Secular morality

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

So the problem secular morality faces, is, I think, that it is the successor of religious moralities where morality was founded in metaphysics, with God as the pinacle of that metaphysics. Every tradition not only had it's prescriptive rules, but also it 'discriptive' myth where the morality flowed from. Now this is important I think, not only did they say "you have to do this because God says so", they invariably embedded it in a story so people would buy into it more readily. So the purpose to all of this, is to give a morality authority. You need to follow it because it's true.

https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Atheists-Guide-to-Reality/

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

What this all means, I think, is that we need to bite the bullet, and reconcile with the fact that morality isn't and can't be true or false.

That sounds like the thing that the logical positivists claimed was necessary, basically creating the field of meta-ethics in the process. There has been a lot of argument about it since and it's far from a settled matter. I think the author with the closest to the correct solution is R.M. Hare, with his universal prescriptivism.

I have my own take on a solution to the problem, which I outline in my philosophy book, as you've already seen the beginnings of, and commented on. I agree that moral propositions are not truth-apt in the same way as non-moral propositions are, because they are not trying to describe reality in the way that other propositions are, so to say they're "true" as in a correct description of reality or not is besides the point. But I hold they they can be "true" in a different sense, in that they are correct instances of a different kind of speech, trying to do something else: to prescribe morality. Like Hare, I think they are more like imperative sentences than like indicative sentences, but that imperatives can be judged superior or inferior to each other just like indicatives can. And with that difference in direction of fit established, I think morality can be sussed out in a way completely analogous to, but separate and distinct from, the way we suss out the truth of non-moral proposition.

I summarize up that analogy in part of one of the essays of my Codex Quaerentis, where I first summarize how the scientific method works:

Quoting The Codex Quarentis: A Note On Ethics

When it comes to tackling questions about reality, pursuing knowledge, we should not take some census or survey of people's beliefs or perceptions, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, believes or perceives is true. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct sensations or observations, free from any interpretation into perceptions or beliefs yet, and compare and contrast the empirical experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for a belief to be true. Then we should devise models, or theories, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be true. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian academic structure.

And then give the moral analogue of that:

Quoting The Codex Quarentis: A Note On Ethics

When it comes to tackling questions about morality, pursuing justice, we should not take some census or survey of people's intentions or desires, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, intends or desires is good. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good. Then we should devise models, or strategies, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be good. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure.

In short: Descriptive claims about what is true or real are to be judged by appeal to empirical experiences, things that seem true, with a whole bunch of important details on the procedure of which to appeal to and how and by whom, not just "whatever looks true to me right now".

Likewise, prescriptive claims about what is good or moral are to be judged by appeal to hedonic experiences, things that seem good, with all the same important details on the procedure of which to appeal to and how and by whom, not just "whatever feels good to me right now".

Quoting Pfhorrest

In short: Descriptive claims about what is true or real are to be judged by appeal to empirical experiences, things that seem true, with a whole bunch of important details on the procedure of which to appeal to and how and by whom, not just "whatever looks true to me right now".

Likewise, prescriptive claims about what is good or moral are to be judged by appeal to hedonic experiences, things that seem good, with all the same important details on the procedure of which to appeal to and how and by whom, not just "whatever feels good to me right now".

Thank you for the insightful comment.

Reply to Tzeentch Thank you for letting me know you found it insightful. :smile:

Everybody has their own theory about ethics, so why shouldn't I. But I can't write a book about it because that would need a lot of filler; I can write a passable essay about it, but nobody would publish it because I don't have a doctorate in philosophy.

so my theory (which I think is superior to all other current theories... but so are everyone else's in their creators' minds) will die with me.

Reply to ChatteringMonkey

I prefer the notion of a genealogy of morals, that our morality develops over a long period of time through a process of trial and error. The wisdom of generations can better attest to the merits and faults of a particular ethics better than any number of philosophers or theologians or gods.

It’s a shame that primitive peoples injected supernatural decrees declaring this or that right and wrong, because such a flimsy metaphysics was doomed to bring doubt on the entire enterprise. Nonetheless those moralities still persist in our cultures and habits and will continue to do so long after we’ve passed. And who knows? Maybe in a distant future the genealogy will converge into one ethics with which everyone can agree.

Reply to Sir2u

Although an atheist, I don't think Alex Rosenberg is entirely up my ally, I think he's too reductionist.

Reply to Pfhorrest

Quoting Pfhorrest

That sounds like the thing that the logical positivists claimed was necessary, basically creating the field of meta-ethics in the process.

I haven't really read much of the logical positivist, but weren't they saying that moral claims are meaningless, not just that truth doesn't apply to them. To me that's an entirely different thing, I don't think moral claims are meaningless, I think they have meaning in moral communities.

Quoting Pfhorrest

In short: Descriptive claims about what is true or real are to be judged by appeal to empirical experiences, things that seem true, with a whole bunch of important details on the procedure of which to appeal to and how and by whom, not just "whatever looks true to me right now".

Likewise, prescriptive claims about what is good or moral are to be judged by appeal to hedonic experiences, things that seem good, with all the same important details on the procedure of which to appeal to and how and by whom, not just "whatever feels good to me right now".

Ok, I think I understand you position better now having read that. I do disagree though. Basically I'm a social contractarian. I think morals originate in communities where dialogue, negotiation and agreements etc... are a vital part of how morals come to be. I don't think this proces can be replicated entirely from a research desk. The role of the philosopher IMO shouldn't be to devise morality like a scientists develops scientific theories... I think the philosopher can play an important role in the proces though, by facilitating and elucidating the dialogue in a community. But so his interventions in that view would necessarily be more topical, rather than systematic and academic.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Ok, I think I understand you position better now having read that. I do disagree though. Basically I'm a social contractarian. I think morals originate in communities where dialogue, negotiation and agreements etc... are a vital part of how morals come to be. I don't think this proces can be replicated entirely from a research desk. The role of the philosopher IMO shouldn't be to devise morality like a scientists develops scientific theories... I think the philosopher can play an important role in the proces though, by facilitating and elucidating the dialogue in a community. But so his interventions in that view would necessarily be more topical, rather than systematic and academic.

Perhaps it's also important to bring up the distinction between morality and legality here. What you describe sounds more like democratic law-making than personal morality.

I think you're right though that a moral philosophy is not an entirely theoretical project. It does require engagement with the restrictions of actual reality, just like the scientific method does. Perhaps, as an analogy, we might say that the scientific method uses what we observe in the present to predict the future. A moral system would use what we observe in the present to prescribe a future.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Now historically, christianity, with it's valuation of truthfullness, was involuntarily the germ from which the scientic method sprung. Faith in God wasn't enough anymore, God needed to be proven with reason, just to be sure.

In the meanwhile, we also came to understand that the basic rules in a formal system of rules cannot be justified from within the system. Any attempt to prove these basic rules from nothing at all, is just a futile exercise in infinite regress.

One never just proves a theorem. One proves a theorem from the basic rules.
It is not "proving" but "proving from".
Proving the basic rules from themselves, is obviously futile.

Furthermore, the scientific method does not apply whatsoever to formal systems. It is the axiomatic method that deals with them.

Therefore, we can only conclude that they wanted to use reason but did not understand the tool. That is the prime reason why their very poor results are so incredibly nonsensical.

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I think the word morality is the centre of a grander concept, which should NOT be touched.

Icarus, he who flew too close to the Sun, is a good metaphor.

'What's good is...' assumes a long list that is tricky to define, requiring an apt tongue, not word.

Did we make a mistake by thinking our language can contain good?

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

I haven't really read much of the logical positivist, but weren't they saying that moral claims are meaningless, not just that truth doesn't apply to them. To me that's an entirely different thing, I don't think moral claims are meaningless, I think they have meaning in moral communities.

To the positivists "meaningless" and "not truth-apt" are basically the same thing, because their theory of meaning is basically entirely descriptivist (that's basically what "positivist" means; positive:normative::descriptive:prescriptive): the meaning of something lies in the empirical experience of the world that it tells you to expect, so something that is not trying to describe the world like that has no meaning, to them. (I disagree about that, to be clear, but I'm not sure you do).

Their various attempts at figuring out what moral claims are trying to do, if not making "meaningful" statements like that, include that they are references to the standards of moral communities.

Also, I don't see how you don't see your view like that as a form of relativism, since it sounds like you think different moral communities can come to different moral conclusions and they're all right within their communities (and, presumably, there's no sense in which they can be right or wrong between communities), which is just straightforward moral relativism.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

I think morals originate in communities where dialogue, negotiation and agreements etc... are a vital part of how morals come to be. I don't think this proces can be replicated entirely from a research desk. The role of the philosopher IMO shouldn't be to devise morality like a scientists develops scientific theories... I think the philosopher can play an important role in the proces though, by facilitating and elucidating the dialogue in a community.

I'm not saying that philosophers should be devising morality like scientists devise scientific theories, and definitely not all alone from a research desk; but rather that the philosophical underpinning of how communities work out what is good is analogous to the philosophical underpinning of how communities work out what is true. I think that that work of figuring out what in particular is good is beyond the scope of philosophy: philosophy just provides a method by which to do so, like it provides the scientific method but doesn't actually do science. (I discuss this at length elsewhere in that essay I quoted from earlier). And science is a social endeavor too, comparing and contrasting different points of view: replication, making sure other people observe the same things in the same circumstances, is a very important part of the scientific method.

Quoting Echarmion

Perhaps, as an analogy, we might say that the scientific method uses what we observe in the present to predict the future. A moral system would use what we observe in the present to prescribe a future.

Exactly. (More or less).

Quoting tim wood

Empiricism and hedonism? You're joking, yes?

If there's a joke in there, I don't get it.

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Quoting ChatteringMonkey

So the problem secular morality faces, is, I think, that it is the successor of religious moralities where morality was founded in metaphysics, with God as the pinacle of that metaphysics. Every tradition not only had it's prescriptive rules, but also it 'discriptive' myth where the morality flowed from. Now this is important I think, not only did they say "you have to do this because God says so", they invariably embedded it in a story so people would buy into it more readily. So the purpose to all of this, is to give a morality authority. You need to follow it because it's true.

If you can pass moral judgement on rules in scriptures, then they can't define morals.
Since you can, they don't.

Conversely, such rules may just have forced some societies into a kind of sufficiently stable social cohesion over time, that they became culturally embedded (at least in a conservative sense).
Could something analogous be said of biological evolution, if only to account for morality (not define)?

Many scriptural narratives and other writings mention the Golden Rule or similar in some form or other.
Seems there are some trends that many will recognize as "good rules of thumb".
Yet, such rules "set in stone" themselves, don't absolve anything; in any given situation you'd still have to personally decide if following them is the right thing to do.
Life (as an autonomous moral agent) ain't always easy...

Quoting tim wood

Maybe I'm missing it. Are claims to be judged, or are the true, real, good, moral to be judged? What is being judged?

Claims about what is true or real, good or moral; though that's pretty much the same thing as judging what actually is true or real, good or moral, inasmuch as a correct claim just states what is actually so.

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Quoting tim wood

And you know that the claim "just states what is actually so" how?

Because that's what it means for a claim to be correct?

Quoting tim wood

all facts are historical facts.

Elaborate?

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Quoting tim wood

Why experience over reason?

It's not one over the other. Experience is what to reason about.

Quoting tim wood

The blind men and the elephant come to mind.

I use exactly that analogy in the essay I linked earlier.... er sorry, confusing two different threads with ChatteringMonkey apparently, another essay related to the one I linked earlier:

Quoting The Codex Quaerentis: Against Nihilism

This is where I come very close to agreeing with idealism in both of the senses described above, in holding that experience is the ultimate arbiter of judgement on both reality and morality. But rather than the perceptions and desires that underlie those views, which can contradict from person to person because they are constructed in the different minds of different people, I propose instead attending to the more fundamental underlying experiences that give rise to those perceptions and desires, free from the interpretation of the mind undergoing them. In psychology a distinction is made between perceptions, which are interpreted by the mind, and sensations, which are the raw experiences that get interpreted into perceptions, things such as colors of light and pitches of sound, as opposed to images or words. I make a similar distinction between desires, being the things that are interpreted by the mind, and what I call appetites, which are the raw experiences underlying them, things such as the feeling of pain or hunger, as opposed to wanting to do or have something.

And then I propose the construction of models of reality and morality that are consistent with all such experiences. An old parable nicely illustrates the principle I mean to employ here, wherein three blind men each feel different parts of an elephant (the trunk, a leg, the tail), and each concludes that he is feeling something different (a snake, a tree, a rope). All three of them are wrong about what they perceive, but the truth of the matter, that they are feeling parts of an elephant, is consistent with what all three of them sense, even though the perceptions they draw from those sensations are mutually contradictory. I propose always proceeding on the assumption that some such model is possible to construct, even if we don't know what it will be just yet; that assumption being the same one described above, that there is something real, something moral, simply because to assume otherwise would just be to give up for no reason. There always remains the possibility that we will fail to construct such models that can consistently account for all experiences, but we can never be sure that we have conclusively failed, rather than having just not succeeded yet. The only choice is between continuing to try despite the possibility of maybe never succeeding, or giving up — embracing nihilism — and definitely never succeeding.

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Quoting tim wood

Oxymoron. No mind, no experience.

I didn't say free from mind, I said free from its interpretation. This is the basic distinction between polling people about what they believe, and appealing to observation.

Quoting tim wood

And you have not considered the historicity of fact(s), have you.

You have not explained what you mean by that yet.

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Quoting Pfhorrest

I didn't say free from mind, I said free from its interpretation. This is the basic distinction between polling people about what they believe, and appealing to observation.

Personally, I think we need to take both into account in order to even approach the accuracy we’re looking for here. It is where observation differs from what most people believe (or vice versa) that we glimpse the possibility of new information or unrealised potential which may be examined free from interpretation by the mind. These are not facts, mind you - their relative uncertainty must be taken into account, and only by attempting to express these possibilities in relation to the information we already have can we make use of this new information to predict future interactions, and then summon the courage to ‘test’ our conceptual hypotheses - in conceptual discussions (what most people believe), and/or in determining and initiating action (observation).

Quoting tim wood

Since perception is interpretation, it's to you to make clear how any observation can be clear of interpretation.

I clearly distinguished between perception and sensation, which is not even my original distinction; I only extended it to normative experiences (appetites) and feelings (desires) by analogy.

Quoting tim wood

All facts are historical facts. To understand that, ask yourself what, exactly, a fact is. And if you disagree, try presenting one here that isn't. Btw, not my idea. My sympathy if it's not immediately obvious.

I can’t do the opposite of something if I don’t know what you mean by that something. I’m not just going to guess what you mean so you can tell me I’m wrong, and it’s not my job to make your attempts at communication clear for you. If you want to make a point, make it better.

