Illusive morals?
Morals are about social behavior and interaction.
The Hippocratic Oath is an altruistic expression of moral duty.
But, as much as I like to take objective morals for granted, it doesn't quite seem to hold up.
Objective: not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts; not dependent on the mind for existence.
Subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions; dependent on the mind or on an individual's perception for its existence.
1. involuntary: most of us like freedom, and dislike being harmed
2. subjective: (1) is not objective, and only has meaning in terms of us beings that dis/like things
3. morals: us liking freedom and disliking being harmed is relevant for morals
4. therefore morals are subjective (in part or whole)
Either objective versus subjective is a false dichotomy, or morals are subjective.
However, morals are not mere matters of arbitrary, ad hoc opinion, are not mere whims of the moment; there are common/shared (involuntary) aspects of life, agreements, that render morals objective-like.
Yet, it seems that reducing morals to self-interest is the most commonly accepted justification, or understanding thereof, like The Golden Rule, for example.
Why the gap?
What is acceptable as a ground for morals anyway (if anything)?
The Hippocratic Oath is an altruistic expression of moral duty.
But, as much as I like to take objective morals for granted, it doesn't quite seem to hold up.
Objective: not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts; not dependent on the mind for existence.
Subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions; dependent on the mind or on an individual's perception for its existence.
1. involuntary: most of us like freedom, and dislike being harmed
2. subjective: (1) is not objective, and only has meaning in terms of us beings that dis/like things
3. morals: us liking freedom and disliking being harmed is relevant for morals
4. therefore morals are subjective (in part or whole)
Either objective versus subjective is a false dichotomy, or morals are subjective.
However, morals are not mere matters of arbitrary, ad hoc opinion, are not mere whims of the moment; there are common/shared (involuntary) aspects of life, agreements, that render morals objective-like.
Yet, it seems that reducing morals to self-interest is the most commonly accepted justification, or understanding thereof, like The Golden Rule, for example.
Why the gap?
What is acceptable as a ground for morals anyway (if anything)?
Comments (84)
The "objective" part here is that which can be boiled down to some necessary principle. So it is quite right that a lot of what is considered morality is just customary variety - local differences that make no particular difference.
Should you wear a tie or not? Should you squash a spider or not? Should you eat pork or not?
Subjectively it can seem to matter for customary reasons, but objectively we can see that it doesn't matter - as tacitly we feel we are already on the track of some deeper principle which makes these distinctions simply accidental details.
So what does morality boil down to. It boils down to the dynamic, the balance, that makes for a flourishing society. That is the general goal that morality encodes - and must do naturally, inevitably, just because societies only persist as systems if they are fit in this fashion.
The Golden Rule is classic because it gets right down to the basic dynamic - the one of local competition and global cooperation. It says self-interest is good. And so is collective identity. Thus morality is about striking the balance at which these two tendencies are maximised. You want maximum personal freedom - but within a global context which is stable enough, integrated enough, to underwrite that very freedom.
Doing unto others what you would have them do to you is a neat summary of that essential balancing act.
Right. Analogous to this old document (translated to English):
[quote=Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789]Article IV - Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law.[/quote]
Social (or societal) sustainability, and a degree of cooperation, is kind of implicit for a society to flourish, which also tend to be a benefit for individual members.
[quote=Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr]Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.[/quote]
Perhaps the objective versus subjective dichotomy is sort of missing the point, or is a misleading line of inquiry.
________
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789; Wikipedia article
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; United Nations
Why not let your behavior come naturally? Be authentic. If that means being a freakin' psycho- killer...well, morals probably weren't going to help you there anyway.
Love and do what you will.
I would say that moral philosophy clings to that dichotomy as otherwise it pretty much lacks a point. If morality is reduced to simple social pragmatics, then the only real issues are around effective implementation - social, political and economic science.
So moral philosophy needs to stick to a sharply dualistic objective/subjective division to continue to have something to argue about academically.
The objectivists and subjectivists can fight like cats and dogs and yet still want that very thing of the unresolved duality which is what will best preserve their tenure.
Why do you think this is self-evidently the right thing to say? A history of social conditioning?
It was a question
I experience morality viscerally. I work in healthcare and occasionally cause people pain. To do that I have to overcome resistance in my own body. I recognize that not everybody is like that.
Quoting apokrisis
Social conditioning is probably about as good at creating monsters as it is fostering care. I'm sure you know that from experience.
Quoting Mongrel
Well, why do we have (secular) law?
Why wouldn't suppressing an impulse to punch my boss be authentic anyway? :)
Indoctrination can also play a role in behavior, be it for good or bad (pun intended).
A degree of empathy can likely be cultivated (or taught), though even empathy might be reducible to self-interest.
Perhaps a more interesting question is then: how do we learn, understand and rationalize morals and moral behavior, as social matters?
Quoting Mongrel
I guess I do as well, to an extent.
For me there's more to it, though.
Law is mostly a tool for creating states, and if you don't live in an era of massive deregulation, it keeps your banking system from crashing the global economy and causing global devastation. If you do live in an era of deregulation.. note the value of law.
Quoting jorndoe
It probably would be if you waited to check your authenticity after counting to ten.
Quoting jorndoe
Can it?
Quoting jorndoe
It depends on your society. Traditionally, across most cultures, morality is not a social issue. It has something to do with things like the destination of your soul after death or your status in your next incarnation, etc.
How do you think about it?
Maybe @apokrisis is right; mostly mental masturbation (pardon my French).
Our similarity doesn't prevent us from acting in various different ways. Most people would say it is wrong to physically attack your boss just because you have a disagreement with him or her. People understand that one can wish harm on a superior, maybe even feel ready to deliver the harm. But, because we are similar, we will generally find that attacking bosses is a very bad policy because it leads to worse consequences for the attacker.
As a labor negotiator put it, "Write the savage letter to your boss, say everything you want to say, then delete it."
We recognize this as good policy--not because we think bosses are so special that they must be protected from very negative feedback--but because we understand that employees are far more vulnerable than bosses are.
But "masturbation" isn't French. Masturbate is from Latin masturbatus, past participle of masturbari. If the French had had a French word for jerking off, mentally or other wise, we would probably be using it. I read somewhere that the French never engaged in masturbation of any kind, so they didn't have such a word. It was probably in the same book that said "People are stupid."
But healthcare is precisely where there is close social attention paid to the ethical dilemmas. Leaving people to "what comes naturally" is a recipe for disaster. Part of the recruitment process to intensive care wards would be avoiding those who by nature would not respond to ethical conditioning? Weed out the psychopaths (and watch them become managers). ;)
Quoting Mongrel
Cultural anthropology would disagree. If we are talking about actual tribal culture, what is remarkable is how purely social morality is.
