The ethical standing of future people
Recent discussions of anti-natalism and climate change have made me aware that, while I am aware of several theories regarding the moral standing of currently existing people, I struggle to find firm ground regarding the standing future people should have.
It seems evident that exactly what weight a given system of moral philosophy assigns to the consequences a decision will have on future people has a significant impact on how at least certain decisions are judged. Yet, it seems that the question is rarely brought up, even when discussing topics where it obviously is relevant, like the ones I mentioned above. An exception here might be virtue ethics, which might sideline the entire question.
It seems conceivable that one might argue that future people have no standing at all. This would be unintuitive, but does not strike me as prima facie incompatible with common consequentialist or deontological systems. So, I'd like to use the claim that "future people have no standing at all" as a baseline for discussion and ask for your opinions and reasons as to why this statement is correct of false, given the system of moral philosophy you ascribe to.
I think it'd be best if we leave substantive discussions about topics like anti-natalism and climate change in other topics, though no doubt they will come up as examples. I also think this discussion can function regardless of whether you think moral systems are in some way objective.
With that said, what are your thoughts?
It seems evident that exactly what weight a given system of moral philosophy assigns to the consequences a decision will have on future people has a significant impact on how at least certain decisions are judged. Yet, it seems that the question is rarely brought up, even when discussing topics where it obviously is relevant, like the ones I mentioned above. An exception here might be virtue ethics, which might sideline the entire question.
It seems conceivable that one might argue that future people have no standing at all. This would be unintuitive, but does not strike me as prima facie incompatible with common consequentialist or deontological systems. So, I'd like to use the claim that "future people have no standing at all" as a baseline for discussion and ask for your opinions and reasons as to why this statement is correct of false, given the system of moral philosophy you ascribe to.
I think it'd be best if we leave substantive discussions about topics like anti-natalism and climate change in other topics, though no doubt they will come up as examples. I also think this discussion can function regardless of whether you think moral systems are in some way objective.
With that said, what are your thoughts?
Comments (99)
Great thinking. Thanks for sharing it.
It is counter-intuitive, but the statement is true both figuratively and literally, at least on the basis that no such people exist. On those grounds I don’t think the moral case for anti-natalism has any merit because it doesn’t deal with real people.
But when it comes to preserving the environment, it isn’t about one future person, but generations of them, to “posterity”, many of them born the moment I write this. So in a way, “posterity” exists and we can point out the countless pregnant and newborn people now existing in order to make it more concrete. For these “future people”, there must be some consideration of their future, at least to guide our actions in the present.
What are your thoughts?
Antinatalism is the only moral "theory" that explicitly addresses the notion of future people. It wouldn't have to be, of course, but there's no other common moral theory, at least, that explicitly addresses them.
With other common moral theories, it seems to me that you could interpret things any way you like with respect to future people. For example, if you're a utilitarian, you could interpret any stance about the moral weight or lack of the same of future people as being or not being a benefit to people in general.
The viewpoint you are describing is called Generationism or ancestor morality. It is the view that ethics should be grounded in a deification of future generations as our true judgers and argues that a good person is someone who strives to be a good ancestor.
The view is interesting but currently incomplete and needs work.
My advice would be to read Albert Schweitzer’s Ethical vision. Generationism is highly influenced by his works and the empirical findings within Moral Psychology.
Possibility is a really intelligent person and has some valuable constructive criticism of this view. While I think he agrees with me that a good person might be someone who tries to be a good ancestor, it isn’t the only factor in determining someone’s overall goodness.
Well, but this raises the question: If the single future person really is a non-entity, because potentialities aren't people, how do we construct a notion of "posterity"? Sure, unlike an individual descendant, which depends on individual choices, "posterity" as a whole depends on social factors, and is thus perhaps more predictable over long timescales. But we'd still need to ground that posterity on something. If it isn't personhood, what is it?
Quoting Terrapin Station
If you can interpret things any way you like, that would imply that you know nothing, i.e. that you system simply offers no solution to the question. Which is a flaw if you wish to base your behavior on that system. Now it strikes me you don't personally ascribe to a moral system, but if one wants to, the question of how to deal with consequences for possible future people or generations seems important.
Quoting Mark Dennis
Thanks for the advice. Are you personally familiar with Schweitzer? Would you say his moral philosophy can be categorized under a broader heading?
[quote=Echarmion]I'd like to use the claim that "future people have no standing at all" as a baseline for discussion and ask for your opinions and reasons as to why this statement is correct of false, given the system of moral philosophy you ascribe to.[/quote]
'My future self has no standing at all.'
But that isn't true, is it? Or better: the statement makes no more sense than 'I, this present self, am not the future self of a past self'.
Based on inherent vulnerability to consequential harms, how can a future self [FuS] be judged not to have standing on, or claim to, the moral concern (i.e. judgments and conduct) of its past self [PaS] which includes most proximately the present self [PrS]? In the same sense that a future self [FuS] is always at risk of e.g. lung cancer caused by its past self's [PaS]'s cigarette habit, a claim on the present self's [PrS]'s agency (especially when foreseeable) functions as a tradeoff - cautionary - constraint on judgments (i.e. preferences, priorities ...) and conduct (i.e. practices, relationships ...) vis-à-vis health. Is concern for 'moral health', so to speak, really any different?
