Natural and Existential Morality
@Mww & @Pfhorrest : This grew out of conversations with you both. I do not aim to convince either of you, of course, but I do aim to give a rough sketch so to why I believe that a priori moral rules and moral objectivity are redundant at best, inaccurate always, and damaging at worst.
I have tried to write this in many different ways, and the OP ends up a small book on morality and natural history. If I add citations, it ends up as a normal-sized book. So this really has to be a thumbnail sketch, with padding out and citations given afterwards.
The thesis is that metaphysical and object notions of morality are wrong, unjustified, and unnecessary, that a historo-scientific approach provides a more apt foundation for morality and has as its natural consequences moral pluralism/relativism.
WARNINGS: Natural selection is taken as a given. Humans are animals throughout. I know there are many who cannot stand such ideas but I don't intend to re-fight that war. And this is going to be long.
Animals fall broadly into three categories based on their degrees of sociality: solitary, subsocial, and social. Solitary animals tend to socialise for courting and reproduction only. Subsocial ones may cohabit and raise offspring briefly as couples, but otherwise operate independently. Social animals tend to operate in their cohabitation groups: hunting, gathering, child-rearing, migrating, fighting, etc.
Humans are ultrasocial animals: we pack a lot of biological capacity specifically for operating in social groups compared with other animals. Typically, evolutionary pathways tend toward higher sociality over successive generations. We are evolved, for instance, from subsocial ancestors of rodents.
Our presocial inheritance
Brief outline only of heritable selfish traits:
Selfish behaviours are not reborn with every human. They can be modulated by socialisation, but we inherit instincts and drives not just from our human ancestors, but from all of our ancestors, including our subsocial ones. For subsocial animals, what is good for them personally is good, so long as they can survive the obtaining of it. There is no exile, no lynchings, no reciprocity, no basis to evolve heritable characteristics for selfless behaviour and, whatever else we get, unless it was selected against in the intervening years, we get that too.
Our social inheritance
Competing with that we have heritable social drives, many of which are likely at least partly presocial in origin. For instance, empathy is linked to selfish behaviour. Understanding the perspective of another individual allows us to assess their threat and their vulnerability. It comes under the general negotiations of subsocial and social animals.
People scoring highly on empathy tests show increased and concentrated activity in mirror neurons [Gazzola, V., Aziz-Zadeh, L., & Keysers, C. (2006). Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans].There are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy (seeing things from someone else's perspective); and emotional empathy (feeling what we'd feel in others' circumstances). The triggering of either is not a given. Some people react to empathetic stimuli more than others. People react to stimuli concerning people like them more than people unlike them. Psychopaths show no signs of emotional empathy, and only demonstrate cognitive empathy when specifically requested to imagine how a subject feels. Empathy is shown to be linked to the genes ADRA2B, 5-HTTLPR, LRRN1, and OXTR.
Such tests also demonstrate increased production of oxytocin. Oxytocin also has its roots in subsocial behaviour. It is, for instance, produced when the uterus and/or cervix expand during childbirth, when the nipples are stimulated during breastfeeding, in romantically attached parents, in physical contact (e.g. sex). Yes, I said cervix and nipples.
In ultrasocial animals (that's us), higher oxytocin is seen during grooming and social eating, in trust negotiation, and is also during empathetically-stimulating scenarios (such as those in mirror neuron tests). People given artificially high doses of oxytocin are seen to be more social altruistic: that is, they behave in a moral charitable way, and that charity tends more toward social altruism rather than a good that the subject might benefit from.
Oxytocin production is heritable via the gene OXT and oxytocin reception via the gene OXTR. We also have a genetic amenability toward socialisation, mediated by oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and seratonin. Socialisation is important because most of the above are capacities rather than drives we are born with. To that extent, an immediate empathetic response to an individual in distress is not fully natural but learned via natural capacities for empathy, altruism, and socialisation together.
Generally, people lie on a selfish-selfless spectrum from psychopaths and narcissists, through arseholes, normal people, and good people, to annoyingly aggressive and obsessive altruists.
Quoting Sonne & Gash
-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5917043/
A Brief Natural History of Morality
The above covers the how and the what: we are ultrasocial animals with heritable altruistic and empathetic capacities that compete with other, selfish heritable characteristics that, together with a heritable amenability to socialisation, allows us to make moral decisions concerning other individuals. That on its own isn't much of a foundational morality though.