Western culture - because of its Romantic model of the human condition - makes people claim that they act from "authenticity". They look deep inside and do what they discover to be the right thing.
But tribal people asked what made them feel they should or shouldn't do something will simply refer to the judgement of their peers. It is quite natural to point to what everyone else would think as the reason why they acted a certain way - the very thing that Western individualism would be most loathe to admit ... following the herd.
In the West, we internalise concepts of such as honour, duty, goodness, etc. We hide from ourselves the socially constructed roots of our own thinking. And the East - being also civilised - does the same.
A large population creates so much room for social cheating that it is necessary that part of the social conditioning involves the internalisation of "a moral conscience" - an inner self that knows what it ought to do even when not under watchful scrutiny of the tribe.
But an actual tribe always has its eyes on everyone. And so the moral code can be understood as something external - part of the social world and not something to be found "inside".
I disagree with your analysis on 2. Certainly freedom and harm are not only personal matters but also abstract matters, that nevertheless depend on people to be instantiated. Freedom and harm, pleasure and pain, yada-yada, matter because people matter.
So in a sense, these values are person-dependent, but this does not necessarily etch out objectivity or realism. For we can still value a population of people who have these values, i.e. a state-of-affairs; classic totalist consequentialism.
The color green exists only within the minds of perceivers. There is no "green" floating around in the darkness of un-perceived space. And yet it would be wrong to deny that colors exist objectively - they exist but in a limited, constrained way. Similarly, value may be person-dependent but that need not make it subjective. We can just as easily say that if value exists, then people exist, just as if colors exist, then perceivers exist.
It's a common form of psychologism that is the placement of properties on objects that don't have them by themselves: sugar is sweet, the apple is red, pleasure is good, etc. And yet we would still say it's an objective fact that sugar is subjectively sweet, or that the apple is subjectively red, or that pleasure is subjectively good. This is why I think labeling anything mind-dependent as entirely subjective is too flimsy to be tenable. If we value pleasure, then it is an objective fact that we value pleasure. Therefore, it is an objective fact that pleasure is valuable in virtue of there being persons available for this. So long as there are people, pleasure is objectively valuable.
It is a false dichotomy, insofar as what is objective and what is subjective are inter-connected - they're not ultimately separable. Within conventional discourse, it is meaningful to speak of objectivity - it is expected of judges, journalists, adjuticators, and the like. But the concept of objectivity as the criterion of what is real, is very much a product of recent history. It's indicative of the assumed stance of modern culture which instinctively divides the world into subject and object, or self and other; and also the 'mental' realm - internal, subjective, personal - and the domain of physical laws - measurable, objective, common to all observers. They're all aspects of that same dichotomy.
And then it's a short step to declaring that science is the arbiter of what is objectively the case, whereas ethical judgements are said to be subjective. And there's your fact-value dichotomy in a nutshell.
human existence is objective,
our moral attitudes and sentiments are part of us,
thus our morals are objective?
If ought (pre/proscriptive propositions) cannot be derived from is (descriptive propositions), then it seems we start out with ought (independently of is)?
(getting late here, but please carry on)
If will-be propositions) cannot be derived from is propositions, then it seems we start out with will-be (independently of is)?
Well not exactly independent. Perhaps one can depend without derivation.
I've said this before at greater length: there is nothing objective about self-interest. To hang morality on self interest is to hang it on nothing more substantial than other interest.
I said I realized that people are different. For some, morality is mainly physical... the nervous system is quite capable of saying "NO!" For some people it may be that the concept of society is paramount. I wonder if people like that would also say that playing the piano and driving a car are fundamentally socially mediated activities (because you couldn't do them if you were alone in the wilderness).
And then there are the highly intellectually inclined: there is no morality unless it can be manufactured by logic.
No, really it's not. It's not altruistic in that it is designed to provide protection for both patient and physician and you might very well argue that it is the latter which is the prime beneficiary. And it has nothing to do with moral duty. It is an ethical code. Although it may intersect with morality it is principally a statement of professional standards. Unlike moral imperatives, its provisions have no universal application. It has force only when you become a 'registered' physician and only for as long as you remain one. It does not only prohibit certain actions but licences others that would have no moral justification outside the context of medical practice.
There are clear and important distinctions between morality, ethics, and law. Failure to maintain them in discussion will usually lead to muddied water if not total derailment (much like mixed metaphors! :s )
But why do they want that? I don't know. Maybe you can help us figure that out by telling us why you'd prefer that morals were objective.
An odd reference since the incapacity has nothing to do with the isolation and everything to do with the absence of physical objects. In reality, of course, pianists very often rehearse without the instrument and learner drivers frequently do the same without the presence of an actual vehicle, and could just as easily do so alone in the wilderness as in the presence of others at home or on a train. Indeed they might very well prefer to do so!
Likewise, you could be moral with regard to imaginary friends while off roaming the tundra. Offering that fact would be a poor response to the argument I was alluding to.
But you don't need 'imaginary' friends (unlike pianos and cars) to be moral surely? Not thinking bad things about them, not planning elaborate methods of murdering them when you return from said wilderness, praying for them and so on are surely moral acts which you can perfectly well do with regard to actual friends while in the wilderness? Isn't that exactly how the first hermits and monks justified their existence?
I don't know. Doesn't seem like much of a hermit who feels it necessary to justify being alone.
Some would say that if you were born in the wild and raised by ducks or whatever, you would have no morality for lack of society. Therefore morality relates only to social interaction.. I imagine people who offer that argument would find something pertinent in the so-called Private Language argument.
I'm not sure if there is any reasoning at all at the base of this perspective. I speculate that it comes from people who don't think of guilt and forgiveness as aspects of morality. Perhaps because both of those words are meaningless to them?
At any rate, there would be some things that are necessary for societies to persist (such as "it's necessary to not kill every single person in that society"), if we could ever figure any less obvious ones out somehow, and then it's simply a matter of whether people subjectively want the society to persist or not.
— Mongrel
Perhaps one's authentic natural self is violent, cruel, demanding, and if so then only way to behave morally is to be inauthentic, maybe that is what authenticity is, the acceptance of one's own fundamental weakness and the willingness to act toward others, not naturally, but as dictated by norms.
Likewise, if one did not behave violently, cruelly, etc., but one felt that behaving violently, cruelly, etc. were moral, then one would have to behave inauthentically to be moral.
Of course, most people feel that whatever is authentic for them is moral. Which means that the violent, cruel, etc. person would likely feel they're acting morally by being violent, cruel and so on.