Can we not then, on the same temporal grounds, rationally generalize from this moral (i.e. intrinsic benefit of harm / helplessness avoidance & reduction absent, or independent of, extrinsic benefits (i.e. reciprocality (e.g. quo pro quo)) concern for our future selves [FuS] to moral concern for (our) future populations [FuPop]? :chin:
(Skip a few more digressive steps) suppose:
if PaS --> PrS --> FuS,
if PaPop --> PrPop --> FuPop,
if PrS ? PrPop,
then PaS ? PaPop --> PrS ? PrPop --> FuS ? FuPop;
therefore PrS --> FuPop :eyes:
Yes? Maybe? No? Not-even-wrong?
Quoting Echarmion
I'd start from the opposite assumption, that future people have as much standing as currently existing people, in theory at least. Because if you would know with certainty that you acting a certain way now will kill a person 100 years from now, that person will have been as real as people living now.
In practice however I think there are certain objections to this. For one the further you go in the future the less certain your knowledge of the impact of your actions becomes. And it makes sense to give more moral weight to certain harmful outcomes than uncertain ones.
Another objection follows from who we are as human beings. We typically feel more for people closer to us, in time... but also in distance. This is the basically the same reason I disagree with someone like Peter Singer who thinks one ought to treat a person across the globe morally the same way as someone next door. It just won't work... because it makes abstraction of moral intuitions and ways in which people tend to behave.
The best reason to care for the future, for me, is maybe more an aesthetic than moral one. There's a certain joy or satisfaction in working together with other people to create a future. And the idea that things will go to hell is depressing.... even if I wouldn't be there anymore. I dunno, maybe this is even akin to religious feelings in that it gives some kind of larger purpose or justification to what you are doing now.
Are you saying; as only the present self has agency, it has an obligation to use some of that agency for a future population?
I don’t think considerations of other future property are much different. Just a combination of that and a more general concern for other people at all.
Schweitzer was a Nobel peace prize winner and set up a hospital in French equatorial Africa. A Theologian, musician, philosopher, writer and a physician. A polymath really. He was Lutheran but he’d say his dominant value was a reverence for life. This guy actually had headlines written about him calling him “The greatest man on earth”. He fell out of favour though when he started predicting that our technology would one day destroy us and he worried that we would destroy the world. His views on race where in some ways really progressive... however although he cared deeply for all his fellow man, he was accused of being overly parental toward non-whites who, although he called them his siblings, he saw himself as the elder sibling and viewed other races as children. He may have meant technologically though as he was very critical of the morality of white people and claimed that most Christians today blaspheme the name of Christ by being all talk and no action when it came to philanthropy, plenty of people talking about loving their neighbour but not enough actually following through in his opinion.
He’s a hard one to put in a box in my opinion as most Polymaths tend to be.
In practice, that's how all systems--utilitarianism, etc. work. That's one of the many things that underscores that contra any beliefs otherwise, ethics really comes down to people feeling however they feel, having whatever dispositions they have, about interpersonal behavior. Systems are adopted because they match dispositions people have on the abstract level on which the systems are stated, but when it comes down to using the system to reach a conclusion about a particular scenario, there's a lot more divergence, because all of this stuff is really about persons' preferences, emotions, etc.
There's no way to ever get to a(n objective) fact that amounts to a valuation or prescriptive normative of any sort.
Well, for one the whole notion would seem to require a consequentialist approach, since we are talking about benefit and harm, correct?
It seems convincing that any consequentialist system has considerations of the future states of current person's build in. To this effect, it requires us to consider persons as stable through time. However, is that consideration not based on the current personhood of the self? I view my Future self as an extension of myself, but I wouldn't view my grandchildren in that manner. They have no current personhood which I could extent into the future. I'd have to assume they have some ideal personhood based on their potential existence, but that seems at least a questionable assumption.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
It might be real, but it might not be. The uncertainty can become a problem if we have to make policy decisions that might help people now, but might hurt people later.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But isn't there an extra step required to extend concerns from people who already exist to people who might potentially exist?
Thanks for the overview!
Quoting tim wood
I am asking what our duties actually are though. And there might be conflicting duties towards current and future people.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Nevertheless, moral philosophers have tried to establish systems for deciding how to act. I, personally, like to consider such systematic approaches.
I don’t know that I’d agree with this. If we anthropologically state that humans use ethics and moral values for the biologically driven purpose to propagate their species and increase long term security and safety, and if we state that it is a biological fact that humans need food and water to do this, then we can probably objectively say something like this; If humans want their species to thrive, they must establish and maintain stable food and water systems.
There are a lot of problems with cultural moral relativism. The two main components of the claim 1, Moral norms differ between cultures. 2, there are no universal moral norms. However this stance creates moral monoliths out of every culture as if there is consensus within them but not without. Also, claim number one sounds a lot like a universal norm which is immediately contradicted by claim number two. Now, descriptive moral relativism which looks into moral demographic makeups of a nation, culture or religion is at least a bit more insightful.
Good, I’m glad it helps. Descriptive moral relativism belongs in the tool box, not our principles.
Sure, but what do you take to be an example of a system that would tell you even whether to murder someone else without it being a case where really you could interpret the system to recommend either a positive or negative answer?
The only way around that is to simply specify "Do not murder others" and so on, but you're not going to be able to specify every possible scenario.
Let's take positive laws as an example in lieu of a moral system. A given body of law can represent a legal system, and in that legal system there will always ultimately be an answer of whether or not an act is legal. That answer is not necessarily uncontroversial, but for a wide variety of cases, there will actually be uncontroversial answers.
Of course, a legal system can rely on a bunch more axioms than a moral system, but in theory you could have moral rules that operate in a similar way.
In other words, a moral system in which everything is morally permissible unless we specify that it's morally prohibited?
So first, re this:
Quoting Mark Dennis
Are you suggesting a purpose that might not be consciously present in individual humans, or are you saying that contingently, due to biology, that purpose is consciously present in all individual humans?