Why need the why and the who to finish off part one (PART ONE!!! IT'S SO LONG ALREADY AND THIS IS THE WHISTLESTOP VERSION!!!).
Moving from solitary and social-but-solitary behaviours to higher subsocial behaviours increased out survival benefit by ensuring that more young lived to reproductive age. This was fairly trivial: oxytocin is structurally very similar to vasopressin, so likely evolved as a mutation. Evolution of the strictly social behaviours were instrumental in allowing social groups to cohere: they cannot be stable if everyone is out just to benefit themselves, their spouse, and their kids. The survival benefits of social groups are well known and include lower risk of starvation, of being killed in struggles for survival, etc.
A key behaviour to social coherence is reciprocal altruism, and nature also had a selection basis for that. Our ancestors lived in small social groups where whoever they met on a given day was overwhelmingly likely to be either a relative or a neighbour they would see again and often. There existed then the potential for reciprocal altruism to benefit the group as a whole, as one kind act begets many more. Mirror neurons and cognitive empathy were likely originally survival mechanisms for gauging threat and opportunity, but they also provided nature with an operating empathy system to hijack for social altruism. Simply understanding how another might respond to kindness by knowing how you would respond to kindness is a great start, but we have, at some point, also evolved the ability to feel how we would feel in another's circumstances. (This is an area of on-going study. It might be that cognitive empathy triggers oxytocin production which trigger emotional empathy for instance, which would fit the aforementioned feedback loop.) Add oxytocin production -- already a thing for subsocial animals -- into the mix to build a general drive toward altruistic behaviour along with feelings of attachment and protectionism toward the specific individual, and you have a part of basis for morality:
In one aspect, natural morality is a biological drive toward altruism triggered by empathy on the survival basis of reciprocity.
As I said, this would compete with other, selfish drives we also inherit, but those drives are now accompanied by a health hazard. If you can get away with benefiting yourself at the expense of another, you are more likely to behave selfishly (viz. the rioters and looters comprised of yesterday's law-abiding citizens who accompany today's peaceful protests). But... A) You have to live with yourself. You have a capacity for emotional empathy that will literally make you hurt if you hurt others, unless you can train yourself or be trained by others or have a natural inclination to suppress it (socialisation and pseudo-socialisation, genetic impairment).
In another aspect, natural morality is an incentive away from antisocial behaviour.
And B) if you don't get away with it, you know damn well you are surrounded by other empathetic individuals who you have also hurt by hurting one. In social animals and ultrasocial ones, this can manifest itself in attacks, exiles, even lynchings. I'm hazy on the mechanisms, but I think its sufficient to say that a) there is a survival benefit in a social group that punishes antisocial behaviour among its ranks, and b) that social groups do punish antisocial behaviour among its ranks.
In another aspect, natural morality is an incentive toward punishment of antisocial behaviour.
These effectively take the place of a priori knowledge in metaphysical constructions of morality. They are biological in origin, honed for purpose by natural selection but completely divorced from that purpose, i.e. there is no so that at root (e.g "punish antisocial behaviour so that...") Formulated without reference to their biological bases, they might look something like:
1. Do not harm others to benefit yourself: Antisocial behaviour is counter to what mankind is. Antisocial people are, to that extent, regressive... less than human... governed more by presocial capacities than social ones. Given the capacity for empathy, you are given the understanding of the harm you cause. If you cause that harm anyway, you are not making a rational error, you are making a social error: you are a hypocrite. From this we can derive a qualified version of the golden rule.
2. Help others, for they may help you later: There is a selfish and a selfless aspect to this which is more in keeping with real human ethics than the ethics of metaphysics. We are not just social animals, we are ultrasocial ones. It is in our being to seek reciprocal relationships with relatives and neighbours.
3. Do not allow antisocial behaviour: As said before, social groups cannot be sustained if there is sufficient antisocial behaviour to make reciprocal altruism unfeasible. It is not only a direct danger to you, your friends and your neighbours, it is a waste of your resources to invest in people who will not reciprocate but who will exploit.
That we are moral beings, i.e. moral in our being, segues nicely into...