Could be. But it's also possible that one is caring and empathetic by nature and the norms at hand say to choke those feelings down and put those Jews on that train. That's an extreme case, but I do believe that (in my society anyway) growing up means learning to be the master of ones feelings. That's morally precarious. The child who acts spontaneously will learn from experience the best ways to satisfy desires. The notion that morality is all about teaching the child to be numb and alienated from himself is wrong.
It's also so general as to be practically useless in terms of ascribing action, since what makes a society flourish will depend on who you're asking. And of course there's some who would deny that society should flourish - we call those people discontents, who have a morality of there own entirely dissimilar to that of everyone else's.
Virtue ethics, as developed in the Aristotelian tradition. And I agree with Wayfarer that the subjective/objective distinction is just a tool of thought, not something to be found as part of reality.
That's where my actual theory of society - the standard systems view that it is an organic whole in being a balancing of constraints and freedoms, global cooperation mixed with local competition - has the advantage.
It says at the local level of the individual, there should be plenty of scope for "discontent" if the society as a whole indeed has a flourishing balance. There needs to be creative tension feeding in novelty from the bottom - just like biological evolution needs "mutation" or genetic variability to ensure the continual adaptivity which allows life to persist in the face of environmental change.
So a natural philosophy approach to morality doesn't seek to impose absolute constraints on behaviour. It also places value on a certain level of variety. The super-empaths and the psychopaths are part of the same gene pool for a reason. And a workable notion of morality would need to follow the same evolutionary logic.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So as I say, evolution depends on a grain of variety. Therefore moral naturalism would target average states of constraint, not absolute states of constraint, when it comes to individual behaviour.
You find this really is the case in governments having to take the pragmatic view in regulating a society. In public, politicians have to be absolutist - not a single case of child abuse can be tolerated. But when it comes to actual policy, it becomes about what can we do to suppress child abuse to the level where it doesn't really disrupt things too much. The same with murders, rapes, terrorists blowing things up, or whatever.
I'm not saying these are a healthy form of individual variety. But I am saying that even anti-social variety only needs to be constrained by a system of morality to the point where it is not disrupting the overall continuation of that social system. The honest answer is that the system does not even need to care once misbehaving becomes small change so far as its general goals are concerned.
If there are bums on the street, drug addicts in the gutter, that is part of life and not necessarily a moral crisis. The ability not to care about what doesn't really matter is part of the definition of flourishing - being the flipside of being able to control things at the level which does matter..
Okay. Then I don't think there's any such thing as purely "subjective" and "objective". I also don't think things are "in" minds. Rather minds are in existence.
For example, a society may inevitably be based on the consumption of other animals - a carnivorous society. Being the progressives we are we might look down on such a society; such a society should be abandoned, eliminated, because its members eat other animals (organic cannibalism).
Again - mind to me is not purely subjective, so this question doesn't make sense in my framework.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Thoughts, desires, etc. can be objective states of the world. It's objective that X is thinking Y. Furthermore, certain experiences can objectively demand certain feelings - such as when your mother dies, you don't start laughing - you start crying.
I have no idea how you're defining the terms, especially given the comment that "thoughts, desires, etc. can be objective states of the world."
Also, per however you're using the terms, you'd not actually be answering the question I asked, which is whether thoughts, desires etc. aren't "in" or "of" minds in your view. If mental phenomena can be objective per whatever definition you're using, saying that thoughts and desires can be objective doesn't answer the question I asked.
The question you asked depends on a framework. The framework involves certain presuppositions about thoughts, reality, and how they relate together. For example you presuppose a distinction between subjective and objective. But this framework is precisely what I am denying. So of course I don't have an answer to your question - the question simply doesn't make sense under my framework, it's a false problem.
Why would judgments of good or bad be relevant to my point of view? Surely my point is that morality - as it pragmatically exists in the real world - is beyond such obviously absolutist and subjective terminology.
Again, if I had to judge flourishing in terms of some universal and absolute telos, I would point to the Universe's thermodynamic imperative. Flourishing in the natural sense - the sense we can actually see and measure as what reality is all about - is the maximisation of entropification.
So "goodness" would be defined by a system being good at that. And "badness" by a failure to degrade entropy gradients.
Given that modern Homo sapiens is spectacularly successful at entropy production, then of course it would be a bad thing for "society to just stop".
A fighter pilot - able to get through 14,000 gallons per hour once he kicks on the after-burners - must be the highest form of life that exists on the planet. No wonder they are our heroes. ;)
Quoting darthbarracuda
But then plants have feelings too. And then why shouldn't we respect the rights of the minerals of the earth, the gases of the atmosphere?
Yes, we progressives ought not only eliminate ourselves, but eliminate all animals (as they are barbaric consumers too), and even all plants (as they too show no respect for minerals and gases).
But then what is the progressive programme for those stars that just burn away merrily, or the Cosmos which is consuming its very self in pursuit of its heat death?
I mean your logic here is unassailable in its progressiveness. It is very superior in its morality. And yet it seems all a mite ... impractical?
Then it quite simply is not morality. Morality is a guide to action, based on what we ought and ought not do. Without absolutism you end up getting either arbitrary subjectivism or inertness (i.e. an inability to decide what to do - nevertheless an action in the objective sense).
Quoting apokrisis
But this equivocates flourishing. Seems to me that people decide what is flourishing and what is not, not the universe at a cosmic scale. Indeed the addition of a mind to the world's inventory creates a sort of world-inside-of-a-world, in which a person can sit around all day and nevertheless flourish despite not creating as much entropy as he would if he were playing soccer or something like that. The mind, the ego, becomes a microcosm of the world.
Quoting apokrisis
You're equivocating ability to perform an action, i.e. accomplishment, with normative good. This is why Mackie argued that moral properties probably don't exist outside of our minds, because they'd be "alien" to the rest of the world.
A hammer is good at hammering nails, but that doesn't make it morally good. A gun is good at killing people, but that doesn't make it morally good nor morally good to kill people. The point being made is that the mind, being a microcosm, has its own rules, its own system. It doesn't follow the same rules that a general model of the entire universe does. This is why non-natural properties ("subjective concepts") can exists in a mind but not in the rest of the world. They are endemic to a mind.
Quoting apokrisis
No offense but really you need to step down from this holistic picture for second and realize that nobody but yourself actually considers fighter pilots to be the highest form of life, and if they did, it would be for their apparent heroism (risk)/sacrifice and not for their entropification. You can't explain everything using your holistic metaphysical model. There exist pockets and corners in reality that don't quite match up with the rest of the world in the global sense, like a bug in a computer program. Separating yourself from this particular zone we call Earth in favor for a holistic picture ends up ignoring Earth entirely.