It was a question. I was asking if that's what he was suggesting.
Sorry for the snappy last message, thought you were ignoring me.
This is a good question. I’ll give you a preliminary answer now and I’ll message you another later after it’s incubated a bit.
Now, it’s important to bring up subconscious and conscious. I do not believe that every human has a conscious desire to have babies, but most have a conscious desire to have sex, or do the thing that makes babies and nearly everyone has the subconscious desire.
Asexuals and abstainests are a little different. Asexuals more so. I’m not asexual so I couldn’t begin to imagine what values they should have. Asexuals May still adopt though, and sexual abstainests in religion usually see sex as the wrong but not having babies. So all productivity no play for these people.
As a collective though, barring a human extinction event or sterility causing epidemics, most humans are gonna keep having sex and babies. To argue whether they should is a pointless and futile endeavour as a collective. Pragmatic arguments could be made for certain individuals not having babies due to medical complications that make a pregnancy riskier than normal for certain women. However you’d be fighting a losing battle to stop said women from adopting or surrogate seeking if she wants to.
I don't buy the idea that we have "subconscious" (or unconscious) mental content, such as desires.
What do you think would count as evidence that we have unconscious mental content?
Future me doesn't exist yet but I care about him. I also care about other people generally. It just follows from the two that I would care about future other people who don't exist yet.
(I also care about people who are already dead, but I've been thinking that that might be a mistake, or at least dwelling excessively on the bygone tragedies of the past may be a mistake, since there's nothing that can be done about it now, unlike future people. I still have to keep myself in check from excessively caring about future people, or other existent people, disproportionate to my influence on them, though).
But who knows, maybe all sleepwalkers are faking it and are all awake the whole time.
Sure, so take sleepwalking. Evidence that sleepwalkers have mental content that isn't conscious? What would count as that?
How do we check whether they're conscious while they're saying something?
The only question I noticed that you asked that I didn't answer (I just searched for it--I found a post I overlooked) was about common moral theories. I mean that literally. So not something highly idiosyncratic--something unique to one person, or to some small cult or something. Common moral theories include contractarianism, divine command theory, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, etc.
Re the question above that you feel needs to be clarified:
The idea is that we have someone who is sleepwalking and who says something while sleepwalking. You said that this is indicative of unconscious mental content. I'm asking how we're checking whether they're conscious or not when they say something while sleepwalking. If you're positing that they're unconscious, presumably we'd have some evidential support of that, no?
“So would it be fair to say you are a moral relativist? You believe that morals and value are relative based on things like culture, nationality, religion?” One of the other questions I asked which you conveniently ignored. If you can’t answer questions and you can’t make a point that actually relates to echarmions point then you shouldn’t be on this discussion thread.
Any system of morals that deals with rights of children and acknowledges a parent responsibility to safeguard their children’s future that right there is a moral system that as the rights of future people’s in mind.
those are historically common moral theories and each of those has many modern variants. So if you’re suggesting that we are only allowed to discuss the moral theories of long dead people that you respect, then I say I’m done with this argument as you’re not contributing to it. It seems to me, that what you call common moral theories, I call entry level ethics.
Try and keep the discussion on track next time. If you aren’t aware of other philosophies and moral systems that deal with these issues then don’t comment and misrepresent the debate like only the systems you are aware of exist. If you don’t know something say it, it’s just intellectually dishonest to say it doesn’t exist just because you are ignorant.
I'm not trying to say anything other than I'm saying. I simply asked you a question. There's no need to get upset over a question.
Quoting Mark Dennis
So if we defined sleep as occurring during consciousness would they be conscious? Surely it's not just a matter of definition, right? We must be saying something different about the ontological facts. The terms are just a name for those facts.
I don't agree that we're not conscious when we're sleeping. For example, when we dream, we're aware of dreaming. Normally we name mental states that we have an awareness of "consciousness." It's not identical to waking consciousness--we're not processing sensory or perceptual information in the same way, although we could say that it's very similar to fantasizing or daydreaming consciousness.
Quoting Mark Dennis
I'm a moral relativist, yes. A noncognitivist, and more specifically, a subjectivist.
Quoting Mark Dennis
I didn't see that post.
Quoting Mark Dennis
lol--I only mentioned common moral theories because uncommon ones could be anything imaginable. So it's difficult to say anything in general about those.
You're moving towards being very patronizing and pompous. There's no need for that. How about just having an honest, good faith discussion and not getting pissy about anything?
You can't be getting offended that I'm challenging anything from a philosophical perspective, right? You're one of the people who did philosophy at university. Surely you're used to views being challenged.
This is going to ramble a bit, while I get some ideas down...
If we consider that our behaviour is geared towards survival, then what constitutes our success? If it is our capacity to continue an individual life, then we are doomed to inevitable failure. If it is to extend the survival of our particular genetic code, then we compromise this aim with each ‘successful’ reproduction.
But why should we concern ourselves with ‘future people’ if we are the ones meant to survive? Because we’re not meant to survive, and both the efforts we make in this finite life and the pain, humiliation and loss we endure are not just in pursuit of our own temporary pleasures.
That we are aware of ‘future people’ at all appears to be unique to our species. Our capacity to map causal chains beyond our own physical existence enables us to predict potential effects of certain actions, and even initiate alternative actions in order to knowingly cause a preferred effect much further along the chain - and in time - than we may live long enough to observe.