Moral existentialism
We are a long way from living in small social groups acting out a few simple moral rules derived from biological capacities honed by natural selection. It would be interesting here to think about the ways our capacities for socialisation were perverted by the powerful over the last several thousand years, including the current situation where morality is so starkly polarised: antisocial behaviour itself is lionised and yet altruism and empathy is being extended more and more thoroughly. Such a description would take us into the field of memetics, a generalisation of natural selection. But I have to wrap this up, so...
There were two major effects pertinent here of the advent of transport and breakdown of the small social group structure:
1. the people you generally see are strangers
2. the people you live near underwent different socialisations to yourself.
We have no genetic capability to deal with either of these problems, because those problems did not exist when we evolved. In the past, strangers were less likely objects of empathy, since they were more likely to be competitors and less likely to reciprocate altruism. (It is also seen in tests that in-group members' empathy responses to out-group members is less than to other in-group members, suggesting that counter-empathetic responses are not contingent.)
The social group can no longer be regarded as family and neighbours. Families are generally distributed, and neighbours often unknown to us. Social groups are virtual and malleable: we work with one set of people, live with another set, socialise with another set, etc. These days, people are likely to have friends and relatives who live or come from a different country. There is no even vaguely-defined boundary you can draw around yourself and say: this is my social group. Your virtual social group encompasses the globe and is overwhelmingly diluted by strangers.
How does one 'do morality' authentically in such a world? Individualism is the accepted political answer. Care for yourself, your spouse, your children, and otherwise do what you can to prosper. Harm, within lawful bounds (and lawful bounds are also malleable) is okay in the name of self-fulfilment. This is not a solution: we are hard-wired toward empathy and altruism and to suppress that is to make ourselves less than human. If we engage in behaviour toward others knowing or being able to know, via empathy, that it would harm us, we are hypocrites, and hypocrisy is the fundamental immoral act. That we accept, through our natural capacity for socialisation, antisocial behaviour as our social conditioning, it is only insofar as we have been morally perverted.
The polar opposite is to accept the world as our social group, and this drives the trend to extend (and codify in law) altruism and empathy to more and more kinds of stranger, who are now less strange because they enter into our virtual social lives. But this is hardly a perfect fit for our natural morality either. The biological drive to do no harm is as grounded as ever but, when your social group is the world:
1. harm of others is continuous and cannot be consistently opposed (empathy fatigue)
2. reciprocal altruism is no longer useful, and yet we are surrounded by those we can help.
Our biological tendency to oppose harm and help others is no longer feasible, which raises a potentially infinite number of moral conundrums and from which we derive a (philosophically porous) distinction between morally obligatory and morally praiseworthy acts.
If you step in to stop a stranger being harmed, it is morally praiseworthy because we are naturally inclined to do this under one set of circumstances but cannot do it at all times in our current set circumstances. It must be permissible to not act end harm. Likewise if we help someone, it is morally praiseworthy because we are morally driven to help others who may help us but the person we help will likely never (have the opportunity to) reciprocate. It must be morally permissible to withhold kindness.
The true moral condition of the global virtual social group is then:
1. do not harm others to benefit yourself (unless you can absolutely get away with it)
2. help others as you see fit
3. oppose harm as you see fit
i.e. 2-3 are now optional capacities. The existential problem is that, if I only have a capacity to do good/oppose harm and no directive or reason for doing so, and I cannot do so in every circumstance, how do I choose when to do good/oppose harm? There are many factors, but the only unaltered fundamental rule we have is: do not be a hypocrite. If you bemoan someone standing by while another is harmed, you oblige yourself to step in when someone is harmed. The moral rule is contingent ("if you...") on your socialisation -- which is not that of your neighbour -- and self-regulating ("you oblige yourself").
It is perfectly acceptable therefore to do what you will that harms no other (hedonism), to never step in to help others or resist others who harm, so long as you are liberal (allow others their hedonism) and never expect others to step in to help you or oppose harm toward you. That is a perfectly valid moral frame of reference, and how one "ought" to behave is assessed only within that frame of reference. It is perfectly feasible that a particular socialisation could and has produced this sort of moral frame. It is equally feasible to for someone to be socialised such that they dedicate their lives to helping others and opposing harm, with no expectation of reciprocity, and moral decisions taken by such a conditioned person would be with respect to that socialisation, i.e. that moral frame of reference.