It's not too difficult to see how, despite what you claim, many or most of our commitments are explicitly fighting against entropy. The focus of morals is on sentient welfare, and to focus on something else is to completely lose sight of what morality even is.
Quoting apokrisis
What, no, plants don't have feelings, neither do minerals. I'm talking about sentient organisms, the only things of moral weight.
Say you're an animal that just got caught and is about to be roasted on a fire. You beg and plead to be let go, but in the end the hunter calmly tells you that what he is doing is perfectly acceptable, because he's increasing entropy. Furthermore he tells you that you ought to accept this and be glad you are being roasted alive.
It's what said elsewhere: if there exists any value independent of people, we shouldn't give a shit about it.
Quoting apokrisis
No, we ought to eliminate our dependency on cannibalism.
Quoting apokrisis
So you're a moral conventionalist. Our abilities dictate our responsibilities. A great way to excuse immoral habitual behavior. History dictates value.
No thanks.
Ah. That good old slippery slope again.
The difference with my point of view is precisely that it includes the practical business of drawing a boundary that, in marking out the degree to which we do care, marks out also where we then cease to care.
So the slippery slope is the world you inhabit. It is not my world.
Quoting darthbarracuda
No. It makes it a measurable concept. It puts a vague philosophical notion that connotes ideas about "healthy growth" on a sound natural philosophy footing.
It is you who equivocates in not offering a definition (except probably in subjectivist/dualistic terms of "god, life feels crap to me no matter how much I dream of a state of untroubled bliss").
Quoting darthbarracuda
You say hammers and guns have no relation to the generality that is the Universe. But clearly you are not understanding the logic of constraints. The Universe only requires us to maximise entropy production. It doesn't sweat the detail of how we might achieve that.
So building things, destroying things - the issue is only that overall any energy gradients are degraded.
And just look at the entropic curve that charts Homo sapiens' progress. On that objective score, hammers and guns are certainly being put to good use. You can't argue with the data even if you might be confused about exactly how our little human world fits so neatly together.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You take life so seriously! Why do you object so strenuously when I put it in terms that you claim to support - framing it as an absurdity?
(Again to short-circuit your response, remember that my case is that our current fossil fuel predicated existence may indeed be absurd in comparison to a more properly self-interested "rate of burn" - we should be aiming instead at a more "moral" or sustainable rate, which would be a social organisation living within the constraints of the solar flux.)
Quoting darthbarracuda
It is hardly separating to want to return to nature. It is your choice to fly off into dualistic realm of the transcendently subjective in search of "a metaphysical foundation". I instead am talking about what it is like to ground everything in physical immanence, the world as it is actually now known to us in measurable fashion.
So the earth and life are highly individuated - the most complex state of being known to us. And we can certainly celebrate that fact (although you get upset when I suggest the big brained human is the peak of all such peaks). But to ground that, we must also look to the limiting simplicity which is the context to our individuation. To talk about the general is not to ignore the particular - when, as I keep saying, systems logic shows them to be reciprocal in their very existence.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Ah, dualism. Or are you finally going to define "mind" in objective and physicalist fashion here?
What limit to caring now marks your usual slippery slope metaphysics now we have introduced this sly boundary term of "sentience"?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep, let's pose crazy scenarios as a last resort when our arguments are falling apart.
As a morality tale, The Magic Pudding is far more convincing on this score - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Pudding
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep. Just turn everything I have said into something different. Chalk up another victory for yourself. Imagine the round of applause.
(Hint: My naturalism is pragmatic and thus anticipatory. The future confirms value. The present thus needs its seeds of unconventionality so as to be able to advance. The past can only be a general guide,)
What I am trying to elicit is what it means to be authentic. We as humans seem to be both bad and good at our core. Perhaps being good means acting in accordance with one's self, and being bad is acting out of accord with what we believe in, 'sinning' against one's self. Acting bad, leading to a bad conscience, leading to guilt involves action, in a sense all actions are violent, since to act means to change something.
The problem that comes up is what we does it mean since in our life means little (without God). We are finite mortal creatures, the meaning we give to events are not in the events, the meanings are in us and as such morals are fictive, stories we tell our self. In spite of this willfully acting with a good conscience means acting in accordance with laws we give to our self which is, I think, the only way we can act freely.
(If the Cartesian Cogito is epistemological truth (leaving aside ego issues), then perhaps Desire is the Cogito's ontological counterpart, which forms the basis for thought. Tired, traveling all day...just some thoughts)
Because you're wanting to make this absurdity moral. Why, because it's naturally occurring? You're painting this picture to me that looks as if we all just entropified everything would be totally fine. Entropy is not moral. Experience is what makes morality in the first place.
Quoting apokrisis
Are you seriously going to argue that we ought to care about pebbles? There is a difference between things that have a mind and that which doesn't. We don't know this boundary, and it's probably a gradiance anyway. But things don't start mattering morally until they have the ability to have frustrated preferences, to be able to suffer. And so we must be reasonably cautious.
Quoting apokrisis
Yep, let's ignore legitimate scenarios because it threatens the cohesion of our worldview. :-}
Quoting apokrisis
woooo go me :-}
That's certainly a point of view. But that extreme subjective position - one that is only supported by naive realism and its implicit Cartesian dualism - is precisely what is the topic of discussion.
You are claiming subjectivity as the ontological basis for moral necessity. I am replying that morality is better understood in terms of "objective" reality - in terms of whatever general purposes or constraints nature might have in mind.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Talking animals and philosophising hunters? Is this Narnia where our legitimate scenario takes place?
But if we grant this craziness, then what actually follows? A sensible animal - if it is indeed taking the hunter at face value - would suggest a way to provide the hunter with an even better meal to their mutual benefit.
Isn't this the standard stuff of kid's morality tales? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Mouse
Other than that, though, I agree with the majority of your post.
I agree with this. Borrowing from J K Galbraith, we're each in motion. A visual image would be a vector. Good is what I'm reaching out for. Evil is what I'm turning away from.
I agree it's most fundamentally about identity, and that's where I see the social aspect of it. Society is the sea out of which my identity rises, and society is itself an individual among others of its kind. I partake of the identity of my society.
But why call this morality? It offers no clear guide as to how to act except in general rules, and places the emphasis on something other than people.
You claim that welfare-centered ethics is only supported by naive realism and its implicit Cartesianism and this is absolutely laughable. What was deontology all about, then? Certainly deontology respects people and isn't dependent on Cartesianism, because Kant! Certainly Mill cared more about suffering than he did entropy!