An awareness of ‘future people’ and the idea that the hardships we endure and the choices we make now are for the benefit of our descendants has been a feature of morality teachings for thousands of years, as have the difficulties we’ve faced in buying into it. The Pentateuch, spanning many generations, attempted to make sense of the causal chains that took the Hebrew people away from a fertile land, into slavery and then the desert, before they returned in force to claim the land as their own. These writings made effective use of ‘divine’ prophecy, promises and punishment to help them join the dots where today we would seek (and have the technology to find) more accurate information. They then used those apparent patterns to try and predict future outcomes of current events, and sought to inform or control ‘future people’ with their theories, hopes, warnings, laws, etc.
The information we have about the universe, as a consequence of our past interactions with it, allows us to predict what will be the result for us of future interactions with the universe.
Mapping causal chains this way is as much a scientific endeavour as it is ethical. Mapping multi-generational casual chains feels ‘right’ - even though it conflicts with a ‘natural’ tendency to think, speak and act primarily in one’s own personal interests. That we are capable of reliably predicting effects hundreds of years into the future from our actions today makes us collectively responsible for those effects - because we can choose to be aware of that information or to ignore it, but we cannot choose that the information doesn’t exist. We cannot absolve ourselves of the harm that occurs beyond our lifetime by simply choosing not to make ourselves aware of the causal conditions we create with every action - or by declaring the information inconclusive.
IMO potential people have as much relevance as any other potential event that may not be as predictable as we’d like. We prefer to control for such uncertainty - to effectively ignore or factor out those variables we cannot control or predict. That’s all well and good, but we cannot pretend we are creating a future where people do not exist. We’re going to have to factor this potential in somehow, and be okay with the uncertainty.
Challenged in methodically correct ways. I’m not offended, I’m frustrated as you aren’t actually refuting my arguments that come with questions. So it’s not really an honest debate as I’m taking in everything you say and challenging it with arguments.
Okay subjectivist; here are some questions for you.
Hitler: What I am doing is morally right
Mother Theresa: What you are doing is morally wrong
Which of them is speaking the truth?
If they are both speaking the truth as you would suggest, then their is no moral asymmetry between them, yet there is significant moral asymmetry between them.
A: it was wrong to invade Iraq
B: it wasn’t wrong to evade Iraq.
Which is the true statement?
If they are both true, then statements A and B don’t mean the same thing by the word wrong
If they don’t mean the same thing by the word wrong then they aren’t really disagreeing. Yet they are both disagreeing. So how can subjectivism be taken seriously? It doesn’t move debate forward because it’s the same as saying everyone is right. It’s intellectually lazy.
You should read up on moral psychology as a field.
“only mentioned common moral theories because uncommon ones could be anything imaginable. So it's difficult to say anything in general about those” not if you have a handful in mind that you’ve studied like Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life or the ethics of pragmatism and moral psychology.
Neither. Moral utterances are not true or false. Again, I'm a noncognitivist on ethics. So the same for the second question.
Quoting Mark Dennis
Because it's what's the case ontologically. It's factually correct.
Quoting Mark Dennis
You should not be patronizing.
Quoting Mark Dennis
Sure, if you have specific theories in mind and exclude others, you can say something about less common theories.
— 180 Proof
Well, for one the whole notion would seem to require a consequentialist approach, since we are talking about benefit and harm, correct?[/quote]
Yes, but a negative consequentialist approach that prioritizes foreseeable harm (i.e. deprivation misery fear etc) reduction & mitigation over all other moral considerations as the "highest good".
[quote=Echarmion]It seems convincing that any consequentialist system has considerations of the future states of current person's build in. To this effect, it requires us to consider persons as stable through time.[/quote]
We only need to consider that persons have (asymmetrically) 'temporal parts', so to speak, which are simultaneously anterior and posterior (except at both ends) much like the stages of development - infant, toddler, child, adolescent, young adult, middle age adult, elder adult - none of which are "the same person" only bearers of a shared continuity of memories, relationships and embodied perspective (vide Parfit, linked previously).
[quote=Echarmion]I view my Future self as an extension of myself, but I wouldn't view my grandchildren in that manner.They have no current personhood which I could extent into the future.[/quote]
Your children, assuming you're a parent, are persons which (will) have future selves that, ceteris paribus, (will) consist in potentials for parenthood just as your future self (will) consist in a potential for grandparenthood, both of which (convergently) imply potential future grandchildren. How parents raise their children will impact any potential future grandchildren during the upbringing of their future selves by your present children's future selves, no? The moral concern of a present parent for a present child is compounded in large part by the prospective welfare of that future child who's potentialities include being a future parent, etc. Just as the future self does not exist presently yet as an extension of the present self concerns the present self ... I don't see how concern for presently nonexistent future grandchildren differs, except in degree.
[quote=Mark Dennis]180 Proof I was with you up until the conclusion “Present Self implies Future Population.”. Could you maybe expand on that a little and clarify. Or correct my reading of the conclusion if it is wrong.[/quote]
Maybe I shouldn't have used the notation for implication; by " --> " I really only mean 'precedes' (i.e. comes before) e.g.
"Present Self precedes Future Population".
Since, as I claim,
"the Present Self, a member of the Present Population, (which) precedes the Future Self, a member of the Future Population"
implying that concern for ourselves entails, or, less strictly, is indistinguishable from, concern for any population to which we belong. Yeah, population (almost always) survives the demise of selves but that future population is an extension of a past population which included ourselves.
[quote=Mark Dennis]Are you saying; as only the present self has agency, it has an obligation to use some of that agency for a future population?[/quote]
Yes, just as present selves use agency for their future selves - and by "agency for" I mean agency to protect and provision the mitigating (or robustifying) of foreseeable needs (i.e. risks) while cultivating capabilities (i.e. adaptive advantages) - which also constitute future populations.