There cannot be, then, a meaningful objective moral universe. Morality, viewed (correctly imo) in this bottom-up way, cannot have top-down rules because that is not what morality really is. Even the nearest to a fundamental rule -- do not be a hypocrite -- is not objective but statistical: there exist many for whom this is a practical impossibility because they lack empathy. They simply cannot equate the harm they do with the harm they'd feel if roles were reversed. Such people must be allowed their own moral frames of reference, because if you were in their shoes, that's what you should expect.
Moral philosophy is overwhelmingly concerned with questions around how one "ought" to act in a given hypothetical situation without reference to the moral agent's socialisation, state, capacity, or any other details that a real person can use to decide whether and how to act. It is pretend-morality precisely because it denies relativism, pluralism, and existentialism.
But these do not constitute a nihilism. Antisocial behaviour still exists, is still hypocritical, and is still sub-human. Those who pool wealth and resources at others' expense, who in small social groups would have been attacked, exiled or lynched, are still moral (i.e. social, not rational) failures. One is not obliged to oppose the harm they do, because one is not obliged to oppose every harm committed in one's lifetime, but if one is inclined to oppose harm, it is morally meaningful to oppose that harm. Likewise racists, misogynists, rapists, drug dealers, paedophiles, political opportunists, looters, etc., etc. You are justified in ignoring or opposing them, so long as you yourself are not a hypocrite. To oppose racism and be racist would be antisocial on all grounds.
I believe that a more thorough description along those lines is sufficient to describe the why, when, how and who of morality, and that top-down or bottom-up a priori approaches are fundamentally in error precisely by not factoring in evidence of the why, when, how and who and, erroneous or not, are unjustifiable on the grounds that it can add nothing, only subtract.
I appreciate the above is too long for this sort of platform, but I promised the opportunity to give me a thorough philosophical kicking so here it is. This is not a complete picture even of my thinking, but could be fleshed out ad hoc.
I have tried to write this in many different ways, and the OP ends up a small book on morality and natural history. If I add citations, it ends up as a normal-sized book. So this really has to be a thumbnail sketch, with padding out and citations given afterwards.
The thesis is that metaphysical and object notions of morality are wrong, unjustified, and unnecessary, that a historo-scientific approach provides a more apt foundation for morality and has as its natural consequences moral pluralism/relativism.
WARNINGS: Natural selection is taken as a given. Humans are animals throughout. I know there are many who cannot stand such ideas but I don't intend to re-fight that war. And this is going to be long.
Animals fall broadly into three categories based on their degrees of sociality: solitary, subsocial, and social. Solitary animals tend to socialise for courting and reproduction only. Subsocial ones may cohabit and raise offspring briefly as couples, but otherwise operate independently. Social animals tend to operate in their cohabitation groups: hunting, gathering, child-rearing, migrating, fighting, etc.
Humans are ultrasocial animals: we pack a lot of biological capacity specifically for operating in social groups compared with other animals. Typically, evolutionary pathways tend toward higher sociality over successive generations. We are evolved, for instance, from subsocial ancestors of rodents.
Our presocial inheritance
Brief outline only of heritable selfish traits:
- survival instinct
- genome benefit: cuckoos, parasites
- basic needs: hunger, thirst, etc.
- the costs of giving
Selfish behaviours are not reborn with every human. They can be modulated by socialisation, but we inherit instincts and drives not just from our human ancestors, but from all of our ancestors, including our subsocial ones. For subsocial animals, what is good for them personally is good, so long as they can survive the obtaining of it. There is no exile, no lynchings, no reciprocity, no basis to evolve heritable characteristics for selfless behaviour and, whatever else we get, unless it was selected against in the intervening years, we get that too.
Our social inheritance
Competing with that we have heritable social drives, many of which are likely at least partly presocial in origin. For instance, empathy is linked to selfish behaviour. Understanding the perspective of another individual allows us to assess their threat and their vulnerability. It comes under the general negotiations of subsocial and social animals.
People scoring highly on empathy tests show increased and concentrated activity in mirror neurons [Gazzola, V., Aziz-Zadeh, L., & Keysers, C. (2006). Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans].There are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy (seeing things from someone else's perspective); and emotional empathy (feeling what we'd feel in others' circumstances). The triggering of either is not a given. Some people react to empathetic stimuli more than others. People react to stimuli concerning people like them more than people unlike them. Psychopaths show no signs of emotional empathy, and only demonstrate cognitive empathy when specifically requested to imagine how a subject feels. Empathy is shown to be linked to the genes ADRA2B, 5-HTTLPR, LRRN1, and OXTR.