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Reply to tim wood Thank you for finally explaining what you mean, but I’m still not seeing any bearing on the topic under discussion. If your point is that we can’t observe the past, I argue that the only notion we have of the past at all is its ongoing effect on the present, including the memories we presently have, the records that are presently available, and other evidence that still lingers in the present: all of which is accessible via experience of one kind or another.

A lot of misunderstandings are going on in this thread, to validate one's stance of rejecting another's stance.

The one being rejected on grounds of misunderstanding now found himself in a position of going through endless excercises of having to defend his stance by explaining the misunderstandings by others.

This is not philosophy. This is kindergartenism. Philosophy would be to carefully read someone else's opinion and make correct inferences, instead of bombarding him with accusations of being wrong, only on the grounds of misreading or not understanding what he had written.

Carried to the extreme, the Misunderstood or Not-Read-Carefully-By-Others may one day throw his hands in the air and declare that he's had enough of kindergartenism, and simply leave the site.

I wish to avoid this, in the case of PFHorrest, who is currently one of the best thinkers on board. Guys, and ladies, let's not antagonize him. Please read what he writes carefully, and don't make him drown in your saliva by nailing him to things he did not say.

P.s. PFHorrest did not ask me to write this. I wrote this entirely out of my own volition. He may even enjoy educating the masses. I dunno. It sure bothers me, though, that this goes on all the time, all the time.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Also, I don't see how you don't see your view like that as a form of relativism, since it sounds like you think different moral communities can come to different moral conclusions and they're all right within their communities (and, presumably, there's no sense in which they can be right or wrong between communities), which is just straightforward moral relativism.

Sure, you can call it meta-ethical moral relativism if you want. That's not relativism on a non-meta level though, if you are part of one of those communities there's nothing relative about it. But isn't that what is actually going on? Different communities have different morals, so it certainly seems to be an accurate description. And furthermore I don't see how you can say one is wrong or right in some objective or universal sense, outside of their context. That is indeed the point where one has to bite the bullet. Absent any metaphysical foundation, there is no false or true to the matter. You can critique the moral system from within the system though, and try to change the tradition... but this is allways from a certain perspective, and not from some objective contextless point of view.

And more to the point of relativism. It seems to me, like I alluded to in the OP, that because one doesn't like the conclusion of relativism, one shouldn't accept the premisses that lead to relativism. But that's not a good argument, the premisses are true if the premisses are true.

And a last point about relativism, I don't understand why that conclusion should be so threatening in the first place. Different communities have different morals, yes, but because people on the whole want similar things, the differences generally needn't be that concerning.

Quoting The Codex Quarentis: A Note On Ethics

This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure.

As to the point about method, I missed the part where you refer to political structures for morality instead of academic structures. I guess we mostly agree on this point then.

Quoting god must be atheist

He may even enjoy educating the masses.

I do, though the futility of it does get annoying sometimes. My patience really depends on how much else is stressing me out in life. If I'm relaxed and having a good time otherwise, carrying on an intractable philosophical argument is a fun way to pass the time. I'm stressed the fuck out by other stuff in life, banging my head against the same wall over and over again can start to piss me off.

Thanks for the words of support, BTW. :-)

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Sure, you can call it meta-ethical moral relativism if you want. That's not relativism on a non-meta level though, if you are part of one of those communities there's nothing relative about it.

I think you might be misreading the phrase "meta-ethical moral relativism". It's not a meta level of "ethical moral relativism"; it's moral relativism, in the sense that applies in the field of meta-ethics, as distinct from normative ethics or descriptive ethics. The descriptive sense just says "people disagree". The meta-ethical sense says "there is no correct way to adjudicate those disagreements". The normative sense says "therefore we morally ought to tolerate differences of behavior".

It sounds like you are asserting the meta-ethical sense of it here, but...

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Different communities have different morals, so it certainly seems to be an accurate description

...this just sounds like the descriptive sense, which doesn't have to entail the meta-ethical sense.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

And furthermore I don't see how you can say one is wrong or right in some objective or universal sense, outside of their context

What is it that makes one able to say anything is right or wrong in some objective or universal sense, not just moral claims?

I say it is the ability to replicate the experiences of things seeming that way, controlling for differences in subjects and contexts. Descriptive claims about reality can be objectively true or false, despite disagreements between people or communities about what is true or false (different religions make differing factual claims too, not just moral ones), because we can each look at the world and see that it looks the same way, in the same contexts, for similar people, etc. And then say that reality is however it needs to be to look true to those people in those contexts etc (as well as all the other ways it looks to other people in other contexts etc).

I say prescriptive claims about morality can be objectively "true or false" in a different sense, a non-descriptive sense (because they're not trying to describe at all), despite similar disagreements between people or communities about what is good or bad, because we can likewise verify that when a person of a certain kind stands in a certain context and experiences a certain phenomenon it seems good or bad to them, like it feels good or bad to them, it hurts or pleases them. And then say that morality is however it needs to be to feel good to those people in those contexts etc (as well as all the other ways it feels to other people in other contexts etc).

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Quoting Pfhorrest

I think you might be misreading the phrase "meta-ethical moral relativism". It's not a meta level of "ethical moral relativism"; it's moral relativism, in the sense that applies in the field of meta-ethics, as distinct from normative ethics or descriptive ethics. The descriptive sense just says "people disagree". The meta-ethical sense says "there is no correct way to adjudicate those disagreements". The normative sense says "therefore we morally ought to tolerate differences of behavior".

Well put. Thanks for this. :clap:

Quoting tim wood

You say empiricist and hedonist claims are how the true, the real, the good, and the moral (TRG&M) are to be judged. You also qualify "claims" as being (assuming they're not in themselves inaccurate) sufficient ground to determine the TRM&G.

I feel like you're getting hung up on some kind of confusion about "claims" here. Any claim about anything, if it is correct, tells you about that thing itself -- that what it means for the claim to be correct, for it to successfully tell you about the thing it's about. So reality is however all the correct claims about it say it is like, and likewise morality is however all the correct claims about it say it is like. This seems like a really weird thing to have to say explicitly, this is just how language works.

Actually on topic, I say empirical and hedonic experiences are how to judge claims about both reality (what is true, in a narrow descriptive sense) and morality (what is good), and so how to assess what is real and what is moral.

Quoting tim wood

The question, it seems to me, is that if you're going to base such things as TRM&G on subjective judgments, how can you universalize them?

Quoting Pfhorrest

What is it that makes one able to say anything is right or wrong in some objective or universal sense, not just moral claims?

I say it is the ability to replicate the experiences of things seeming that way, controlling for differences in subjects and contexts. Descriptive claims about reality can be objectively true or false, despite disagreements between people or communities about what is true or false (different religions make differing factual claims too, not just moral ones), because we can each look at the world and see that it looks the same way, in the same contexts, for similar people, etc. And then say that reality is however it needs to be to look true to those people in those contexts etc (as well as all the other ways it looks to other people in other contexts etc).

I say prescriptive claims about morality can be objectively "true or false" in a different sense, a non-descriptive sense (because they're not trying to describe at all), despite similar disagreements between people or communities about what is good or bad, because we can likewise verify that when a person of a certain kind stands in a certain context and experiences a certain phenomenon it seems good or bad to them, like it feels good or bad to them, it hurts or pleases them. And then say that morality is however it needs to be to feel good to those people in those contexts etc (as well as all the other ways it feels to other people in other contexts etc).

Quoting Pfhorrest

I think you might be misreading the phrase "meta-ethical moral relativism". It's not a meta level of "ethical moral relativism"; it's moral relativism, in the sense that applies in the field of meta-ethics, as distinct from normative ethics or descriptive ethics. The descriptive sense just says "people disagree". The meta-ethical sense says "there is no correct way to adjudicate those disagreements". The normative sense says "therefore we morally ought to tolerate differences of behavior".

It sounds like you are asserting the meta-ethical sense of it here, but...

Different communities have different morals, so it certainly seems to be an accurate description — ChatteringMonkey
...this just sounds like the descriptive sense, which doesn't have to entail the meta-ethical sense.

Individual people disagreeing is not the whole story though. People do disagree, all the time, but if they want to be part of a moral community they have to accept that the group can come to a different agreement about a particular matter. The way those disagreements get settled is the group coming to an agreement, by whatever process that is.

So yes, there is no meta-ethical sense in which those agreements can be adjudicated. But that doesn't entail the normative sense that we should tolerate differences in behaviour. People are bound by the conventions of their group... the social contract.

The relativism only applies to different groups coming to a different set of conventions, but that's not relativism in the sense that everybody can do as he pleases. That's why I used the term meta-ethical moral relativism. Maybe that's not how it is commonly used, but I hope you see what i'm trying to get at, and why it is not just anything goes relativism.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I say prescriptive claims about morality can be objectively "true or false" in a different sense, a non-descriptive sense (because they're not trying to describe at all), despite similar disagreements between people or communities about what is good or bad, because we can likewise verify that when a person of a certain kind stands in a certain context and experiences a certain phenomenon it seems good or bad to them, like it feels good or bad to them, it hurts or pleases them. And then say that morality is however it needs to be to feel good to those people in those contexts etc (as well as all the other ways it feels to other people in other contexts etc)

This sounds like a great idea in theory, but I don't think it would work all that well in practice. Do you see how many qualifiers you had to get in to make it work, i.e. 'a person of a certain kind', 'in a certain context', ' experiencing a certain phenomenon' etc... Who other than maybe a philosopher has the time and ability to work out an equation with that many variables while going about his day? Utilitarism and consequentialism have the same kind of issues...

So therefore i'd say, fluid dynamics, while far from perfect, is the way to go... because we are only human.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

The way those disagreements get adjudicated is the group coming to an agreement, by whatever process that is.

The question at hand here is exactly what the correct such process is.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

But that doesn't entail the normative sense that we should tolerate differences in behaviour.

Where are the boundaries between these groups? If my neighbor in contemporary California keeps a slave, do I and the rest of the neighborhood have the right to tell him he's not allowed to do that? If a whole state wants to allow slavery, do the rest of the states have a right to tell it that it's not allowed to do that? If another country has one caste that holds another caste in slavery, are other countries allowed to come in and tell them they're not allowed to do that? Would that be a righteous liberation of an oppressed people or an unjust invasion of a sovereign state?

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

This sounds like a great idea in theory, but I don't think it would work all that well in practice. Do you see how many qualifiers you had to get in to make it work, i.e. 'a person of a certain kind', 'in a certain context', ' experiencing a certain phenomenon' etc... Who other than maybe a philosopher has the time and ability to work out an equation with that many variables while going about his day? Utilitarism and consequentialism have the same issues...

The investigation of what is real is every bit as complex, but people don't generally have to do that complex investigation in their day to day lives. They can do a much simpler version of it for small particulars that matter just to them, and trust the results of people who do the much more in-depth investigation of more nuanced matters when it comes to those things. Those qualifiers are all there to cover my ass as to possible objections in tricky cases. In day to day life, just don't do things that hurt people. If you get into a really intractable fight about whether someone has really been hurt or not in a way that needs prohibiting... that's basically a legal case, and the laws should be formulated by legislators and executed by lawyers and judges that do this kind of deep thinking about the nuances, because that's their job. They are the "scientists" of "morals".

I go into this in much more depth in my essay On Politics, Governance, and the Institutes of Justice, which may be more on the level of abstraction you're concerned with, but rests ultimately on the building blocks you're contesting here.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The question at hand here is exactly what the correct such process is.

There is no 'correct' process. How would you determine if it's correct or not?

Quoting Pfhorrest

Where are the boundaries between these groups? If my neighbor in contemporary California keeps a slave, do I and the rest of the neighborhood have the right to tell him he's not allowed to do that? If a whole state wants to allow slavery, do the rest of the states have a right to tell it that it's not allowed to do that? If another country has one caste that holds another caste in slavery, are other countries allowed to come in and tell them they're not allowed to do that? Would that be a righteous liberation of an oppressed people or an unjust invasion of a sovereign state?

If freedom of speech is a right in California, then you have the right to tell them anything you want, barring the usual exceptions like inciting violence. You probably also have the right to critique the mores and laws of California... and to convince and seek support to change those laws if you don't agree with them. But there's no guarantee it will work. And if it doesn't work you can allways disregard the law or mores, at your own peril.

There are international conventions and treaties between nations to try to settle disputes like that. But yes, generally intra-group moral conventions don't apply between different nation states... that's why it often ends in war.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I go into this in much more depth in my essay On Politics, Governance, and the Institutes of Justice, which may be more on the level of abstraction you're concerned with, but rests ultimately on the building blocks you're contesting here.

I'll read it tomorrow, I have to get some sleep now.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

There is no 'correct' process. How would you determine if it's correct or not?

By doing philosophy. That's what philosophy is all about: coming up with the correct processes by which to determine the correct answers to particular questions. How did we come up with the correct process for figuring out what is real, i.e. the scientific method? Philosophy.

Exactly how to do that philosophy is itself a philosophical question, but my approach is to rule out the approaches that can't work (can't result in a process of mediating disagreements and converging toward a common consensus) and run with whatever's left.

Two particular things that can't work out are:
- Just assuming nothing will possibly work, and so not trying at all.
- Just assuming some arbitrary person or group, including a majority, is automatically right.

Some immediate consequences of ruling those things out are:
- We can't demand that nobody hold any opinion until it's justified from the ground up, because the consequent infinite regress would be equivalent to assuming nothing will possibly work; so we have to let people hold their tentative opinions, agreeing to disagree, until they can be shown wrong.
- We can't accept appeals to things beyond our common, shared experiences, because if each person can't at least in principle verify for themselves what's being appealed to, we'd be asking them to just take the word of whoever is making that appeal, just assuming that they're right.

What's still left is assuming that something or another is the objectively correct answer, but not taking anybody's word for what in particular it is, instead letting people hold their own (different) tentative opinions about what it is, until they can be shown wrong by appeals to our common, shared experiences.

When applied to morality, this generally means letting people do what they want until it can be shown that they're hurting someone, but just as with the scientific method, there's a lot of nitty gritty details that matter in the edge cases.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

If freedom of speech is a right in California, then you have the right to tell them anything you want, barring the usual exceptions like inciting violence. You probably also have the right to critique the mores and laws of California... and to convince and seek support to change those laws if you don't agree with them. But there's no guarantee it will work. And if it doesn't work you can allways disregard the law or mores, at your own peril.

You get that I'm not talking about my literal right to say words to him, but about the morally compulsory force of those words, right? It feels like you're being intentionally obtuse here and not engaging honestly and charitably.

But let me be more technical in case you really are just being accidentally obtuse:

- Are neighbors morally bound to the morals decreed by their neighbors?
- Are parts of the same country morally bound to the morals decreed by other parts?
- Are countries morally bound to the morals decreed by other countries?

Where are the boundaries of "the group" whose consensus is what matters?

If you keep going smaller and smaller, you get a group size of one, every individual their own "group", which is exactly the kind of individualist relativism, or egotism, equivalent to moral nihilism, that you say you're against. But if you keep going bigger and bigger, you get the group of everyone everywhere, which is getting awfully close to an objective morality.