Instead of trying to make morality a global holistic thing, make it an isolated and domain-specific phenomenon. Morality is all about choices. You're making it so that it has nothing to do with the people making the choices.
Quoting apokrisis
:-}
You don't seem very good at analyzing other people's positions charitably. It's not far fetched at all to think that other animals outside of our species have emotions, can feel pain, and can have future interests. And I don't see why philosophy is outside the realm of a hunter. Indeed this is exactly what Zapffe talked about with his example of the prehistoric man dying on the beaches when he realized how all life was connected as a family of suffering.
Quoting apokrisis
Or, you know, it's more about inflicting harm on an animal that can't consent. You're basically justifying murder and/or torture simply because you can get away with it (the animal can't fight back, the animal can't offer alternatives - as if the animal's life should even be on the gambling table to begin with, might=right). Sensibility is not a requirement for moral value - the ability to suffer is. Innocent, senseless suffering.
Instead the animal is senselessly thrown into a situation that it could not consent to, cannot escape, and is forced to endure extreme pain and fear so you can have a snack. It's cannibalism and barbaric. You're arguing that the animal should have been sensible enough not to walk into the trap that we set, or have been sensible enough to run away from the gunshot in a zig-zag fashion. But it's somehow the animal's fault that it got trapped and eaten? We humans get off scotch free?
Being the most intelligent organisms on the planet, we ought to use this intelligence for the benefit of all sentients, not to subjugate them. Avoid speciesism.
That doesn't follow at all. Intelligence does not equate to morality. Indeed one could reasonably argue that they are utterly opposed in this case. Intelligence is after all basically a measure of the degree to which a species can manipulate and best exploit its environment for its own benefit. It is no accident that a significant proportion of the most intelligent species known to us are carnivores. The hunt both benefits from and enhances intelligence. You impose this supposed duty on humans to benefit other species because they are like us yet fail to follow through the logic that if they are like us they should also be bound by the same duty. If the sentience of a tiger is so close to our own why is it okay in your understanding for a tiger to kill me but not for me to kill a tiger? And just how sentient does a creature have to be or do you simply see them as all equal?
If, by the way, you are cryptically arguing your way toward the moral superiority of vegetarianism, as it certainly seems, then I think it would be fairer to all if you exposed that to more focused scrutiny.
Maybe you missed my first post. I argued that the systems approach supports the golden rule. It explains why social systems need a morality that encodes a way to balance the opposing tensions of competition and co-operation. Neither of these drivers are bad. Both are required. But then so is the third thing of their appropriate balance.
The question of the appropriate balance must then be answered within the larger context of an environment's carrying capacity - the entropy equation.
At the cosmological level, it is "morally good" to maximise entropy. (Although of course in attributing finality or purpose to the Universe, we would only be doing that in the weakest possible sense. And there is no reason why we can't do both those things.)
But a social system has to make some choice about its burn rate. If its growth rate is too anaemic, it will be out-competed due to its lack of efficiency. But on the other hand, too fast and it will flame out. A measure of the intelligence and foresight of a social system will be how good it is at making some right decision on the issue.
So yes. Morality can be built up from first principles in natural fashion. And it arrives at the kind of moral truths that are found to be the most general across societies. Anthropologists find a common structure across societies because - by definition - if they can survive, they must have found a suitable balance in this regard. They will have tuned their competitive~cooperative social balance so it has a good fit to their environmental carrying capacity.
Of course civilisations rise and collapse. That is natural too. A lack of foresight and natural disasters - nothing is ever perfect in life.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Again this is just you ranting.
My argument is that a secure morality is one built from the ground up on natural principles. If we can see what nature wants of us, then we can tell in measurable fashion how close we are to what it says is good. That creates a context in which we can make actually meaningful and useful choices.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You are just making simplistic assertions with no grounding argument other than how you personally feel about things.
As you can tell, I have no problem with what is in fact actually natural. So natural=normal. And unnatural=questionable.
Again a degree of behavioural variety is also natural. So I don't have any fundamental objection to veganism. I would only want to see it "done right" - done as an actually healthy diet.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Here we are again off into your wild rants. Maybe you live somewhere where everyone runs around with spears, chasing down squirrels and possums, ripping them apart on the spot and eating them raw. But I live somewhere where we buy meat over the counter after it has been humanely reared and humanely slaughtered.
Of course the "humanely" part remains a work in progress. But that just shows there is a moral awareness that is being acted upon.
And if indeed a lamb has a happy life in a paddock, safe from all the usual diseases and predation, then dies instantly and painlessly, could you still morally object to it ending up on my dinner plate?
On your calculus of suffering, is it better that it grows up a sheep in the wild than a carefully fattened meal? How does that work exactly?
Quoting darthbarracuda
This is more mindless PC sloganeering rather than moral philosophy. Why is there any "ought" here?
I am pointing out that, because of our intelligence, we are able to transcend beyond what our intelligence was originally meant for. We can recognize what it's all about and come to terms with it. Become the janitors of nature so to speak.
Other species are not capable of this. Other species are morally relevant but cannot necessarily be ascribed agency. Whereas humans are the only species whose members lead their lives (pace Heidegger), and are capable of agency.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
Yes, I think carnivorous diets are morally unacceptable.
Quoting apokrisis
Cosmic tendencies are not equivalent to morality, though. Again, morality is only able to be ascribed to sentients. Any other ascriptions are merely equivocations - just as gravity is not the force of love but of a non-agential force. It would be wrong to say that two large options are in love and so they come together, just as it would be wrong to say that entropy is morally good because that's what the universe tends to.
Quoting apokrisis
How do you evaluate a decision's right/wrongness? What makes the continuation of a society cosmologically right?
Quoting apokrisis
But only after realizing that they correspond to the golden rule, as you said. Which isn't building from naturalistic first principles. Unless you consider the golden rule to be one of these first principles, which is rather ad hoc.
Quoting apokrisis
This is quite simply atheistic divine command theory. God wants us to not do something, therefore we don't do it. The universe wants us to entropify, therefore we entropify.
Quoting apokrisis
Nope. Natural is indeed what is normal, but the unnatural is what is not-normal. You jumped from the non-normative to the normative without justification. What makes it the case that the status quo is natural? Why can't morality go against the system?
Is what is natural also what satisfies our preferences? Not necessarily. Indeed satisfying preferences is "natural" but may go against the cosmic naturalness you're talking about here; see the various societal constructions meant to curb the triumph of entropy.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure. But previously you were making it seem as though hunting a deer is normal and therefore acceptable.
