us. The question 'But do we REALLY have free will?' is at best unanswerable, and at worst inapt and even incoherent. The idea that it is a coherent question seems to be a chimera created, again, by outmoded and unfortunate atomistic, mechanistic thinking.
Of course it can be. Coherency is insufficient for truth. This is particularly the case regarding accounts of and/or when one is reporting upon that which existed in it's entirety prior to the account/report.
That's right, and the same goes for materialism and physicalism, despite what any methodological assumptions that are made in the practice of science might seem to indicate.
Quoting Mww
No, and I think this is where many people become confused. It is well accepted in philosophy of science that theories cannot be verified to be right or wrong. A theory is provisionally accepted as long as it seems to be, regarding what is observed, the most explanatory one available and as long as any predicted conditions and events that it entails are consistently observed to obtain.
Haha (or were you not joking?)
Twaddle. That's just one common definition, and it doesn't even account for intentions, character, or consequences, which are three very important aspects of ethics.
Someone seems to have changed their tune. When I gave a logical argument against idealism, it was all empiricism, empiricism, empiricism.
Einstein was wrong about the atom, because he utterly failed to distinguish between atoms and thinking about thought/belief. He failed to realise that atoms are existentially dependent on that which is prior to thought/belief.
The final words on Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone”, the way it was said....fits that comment to a gold-plated tee: ahhh, that’s just beautiful.
Yep. Not to mention, coherence is not a condition of a valid theory. Just because it doesn’t make sense to someone, or even a group of someone’s, doesn’t mean it is senseless.
True enough, but it doesn’t have to be; that’s logic’s job.
Nope, not joking. Being or becoming is already present in transcendental reductive epistemology. Working with what is, beats working with how something becomes what it is.
But you care about ontology only if it's irrelevant?
I don't follow your logic.
If ontology isn’t presupposed or irrelevant, then he doesn't care what it is. It is presupposed (or so he suggests), so it's not true that he doesn't care what it is.
Saying you don't care about ontology if it isn't presupposed or irrelevant suggests that you do care what it is if it is presupposed or irrelevant.
Yes, and the implication is that he does care what it is, because he thinks that it's presupposed. The "irrelevant" part is itself irrelevant in this case.
If I don't have work or I'm a kangaroo, then I'm not at my workplace. I don't have work. Therefore, I'm not at my workplace.
The "kangaroo" part is irrelevant and can be swapped with innumerable other things.
Why state it then? (The kangaroo/irrelevant part)
You'll have to ask him. But the logic is unproblematic.
I think the "presupposed" part is stupid, too, by the way, but not as stupid as the "irrelevant" part, which is why I emphasized that.
I also think that saying "presupposed or irrelevant" in this context is stupid is the "irrelevant" part was irrelevant.
Well, you haven't said why that is, not that I'm particularly interested. I'm not particularly interested in what he has to say, because, for starters, as others have pointed out, much of whatever point he's trying to make is obscured behind bad writing.
I don't have much of a bone to pick with you over the rest of what you say. I won't go as far as saying that it was stupid, but it was kind of redundant.
There's no necessary link between being super smart and the excessive use of obscure language. Otherwise Hegel would surely be in the running for smartest philosopher of all time. If anything, it suggests the opposite. It requires a higher level of intelligence to be able to translate complex rhetoric into more readily understandable text. Bad writing suggests a lack of skill or a deliberate choice.
Re only being interested in presuppositions, it doesn't seem very much in the spirit of doing philosophy that we simply accept an assumption, and especially that we're only interested in something if we do that.
"Either we accept this assumption without question, or it's irrelevant, or I'm not interested."
Ohhhhhhkay. :razz:
No excuses. I got careless.
If ontology isn’t presupposed, or if ontology is irrelevant, I don’t care what it is.
I think he was suggesting that ontology is redundant, as it is subsumed in some Kantian gibberish which needs translating back into normal human talk.
The bedroom scenario is a false analogy.
The discussion is about so-called 'pure reason', which is called "pure" because it is supposedly empty of emotional content. Pure reason includes thinking about pre-reflective pre-existing thought/belief. All pre-reflective thought/belief has an emotional aspect. That which pure reason is thinking about always has emotional content.
Again, Kant's and Hume's failure to recognize this is a consequence of an utterly inadequate (mis)conception of thought/belief that neglects to draw and maintain the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. And again... they are not alone.
No, it's not. That is a huge mistake.
The job of logic is to preserve truth(correspondence). Truth(correspondence) is presupposed in logic by virtue of being presupposed in the premisses. That is precisely how it can be the case that a perfectly valid(coherent) argument and/or position can be wrong. It is based upon false premisses.
There's a problem here in recent meanderings. The terms "coherent" and "incoherent" have been being employed as a synonym for having sense, and/or being understandable. Being sensible simply means that the terms in use are being used in some commonly accepted way. Whereas being coherent and/or being incoherent is a matter of validity and/or lack of self-contradiction.
Terms can be perfectly sensible and lead to incoherence/self-contradiction. Terms can be perfectly sensible and utterly inadequate for taking proper account of whatever it is that they are attempting to take account of.
Definitions can be wrong when they are delineating and/or describing that which exists in it's entirety prior to being taken account of.
This suspiciously looks like an equivocation of the term "perception". It doesn't seem to square with our earlier conversation regarding physiological sensory perception. If perception is direct, which I wholly agree with, then it cannot be linguistically informed/laden. It's the difference between perceiving a computer as a computer(not direct) and perceiving a computer as a part of a mental correlation where the creature has no language, such as when a cat is chasing something and that something runs behind a computer. The computer is perceived. There is a correlation drawn between it and the cat's operative thought/belief... chasing the prey. The cat looks behind the computer without ever perceiving it as a computer.
The notion of perception as being linguistically informed/laden - which is perhaps the most common usage - is yet another consequence of failing to drawn and maintain the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief.
It learns that touching fire causes pain.
It has correctly attributed/recognized causality. It draws a correlation between it's own behaviour(touching the fire) and the subsequent pain. No language is necessary here. Are we really going to say that the creature doesn't apprehend that the fire caused the pain by virtue of direct physiological sensory perception combined with mental correlation between the fire and the pain?
That is most certainly more than adequate for thought/belief. Rudimentary, but none-the-less thought/belief.
All rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour are first adopted via language acquisition. One's initial morality is thus subject to individual, familial, cultural, societal, and/or historical particulars. That is true of everyone. It is neither objective nor subjective, it is point of view invariant.
Does it follow that morality is relative? Sure. Does it also follow that conflicting statements about what's good/bad can be true as a result? Surely not.
"Good according to your morality", isn't about being good. It's about what you think/believe is good. It's the difference between being called "good" and being so, and we can most certainly be mistaken in that regard.
What counts as being an academic? How many letters must one have after his/her namesake?
No. Pure reason is empty of empirical content. The bedroom is empirical but incidental to the color, which cannot be related to the physical paint because the paint isn’t present. The palette of possibilities is a priori in my mind.
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Quoting creativesoul
I reject that thesis as without sufficient warrant. It is patently obvious there are conditions where no feeling or emotion requires my attention.
———————
Lemme ask ya.....who does distinguish between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief? Other than you. Anybody whose name I’d recognize?
Guy going about his business, just living the life, being of sound mind and body, normal Everydayman stuff, thought/belief is operating in him.
Guy gets done with the day, or just done with whatever, thought/belief goes idle, he begins witnessing what had been thought/belief. What was thought/belief in the office inventory, e.g., is now thinking about what thought/belief was doing at the time of the office inventory.
If not this, then I have no more interest in it.
My mistake then. Earlier the comparison/contrast was between pure reason and emotion.
This is even worse.
Thought/belief without empirical content? What would thought/belief devoid of all empirical content consist of?
If not equal to your misunderstanding then you've no more interest?
Hmmm.
So little Joey's parents tell him that it's wrong to hit little Stevie just because Stevie won't give Joey a toy when Joey demands it. If Joey doesn't agree, so that he feels it's wrong to hit Stevie, just how does that amount to a moral stance for Joey?
I take it that you accept that there are a number of intelligent and knowledgeable people on this forum. How many have adopted your peculiar views and your peculiar manner of speech? And why do you think that is?
I think you need a breakthrough moment. A moment when you realise that what you've been building and [I]incessantly repeating[/i] isn't as intellectually valuable as you think it is and would like it to be. I think you actually need to take on board some criticism and adapt. There is so much room for improvement. But you must lower your defences and lose the ego. Stop acting like a malfunctioning robot!
Why don't some people ever seem to learn from their errors in understanding, and instead continue to persist in making the same errors over and again?
You don't have to accept moral relativism, but if you reject it on dogmatic or unreasonable grounds, be explicit and honest about it! Just saying that there's a distinction between subjective morality and objective morality, and that you're certain of the latter is not a reasonable justification. It is private in part, which renders that part ineffective. What if I'm certain that there's a God and that miracles are real? Do you accept that? Is that being reasonable?
How the hell would I know? It’s your theory, maybe that parameter is.....you know, like......incoherent to you.
Rationality belongs to a biological entity with the capacity to reason by means of conceptions, in accordance with logical laws of his own invention, AND, willfully act in discord with them.
Find me a cat with those attributes, and we can talk.
Whoa...you've never heard of formal logic or mathematics!?
A theory predicated of internally consistent, non-contradictory tenets has truth as its possibility, regardless of its coherence. A theory can be perfectly coherent and be refutable to extinction.
The job of logic is to provide the conditions for truth, given the correct use of it, it is the means to an end. It is the form of correct reasoning, content be what it may. After truth is known, there is no need of logic to preserve it.
What in the...? He was talking about sensory perception. Where did you get rationality from?
Yes, I think so. I wouldn't call that thought or belief, and I also don't agree with the part about perceiving a computer as a computer, because I wouldn't call that perception. I would just call perceiving the computer perception, and the other part sounds like identification.
There is much I don't agree with when it comes to him. I didn't agree with his earlier interpretation of pure reason, and I don't agree with his comments about Kant and Hume, and I despise his confused and awkward and extremely repetitive manner of speech and his peculiar pet theories. And I don't agree with any of his arguments against subjective moral relativism.
On reification:
There’s as much distance between reason and instinct, as there is between apperception (by the mind) and perception (by the senses).
If we never learned a language, would we still be able to think?
C'mon Mww. Surely you agree that pure reason consists of thought/belief.
Right?
No. I was not. Cats are quite capable of thought/belief. The cat believed the prey went behind the computer without ever perceiving the computer as a computer. I've set this out more times than I can remember.
The point being made, however, was about the all too common notion of "perception"...
That's irrelevant. I'm not claiming that every situation demands that we focus upon the emotional aspects.
The issue here is what all pre-reflective thought/belief consists in/of. What is the content? If it includes emotion, and it most certainly does, then thinking about it requires one to think about the emotional aspects of it. Pure reason is thinking about pre-existing thought/belief. A proper account would include all that that pre-existing thought/belief consists of.
Shouldn't a discussion about perception, thought, belief, language, reason, and so on, be confined to a separate discussion?
This is just plain wrong. Logic does not provide truth conditions. Logic presupposes truth. Truth is presupposed in premisses.
Do me a favor here...
Define the term "truth" in such a way that the reader could replace all your uses of it with it's definition and not suffer any loss of meaning and/or coherency. The last statement above makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me...
The rules of logic most certainly need to preserve truth.
This is getting downright preposterous.
You're welcome to address where I left off...
"'X' is good according to person A" is not about the goodness of X.
Agree?
Nice rough history...
Insert The Great Moustache at this point. His life is a fine example of the sheer difficulty one has in 'shedding' one's first worldview when it is grounded upon such deeply held belief such as one in the God of Abraham.
Good/Evil
Reward/Punishment
Unfortunately the church did not do us any favors. The baby is hard to find in an opaque tub. She's there though.
God may be dead, but that God had nothing to do with an admirable moral code.
Are these meant to name two distinct kinds(modes) of perception? If so, what do they both have in common that makes them what they are... examples of perception. Surely it's more than just because we say so. Right?
What is the criterion, which when met by some candidate or other, counts as being a kind of perception. Clearly the difference is 'by the mind' and/or 'by the senses'. What makes them both perception though?
What exactly is it that you're saying is 'by the mind' and 'by the senses'?
I laughed... ...quite heartily.
If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.
That's what tends to occur when one throws truth out the window.
No, obviously I don't agree. That's basically asserting without argument that moral relativism is not about right or wrong, and then asking a moral relativist if he agrees, which is extremely daft. You would have to be a fool to expect a different answer.
You need to support that without begging the question, which is a task that people like you seem to find impossible. You've had 57 pages to provide a sound argument, yet you've been unable to do so.
But none of that addresses the topic. The topic is about morality itself, making this discussion a meta-ethical discussion. What you said is consistent with both of the main positions in the debate. The topic is not about whether there is right or wrong, or what you judge to be right or wrong, or whether there is a sense of right or wrong. Your qualifications like "I consider" and "the way I see it" render your statements useless as an argument against subjective moral relativism, if that was your intention. Was your intention to have a stake in the debate, or to say nothing controversial at all?
Nope, that's still not even a valid argument. It's not as though you've had 57 pages to produce one or anything...
And once again, you succeed in demonstrating your lack of understanding of subjectivist moral relativism, which doesn't throw truth out of the window. On the contrary, it is a meta-ethical theory committed to moral truths, just like your meta-ethical theory is committed to moral truths, but there's a dispute over interpretation.
Once again, this is an example of the opposition naively assuming that they have dictatorship over the meaning of moral truth, and that anything that doesn't fit their own interpretation doesn't count. And he's predictably doing exactly the same thing with right and wrong. Anything that doesn't fit his interpretation doesn't count. Even though that's a clear example of begging the question, which is a logical fallacy. How far must your head be up your own backside to make that schoolboy error?
Learn the basic fallacies you're committing, and then come back when you're competent enough to stop committing them.
This is a philosophy forum, where the aim is to present reasonable arguments in support of a proper account of things, not merely to assert or assume that you're in possession of such an account, and that any one who disagrees with your account must be mistaken and "fail miserably". This is no place for empty rhetoric. It's either philosophical substance or don't waste your breath.
A judicial system can protect humanity from itself, as well. Can the judicial fully contain the moral, or does morality need to be a system of its own?
Your proclivity of conjoining disparate conceptions is off-putting. I understand thought, I understand belief. I understand thought is possible without a belief attached to it, I understand no belief is possible without being thought. I don’t have any reason to suppose conjoining them with the implication they are the same thing, would serve a purpose they couldn’t serve just as well by treating them as different conceptions, and as having different relations within a rational procedure.
Pure reason is a procedure, the method of exercising our intrinsic rationality, so of course it consists of thought and beliefs. There is no place in the procedure for thought/belief as a singular notion.
Your irrelevancy is misplaced. I reject the thesis because reason doesn’t think. I do. I am the thinker. By means of reason, imbued in me as a condition of being human, I do my thinking. That is why I am certain there are conditions where no emotional content is involved, for the simple fact I don’t think about them.
Are you familiar with “Cartesian theater”? Your “thinking about thought/belief” as it seems to me, demands one, which both speculative philosophy and cognitive neuroscience shows as unnecessary on the one hand or implausible on the other.
Quickly.......
Perception: real objects are passed through the senses in order that we understand we are being affected by something outside us;
Apperception: representation of objects are passed to understanding a priori, so we are enabled to think an object without it being outside us.
If we didn’t have that ability, we wouldn’t have a memory. Perception is the energized neural pathway, the empirical aspect, apperception is the feedback loop such that the pathway is maintained, the rational aspect.
In theory.......
And the award for understatement of the century goes to...
No one is debating the way things actually are and anyway, that isn't a problem for ethics it's just hard science and observation of an indifferent world.
Purely observing the world never offers an answer as to how humanity should behave. That's all ethics is concerned with, how humanity behaves.
So if we strip human psyche of emotion we're left with a cold, hard robot in a cold, hard world. How would such a machine react to the question, "perform a morally right action"?... It wouldn't inherently know what a morally right action is. It would require context, a goal and a motive.
Within a moral construction context is clearly subjective; We need to know what scenario we're talking about. The motive is also subjective; we make actions to fulfill our emotional needs. There is not one emotion, there's infinite hues. This concludes that the goal will be subjective; Subjective to our situation and motive.
All of the above is subjective. You can't apply objectivity to action.
Nahhh....I ain’t doin’ that. No matter how I did it, somebody could take exception. Especially you, methinks. It’s a fine line between truth being out there waiting for us to find it, in which case logic preserves it, or truth doesn’t exist until we determine what is true, in which case logic makes it possible. Historically, empiricists use the former to denounce the latter, rationalists use the latter to denounce the former. And the beat goes on.....
At which point we ask, "Why is it (morally) wrong to corrupt the gene pool?" or "Why is it (morally) wrong to not have offspring?" etc.
Maybe people would also have answers to that, and then we'd ask "Why is it (morally) wrong to
Before too long, they'd have to say, "Duh, it just is!" or "Duh, I just feel that way" or "Duh, it's just what I desire versus alternatives" or something like that.
Could you give an example and explain how we'd be mistaken?
For example, maybe you'd want to say that someone saying "It's morally permissible to rape others" would be mistaken and would be getting something incorrect, where you're not just saying that you feel differently than they do. So could you explain how that would be the case? (Or you can use another example to explain if you prefer--it doesn't matter to me, I was just suggesting one.)
True, but I think nsmith was just pointing out the evolutionary development of perceived common morality. It certainly explains why some actions are near universally frowned upon.
How so?
That was a true statement.
You could always offer a valid argument in support of your position. I've yet to have seen one from you. It's all gratuitous assertion, handwaving, and ad hom from you thus far.
"'X' is moral according to person A's morality, and/or worldview"
What is the above statement about?
I say person A's belief. My answer is obvious. X equals some behaviour. "Is moral" represents person A's thought/belief about the behaviour.
Good. At least there's something we agree on here. I'll return to this after more paving.
Poor wording on my part. Of course reason doesn't think.
We do. Reason is a method and/or means.
Here we have a disagreement that seems relevant.
Reason is imbued in us as a condition of being human?