Such tests also demonstrate increased production of oxytocin. Oxytocin also has its roots in subsocial behaviour. It is, for instance, produced when the uterus and/or cervix expand during childbirth, when the nipples are stimulated during breastfeeding, in romantically attached parents, in physical contact (e.g. sex). Yes, I said cervix and nipples.
In ultrasocial animals (that's us), higher oxytocin is seen during grooming and social eating, in trust negotiation, and is also during empathetically-stimulating scenarios (such as those in mirror neuron tests). People given artificially high doses of oxytocin are seen to be more social altruistic: that is, they behave in a moral charitable way, and that charity tends more toward social altruism rather than a good that the subject might benefit from.
Oxytocin production is heritable via the gene OXT and oxytocin reception via the gene OXTR. We also have a genetic amenability toward socialisation, mediated by oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and seratonin. Socialisation is important because most of the above are capacities rather than drives we are born with. To that extent, an immediate empathetic response to an individual in distress is not fully natural but learned via natural capacities for empathy, altruism, and socialisation together.
Generally, people lie on a selfish-selfless spectrum from psychopaths and narcissists, through arseholes, normal people, and good people, to annoyingly aggressive and obsessive altruists.
Quoting Sonne & Gash
The underlying neural circuitry differs between psychopaths and altruists with emotional processing being profoundly muted in psychopaths and significantly enhanced in altruists. But both groups are characterized by the reward system of the brain shaping behavior. Instead of rigid assignment of human nature as being “universally selfish” or “universally good,” both characterizations are partial truths based on the segments of the selfish–selfless spectrum being examined. In addition, individuals and populations can shift in the behavioral spectrum in response to cognitive therapy and social and cultural experience, and approaches such as mindfulness training for introspection and reward-activating compassion are entering the mainstream of clinical care for managing pain, depression, and stress.
-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5917043/
A Brief Natural History of Morality
The above covers the how and the what: we are ultrasocial animals with heritable altruistic and empathetic capacities that compete with other, selfish heritable characteristics that, together with a heritable amenability to socialisation, allows us to make moral decisions concerning other individuals. That on its own isn't much of a foundational morality though.
Why need the why and the who to finish off part one (PART ONE!!! IT'S SO LONG ALREADY AND THIS IS THE WHISTLESTOP VERSION!!!).
Moving from solitary and social-but-solitary behaviours to higher subsocial behaviours increased out survival benefit by ensuring that more young lived to reproductive age. This was fairly trivial: oxytocin is structurally very similar to vasopressin, so likely evolved as a mutation. Evolution of the strictly social behaviours were instrumental in allowing social groups to cohere: they cannot be stable if everyone is out just to benefit themselves, their spouse, and their kids. The survival benefits of social groups are well known and include lower risk of starvation, of being killed in struggles for survival, etc.
A key behaviour to social coherence is reciprocal altruism, and nature also had a selection basis for that. Our ancestors lived in small social groups where whoever they met on a given day was overwhelmingly likely to be either a relative or a neighbour they would see again and often. There existed then the potential for reciprocal altruism to benefit the group as a whole, as one kind act begets many more. Mirror neurons and cognitive empathy were likely originally survival mechanisms for gauging threat and opportunity, but they also provided nature with an operating empathy system to hijack for social altruism. Simply understanding how another might respond to kindness by knowing how you would respond to kindness is a great start, but we have, at some point, also evolved the ability to feel how we would feel in another's circumstances. (This is an area of on-going study. It might be that cognitive empathy triggers oxytocin production which trigger emotional empathy for instance, which would fit the aforementioned feedback loop.) Add oxytocin production -- already a thing for subsocial animals -- into the mix to build a general drive toward altruistic behaviour along with feelings of attachment and protectionism toward the specific individual, and you have a part of basis for morality:
In one aspect, natural morality is a biological drive toward altruism triggered by empathy on the survival basis of reciprocity.