All that's left is to sort out who in that group-of-all gets to make those decisions. Is it a simple majority? A plurality? A supermajority? Some special elite subgroup, or individual? (And if so, which?) Or only a unanimous consensus of everyone? (And what if that doesn't happen?) I expect you'll probably say "whatever the group decides is appropriate" but who in the group gets to decide which part of the group is the appropriate part to be making those decisions? It just pushes the question back further.

Who gets to make the decisions about what is moral is only one of several questions about morality that philosophy has to answer. Other important ones are about what criterion by which to judge whether something is moral, and what process whoever is supposed to use to apply whatever criterion that is. (A fourth is what constitutes a moral character of a person, but that's kinda separate from this chain of questions here). Hedonism is only my answer to the criterion question, and your objections to that don't really seem to be about that question but about the others. Liberalism or libertarianism (broadly speaking) is my answer to the process question. A kind of anarchism (detailed in that essay you haven't read yet) is my answer to the "who" question, which is what you seem more concerned with.

Quoting Pfhorrest

You get that I'm not talking about my literal right to say words to him, but about the morally compulsory force of those words, right? It feels like you're being intentionally obtuse here and not engaging honestly and charitably.

I was being intentionally obtuse, but there was a point to it... Words never have a compulsory force by themselves, right. Only if you manage to convince him, will the words have an effect on his behaviour. People can change their minds when presented with good arguments, but more typically there is some other force doing the convincing. In case of the law we have institutions that enforce the laws. For morality this is a bit more nebulous, but generally the enforcing will be done by social pressures... if you don't follow the mores of the group, you risk being excluded from the group, which, for the social beings we are, will often be enough to convince people to follow that morality.

This is an important point I think that maybe isn't allways appreciated enough. For morality to work, it needs to have some authority behind it... and like I alluded to in the OP, ultimately that authority comes from the group agreeing on certain moral rules. That may be tacit, by consensus, by majority or even imposed 'agreement' in case of tyrants... but the point is that you need something like that for it to actually be something more than mere words. Are there better and worse ways of going about this? I'd like to thinks so, but ultimately it doesn't matter much what I think... I may have the most solid arguments and empirical evidence for a certain moral rule, If I don't manage to convince people that they should follow it, than it remains only my idea of what morality should be.

So yeah by all means propose methods to adjudicate disagreement, that certainly is a way a philosopher can have valuable contribution to the proces. But I don't think there one 'correct' way, nor will that way, even if we were to assume there is a correct way, necessarily be accepted in practice because it's correct. And then we still need to keep on living together with whatever morals that got agreed on, even if we think the proces by which they came to be was a bad one.

I may have more to say later, haven't found the time yet to read all of your text...

Quoting Pfhorrest

I'm stressed the fuck out by other stuff in life, banging my head against the same wall over and over again can start to piss me off.

A sure sign of genius is that once the same thing is tried over and over but in vain, one has the foresight to stop doing it and to look for a different solution. (-:

The great thing about morals derived from God or whoever is you can be certain they're right as long as you accept their supernatural source.

This certainty is what is missing from secular ethics and this is what leads to moral relativism which is essentially amorality. Living in society is helped by some shared ethical axioms. It is not clear where these come from without religion. Neither virtue ethics, nor deontology, nor consequentialism have been able to provide us with the certainty that has been provided by religious belief.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

So the problem secular morality faces, is, I think, that it is the successor of religious moralities where morality was founded in metaphysics, with God as the pinacle of that metaphysics.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

So as scientific thinking progresses, what we end up with is a morality that had lost it's foundation

Prima facie it appears as though morality has "lost its foundation" with the rise of secularism and its decidedly atheistic spirit. However, Plato's Euthyphro dilemma brings to light the fact that religious moralities never had any foundation to begin with if the foundation is thought of in terms of god's wishes in re how we shoud act/not act; we all must come to terms with morality being separate from god or else concede that murder, theft, rape, etc. are good if god commands them.

Secular morality is then nothing more than the recognition of the flaw in divine command theory and an attempt to get our hands on the moral truths it implies as having an existence apart from god.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

What this all means, I think, is that we need to bite the bullet, and reconcile with the fact that morality isn't and can't be true or false.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Same as we allways did, we discuss these things with other people, come to some agreements and found institutions that can settle disputes if need be... this is basicly social contract-theory. The authority is in the morality being supported by the community.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

There's enough convergence in what people want - certainly now that we will have a progressively better understanding of humanity - that it will mostly end up in something that works fine if people are educated in and accustomed to the idea of it.

That god has been successfully ejected from morality, to say nothing of the fact that god never really figured in it as explained above, doesn't imply that there are no moral truths. You mentioned convergence of moral values and that, to me, indicates a measure of objectivity to moral truths.

Quoting Txastopher

The great thing about morals derived from God or whoever is you can be certain they're right as long as you accept their supernatural source.

I don't think it's their supernatural quality that is the main spring in accepting religion-driven morals, but the (believed) absolute authority of the issuer of the moral creeds.

Once a firefighter was interviewed why there were no women in our town in firefighter groups, but there are women in the police force. He replied, "because in policing you carry a Smith and Wesson, and that gives you leverage; in firefighting, you can't rely on anything but your own brute strength."

Morals as dictated by religions are helped to be accepted by the equivalent of Smith and Wesson, by the promise of heaven (perfect existence) and hell (endless suffering). Those who believe, truly, are not moral due to choices or considerations or because of the elegance of a moral-ethical argument or theory; they are moral because God means business. You behave, you go to heaven, you misbehave, you go to hell. No moral choice here. It's all the selfish consideration on the most basic of potentially false promises.

Secular morality is completely different. They act moral, if they do, because their inner self tells them to do it. They can appear to act moral by the weight of the law; the law punishes the miscreants much like God does, so there is a lot of selfish acting among secularists, too. But if a Secularist acts moral, you bet your sweet toosh that s/he is acting moral because s/he is moral.

Quoting god must be atheist

Secularist acts moral, you bet your sweet toosh that s/he is acting moral because s/he is moral.

Nonsense, it’s immoral to bet on sweet tooshes.

Reply to praxis Praxis, please don't misquote me. There was an "if" before "secularist".

Are you a journalist? I wouldn't be surprised if you were.

Quoting god must be atheist

I don't think it's their supernatural quality that is the main spring in accepting religion-driven morals, but the (believed) absolute authority of the issuer of the moral creeds.

OK. It doesn't really make any difference though. Certainty is still the quality lacking in secular morals. Indeed, maybe faith doesn't cause certainty, but rather the need for certainty creates the pragmatic adoption of faith.

Reply to Txastopher Certainty is lacking in secular descriptions of reality too. That's not an excuse to substitute the Bible for science.

A secular system of morality as reliable as the physical sciences is possible. That won't give you the false certainty of religious morals, but false certainty just makes you more likely to be wrong. Critical humility about our own fallible answers, coupled with objectivist trust that there are answers to be found, is the only way to even gradually approach correct answers, to questions about either reality or morality.

This thread ought to have a practical definition of what ‘secular’ means. It originates from time. To my understanding, the ‘secular calendar’ was originally distinguished from ‘the liturgical calendar’ because it was concerned with affairs of state, not with those of religion.

As the scholar of religion Mircea Eliade noted, the religious calendar is basically concerned with recapitulating an eternal order in the world of human affairs, whereas the secular calendar is essentially concerned with more utilitarian or pragmatic matters.

A secular morality is not hard to envisage, insofar as it is based on something that resembles the ‘social contract’ of the European enlightenment, and the concomitant agreement of rights, responsibilities and laws necessary to maintain civil law and order to equitable access to basic goods.

However it is self-limiting in the sense that it can envisage no good beyond the physical or a peaceful and at least minimally prosperous life. Whereas religious lore is underwritten by (however it is put) a sense of cosmic purpose, that human existence is only one aspect of a larger whole which is working towards a greater end than the secular state is able to contemplate.

Personally, I think that there is such a subject as ‘the metaphysics of morals’, and the reason is that humans do have the capacity for sensing a domain beyond the physical. In Christian doctrine, that sense is the basis of ‘the conscience’. It suggests an aim beyond the physical, the pursuit of which provides the rationale for religious discipline. Obviously a secular philosophy can have no equivalent, by definition, although it is often sought through ‘the immortality of works’, through leaving a fortune to one’s descendants, and the like. But in important ways, the religious and secular aim are what Thomas Kuhn described as ‘incommensurable’, although in a rather different context.

//ps// this is a relevant OP.//

A lot of the statements here seem to be strawmen (e.x. equating "religious" morality with the text of the Bible;, equating "science" as a method or institution with "secular" or secularism") or false dicthomies.

In practice, there is no hard or necessary delineation between "secular" or "religious" morality, as far as history, law, and legal systems are concerned.

For example, the modern Common Law systems which most would consider "secular" developed or evolved out of older legal or moral systems, such as Rome and Exodus.

Likewise, there may crimes or moral wrongs which both "religious" and "secular" systems deem to be morally reprehensive (e.x. murder is a sin and crime in the Old Testament, as is also pushed as a crime in "secular" systems of law and government).

Likewise, in practice, other notions or concepts (e.x. religious freedom) may have varied in their existence and/or implementation through history, regardless of anything specifically "religious" or "secular".

For example, in some older "religious" forms of government, other religions were tolerated in regards to mutual coexistence (e.x. coexistence of different Abrahamic faiths), while likewise, in some "secular" or "atheistic" governments (e.x. Stalinist Russia, Maoist China), religious freedom was denied.

Reply to TheMadFool

Quoting TheMadFool

That god has been successfully ejected from morality, to say nothing of the fact that god never really figured in it as explained above, doesn't imply that there are no moral truths. You mentioned convergence of moral values and that, to me, indicates a measure of objectivity to moral truths.

No it doesn't. Even if every person where to think exactly the same about morality that wouldn't make morality objective. It's an objective fact that all people think the same in that case, but it's still something people think... so it doesn't get anymore 'subjective' than that. Words have meanings.

Morality is something we create, like language is, we do not observe or find morality or language like we find objective facts about the world. And so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use terms like true or correct or whatever equivalent.

This may not seem like it is that important, but I think it matters. The language we use will inform the way we think and talk to eachother about morality. If people use descriptively inaccurate words to begin with, I don't think much progress can be made.

Reply to IvoryBlackBishop I actually argue that states are functionally no different than religions, as both appeal to faith as in taking someone’s word for it. Why do what the law says? Because the law says so. That’s no reason, so even “secular” state authority is in practice just like religion. A truly irreligious moral system would have to function more like science, with a decentralized “authority”, such as it were, about what is good or moral, akin to science’s decentralized “authority” about what is true or real.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

No it doesn't. Even if every person where to think exactly the same about morality that wouldn't make morality objective. It's an objective fact that all people think the same in that case, but it's still something people think... so it doesn't get anymore 'subjective' than that. Words have meanings.

Morality is something we create, like language is, we do not observe or find morality or language like we find objective facts about the world. And so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use terms like true or correct or whatever equivalent.

This may not seem like it is that important, but I think it matters. The language we use will inform the way we think and talk to eachother about morality. If people use descriptively inaccurate words to begin with, I don't think much progress can be made.

What's the essential difference between objective and subjective? In my humble opinion the former has to do with sound logic and the latter can be chalked up to opinions that need not be argument-based. When you spoke of convergence I assumed it to mean finding a common ground in morality; a universal set of moral tenets emerging through consensus of various moral traditions. This consensus isn't just a matter of numbers and agreement simpliciter; consensus is arrived at through logical argumentation and that has translated in real terms as a convergence of moral codes. There is objectivity in the convergence of ethics.

Quoting TheMadFool

There is objectivity in the convergence of ethics.

The objectivity could be said to be in the deduction from subjective desires and preferences. The axioms in the system you describe would be subjective, which means the foundations of eveyr conclusion, thus moral idea, would be subjective also. The process of deriving a universal morality might have much that is objective in it. IOW if we generally agree we don't want children harmed, we can from that vague axiom derive logically certain conclusions (not that humans will ever agree on these but hypothetically). Still the axiom, hence the entire morality, has a subjective foundation and is subjective, if universal in this hypothesis.

For example, let's say humans are a blight on the universe. Let's say we do terrible things to other species and prevent lovely species from evolvling into the great sentient creatures that are a potential product of life. We do this in our blundering way and the very fact
that we take care of our kids
is part of what leads to futhering our pernicious kind - or a kind that in the end has pernicious effects.

There is no objective goodness (or badness) in the thriving of our species, because there is nothing outside us to make it objective, unless one believes in a God, for example. What is subjectively good, even if it is for every human, may not be good in general, as many species on earth might testify if they could.

Reply to TheMadFool

Mind dependant or mind independent is how the distinction is typically used.

There is convergence in what people want. But what people want isn't morality yet. I think there are different ways moralities get created, but because people generally want the same things, there will be a lot of similarities usually. This was meant merely to counter the often made point about relativism... and how it leads to anything goes, if we can have no truth about the matter. It doesn't, because people agree about certain things.

To be clear, I specifically don't want to derive a universal set of moral tenents from consensus between moral traditions. I think that quest for universality or objectivity is precisely where it often went wrong in philosophy.

Reply to Coben

Thank you!

Quoting Coben

The objectivity could be said to be in the deduction from subjective desires and preferences

Yes we allways have to start from something subjective no matter how you slice it.

And I don't even think it really works like that, simply deducing morality from desires or preferences in some kind straigtforward logical way. There's a lot more that goes into it.

From the time I've spend writing laws as a professional, I know it doesn't work like that. You can think in advance about how you want to formule a rule, state the goals you want to accomplish with it, and speculate about what you think will or won't work to accomplish those goals... but ultimately the real test is in how it plays out after it's implemented. And then you get feedback, some actual empirical evidence, to adjust the rules if necessary.... back and forth. It's a process.

So yeah, what philosophers have been trying to do in ethics over the ages, seems pure hubris to me, and doomed to fail.

Reply to Pfhorrest

The question is what will you do in the meantime, while waiting for a properly decentralized authority? It could take a while...

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

And I don't even think it really works like that, simply deducing morality from desires or preferences in some kind straigtforward logical way. There's a lot more that goes into it.

No, in reality even if we could agree on core values, how we see these playing out and prioritized are going to have individual and cultural differences. And the means itself will also have values in it. We want to all make kids safe. Peachy. Seems like a shared core value worldwide, except for certain people generally considered pariahs in most cultures. But then bang, the means of achieving that (let alone what that actually means) requires even more agreement on stuff that gut feelings and culture have their way with. And then how that core value is prioritized in relation to other core values, such as developing adults from children who are experts, or not undermining their strength and independence.

Quoting Txastopher

Certainty is still the quality lacking in secular morals.

Nah, there's no lack of moral certainty among secularists; you need to look a bit more into history and generally get out and meet more people. Being certain that you are right is more related to character than anything else.