What does that mean? "Imbued in us"?
Quoting Mww
Are you claiming that you, as a human, do not have any emotional content within your reasoning? No propositional attitude? Neither confidence nor lack thereof? Neither contentment nor discontentment. No certainty? No confusion?
No.
Again, [i]you[/I] can't just assert without argument that a disputed claim is true. And trying to shift your burden on to me or change the subject is fallacious. Do you understand that? I won't tolerate that. That's not doing philosophy properly.
So, before moving on to anything else, [I]you[/I] have a burden to support:
1. "If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are".
2. "That's what tends to occur when one throws truth out the window".
Or to explicitly concede that you're unwilling or unable to do so. And you should also address, and not rudely disregard, my criticism.
Where have you addressed my point which disputes your claim about throwing truth out the window? You haven't.
Once we've settled this matter, I will consider moving on to what you want to address, but not before.
Just saying that it makes sense, or that there's a good independent of relativity, doesn't actually do anything philosophically. Nor does blowing your own trumpet by proclaiming your view to be virtuous.
There obviously isn't, rather, because there's nothing at all in the vein of a "good" assessment in the extramental world. The extramental world simply is. It has no preference for one way it can be over another way it can be. The extramental world couldn't care less if humans survive or not, if they have continuing communities in whatever state. Humans care about that, and a human caring about something is subjective, not objective.
Quoting Janus
If we're talking about people approving something, we're surely not talking about something objective.
If you don't buy that there's an extramental world, or you don't know what one would be, you have no business arguing that anything is objective.
Quoting Janus
An objective fact is a fact that obtains extramentally.
There are extramental facts about bodies, the states that bodies are in, etc., but as I've noted many times, if we're using a term that has a normative connotation to it (for example, "healthy" as a normative) then there's nothing objective about that. There are no shoulds or preferences in the extramental world. There only is what IS.
And you can't get anywhere near morality if you avoid normatives.
There is no objectivity in human discourse beyond our ability to inter-subjectively agree that something is the case. What else could objectivity consist in?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course; normatives just are inter-subjective agreement; what else could they be? And by your own argument, since you reject inter-subjective agreement, "you can't get anywhere near morality".
How many times did I ask you to explain just what "intersubjectivity" amounts to in your usage? You've never done so.
Different people use that term in different ways. If you simply mean agreement that's fine.
How in the world does agreement amout to objectivity?
Well, so what? How does the fact that 98% of people say that make it right? And isn't the claim that that makes something right known as the argumentum ad populum fallacy?
Saying that something is a social phenomenon would exclude meaning, preference, etc. Societies don't have minds, individuals do.
What is that supposed to be a response to? It doesn't seem to be an answer or comment to any question I just asked you or any comment I just made in response to stuff you'd just said.
Okay, now what? How do we get from that fact to anything you're attempting to claim re objectivity, etc.?
Definitely "cultural attitude" is only a very loose manner of speaking. Cultures don't literally have attitudes. Attitudes are mental phenomena, and only invidividuals have minds. Cultures do not.
Social behavior has something to do with mental stuff in that it can both reflect and influence mental stuff. We can't identify it with mental stuff if we want to speak at all precisely, though.
Only people care about communities continuing though, no?
An undeveloped albeit intrinsic quality present at birth.
Quoting creativesoul
No. I’m saying I can Reason with respect to emotion when it’s called for. Feelings are not cognitions, which is why they have no object of their own. The body supplies the object, re: tears, butterflies, sheer delight or sheer adrenaline rush....whatever. One never thinks......is this where I’m supposed put a smile on my face? Is this the right time to cuss the bad guy, applaud the good guy?
Reason with respect to emotion enters the stage when the response expected, or considered appropriate, doesn’t conform to the feeling, re: being punished (remorse) for something you didn’t do (anger), or, what’s worse, being given credit (pride) for something you didn’t do (shame).
Herd morality that doesn't benefit the herd will not last for long. Some brilliant individual(s) will come along and overthrow it. Human communal life is always a work in progress. The main point anyway is that when it comes to the central moral issues (murder, rape, torture, and so on) there is little to no variance within or across communities. That is because murder, rape, torture and so on cannot be generally approved of and widely practiced without destroying community. That is an objective fact. You allude to Nietzsche; where did he ever condone such acts?
Quoting Janus
So that's what we're referring to by this being subjective rather than objective. And that's what makes it not factually correct or not (to prefer one thing to another).
Quoting Janus
Sure. But that's nothing objective, and nothing correct versus incorrect.
Per how they're defining "flourishing," sure. But what of it? That doesn't make anything objective or correct morally.
It is objectively so that they share the attitudes, and the effects such shared attitudes have on communities are objectively so, and communities are objectively more or less harmonious or riddled with conflict.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Flourishing versus declining is, when it comes to communities. equivalent to solidarity versus division, harmony versus conflict and these can be observed at work within communities, in other words they are empirically assessable. If some moral attitude increases conflict within community, then it is incorrect; it is the wrong strategy.
And also, given that the "sociopath" dismissal has long since been exposed and refuted without any attempt at rebuttal, I don't know why you are repeating it: a) you're not qualified to make that diagnosis, and b) it's basically just an ad hom.
But that's just changing the topic. The topic is whether moral stances themselves are subjective or objective, and whether moral stances qua moral stances can be correct/incorrect.
No one is arguing that people don't really share attitudes (etc.) when they do, or that behavior isn't what it is, or that the states of communities aren't what they are.
It's becoming tedious to argue with you, like it is with terrapin, because you both refuse to address any points as they are made, but instead distort them so that you can attack them within the context of your own inadequate presuppositions. No one can stop you from continuing to do that; so no matter waht I say you can always come back with some shit or other. But there's no point to that.
Obviously I'm not saying anything like "individuals are not embedded within their communities." The only thing that would be simpleminded is thinking that I'm saying anything at all like that.
The problem is that being embedded in your community doesn't make mental phenomena communal phenomena. Mental phenomena, qua mental phenomena, still only occurs in individuals. And moral stances are mental phenomena.
It's just like, say, ice phenomena, qua ice phenomena, only occur in or "of" water. But obviously the water in question is embedded in a non-water environment, which has various influences on the ice phenomena in question. And it would be ridiculous to assume that anyone is supposing that the water in question isn't embedded in an environment. But guess what? Ice phenomena are still only in or "of" water. (Simplifying of course so that we're not talking about other types of ice.)
I have never claimed that moral stances are "correct/ incorrect" in themselves. What could that even mean? You argue that they are correct or incorrect only in relation to individuals; and I say that is simplistic, because individuals are not isolated entities, but are embedded in communities, and that therefore moral stances are correct or incorrect, or more aptly suitable or unsuitable, relative to communities. I have also argued that there are central moral dispositions which are virtually universal within and across communities. If you don't agree all you need to do is provide some counterexamples; of communities that condoned murder, rape, torture and so on of their own citizens.
This is simpleminded. It is based on seeing individuals as self-contained atoms, and ignoring the fact that everything we can say about individuals' mental lives is the result of culture; a shared phenomenon.
And the moral stance that says that it is only the individual that matters is itself an unsuitable disposition for the flourishing of community.
Another example of simpleminded thinking! "Ice phenomena" are of the whole various sets of conditions that give rise to them. Water is not isolated from the environment any more than we are isolated form our communities and the wider world of nature. You would benefit from studying some ecology, it might provide some correctives to your simplistic nonsense.
Straw man alert! I said nothing whatsoever about surviving without the community. Try again. I said "strong-minded individual", not "isolated hermit" or "Bear Grylls wannabe"!
Quoting Janus
Again, herd-morality has nothing necessarily to do with what's beneficial or detrimental to the flourishing of the herd. It is just whatever the herd judges to be right or wrong.
And it's not true that a morality which doesn't benefit the herd won't last long. It has lasted since the very beginnings of humanity right up to the present day. Non-cooperative strategies have been around for about as long as cooperative strategies, and if the former had a zero success rate, then it would have disappeared a long, long time ago, but it very obviously hasn't. It's what capitalism is built on, for heavens sake! Competition. What you must mean instead is that it won't dominate, but that suggests an ignorance of history and of global affairs. There are countless examples of master-morality dominating a society, and holding on to the reins of power for significant periods of time. Do I even need to give examples?
I'm afraid your points about being overthrown, community goals being a work in progress, murder, rape, and so on, and about approval, and destroying a community, and what Nietzsche did or didn't condone, all completely miss my point.
My point is simple enough. It's about what matters to me, as an individual, in an ethical context. It's about what or who I am subservient to, and that is not the herd, not for my sense of right or wrong. They can only try to influence my morality, and either fail or succeed in doing so. They cannot dictate morality to me, because I am an autonomous moral agent and a strong-minded individual. I am neither sheep nor slave, but master of my own morality. You can deny and argue until the cows come home, but the fact of the matter is that I know myself better than you do. You're stuck on the outside, trying to peer in from a distance.
[quote=S]And herd-morality isn't whatever is beneficial to the flourishing of the herd, it is whatever the herd judges to be right or wrong. I was hoping earlier that historically factual examples of herd-morality would actually get you to think and to see the error in this type of thinking. What if, for example, you were a slave in a society where master-morality was predominant? The herd would go along with that, because slaves are good to have. They would see slaves as a lower class that aren't valuable except for their utility. If they disobey, it is justifiable to punish them harshly. How does that morality sit with your individual sense of right and wrong? Is the herd right or are you right?[/quote]
What's your answer?
It seems futile to try to argue against that. What else could it be? Dogmatists, like Tim (nice, but...) and creativesoul, would of course merely assert something along the lines that it's simply, absolutely, objectively good, irrespective of all of that, but that's no argument and can rightly be dismissed. The less they say, the better, because there's rarely if ever any philosophical substance to it. And the latter seems frankly deluded that his crackpottery is the ultimate solution to all of philosophy.
Let me ask you this. Would you say that what's suitable or not to a community hinges on what people desire with respect to the community?
It matters a great deal that your personal vision isn't necessarily my personal vision. Two individual moral agents don't have to see eye-to-eye. That is precisely what normative ethics is for! We would hardly find much use for it otherwise. We are individual moral agents, each with our own unique sense of right and wrong, and what we should or shouldn't do, and what's important or what's more important, and so on. And this is true in spite of having things in common, and sharing certain judgements, and living in a community, and whatever other irrelevancies you've raised.
Remind me, what's your argument against this, again? If I recall correctly, I think it was something along the lines of: "You're a sociopath! You're not Bear Grylls! I value the community! My opinion is more popular than yours! But... but... the herd wouldn't flourish if...". It is pretty laughable stuff. And it does not indicate a critical approach akin to that of Nietzsche, which questions the very values which many of us so often take for granted, especially since the dominance of Christian morality.
But whatever, go ahead and throw your toys out of the pram.
What would be the distinction between the morality you are discussing with T and S, and laws? Why are you calling it morality instead of law?
a) Morality is relative to the individual.
b) Morality is relative to the community.
c) Morality is relative to the context, including both individual and community.
Of course, morality is - on a fundamental level - relative individually, because a community is just a group of individuals who happen to have certain things in common. That a morality is relative to a community is just to say that it is relative to this individual, and that individual, and this other individual, and that other individual...
I'm not looking to argue about it. Just want to see if you're talking about my position. I respect your opinion. Otherwise I wouldn't be asking. I deliberately try to avoid any sort of anthropomorphism. I do see how it is related, as a result of being about all thought/belief, and morality is a kind, but...
It certainly is tangential.
PM me... if you would. Just want to avoid being guilty of the charge is all... A decades worth of work ought not be guilty of such.
There are conflicting statements, including moral statements. That's just the way it is. We all know this to be true. That claim corresponds to what has happened, what is happening, and what will most certainly continue to happen barring an extinction event.
If there are no conflicting statements under subjective moral relativism, then it fails miserably as a means for taking proper account of the way things actually are.
That's where I am at on a simple 'foundational' level wrt moral discourse. It makes the most sense on a simple to understand level. It can tolerate our fallibility. In fact, it uses it as part of the argument/position.
The difficulty, some say, is saying where goodness comes from, or some such...
It's the aim. It is discovered by virtue of trial and error. The fact that we can be wrong also refutes the idea that what is good is equivalent to our belief about it.
You've already admitted to having made that mistake. We all have made that mistake, I would think...
Use your own example.
This, I am fairly certain, highlights the remarkable differences between Kant's framework, and my own...
An undeveloped albeit intrinsic quality present at birth.
I wouldn't put it that way, but I also do not entirely disagree. Let's flesh this out a bit more.
I agree that neither physiological sensory perception nor emotions are equivalent to cognition(thought/belief). They are an irrevocable elemental constituent thereof. They are necessary for all thought/belief(all cognition is existentially dependent upon them both). I think we agree there, but I also think that that is where we part...
You want to separate complex thought/belief(about pre-existing thought/belief) from both it's content(what it's about) and it's own elemental constitution. There's also an aspect of existential dependency that is not being taking into proper account.
We are very close to talking past one another, and actually may already be doing so.
I am talking about what all thought/belief consists of and relating that to the fact that pure reason consists entirely of thought/belief. You're offering specific examples of situations where the thinker does not deliberately consider emotion. I'm not denying that. Grant it, without hesitation. It misses my point...
Pure reason is thinking about thought/belief(they are one in the same prior to metacognition, and even afterwards they consist of exactly the same core - mental correlations). So, for now at least, let this pass. I do distinguish between the two, particularly in cases where one is suspending one's judgment as a pre-requisite for entertaining another possible explanation/worldview/position. Prior to metacognition(thinking about thought/belief) there is no difference.
As best I can tell:We are unique in the animal world in that way. We are the one ones capable of isolating our mental ongoings and then considering them as a subject matter. Here is where the distinction between our report and what we're reporting upon is pivotal.
"Abortion is morally permissible" and "Abortion is morally impermissible".
They can't both be true, by the law of noncontradiction. You assert that with statements of this sort, one is true and the other is false, and your argument for this is... you don't have one.
That is very much a problem.
My position begins with a recognition of the problem. It then resolves it through moral relativism, as follows:
In an ethical difference over abortion, interpret, "Abortion is morally permissible", as "In my judgement, abortion is morally permissible", and interpret, "Abortion is morally impermissible", as "In my judgement, abortion is morally impermissible".
Given that in the each statement above, "In my judgement", refers to a different thing, namely, in one case, the judgement of one person, and in the other case, the judgement of the other person, there is no contradiction. Both statements, assuming sincerity, are true. Meta-ethical problem resolved.
You always seem to have trouble with this, because either a) you don't present a supporting argument for your dogmatic moral absolutism, or b) you misrepresent moral relativism, or c) you misrepresent the law of noncontradiction, or d) a combination of the aforementioned.
We must have been over this a million times, but you've proven incapable of getting it. I think that I'm very good at explaining things like this, even if I do say so myself. I don't think that it's my explaining that's the problem. I mean, just compare the above post with mine. It should be clear to others which of the two of us is the better writer, clearer thinker, less of a crackpot...
I would never come out with something like "Pure reason is thinking about thought/belief". I would be far to embarrassed to say something like that in all seriousness. Seriously, stop trying so hard to be original. You're never going to be a famous philosopher. You are no where near being in the same league as the likes of Hume and Kant. None of us are, but least of all you. They aren't "utter failures", you are. That is very much an example of psychological projection. Please. Stop. For your own good. It's embarrassing. Just google "pure reason", and learn.
Where you wrote "interpret as..."
I wonder. This is too funny. What would a misinterpretation look like? What about all the different people and positions that acknowledge the fact that the majority of people, when saying "X is immoral" mean that X is immoral.
Under your position... everybody holds that being moral/immoral is just a matter of being about personal judgment, or we misattribute meaning to everyone who doesn't think like that.
Everyone does not think like that.
The position you're arguing for/from is utterly inadequate for taking account of the way things actually are.
Your answer: dogmatism. The problem? Dogmatism leads to all kinds of unfounded nonsense.
Misattributing meaning to statements of thought/belief does not resolve the problem.
I have done so already. You want me to highlight it for you? Okay, but don't take the piss. My patience is limited.
Quoting S
That's big problem number one.
Quoting S
That's big problem number two.
His is wrong about my position in the exact same way that Western Philosophy has been wrong about what thought/belief consists of and/or how it all works. Being wrong about that which existed prior to our reports comes in a variety of ways.
Common use of language qualifies. Drawing mental correlations between different things qualifies.
My avatar's namesake hasn't changed except for the "soul" part. It's been lost and found a couple of times.
The only means of becoming aware of one's own mistake is by virtue of an other... I welcome valid criticism.
It has become clear that your psychological mechanisms have now taken over. Anything to escape having to actually deal with the problem rationally, right? Go ahead, blame your incompetence on me. It is my fault that you're too incompetent to deal with the problem I raised. It is my fault that you don't want to admit your shortcomings to such an extent that your own unconscious psychological mechanisms have kicked in to protect your fragile ego.
Quoting S
Damn, I'm good.
Be helpful.
Ha! More than I already have been?!? Good god, man. Learn to help yourself.
Jesus H Christ. You are [i]really[/I] bad at writing. Just say that I misrepresented you.
Quoting creativesoul
Crackpot alert!
One last chance...
There are probably upwards of five or ten or arguments I've given in this thread about various aspects of morality. I would be interested in having you copy at least one in it's entirety and then offer valid criticism of it.
The astute reader already knows that I've already satisfied that criterion. I've just completed doing so on this and the previous pages. I've levied clear concise and well-reasoned criticism based upon obvious true statements.
You've offered nothing more than grandstanding, gratuitous assertion, double standards, equivocation of terms, red herrings and non-sequiturs, the list goes on and on. This report of actual events that I'm asserting is true, because these things happened. Anyone can go look for themselves.
Your personal tirades against the author as compared/contrasted to being about the statements is not only automatic loss in formal rational and ethical rules of debate, but it is quite indicative of the 'larger' problem of ill-founded blatant disgust and/or obtuse disrespect for another person...
Edit in light of the latest response...
What a shame. You had so much potential.
:worry:
... and I'm being called "a crackpot".
Sigh....