Quoting apokrisis
"Humanely" is not compatible with "slaughtered". Indeed if we have an option of killing an animal vs eating a perfectly good slice of synthetic meat, we'd go with the synthetic meat. There would be no point in killing the animal. There is no justification for killing animals unless it's out of self-defense - and even then this is often caused by a violation of the animal's own territory, it's own "home".
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, because husbandry is not as perfect as you make it seem. It's absurdly easy to market one's meat as "humanely raised" by a couple easy fixes to the farm that doesn't help the animals much. Like I said before, if we have the choice between natural and synthetic meat, would you be able to come up with a reason why natural meat is so much better that it justifies killing another creature?
We inherently don't know what's going on in the minds of other people, other creatures. It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that only the human species members ought not to be murdered. That's exactly what killing other animals for no reason is: murder. Since when did we have the right to decide how long a creature lives? Since when did we have the right to own another sentient?
Why not? Support your assertions with an logical argument.
I've argued how they are the natural ground to what we humans call our morality. If we look at what we actually do as societies, we can find why it in fact works due to general natural principles.
Now I'm guessing you are thinking that if something is "simply pragmatic" or "simply a result of nature", then it isn't "moral" because morality ought to involve some kind of transcending human choice. You have the Romantic conviction that humans are above "mere nature" in being "closer to God", or "closer to goodness, truth and beauty", or whatever other traditional morality tale has been part of your up-bringing.
But sorry, I just happen to go for a naturalistic view of morality where it is not surprising that human moral codes would encode a certain central naturalistic principle - the need for a society to strike its flourishing balance. And science now supports that position rigorously.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Why is your thinking so relentless back to front?
In "unthinking" fashion, human societies evolved to express a pragmatic balance of competition and co-operation. That just is simply what works. And then once human societies started doing moral philosophy, it was understood that what works has the kind of underlying principle that could be sharply caught and taught as slogans like the golden rule. And now - as science has better come to understand systems in general - we can see that social systems are like biological and physio-chemical systems in this way.
All systems persist by striking a fruitful entropic balance. They need global coherence (physical laws, genetic programmes, ethical codes) as their organising constraints, and also local action (material degrees of freedom, evolutionary competition, individual initiative) as the dissipative flow of events that sustains the whole.
So the "ad hoc" bit is that it has taken time to learn enough about nature to understand why we are in fact expressions of nature - and not unnatural, or God's children, or demiurges recalling our origins in Platonia.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Sorry. Remind me which those are again? Are we talking patents for perpetual motion machines?
Or have you simply forgotten what is meant by a dissipative structure?
Quoting darthbarracuda
LOL. This is quite simply atheistic divine command theory.
Quoting darthbarracuda
OK. But I ask again, where do you stand if the husbandry was perfect and the lamb had the happiest life, a painless death?
Applying your own calculus of suffering, how would it be immoral to eat the lamb?
Well firstly, it's not for no reason if it's either to eat or protect ourselves. And secondly it cannot be murder. Murder is and always has been a forensic legal term with an exact definition which does not apply to any non-human (which for the purpose includes unborn foetuses, incidentally). No amount of propaganda will change that.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Since when did we not have the right? It is assumed in all the major moral and religious codes in history and prohibited by none of the world's legal systems.
Touche!
Yes indeed but you are not arguing that we can, you are arguing that we must and in certain ways prescribed by your particular understanding of the world which, I have to say is only flimsily supported at best by science or to put it more precisely the very intelligence in question. This is special pleading not rational argument.
Not really. I just don't equivocate tendencies with normativity.
Quoting apokrisis
Does it really?
Quoting apokrisis
Anchoring your morality in what is prevents you from wondering what could be. What could be better, what is not the case, possibilities. It keeps you from exploring other options. Once you remove this veil you're able to go about finding new paths.
Is it moral to kill a person so that society will continue to progress and entropify? No. Here we have a direct contradiction in what the universe "wants" and what we think is moral. You may argue that such action would undermine the societal structure - but we need only look at the past several thousand years to understand how that hasn't done anything to the system. Murdering people hasn't brought humanity to its doom.
Quoting apokrisis
No, we're talking vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, public maintenance, art, etc. The use of entropy to curb other entropic expansion. Would it be immoral, according to you, to have a nuclear bomb and not drop it somewhere? Such entropy!
If we cannot fail to entropify, then this means there is no prescription for action, and your ethics is empty. Prescribing maximum entropification also disregards sentients for a more abstract entropy.
Quoting apokrisis
How so? Keep in mind I'm a moral anti-realist.
Quoting apokrisis
You still killed another animal. That's murder.
Quoting apokrisis
It's not just suffering, it's preferences as well. I don't get to decide who lives and who dies.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
LOL, why do you think we don't apply murder to non-humans...? So we can keep eating them, that's why!
Quoting Barry Etheridge
Might =/= Right.
Absolutely not. Science is on my side on this one. Humans are not the only ones who have sentience.
Calling other people out who eat meat as "speciesists" is perfectly acceptable if I think this is accurate. If you disagree with this label, tell me why. It is perfectly accurate. Killing other animals is disregarding them as sentient, feeling beings - and if you're going to be moral to humans, you had better have a good reason for being moral to human exclusively without begging the question.
I'm sure I could explain it a million more times and you still wouldn't twig what is meant by "constraints".
I will simply repeat that constraints are what make possibilities actually possible. Limits give choice meaningful shape (such that some action could be regarded as actually moral vs immoral).
Quoting darthbarracuda
Oh, you mean those things we plug into an electrical socket and get hot and make a noise?
Quoting darthbarracuda
So you now admit your argument based on suffering has no bearing here. We can remove that from the discussion.
Now we instead have something truly ethereal - preferences. Why should I have to share yours? Where is the argument for that?
It's a false dichotomy... it's like love and marriage,,,
"Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you brother
You can't have one without the other
Love and marriage, love and marriage
It's an institute you can't disparage
Ask the local gentry
And they will say it's elementary
Try, try, try to separate them
It's an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one, you can´t have none
You can't have one without the other
Try, try, try to separate them
It's an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one (you can´t have none)
You can't have one without the other"
What I see to be the fundamental problem with your view is that you aren't taking into account the phenomenology of ethics.
I won't disagree with you that entropy rules in the end. I won't disagree with you that our normative intuitions came about via entropic constraints.
What I will disagree with you on is the phenomenal motivation we have for acting ethically. Any entropic constraint that made our intuitions what they are, are ancestral. I don't step in to prevent a rape because I'm worried about maximizing entropy, or because if I step in it will help keep society stable and ultimately increase our entropic footprint. I step in because I care about the person getting raped. I have placed the fundamental value on persons. My intentions are, ultimately, towards people regardless of how these intentions have evolved in the past.