As I said, this would compete with other, selfish drives we also inherit, but those drives are now accompanied by a health hazard. If you can get away with benefiting yourself at the expense of another, you are more likely to behave selfishly (viz. the rioters and looters comprised of yesterday's law-abiding citizens who accompany today's peaceful protests). But... A) You have to live with yourself. You have a capacity for emotional empathy that will literally make you hurt if you hurt others, unless you can train yourself or be trained by others or have a natural inclination to suppress it (socialisation and pseudo-socialisation, genetic impairment).
In another aspect, natural morality is an incentive away from antisocial behaviour.
And B) if you don't get away with it, you know damn well you are surrounded by other empathetic individuals who you have also hurt by hurting one. In social animals and ultrasocial ones, this can manifest itself in attacks, exiles, even lynchings. I'm hazy on the mechanisms, but I think its sufficient to say that a) there is a survival benefit in a social group that punishes antisocial behaviour among its ranks, and b) that social groups do punish antisocial behaviour among its ranks.
In another aspect, natural morality is an incentive toward punishment of antisocial behaviour.
These effectively take the place of a priori knowledge in metaphysical constructions of morality. They are biological in origin, honed for purpose by natural selection but completely divorced from that purpose, i.e. there is no so that at root (e.g "punish antisocial behaviour so that...") Formulated without reference to their biological bases, they might look something like:
1. Do not harm others to benefit yourself: Antisocial behaviour is counter to what mankind is. Antisocial people are, to that extent, regressive... less than human... governed more by presocial capacities than social ones. Given the capacity for empathy, you are given the understanding of the harm you cause. If you cause that harm anyway, you are not making a rational error, you are making a social error: you are a hypocrite. From this we can derive a qualified version of the golden rule.
2. Help others, for they may help you later: There is a selfish and a selfless aspect to this which is more in keeping with real human ethics than the ethics of metaphysics. We are not just social animals, we are ultrasocial ones. It is in our being to seek reciprocal relationships with relatives and neighbours.
3. Do not allow antisocial behaviour: As said before, social groups cannot be sustained if there is sufficient antisocial behaviour to make reciprocal altruism unfeasible. It is not only a direct danger to you, your friends and your neighbours, it is a waste of your resources to invest in people who will not reciprocate but who will exploit.
That we are moral beings, i.e. moral in our being, segues nicely into...
Moral existentialism
We are a long way from living in small social groups acting out a few simple moral rules derived from biological capacities honed by natural selection. It would be interesting here to think about the ways our capacities for socialisation were perverted by the powerful over the last several thousand years, including the current situation where morality is so starkly polarised: antisocial behaviour itself is lionised and yet altruism and empathy is being extended more and more thoroughly. Such a description would take us into the field of memetics, a generalisation of natural selection. But I have to wrap this up, so...
There were two major effects pertinent here of the advent of transport and breakdown of the small social group structure:
1. the people you generally see are strangers
2. the people you live near underwent different socialisations to yourself.
We have no genetic capability to deal with either of these problems, because those problems did not exist when we evolved. In the past, strangers were less likely objects of empathy, since they were more likely to be competitors and less likely to reciprocate altruism. (It is also seen in tests that in-group members' empathy responses to out-group members is less than to other in-group members, suggesting that counter-empathetic responses are not contingent.)
The social group can no longer be regarded as family and neighbours. Families are generally distributed, and neighbours often unknown to us. Social groups are virtual and malleable: we work with one set of people, live with another set, socialise with another set, etc. These days, people are likely to have friends and relatives who live or come from a different country. There is no even vaguely-defined boundary you can draw around yourself and say: this is my social group. Your virtual social group encompasses the globe and is overwhelmingly diluted by strangers.
How does one 'do morality' authentically in such a world? Individualism is the accepted political answer. Care for yourself, your spouse, your children, and otherwise do what you can to prosper. Harm, within lawful bounds (and lawful bounds are also malleable) is okay in the name of self-fulfilment. This is not a solution: we are hard-wired toward empathy and altruism and to suppress that is to make ourselves less than human. If we engage in behaviour toward others knowing or being able to know, via empathy, that it would harm us, we are hypocrites, and hypocrisy is the fundamental immoral act. That we accept, through our natural capacity for socialisation, antisocial behaviour as our social conditioning, it is only insofar as we have been morally perverted.