Here's one right here:

Quoting Pfhorrest

A secular system of morality as reliable as the physical sciences is possible.

And by what standard, pray tell, do you judge the reliability of your system of morality?

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Even if every person where to think exactly the same about morality that wouldn't make morality objective. It's an objective fact that all people think the same in that case, but it's still something people think... so it doesn't get anymore 'subjective' than that. Words have meanings.

Morality is something we create, like language is, we do not observe or find morality or language like we find objective facts about the world. And so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use terms like true or correct or whatever equivalent.

Well, morality is what people think in the same way in which electric charge, say, is what particles have. Morality (and language) is no more and no less subjective than facts about the world - it is a fact about the world. I think this subjective/objective dichotomy isn't helpful at all.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

So yeah, what philosophers have been trying to do in ethics over the ages, seems pure hubris to me, and doomed to fail.

Right on. I generally agree with what you say, except it seems like you overestimate the degree to which morality is a social contract. First of all, we need to distinguish social mores and individual moral character. The genesis of social moral codes can plausibly be analyzed that way, but there are probably other contributing causes. And when it comes to personal morality, its development will vary greatly case by case.

Reply to SophistiCat No I agree it isn't a helpful distinction.

But I don't agree it's the same as the charge of a particle. It's a fact that we think yes, but what we think about are not facts. Ideas don't exist in space and time.

Quoting SophistiCat

Nah, there's no lack of moral certainty among secularists. [...] Being certain that you are right is more related to character than anything else.

Up to a point, yes. However, by its nature, secular morality allows for challenge. Morality derived from the divine does not and this, I would argue, is what makes it attractive; in fact, especially attractive to the character you mention.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

I felt the need to create this tread as a reaction or continuation to some of the recent discussion on morality, and specifically the anscombe thread.

So the problem secular morality faces, is, I think, that it is the successor of religious moralities where morality was founded in metaphysics, with God as the pinacle of that metaphysics. Every tradition not only had it's prescriptive rules, but also it 'discriptive' myth where the morality flowed from. Now this is important I think, not only did they say "you have to do this because God says so", they invariably embedded it in a story so people would buy into it more readily. So the purpose to all of this, is to give a morality authority. You need to follow it because it's true.

Now historically, christianity, with it's valuation of truthfullness, was involuntarily the germ from which the scientic method sprung. Faith in God wasn't enough anymore, God needed to be proven with reason, just to be sure. In came Hume who was fed up with spastic scolastic attempts to prove God, and he showed that ought didn't follow from is. (as an aside, he meant this only as a rebutal of direct logical deduction of ought from is, as rationalist were prone to do in his time. I don't think this implies that 'was is' can't have an effect on 'what should be').

So as scientific thinking progresses, what we end up with is a morality that had lost it's foundation. Kant, allegedly awoken from his slumber, thought he could step in and save to day by subsitituting God with pure reason. Apparently he was only half-awake though, as he didn't notice that God was indeed dead.

What this all means, I think, is that we need to bite the bullet, and reconcile with the fact that morality isn't and can't be true or false. Because what is even worse than a mere lack of Godly authority, is lying to people about the origins of morality and people finding out. And people will find out any new attempts at founding morality in made-up metaphysics because, by now, a scientific mindset is ingrained. But but... what are we to do then, we cannot accept the conclusion that anything goes. Surely relativism is even worse then lying to people? Well no, because if people find out, you end up not only with relativism, but with a relativism of the rebelious kind.

From an atheistic perspective one has to wonder how non-existing Gods managed to come up with reasonably functioning moralities through-out history. People did all of that even then, so surely it should be possible to do something like that now, content-wise. I'd argue we can do a lot better, because for the first time in history, we actually start to 'know' some things about the world. As to the question of how we are going to imbue those moralities with the necessary authority? Same as we allways did, we discuss these things with other people, come to some agreements and found institutions that can settle disputes if need be... this is basicly social contract-theory. The authority is in the morality being supported by the community.

And eventhough these are 'merely' created moralities, and so not true in any objective sense, I'm not all that worried of relativism. There's enough convergence in what people want - certainly now that we will have a progressively better understanding of humanity - that it will mostly end up in something that works fine if people are educated in and accustomed to the idea of it.

Perhaps, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is a better place to start a discussion of secular morality. Cicero studied in Athens and I think he made an important contribution to our understanding of why we are moral and why our judgment is sometimes wrong. Daniel Webster wrote "Education, to accomplish the ends of good government, should be universally diffused." I think our liberty and democracy depends on such education.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Individual people disagreeing is not the whole story though. People do disagree, all the time, but if they want to be part of a moral community they have to accept that the group can come to a different agreement about a particular matter. The way those disagreements get settled is the group coming to an agreement, by whatever process that is.

The gods argued until there was a consensus on the best reasoning and democracy is an imitation of the gods. Ideally, we argue until we have a consensus on the best reasoning.

Quoting Coben

The objectivity could be said to be in the deduction from subjective desires and preferences. The axioms in the system you describe would be subjective, which means the foundations of every conclusion, thus moral idea, would be subjective also. The process of deriving a universal morality might have much that is objective in it. IOW if we generally agree we don't want children harmed, we can from that vague axiom derive logically certain conclusions (not that humans will ever agree on these but hypothetically). Still the axiom, hence the entire morality, has a subjective foundation and is subjective, if universal in this hypothesis.

I think there's a general tendency to look down on subjectivity; it's seen as an impediment to its favored counterpart objectivity which is taken to be the infallible path to truths. I have no issue with this view if it means that our minds are riddled with biases that lead us astray and so need to be detected and eliminated. In short subjectivity is a problem if it interferes with logic by way of letting our biases influence us. It's a common practice to include emotions under the banner of subjectivity and logicians even single them out as pitfalls to clear thinking. No issue there at all.

That said, the subjectivity you refer to is a different animal altogether. Morality is intimately linked to emotions: happiness and sorrow, the very essence of morality in that it attempts to promote the former and mitigate/eliminate the latter anyway you look at it, are emotions. It would be rather inconvenient then to try and achieve total objectivity in morality if by that we mean purging all emotions from morality; it would be like trying to understand math without numbers.

The fact that morality is subjective can't be helped but the nature of morality, with complete recognition of its subjectivity, can be studied objectively and what have we discovered doing so? Simply that morality's subjectivity, roughly our emotions , are now converging to some very specific moral norms and this is happening despite variations in social, cultural, economic, etc. conditions. This is the objectivity that I feel is relevant here.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Mind dependant or mind independent is how the distinction is typically used.

There is convergence in what people want. But what people want isn't morality yet. I think there are different ways moralities get created, but because people generally want the same things, there will be a lot of similarities usually. This was meant merely to counter the often made point about relativism... and how it leads to anything goes, if we can have no truth about the matter. It doesn't, because people agree about certain things.

To be clear, I specifically don't want to derive a universal set of moral tenents from consensus between moral traditions. I think that quest for universality or objectivity is precisely where it often went wrong in philosophy.

What do you make of my reply to @Coben

Quoting TheMadFool

I think there's a general tendency to look down on subjectivity;

Not on my part. But I did want to point out what would be subjective and what is subjective. Subjectiviity is the best part of my life. Not relevent in you case since you were speaking in general, but often I notice how this or that is sold as objectivity as a power move. Some of the most subjective and unempathic forces out there claim objectivity as a way to try to get others to back down. I gots no problem with subjectivity. Amongst other things, accepting my own, helps me suss out these power mad fools who are happily destroying the planet and our souls.
Now that sounds like I am taking an objective moral stand, at least potentially. But in fact, I just have a strong affection for this planet and life, so I dislike what they are doing. Further I see what they are doing is as painting their choses processes and goals as objective, when it is just a bunch of people with their preferences.

Quoting SophistiCat

And by what standard, pray tell, do you judge the reliability of your system of morality?

Short answer: Same way I judge the reliability of science.

Long answer is about 80,000 words if you care to read it. You could start here for just the objectivity part or the last section of this for a general overview.

Reply to TheMadFool

I very much agree with Coben. Subjectivity is not a pejorative in my book. I also feel like objectivity is often invoked more as a rhetorical tool than an accurate description. That's why I allways tend to side on the morality is subjective side of things, like in this thread... although I do realise it's not only subjective. I guess it's a question of where I think the emphasis needs to be put on.

Quoting Pfhorrest

And by what standard, pray tell, do you judge the reliability of your system of morality?
— SophistiCat

Short answer: Same way I judge the reliability of science.

The issue being the fact that the reliability of science is based on quantitative analysis, whereas qualitative factors are intrinsic to moral principles.

A paragraph from your Against Nihilism essay:

I propose the construction of models of reality and morality that are consistent with all such experiences, whatever complicated models may be necessary to account for all of them, and regardless of the agreement of those models with anyone's thoughts or feelings on the matter, only accounting for their experiences. An old parable nicely illustrates the principle I mean to employ here, wherein three blind men each feel different parts of an elephant (the trunk, a leg, the tail), and each concludes that he is feeling something different (a snake, a tree, a rope). All three of them are wrong about what they perceive, but the truth of the matter, that they are feeling parts of an elephant, is consistent with what all three of them sense, even though the perceptions they draw from those sensations are mutually contradictory.

Interestingly, that parable is retold in different Indian religions, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist. It is, as you say, a parable for a partial knowledge, or the kind of knowledge that can't perceive the whole; in each case, the subject says something that is true as far as it goes but cannot see the whole 'elephant'. But implicit in that parable is the belief that the sage is someone who 'sees the whole'. I suppose you could dub that capacity something like the 'unitive vision' which is most often associated with mystical lore.

Reply to Coben Reply to ChatteringMonkey

Well, I didn't mean to say you think/claim that subjectivity is bad in any way for morality but you replied to my claim that moral convergence among various moral traditions was an indication that morality is objective by saying that morality is subjective as if to say that that precluded any objectivity on the issue. It doesn't matter as I may have read too much into your words. You replying to my point with the subjective comment didn't help.

Quoting Wayfarer

The issue being the fact that the reliability of science is based on quantitative analysis, whereas qualitative factors are intrinsic to moral principles.

Science is based on “subjective” first-person experiences just as much as my ethical system is. We compare and quantify aspects of those experiences in the building of our models of reality, and there is no reason in principle we cannot do the same for our models of morality.

Quoting Wayfarer

But implicit in that parable is the belief that the sage is someone who 'sees the whole'.

What is a sage but a wise man? What is wisdom but the ability to discern truths from falsehoods? What is a scientific method but a means to such ability? Scientists are modern sages, and what I am proposing is an ethical analogue of the usual physical sciences.

The important thing I draw from that parable is the difference between experiences and interpretations. The three men judge based only on their own immediate interpretations of their own experiences. The “sage”, or scientist, searches for some possible interpretation of all of their experiences combined. And then keeps searching for more experiences to test that interpretation against, and new interpretations as necessary to account for those experiences, forever.

Quoting TheMadFool

Well, I didn't mean to say you think/claim that subjectivity is bad in any way for morality but you replied to my claim that moral convergence among various moral traditions was an indication that morality is objective by saying that morality is subjective as if to say that that precluded any objectivity on the issue.

I did specifically mention that one can work with objectivity once one has subjective axioms. So I acknowledged that facets of working out a morality can be objective. But this does not mean that the conclusions (or moral rules) are objective. The sum of the process is still a set of rules that are subjective. Say, we all decide that violence is bad. WE don't like it. Then we can turn to science and parenting studies, etc. to see if there are ways to reduce violence. And then we come up with some moral guidelines. Like say corporal punishment has been shown to lead to violence, so we now want to stop corporal punishment.

But none of this would show that corporal punishment (or any violence is bad) because the foundation is subjective.

I am not saying this makes such investigations a waste of time at all, or anything of the sort. But even with objective elements in the process of working out morals, we still end up with subjective morals. But if we all agree, this doesn't matter, since we would now have a system that meets our collective subjective desires. It just wouldn't be objective morals.

Quoting Coben

I did specifically mention that one can work with objectivity once one has subjective axioms. So I acknowledged that facets of working out a morality can be objective. But this does not mean that the conclusions (or moral rules) are objective. The sum of the process is still a set of rules that are subjective. Say, we all decide that violence is bad. WE don't like it. Then we can turn to science and parenting studies, etc. to see if there are ways to reduce violence. And then we come up with some moral guidelines. Like say corporal punishment has been shown to lead to violence, so we now want to stop corporal punishment.

But none of this would show that corporal punishment (or any violence is bad) because the foundation is subjective.

I am not saying this makes such investigations a waste of time at all, or anything of the sort. But even with objective elements in the process of working out morals, we still end up with subjective morals. But if we all agree, this doesn't matter, since we would now have a system that meets our collective subjective desires. It just wouldn't be objective morals.

I agree but morality is subjective for it concerns happiness and joy and these are emotions, subjective. You can't hold numbers against math; math is numbers. We can try and understand what makes us happy and what makes us sad and build the edifice of morality from there using objective rationality. I daresay we agree on the last sentence.

Quoting Txastopher

Up to a point, yes. However, by its nature, secular morality allows for challenge.

The flexibility and openness to change of secular moral systems can vary as much as the flexibility of and openness of religious systems (which vary a good deal). But ultimately systems are only as open and as flexible as their users.

Reply to TheMadFool Quoting ChatteringMonkey

That god has been successfully ejected from morality, to say nothing of the fact that god never really figured in it as explained above, doesn't imply that there are no moral truths.

OK, good. I did a trace back through our posts and I think it was your use of the phrase 'moral truths' coupled with the mentioning of objective processes in determining morals, that led me to believe you were saying something opposed to that last sentence.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Science is based on “subjective” first-person experiences just as much as my ethical system is

That is not so. Note this article in Aeon magazine (subject of a rather acrimonious debate here last June). The point of this criticism is precisely that until now, science has excluded the subjective from consideration, which is one of the basic tenets of 'objectivism'. You can't simply appropriate the subjective as part of scientific method, when, until such criticism as these came along - and they're recent and still highly controversial - it was always assumed, and still is widely assumed, that science is exclusively concerned with the domain of the objectively measurable. The whole point of having agreed measures, peer review, and so on, is to screen out the subjective elements to purportedly arrive at what Thomas Nagel describes in his book about exactly this point, 'the view from nowhere'.

Quoting Pfhorrest

What is a sage but a wise man? What is wisdom but the ability to discern truths from falsehoods? What is a scientific method but a means to such ability? Scientists are modern sages, and what I am proposing is an ethical analogue of the usual physical sciences.

Which is still based in physicalism, the notion that the physical domain and its analysis by science is the yardstick of what is real. Modern scientific method, starting with Galileo and Newton, certainly grew out of the tradition which venerated sagacity, and indeed is an attempt to arrive at the unitive vision in a disciplined way. But it is the implicit bracketing out of the subjective which makes it radically different from the quality of sagacity as understood in the earlier, and broader, philosophical tradition. I've read all your essays, and I can't see any indication of an appreciation of that quality (which is not to claim that I possess it, but I believe I can identify philosophical sources of it.)