Be well Sapientia.
Any of you know what "argument" @creativesoul is referring to? No, me neither. It's alright, I'll just go on a wild goose chase through 60 pages of discussion.
A little off topic, but [i]yes![/I] If I was a crackpot, I would most certainly want people to do more or less whatever it takes to breakthrough to me that I am a crackpot, even if it shattered my false self-image. The first step is identifying the problem.
By being principled enough to tell it like it is?
You're a crackpot, but I love you? Let's hug it out? Am I a decent human being if I tell you comforting things you want to hear, in addition to the harsh truth? Or do you think it's better just to flat out lie? You're not a crackpot, you're a genius who has got it all figured out, unlike the entirety of Western philosophy? Oh, and you're really good at writing? Keep up the good work?
Seriously. Be well.
Woh. Wait. You just said "belief". [I]On its own[/I]. You didn't do the annoying forward slash thing. That's a sign of progress.
Quoting creativesoul
You too. I hope you deal with your issues. Be brave enough to face the harsh reality. The world won't come to an end if you do.
Do you not worry about equivocating and/or self-contradiction? Given the context, it seems to me that what sorts of things can be true and what makes them so matters...
Statements of thought/belief can be true. Can moral statements be true? If so, they ought be so by virtue of the same way that other statements are. Correspondence to what has happened.
The interesting aspects come out when one sets out exactly what they mean by the name("moral statement"). Clearly, it is a kind of statement. What makes it qualify for being of the moral variety?
The coherency of everything else claimed about moral thought/belief hinges upon this. No?
Is it helpful to parse morality in such terms? "Moral" not being a synonym for right, acceptable, and/or approval, but rather as a kind of thought/belief that everyone has; a kind that is determined the same way that all kinds of thought/belief are determined... by the content of their correlations.
I'm quite unconvinced here.
No, I've no idea which of his bare assertions he's erroneously describing as an argument.
I've had enough of this nonsense. I'm not wasting any more time writing stuff that just gets ignored, I might as well talk to a wall.
I asked you, "Could you give an example and explain how we'd be mistaken? . . . "
Your response to that is "You've already admitted to having made that mistake." ????
And then you said to use my own example.
I suggested an example and asked you to explain how it would be mistaken rather than just being a different, far more unusual, moral stance that someone could have. How am I supposed to use that example? I have no idea how you'd believe it works that the person is supposed to be mistaken.
I'd say they were more his explanations or accounting of what's going on with morality than something like an argument with premises and a conclusion. I could find some examples of that, but it would take a bit because there are so many posts in this thread.
His explanations have been met with many objections that he hasn't really addressed.
It always does, when opinions are the primary source in a dialectic.
Quoting creativesoul
No conflicting statements implies subjective infallibility, but otherwise normal humans are very far from infallible if it be granted it is impossible to have sufficient evidence to prevent being wrong universally, such that an agent’s statements and the world of his involvement immediately coincide regardless of circumstance. It follows that “fails miserably”, while perhaps being a rather harsh judgement, isn’t entirely misplaced.
On the other hand, in a broader sense, involving groups of subjects, there can be private statements among individuals which may not conflict internally but conflict inter-subjectively. This broader aspect entails a failure in the culture in which the SMR is operative, but not so much the individual. Either way, the implication is that subjective moral progress is very difficult and any rational criticism of his own or any other social climate is virtually non-existent.
All of which seems to indicate a problem with “conflicting statements” with regard to what is in conflict with what. Such problem with statements reduces to a problem with relativism, in which case the question becomes, what is it actually that is relative, and what is it relative to.
I would have left out right and wrong, but otherwise, well said. The sense of “good” already contains right or wrong in it for the moral agent, and on the other side, the observing agent has no say in the moral agent’s determinations but may only make his own judgements relative to them.
I shouldn't respond to something else because I want you to address "Let me ask you this. Would you say that what's suitable or not to a community hinges on what people desire with respect to the community?"
But re the other most recent comments to me, you're conflating things that I'm making pains to not conflate.
A precondition for x isn't identical to x. (Or x being the result of y doesn't imply that y is identical to x.)
So it's a precondition for me to awaken that I fall asleep or that I'm unconscious first. But falling asleep or being unconscious aren't identical to awakening.
It's a precondition for me to drive somewhere that I have access to a vehicle. But having access to a vehicle isn't identical to driving somewhere.
Also, me driving somewhere might be the result of someone asking or commanding me to drive somewhere, but someone asking or commanding me to drive somewhere isn't identical to me driving somewhere.
When I say that moral stances are mental phenomena, and only individuals have mental phenomena, I'm not saying that there aren't preconditions for having mental phenomena or moral stances, I'm not saying that the preconditions are (of) individuals qua individuals. But those preconditions aren't identical to mental phenomena or moral stances. (And likewise with ice states and the environmental, chemical, etc. preconditions of the same.)
:lol:
Quoting Isaac
I know the feeling. :meh:
Him and Ranky are extremely hard to pin down. It's like they have an automatic shutdown when things get too tough.
Not really, because of the relativism. One can of course be wrong in the relative sense. In practice, it most certainly doesn't work as though we're infallible, so whatever's going on behind the scenes doesn't make a big difference in that sense. We can change our ethical views, and ethics is about competing moralities. There's no practical difference, from my perspective, between others being wrong relative to my morality, and others simply being wrong. It works that way for you and for everyone else, also.
Nope, no problem. And there's a conflict between moralities. I would rather he conform with mine, he would rather I conform with his.
There's no problem, and that question has been answered.
No. I’m sure of what I think. I know I’m not self-contradictory, but I certainly could be just plain wrong because I’m missing some experience which would alter my judgements. That being said, I’m as much subject to possible cognitive prejudice as the next guy. But if so, I came by it honestly, so I’m ok with it.
——————
Quoting creativesoul
I said I wasn’t going to define “truth”. That’s not to say I don’t accord with with a similar form of yours, insofar as...a-HEM!!!!.....truth is given when a cognition conforms to its object. While not a definition per se, it is an indication of a purely subjective condition which abides no internal controversy.
—————-
Quoting creativesoul
What’s a moral statement? From the agent’s perspective, is it a declaration of an interest (hunger is detrimental to good health), or, is it the representation of an interest in the form of an action (I go to the gospel mission every Tuesday to feed the hungry)? I don’t make linguistic moral statements when the occassion arises to formulate my morality (I can see it in my head) so the truth of that kind of statement is moot. If my action is considered a moral statement, and it derives explicitly from my moral law, then it is a true representation of a moral interest but not a linguistic statement. If I just outright tell you something I consider implicit in my moral agency, then that statement I make to you must be a statement about a true moral interest of mine. But you wouldn’t know if I actually held the moral principle from which the interest came anyway, so, again, the truth of that statement is moot.
Truth or non-truth is not sufficient for moral statements, but only for actions in compliance with a subjective principle. Only then is an agent is morally true to himself.
———————-
Quoting creativesoul
Since this whole Chinese fire drill started, it has been my position that morality is one of two intrinsic conditions of being human, the other being rationality (I said reason, but that isn’t quite right). So, no, I do not consider it helpful at all to parse morality in terms of right or wrong, true or false. These are all subject to definite quantification, hence those dualities are reducible to something else, which is the foundation of relativism in general.
I think we need the term “right”, of a certain sense not negated by “wrong” but having to do with “harmonious”, in which relativism has no say, and we also need something irreducible to anything else but still relative in itself. We end up with.......doing the right thing because it is good to do it. Here, what is right is given by the rules the agent himself determines and has no relativism, what is good is relative to the separate agents’ sense of moral obligation with respect to each other.
So, the idea is simply this. Normally, we say that something like "Man first landed on the Moon in 1969" can be true or false. Can "One should not murder" likewise be true or false in some way?
Superficially, man landing on the moon is empirically provable, carrying the implication of necessary truth in the statement. To say one should not murder is not the same kind of statement, insofar as no empirical proof arises from the commission of the act. Committing a murder doesn’t prove it true you shouldn’t have, but only proves it necessarily true that you did. And the negation is the same: not committing the murder proves you didn’t but doesn’t prove you shouldn’t.
If I say it is true my best interest is served by not committing murder, then I am tacitly admitting the statement “one should not murder” is true, but that admission is only with respect to my interest, not to the fact of the matter contained in the statement itself. Besides, how would I know with apodeitic certainty the statement is necessarily true without actually doing what the statement says I shouldn’t? Have you ever been aware of some mindset of yours, committed some act associated with that mindset, then been aware of your mindset post-act? Oh man...I should NEVER have done that!!! The difference in those two mindsets perfectly describes the truth of the statement, which manifests purely as a conflict of interest.
So....is there a sense? Sure. But we have no business in formulating our moral interests by having to actually do something beforehand, in order to then discover whether our moral condition is supported by it.
When you say “true in some way”, don’t you mean “true in the same way” as the moon landing? Something can be true in accordance with the “preferences” one has accepted can’t it, or do you use another word to describe that?
ie someone could say it is true that you should not murder if you do not want to go to jail. Thats not an objective fact statement as your opponents want to claim, but I would say its true, at least in “some” sense.
True, for the morality of the individual is already determined, so what is good for him is given. The differences in already determined moralities of separate individuals, assuming there are any, and the matter and degree of those differences, is where the relativism resides. By association, what is good for the community is determined by the relative moralities of its individual inhabitants and how those differences manifest in public.
The obviously objective “what is the case” of the good of the community is given by how well it performs as a community. It is the case objectively that the community gets along well when the members do, and vice versa.
That which is thought but never expressed is an opinion. That which is opinion expressed is a belief. That belief of which a single instance of its natural occurrence is met in experience, is knowledge. Ever been in a community where some people exhibit moral differences but the community gets along? All righty then......thesis validated far FAR beyond mere opinion.
The judicial system is an administrative code of conduct, in which rules or laws have a consequence associated with them. It works well to supervise public conduct, but it doesn’t speak to private conduct
Whether law grounds moral dispositions, the why and how of it, is the purview of deontological doctrine. If one doesn’t grant the validity of that doctrine and abide by it, moral dispositions in conjunction with moral law are meaningless.
One would have to find some other way.
That's a good example of a needlessly convoluted answer to a simple question. I say yes, like most of us, and then some of us argue over interpretation. There's only one person I know of here who says no. But seriously, what kind of answer is the above? We all know a moral statement, like "Murder is wrong", when we see one. Are they truth-apt or aren't they? Then, are there some which are true? Then, in what sense?
And how do you justify the leap from what seems to be nothing other than a personal judgement, to something more than that? It very much seems to me like one of those statements where you can add something like, "In my view...", or "In my opinion...", or "The way I see it...", and in fact you did this earlier. Yet, if one were to say something like, "In my view, there are 365 days in a year", or "In my opinion, we're in the Milky Way", or, "The way I see it, 2 + 2 = 4", then we'd find that very odd. I think that that's telling.
You don't have to throw yourself into debate, but I think that it's important to keep in mind what's relevant to the topic and what doesn't really need to be said. I was curious about whether you have a view on what we're debating. And whether you take a position or lean more one way than the other. It was hard to tell from your comment. With due respect, I think that some of your statements seemed to miss the mark, a bit like saying something like, "I think that morality is important, and about right and wrong. And I think that murder is wrong", for example. That's not what's at issue here. Is morality relative, absolute, subjective, objective, primarily a matter of emotion, or of reason. Is it, or should it be, individualistic or collective? Those are the sort of things we've been discussing.
Right, and I think the "differences in already determined moralities of separate individuals" are relatively insignificant when it comes to the central issues of morality, which involve the most obvious forms of harm that members of a community could inflict upon one another.
So, disagreements over issues like abortion, for example, revolve more around the definition of 'person' than over the question of whether it is right or wrong to wantonly harm persons.
I agree with your comment about the good of the community consisting in how well it performs as a community, just as with the human or animal body, where its fitness is equivalent to how good it is.
I also agree that healthy communities can, and probably should, exhibit a range of opinions about the more nuanced moral issues. But again these usually consist in differences of opinion over what constitutes harm.
So, I am a moral relativist in a sense apparently not too different form the sense in which you also seem to be. The frustration I am experiencing in responding to others here who claim to be championing a different kind of moral relativism is that I am not even sure as to exactly what that "difference" consists in, or exactly which points we are disagreeing about.
All they seem to be saying is that it is individuals who make moral choices and hold moral attitudes, but that seems to be trivially obvious, and I can't see how anyone could disagree with that. I would like to see clear statements from them as to what they think I am claiming and how that differs from what they want to claim, otherwise it seems like an endless talk-pastfest, which is a complete waste of time.
I guess I’m a moral relativist in the sense you gave here. I’m pretty sure I have different moral interests than many others hereabouts, and we all get along pretty well.
That being said, I think that notion of morality is reducible to something that, while I get along well here, I wouldn’t get along well at all in, say, Belltown in Seattle, or the South side in Chicago. Or, hell....anywhere in Saigon. Is it something that can be addressed by a shrink, to see if I’m simply a elitist, or would it be better addressed by an examination of my moral philosophy, to see if I live where I do because it is good for me to live here?
I think it means something if I can say my moral interests would change dramatically if I was forced to inhabit a community I didn’t like. If that is true, the influence of culture can explain the occassion of my moral relativism, but it can’t explain the relativism of my moral disposition itself.
I go by the Lincoln-Douglas style. I take the first negative in opposition to whatever first positive I’m responding. The correct second positive reply to me should address what I said and nothing else whatsoever. If it doesn’t......I’m out. Patience is not my thing. Right before wasted effort.
Mores can differ markedly between cultures, but I tend to see those more in terms of different forms of etiquette than of central moral differences. I don't know, perhaps we would need to examine actual examples.
The "relativism of (your) moral dispositon itself" I would see as a combination of enculturation and freely exercised rationality. And certainly there will be diversity of opinion over the finer points, which I can only see as a good thing.
I think that's the way to go...
I feel as though I have certainly participated in what I see as the useless parts of the overall discussion that comprises this thread; with some degree of frustration and not much sense of the satisfaction that comes with getting at the heart of issues. The only reason I can find for doing so is that I don't like to be misunderstood, and even less do I like being willfully misrepresented. but, there does come a point....
You give me the impression of an unwillingness to take things to their full logical conclusions for fear of giving up in some way on those very "central issues" of which you speak. You seem to have a lingering attachment to wanting your moral judgements to somehow impossibly amount to something greater than [i]your moral judgements[/I]. Any central issues are central only because we make them so, because we happen to feel a certain way about them. Now, let's say that we take away that feeling. What's left?
Do you think that the most obvious forms of harm that members of a community could inflict upon one another would mean anything, ethically, absent the way we feel about it?
There's an error here which I think that some people fall prey to, which is to try in vein to detach their own subjectivity from that which they subjectively judge. They think it is because harm is wrong that they judge it to be so, without realising that this is in fact backwards. This is just a story that people tell themselves and others. We do not believe that it's just a story because we do not [I]want[/I] to believe that it's just a story, just like how we believed in creation myths and our imagined centrality in the universe. But, just as the work of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and others, is capable of dispelling certain widespread and deeply ingrained myths, the work of Hume can do so also.
The good of the community consists of the good you judge of it, and that he judges of it, and that she judges of it, and that they judge of it, [i]and nothing more[/I].
Is a healthy community a good community? Well, a healthy community is just a healthy community, unless we judge it to be good, in which case we naturally say that it is so. If we were to judge it to be otherwise, then naturally we would say that it is otherwise. There is no litmus test here which can be appealed to. That is the challenge which is never overcome. Has anyone here provided such a test? No. Some have tried, but have failed to realise that it is not a test, but an act of faith. If you place your faith in Kant, He will show you The Way!
Indeed, you've made your attitude clear. And I have made my feelings on the matter clear also. This too is a serious ethical disagreement between us. You think that you're above responding to me directly. You think it beneath you. I think that childish and arrogant. I lack the commitment to such pettiness, as you can see. If I see a point I feel like expressing my thoughts on, I generally do so. You have shown yourself to be very much the type to hold grudges to an extent that I struggle to match. I am more tolerant and forgiving in that regard. I have a different set of priorities.
Yes, of course, they would have a detrimental effect on the life of the community. You might say that is because of how everyone feels about it; and of course this is a part of the overall true picture. Everyone dislikes being murdered, raped, stolen from, deceived and so on, and that is an objective fact about human nature.
So I disagree with this:
Quoting S
because it ignores the actual functionality or dysfunctionality of the community.
Quoting S
No, this is nonsense. Of course a healthy community is a good community, just as a healthy body is a good body or a significantly damaged hammer is a bad hammer. It all comes down to functionality. If your life is a harmoniously functional life then it is a good life, if it is a conflicted and dysfunctional life, then it is a bad life. Insofar as we are and want to be social beings functioning well in relationship is an integral part of what constitutes a good life. And there are objective facts about what kinds of acts will and won't sustain your ability to do well in relationship.
You rant and cast aspersions too much; which makes you look defensive and as though you don't have any decent arguments, and makes replying to you more tedious than it should be. Just stick concisely to the salient points of arguments and you will do much better.
Of course, he says! Yet he fails the challenge. No, that in itself is not meaningful ethically unless you associate that with being bad, which brings us right back around to the exact same problem I just explained to you. If you don't associate that with being bad, then how is it of any meaning, ethically?
Quoting Janus
Yes, of course.
Quoting Janus
It is [i]the most fundamental[/I] part of it. Without that part, nothing is of any meaning, ethically.
Quoting Janus
Yes. But why are you telling me this?
Quoting Janus
There is no functionality or dysfunctionality of the community, except relative to some purpose someone or other ascribes to it. And [I]that[/I] is of [i]zero[/I] ethical relevance, unless we judge it to be so. But that we either judge it to be so or do not judge it to be so only really says anything about us and our judgement, whereas you seem to want to say something more than that.
Quoting Janus
No, that is nonsense.
Quoting Janus
Yes, of course it is, [i]obviously[/I] so long as we judge healthy to be good, and obviously [i]not[/I] otherwise.
Quoting Janus
Oh my god. Seriously? That's either equivocation on the sense of "good" or you're not saying anything ethically relevant. That is a novice move.