The polar opposite is to accept the world as our social group, and this drives the trend to extend (and codify in law) altruism and empathy to more and more kinds of stranger, who are now less strange because they enter into our virtual social lives. But this is hardly a perfect fit for our natural morality either. The biological drive to do no harm is as grounded as ever but, when your social group is the world:
1. harm of others is continuous and cannot be consistently opposed (empathy fatigue)
2. reciprocal altruism is no longer useful, and yet we are surrounded by those we can help.
Our biological tendency to oppose harm and help others is no longer feasible, which raises a potentially infinite number of moral conundrums and from which we derive a (philosophically porous) distinction between morally obligatory and morally praiseworthy acts.
If you step in to stop a stranger being harmed, it is morally praiseworthy because we are naturally inclined to do this under one set of circumstances but cannot do it at all times in our current set circumstances. It must be permissible to not act end harm. Likewise if we help someone, it is morally praiseworthy because we are morally driven to help others who may help us but the person we help will likely never (have the opportunity to) reciprocate. It must be morally permissible to withhold kindness.
The true moral condition of the global virtual social group is then:
1. do not harm others to benefit yourself (unless you can absolutely get away with it)
2. help others as you see fit
3. oppose harm as you see fit
i.e. 2-3 are now optional capacities. The existential problem is that, if I only have a capacity to do good/oppose harm and no directive or reason for doing so, and I cannot do so in every circumstance, how do I choose when to do good/oppose harm? There are many factors, but the only unaltered fundamental rule we have is: do not be a hypocrite. If you bemoan someone standing by while another is harmed, you oblige yourself to step in when someone is harmed. The moral rule is contingent ("if you...") on your socialisation -- which is not that of your neighbour -- and self-regulating ("you oblige yourself").
It is perfectly acceptable therefore to do what you will that harms no other (hedonism), to never step in to help others or resist others who harm, so long as you are liberal (allow others their hedonism) and never expect others to step in to help you or oppose harm toward you. That is a perfectly valid moral frame of reference, and how one "ought" to behave is assessed only within that frame of reference. It is perfectly feasible that a particular socialisation could and has produced this sort of moral frame. It is equally feasible to for someone to be socialised such that they dedicate their lives to helping others and opposing harm, with no expectation of reciprocity, and moral decisions taken by such a conditioned person would be with respect to that socialisation, i.e. that moral frame of reference.
There cannot be, then, a meaningful objective moral universe. Morality, viewed (correctly imo) in this bottom-up way, cannot have top-down rules because that is not what morality really is. Even the nearest to a fundamental rule -- do not be a hypocrite -- is not objective but statistical: there exist many for whom this is a practical impossibility because they lack empathy. They simply cannot equate the harm they do with the harm they'd feel if roles were reversed. Such people must be allowed their own moral frames of reference, because if you were in their shoes, that's what you should expect.
Moral philosophy is overwhelmingly concerned with questions around how one "ought" to act in a given hypothetical situation without reference to the moral agent's socialisation, state, capacity, or any other details that a real person can use to decide whether and how to act. It is pretend-morality precisely because it denies relativism, pluralism, and existentialism.
But these do not constitute a nihilism. Antisocial behaviour still exists, is still hypocritical, and is still sub-human. Those who pool wealth and resources at others' expense, who in small social groups would have been attacked, exiled or lynched, are still moral (i.e. social, not rational) failures. One is not obliged to oppose the harm they do, because one is not obliged to oppose every harm committed in one's lifetime, but if one is inclined to oppose harm, it is morally meaningful to oppose that harm. Likewise racists, misogynists, rapists, drug dealers, paedophiles, political opportunists, looters, etc., etc. You are justified in ignoring or opposing them, so long as you yourself are not a hypocrite. To oppose racism and be racist would be antisocial on all grounds.
I believe that a more thorough description along those lines is sufficient to describe the why, when, how and who of morality, and that top-down or bottom-up a priori approaches are fundamentally in error precisely by not factoring in evidence of the why, when, how and who and, erroneous or not, are unjustifiable on the grounds that it can add nothing, only subtract.
I appreciate the above is too long for this sort of platform, but I promised the opportunity to give me a thorough philosophical kicking so here it is. This is not a complete picture even of my thinking, but could be fleshed out ad hoc.