Quoting Wayfarer

The whole point of having agreed measures, peer review, and so on, is to screen out the subjective elements

Yes, but you’re still building that objective view out of subjective views. Nobody can get outside their own first-person perspective; but we can build models that account for many first-person perspectives simultaneously. Nobody can have a truly third-person perspective on everything, but they can filter out and control for their own biases and so approach one arbitrary closely. Whether investigating reality or morality.

Quoting Wayfarer

But it is the implicit bracketing out of the subjective which makes it radically different from the quality of sagacity as understood in the earlier, and broader, philosophical tradition.

It is the bracketing out of the subjective that drives progress toward more universal truth. It’s just the elimination of bias, the concession to other points of view, the willingness to admit to being wrong and move on to try to find something less wrong, together. Objectivity isn’t about saying that nobody’s subjective experience matters, it’s about saying that everybody’s subjective experience matters equally, and looking for some way to reconcile all of them together.

Quoting Pfhorrest

bjectivity isn’t about saying that nobody’s subjective experience matters, it’s about saying that everybody’s subjective experience matters equally, and looking for some way to reconcile all of them together.

Fair point, and I agree - but that is not how it works out it practice. Because of the emphasis on quantitative judgement, then there are fundamental aspects of subjectivity, or should I say subject-hood, that are excluded from consideration by scientific analysis.

And looking at the state of scientific cosmology and physics at this point in history, I think it's impossible to argue that they're tending towards a view of the cosmos as an ordered whole. (I mean, now it's not a matter of 'seeing the whole elephant', but of seeing 10[sup]500[/sup] elephants.)

Furthermore the tendency of evolutionary accounts of human nature tends to marginalise the significance of first-person experience - that is the source of the arguments about the hard problem of consciousness.

The philosophies that agree on the significance of the first-person account are for example phenomenology and the significance of embodiment - but these are of pretty recent vintage. For example, Varela and Maturana's Embodied Cognition was published in the early 1990's; thankfully we've seen the effect of these perspectives percolating through culture since.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Nobody can get outside their own first-person perspective;

That is something that many philosophers of science wouldn't agree with. Einstein, for example, would never agree with such a statement. So even though I agree with your analysis of it, your analysis does not represent the mainstream in this matter.

In a sense, ''The View From Nowhere'' is about a single problem - how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of the same world, including the person himself. But because this internal-external tension pervades human life, Thomas Nagel is able by studying it to cast light on four of the supreme topics of philosophy - the metaphysics of mind, the theory of knowledge, the possibility of free will and the nature of ethics.

We cannot help viewing things from a particular standpoint; all our inquiries and all our strivings must start from where we are, each of us at a tiny point in a vast world we hardly begin to understand. Yet any progress in knowledge, any worthwhile achievement, depends on our attempts to transcend our particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully. Mr. Nagel shows how this thesis applies to values and attitudes just as much as to beliefs and theories.

NY Times review

Quoting Pfhorrest

Objectivity isn’t about saying that nobody’s subjective experience matters, it’s about saying that everybody’s subjective experience matters equally, and looking for some way to reconcile all of them together.

This deserves more discussion, especially in regard to the question of values - which is where we started.

The point is that the 'objectively measurable' is not subject to opinion, in the way that ethical and moral judgements are held to be. This, of course, is one of the implications of David Hume's observation about the 'is/ought' problem, which I will presume you're familiar with. It is that statements about 'what is' and 'what ought to be' are of a different order.

The problem in respect of secular culture is this. We can all agree on what is ascertainable by science - with 'what is' - but that doesn't necessarily cast any light on questions of morality - 'what we ought to do'. This tends to lead to subjectivism and relativism, which, you say, ought to be rejected.

There's an illuminating article which describes Theodore Adorno's analysis of nihilism:

Adorno argues that morality has fallen victim to the distinction drawn between objective and subjective knowledge. Objective knowledge consists of empirically verifiable ‘facts’ about material phenomena, whereas subjective knowledge consists of all that remains, including such things as evaluative and normative statements about the world. On this view, a statement such as ‘I am sitting at a desk as I write this essay’ is of a different category to the statement ‘abortion is morally wrong’. The first statement is amenable to empirical verification, whereas the latter is an expression of a personal, subjective belief.

Adorno argues that moral beliefs and moral reasoning have been confined to the sphere of subjective knowledge. He argues that, under the force of the instrumentalization of reason and positivism, we have come to conceive of the only meaningfully existing entities as empirically verifiable facts: statements on the structure and content of reality. Moral values and beliefs, in contrast, are denied such a status. Morality is thereby conceived of as inherently prejudicial in character so that, for example, there appears to be no way in which one can objectively and rationally resolve disputes between conflicting substantive moral beliefs and values. Under the condition of nihilism one cannot distinguish between more or less valid moral beliefs and values since the criteria allowing for such evaluative distinctions have been excluded from the domain of subjective knowledge.

The way this manifests in contemporary culture is the notion that the facts of science are what are in the public domain, while ethical judgements and values are an individual, and therefore private, matter. This underlies a lot of the tension in debates about moral realism; the feeling generally is that moral realism is connected to, or a relic of, religious ideology and is therefore oppressive or reactionary.

Accordingly, in secular culture, there's the usually implicit notion that the real world is the world described by the sciences, which is what remains when the accretions of religious dogma have been removed.

Which is what, I think, you're saying.

Quoting Coben

OK, good. I did a trace back through our posts and I think it was your use of the phrase 'moral truths' coupled with the mentioning of objective processes in determining morals, that led me to believe you were saying something opposed to that last sentence.

Can we discuss the meaning of subjectivity? @ChatteringMonkey offers the following definition: Quoting ChatteringMonkey

Mind dependant (subjective) or mind independent (objective) is how the distinction is typically used.

and the lexical definition is "based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions,".

Do the definitions above conflict with my belief that there are moral truths, here being interpreted as those moral tenets arising from the simple fact that we all share a great deal when it comes to emotions, especially happiness and sorrow, which form the foundation of morality?

In this discussion of morality, the definition of subjectivity that I'm concerned about is the one that asserts that morality is opinion, feelings, taste and hence doesn't lead to objective moral truths. As I said before even if morality is about personal feelings, so subjective, the causal patterns in re these feelings are sufficiently generalizable, i.e. the causes of happiness and sorrow seem to be similar for all people irrespective of cultural, social, economic, variations, that it allows us to be rational about what must follow thereof; in other words, we can be objective about what sort of moral theory is consistent with, morality's essence, our feelings. For example, there's a universal dislike for murder - we feel offended by it - and this can be the basis of the objective moral truth thou shalt not kill.

Quoting Wayfarer

The point is that the 'objectively measurable' is not subject to opinion, in the way that ethical and moral judgements are held to be.

My point is that ethical and moral judgements are wrongly held to be not "objectively measurable", and that the same kind of processes by which we tease out an objective picture of reality from our subjective empirical experiences can be used to tease out an objective picture of morality from a different kind of subjective experience, the hedonic kind. That it is a false dichotomy to say that morality must either be ascertained by appeals to religious faith (or secular laws, which I hold to be formally the same kind of thing), or else left to relativistic matters of mere opinion.

The "is" and the "ought" are separate, but differ only in direction of fit, and can otherwise be treated in perfectly analogous ways. You say you've read all of my essays, so you should know my take on this already, and I think I quoted the summary of it earlier, but here it is again just in case:

Quoting The Codex Quaerentis: A Note On Ethics

When it comes to tackling questions about reality, pursuing knowledge, we should not take some census or survey of people's beliefs or perceptions, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, believes or perceives is true. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct sensations or observations, free from any interpretation into perceptions or beliefs yet, and compare and contrast the empirical experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for a belief to be true. Then we should devise models, or theories, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be true. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian academic structure.

When it comes to tackling questions about morality, pursuing justice, we should not take some census or survey of people's intentions or desires, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, intends or desires is good. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good. Then we should devise models, or strategies, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be good. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure.

Quoting Pfhorrest

My point is that ethical and moral judgements are wrongly held to be not "objectively measurable", and that the same kind of processes by which we tease out an objective picture of reality from our subjective empirical experiences can be used to tease out an objective picture of morality from a different kind of subjective experience, the hedonic kind.

So you're saying that the basis of moral and ethical judgement is necessarily connected with pleasure? I think your model amounts to a kind of hedonic utilitarianism - trying to ascertain the average of what people feel pleasure in (or purport to). In other words, trying to democratize the process of ascertaining values on the basis that an average of what people think pleasurable will amount to an ethical norm.

But it's possible for whole societies to fall under the spell of delusion, so that 'the people' might take pleasure in what other cultures would see as obvious evils - for example the last days of the Roman empire. Hell there are good arguments that large populations in contemporary culture suffer as a consequence of hedonism. I don't think it amounts to an ethical philosophy.

I suppose, to be blunt about it, I am arguing for some form of moral realism - that at least some religious, spiritual or philosophical schools genuinely discern a higher good, which is not simply an hedonic good.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think your model amounts to a kind of hedonic utilitarianism

There are similarities, but also a lot of sophisticated differences, that make all of the difference. Most of this was covered in the bit of my Codex I quoted in my last post.

The most important one is the difference between desires and appetites, analogous to the difference between perceptions and sensations. The physical sciences doen't work off of what people perceive, because perception is post-interpretation. They go off of pre-interpretation sensations, or observations. Likewise, the ethical sciences need to work off of appetites, not desires. It doesn't matter what someone wants or doesn't want, it matters what actually feels good or bad to them.

This is the blind men and the elephant thing: it doesn't matter that blind man #3 thinks what he's feeling is a rope, all that matters is that the full picture accounts for what he actually feels, and if an elephant's tail feels the same as a rope, then an elephant accounts for what he feels perfectly well, even if he's really sure that it's a rope and not an elephant and that those guys who think they're touching a snake and a tree are just dumb and should be ignored because it's obviously a rope.

Relatedly, there's a difference between self-reports and replicability. The physical sciences don't just ask people what they saw and take their word for it, they ask for the full circumstances in which they saw it, and then have others stand in those circumstances themselves to check if they see the same thing too. Likewise, the ethical sciences need to be based on replicable experiences, not just self-reports.

Between those two things, we're not just asking people what they want, but verifying what they feel, and looking for things that avoid making people feel bad.

Also, unlike utilitarianism, and like the physical sciences, there's no majoritarian balancing going on here. Every replicable hedonic experience is a bit of "evidence" that must be accounted for in a complete moral account. You can't just say one course of action brings pleasure to a majority and pain only to a minority and so it is good. That's less bad than the other way around, sure, but it's still bad. The physical sciences don't just disregard evidence that doesn't fit with a theory that fits most of the other evidence. Every replicable observation has to be accounted for. Ethical sciences need to work the same way.

Relatedly, unlike utilitarianism, my system is anti-consequentialist. I'm getting tired of retyping things I've already written extensively about so I'm just going to quote myself again (the same essay I quoted earlier, different part):

Quoting The Codex Quarentis: A Note On Ethics

The primary divide within normative ethics is between consequentialist (or teleological) models, which hold that acts are good or bad only on account of the consequences that they bring about, and deontological models, which hold that acts are good or bad in and of themselves and the consequences of them cannot change that. The decision between them is precisely the decision as to whether the ends justify the means, with consequentialist models saying yes they do, and deontological theories saying no they don't. I hold that that is a strictly speaking false dilemma, between the two types of normative ethical model, although the strict answer I would give to whether the ends justify the means is "no". But that is because I view the separation of ends and means as itself a false dilemma, in that every means is itself an end, and every end is a means to something more. This is similar to how the views on ontology and epistemology I have already detailed in previous essays entail a kind of direct realism in which there is no real distinction between representations of reality and reality itself, there is only the incomplete but direct comprehension of small parts of reality that we have, distinguished from the completeness of reality itself that is always at least partially beyond our comprehension. We aren't trying to figure out what is really real from possibly-fallible representations of reality, we're undertaking a fallible process of trying to piece together our direct sensation of small bits of reality and extrapolate the rest of it from them. Likewise, to behave morally, we aren't just aiming to use possibly-fallible means to indirectly achieve some ends, we're undertaking a process of directly causing ends with each and every behavior, and fallibly attempting to piece all of those together into a greater good.

Perhaps more clearly than that analogy, the dissolution of the dichotomy between ends and means that I mean to articulate here is like how a sound argument cannot merely be a valid argument, and cannot merely have true conclusions, but it must be valid — every step of the argument must be a justified inference from previous ones — and it must have a true conclusion, which requires also that it begin from true premises. If a valid argument leads to a false conclusion, that tells you that the premises of the argument must have been false, because by definition valid inferences from true premises must lead to true conclusions; that's what makes them valid. If the premises were true and the inferences in the argument still lead to a false conclusion, that tells you that the inferences were not valid. But likewise, if an invalid argument happens to have a true conclusion, that's no credit to the argument; the conclusion is true, sure, but the argument is still a bad one, invalid. I hold that a similar relationship holds between means and ends: means are like inferences, the steps you take to reach an end, which is like a conclusion. Just means must be "good-preserving" in the same way that valid inferences are truth-preserving: just means exercised out of good prior circumstances definitionally must lead to good consequences; just means must introduce no badness, or as Hippocrates wrote in his famous physicians' oath, they must "first, do no harm". If something bad happens as a consequence of some means, then that tells you either that something about those means were unjust, or that there was something already bad in the prior circumstances that those means simply have not alleviated (which failure to alleviate does not make them therefore unjust). But likewise, if something good happens as a consequence of unjust means, that's no credit to those means; the consequences are good, sure, but the means are still bad ones, unjust. Moral action requires using just means to achieve good ends, and if either of those is neglected, morality has been failed; bad consequences of genuinely just actions means some preexisting badness has still yet to be addressed (or else is a sign that the actions were not genuinely just), and good consequences of unjust actions do not thereby justify those actions.

Consequentialist models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what is a good state of affairs, and then say that bringing about those states of affairs is what defines a good action. Deontological models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what makes an action itself intrinsically good, or just, regardless of further consequences of the action. I think that these are both important questions, and they are the moral analogues to questions about ontology and epistemology: fields that I call teleology (from the the Greek "telos" meaning "end" or "purpose"), which is about the objects (in the sense of "goals" or "aims") of morality, like ontology is about the objects of reality; and deontology (from the Greek "deon" meaning "duty"), which is about how to pursue morality, like epistemology is about how to pursue reality.

Quoting Pfhorrest

the ethical sciences need to work off of appetites, not desires. It doesn't matter what someone wants or doesn't want, it matters what actually feels good or bad to them.

As I said, I think appetites are altogether too limited a foundation for an ethical philosophy.

Quoting TheMadFool

Do the definitions above conflict with my belief that there are moral truths, here being interpreted as those moral tenets arising from the simple fact that we all share a great deal when it comes to emotions, especially happiness and sorrow, which form the foundation of morality?