Quoting Janus
Are you really so naive as to not realise the essential part that your own judgement plays in your expression of what you seem to mistake as some sort of objective fact? If we make a bunch of additional assumptions, then yes. But those additional assumptions just kick the can further down the road.
And if that's just your opinion, then fine. But be more explicit about it.
Quoting Janus
I don't think anyone here is questioning mere conditionals like that. If I want to get by in society, I'll make sure I fit in well enough. If I want to satiate my desire for murder, I'll murder people. If I want to be a good Samaritan, I'll set out to help others. If I want to be a good salesman, I'll learn to be manipulative.
Quoting Janus
Beside the point.
(Ignoring the last bit).
If you don't judge health and functionality to be good and ill-health and dysfunctionality to be bad, then we have nothing to talk about. If you don't believe that the most fundamental aim of community is to live harmoniously together, then I will agree that of course you are entitled to that stupid opinion. But I see nothing to support such an opinion except "that is what I choose to believe"; it would be a perverse, and not a reasonable, opinion.
Say something cogent or be ignored.
Okay, I will. I will say this, and only this, and then I will remain silent until I judge the situation differently: here is a spoonful of your own medicine. How does it taste?
Will any interest do or does it require a specific kind of interest in order for it to qualify as being a moral one, as compared/contrasted to one that is not. I've all kinds of interests, from people watching to inventing, to rendering, to poetry, to non-fiction, etc.
I find it rather important to set these things out as clearly as possible, otherwise the line of thinking goes awry. That's what prompted the earlier definition of morality, although interestingly enough, I do not agree with that definition entirely. It is current convention though, so. No better place to start. However, it leads to morality being relative/subjective. The SEP article actually changed and mentioned that particular objection to it at one time, although I'm not sure if it still does. I do not remember. I'm also not sure if it was a result of my argument showing it at the time - a number of years back on another forum - or it was just chronological coincidence. I mean, there are number of paid professionals here and elsewhere, some of whom write and/or edit articles on the SEP website. Anyway... I do not find that focusing on the rules gets to the heart of focusing upon the thought/belief underwriting those rules. That's how knowledge of the matter at hand is acquired.
I aslo commend the direction you've taken here wrt the law and morality. On my view, the law is nothing more and nothing less than legitimized morality(legitimized moral belief).
A bit too utopian/idealistic methinks.
We have a right to discuss our personal thought/belief on a public forum. Besides that, the sentiment itself is both self-contradictory and untenable. It sets an impossible criterion to meet. In other words, if what you say is true, then you have no right to say it. You see what I mean? You most certainly do. It is also literally, figuratively, physically, mentally, and practically impossible for anyone at all to have all the facts.
While there is also most certainly a need for us to curtail immoral behaviours, telling someone something is not one of them. How something is told matters much more. The level of respect that the telling is based upon matters. The telling itself is a necessary method. It is not only necessary but it is irrevocable to thinking/believing anything anew. It takes an other - in some way shape or form, so to speak - to show us our own mistakes. If no one told anyone else anything at all language would have never gotten off the ground.
Well, surely you see the need for telling people stuff.
It's all personal thought/belief being expressed here anyway. What matters most is whether or not it is true. What matters second most is whether or not it is well-grounded. Given that the topic is morality, and we all adopt our own initial worldview, we're all on equal grounds to that - being adopted - extent.
Moralities vary according to particular circumstances. Not all are on equal footing however. Some allow exceptions to the rules. Some do not. Some are based upon true claims, some are not. There are many aspects to consider when one is considering morality.
History shows us that our moral thought/belief changes. What we once thought/believed was good is no longer thought of as being such. Slavery is a prima facie example, although it has morphed more than being abolished. That's another topic altogether though. The point is that humans are the ones that make the rules for human behaviour, and those rules have changes dramatically over the last few centuries, right alongside the evolution of our thought/belief.
Morality has been called a necessary human condition. I think that that sort of thinking highlights one very important aspect of morality. We are all interdependent social creatures by physical and mental necessity. Our cooperation with one another has been instrumental in the survival of the human race. This is true of all long lasting communities.
With an ever-shrinking world filled by an ever-expanding power of personal expression, we're beginning to see more and more of not only our differences, but our similarities as well. The shrinking is due to computer technology. Easier access to information is not good in and of itself. The quality matters most. As a result of being able to access whatever one wants to by virtue of a couple of keyboard clicks, confirmation bias has never been so easy unless one already agrees with everyone around him/her.
Difference is irrevocably crucial for improvement.
The need for critical reasoning skills has never been more prevalent.
Such criticism is usually based upon an ill-conceived notion of thought/belief itself. Everything ever spoken, written, and/or otherwise uttered consists of thought/belief.
Morality is tough because of the differences. Who is the standard bearer, so to speak. Who determines what is moral/immoral? Who determines what is acceptable/unacceptable? These are common questions...
We do, and thankfully more and more people across the world are coming to the agreement that blatant, willful, and underserved disrespect for another's person is unacceptable. Racism is dwindling. However, it is but one manifestation of the same fallacy. Gross overgeneralization. Unfortunately, it still underwrites soooo much 'Western' pop culture, not to mention the institutionalized racism still prevalent in American government at every level, federal, state, and local. However, that is also evolving moe and more into socio-economic prejudice/injustice as compared/contrasted to racial. There are some token pieces of diversity roaming about, and they are well-paid to do what they're asked.
Is it morally acceptable to literally pave a legitimate way for a foreign country, citizen, or group to have and freely express a much more powerful freedom of speech than the average American? I think not. However, that has actually already been done at the Supreme Court level. All of these directly involve morality.
There are things that can be said; things that are true of everyone regardless of one's individual circumstances. These things help to frame our thinking and understanding about how we ought act. Our behaviour has an effect/affect on other's. Keeping that in mind is crucial for determining which action to take.
But this is not a moral stance. Loads of people dislike broccoli, yet still eat it because they want to be healthy. Dislikes and behavioural proscriptions are not the same thing. I may dislike being stolen from, but dislike being unable to steal much more and therefore prefer a society where we all steal from each other. In many tribal cultures it is considered OK to just take someone else's possessions if you want them, so your concept of what everyone likes and dislikes just reveals your Western values, not anything about human nature.
Quoting Janus
OK, let's follow your line of thinking and see where it goes. The actual functionality of a community is an objective fact, and that certain behaviours lead to or avoid such functionality is also an objective fact (or, I believe in your use of 'objective' something can be so on the grounds of being widely agreed on, so we'll go with your definition here).
So... Simply list those things. List all the behaviours which objectively (by your definition) lead to the dysfunctioning of a community. Or just a few, if there are too many to list. I ask because I'm struggling to think of any without further questions which make any central agreement pointless. I'll start you of with those issues I'm having trouble with.
Murder of innocents - who exactly is innocent, an adulterer (already carries a reduced burden of guilt in some countries), a slave (entire cultures considered this acceptable in the past) who is truly innocent in war, are we really at war (see Northern Ireland), what about the trolley problem, saving several lives by killing one innocent, how many lives make the killing of one innocent one OK, how far into the future do these saved lives have to be, how certain do you have to be about innocence...etc?
Rape - how has the MeToo movement evolved if everyone agrees (and always has) on the boundaries of what rape is?
Torture - Guantanamo Bay?
Stealing - I've just given examples of cultures where taking other people's possessions is considered OK. What about revolution, Marxism radical anarchism, all have very different ideas about what property is and who it belongs to.
Hurting innocent children - smacking?
So, you say our agreement on these matters is the objective fact, and our disagreements are of less importance, but all I see from an objective viewpoint is disagreement. So perhaps you could help me out with a quick list of some things you think we all agree on.
Show me. Many native American tribes had no concept of personal property. There is no such thing as stealing someone's possessions in a community where all property is gladly and happily considered communal to begin with.
If you don't agree with my opinion, then we have nothing to talk about. If you don't share my opinion, then you're a stupid head. If you disagree, then I choose to close my eyes to any support you've provided. If you disagree, then you're a pervert. (Which makes you a pervert sociopath stupid head!).
And say something I'll agree with, or else I'll ignore you.
Wow. That's astoundingly humble. @tim wood, @creativesoul, @Janus... did you hear that?
Okay, that's an interesting spin on what you said. Is that an indirect refernce to me? Reasonable criticism is encouraged in philosophy. It doesn't defeat the purpose of a forum such as this. On the contrary, it is very much in line with the purpose of a forum such as this. What's not in line with it, would be to indirectly refer to my criticism in such a manner without properly addressing it. I think that it's [i]generally[/I] fine to use such qualifiers. I believe that there's [i]generally[/I] nothing wrong with that. My [I]specific[/I] criticism was only applicable in a certain context, namely with regard to moral statements, and when intended as an argument against subjective moral relativism. They support subjectivity by their subjective nature, so it would be self-defeating.
It's called Demand Sharing. It was first identified by Les Hiatt among the Arnhemland Aborigines, but it's since been recognised quite widely among hunter-gatherers.
What I'm hoping to show by this is that there are no objective facts of the matter even by Janus' definition of objective. I'm not particularly precious about my personal definitions, but I am precious about people confusing cultural superiority complex with objective fact.
Yes, we all agree with the very nebulous concept that "murder is wrong" and so by Janus' (rather idiosyncratic) definition of 'objective', such a concept could be considered an objective fact ('wrong' would also have to be quite weirdly defined as a class of behaviour, but as I said, I'm not precious about definitions).
My point is that this does not provide any useful insight because the concept is too nebulous to be of any normative utility. Hence he can safely leave the thing behind when investigating the meta-ethical issues.
I know it's a long way round, but the direct route didn't seem to be working.
Yeah, if everyone feels that murder is wrong then surely it's a fact that everyone feels that murder is wrong and that fact implies . . . exactly nothing else. It certainly doesn't imply that any individual should feel that murder is wrong (if some odd individual happens to show up at any point and not feel the same as the rest of us), or that anyone has things incorrect if they don't feel that murder is wrong, or anything like that.
So presumably you believe that it's a non-opinion-oriented fact that "health and functionality are good" is reasonable, and you believe in general that "x is reasonable" can be a fact that in no way hinges on individual mental predispositions, habits, etc., right?
How would you attempt to support that?
Yes, absolutely. But then what is to stop someone from saying that a collection of such things (things everyone thinks is wrong) is what we call "wrong" when it comes to moral-apt behaviour? "wrong" is just a word, words quite frequently mean different things in different contexts (and to different people). It's quite reasonable that "wrong" when we're talking about morality means {those behaviours which most people dislike}, whereas "wrong" when talking about the statement "the sky is made of jam" means {does not correspond with reality}. After all, we say 2+2=5 is "wrong" all the time, and by that we don't mean {does not correspond with reality}, we mean {does not correspond with the rules of maths}.
So, if "wrong" in the context of morality means {does not correspond with the rules of morality} that would be a completly normal use of "wrong", and if the rules of morality happen to be decided by consensus, then so be it. I don't complain that the rules of chess are derived without my input, nor do I cry foul when someone uses those rules to claim that I was objectively "wrong" to move the bishop perpendicularly.
What is not implied (which is where I agree with you) is that one then should behave a certain way. All those statements above can reasonably be correct uses of the word "wrong" but none mean that I should not murder, presume 2+2=5, or move a bishop perpendicularly.
The reason I bring this up is that I think there's a difference between the ultra-rationalist view that some moral behaviour is rationally right, and what seems to be Janus's view that some behaviour is right because that's what we use the word "right for in this context.
I disagree with both, but I disagree with them for different reasons because they are different propositions, and that's what I was trying to draw out.
Sure, but there would be no way to support that using "right"/"wrong" in a particular way is the correct way to use it aside from just descriptively noting that it's the conventional or common way to use it. But that's not all that the other side here wants to say. They don't want to just say that such and such is the common moral view, or that such and such is the common way to use a term. If that's all that they wanted to say there would be no argument with us--or if there were, we could just settle any disagreement by doing a survey of beliefs, of word usage, etc.
People want to instead say that there's normative weight to what's common or conventional (or we could say that they want to support the notion of normative weight, period), they want to say that certain things are correct versus incorrect, reasonable versus not reasonable, etc.
Yeah, that's what I wasn't quite sure about from Janus's latest posts. Tim and the ultra-rationalists definitely are trying to say that, but arguing against them is a pointless waste of time if they're never going to address the actual issues.
@Janus, I thought was saying something slightly different. That, in the case of morality, some collection of behaviours can be objectively called "right" just and only because that's what the word "right" means in this context, and any normative weight is derived entirely from the fact that we probably do want to live in a harmonious society (and so anyone who doesn't need not pay attention, ie the normative weight is not exhaustive).
This is a form of relativism (in that the few who do not have a desire to live in a harmonious society are excluded from the normative value), but it is still one with which I disagree, because I think widespread agreement is merely fabricated or presumed in order to give cultural preferences more weight than they rightly have under their own system.
If that's all he's saying, though, what exactly is he disagreeing with me about?
Bingo. It is odd to me how certain otherwise logical thinkers, who I shan't name, somehow end up at a different conclusion. We can add in a premise that if everyone feels that way, then it's objectively true that murder is wrong, but that is, as you rightly point out, a fallacious appeal to the masses, so that just won't work, and there should be more recognition from the other side of the debate that this just won't work.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Exactly. At best, it implies only a mere conditional, which is totally ineffectual if you don't subscribe to the antecedent in the conditional. At best, it implies something along the lines that, if this is your measure of judgement on right and wrong, than it will be right or wrong for you on that basis. That's [i]totally consistent[/I] with subjective moral relativism, and no one [i]has[/I] to accept that [i]personal[/I] standard of judgement. One could simply go by a different standard of judgement. It's not as though there's a moral authority we can appeal to in order to settle this, or at least, this has not been successfully demonstrated, even after 60 pages worth of discussion.
Again, where is the recognition of this problem from the other side? Where are the attempted refutations? It seems we've reached a point where, for them, dogmatic bare assertions, handwaving, and flat out ignoring is the order of the day. What an abysmal state of affairs. This is a [I]philosophy forum[/I].
Well, yes. As usual he'd be disagreeing with the usual straw man of relativism, that we all think murder is OK. Or a rather boring semantic argument about the use of the words "right" and "wrong" in this context. Or more likely just found himself on the wrong side of an argument with a little too much pride. I'm just trying to squeeze a little philosophical interest from this, and my previous tactic of pointing out the glaringly obvious ontological facts hasn't been doing it.
The main reason why I'm keen to support relativism is not because of its ontological truth (as I've said before, "truth" is not such a big deal for me) it's because I think objectivism is harmful, and I care about avoiding harms (at least to those people I choose to care about).
It is in this context I find the argument about near universality to be more fruitful to oppose than the one about absolute universality which would be required to prove objectivism (and which those on that side of the argument have so spectacularly failed to provide).
Indeed, how would you support the claim that health and functionality are good in themselves, rather than conditionally so in accordance with our moral judgement?
It can't be done. Surely at this point we're justified in writing off such claims as unsupported.
This is where I disagree with you (and I have a feeling disagreeing with you is going to be a lot more fruitful than disagreeing with my previous interlocutors). I think it is an erroneous appeal to the masses, not a fallacious one. I don't think it is fallacious to appeal to the masses (or any other authority) as to what is "correct" in certain circumstances. It is "correct" to move the Bishop diagonally in chess, and this is entirely because the consensus of chess players think that. It is incorrect to say 2+2=5, and this is entirely because the consensus of mathematicians define the terms that way.
What I think the appeal to the masses is here is erroneous. It is a mistake (given what the proponents claim to want) to use the opinion of the masses as a normative force to guide behaviour in that way. Diversity is good, innovation is good (I also trust instinct quite a lot too). Reversion to the mean stifles these things and so is a mistake. It ends up back with something I think you and I spoke about right at the beginning. People imposing their own cultural values as if they were objectively right.
I disagree with you on that, too. It's fallacious. That something is common never makes that thing correct or right or anything like that. It's simply the argumentum ad populum fallacy.
You could say "Well, people consider it correct if it's the standard or the norm," which is true, but the fact that people consider things to be correct in that case suffers from the same fallacy. It's not correct just because people consider it to be.
The only thing that commonality makes correct is the fact that it's common.
So how do you treat the use of the term "correct" when applied to a move in chess? Is it a misuse of the word for you? Because the way i see it, the moment the majority of chess players change their mind about the rules, a previously incorrect move becomes correct. It seems entirely based on what the majority think.
As a sloppy manner of speaking. Yes, it's a misuse of the word to me. If you want to play by the widespread conventions, you can play by them, and have people monitor that, etc.--that's fine. But it's important to not conflate that with the notion that there's something "wrong" with it if you want to play differently. Whatever exact terms we use. This isn't about the terms, it's about the ideas. You can simply play in conformity with the conventions or you can do something more unusual. There's no inherent value to doing either.
I agree entirely with your successful refutation. Where I'm at odds is that if he had come back and said "in a racist society, racidm is morally" right" because that's what "right" means" - then, I think he would have had a reasonable position. We're free to define words that way and I'm not sure it would be too far from the way a lot of people use the term. They are just wrong about the behaviour of the they consequently advise.
So a move which is against the rules of chess, whilst playing chess would be what? What term would be the one you'd prefer to hear? That move is...
Unconventional, perhaps against rules that someone has agreed to play by (if they have)
Fair enough. I'd just say it's not a correct move, but maybe I'm more careless in my speech than I should be.
I’m ok with that. Mores being a form of social etiquette, or an unwritten code of public conduct, as opposed to, say, taboos. The consequence of violation of a civil code of conduct is usually pre-determined as part and parcel of that code. The consequence of violation of social mores is usually something like being ostracized to some degree, or something like it, and isn’t usually pre-determined in form or degree. It’s like mores are an informal code, civil law is a formal code, both having to do with public conduct.
It is very much more the case that an outsider will find the mores of an extant community sufficient reason to join it, rather than the unambiguous, etched-in-stone civil code. Though I suppose it is possible a guy will come to a state where the penalty for bank robbery, e.g., is substantially less than some other state. Nevertheless, it seems rather significant that one’s sense of good conduct has precedence over one’s sense of right conduct.