Quoting apokrisis
No we can't. And no, suffering has inherent bearing in here because suffering is partly the violation of preferences (i.e. why masochists can feel some pain but not suffer - they have a preference for pain).
Quoting apokrisis
Indeed, why should I have to share your preference for entropy maximization, hmm?
Like you would say, our preferences are a result of the environment. And no, preferences are not ethereal - we have preferences after all. You're saying anything that isn't a major force in the holistic global scene is ethereal? Hardly.
But of course I take phenomenology into account by sheeting it back to its naturalistic grounding. So whereas you talk about phenomenology dualistically in terms of "qualia", I talk about the biological and sociological logic of having "feelings".
You know I've explained my view of the role of pleasure and pain as signals which make biological "common-sense". Just as humans are also wired to value their social interactions in terms of empathy and antipathy.
The difference is that while I do ground these feelings in something measurably real, you seem to want to treat them as cosmically-free floating - just feelings that exist in some abstracted fashion with no connection to anything in particular and thus absolute in their solipsistic force.
Quoting darthbarracuda
All you are saying is that you have discovered that you are constrained to think in certain ways about events or choices in life. And while you also know that this is due to some ancestral history (both a biological and cultural one), right there your analysis stops. You just accept whatever it is that you have ended up being without further questions.
This is a very odd idea of moral philosophy to me. Indeed, its exact opposite.
Quoting darthbarracuda
So we are back to my question then - the one you are dodging.
If the lamb that ends up on my plate involves no suffering, where is the issue with me enjoying my dinner? It cannot be any issue to do with suffering, can it?
Quoting darthbarracuda
But they are not preferences any more in the sense of being a moral choice when you are saying you have no choice but to respect your own discovered feelings on these matters.
I am saying we can instead understand the actual moral codes of societies - which are general pretty enthusiastic about hunting and meat-eating - as natural preferences because they encode the kind of balancing acts that make for a flourishing society.
You are speaking up here only for your own very personal minority view of what feels right when it comes to being a member of the tribe, Homo carnivorius. So either you have special privileged knowledge the rest of the world doesn't share, or you are just speaking to some particular quirk of your own psycho-developmental history.
The facts - as documented in Vaclav Smil's Harvesting the Biosphere for example - are that humans have transformed the planet into a giant livestock farm in just a couple of centuries.
The total planetary biomass of domestic animals - cows, goats, sheep, camels, buffalo - outweighs that of true wildlife by 24 to 1.
So while you waffle on about all right-thinking dudes knowing instinctively that eating animals is inherently bad form, pretty much the entire human race plainly just does not believe you.
But as you say, your position doesn't rely on such facts. The only thing that matters in all existence is your preferences on some issue. If we want to understand morality, we must come to you - learn about how self-deluding we all are.
No. I am not claiming that these feeling are just floating around somewhere. But neither am I going to deny the appearance, the "projectedness", the transparency of these experiences. Identifying pain as C-fibers firing (an outdated neuroscientific model) doesn't change the fact that pain hurts. Telling someone that their fear is only a chemical reaction doesn't help them. Identifying the cause of our morality (empathy, sympathy, compassion) and identifying the cause of these as well does not change how we experience them.
In other words, the content of our phenomenological experiences does not change with the introduction of a new scientific image of man. You need to take into account this.
Quoting apokrisis
Because that's all that's needed. A further anthropological analysis of what makes me tick won't change how I act, although there is some sketchy data which claims to show that moral realists are, all things considered, more likely to act "morally" than anti-realists.
If you want to go into meta-ethics, by all means go ahead. But keep in mind that you're doing meta-ethics, and not normative ethics.
Quoting apokrisis
If the person that ends up in the cemetery involves no conscious suffering (perhaps you 360 no-scoped them), where is the issue with this murder?
The issue is that someone's preferences were violated. Suffering isn't just the violation of a preference - that's much too empty. But suffering is, all things considered, the most prioritized of experiences.
Quoting apokrisis
This is sort of where Levinas comes into play with his idea of the persecution of ethics. We feel compelled to act ethically. Ethics is not egoistic, ethics do not necessarily align with our preferences. Only in the "virtuous" man does this occur.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh, sure, they're natural, but again personal preferences are not necessarily normative. What you want to do is not necessarily moral. The satisfaction of preferences can be moral in the abstract sense, but just because we have preferences doesn't mean their contents are moral.
Quoting apokrisis
Or, to be less dichotomous about all this, it's that I recognize that humans have a surplus of intellectual ability that is able to reflect upon our ingrained preferences and reject them. This goes right back to Zapffe again. We're not comfortable in the world anymore, we're not complacent. We've seen too much.
This is not at all unrealistic. Software programs have bugs that persist simply because the conditions around them allow them too. They don't belong, but the nevertheless are there. Change the programming, the bug disappears. The same applies to the human psyche. For some crazy reason human consciousness exists when a toned down version would have sufficed. Perhaps this is a product of the agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia all those centuries ago.
We evolved in a relatively thermodynamically-stable environment. We had no concept of entropy. And yet entropy, the same thing you're arguing is moral, is going to stab us in the back.
Quoting apokrisis
Are you seriously going to argue that population dictates moral righteousness? Really?!
Clearly the majority of civilizations two thousand years ago wouldn't have thought slavery was wrong.
Like I said before, moral conventionalism all the way. It's an ad hoc meta-ethical theory.
Quoting apokrisis
I wouldn't be so smug about it, but, yes, I think with the proper education and a little bit of honesty, people can see the errors of their ways. This applies universally.
It's not self-consciously egoistic, but you are talking about individual compulsions. In the end, it's a matter of I want it this way. But usually the rhetorical appeal is made to something the tribe holds sacred, perhaps one established principle against another. The individual sometimes experiences the pain of being torn between two compulsions, perhaps between the "ego ideal" and the lust or the hunger of the body. Our self seems more or less constituted by the "spiritual instinct," so that is given the superior position. That compulsion is the one we want recognized as adults. The self projects itself as a universal and therefore conceals its egoism from itself (which may run counter to an investment the so-called anti-egoistic.)
I don't think this identification with moral leadership and a vision of the world as not worth the trouble are the least bit separated. If one desires recognition in a world that will not give it, then to hell with the world. I'm too good for it. No one can take that away from you, but you might get tired of it. As I see it, there is violence and not saintly love at the heart of it, though I'm sure empathy is involved, too.
Still, I'm glad you're around to make your case. You have the wit and the guts to argue.
Good points. I'd say the freedom is also about being able to change these self-given laws. Philosophy at its best is just this sort of freedom at work. It's personality editing at its most radical.