I think it is better to say universal morals. Your sense of what you mean may be fine, but moral truths sound like objective things, to me at least. Or one could work from your verb converge, to converged morals, since we are not likely to have universal morals any time soon.Quoting TheMadFool

For example, there's a universal dislike for murder - we feel offended by it - and this can be the basis of the objective moral truth thou shalt not kill.

Sure, but there are so many definitions of murder, what is a wrongful killing and I think, at this point in history at least, we are making a huge assumption that really, deep down, we all want the same thing. Different cultures AND different individuals inside single cultures have a different sense of what makes a killing OK. We also have deontologist and consequentialist divides. IOW when killing someone who is not directly guilty is allowed, for example. Like in bombing even military targets when some civilians will or may get killed. And then honor killings, or total quaker pacifists, or home as castle justifiable killing for thief break-ins versus cultures that require even escalated responses, and much more. And these are not going to be resolved by logic, because I think at base they are based on fundamental differences in worldview AND temperment. Maybe deep down we really all want the same thing, but it's a maybe. And right now we are dealing with intractable splits in many areas. It looks like we all don't like murder, but actually that is based on the equivocation that the word 'murder' represents. It means radically different things to different people and that's not even bringing in vegans.

Quoting Wayfarer

As I said, I think appetites are altogether too limited a foundation for an ethical philosophy.

What you said upthread sounded like you were talking about desires more than appetites. "An average of what people think pleasurable" (what they think, not what actually is), "the spell of delusion" (delusion being false belief), "what other cultures would see as obvious evils" (as in what they think or believe is evil, not something that actually inflicts suffering on them), "suffer as a consequence of hedonism" (a blatant contradiction, as hedonism is all about avoiding and reversing suffering).

I get the impression that you're picturing people eating, drinking, fucking, doing drugs, etc, all wantonly, while laying about and neglecting to plan for their future, neglecting to think or introspect, to appreciate more subtle intellectual or "spiritual" goods. That is the colloquial way "hedonism" gets used, sure. But that's not what philosophical hedonism is. Someone looking to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering for themselves and everyone else needs to be restrained, pragmatic, thoughtful, etc. Just like someone who wants to be rich and have lots of money to spend needs to be frugal and budget and not waste their money.

The reason why over-indulging in short-term pleasures and neglecting that restrained, pragmatic, thoughtful living is bad is because it results in longer-term suffering; where suffering is a negative hedonic experience. Even Stoic and Buddhist practices aimed at minimizing suffering through changing the way you think about things are still aiming for a hedonic good, the minimization of suffering.

Reply to Coben Indeed there are differences among moral traditions - what is clearly murder in one culture may be defending the honor of the family in another. However, as far as I know, killing an innocent defenseless person is murder in all cultures. It's this type of convergence I refer to - very basic intuitions or even well thought out positions. I suggest not to mistake the diversity for a lack of unity.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I get the impression that you're picturing people eating, drinking, fucking, doing drugs, etc, all wantonly, while laying about and neglecting to plan for their future, neglecting to think or introspect, to appreciate more subtle intellectual or "spiritual" goods.

Whoever does that? We all know the citizens of our advanced economies are almost without exception dedicated to self-improvement, edifying spiritual and cultural pursuits, and the abandonment of hedonistic desires in pursuit of the greater good. (God knows I have never been able to live according to that standard.)

Quoting Pfhorrest

Someone looking to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering for themselves and everyone else needs to be restrained, pragmatic, thoughtful, etc

Like Epicurus, in other words.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Even Stoic and Buddhist practices aimed at minimizing suffering through changing the way you think about things are still aiming for a hedonic good, the minimization of suffering.

Buddhism aims at the eradication of suffering, the complete going beyond of it.

[quote=Nyanoponika Thera] Buddhism has sometimes been called an atheistic teaching, either in an approving sense by freethinkers and rationalists, or in a derogatory sense by people of theistic persuasion. Only in one way can Buddhism be described as atheistic, namely, in so far as it denies the existence of an eternal, omnipotent God or godhead who is the creator and ordainer of the world. The word "atheism," however, like the word "godless," frequently carries a number of disparaging overtones or implications, which in no way apply to the Buddha's teaching.

Those who use the word "atheism" often associate it with a materialistic doctrine that knows nothing higher than this world of the senses and the slight happiness it can bestow. Buddhism is nothing of that sort. In this respect it agrees with the teachings of other religions, that true lasting happiness cannot be found in this world; nor, the Buddha adds, can it be found on any higher plane of existence, conceived as a heavenly or divine world, since all planes of existence are impermanent and thus incapable of giving lasting bliss. The spiritual values advocated by Buddhism are directed, not towards a new life in some higher world, but towards a state utterly transcending the world, namely, Nibbana.[/quote]

Buddhism and the God Idea

Quoting Wayfarer

Whoever does that? We all know the citizens of our advanced economies are almost without exception dedicated to self-improvement, edifying spiritual and cultural pursuits, and the abandonment of hedonistic desires in pursuit of the greater good. (God knows I have never been able to live according to that standard.)

I sense sarcasm here but I'm not quite discerning your point out of it.

In any case, my point was that hedonism as a philosophical principle isn't selfishness, it isn't short-sightedness, it isn't unclassy low-brow living, it's just judging things on account of how they effect our suffering or enjoyment. A hedonist can and should concern themselves with the suffering and enjoyment of others besides themselves, with the long-term prospects of that suffering and enjoyment, with more subtle emotional and cultural objects of suffering and enjoyment, etc.

Quoting Wayfarer

Like Epicurus, in other words.

From what I know of him, yes.

Quoting Wayfarer

Buddhism aims at the eradication of suffering, the complete going beyond of it.

That is the limit, the extreme, of minimizing suffering. Surely the Buddhist doesn't think there's no point to getting only part way there; any progress in that direction has to be good, even if you haven't made it all the way there yet.

Quoting Wayfarer

Buddhism and the God Idea

I don't see what this has to do with the topic at hand.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I don't see what this has to do with the topic at hand.

You’re the one who brought Buddhism into it; as an example of a philosophy that minimises suffering. What that quote illustrates is something beyond ‘harm-minimization’, beyond living the most comfortable life possible.


Quoting Pfhorrest

Surely the Buddhist doesn't think there's no point to getting only part way there; any progress in that direction has to be good, even if you haven't made it all the way there yet.

Sure - but there is a ‘there’, there; an ultimate end, a summum bonum. What this has to do with the topic at hand is that whether there is such an ultimate end, or not, is the question that the values of secular morality hinge on.

Quoting TheMadFool

However, as far as I know, killing an innocent defenseless person is murder in all cultures.

Not in war time, at least for some. Others see no reason to create an exception when a government decides X is the enemy and must be fought. All sides even in what one side thinks is a just war will kill innocent defenseless people. Though I am not sure why innocent people with kevlar vests and MMA training are morally more OK targets. Like they are walking down the street and I don't shoot the guy with the suit, but the guy who looks pretty tough (and is training in MMA ((I can see by his black belt) and I see his kevlar vest sticking out of this collar so my shot has to be a head shot) so killing the second guy is less morally reprehensible.

And now we have another word 'innocent' that is interpreted differently, also, in different cultures. And then even what amounts to killing someone. Do economic killings via say excesses of capitalism or lack of access to medical care count as killing. How about via problematic additives in food or lead in the wall paint or through th legalization of guns and the side effects of this in certain neighborhoods. I don't think we have any agreement about this. Is an embargo ok if it (seems to) lead to deaths of children, even if the boycotted regime could perhaps deal with the embargo in a way that protects the children but we know he won't. And if you think this isn't murder, it is called murder by people as other my other examples.

And then let's not even think about abortion.... even the word 'person' is up for grabs in what seems to you like a sentence we can all agree on. And then Peter Singer and other vegans grant personhood also wider than some others.

Reply to CobenYou're right you know, moral rules have exceptions but don't forget rules come first and exceptions later by which I mean all attempts at formulating moral codes are meant to be universal and that, as we all know, is impossible without convergence of moral values.

Reply to TheMadFool I don't see those as exceptions, I see them as fundamental disagreements. Ghandi, certain Buddhists, MLK, Quakers have fundamental disagreement around violence and killing. It's not an exception, it's across the board. Deontologists vs. consuentialists have fundamental disagreements. IOW it is for many Ds not possible to justify killling certain people regardless of the consequences. Whereas Cs can accept killing if in the end it leads to less innocent people dying. There are fundamental disagreements about what is a person, what is innocent and then how to prioritize various 'things we want to avoid or attain..'

Quoting SophistiCat

And by what standard, pray tell, do you judge the reliability of your system of morality?

Quoting Pfhorrest

Short answer: Same way I judge the reliability of science.

Long answer is about 80,000 words if you care to read it. You could start here for just the objectivity part or the last section of this for a general overview.

Yes, I understand that you have some pet utilitarian system, but this doesn't really answer the question. If my system of morality prescribes maximizing the amount of Chinese fortune cookies in the world, the reliability of this system qua moral system will not be judged by its own criteria of success, i.e. by the amount of Chinese fortune cookies.

This was a trick question, of course. The criteria of success for a system of ethics themselves belong in the ethical category. You have to have ethical judgment before you can judge a system of ethics. But if you already have ethical judgment, then what need is for a system?

Quoting SophistiCat

Yes, I understand that you have some pet utilitarian system

It's not utilitarianism.

Quoting SophistiCat

The criteria of success for a system of ethics themselves belong in the ethical category. You have to have ethical judgment before you can judge a system of ethics. But if you already have ethical judgment, then what need is for a system?

Do the criteria of success for a system of science themselves belong in the science category? Must you have a scientific judgment before you can judge a system of science?

No. Same with ethics. We do philosophy to figure out what we're trying to accomplish with an epistemological method like that of science, and how to best accomplish that. We don't use science itself to judge the methods of science. Likewise, we can do philosophy to figure out what we're trying to accomplish with an ethical system, and how to best accomplish that. We can't use the ethical system itself to judge its own methods.

Quoting Coben

I don't see those as exceptions, I see them as fundamental disagreements. Ghandi, certain Buddhists, MLK, Quakers have fundamental disagreement around violence and killing. It's not an exception, it's across the board. Deontologists vs. consuentialists have fundamental disagreements. IOW it is for many Ds not possible to justify killling certain people regardless of the consequences. Whereas Cs can accept killing if in the end it leads to less innocent people dying. There are fundamental disagreements about what is a person, what is innocent and then how to prioritize various 'things we want to avoid or attain..'

Fundamental disagreements? Maybe you're right but let's look at the situation of one person killing another. A fundamental disagreement in my view would be if one moral theory permitted it and the other prohibited it for all cases. The examples you mention where there are disagreements between moral theories are a few cases, not all; hence these are exceptions not fundamental disagreements.

Reply to TheMadFool Well, with that definition of fundamental, yes, it's not fundamental,with most other current cultures. I just look out at a world no where near agreement on a wide range of issues and that includes around killing. I don't see convergence on a wide range of issues - and on many killing related issues as remotely close, because what I would call fundamental moral differences exist. Ones that cannot be reasoned away. IOW one cannot argue that really you and I want the same thing, we just have different means. Let me show you how my means are more effective in getting what we want.

To me the following quote, which sent us along this line, is Pollyanish....
Quoting TheMadFool

In this discussion of morality, the definition of subjectivity that I'm concerned about is the one that asserts that morality is opinion, feelings, taste and hence doesn't lead to objective moral truths. As I said before even if morality is about personal feelings, so subjective, the causal patterns in re these feelings are sufficiently generalizable, i.e. the causes of happiness and sorrow seem to be similar for all people irrespective of cultural, social, economic, variations, that it allows us to be rational about what must follow thereof; in other words, we can be objective about what sort of moral theory is consistent with, morality's essence, our feelings. For example, there's a universal dislike for murder - we feel offended by it - and this can be the basis of the objective moral truth thou shalt not kill.

I don't see people having similar reactions to all sorts of types of killing and violence in general. I see this as part of enormous intractable divides around war, abortion, home as castle right to kill intruders, regarding society care for its poor, in relation to medical care, in what is allowed in terms of intelligence services behavior, in what justifies a killing in the courts, in what police are allowed to do in terms of violence and more. I see groups that are not offended by killings that other other people are and that this is regular and even correlates with things like Trump supporters vs. Trump haters. It also correlates with laws in different countries, even within Western nations - Scandanavia vs. US, for example, around a wide range of potential killings.

It's good you clarified what you meant by fundamental. But when I read the above I feel like you are glossing over how deep this divide goes, whether we call a divide at that depth fundamental or not. I do not see a common base that we can then simply use deduction to help the difference converge. I think we have a fundamental bunch of divides that mean that people react quite differently to the same events.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Do the criteria of success for a system of science themselves belong in the science category? Must you have a scientific judgment before you can judge a system of science?

No. Same with ethics.

You are right about science, of course, but wrong about ethics. Whether ethical principles are right or wrong is an ethical question - a redundant one, of course, which was my point. You can evaluate ethical systems by other criteria, but the most important criterion for ethical principles is their moral truth - and that judgement cannot be subordinated to philosophy or science or anything that is not ethics.

Reply to Coben The definition of fundamental disagreement really doesn't matter. I would like only for you to see that the differences you mention between moral traditions are nothing more than exceptions to a general rule that has a home in all moral theories. Take your example of honor killings, killing in self-defense. Clearly these are situations where the moral rule not to kill is suspended because of one reason or another. In other words such differences can be validly phrased in the form: don't do D except if x, y, z... The differences x, y, z vary among cultures and religions and other relevant parameters: for instance it's permissible to kill your daughter in Pakistan if your family's "honor" is at stake but this would be laughed at in the US. As this example should elucidate, there's an agreement or convergence in don't do D which is what we should appreciate; the differences in the exceptions (x, y, z) are expected because cultures have different values. In short the differences you cite are restricted to what qualifies as an exception to a moral rule, expressed in don't do D, which seems to be approaching a set of universally acceptable set of moral norms.

It's somewhat like thinking that there's no agreement between the Saudis and Americans on the belief that we should work except on holidays just because holiday for the former is on Friday and for the latter is on Sunday

Quoting SophistiCat

Whether ethical principles are right or wrong is an ethical question

No, it's a meta-ethical question. Just like the foundations of the physical sciences are found in answers to meta-physical questions (broadly, including epistemology in there).

Whether or not there are correct answers to either type of question, what criteria to use to judge potential answers to either type of question, what methodology to use to apply those criteria, what each type of question even means, and so on, are all questions a level of abstraction away from those questions themselves.

Quoting Pfhorrest

No, it's a meta-ethical question. Just like the foundations of the physical sciences are found in answers to meta-physical questions (broadly, including epistemology in there).