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Quoting Janus
Again, I concur, if I’m already in a social environment, but if I’m freely changing environments because of some arbitrary unhappiness with either myself or the community, to wit: my enculturation is insufficient, or even detrimental somehow, then my freely exercised rationality becomes the means by which I know what’s good for myself, and in turn justifies me packin’ up the kids and BBQ and hittin’ the road.
If it be true my moral relativism enables me to be well-adapted to a community, and my moral relativism enables me to be unhappy with a community, enculturation because of community can’t be the ground of my moral relativism. Cultural predicates can only serve as the means of exposing my freely excersiced rationality. In other words, I myself am common to both situations, therefore whatever the distinctions are, and however they manifest, absolutely must have their origin in me.
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Quoting Mww
All my above is in relation to your assertion here. I voted it true, because I agree with that assertion in itself. I bring it up to exemplify the difference between your “morality is relative” with respect to the good of a community, and my “the relativism of morality” which I assert has nothing to do with community.
Is there any common ground?
I think it's important that we avoid suggesting that anyone should be doing anything just because it's what everyone else is doing.
I completely agree. It's what is most fundamental to me about this discussion. What I'm trying to do is to demonstrate that this continues to be true even if one accepts the terminology of "correct" = accords with the rules the masses make.
The masses do not, in fact, agree on 'the rules' like they do in chess, or maths, and if any community were to devise some 'rules' with the objective of bringing about social harmony, it is my view that they would be well advised to proscribe something which acknowledged individual autonomy, diversity and innovation. Something very different from that which moral objectivists tend to think of as 'morality'.
In other words, I got bored of banging my head against a wall on meta-ethics and started talking about normative morality instead.
Excellent question, and well-thought. There are two kinds of interests. An interest which is the object of desire is an interest of empirical reason and is subjectively pathological; an interest which is the object of will is an interest of morality and is purely subjectively practical. It is here that it becomes clear objective examples, re: external to the moral agent, of moral conditions are not sufficient for moral judgements.
In the former it is the object itself that is good because it satisfies a desire, in the latter it is the willful determination of a volition in order to attain to an object that is good because it satisfies a moral disposition.
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Quoting creativesoul
Absolutely. As long as we agree it is a moral law, not a law in general. And it must have the form of law, because laws are the only possible manifestations of universality and necessity, with respect to human rationality. And it must be those in order to be non-contradictory. And it must be non-contradictory in order for the moral agent to know with certainty what his moral dispositions are. He cannot go through life constantly asking himself what the right thing to do is, or, more importantly, what the good thing to do is. Here is where the intrinsic circularity of human rationality arises, insofar as he must reason to a law, which must then be used to reason to his lawful actions. Enter.......yeah....that’s right......moral subjective relativism. Proof positive moral relativism has no place in the world. An agent needs to determine his laws relative to his sense of good. THAT is the name of the moral game.
Even so, given the necessary conditions of law, it still must be determined how a moral law is possible.
FYI, of purely general interest.
This struck me most:
“....a survey of 73 professors with a PhD in philosophy and primary area of specialization in ethics revealed that 37% endorse deontological principles, 27% endorse utilitarian principles, 22% endorse virtue ethics, and 14% endorse none of the above....”
(reported in Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2012)
http://home.uchicago.edu/bartels/papers/BartelsEtAl-MoralJDM-2015.pdf
Interesting take on it. I'm very much with Terrapin in that it's first of all a disinterested approach about what's the case regarding morality, ontologically. But in addition to that, for me, it then becomes pragmatic in the sense of which interpretation is most useful or least problematic philosophically, and I argue that that's subjective moral relativism, in spite of the clear prejudice and misconceptions some people have about it.
If I didn't take that pragmatic approach, I would've stopped at error theory. I think we can actually order meta-ethical positions in terms of how sophisticated they are. I would roughly place dogmatic moral objectivism at the bottom, with error theory somewhere in the middle, and my pragmatic subjective moral relativism at the top.
I would place emotivism and error theory below my position, because the former is problematic in terms of moral truth-aptness, and the latter in terms of moral truth.
It was clear to me from the start that Janus would put forward a position with more going for it than that of Tim, creativesoul, or Rank Amateur. I think that's likely true in general, whatever the topic.
My recent quarrel with him hasn't changed my assessment in that regard. The truth is, we aren't all intellectual equals.
I consider it a very minor difference, if it is even a real difference at all, whether we say erroneous appeal to the masses or fallacious appeal to the masses. I agree that not every such appeal is erroneous or fallacious. When it is a consensus-based thing, it is more of an appeal to authority. I don't think that his claim would be a valid appeal to authority, because he's not actually appealing to an authority. They are an authority on herd-morality, not on morality. If you want to know about herd-morality, obviously it makes sense to consult the herd.
Yes, I agree that that would have been a considerably better response: bite the bullet, stick to your guns. That's better than handwaving and ignoring at least. But I think that that just doesn't feel right. And I prioritise what your gut is telling you here. It seems pretty damn wrong and crazy to appear to be siding against your own moral judgement with the racists and the slavery supporters by affirming that they're morally right in these scenarios. To me, that indicates a problem, even if only semantic. It's really weird not to give your own moral judgement priority, and say that they're wrong. I think he's like pretty much everyone else when faced with this thought experiment: he instinctively wants to say that they're wrong. But he can't do that without seriously undermining his broader position.
This objection is a slight variation in wording from your earlier objection, and it has been dealt with. But I will generously remind you of the answer.
As you know, I am a moral relativist. That means that I consider normative moral statements, like "Murder is wrong", to be true in a relative sense.
As you [I]should[/I] know, I haven't committed to relativism more broadly. I actually just consider meta-ethical statements about morality to be either true or false in the normal way we treat such statements. There's no contradiction there at all. These are two distinct positions about two distinct types of statement.
This has been explained to you multiple times, by myself and by others. The real question is, why do you persist with this stuff? Is it that you just don't get it, or that you deliberately disregard the explanations? Either way, it makes you look bad.
Yes, me too. Again, this is kind of the point I'm trying to make here. If (not an if I would agree with) one were to say "morality" just is the rules set by the masses, and if one somehow took the edge off the 'mob rule' that would allow by claiming some notion of humanity as the universal belief, even then, one would have little by way of answers because the 'rules' thereby created would barely answer a single real question. Questions you and I could answer in an instant by consulting our gut.
:100:
I'm not sure about your distinction here. There are more or less serious taboos, just as there are more or less serious mores. Taboos are the kinds of mores that tell us what not to do and there is another class of positive mores which tell us what to do. I don't believe it is terribly important for the health, harmony and stability of societies that their members adhere to the less serious mores, although it might be so in very tradition oriented societies.
Modern societies thrive on difference, so it might be worse for such societies, societies that are based on change and growth, if everyone obediently adheres to less serious mores. If everyone began practicing incest on the other hand, I think that would certainly be deleterious to modern societies, but perhaps not to societies in which the practice had somehow become sanctified. Although it seems that there have been very few, if any societies which did not proscribe incest.
Quoting Mww
OK, but I was referring to your enculturation as a child being the foundation of your moral attitudes. Of course you can think about and modify those attitudes however you want to, or are capable of, by freely thinking about them. One aspect of the kind of moral relativism that says it's all about the individual is right; the individual is certainly in principle free to change his or her mind about any moral prescription or proscription whatsoever. The individual can do whatever they want to within the limits of what their enculturation, and of course the law, will allow.
My position is just that acts which foster flourishing, peace and harmony for individuals and for their (whole) communities are morally right, and acts which bring about decline, conflict and disharmony within individuals and their communities are morally wrong. Different mores may suit different communities, but as I have repeated many times, I believe that when it comes to the big central moral issues there is little variation within and across communities. I also believe that if egregious acts like murder, rape and so on were widely approved it would be fatal to the community in which it was approved. So there is plenty of room for diversity when it comes to the less serious mores, but not when it comes to the serious ones.
I am curious about one thing; which is that, although you apparently consider yourself a moral relativist, you seem to be in favor of Kant's categorical imperative. That would seem to be a difficult if not impossible reconciliation.
You know...the human complement system: Yes, no; left, right; front, back; up,down.....mores, taboos.
But you think of a taboo more as a negative more? That’s fine. I can do that, if it ever comes up again.
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Quoting Janus
So you use enculturation that way, from a child-rearing perspective. I was attributing more to it than that, looks like. It relates because I treat morality from the perspective of a fully developed rational system. As such, I don’t think morality is given to me by parents or society or environment. I figure if I’m responsible for my actions, I get to say what they’re going to be.
All the rest of your comment.....all good.
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Quoting Janus
Moral relativism is only recently prominent, sorta like when science divorced itself from philosophy, so too did relativism divorce itself from anthropology, and has since sliced and diced itself up into so many separate denominations....it’s ridiculous. If morality is a study of personal conduct, then there are only two sources of what would stand as a guide for it. Either the code is external, as religious, tribal or administrative doctrine, and is called descriptive ethics, or it is internal, called normative ethics, as a function of personal character, called virtue ethics, or as a function of will, called deontological ethics. That’s it...ain’t no mo’.
I am a relativist in the common sense only insofar as my moral interests are certainly not going to be identical to everybody else’s, I’m a subjectivist simply by nature, and I’m a deontologist because the idea of moral law appeals to me.
The C.I. is the formula for a moral law, it says act strictly in accordance with a principle and whatever that principle is, which I am free to choose, treat it as if it were a law on which everybody else acted the same way. Although this is not a realistic “ought”, it is a very substantial guide to private conduct, to being morally disposed. And that’s all it was ever supposed to be. Murder is a moral interest of mine, because from it I can hold with a principle (murder is contrary to the purpose of life), therefore I ought to act (never commit murder) as if it is indeed a fact murder is contrary to the purpose of life.
As an aside, this formulation also solves the “is-ought” problem. Turns out, it ain’t all that difficult to reason from an “is” (murder is contrary to the purpose of life), to an “ought” (don’t do it, man).
It's not flawless...
Someone who does not care about others could use the CI as a rule of thumb and arrive at unwanted, unexpected, and harmful consequences regardless. Someone could use the CI, in some logically possible scenario, as a means to intentionally harm others(steal and wish that everybody else would as well). Isaac argued something quite similar earlier. It could be used as a means to an end. Goodness is an end in itself. A method is only as successful as it's implementation.
How much does this logically possible situation actually matter though? Not much if we also recognize that all such guiding principles of behaviour are prone to the exact same thing.
We do what is good for the sake of doing good.
Kant's CI is a fantastic starting point for helping all youth develop a greater sense of the actual part we play in our own lives including the actual influence that our thought, belief, and/or behaviour has upon the world. It couldn't be more realistic and practical. It also gives it's user the best possible chance to discover, release, and/or further perpetuate goodness. Kant's CI is quite easily taught despite Kant's unnecessarily complex taxonomy/linguistic framework.
Certainly the best moral belief can be taught to everyone first acquiring language, regardless of individual particulars.
"What if everyone acted like that?"
Easy to understand. Easy to further develop.
With simple reasonable follow-up focusing upon the obvious negative consequences, it helps to further develop critical thinking skills and it begins and/or continues to promote active conscious deliberation regarding how our actions affect/effect others. <---------That is the very heart of all that is morally relevant.
Bring it to the forefront of the child's thought at the appropriate time, and it can leave quite the good impression. Teaching children how to come to such terms promotes goodness for it helps nurture a worldview built upon how important it is to consider others as well as considering the efficacy of their own thought, belief, and/or behaviour.
It fosters goodwill.
It teaches a well-grounded sense of responsibility based upon considering how one's own behaviour effects/affects the world. It is easily understood with simple terms at first. It is also easily amenable to further nuance. After it is introduced as a way to come to terms with everyday situations and is being actively employed by someone, it can be used as the sole means for helping them to finally determine what they ought do in any actual situation that they find themselves in. It will not eliminate the possibility of being mistaken.
Not everyone likes being treated the same way. Everyone likes being respected, accepted, and valued. Thinking about everyone in such terms promotes goodness. Our honourable use of Kant's CI can help pave the way.
It provides a foundation upon which to discover, release, and/or further perpetuate goodness.
If someone already respects others it is a fantastic tool for honing the will. If someone does not already respect others, say someone has a long history of not giving a fuck what sort of harm she/he/they do to others, then Kant's CI is much less affective/effective. Certainly we all agree that that sort of behaviour is not the best.
The best possible results stem from early teaching and constant reminding. It fosters good habits of mind.
Thinking about the affects/effects that our own behaviour has upon others is the very best foundation. It is easily administered, taught, and/or otherwise initially implemented. It provides a baseline from which to judge. It supports the idea of doing what is good for it's own sake. It provides the best practical and realistic possibility for increasing happiness and livelihood while decreasing unnecessary suffering.
We're not seeking perfection. We're setting out which is the most likely to increase goodness while decrease unnecessary suffering. If everyone did this, there is no doubt that the world world be a much better place than if not. So, it also consistent.
What more could one ask for?
My vote is Kant's CI, and you've just read my off the cuff meandering.
You're talking like a religious zealot. You keep repeating this belief without any justification.
What are these big central moral issues about which there is little variation within and across communities? You haven't answered any challenge to a single one yet.
It's all very well ignoring anyone who opposes your position, but this is a philosophy discussion site, not a personal blog. It's not here for you to just declare what you believe to the Internet at large, its here for you to engage with the views of others who may think differently to you.
If all utterances of ought are moral statements, then I know of at least one variety that is most certainly true and it follows from what is(what happened) without presupposing another ought. Arguments to the contrary are based upon the misattribution of meaning.
If person A promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday, then it follows that there ought be a rose garden the day after, not because one ought keep his/her promise, but rather because that is exactly what the promise means. It means nothing else.
The Speech Act theorists used the notion of 'direction of fit'. To make a promise is to voluntarily obligate oneself to make the world match one's words. That is what a promise means. That is all that it means. This is not about my approval. I'm not saying that someone should keep their promise.
Either not all utterances of ought are moral utterances, or Hume is wrong.
Yeah, it's gone down hill, unfortunately. I think this is actually [i]far worse[/I] than when we were getting frustrated with people who were presenting criticism of a position based on misunderstandings of it. At least that was an attempt to [i]engage[/I].
I also don't think it helps that Janus is confused about what counts as relevant to the topic and what doesn't, given that he considers normative ethical points, like "a harmonious society is good" to be of relevance in meta-ethics, which is about morality itself. It is about statements like the aforementioned. You're not supposed to just be [i]saying[/I] them.
Here's an idea. Maybe it's you that's wrong. Has that possibility even crossed your mind?
Quoting creativesoul
No they're not.
Quoting creativesoul
No it doesn't.
Quoting creativesoul
Wrong.
Quoting creativesoul
No it isn't.
Well isn't this fun and engaging philosophical debate! We all just state arguable positions as if they were absolutely true without any support whatsoever. I don't know why philosophy papers are so long, this is much easier.
Fuck, man, how many times? Murder, rape, torture, exploitation...basically anything which treats the other as means, and fails to recognize the inherent value of life. Name a culture where such acts committed by one citizen upon another has been approved or even condoned by the members of the community.
No, no, no. That's impossible. He's a genius. It is Hume and the rest of Western philosophy who is wrong. They have utterly and miserably failed to distinguish between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. That which is prior to thought/belief isn't existentially dependent on language.
That doesn't even [i]begin[/I] to engage the challenge. Meta-ethics isn't about asserting normative judgements or the normative framework you use. And proper philosophical dialogue isn't about just asserting that your interlocutor fails to recognise something you ardently believe, but haven't proven capable of reasonably supporting.
Fuck, man.
Yes, all of which I have raised a challenge to, all of which you have ignored.
People absolutely and evidently do not all agree that murder is wrong across all communities.
In Nazi Germany murder of Jews was commonplace and ordinary citizens were entirely complicit. Columbus murder hundreds of natives on arrival in America and that was considered perfectly acceptable. Murdering slaves for most of modern civilisation was seen as merely regrettable.
All wars are murder to those who don't agree with the justification for the war.
Rape was considered a legitimate 'spoil of war' for the best part of 200 years during both the viking and the Mongol expansions.
Torture is used today by one of the world's largest democracies.
The whole fucking third world is exploited to save a few pence on our commodities and no one gives a shit.
Of course, my mistake. How foolish of me!
Of course in actual situations there are moral issues which are not so clear cut; the underlying principles are the same, but it is not always so easy to determine right and wrong, and there is thus, especially in our modern individualistic culture, some diversity of opinion. But I don't think the general diversity, even on these more nuanced issues is all that significant.
I gave the example of abortion before, Virtually no one questions the sanctity of the individual person's life, if not every person, then at least members of their own culture, so attitudes that are pro or anti-abortion turn on the definition of personhood.
On the central issues there is little or no variance across cultures. If you think there is then give an example. If you want to reply then directly address what I say here with some interesting or relevant comment. It doesn't have to agree with what I have said, but if you want to disagree then you should disagree with what I have actually said, and give good reasons why If you go off on a stupid rant. claiming that I am sounding like a "religious zealot, or some such shit, then I won't respond. If you genuinely want to discuss then you should be able to do so civilly without getting all defensive,casting aspersions and ranting and so on. I don't think you realize how boring that is.
They had little choice but to be complicit, and it was not considered murder because the Jews were not accorded status as properly human by the Nazis; they were considered to be a disease to be eradicated.
The example remains about meta-ethics. There is an argument in moral realism for various forms of ethical naturalism such as these. They are still meta-ethical positions. The meta-ethical argument is that the universality of concepts creates an abstractly real truth. It ignores any normative instruction aside from that which comes along with the weight of authority. I don't agree with that, but I don't think we could sustain an argument that it isn't even a meta-ethical position. It is one, just not a well supported one.
If we require him to support his interpretation of these moral judgements, then we run the risk of committing the same fallacy as Tim, that were asking him to support his position, but from our understanding of what morality is.