[quote=Pfhorrest]I submit that we all act in consideration of future people all the time: our future selves.[/quote]
Yes.
Also, if you’re a subjectivist how can you claim that subjectivism is factually correct when subjectivists don’t believe in facts? This is what I mean about relativists. They say silly things like nothing is true and then claim “nothing is true” is true.
This is the ultimate flaw in moral relativism and with autodidacts it comes out so much more because you hold onto ideas based on feelings, not logic. There is no prescriptive value in relativism whatsoever. You simply went wow at the idea use that very idea to justify the first wow.
No. I don't realize that. Because they're not contradictory.
What do you believe the P is that one is affirming and the other denying by the way?
Quoting Mark Dennis
Since I'm a subjectivist, this isn't the case. Obviously I answered them the way a subjectivist would.
Quoting Mark Dennis
Oy vey. We're talking about ethics.
I’m going to level with you here; there is one over arching reason why you will never convince me that being a relativist or any form of moral antirealism is The Argument of Trust.
There may or may not be moral truths. If there are though, immoral people will try subversive tactics against that claim.
Individuals who claim there are no moral truths have the potential for a dark hidden bias. A reason why they either hope there are no moral truths or a reason why they want to convince other people of it. Now I’m not suggesting this of you but it’s one that should make you pause when listening to other moral antirealist views.
I’m sorry if I’m sounding patronising, I can’t help it sometimes. See, learning the theory is one thing, but how well do you know the personal history of the individuals behind them and the history of the society they lived in? You’d be shocked at how many people immediately discard Kant at the first reading simply because they didn’t understand Kant as a person based on the historical accounts and they rarely understand the times he was living either.
Thank you for bringing questions about the nature of self into this.
To make a distinction between my own future self and that of a person not yet born, saying that I exist and they don't and that they therefore have no moral standing, while my future self does, since I already exist, involves a faulty conception of self not unlike the traditional Christian soul. I don't believe that there is any such personal self that begins to exist at my birth, has continuity throughout my life, and then either ceases at my death or goes to an afterlife. Such a notion falls apart upon examination. And yet, this is how most people seem to think of themselves, probably mostly because of the way memory works, or more precisely, the way information is integrated. Assumptions of the existence of such personal selves sneak into arguments about the moral standing of potential future persons. I suspect that most people making such arguments don't question the mostly unconscious, common-sense (but wrong) notion of what a person is. But such notions of selves and persons should be questioned in the context of such arguments.
180 Proof, is your position on personhood or selfhood basically in agreement with Parfit's?
:cool:
[quote=petrichor]180 Proof, is your position on personhood or selfhood basically in agreement with Parfit's?[/quote]
My position has definitely been inspired by Parfit's conception of personal identity but more informed by Thomas Metzinger's phenomenal self-model et al.
It is possible to be subjectivist about some matters but not others. Subjectivism is just an empirical conclusion about where a truth-maker might reasonably lie for propositions. The answer to this question might well be different for propositions in different fields of thought. For example the 'truth' of Beethoven is a great composer' is not to be found in the world, but we might reasonably think that the truth of 'I can fly unaided' is definitely to be found in the world. It must therefore be possible to be subjectivist about some matters, but not others.
Quoting Mark Dennis
I don't see how this doesn't also affect moral realists who have a strong incentive to appeal to some objective, higher-authority, to get people to behave the way they prefer.
I wasn't trying to persuade you to adopt a different view. I gave my opinion on the initial post, that led to a brief back and forth, you asked some questions about that, and I gave my opinion on some of what you were saying in response. I'm happy to give my view about things and to explain it, especially in contradistinction to other views, especially if someone is curious about it, or if they want to suggest that only their view is workable or anything like that.
The reason I buy moral noncognitivism/subjectivism is that I want to get right what the world is like, and it's clear to me, via empirical and logical/reasoned means, that morality is simply dispostions that people have about interpersonal behavior that they consider more significant than etiquette. Moral stances aren't found in the extramental world, so there's nothing there to match or fail to match (so that utterances can be true or false).
If you have a different view that's fine. Hopefully you're also not looking to persuade me to your view, or you really have your work cut out for you.
That'd be one way to go about it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The issue I have with this approach is that I think any moral imperative needs to reference a subject. If we are going with a consequentialist approach, the judgement of benefit / harm needs to be made concerning specific moral subjects.
For the future "selves" of present subjects, I can conceptualise their potential future interests as present interests referencing the future. But if I have no current subject to start with, how do I make sense of the notion that a given action harms someone?
Quoting Possibility
I agree with the epistemological stance here, but it's not just about whether or not we can reasonably predict future harm to future people. It's about what these future people are supposed to be. Moral rules concern the interactions between moral subjects. The problem I see is that future people aren't subjects at all. They're merely imaginations. Reasonable ones, sure, but that doesn't make them persons.
Quoting 180 Proof
Sounds good. This nevertheless seems to supply us with a special relationship to our future selves that is absent when we consider potential future persons that are not part of this continuity.
Quoting 180 Proof
My issue is that before I can get into deliberations about how a given action might cause harm, I need to establish the moral standing of the affected subject(s). I don't worry about the effects my actions might have on various bacteria, for example, because bacteria aren't considered moral subjects (usually, anyways).
How do I go about doing this for potential future people? I cannot base it on some list of physical characteristics, or on some communicative act. I cannot engage in any form of reciprocal recognition process.
And.... people agree on certain dispositions and enforce those agreements. Those agreements in turn influence what moral stances people adopt. Moral stances aren't found in the external world, but morality is very real in that there are consequences if you fail to match it.