The relationship of science and philosophy is a complex one. Philosophy can and does take science as an object of study, just like anything else, but its prescriptive role is very limited. I personally believe that there can be some fruitful cross-pollination between science and philosophy, but it would be the height of hubris to think that science is principally guided by philosophical doctrines, other than the ones that emerged organically in the course of its own development.

The situation with ethics is different though. You can think up metaphysical interpretations and epistemological models, you can package ethics into systems - all as part of the descriptive program of philosophy. But philosophy has no prescriptive role to play with respect to ethics, because at the end of the day, the question that ethics is answering is what one ought to do. Ought questions cannot be decided by anything other than moral judgement. They are like the universal acid: any philosophy that you throw at them will be cut through to the foundation by this stubborn ought: Why ought this be so?

Quoting SophistiCat

to think that science is principally guided by philosophical doctrines, other than the ones that emerged organically in the course of its own development.

Why do those ones deserve an exception?

The physical sciences we have today began as a branch of philosophy, "natural philosophy", that pretty much solved its foundational questions and then went on to do the business of applying them.

There is no reason to think that moral philosophy cannot do the same thing, solve those foundational questions, and go on to start doing ethical sciences by applying those.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Why do those ones deserve an exception?

The physical sciences we have today began as a branch of philosophy, "natural philosophy", that pretty much solved its foundational questions and then went on to do the business of applying them.

Science didn't wait around for its foundational questions to be solved before it could get off the ground - if it did, it would have been waiting to this day. Historical nomenclature aside, what we today recognize as science came together haphazardly as a living practice, rather than as a systematic application of a fully developed philosophical program. If anything, metaphysics and epistemology have for the most part been playing catch-up to science, taking its practice and its findings as a subject of study.

Quoting Pfhorrest

There is no reason to think that moral philosophy cannot do the same thing, solve those foundational questions, and go on to start doing ethical sciences by applying those.

Well, since in truth nothing in history has followed this path, then there is nothing for moral philosophy to imitate here.

Quoting SophistiCat

Science didn't wait around for its foundational questions to be solved before it could get off the ground - if it did, it would have been waiting to this day. Historical nomenclature aside, what we today recognize as science came together haphazardly as a living practice, rather than as a systematic application of a fully developed philosophical program. If anything, metaphysics and epistemology have for the most part been playing catch-up to science, taking its practice and its findings as a subject of study.

It is impossible to do science without agreement on foundational things like empiricism and realism and some form of rationalism (as in rejecting appeals to intuition, authority, etc). Those practicing scientists may not have all made explicit their philosophical assumptions, but the work they did as a community had to take them for granted; those who continued to dispute those principles did not become part of the scientific community, but instead became its opponents, disputing its results on what scientists consider fallacious philosophical grounds. Because those scientists had at least an implicit philosophical framework in common.

Moral philosophy has slowly been making organic progress in a similar direction. Utilitarianism’s emphasis on hedonic flourishing mirrors the emphasis on empiricism. Deontological and rights-based models mirror the emphasis on rationalism. All of them generally reject appeals to authority and such. Liberty and equality are more valued now than historically. There is a clear trend of moral thinking moving toward a more “scientific” methodology based on common experience and critical reasoning, we just haven’t fully developed a consensus on how exactly those principles all fit together yet.

Quoting Pfhorrest

It is impossible to do science without agreement on foundational things like empiricism and realism and some form of rationalism (as in rejecting appeals to intuition, authority, etc). Those practicing scientists may not have all made explicit their philosophical assumptions, but the work they did as a community had to take them for granted; those who continued to dispute those principles did not become part of the scientific community, but instead became its opponents, disputing its results on what scientists consider fallacious philosophical grounds. Because those scientists had at least an implicit philosophical framework in common.

You are conflating actual practice with its philosophical interpretations. Science is done the way it is done not because scientists have come to an agreement about its philosophical foundations (even the philosophical community is far from such an agreement), but because science is a fairly distinctive enterprise and there is a particular way in which it is practiced, which scientists learn in the course of their training. This is not to say that science is a game with arbitrary rules institutionalized by tradition. I believe that modern science is a product of cultural evolution, the seed of which is just our instinctive way of understanding our environment, one which we practice on an everyday basis. Moreover, the weightiest normative criteria in science - closeness of fit and parsimony - are objective to an extent that few other activities can boast (which partly explains the trust that we put in science). It is because science is constrained between its determinate natural origins and its semi-determinate goals that we think we can retrofit it with determinate philosophical foundations.

Which leads us to the contrast case: morality. On the one hand, morality, like science, has deep evolutionary, cultural, social and psychological roots, which makes it fairly determinate and eminently suitable as an object of study. But the other, normative end does not hold up, because of course morality is itself normative. This immediately short-circuits any question about what ought to be moral - what ought to be moral is what is moral, duh!

Quoting Pfhorrest

There is a clear trend of moral thinking moving toward a more “scientific” methodology based on common experience and critical reasoning, we just haven’t fully developed a consensus on how exactly those principles all fit together yet.

Yeah, this is just cargo cult science, I am afraid. There is a science for everything nowadays (or rather since the Enlightenment), so there must be a science of morality! Never mind that it makes no sense - to be intellectually respectable it gotta look like science.

Quoting SophistiCat

Science is done the way it is done not because scientists have come to an agreement about its philosophical foundations (even the philosophical community is far from such an agreement)

The scientists don't have to explicitly elucidate the principles for it to be evident that they have agreed upon them; and the philosophical community don't have to agree on everything that they explicitly elucidate about those principles for there to be agreement on a common core of them. Try appealing to authority in a scientific paper, like "the Bible says...". Try appealing to some completely unobservable-in-principle phenomenon as evidence (not an as-yet-observed phenomenon as explanation for an observed one). Try suggesting that maybe there isn't actually any objective truth about reality, and local opinion is all that constitutes truth, so inside the headquarters of the Flat Earth Society the world (all of it) actually is flat, even though as soon as you step outside it goes back to being round (everywhere, even inside there) again. There are broad philosophical assumptions that all scientists make, like (as I said) realism, empiricism, and some kind of rationalism, and if you try to forward an argument that doesn't take those for granted, scientists will reject it because of that.

All we need for an "ethical science" is that kind of broad agreement. Rational appeals to evidence only, no authority, no popularity, no intuition. Evidence based on experience, i.e. hedonism. Objectivism in the sense of universalism, contra relativism, to quote Chomsky:

Chomsky:if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others—more stringent ones, in fact—plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil.

Quoting Pfhorrest

All we need for an "ethical science" is that kind of broad agreement.

Why do we need an "ethical science"? You never stop to ask yourself this question. This is cargo cult.

Reply to SophistiCat The function of any kind of science is to reliably and methodically find answers to some kind of question. If you cannot see the utility of having some way of reliably and methodically finding answers to questions about morality, then you've apparently just given up hope.

Reply to Pfhorrest "Methodically" is the key word here. Yes, you have a method, but that's not enough to qualify as "science." If you don't understand why you do what you do, then your method is no more scientific than astrology or divination.

Quoting SophistiCat

If you don't understand why you do what you do

What suggests that I don't?

Reply to Pfhorrest Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to do with being moral. What are the criteria of success (other than aping the superficial trappings of science)? How do you jump the is-ought gap?

Quoting SophistiCat

Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to do with being moral. What are the criteria of success (other than aping the superficial trappings of science)? How do you jump the is-ought gap?

No system of morality owns morality. Of course the followers and advocates of theists systems believe and advocate that moral truths come from gods, which can be shot down in a few good arguments, as easily as the morality as viewd to be such by secular schools of thoughts.

What I am trying to say is that you CAN'T ask yourself, nobody can, what any of anything has to do with being moral. Once you ask that question, you're lost. So why blame the builders of optimized utilitarianism, when the same question can't be answered with a satisfactorily delimiting definition by anyone else, either?

Chomsky:if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others

Ah. Noam Chompsky.

The minimal moral level as stated by him can be argued against, too.

Take the persona of a state executioner. A person who kills people who have been condemned to death by the court systems.

Does he or she practice what he preaches against? Is he or she immoral?

Or take the case of a collaborator against Nazi oppression. Does his or her lying make him or her amoral?

Chompsky ought to have known better. But he does not.

He's one of my pet idiots, like Immanuel Kant.

I seem to be arguing against defining morals as science, but there is another approach that makes that possible. I can't describe it here, as it merits publication, which I can't expedite, since I don't have a doctorate or masters in philosophy, so editors of scientific and professional / academic journals will outright reject my manuscript.

Quoting SophistiCat

Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to do with being moral.

What do you even mean by "being moral"? That is the first metaethical question to ask, what claims that something is or isn't moral even mean, and that's one that I do answer, before I even begin approaching the other questions.

Quoting SophistiCat

What are the criteria of success (other than aping the superficial trappings of science)?

The criteria for the success of what? A moral science, or generally any system of morality? The criteria for success of those things is to provide a means of answering questions about morality. When someone wonders what is moral, how do they figure it out? When two people disagree about what is moral, how do they resolve those difference? Answering how to do that, how to figure out those answers to questions about morality, is the criteria for the success of a system of morality.

"You can't do that, so don't try" is one proposed "solution".

"Just do whatever [God/the State/etc] says" is another.

I think it's easy to show that neither of those proposals actually works, and rejecting them both and working with whatever's left is where I begin my project.

Quoting SophistiCat

How do you jump the is-ought gap?

That you think I'm even trying to do that shows you haven't understood a word that I've said so far. I'm staying entirely within "ought", starting from "ought" and following to "ought", just proceeding in a way analogous to the ways we've been successful at starting with "is" and following to "is".

(I predict you'd respond here "aha! So you're starting with a system of morality already, your 'ought' premises, just like I said!" But no, no more than the physical sciences start with some set of unquestionable "is" premises. The physical sciences start with uncertain "is" hypotheses and try to rule them out to get an ever-narrower range of remaining possibilities, they don't start with some presumed facts and derive others from those. I propose doing the same thing with ethics: we don't start with anything as certain, we start out with a bunch of possibilities, and then narrow them down. The point above is that all those possibilities are "ought" to begin with, and narrowing them down doesn't appeal to any "is" either).

Quoting Pfhorrest

The physical sciences start with uncertain "is" hypotheses and try to rule them out to get an ever-narrower range of remaining possibilities, they don't start with some presumed facts and derive others from those.

There are facts, and then there are axioms. Naturalism certainly starts with the axiom of 'nothing beyond nature' . You yourself start with that presumption. Those axioms dictate what kinds of explanations will be considered, what kinds of facts can be meaningfully sought.

Likewise secular morality as a matter of definition needs to ground its principles in what can be known of nature by rational and empirical means. The term 'secular' explicitly means 'as distinct from religious', and accordingly, there are certain kinds of judgments that it is precluded from considering, such as 'that man's conscience derives from God'.

Quoting Wayfarer

Naturalism certainly starts with the axiom of 'nothing beyond nature' . You yourself start with that presumption

I don't start from it, I derive it from the earlier methodological principle of criticism. You can't possibly test claims about things beyond all experience ("beyond nature"), so any claims about that are inherently unquestionable, and so violate the principle to hold everything open to question ("criticism").

That principle (criticism) in turn is an application of an even deeper, practical principle that I've sometimes termed "humility": always assume in every endeavor that failure is still possible, or equivalently that success is not guaranteed. Applied to the endeavor of inquiry, that means always assuming there is a possibility that your answers might be wrong, i.e. holding them open to questioning.

That principle (humility) is in turn an application of the even deeper practical principle to always try. If you assume success is guaranteed, or that failure is impossible, then there is no need to try; trying tacitly assumes that you need to try and can't just sit back and win with no effort.

Another practical application of that first principle to always try, one on par with "humility", which I've sometimes termed "hope", is to always assume in every endeavor that success is still possible, or equivalently that failure is not guaranteed. For the same reason that in trying, you must tacitly assume that there is a point to trying, and aren't just doomed to failure no matter what.

Applied to the endeavor of inquiry, that means always assuming that there are genuine answers (not mere opinions) to be found, even if you haven't found them yet. That ("hope" applied to inquiry) is the principle I call "objectivism".

And a consequence of that, on par with phenomenalism (that principle you're disputing, about nothing being beyond experience), is a principle I call "liberalism", which says to allow people to hold any opinion as their preferred possible answer until it can be shown wrong, because to do otherwise would, via infinite regress, require holding no opinions to be possible options at all; or else, contra criticism, starting with some things being just beyond question.

Those four things derived from "always try", applied to ethics specifically, mean:

- Assume it's possible to find genuine answers to moral questions
- Don't just take anyone's word for what they are, question everything
- Take everything as "possibly good", i.e. permissible, until it is shown bad
- Show things bad by appealing to repeatable experiences of them feeling bad

That's really the core of my whole ethical system, and the rest is just details.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Applied to the endeavor of inquiry, that means always assuming that there are genuine answers (not mere opinions) to be found, even if you haven't found them yet. That ("hope" applied to inquiry) is the principle I call "objectivism".

Yes, but the problem with your approach is this principle of 'maximising hedonism' or however you describe it. Sure, you're appealing to something more than your opinion, only insofar as it's a kind of collective opinion - something which pleases the greatest number of constituents, if you like.

This *is* a kind of utilitarianism, as I and others here have said, even though you keep disputing it. The basic definition of utilitarianism is 'the greatest good for the greatest number', and I don't see how you're not saying that.

But along with that you're already declaring out of bounds all those many things which are swept up under your heading 'transcendent' and 'fideism', which includes a lot of territory - almost everything associated with spirituality and religion.

Quoting Pfhorrest

You can't possibly test claims about things beyond all experience ("beyond nature"), so any claims about that are inherently unquestionable, and so violate the principle to hold everything open to question ("criticism").

The problem is, that 'the bounds of experience' are very much culturally-conditioned also. If you're in a culture that values spiritual experience, then such experiences are by nature not out of bounds.There are ways of disseminating them, ways of navigating them. That's one of the meanings of culture.

In the secular west, they're out of bounds because we're bound by a lot of implicit assumptions about human nature drawn from the scientific-secular outlook on life. Secular morality pretends to be based on what the world is really like when the clouds of religious superstition have been dispersed. But a great deal of it is built around Enlightenment rationalism, which basically puts science in the place previously occupied by religion. (And that is not my idea, there is a voluminous literature on these factors.)

At the end of the day an ethical philosophy has to provide for an unqualified good - something which is good as a matter of fact, not opinion. You can trace the lineage of that idea to Platonism, for instance, wherein the 'vision of the Good' was the acme of the philosophical quest, whereas most ordinary people (the hoi polloi) are 'prisoners in the cave' - of mere opinion, doxa and pistis. Sure, it's radically antidemocratic, but then Plato was writing at the dawn of civilized culture.

I value many of the qualities that modern secular culture provides - freedom of thought, freedom of religion, commitment to technological progress and political equality. These are all good things, but in the absence of a philosophy which orients one to spiritual growth - those qualities that were in bygone days the province of religious lore - then they're basically empty. And you do see that sense of emptiness echoed in a lot of modern culture - a sense of lack, a lack of relatedness, relationship, and meaning. Secularism provides a framework, but that's all it provides; it doesn't have any intrinsic good in that sense, beyond providing the framework within which such goods can be sought.