As I said before, what 'morality' is, is still an open question. For us it is the preferences which guide a certain class of actions and that seems to well describe the situations in which we use the term. For others though, 'morality' just is a set of rules. Rules that we are not actually obliged to stick to (thus avoiding the is/ought problem)
I haven't yet read Janus say that we ought to adhere to these rules (without the accompanying if we want a harmonious society).
Maybe I've just missed it (or forgotten it). Possible in this meandering thread, but I'm currently reading his argument as saying that morality is a set of rules a culture creates (much like the rules of chess) and just as certain moves in the chess are objectively incorrect, by those rules, certain behaviours ae objectively immoral, by those rules.
This far, I see nothing normative about all that. It is not saying that the 'ought' is universal, only the rules. We can ignore those rules as we see fit, but doing so would be 'incorrect' in the same way as moving a bishop perpendiculaly is 'incorrect'.
For those people I believe the universality of those rules can challenged, even from within their own paradigm. But if I've missed a glaring claim to universality of an 'ought' (a normative claim), then by all means set me right. Its been a long thread and I wouldn't be surprised if I missed it.
Exactly. So what use is the universality of proscription against 'murder' if the meaning of 'murder' is just redefined to suit whatever objective society had at the time. If 'murder' does not have a consistent meaning, then its proscription is not a universal belief.
Basically, it's meaningless to say everyone agrees we shouldn't kill X, but we all disagree on what X is.
They absolutely did have a choice. There's tons of archive evidence of ordinary people willingly colluding in order to obtain Jewish property.
First of all, thank you for engaging. :up:
I think that there's a massive problem with logical relevance here.
The first part of what you say, that "what is near universally valued and dis-valued reflects the reality of the human situation", seems logically impotent, although the "human situation" part is ambiguous, which is a bit of a problem. If this is just a descriptive fact about moral judgements, then okay, but we need to take it further to make it logically relevant.
The second part of what you say, as far as I can make out, is either descriptive and quite clearly false, or normative and irrelevant, depending on what you really mean. If you mean exactly what you said, that this is "the only guide to working out what is generally right and wrong for human life" then that's false, because, for example, Isaac and I have just been discussing our shared method of going by your gut. And if it's normative, in other words if you really mean that it [i]should[/I] be the only guide, then that's missing the point.
Quoting Janus
Significance is the key word. I actually agree - or [I]would[/i] agree - with you on much about this, at least under the right conditions. The exceptions to what you and I both judge to be the most important moral judgements, like that murder and rape are wrong, are indeed insignificant in important respects. Herd-morality is king in these respects, and my own morality doesn't clash with it. Herd-morality, in practice, or in a certain sense, dictates right and wrong. But it is extremely important to remember your history here, because it shows that this hasn't always worked out too well.
But herd-morality can never override my morality in any conflict, so ultimately my morality is king.
Where I would strongly disagree is if you assert meta-ethical significance. If you draw a logical link between the descriptive and normative on the one hand, and the meta-ethical on the other, such that you reach an unwarranted conclusion about the latter. The premises do not reasonably lead to the conclusion. It always seems to come back to, "Morality is herd-morality, so anything that differs from herd-morality is insignificant!", but that is begging the question. I reject your implicit premise, so the logical consequences of your premise are themselves irrelevant in the bigger picture of this debate.
Quoting Janus
Isn't that just suggesting something along the lines that we can find resolutions over normative ethical issues which are considered to be controversial, like abortion? Yes, that's true. We can go by some method whereby we accordingly reach a resolution. But that doesn't seem to say much if anything about meta-ethics, so again, it seems there's a problem of logical irrelevance.
This is the massive problem with what the Kantians here are wasting so much time doing. Like I said earlier, the categorical imperative is itself effectively a logical conditional or a demand, which is a giant problem in this meta-ethical context. Where has been the response to this? Granted, this was mostly directed at Tim, but it was made in public, and I suspect that it was read by multiple people, yet ignored or dismissed. Isn't it a giant problem in this context to merely say, "Well, IF you were to treat this as a universal maxim...", or to merely DEMAND that we act as though something were a universal maxim?
Quoting Janus
The problem again is logical relevance. If it isn't there, then why should I engage, except to point this out?
Quoting Janus
Yes, fair point, but you've been guilty of this sort of behaviour also. We should both try harder to avoid that kind of thing. On my part, I will try, at least with you, because I have more respect for you than I have for certain others. But it will have to be a [I]quid pro quo[/I] thing.
And you know my stance on this sort of thing, I think. I am very capable of setting aside the pettiness, the insults, the ad homs, the things which don't really need to be said, but are said anyway. I am quite extreme on that, I think. It is against the guidelines here, but if you were to call me a cunt or a fucking idiot after every single sentence, I could still address whatever substantial point you made alongside that. It's about getting your priorities straight.
Also, I want to add following here, because I think it was salient:
Quoting S
That book I referenced earlier, [I]Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust[/I] by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
I've argued that that's trivial in a strict sense, not generally speaking. I see it as trivial because we could agree or disagree over what we ought to do, or over the antecedent in the conditional properly ordered (the part about a harmonious society), disagree over the aim, or differ in what we want, because that leaves meta-ethics behind. It neglects it.
Quoting Isaac
Okay, but then my point against that is that it rules out our morality determined by appealing directly to our respective guts. That doesn't count? It seems his position is far too rigid and narrow.
I don't rely on a rulebook, and like you have argued, and I have argued, there's a strong case against this. Imagine if we applied the rulebook method in a different time and place. That is a horrifying thought. That certainly counts as "doing morality", but to call that morality itself is strongly objectionable.
My understanding is that Janus wants to set aside certain statements which he considers of central importance, and that many others consider of central importance, like that murder and rape are wrong, but I question the assumed meta-ethical support of suggesting that they're anything other or more than exactly what I've said they are.
I get what you're saying, I think we just have a different focus and I'm willing to concede that mine might not be right for this thread. I'm a fairly thorough-going quietist, for me philosophical questions aren't about finding out what actually is the case, I'm actually very uninterested in what actually is the case. I'm more interested in how different ways we can model 'what is the case' are useful to us for whatever we personally want them for.
Obviously models which are wildly out of sync with 'what is the case' are going to be next to useless, and so correspondence with reality matters, but it only matters to the extent that it makes the model useless.
Anyway, all that is to say that what interests me here is how someone like Janus supports their argument, what the scaffolding looks like from my perspective on the ground. I have to ask "what's that piece there for?" and "why doesn't that bit actually support the thing it's supposed to be holding up?". People, in my experience, don't like questioning their own scaffolding, so if I want answers I usually have to be quite harsh in my persuit.
But ultimately, no matter how harsh I am, it's his scaffolding I'm interested in, not the 'actual way the world is'.
Maybe that's not a very good fit for this site either, in which case I apologise for derailing the thread, but I hope the two approaches can co-exist.
I was searching for that exact reference. Thanks.
:scream:
Quoting Isaac
I'm slightly less aghast. But only slightly.
Quoting Isaac
Ah, okay. I get that.
Quoting Isaac
:scream:
Quoting Isaac
No, that's perfectly fine, in a sense. It is just that it is fundamentally different from how I see it. I agree with you only in part, and the other part is wildly different from how I see it. I'm a moral anti-realist, but not a metaphysical anti-realist.
I'm quietly pleased I shocked you! It would certainly be good to co-exist as your persistence compliments my interests. There's no better check of how the scaffolding works than to give it a good kicking, and you certainly deliver a good kick.
Quoting S
That would be a very interesting discussion to have some time.
:grin:
Quoting Isaac
With steel-capped boots! :grin::up:
Quoting Isaac
Agreed. But you better not make me any more sceptical than I already am! I'm trying to build something, lol. Please don't collapse my scaffolding! :lol:
Wouldn't dream of it! [...surreptitiously kicks at a loose-looking pole].
The first is true, the second theoretically true, depending on one’s metaphysical bent. But there’s also a third, in which Hume never said no ought can be derived from any is, but only that if some moral theory adventurist wanders thereupon he should show his work. Of course, Hume then presumes such efforts to be ill-founded. Leave it to those wishing to make mountains out of molehills, in a rush to publish any old thing with his name attached, and we end up with a philosophical dilemma that never was. Also, it should be noted that Kant didn’t address this false dilemma in his moral philosophy, because it didn’t exist (Black, 1964). And conceding that Kant read and understood Hume very well indeed, it is easy to suppose no import should have been given to it even if it now does.
First of all is the exposition of the “problem”. For context, from the book itself, this is easy to find at the very end of the reference pagination, so one doesn’t have to scroll or thumb page after page for the backdrop on what he’s saying here:
“.....I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason....”
(THN 3.1.1.,1739)
Make of it as you wish. If you don’t already have a full text, and if you’re at all interested, especially in the context, and if you’re on an IPad, maybe any device....dunno.....you can highlight and go right to the reference pagination.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hume-a-treatise-of-human-nature
All that to say this: Hume was wrong, but only with respect to the very last sentence of the passage, insofar as we do see that the distinction between vice and virtue is founded on the relations of objects and is most certainly “perceived” by reason.
What I find interesting is that he is willing to entertain the thought that Hume was wrong about something or other, but not apparently Kant. Kant, it seems, was infallible. If the Word of Kant says nothing of the problem, 'tis no problem. So sayeth the prophet, Mww.
This is an even bigger aside, but I once wrote a post [I]so[/I] long that I would fall asleep whilst writing it, and I would continue to write it whilst I was asleep. Back then, posts were called "books". It ended up being published in the year 1807. I wrote it under a pseudonym, and I gave it the title, [I]The Phenomenology of Spirit[/I].
It now exists solely as a warning never to fall asleep whilst writing a book on philosophy.
Nope, it isn’t. It’s philosophy, which presents an inherently logical possibility, which experience will either confirm, deny or not address at all.
——————
Quoting creativesoul
Exactly. Under this paradigm, to be moral is to choose a worthy principle and act accordingly; to be immoral is to choose a worthy principle and act contrary to it. Humans always have choice, but they also have choice to disregard their own best interests. Like...it is morally good to let an ex-girlfriend have her own life; it is immoral to let and ex-girlfriend have her own life yet key the new boyfriend’s brand new Mustang.
——————-
Quoting creativesoul
Well said. I might say we do set out to find perfection, but recognize our own imperfections which naturally prohibit exemplifying what we find.
“The first rule of culture: let each man be the best he was created capable of being”- Carlyle
This worthy of careful attention.
When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.
You disagree, apparently.
I say, given those conditions, "there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday" is a true statement in the same way that all true statements are. Correspondence to what has happened.
You disagree apparently.
And I do, too. It shows that you do not understand logical validity.
And this exact same example of yours has been previously identified as erroneous by me. Two months ago: I just looked it up.
Of course. How does the statement of one person's subjective intention become an objective requirement on the world at large? Why ought they keep their promise? By what mechanism does their promise impose a requirement on the objective world? It makes no sense. It's basically still making the mistake that is at the heart of this thread, you've made a jump from the subjective intention within someone's mind to an objective state of affairs in the world at large without justifying that step.
When a sincere speaker says "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday", then it follows that if that person thinks making a promise confers a duty to satisfy that promise, then they will believe there ought be a rose garden planted on Sunday.
How do you justify removing the bolded sections?
I disagree, too, if you're saying that the ought is anything like a fact.
Yes, there ought to be a garden; that is all the consistency between a promise made and an obligation to it, by the same person, means. Whether or not the ever is, or ever was going to be, a garden, is irrelevant with respect to the relationship between a promise and the obligation presupposed by it.
Facepalm.
The original claim is a matter of basic logic, specifically logical validity. He presented an argument that is incomplete, and, as presented, is a [I]non sequitur[/I]. So no, it doesn't follow. That is the meaning of the Latin phrase, and it means that the argument is invalid.
It simply won't do to apply common sense assumptions about what the promise suggests if that doesn't work as a valid argument. Don't use logical terminology if you can't back it up or don't understand what you're talking about.
If he is capable of putting together a complete and valid argument, then he should stop wasting time and do so, and then we can move forward to discussing soundness.
I was very busy yesterday when I responded briefly to this. Today I have a little more time to read and respond more thoroughly to some points which I think do warrant it.
What I have said is that within and across cultures it is generally agreed that murder, rape, torture etc. of their own people is wrong, and I think, absent any evidence to the contrary, that this is so is justifiably believed. It is a matter of life and death for communities, particularly those which are in conflict with other communities (and that is characteristic of most of human history) to be able to trust the good will of their own members towards one another ("there is honour among thieves").
The fact that marauding tribes wantonly murder and rape those they see as their enemies I don't consider as being relevant, because they do not accord any important human status to those enemies. Often it is a matter of survival; kill you enemies now or be killed later by them, and if you don't see them as human in any important sense, then why not exploit them for your own pleasure before killing them? Now, of course I am not saying that such attitudes are rationally informed.
For sure some German citizens may have been complicit with the Nazi regime in order to acquire Jewish wealth or property, or even simply because they were brainwashed into thinking the Jews were less than human. In any case, the fact that some German citizens were complicit, does not entail that they could not have had to comply regardless of whether they were complicit or not.
I haven't said that every individual thinks for themselves or is capable of freeing themselves from nationalistic or tribalistic ethea. The point is that murder and other extremely violent and violating acts committed by members of a community against others members of the community are generally condemned.
It seems to me that ethea have evolved, and are evolving within the existential constraints of what it takes for communities to survive and thrive. The modern ethos of individualism is really a luxury which has been made possible by the exploitation of fossil fuels and the less developed cultures and their resources.
And it is a mixed blessing, because although it has resulted in unprecedented prosperity for great numbers of people, it destroys the livelihoods and lives of others, and it also promotes a culture of selfishness, hedonism, exploitation of the self and others and the environment for momentary pleasures, and all this it would seem is definitely going to end badly, more particularly for the exploiters, when the shit hits the fan, because they will be so much less capable of coping with the deprivations that are to come than those who are already suffering deprivation are.
Economic exigencies have forced us to be global citizens before we have developed the intellectual and emotional wherewithal to think outside our tribalistic and nationalistic prejudices. And of course once hardship begins to be felt the masses push back against globalization (just look at the phenomena of Trump and Brexit, for example). And yet within our our unprecedentedly prosperous societies all sense of real community has been lost.
The biggest problem I see with the crudest form of moral relativism ( morality relative to individual preference only) is that it is really a symptom of our modern, self-centred, exploitative culture. Is it really sensible to think that everyone should be ruled by their passions? It might be OK for highly emotionally and intellectually cultivated and responsive people to consult their moral feelings, but what of those whose moral feelings are underdeveloped, atrophied or whose feelings are just not moral at all?
It's obviously a huge, complex, nuanced topic (which is a situation that I think moral relativism in it's crudest form that says its all about the individual moral response cannot begin to address) and we're never going to do more than scratch the surface in these forums, but in any case that's all I have time for now; and I'll have to leave responding to others later.
Questions of what "should be" are not even on the set agenda here. Nor are questions such as whether moral relativism is bad ("exploitative", "selfish", etc.), as opposed to whether it is true. That would be normative ethics, and would be for a [i]different[/I] discussion.
I don't understand why people cannot, or choose not to, stick to the original topic. That entire post was either descriptive (e.g. people generally believe such-and-such is wrong) or normative (as indicated above for example). I know that your reply wasn't a reply to me, but rather to Isaac, and maybe the two of you want to discuss something else, but I still find it frustrating that so much time and effort is going into producing lengthy posts about that sort of thing, when it is off topic.
Remember that this discussion is about morality itself, as the title indicates, and that it began with a quoted passage which made a claim about what morality is, namely that it isn't anything other than how people feel, whether they approve or disapprove, etc. of interpersonal behaviour that they consider more significant than etiquette. [I]What[/I] people approve or disapprove of in ethics is not at all helpful in this context.
That is an example of what meta-ethics looks like. Take note.
My view is that meta-ethics is concerned with what ethics consists in. So, the descriptive gives a phenomenological account of how people's moral beliefs and dispositions are mediated by the community and the normative gives an account of why the communal origins of moral beliefs and dispositions are relevant to an individual's moral choices. Ethics just does consist in "what should be"; what else could it consist in?
So. I am not doing ethics, which would be to make specific claims about specific acts or situations; I am doing meta-ethics, making claims about what ethics really consists in. I just don't think the idea that ethics consists in individual's feelings alone is adequate to give a comprehensive account.
The point is, from my perspective, that there is no "how people feel" which is separable from their communal conditioning. The purpose of ethics is to understand how best to live, and to practice in accordance with that understanding. So, the first principle for anyone who wants to live in a community is how best to harmonize with the other members of the community. It seems obvious that dis-valuing them, exploiting them, harming them or even deceiving them cannot be the best ethical strategies.
If you want to participate in a community then you should care, not only about yourself, but about the community; otherwise you are not really participating, but exploiting. If you want to benefit from the community without giving anything in return, without caring about the other members or the welfare of the whole community, then you are basically a disingenuous, even dishonest, individual. This is on account of the fact that you could not be honest about your intentions, because if you were you would be shunned. That might work for you for a while but it cannot but end badly. Also I think it is an ethical truth that if you exploit others you also exploit yourself. This cannot be the best way to live, and if ethics is about how best to live, then it cannot be ethical at all, by any measure.
I also can't understand why you don't acknowledge that there is a third category beyond what is considered to be mere etiquette, and what is considered to be interpersonal behavior that is more morally significant than etiquette. The third category I refer to is interpersonal behavior which involves matter of "life and death".
This in particular warrants some more attention. I do agree with you about this exploitation, and I think it is lamentable, but I don't think it is true that we don't, at least in principle, "give a shit". I don't think we are generally ethically advanced enough to genuinely care about those who are strangers to us, but I think most people if asked whether it is ethically right to exploit third world people for our own convenience and prosperity would say "no". But they would probably add that they are better off than is we completely left them alone, and that because their conditions are being improved by us, then they are not really being exploited and so on. So, I think they would not condone exploitation of third world people per se, but would instead rationalize it, make some excuse for it.
The reality is that most of us prosperous first worlders are just too spoiled and indulgent to have the ethical fibre to give up even the smallest part of our precious lifestyles in order to help people who are members of our community but whom we don't know personally, and I'm not even sure how much most of us would give up to help anyone who isn't family or close friend, or for that matter, even how much we would give up for those close to us.