It seems to me that if you want to get right what the world is like, this should at least be part of your description ;-).
Sure, no disagreement with that. It just doesn't make any of it true/false, correct/incorrect, etc.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
It's just that that stuff is irrelevant when we're talking about the ontological status of moral stances re whether they can be true or false. You're not going to say every single thing about every aspect of morality every time it comes up. You'd have to write a book over and over.
I’m starting to have a better understanding of your problems with some aspects of moral realism. How demanding most moral systems tend to be. Would it be fair to say that you’d call Moral systems inherently demanding?
Sure. I happen to think it's a vital aspect though if you want to understand how morality and the world works. It's also the reason why a lot of people believe morality is objective, and can be true or false.... well at least after mere convention becomes tied up into some kind of metaphysics. True or false is the context of morality simply means whether or not it is in accordance with fixed convention... the convention part often gets forgotten.
That's the argumentum ad populum fallacy, and it results in saying that it's true that it's morally permissible to have slaves (if you're in the US in the 1820s in the South), that it's true that it's morally permissible in certain historical tribal settings to cannibalize neighboring tribes, etc.
But it is true that it was morally permissible to have slaves in the South of the US in the 1820's.
What's your point? Let me guess... relativism?
It’s only morally permissible if you don’t take in the moral opinions of actual slaves at the time. Pretty sure they weren’t calling it morally permissible nor were their white advocates. It might have been legally permissible at the time, doesn’t mean it wasn’t morally reprehensible though.
To clarify, I'm not saying I believe it's true, I'm saying a lot of people believe it's true. I'm with you on this, I think, that true and false don't really apply to moral claims.
:up:
No stance is going to be unanimous. You just pointed that out yourself a few posts back (well, maybe in another thread . . .I don't remember if it was this same thread or not)
We could say that it was true that it was conventionally considered morally permissible. That's an important distinction to make.
I think we’ve discovered a lot about the others views so far which means we might be able to broach where we have consensus.
I think one thing we will disagree on always is how we are defining truth in terms of morality. You don’t believe it is possible for moral statements or arguments to have a value of true or false. I do.
If we define that which benefits a life, as things like having enough to sustain its life until it’s natural end. Is morality useful to life? More specifically, is morality useful for you? Does it help your position to have humans who believe in morals around you or would it be better if every single one of them was a moral antirealist?
Aside from some extreme medical conditions, I don't think it's really possible to have a human who doesn't have a whole host of moral stances. It doesn't matter what they think the status of moral utterances is ontologically; they're going to think that some behavior is morally kosher and other behavior isn't. And most people aren't going to have extremely unusual moral stances--or at least they're not likely to have stances that result in extremely unusual behavior. Some will, but not that many.
So can we take your relativistic stance to mean that if you’d been around at the time, you wouldn’t have seen any value in even debating whether or not it was right to keep slaves? This just makes you a moral apathist in my eyes. Your apathy is probably the biggest indicator of a fundamentally immoral mind.
Sure, though I'm not entirely sure what "it was morally permissible" could mean otherwise in the absence of an objective morality.
Nice debate guys! (I bought an extra box of popcorn... .)
I'm sure Terrapin Station can answer for himself, but I do want to give you my answer too because I think it's an important question, and our meta-ethical stances seem to overlap at least to some extend.
In the absence of objective morality and moral claims not having truth-value, I think it is even more important to have moral dialogue. Because one consequence of that view is that you cannot just find or discover moral facts, we have to create or construct them. Dialogue then serves a vital role to refine, clarify and generally evolve your moral ideas.
Furthermore the only way to get to some kind of morality that transcends individual moral stances, which I think is necessary to live together somewhat successfully in groups, is to agree on certain moral ideas... and agreement necessarily implies that you debate what you want to agree on first.
Quoting Echarmion
A moral subject is anything that can be harmed. You’re dismissive of bacteria as a moral subject, but I would argue that’s only because their value is considered to be negligible in relation to other moral subjects. This is not objective, but is an anthropocentric perspective.
When you’re trying to determine the ‘moral standing’ of subjects, you’re positioning your experience of these subjects in relation to value. And we can’t overlook the evidence that this priority we attribute to ‘personhood’ and our qualification of the term is a feature of morality that has not only contributed to much of the oppression, abuse and hatred in human history, but has also brought us to our current environmental crisis.
If an ‘objective’ moral standing is what you’re after, then you can’t restrict ‘relevant information’ only to that obtained from a person’s perspective. I recognise that this complicates our ability to establish any moral standing at all, given the lack of information we have about the perspective of future people or bacteria, for instance. But I think we need to be honest about these subjective limitations in relation to moral standing.
Quoting Echarmion
This is where we need to become reacquainted with uncertainty as a feature of reality, and recognise the limitations of a reductionist approach.
When we calculate potential energy, it’s in relation to a specific future action produced from specific causal conditions. The potential energy is an imagination - but it’s one that depends entirely on information we’ve acquired from past interactions with the system. We’re pretty confident in our calculations as long as the causal conditions are as calculated.
So the only real difference I see between being aware of the effects my actions might have on potential energy and the effects they might have on potential people, then, is the variability of causal conditions - but it’s a BIG difference. People are unpredictable (except on a macro scale), in that they have the capacity to internally create the causal conditions for their own actions.
We cannot reliably predict the effect of a specific action on our calculation of potential energy unless we can control or specify ALL other causal conditions. This is achievable in the science lab, but not often in reality. But we still have to worry about the effects of these actions outside of the control conditions of a science lab.