Quoting Wayfarer

This *is* a kind of utilitarianism, as I and others here have said, even though you keep disputing it. The basic definition of utilitarianism is 'the greatest good for the greatest number', and I don't see how you're not saying that.

I've repeatedly elaborated on how I'm not. That's why I keep drawing the analogy with physical sciences, to illustrate that difference. The physical-science analogue of utilitarianism would be "ask everybody what they believe is real, and declare whatever the majority says to be reality". We adamantly do not do that in the physical sciences, for good reason, and I am vehemently opposed to doing it in ethics either, for the same reasons. Instead, I say, look at what the physical sciences do do instead of that, and adapt that to ethical inquiry, by substituting empirical experiences (experiences that "seem true or false", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about reality) with hedonic experiences (experiences that "seem good or bad", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about morality). NB that physical science aims to account for all (replicable) empirical experiences, not just a simple majority, and my ethical science would do likewise with hedonic experiences.

Quoting Wayfarer

The problem is, that 'the bounds of experience' are very much culturally-conditioned also. If you're in a culture that values spiritual experience, then such experiences are by nature not out of bounds.There are ways of disseminating them, ways of navigating them. That's one of the meanings of culture.

If those "spiritual experiences" are replicable -- if someone else can go and do the same things that someone who claims to have them did, and also have them, the same ones -- then they're perfectly admissible in my ethical system (and my take of science, for that matter, if the experiences are of a descriptive rather than prescriptive nature). If they're not replicable, then they're useless as a common grounds for questioning which opinions are the right or wrong ones (you're back to just opposing claims about who had which experience and which was legit), and only then ruled out as putting some things beyond question.

Quoting Wayfarer

At the end of the day an ethical philosophy has to provide for an unqualified good - something which is good as a matter of fact, not opinion.

Absolutely. Which is why saying either "there is no matter of fact, there is only opinion" (nihilism) or "you'll just have to take [arbitrary source]'s word that this is the matter of fact" (fideism) cannot possibly work. The first for obvious reasons, the second for the only slightly-less obvious reason that's as old as the Euthyphro: what if "the gods" (different arbitrary sources appealed to as authoritative) disagree, how do you choose which one to listen to?; and even if they do all agree, are they right because they know of some good reason to think as they do (in which case it's that reason that really matters to us, and they're just messengers), or is just any arbitrary thing they say right by definition (in which case, how is that any better than mere opinion)?

Partially inspired by this conversation, I just added the following two paragraphs to my essay on my general philosophy:

Quoting The Codex Quaerentis: Commensurablism

Phenomenalism may superficially sound similar to nihilism (there being nothing more to things than their experiential qualities sounds superficially similar to there being no actual things but only the appearance of them), but as previously elaborated in my essays against nihilism and against transcendentalism, I differentiate clearly between the two, and hold to objectivism. Conversely, while objectivism may sound like it could entail transcendentalism, for the same reasons but in reverse, I have already explained why I think it does not, and still hold to phenomenalism as well. An objective phenomenalism is not nihilistic, and a phenomenal objectivism is not transcendent. Likewise, liberalism may superficially sound similar to fideism (not requiring justification to hold a belief sounds superficially similar to condoning appeals to faith), but as previously elaborated in my essays against fideism and against cynicism, I differentiate clearly between the two, and hold to criticism. And conversely, while criticism may sound like it could entail cynicism, for the same reasons but in reverse, I have already explained why I think that does not, and still hold to liberalism as well. A critical liberalism is not fideistic, and a liberal criticism is not cynical.

I strongly suspect that such chains of inference at least tacitly underlie many philosophical views: those who see the rejection of fideism for criticism leading (so they think) to cynicism and thus nihilism, and to the rejection of transcendentalism for phenomenalism and thus (so they think) to nihilism again, rightly reject nihilism and thus (as they think necessary) phenomenalism with it, along with cynicism and thus (as they think necessary) criticism along with it, embracing transcendentalism and the fideism that it entails as their only hope (so they think) against nihilism. Conversely, those who see the rejection of nihilism for objectivism leading (so they think) to transcendentalism and thus fideism, and to the rejection of cynicism for liberalism and thus (so they think) to fideism again, rightly reject fideism and thus (as they think necessary) liberalism along with it, along with transcendentalism and thus (as they think necessary) objectivism along with it, embracing cynicism and the nihilism that it entails as their only hope (so they think) against fideism. This confusion of liberalism with fideism, or equivalently of criticism with cynicism, and likewise of phenomenalism with nihilism, or equivalently of objectivism with transcendentalism, leads many people, I suspect, to see the only available options as a transcendent fideistic view, or else a cynical nihilistic view. The differentiation of those superficial similarities and so the opening up of possibilities besides those two extremes is the key insight at the core of my entire general philosophy, embracing objectivism without transcendentalism, criticism without cynicism, liberalism without fideism, and phenomenalism without nihilism.

Quoting Pfhorrest

Instead, I say, look at what the physical sciences do do instead of that, and adapt that to ethical inquiry, by substituting empirical experiences (experiences that "seem true or false", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about reality) with hedonic experiences (experiences that "seem good or bad", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about morality).

I did a search on the term 'hedonic' in this thread, of which there are quite a few instances. And it all amounts to the following: that you equate something like 'the maximisation of hedonic experiences' with 'the good'. But that is hedonism, pure and simple, which simply means 'the pursuit of pleasure or of pleasurable sensations'. The only factors you seem to recognise as motivations for ethics, are appetites and the maximisation of pleasure, despite the prolixity. I think that's about all that needs saying.

Reply to Wayfarer
Wayfarer I am afraid you understand the word "pleasure" in a very restricted sense. To you it may only mean base, or not base, physical pleasure.

Reading the text, to me what PFHorrest means by "pleasure" or more specificially, "hedonism" or "hedonistic reward" is the good feelings accompanying any of the following (not an exhaustive list) independent of each other:

accomplishment
physical pleasing
emotional well being and rapture
happiness
satisfaction with life
peace with the world and with oneself
knowing to have paid one's own dues properly
lack of contention other than in entertaining activities not intended to hurt someone (sports, games, card games, games of skills and / or chance)
loving and being loved
seeing your young flourish
etc.

Reply to Wayfarer

I have to admire the fact, however, that you chewed your way through that wall of text. PFHorrest indeed has a tendency to prolixity. It is the one thing that stops me from reading his posts. The only thing.

Quoting god must be atheist

I am afraid you understand the word "pleasure" in a very restricted sense.

It was appropriate, in the context. Sure, 'pleasure' can be construed in many ways, but here we're talking about one of the main factors underlying ethics, and I'm afraid that I don't think either hedonism or the satisfaction of appetite provides that. And besides, many of the items on your list are not emblematic of pleasure so much as of happiness, which may or may not be derived from pleasure. You can derive great pleasure from love, for example, but sometimes it also demands great sacrifice, and causes great pain. But we don't think less of love for that.

Compare Freud: to him, this principle was libido. That too has a narrow meaning - sexual appetite - but also a broader one, which manifests in all kinds of ways, as it is something like 'the will to live'. But the main reason Jung broke from Freud was exactly because he felt Freud's 'libido' was too narrow to account for human drives generally. I'm making a similar criticism here, although I've more or less given up on making headway with it.

Quoting Wayfarer

don't think either hedonism or the satisfaction of appetite provides that.

Why not? You have to show that.

Pleasure can be attained by helping others. By satisfying one's sense of empathy.

Pleasure can be attained by self-sacrifice for the greater good.

I don't know why you insist that hedonic motivation is "below the level" of the topic.

Quoting Wayfarer

many of the items on your list are not emblematic of pleasure so much as of happiness,

Happiness is pleasure. You can't say happiness is neutral or suffering.

You are still incapable of divorcing the concept of pleasure from phyisical pleasure. That is a limitation I wish you to overcome.

Quoting Wayfarer

Compare Freud: to him, this principle was libido. That too has a narrow meaning - sexual appetite - but also a broader one, which manifests in all kinds of ways, as it is something like 'the will to live'. But the main reason Jung broke from Freud was exactly because he felt Freud's 'libido' was too narrow to account for human drives generally.

Precisely. You are stuck on pleasure = libido; I am trying to make you see that pleasure = anything that feels good. (Including intellecutal, moral, and sacrificial pleasures.)

Quoting god must be atheist

Happiness is pleasure

I don't agree that they're the same, but I am not going to make a detailed argument for that, other than to observe that oftentimes the pursuit of pleasure does not end in happiness, and that it is possible to forgo pleasure and still be happy.

Reply to Wayfarer

I am sorry. I don't mean they are the same. Happiness is pleasureable. Happiness is one of the many forms of pleasure.

I misspoke.

Reply to Pfhorrest

Quoting Pfhorrest

nstead, I say, look at what the physical sciences do do instead of that, and adapt that to ethical inquiry, by substituting empirical experiences (experiences that "seem true or false", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about reality) with hedonic experiences (experiences that "seem good or bad", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about morality).

The difference is that you have a reliable point of reference in the case of physical sciences that's not there for morality. It's not only that those experiences are subjective, it's that those experience are already informed by morality. We do not suddenly wake up when we are 18 or so when we have enough maturity to think about this, and start experiencing good and bad things in a vacuum... we already have been conditioned into some form of morality, which will influence how we value those experiences. So how does that work as an objective science, we measure morality by a moving standard that is itself informed by morality?

Quoting Pfhorrest

What do you even mean by "being moral"?

Making right moral decisions. What is right is, of course, the very subject of morality.

Quoting Pfhorrest

The criteria for the success of what? A moral science, or generally any system of morality? The criteria for success of those things is to provide a means of answering questions about morality. When someone wonders what is moral, how do they figure it out? When two people disagree about what is moral, how do they resolve those difference? Answering how to do that, how to figure out those answers to questions about morality, is the criteria for the success of a system of morality.

So any procedure for answering moral questions will do, as long as it is comprehensive? No other criteria of success are required?

Quoting Pfhorrest

That you think I'm even trying to do that shows you haven't understood a word that I've said so far.

If by that you mean that I haven't read your articles on morality, then no, I haven't. That wasn't the subject of this thread.

Quoting Pfhorrest

I predict you'd respond here "aha! So you're starting with a system of morality already, your 'ought' premises, just like I said!" But no, no more than the physical sciences start with some set of unquestionable "is" premises.

That sort of Cartesian scheme that you outline doesn't remotely resemble the way science is done. But even if your approach was better at aping science, that still wouldn't make it any better than a cargo cult, because you still aren't thinking about why you do what you do. Why should morality resemble science?

Reply to Wayfarer I'm not denying hedonism. I thought I'd been pretty clear about that.

I'm denying that hedonism necessarily means that whatever a majority desires is good, in the same way that I would deny that empiricism means that whatever a majority perceives is true.

Firstly, perceptions are subject to interpretation. But even if we go down to the level of sensations, which aren't, a majority isn't good enough. All of them count.

Likewise, desires are subject to interpretation. But even if we go down to the level of appetites, which aren't, a majority isn't good enough. All of them count.

We don't "do empiricism" by polling people about their perceptions, and we shouldn't "do hedonism" by polling people about their desires. What do we do instead of that, when we "do empiricism"? And how can we adapt that to a better way to do hedonism too?

In any case, when combined with all the rest of my ethical principles, especially liberalism, hedonism just boils down to "if you want to claim that this is wrong, you need to show how it hurts someone". I still get the impression that you think it means people selfishly and short-sightedly over-indulging in the most base and carnal pleasures.

Quoting ChatteringMonkey

The difference is that you have a reliable point of reference in the case of physical sciences that's not there for morality. It's not only that those experiences are subjective, it's that those experience are already informed by morality. We do not suddenly wake up when we are 18 or so when we have enough maturity to think about this, and start experiencing good and bad things in a vacuum... we already have been conditioned into some form of morality, which will influence how we value those experiences. So how does that work as an objective science, we measure morality by a moving standard that is itself informed by morality?

You seem to be thinking of moral beliefs. I'm not talking about that. I'm not saying we base morality on what people think is moral; that has all the problems you just outlined. I'm not even saying we base morality on what people want. I'm saying we base morality on what feels good or bad to people.

It's the difference between "I am hungry" (an experience, an appetite), "I want a burrito" (a desire), and "I deserve a burrito" (moral beliefs). I'm not saying that you thinking you deserve a burrito should be a moral consideration, or even you wanting a burrito should be a moral consideration, but your feeling of hunger should be a moral consideration, and any complete moral plan of action will not just leave your hunger unsatisfied, though it may not give you the burrito you want or agree that you deserve one.

Quoting SophistiCat

So any procedure for answering moral questions will do, as long as it is comprehensive? No other criteria of success are required?

If I understand the question correctly then yes, but I suspect this is a trap somehow.

Quoting SophistiCat

If by that you mean that I haven't read your articles on morality, then no, I haven't. That wasn't the subject of this thread.

No, I just mean the many words I have already written in this thread.

Quoting SophistiCat

That sort of Cartesian scheme that you outline doesn't remotely resemble the way science is done.

What "Cartesian scheme" are you talking about, that doesn't remotely resemble the way science is done? Science is definitely objectivist, and critical (as in skeptical), and phenomenal (empirical), and on most modern accounts at least, what I called "liberal", which in this context basically means falsificationist. All I'm claiming about science is that it operates somewhere within those broad restraints: you're not going to get science done if you're making relativist claims (that reality depends on opinion), appeals to faith or authority, or to evidence beyond observation. I said all of this before, I don't know why I have to repeat myself.

Quoting SophistiCat

But even if your approach was better at aping science, that still wouldn't make it any better than a cargo cult, because you still aren't thinking about why you do what you do. Why should morality resemble science?

I'm getting tired of that naked insult there being repeated, and the implication that I'm not thinking about the motives behind this. I already explained them in great length in response to Wayfarer last night.

I'm not just saying "hey, let's copy science! that will work!" I developed general principles about inquiry of any sort, out of more specific principles about both descriptive and prescriptive fields; my epistemology borrows from liberal deontological methodologies, for instance. I then applied those general principles about inquiry of any sort to both inquiry about reality, and inquiry about morality. Not because of a starting assumption that morality has to copy science, but because there's no reason not to apply those general principles of inquiry to one kind of inquiry and not others; they're general principles after all. Those principles applied to inquiry about reality give a broadly scientific method: critical rationalist epistemology and empirical realist ontology. The same principles applied without any modification to inquiry about morality therefore automatically give a moral analogue of that method.

I didn't set out to build a moral science, I set out to investigate questions about how to investigate questions about both reality and morality, and wound up with general principles that could be applied to both. You're the one saying that a special exception should be made for moral inquiry. That's what calls for justification, not just applying the same principles as I would to any other inquiry.