But probably most of us would at least say we should sacrifice our own prosperity and comforts to help others close to us, and even people in general, including those of other communities; the question is whether we actually would make sacrifices when it came down to it, or whether we would instead start making excuses for not doing so.
[quote=Wikipedia]Meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties, statements, attitudes, and judgments. Meta-ethics is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics and applied ethics.
While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", evaluating specific practices and principles of action, meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What is goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the nature of ethical properties and evaluations.
Some theorists argue that a metaphysical account of morality is necessary for the proper evaluation of actual moral theories and for making practical moral decisions; others reason from opposite premises and suggest that studying moral judgments about proper actions can guide us to a true account of the nature of morality.
According to Richard Garner and Bernard Rosen,[1] there are three kinds of meta-ethical problems, or three general questions:
What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments? (moral semantics)
What is the nature of moral judgments? (moral ontology)
How may moral judgments be supported or defended? (moral epistemology)
A question of the first type might be, "What do the words 'good', 'bad', 'right' and 'wrong' mean?" (see value theory). The second category includes questions of whether moral judgments are universal or relative, of one kind or many kinds, etc. Questions of the third kind ask, for example, how we can know if something is right or wrong, if at all. Garner and Rosen say that answers to the three basic questions "are not unrelated, and sometimes an answer to one will strongly suggest, or perhaps even entail, an answer to another."[1]
A meta-ethical theory, unlike a normative ethical theory, does not attempt to evaluate specific choices as being better, worse, good, bad, or evil; although it may have profound implications as to the validity and meaning of normative ethical claims. An answer to any of the three example questions above would not itself be a normative ethical statement.[/quote]
That should clear things up a bit.
Quoting Janus
Only the latter is relevant.
Quoting Janus
The question of how best to live is a question in normative ethics, so it should not be addressed here. The primary question which began the discussion was that of what morality is, not what the purpose of ethics is, or should be. The latter was a red herring that was introduced later, and whoever introduced it has earned my scorn, as I am very stern about sticking to the topic and remaining on point, and this really didn't help.
Quoting Janus
That is the sort of thing that you should confine yourself to talking about.
Quoting Janus
No! That is normative ethics again!
Quoting Janus
That is moving more in the right direction. Talking about whether there are any moral truths, and if so, in what sense they are moral truths, and how they are known to be so, is meta-ethics. So these are the kind of follow-up questions which you should be addressing.
Quoting Janus
No! That is basically saying that it is wrong. This isn't simply about what you or I think is wrong. Do you understand that? It is about a deeper philosophical examination. It is a sort of "one step removed" thing, hence the "meta".
So, to repeat what I have said in other posts, if you want to participate in community then exploitation is going to be a stumbling block to your aim. Most people do want to participate, so exploitation is ethically wrong for them. If you are a criminal who lives on the fringes, then this will not apply to you, except that if you want to participate in a criminal sub-culture it will apply in that context, but not in the larger context of the whole society.
Ethics and moral philosophy are not really much different except that moral philosophy is usually taken to involve others; whereas ethics does not necessarily by definition do so. There's no point trying to browbeat me into agreeing that I am not doing meta-ethics and that I am thus "off-topic" because that would only be so on your interpretation of a definition, which I don't accept. I see nothing in the wiki article you quoted which is out of accordance with what I am doing here.
To go back to what I have said earlier in this thread; the is/ ought distinction, and Hume';s idea that you cannot get an ought form an is is not the relevant one; it is a kind of category error,as though there could be some empirically observable object which could definitively confirm of diconfirm ethical claims. The relevant distinction is "if/ ought"; 'if I want X, then I ought to do Y". This should be coupled with the realization that there are in fact some things which almost all people do want; which means that there are some things which almost all people ought to do.
If we are social beings, if that is we desire society, then ethics is about how to live the best life harmoniously with the others of our community. It would be absurd to say that it could be about how to live the worst life in conflict with others of our community. Do you not see the difference, and that it has nothing to do with personal preferences except in the first instance of what it is that we really want; to be or not to be social beings?
You do not need to explain to me what ethics is about, nor do you need to be doing ethics. That is not helping at all. My objection is that that is off topic. We should be doing meta-ethics instead.
Quoting Janus
No, repeating your problematic comments won't help either. I have no interest in agreeing or disagreeing with content I judge to be off topic.
To get back on topic, tell me in what sense this is a moral truth, and how you know it to be true. That would be meta-ethics, as confirmed by the Wikipedia article.
Quoting Janus
Sigh. Explain to me how your conditionals are in any way relevant to the sort of meta-ethical questions on the set agenda of this discussion, as opposed to those on your own agenda, which seems largely descriptive and normative. How does saying that if you want to work towards a harmonious society, then you should be a virtuous person, address any meta-ethical problem set out in the Wikipedia article that has been on the set agenda here. It doesn't tell us what morality is, it doesn't tell us about moral truths, or moral truth theories, or the meaning of moral statements, or how a moral truth is known, or anything about moral relativism or universalism or objectivism or absolutism. It seems frankly useless and irrelevant.
Yes, fine. But it's very annoying that you refuse to cooperate and are adamant about talking about what you want to talk about, in spite of my objections.
But I hope you still get around to addressing my lengthy post from earlier. I put quite a bit of effort into that, and you've already done me an injustice by ignoring or being very short and dismissive of a number of my earlier comments, although I have set that aside and moved on.
And if you're interested in furthering this meta-ethical discussion at some point, then let me know.
But that would only be an injustice (i.e. morally wrong) if both our aims are to have a free discussion with full acknowledgement of, although not necessarily agreement to, each other's founding assumptions and problematics. That said, if you want to enumerate some definitive points I will attempt to address them.
I don't understand why you single this out. If exploiting others equals exploiting ourselves that will be so on the basis of some facts about human nature. I could say the same about murder, rape, torture and so on, too.
I don't recall deliberately ignoring several of your replies, as you have done to me, which is, in my judgement, a greater injustice than name-calling, ad hominems, and whatnot. And it is a bit of affront to expect me to do more work than I've already put in by putting together an enumerated list for you. Remember [I]quid pro quo[/I].
Quoting Janus
Exactly: the specifics don't matter. It doesn't matter whether it is murder, rape, torture, and so on. I only singled that out because you explicitly spoke of it as a moral truth, which, as I said, is heading in the right direction in my assessment. I am interested in talking in general about the questions I raised there, or by doing so in relation to any example of your choosing. That is, talking about whether there are any moral truths, and if so, in what sense they are moral truths, and how they are known to be so, and that sort of thing. This is meta-ethics. It is like the metaphysics, epistemology and semantics of ethics itself, not how we should live and whatnot, which is just to [I]do[/I] ethics.
I haven't had time, apart form any other considerations, to respond to every 'mention', and have not deliberately ignored anything which in my judgement is an apposite reply, and does not rely on distorting what I have said or not acknowledging its basic assumptions. If you showed that what I said was inconsistent, not with your basic assumptions, but with my own; or if you could show that my basic assumptions were wrong, then that would be fine. I don't care about 'name-calling, ad hominems and what-not"; my skin is too thick for that. I see things the way I see them, as I have no doubt you do too; but I am open to being convinced otherwise.
From your standpoint there is no way to judge the relative merits of our different viewpoints, because what matters is personal preference; and we would be seen to simply have different personal preferences. From my viewpoint some personal preferences are more generally workable in the communal context than others. Of course, I can try to convince you till the cows come home that I am right and you are wrong, that there are objective (in the sense of inter-subjectively validated) moral truths, but as long as you do not acknowledge any independent measure, meaning 'beyond both of our, or any other, viewpoints' it won't matter what I say, and I would most likely be wasting my breath. I don't want to do that; it's nothing personal.
For me, in the ethical context, to be right simply means being effective in promoting what nearly all of us want; to live in harmony, and being wrong simply means being defective in promoting it.
I don't believe we've reached a stage where there's nothing left but to simply agree to disagree. There are unresolved and unaddressed problems, and the ball is in your court.
I've tried multiple times now to kick-start a discussion with you over these issues.
If the person making the promise does not think doing so confers a duty to keep their word, then either they are ignorant of what a promise means, or it is an insincere speech act.
I specified sincerity intentionally. It matters. I admit that the use of "follows" is off-putting, particularly given the brevity.
This approach to promises isn't about anyone's approval. It's about meaning. It's relevant because one can most certainly derive an ought from an is without presupposing another ought. Facts, on my view, are what has happened. The kind of fact depends upon the content of the events. Moral facts would be actual circumstances/situations involving acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Making a promise is a moral fact. Note here that I am not, nor have I, been using the term "moral" as a synonym for "good" or "acceptable". I am not arguing that one ought keep their promise.
I'm simply pointing out what making a promise means, and then further pointing out how just simply understanding the language use causes expectation that is only taken into proper account with an ought.
This could be shown with nearly anything said...
The only point being that one can most certainly derive an ought from an is. Seeing how the text offered earlier doesn't have Hume saying that it cannot be done, perhaps this is a waste of time anyway.
I have that book... I ought look for it. :yum:
Sigh...
I haven't claimed your viewpoint is internally inconsistent; but I have claimed that it is, along with Terrapin's, inconsistent with a general phenomenological account of human life and hence inadequate and I have given my reasons for that contention. You don't have to agree, in fact I doubt you will ever agree, so I have little motivation, beyond a general respect for you, to respond at all, since there is no way to prove which of us is right given that we will interpret the evidence differently.
As I said if you want to focus on some specific points I have made that you disagree with and you lay our your reasons for disagreeing then I will respond, provided I judge that you haven't distorted the point in order to disagree with it.
Off putting? A very poor choice of words, more like, if you didn't mean it in the logical sense. You're on a philosophy forum. [I]Think[/I] before you speak. How could you not have foreseen the problem of a misunderstanding arising as a result of this?
And besides, if you weren't talking about logic, then you've missed Hume's point, as he was. He was saying you can't logically get from an "is" to an "ought". He wasn't merely rejecting common sense assumptions about promises being kept, or common sense assumptions about an "ought" from an "is". His point was about logic, about the limits of reason.
I'm always baffled by what could possibly motivate someone to argue against these... some of the simplest utterances to understand. Very young children know exactly what making a promise means. It's a convention, no doubt.
Sigh. More work. Great.
I don't want you to repeat yourself. It is the parts which we've already explored up until I think you've encountered an obstacle which is still causing a problem which I want to deal with. But since you shut things down at the time, it would now require me to go to the efforts of going back through the discussion to find what exactly the problems were, and present them to you again, and I don't know if I want to go through that, especially since you haven't reassured me of your cooperation. You expect me to go through all of that, only for you to potentially dismiss it or ignore it altogether like you've done before? Again, it would have to be [I]quid pro quo[/I]. That's essential. I would need your assurance that it would be worth my time and effort.
I don't understand this. If a promise means that what it says ought to done, is this not the same as to say that promises should be kept? You might say that is only if the person making the promise is sincere, in which case the promise will be kept, to the best of their ability to keep it. But something made by and insincere person, which appears to be a promise, is not actually a promise.
A promise is when one voluntarily enters themselves into an obligation - to the very best of their ability - to make the world match their words.
I'm not arguing that a promise means that what it says ought to be done.
Your bafflement must be because you misunderstand Hume's point. He wasn't an idiot, and nor is anyone arguing his point here. Of course he knew what a promise meant, as does everyone here. That doesn't even begin to address the problem. You insult his intelligence, and that of others. You act as though you're a genius. That illusion still needs to be shattered, but your psychological defences are strong.
I am running out of time, but I can't let this go! Is it not the case that to say that sincerely promising or "voluntarily entering into an obligation- to the very best of their ability- to make the world match their words" is the same as to say that what is sincerely promised ought to be done? I can't see any difference there.
I can't quite work out whether you're massively backtracking or you're just being extremely unclear.
This is the very best question that has been asked.
I'll work on an appropriate response.
Who here disagrees?
Making a promise is a meaningful act with tremendous social significance. It means that the speaker has given their word. This aims to rest uncertainty, and build trust and confidence. It is to assure the listener that the speaker is going to do what they say that they are going to do. It is harmoniously used everyday involving situations where there is an immediate and/or urgent need for the speaker to reassure the listener that what's promised to be done will get done.
Looking at another situation where promises are made...
Imagine that a guy owes some very unsavory characters a large amount of cash that he does not have. He cannot pay. He knows that these are dangerous people:Eyewitness style. Further envision a promise being made to the guy from the unsavory ones to harm the guys family if the guy didn't pay up.
If the guy doesn't pay, then his family ought be dead. I'm not condoning the act. I'm saying that knowing the meaning of a sincerely made promise creates expectation.
I am not saying that all promises ought be kept.
I'm saying because the guy knows what a promise means, then if he could neither pay nor warn his family, he would expect them to die.
Let five years go by without him ever having the ability to check and see. He gets asked by someone who knows, "So, Joe. What going on with your family? What do you think happened?"
"They ought be dead by now" would be quite the appropriate response.
I would not say that he was voicing his approval, but rather his expectation based upon his knowledge of what making a promise means and believing that the speaker was sincere.
Lots to reply to and not much time today, so I might expand on some of this later.
First I think I ought to justify and circumscribe the discussion. @S is right to restrict it to meta-ethics, otherwise we get wildy off-topic, but I feel differently to him about the extent to which your comments are meta-ethical. The way I understand your argument in the terms S provided is this;
What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments? (moral semantics) - Moral judgements mean that an action is or is not in accord with the rules devised by that community to promote their continued harmonious existence. Your evidence for this is that all such judgements seem to be aimed at achieving this goal, and therefore it is likely that this is what moral terms mean.
What is the nature of moral judgments? (moral ontology) - Moral judgements do not have any real existence in an ontological sense, that would require a religious text, or divine command to which you do not ascribe. Moral judgements are contained within people's minds, but they are not expressions of mere preference, they are expressions of a very specific type of preference which is always mediated through the community rules. Your evidence for this is the similarity in the properties of those judgements we call 'moral' which you feel any definition needs to take account of.
How may moral judgments be supported or defended? (moral epistemology) - Initially moral judgements may be supported by adherence to the community rules (like an incorrect move in chess) but those rules themselves may be questioned by their own objective of community harmony, and your evidence for this is the fact that all moral rules have this aim, therefore anything which doesn't is not a moral rule, but simply some other kind of rule.
Have I made any massive error understanding you there? If not, then it is those aspects (the meta-ethical argument) and those alone that I'd like to discuss, if that's OK with everyone involved.
Quoting Janus
I've bolded the important bit. If I have your meta-ethical argument right, then quite a lot of it hangs on the universality of community harmony. Your claim seems to be that ethical questions are those related to promoting community harmony because that seems to be the common factor in all things ethical. My counter to that, is that something individual precedes such judgements and that something is a universal component of ethical judgement which (being antecedent) has the better claim to be what morality is.
The antecedent stage is evident in the decision about who is and who is not a 'member of the community'. Take the witch trials of the late middle ages. It is documented that women, for all sorts of personal reasons (grudges, debts, politics) were declared 'witches' and therefore outside of the community, and so murdered. As with the Jews in Nazi Germany, the intention to murder came first, second came the ostracisation necessary to make that murder acceptable. So the intention was to murder someone who was (at the time of the intention) very much a member of the community.
This repeats itself through most of modern human history. People are not seen as outsiders first and then second treated by some moral rule based on community membership. People decide they are going to commit some act of murder, theft, torture, whatever first, and then ostracise the person to whom they intend to do these acts, in order to make them more socially acceptable.
So, the best you can say is that people do tend to describe behaviours that promote social harmony as 'moral' and those that don't as 'immoral', but I don't see there being any universal agreement at all on what behaviours do, in fact, promote social harmony and which do not.
Absent of this agreement, I don't think you can support the meta-ethical theory that moral judgements consist of a conference with inter-subjectively agreed rules. Something which we still call 'moral' seems to come before that, and is entirely subjective.
All of which supports the argument that some entirely subjective decision is being made, first about what we are actually going to do, and second about what we are going to say to make our actions seem socially acceptable. The second part seems only to be acting on a desire to seem more of a socially useful person than one actually is.
If 'moral' judgements are toe defined as that sub-set of all judgements which relate to promoting social harmony, then the persons actual moral judgement is the one defining their actions. The concurrence with social rules seems entirely a secondary pragmatic matter, otherwise it wouldn't be so appealing to merely fake agreement.
So this, for example, is a semantic disagreement between us which I don't think you've properly dealt with. You're not interested in any problems I see with it, just because you can maintain internal consistency, which almost anyone can do without great difficulty? How hard can it be not to contradict yourself? Internal consistency ain't the be-all and end-all.
My objection wouldn't merely be that I go by a different semantics. It would be criticism along the lines that mine makes more sense or is less problematic. If yours cannot account for a number of situations about what is right or wrong supported by strong intuitive appeal or experience or common usage of moral language, then that is evidence against your semantics. Are you not interested in that?
I suspect that you're defining these terms how you want them to be defined, so that they fit your preexisting moral principles. I am not doing that. I am thinking about how it is used, how people reach moral judgements, what they mean. Mine is more of a disinterested approach to ascertain the truth, not to make the truth fit my agenda like you seem to be doing.
Or they don't agree with you about what a promise means. Your arrogance is restraining your philosophical investigations. If you continue to simply presume that however things seem to you to be, that must be how they are, you're never going to reach any more interesting conclusion than that you were right all along. In which case there's very little point posting here.
Quoting creativesoul
No, you are not 'pointing' either of these things out, like a tour guide might 'point out' the incontrovertible existence of the Eiffel Tower. You are asserting these things, and in philosophical discussion it is reasonable to expect assertions to be accompanied by justification, otherwise, what's the point of asserting them to a discussion forum?
When you ae ready to discuss your reasons for believing these things to be the case, then we will have something to talk about.
The problem I see is one of logical irrelevance. He wants to refute Hume, but he is missing the target. Even if we were to grant his point, it misses Hume's point. It actually just tries to unphilosophically reinforce the pre-Hume sort of thinking.