Just because it’s difficult and uncertain, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about it. We need to recognise first of all that we cannot expect to fully control or predict the causal conditions that contribute to effects on potential people, and then find another way to look at it.
How do we talk about how a specific action impacts on potential energy in general? We don’t, do we? And yet we can’t get away with not taking potential energy into account when determining our actions (even unconsciously), so it’s far from irrelevant. We don’t have to consciously think about or calculate potential energy as adults interacting with the world, because we’ve integrated this information about the universe into our automatic systems of operation, and we teach our children to recognise and take into account this relational aspect of reality without needing to explain what potential energy is or why it’s important.
Personally, I think we’re afraid to acknowledge the moral standing of future people, just as we’re afraid to acknowledge the moral standing of bacteria. Because to do so we would need to recognise that our own moral standing, objectively speaking, is not nearly as significant as we’ve been led to believe. And we’re just not willing to accept the discomfort of that reality. Ignorance is bliss.
The problem I see with this approach is that, even if we profess to care about everything, our value judgements are necessarily anthropocentric. There is no way for us to actually judge the interests of a bacteria, and hence decide what counts as harm to then. What we'd actually do if we tried is to anthropomorphise the bacteria and assume it has human interests. This results not in a relationship of moral subjects, but in a kind of paternalism, where humans decide what they feel comfortable doing.
Quoting Possibility
As a historical fact, this is true, but I don't think a different grounding of morality would have changed the outcome significantly. It's always possible to draw arbitrary lines if you really want to.
Quoting Possibility
I am not really sure what you're proposing here. Obviously all my information is restricted to my perspective. How could it be any other way?
Quoting Possibility
Well, to me, this is the problem. If we are willing to give all potential future people some moral standing, even if the standing is relative to the certainty we have regarding their existence, this potentially makes the interests of current people fairly insignificant. Without a clear grounding of the moral significance of the future, this could be used to justify all manner of measures, including fairly draconian restrictions. This seems to reduce everyone to cogs in a machine, forced by posterity to provide a more of less specific outcome.
It’s not as obvious as you seem to think. A good deal of what we learn about the world as human beings is from the perspective of others - even something as simple as a child being told ‘don’t touch that oven because it’s hot’. These words provide new information about the system based on their relationship to the person speaking and the words they’re using, rather than to the oven itself or any direct experience of touching the oven. An actual experience of touching the oven that would directly provide such information may have been from the perspective of the person speaking, or from their parents, or the information may have been a result of inductive reasoning on the part of the person speaking (or their parents), based on their observations. The point is that the experiential source of the information obtained is not the child’s direct perspective.
The same thing occurs, for example, in the use of sentinel species such as canaries in coalmines, or when we observe from someone’s facial expression that a particular person has just walked into the room. We don’t need to directly interact with something in order to obtain relevant information about it. We just need to understand and value/trust the relational structures that provide that information.
The point is that we can and do obtain information from other perspectives, from interacting with someone or something that interacts with something else (and so on) - when we have sufficient information from the result of past interactions to confidently rely on how we’ve mapped the causal structures. So when I suggest that a microbiologist, for example, has the capacity to understand the universe from the ‘perspective’ of a bacteria - at least to some small extent in their imagination (based on information obtained as a result of many past interactions with the same or similar bacteria) - that’s not as ridiculous as it might sound initially. They may even come to admire the behaviour of bacteria, or to align their value structures in some respects.
I would simply call that a form of indirect evidence for states of affairs. I base a lot of my knowledge/predictions on things people have said, because a report of an event is evidence the event happened. But all that evidence, and my notion of the event, happens in my perspective. If someone tells me they touched a hot oven and it hurt, I'll treat that as evidence that touching hot ovens hurts, among other things. I can also use my capacity for empathy to imagine the pain, but I can never actually feel their pain, nor experience the hot oven from their perspective.
Quoting Possibility
But knowledge about the outside appearance of a (supposed) subject doesn't tell us anything about their internal perspective. Only with other humans can we confidently make conclusions about their internal perspective based on their external behaviour, and even that is fraught with errors (like the fundamental attribution error).
And technically, our understanding of other human's internal perspective is fake, too, since what we're actually doing is imagining ourselves in their shoes. This works well enough for people we share a lot of common cultural ground with, and with very basic emotions. But Modeling the internal perspective of a chimpanzee is going to be a lot less accurate, to say nothing of housecats, fish or bacteria.
I understand these reservations. But I’m not advocating authoritative measures. I don’t see ethics as something dictated or enforced from above, nor from the future. We can’t control the actions of others - we can only have an effect on the world by increasing our own awareness, connection and collaboration.
Like the bible? Like Trump’s tweets?
A report of an event is an expression of subjective experience.
So, in a post in another thread that was a response to Artemis, I responded that a view he brought up wasn't a view that I agreed with, after he'd said "anywhere in the world you find the same underlying principles to ethics."
You responded with "the majority would agree," as if that fact were significant, and minority dissent wasn't worth mentioning.
Now, in this thread, I brought up the fact that in the southern US in, say 1820 (or whatever similar date I used), the majority would say that it's ethically permissible to have slaves.
But now, you don't care that the majority would agree. You're bringing up minority dissent as if it's suddenly worth mentioning.
I'm certainly not in any way advocating that there's any significance to consensuses about this stuff. In fact, I asked you what you believed the significance of it was, and I didn't see you answer that (though you might have and I just didn't see that post yet--I've been busy; I'm just checking out responses to posts now). At any rate, the reason that I'm bringing up consensuses, majorities, etc. is because other people, including you, brought them up in a normative context.