Well in fact that scientific image produces pain-killers, and hip operations, and cognitive therapies, and other stuff which can change the content of that phenomenological experience.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep. Still ducking my question.
Did the lamb express a preference? Is it capable of having one? Again you are having to support your position by talking nonsense.
Do you have a preference about lamb-eating? Might I have a different preference? Now we are talking. What general ground decides the issue morally when preferences are in conflict like this?
Yes, "life is sin." Movement is sin. There's a religion of stasis in our guts somewhere that just reaches out and grabs us now and then. Not life-death but un-life, un-death. And yet this religion itself looks like some modulation of the killer instinct and quest for a position at the apex that it condemns in a sort of sublimated verbal violence. It seeks to bring guilt and humiliation to everything self-assured and at home in our flesh-eating flesh.
Seriously? Is it not just as standard a mythology to celebrate the natural circle of life.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, we got to get ourselves back to the garden ... woo, hoo, hoo, hoo, lah, la, la, la, lah....
I can't tell if you got where I was coming from. I was trying to paint a picture of world-denying, world-accusing morality as an expression of what is supposedly hated about this world (violence, self-assertion, motion). Of course there is the other song and dance, too, which is far more popular. Explaining how life could pose as anti-life is the challenge.
Not really. So you are pointing to irony of using violent means to put an end to violence?
I guess my point of view here is that we actually, socially, have really big problems in this world we are so busily creating/entropifying. We haven't got time to piss around with vegetarianism or pessimism or other whiny philosophical trivialities.
People just don't know stuff like how exponentially we are transforming life on the planet - the literal domestication (or enslavement ;) ) of all four-legged protein sources.
And there is this view that when people learn the truth, they will get scared and change their ways. But hey, I believed in the factuality of the Limits of Growth the first time around - and ever since have had to boggle at humankind's ability to ignore its inconvenient truths.
Eventually one has to decide whether humankind just is crazy, or instead this is some legitimate "wisdom of the crowd" effect. One has to be willing to challenge ones own eco prejudices against a testable model of reality which then might allow some actual control over the future.
If you don't understand the drivers of a phenomenon, you can't really expect to be able to express any meaningful preferences about where the phenomenon is headed.
And burn rate - solar flux vs fossil fuel - is at the base of modern civilisation and its existential dilemmas.
I do find those ideas fascinating. I also like metaphysics as thermodynamics. It's not my game in particular, but it's nice to see something new. I don't worry much about the planet, myself. I "should." But I really don't. Largely because I don't see it in my control. I can't waste the effort in what would seem to amount to a fashion choice. Some "game theory stuff" may extinguish us along these lines. Oh well, we made some smoke.
This is only true for a particular definition of sentience which you have carefully kept hidden. There simply is no evidence that any species other than humans is sentient according to that definition and in fact you have acknowledged this is in your comments on the question of why it is acceptable for animals to behave in certain ways towards humans but not for humans to act in the same way towards animals. You really can't have your cake and eat it. Either the sentience of animals is identical or so close to identical as makes no difference to that of humans in which case they should be afforded the identical moral and legal protection or it is not and there can be no rational objection to their being treated as the food that nature made them.
The problem with electing for the former is one of infinite regress. If species Z so resembles humans that it is afforded human 'rights' (I very consciously apply the inverted commas here but that's for another thread I suspect), then if species Y resembles Z it must also be afforded them. And if species X resembles Y ..... and so it goes on. Where and how do you draw the line? Or do you simply declare every living thing (including plants with their rudimentary sentience) off limits and starve to death?
This is the crux of the matter. The moral argument for vegetarianism ends up effectively proposing that it it is better to starve to death than eat meat (doubly so for vegans), sociopathy by any other name. Doesn't exactly scream 'morally superior' to me!
Or sentience exists on a spectrum, and we can't play dice with other people's lives.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
Admittedly there is no precise line. We can say for sure that rocks, bacteria and fungi do not suffer. We can say for sure that mammals do. We can't say for sure whether or not insects, fish, or amphibians suffer - we have to take into account the benefit of the doubt and assume they can until substantial evidence shows they cannot.
Quoting Barry Etheridge
Straw man. If you are starving to death, you have no choice in the matter, you have to eat something. This is why self-defense is acceptable moral behavior - killing someone for no reason is immoral, defending yourself is not.
Luckily for most of us we don't depend on meat to survive, so there's really no excuse.
And this changes...what, exactly? This only confirms what I had been saying earlier - phenomenological experiences are the subject of ethical priority. Your entropic ethics is missing what makes something moral - it's failing to resolve Moore's open-ended question.
Quoting apokrisis
Does it have a preference? It sure seems as though it does.
I'm not ducking your question as much as you are apologizing for murder.
Does an autistic child have preferences? Is it okay to murder them? Is it okay to have slaves, just because everyone else has slaves?
No.
Quoting apokrisis
Empathy, compassion, etc. Pointing out the reality of certain preferences and decisions and honestly assessing what our reactions are to these realities. Intuitive responses are prima facie evidence for something being of value, because value depends on people who exist.
In any case, there are more important preferences at stake here than your appetite - namely, the lamb's preference to continue living. Are you really going to make equivalent your appetite with the inherent desire to live another day?
The exact same issue arises when a man rapes a woman. There's a violation of preferences here - which is more important, the man's lust or the woman's liberty?
Your entire position essentially boils down to might=right. I'm intellectually superior, therefore I get to make the rules. And this goes entirely against any modern egalitarian ideal. It's barbaric.
Regarding the subjective versus objective thing, let me just ask what it's like to be you, the reader? [1]
You may describe it so others can relate, even though "being you" will always be out of reach for others to experience (barring genuine telepathy I suppose).
Cutting it short, self-awareness is more-or-less noumena (though not all noumena are necessarily self-awareness). [2]
So what? It's just a consequence of onto/logical self-identity (the 1st law, the law of identity).
In that particular sense, subjective versus objective is a real partition if you will, except still part of a larger environment/context. A focus on subjectivity is self-emphasis.
It seems to me that morals are (at least in part) subjective, with respect to mind-dependence, as argued in the opening post. Yet, surely that's still real?
Have a good weekend everyone.
[1] cf Nagel
[2] cf Kant, Brie Gertler (with whom I personally disagree)
I apologize for the simplfication with that comment.
The situation is analogous to the valuation placed on money, or gold. That money is valuable is a real, objective fact of the world; it makes the difference between someone wielding enormous power vs. a stack of worthless paper. And yet, there is nothing objective in the world which confers on money it's value, outside of the collective agreement of the individuals who use it.
Maybe a new term is called for. Morality is neither objective nor subjective, but rather collective.