There's nothing modern at all about it. Morality relative to individual preferences is what morality IS, ontologically, and it's what it always has been--errant, confused, mistaken beliefs that it's something else aside. "Shoulds" are just as well individual preferences (re "should be ruled by their passions.") The fact that morality is individual preferences in no way implies what morality should be. It's just a fact about what it is.
Quoting Janus
All of that is only relative to someone else's opinions, opinions that hinge on their preferences contra someone else's.
That would have to hinge on claims that things like meaning as well as preferences can literally, wholesale be given to someone from something outside of themselves.
Those claims would require support.
What makes them all "moral"?(the kind of semantics, ontology, epistemology, thought, belief, judgment, etc.)
Hume has been refuted. It had nothing to do with promises. Your belief is not necessary.
You also conflate belief and truth, but I do not expect you to see it. Keep on riding shotgun with one who does not care about truth. Confirmation bias feels good.
A promise, in and of itself, or any affirmative token with a moral interest, regardless of it’s object, implies something a whole lot more fundamental than mere intentionality. Without these fundamentals, the object might as well not even be included in the predicate of a promise proposition.
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Quoting creativesoul
Certainly. Statements, at least explications about promise, should include those aforementioned fundamentals. Any decent meta-ethicist is already well aware of them.
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Quoting creativesoul
Agreed. Still, a promise is a synthetic proposition, and all synthetic propositions have a necessary connection between its subject and its object.
Maybe not within the context of promise, but you’d argue that one ought to kee a promise if the context was about “ought”. I mean, one ought to keep his promise is a valid argument to make, right?
I just saw this reply of yours...somehow slipped through the cracks...
Could it reasonably be said that taboos (proscriptions) are generally stronger than mores (prescriptions)? I don't know. It seems that every proscription could be reframed as a prescription in any case.
Quoting Mww
Yes, I agree that your moral responsibility entails your saying what your actions are to be. There could be no morality without that, just enforced law.
Quoting Mww
I am also a relativist in that sense, because it seems obvious that no two people's moral intersts are ever going to be identical. I lean towards deontologism and virtue ethics and away from consequentialism, at least in so far as it consists in any form of hedonic calculus. I also favor an approach which might be called 'intentionalism'; the idea that one's intentions as sincerely enacted determine whether actions are good or bad; or in other words if my intention is to act in the interests of others rather than self-interestedly then my acts will be morally good. This also seems in some ways to be close to virtue ethics, in others close to deontology, and in yet others close to consequentialism. There are bound to be overlaps, and it seems "isms" are not as hermetically sealed from one another as might generally be thought.
I think I would rather say that murder is contrary to the universal desire for life, rather than that it is contrary to the "purpose" of life, though. I wonder what difference that makes...
It just occurred to me that, in a way, the C.I. is a reformulation of the Golden Rule.
Quoting Mww
Could you explain some more how you see the difference between ""morality is relative" with respect to the good of a community" and ""the relativism of morality" which has nothing to do with community"? If I clearly understand the distinction then I may be able to say whether I think there is any common ground.
I think I would call that a threat rather than a promise. To me a promise is something you sincerely state and sincerely intend to act upon, and it also must be something that will be of benefit to the other, such that if you don't hold to it the other will be let down, and feel deceived or betrayed.
So, I would say that, in principle at least, promises should be kept and threats should not be carried out, which would mean that they are kind of opposites. Perhaps threats could be classed as "negative" promises.
That has been the case since its inception, and the literature is abundant both pro and con. Skipping all the theoretics, the bottom line is.....the second formulation of the C.I. we all know and love in effect says never treat another rational agent as a means to your own ends, whereas the G.R. explicitly requires a rational agent to do just that. In addition, by that same requirement, the other person is relieved of both his freely autonomous will, and his duty.
On the other hand, there’s nothing untoward in treating someone a certain way for no other reason than it would be good for you to be treated that way. Problem is of course, this system only works with non-deviant rationalities. I mean, you wouldn’t gain much if you went around robbing people because you want them to rob you.
But no, the C.I. prime doesn’t relate to the G.R. It doesn’t obligate anyone to treat you any way at all. It only obligates individual agents to act as if everyone else was obligated the same way.
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Quoting Janus
Nahhh........I lost my chain of thought on that. Reading back through all your stuff, I couldn’t pick it back up.
Granted.
Quoting Janus
As is a threat.
Quoting Janus
I'm having significant difficulty here...
Hot and not. True and false. Open and closed. Meaningful and meaningless. Caring and not caring. Speaking honestly and speaking dishonestly. Deliberately misrepresenting one's own thought/belief and not. These are the sort of things that it makes sense to me to call "opposites".
None can be a kind of the other.
A promise to cause bodily harm is a threat, there can be no doubt. It is still a promise none-the-less. Clearly. Some promises are a kind of threat.
All promises understood and believed by the listener create and build the listener's expectation that the world will be made to match the words. That holds good from promising to plant a rose garden to promising to cause harm. All expectation about what will one day happen is thought/belief about what has not happened but is expected to. Knowing what a promise means in addition to believing that it was sincerely uttered(or not) is more than sufficient/adequate reason to believe that it will be kept(or not).
I cannot agree with saying that all promises ought be kept.
This is interesting, but I'm not seeing the link yet. Could you lay it out a bit more.
Really. What is the point in you posting if all you're going to do is just tell us what is and is not the case? I honestly want to know what you post here for.
Even if he has, he hasn't been refuted by you. That would be a delusion.
Quoting creativesoul
I know you would rather attack a straw man. That is perfectly clear.
Agreed. I was going to make the same point myself, but was more annoyed by his style than by the substance of his argument at the time, so didn't tackle the glaring error in it. I don't think anyone sane would agree that if someone promised to eat a meal, but subsequently found out the meal was poisoned, that somehow they still ought to eat the meal. I think tacit within every promise is "all things being equal, and unforeseen changes of circumstances aside...".
To me, it's like there's a load of small print attached to each word, we all know it's there, we're none of us exactly sure what the other person's small print is, but we fully expect there to be some.
The idea that a promise leads to an ought on the basis of its meaning is a classic example of philosophy constructing castles in the air by attempting to make logical deductions from words. It's a bit like trying to deduce the structure of a bridge from the facade alone, there's a lot more going on underneath that needs to be factored in if one is going to attempt something like that.
Though why they would bother when we all know already what a 'promise' means from years of experience using the word, is beyond me.
I'm not even sure what the notion/idea of "a promise's object" is picking out and/or referring to. I know what a promise is. I know what an object is. I do not know how an object can belong to a promise.
Promises include/contain predicates. If there is an object in the predicate of a promise it is but one part of the whole promise. Roses and family are objects mentioned in the predicate of the promises under current consideration.
I was thinking more along the lines of existential dependency.
Good.
The irony is thick when the above comes from one that mischaracterizes an argument about how an utterance of ought can be derived as an argument of/for moral approval despite the author's obvious rejection of exactly that.
:yikes:
It is a semantically blind reader who mistranslates claims like "I am not, will not, and cannot argue that one ought keep one's promises" as "if you promised to do it, then you ought to do so"... and then goes on and on and on and on and on... all about the imaginary opponent.
What do you care for? You do not have use for truth, or what's true, or what can be true, or how true things become so...
I'm not seeing the link. Why would my attitude to 'truth' have anything to do with wanting to hear about people's motives?
Quoting creativesoul
No it doesn't. You're wrong. Accept it and move on.
Ok. Promise has it, sure. Promise is existentially dependent on some a priori abstract concepts the understanding thinks as belonging to it necessarily, re: in descending order of power, obligation, duty, respect. No promise as the meaningful subject of a synthetic proposition is possible without these a priori conditions.
We don’t think a promise to ourselves alone. Knowledge of those necessary fundamentals is given a priori in a subject, therefore he has no need to represent them to himself in the form of a promise. Thus, promise has the existential dependency of being represented in the world by the subject who understands the a priori conditions for it.
What does existential dependency mean to you?
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Quoting creativesoul
Under the assumption that all promises have moral implications, can you agree with thinking that all promises ought to be kept? Or, upon the making of a promise, the ought to keep belongs to it necessarily? I wouldn’t even make a promise, given a certain set of conditions, unless I knew beforehand I would keep it, within that same set of conditions. My contention would be, the fact I am relieved of my moral obligation immediately upon discovery of false representation of the predicate under which the promissory proposition was made, is insufficient to relieve me of my moral obligation otherwise.
Wait....maybe you mean a promise made by some other person that would not be in your best interest ought not be kept. Even so, you’d still be forced to admit his obligation to keep it despite your being ill-disposed because of his moral integrity. Seems odd, although nonetheless morally worthy, to credit his moral worthiness in keeping a promise at the same time he ends you.
Existential dependency is a relationship between different things. When something is existentially dependent upon something else it cannot exist prior to that something else. When something exists in it's entirety prior to something else, it cannot be existentially dependent upon that something else. That's a rough basis/outline of the paradigm. The simplicity is remarkable. The scope of rightful application... quite broad.
In the context of this conversation...
There is an actual distinction between making a promise and making a statement about that promise. A difference that can only be discovered by understanding existential dependency. The latter is existentially dependent upon the former. The former existed in it's entirety prior to the latter.
Voluntarily entering into an obligation to make the world match one's words is what one does when making a promise. That is determined wholly by a community of language speakers who understand the crucial importance of the role that trust and truth play in interdependence. The preceding two statements report upon and/or take account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to my account of it. It is about promise making. It is a report about what has happened, what is happening, and barring an extinction event of humankind, will continue happening.
Saying that one ought keep their promise is about what has not happened.
It's not about approval/disapproval of how the world was promised to be changed, or what was promised to be done. Rather, saying that one ought keep their promise is about the reliability, dependability, and/or trustworthiness of the speaker. Such character traits are crucial for the survival and over-all well-being of interdependent groups.
A complete lack of trust is unsustainable.
Yes (for my views, at least. I can't speak authoritatively for anyone else. Also, technically the "yes" is assuming that we're talking about a foundational moral stance, but let's keep it simple for now.)
No. All promises do have moral implications according to my position, but as I've noted and asked of several different participants, even going to the extent of asking an 'at large' question...
What counts as being moral in kind???
Earlier you elaborated upon what counts as a moral kind of interest, as compared/contrasted to other kinds. I was left with no greater understanding than before I asked the question. Here's the answer again...
If an interest which is the object of will is an interest of morality, and being an interest of morality is what counts as being moral, then moral agents are agents of morality, conditions of morality are moral conditions, and judgments of morality are moral judgments. Applying this to what counts as 'moral' implications, we would be saying that implications of morality are moral implications. The obvious next question would be what is morality?
If an interest which is the object of will is an interest of morality, and being an object of the will is what counts as being moral, then moral agents are objects of will, moral conditions are objects of will, and moral judgments are objects of will. Applying this to what counts as 'moral' implications, we would be saying that moral implications are objects of will. What is will?
I do not actually think/believe that either one of the above elaborations align with your position, but the answer you offered was not not at all helpful. Could you set it all out in as clear and simple terms as the position you argue for/from will allow?
What counts as being moral in kind, such that all things satisfying the criterion are sensibly and rightfully called "moral" things?
It's an opinion about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette.
So, if person A has an opinion that they must act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth and they feel that this is more significant than table manners, whatever they do is moral?
Opinions can be true/false.
True enough. But a thing has happened. Would you concur with my description, or conceptual itemization, of the existential dependency of the promise itself?
Otherwise....d’accord.
So, on your view, no matter what unforeseen circumstances may arise, no matter what false pretense led to the promise... if one promises to do something, then they ought do it out of moral obligation alone.
If keeping a promise would knowingly cause unnecessary harm, and that consequence was unforeseen at the time the promise was made...
Promises to cause harm...
I think that there are a number of different situations/circumstances in which I would not say that one ought keep one's promise.
Not in the relevant sense of "opinion."
Yes, relative to them. In other words, to that particular person, it's moral to act in whatever way it takes to acquire tremendous wealth.
If you mean this...
I'm uncertain whether or not I understand.
I'd be interested in your setting out of the a priori concepts...
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Terrapin Station
So, it would follow that all opinions about the relative permissibility or recommendability or obligatoriness of interpersonal behavior that the person in question feels is more significant than etiquette are moral.
:brow:
Relevant because???
What counts as being moral is the tripartite correspondence between that which is freely determined as good in itself, the will which authorizes an action in accordance with it, and the duty to execute that action.
What counts as not moral is everything else. The metaphysical description might read....that which has freedom as its causality is moral, that which does not invoke freedom as its causality is merely rational.
I like how ants and bees both take care of their queen and they both have very small brains. It just goes to show you that alot of processing power can be packed into a small space. I do believe complex morality in combination with people having their own personalities does require a highly evolved creature or at the very least a very complex creator and i add that last part because i have a religion.
From deontological metaphysics, the key is understanding there is a freely determinant will that both prescribes a law and subjects itself to it. For that to have any sustainable power, a moral agent must hold with respect for law in itself. Otherwise, morality can never be grounded in that which is universal and necessary, which are the criteria of law, and our private conduct would know no ground. Duty is the consciousness of respect for law, and consciousness of the will that determines it. Obligation is acknowledgement of duty in the form of judgement, when it comes to acting in conformity to an imperative.
A promise is, as you say, when one enters himself into an obligation. If one obliges himself, in this case oblige himself with making the world conform to his word, he has already done his duty out of respect for the law which says it is never a moral interest to issue false intent.
Metaphysics. Where one is allowed to theorize without having to actually prove anything, while still maintaining internal consistency.
Because it's the sense of opinion that's appropriate for the discussion. It's the sense pertinent to the subject matter, to the phenomena in question.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes. Hence why I wrote that.
— creativesoul
Ok. Promise has it, sure. Promise is existentially dependent on some a priori abstract concepts the understanding thinks as belonging to it necessarily, re: in descending order of power, obligation, duty, respect. No promise as the meaningful subject of a synthetic proposition is possible without these a priori conditions.
We don’t think a promise to ourselves alone. Knowledge of those necessary fundamentals is given a priori in a subject, therefore he has no need to represent them to himself in the form of a promise. Thus, promise has the existential dependency of being represented in the world by the subject who understands the a priori conditions for it.
What does existential dependency mean to you?
— Mww
Existential dependency is a relationship between different things. When something is existentially dependent upon something else it cannot exist prior to that something else. When something exists in it's entirety prior to something else, it cannot be existentially dependent upon that something else. That's a rough basis/outline of the paradigm. The simplicity is remarkable. The scope of rightful application... quite broad.
In the context of this conversation...
There is an actual distinction between making a promise and making a statement about that promise. A difference that can only be discovered by understanding existential dependency. The latter is existentially dependent upon the former. The former existed in it's entirety prior to the latter.
Voluntarily entering into an obligation to make the world match one's words is what one does when making a promise. That is determined wholly by a community of language speakers who understand the crucial importance of the role that trust and truth play in interdependence. The preceding two statements report upon and/or take account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to my account of it. It is about promise making. It is a report about what has happened, what is happening, and barring an extinction event of humankind, will continue happening.
Saying that one ought keep their promise is about what has not happened.
It's not about approval/disapproval of how the world was promised to be changed, or what was promised to be done. Rather, saying that one ought keep their promise is about the reliability, dependability, and/or trustworthiness of the speaker. Such character traits are crucial for the survival and over-all well-being of interdependent groups.
A complete lack of trust is unsustainable.[/quote]
That has got to be one of the worst conversations I have ever read in my life. Two people going on an irrelevant and badly written tangent.
I did say I am relieved of my moral obligation immediately upon discovery of false representation of the predicate under which the promissory proposition was made. Otherwise, yes, to be morally worthy one ought to act in accord with his moral obligation, in this case do what he promised. Won’t be long before he becomes quite careful in what he promises.
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Quoting creativesoul
Then he has no business making one. Remember, you said....voluntarily obligates himself. A guy promising to commit murder, again, as you say, hasn’t actually done it, so he is just speaking threateningly.
Moral relativists. And why "so-called"? There's nothing inappropriate about that name.
Quoting tim wood
It's not interesting and has already been answered.
Quoting tim wood
That's the gist of it, although if you read and take in what I say in discussions like this, you should know that I don't even use terms like "personal preference". I would say "individual moral judgement".
Moral relative to who's judgement? If you had any real understanding of moral relativism, then one would expect that to be reflected in the wording of your question. Yet it isn't.
And what's the point in begging the question?
Serendipitously, just this morning I read a passage in Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein which says "Jesus's Golden Rule has been misconstrued and should read. "As you do unto others, so also you do unto yourself". I made a similar point to @S earlier in this thread when I said that if you exploit another you also exploit yourself. I think this speaks to a commonality, an integrality, a communality in and between human beings. And as I see it it is this that motivates the idea of universalizing moral maxims.
I would paraphrase the Golden Rule in another way also, which brings out the inevitably reciprocal, as opposed to calculative, nature of ethics and moral thought and feeling: "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them". I don't think examples like robbing people because you would like to be robbed are apposite to the intent of the Golden Rule. No one wants to be robbed unless they are mentally ill and totally confused.
The salient point would be similar to the salient point of the C.I.: that the universalization requirement for any maxim will show you if an act contradicts the general moral requirements for harmonious human community.
So per the example of lying: it is wrong because if you universalized it as a maxim "Everyone should lie" it would contradict and render meaningless the notion and requirement of trust which is so essential to human life. If humans had been creatures who preferred to live in a context of universal distrust, a hard thing to imagine to be sure, but not logically impossible, lying would then be a good thing. In this context of universally desired universal distrust regarding the conventional formulation, Eisenstein's and my own reformulations of the G.R. lying would then be in accordance.
On the other hand, no formulation can, when considered as the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law, cover all cases; and that is just where intention, conscience, good will, come into play as criteria of what counts as moral (as opposed to immoral and amoral) thought and action. So, as I said earlier I conclude that ethics and moral philosophy is more of an art than it is a precise science.
Terrapin uses the term "personal preference". Are you prepared to say that 'individual moral judgement' is anything more than personal preference? Terrapin apparently doesn't believe it is anything more. If you think it is more, then what does that "more" consist in?