"It's morally permissible to do x" is an opinion that someone can have, a way that they can feel about interpersonal behavior.
I'd still have an issue with personally adopting a moral system that is entirely outcome oriented like that though.
Quoting Possibility
Sure, Trump's tweets and the bible are evidence. Not good evidence, but evidence nonetheless. We can say that a report is an expression of subjective experience. But subjective experience does indicate objective events, on average.
Right, 'It's morally permissible to do x' in the mouth of someone, is then the expression of the moral feelings of that someone.
'It was morally permissible' (past tense) however, can't be an expression of a moral attitude a person wants to voice (because it's the past), but only really makes sense as a description, of a group of people having had those moral feelings. If it only was one person then it seems like you would specify that, right (person x had that moral feeling)?
Maybe you think it doesn't makes a whole lot of sense to make those 'it was'- statements about moral feelings because not all people had the same feelings etc.... but I think it's a meaningful statement one can make. There's a sense in which the overal moral feelings concerning slavery have changed over the years, across the board... so that you can make meaningful descriptive 'it was'-statements about it.
Likewise, present-tense 'it is morally acceptable'-statements can also be descriptive if enough people agree, and so they need not be allways expressive.
Okay - how is it entirely outcome oriented, and what is the issue?
The way I see it, the common issue is fear, but most people are loathe to admit this about themselves - that they’re afraid and overwhelmed at the responsibility. And the ‘outcome’ is entirely open-ended, as far as I can see.
Quoting Echarmion
Not evidence of an event (certainly not of an objective event), but of an experience. ‘On average’ is hardly reliable as evidence.
What I wrote was "We could say that it was true that it was conventionally considered morally permissible."
"Conventionally considered" is another way of saying that most individuals thought such and such.
Yeah I got that, but you wanted to add "conventionally considered" because you seemed to think that was necessary to make some kind of distinction there, whereas I think it is redundant because it can really only be interpreted that way, in the past tense anyway... which is why i wrote what I wrote.
I think we agree, ultimately.
Well, it can be morally permissible to just an individual and to no one else, or to a small sub population, say. And of course objectivists will read it so that it's not about anyone's views.
I'm very behind in responding. I don't know if I responded to this.
No, I don't think that it's useless. I think that it's pragmatically useful for helping to clarify views as well as for trying to influence others.
Pragmatism in no way implies a belief in objective morality (absolutes or not), but sure, it wouldn't preclude them.
Relativism precludes a belief in an absolute objective morality, but not belief in objective morality that's not absolute but relative.
I don't buy any objectivity for moral stances, however.
This is just plain wrong. For example a pragmatist can still be religious and a moral realist. A pragmatist can believe in the concept of pragmatic moral truth and pure yet unknowable moral truth. He just resigns himself to using pragmatic truth in place of pure truth but understands that the drive to find pure truth is what leads to improving pragmatic truth.
I don't think you're understanding what I wrote there. For pragmatism to IMPLY a belief in objective morality, that means that one can not be a pragmatist without buying objective morality.
But that's not the case. One can be a pragmatist and either think that morality is subjective or one could remain agnostic about the question.
Since the implication is subjective we can’t really know but I would argue that any pragmatist who thinks pragmatism doesn’t make this implication is wrong and they will think I am wrong.
Is it correct to say pragmatism implies pure moral truth? I don’t know and neither do you (and you’ll never believe there is anything to know) but it is completely correct to say that my belief is that it does imply this.
Knowledge about how potential energy appears to behave doesn’t tell us anything about potential energy, either - but we make predictions and conclusions based on this behaviour anyway, and it turns out to be far less error-prone than human behaviour. I would argue that animals are somewhere between these two in terms of potential for error.
Our understanding of other human’s internal perspective isn’t ‘fake’ simply because we use our imagination. I’ve already explained why assuming the causal conditions behind human behaviour is prone to error. I disagree that it’s going to be less accurate for simpler organisms. It’s just that we don’t tend to care enough to find out.
I would argue that they are not necessarily anthropocentric - it’s a preference that we would argue is justified. And we can approach an understanding of the general interests of bacteria, and of what counts as harm to them. Microbiologists do this as a matter of course. The difference is that there is a tendency to evaluate harm for bacteria as ‘good’ for humans - although probiotics is certainly changing that view to some extent.
I believe no single future individual has any standing, because we do not know exactly who is going to exist in the future. Therefore it would be impossible to give unborn individuals their own moral standing. However future people in general do deserve some moral standing. Particularly when conceiving of the ways in which we shape our societies and laws. For example if we pollute the earth to the point where we can't live on it, not only could it deprive many alive today of their life, it could potentially lead to the great suffering or deaths of future people. In this more general context these potential future lives do hold moral weight and that responsibility would be those who caused that suffering to future generations.
While we can’t know much about the individual personal identities of future peoples, intuiting their needs should be fairly easy. Same needs as us in the present.
Creating real stability and balance across as many areas as possible is the best thing we can do for ourselves and future peoples.
I didn't see this reply until now. First, "pure moral truth" wouldn't imply objectivism necessarily, either.
At any rate, can you explain how in your view pragmatism implies that the pragmatist is an ethical objectivist?
Quoting Mark Dennis
Sure we know. You simply look at what people label as "pragmatism," especially when people are self-identifying as a pragmatist. Do those views they're labeling as pragmatism imply objectivism with respect to ethics? It's not difficult to figure that out.
Although, I suppose you could be someone who understands pragmatic ethics but willingly goes against it because you don’t believe in objective moral truth. That isn’t the same as behaving like a pragmatist.
Would you agree with Wikipedia's characterization of pragmatic ethics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_ethics