Comments (222)
War? No it's a debate. To some perhaps it is. You see something dead, therefore it is. Which even if refuted still elevates us only slightly over what preys on an opossum. Not worthy of lengthy debate. The only war was the one over people who necessitate the idea of war over living and sharing ideas that do not seem to conform. This was won long ago. Curious huh. A war that- by it's own definition of victory- can never be "truly won". How's that for irony.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
1. Conditional blether. Otherwise implies people get into accidents on purpose.
2, 3. Do whatever you want.
Sure. Why not
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Blanket statements, even when supported by all current social standing or "reality" that can be disproven under basic differences and changes are somewhat this. If the majority of society as a whole engages in either antisocial or subhuman behavior and as a rational man you seek to avoid it, this presents a paradox. You can't be subhuman for avoiding subhuman behavior. Or if you can, how so?
All those newly-established words of negative connotation are unfortunately how everyone got here and most fundamentally continue to exist. Where they are, with what they have, etc. Except for drug dealing. That's subjective to objective laws placed subjectively. They could ban caffeine. All of a sudden if you trade in coffee or energy drinks that's you. Basically the idea of using the word hypocrite is logically like misplacing a past tense with a present tense. Not much debate to be had. Granted the idea of a utopia has long existed before any civilization has and people naturally want to be part of this, especially over another that is less so. So naturally we gravitate toward not what manifests this but what convinces us it will, obviously because we view these as one and the same.
Incorrect. It is merely an error. Rationality has nothing to do with it: that is metaphysics again. There can be no society of majority antisocial behaviour. It is an oxymoron.
In fact, I'll go a step further as there is a simplifying and unifying point here. Antisocial behaviour places you outside of the social group. That covers several points in one.
The practice of devising unreal and even nonsensical scenarios for pretend moral agents to play out pretend morality is precisely the thing I'm arguing against. It is not useful because it tells us nothing applicable outside that particular fantasy. In a natural philosophy of morality, it is particularly acute. Nature could not have selected for social characteristics that benefited us in an antisocial environment. We can ask what happens when that social environment changes in a way inconsistent with your nature, and the answer must surely reduce to: that particular social drive is no longer relevant, it has no determinable object.
Damn good. :up:
Interesting. As soon as I figured out the emboldened text referred to the section above it, rather than below, as is the norm in dissertation.......
As for a philosophical asswhoopin’, I needn’t bother, for the entire section on Moral Existentialism, particularly the subsections beginning with “The true moral condition of the global virtual social group” and ending with “Morality, viewed (correctly imo) in this bottom-up way, cannot have top-down rules because that is not what morality really is“ is predated by....oh....couple minutes or so, exemplified in The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1788, specifically with respect to the idealistic notion of “the kingdom of ends”. Not exactly, of course, but generally, Kant has said pretty much what you said within those subsections.
But you have an intrinsic contradiction in your version, to wit.....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
.......which is correctly delineated as a rule, with the exculpatory.....
“The moral rule is contingent.”
However, in the next...
“do what you will that harms no other (...), to never step in to help others or resist others who harm, (...) and never expect others (....)”
....are very far from contingent rules, for they abide no possible exception. Which, I must say, leaves the metaphysical barn door wide open to the notion of moral law in the form of deontological moral philosophy.
But I totally agree: morality cannot have top-down rules, these being nothing more serious than, and having just as little power as, a mere administrative code.
And I don’t give a solitary hoot for the science, the chemicals in my brain that make me both charming and obnoxious, cheerful and gloomy, lend a hand to those I like and leave a dipshit in the ditch right where I found him. I am quite known to myself without knowing a clue about my oxytocin level, thank you very much.
Still, pretty much like all the other expositions on a topic, here we have a lot of what’s and who’s, but not much in the way of how’s, and while natural morality may tend to eliminate the need for a priori knowledge, the existential morality, which asks.....
“how do I choose when to do good/oppose harm”
.....would certainly seem to require it, for therein lays the how of the necessarily subjective determination of choice with respect to moral action, and the innate subjectivity of good itself. Or, at least the how we can grasp with words, rather than it be forced upon us by some obtuse empirical architecture.
Kudos, nonetheless. Well done indeed.
Peace.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
(Emphasis and ellipses mine.) That is, after giving us a quick tour of the natural history, anthropology and sociology of morality - what is - you skip to the conclusion - not about any matters of fact - but about matters of ought.
Except that it is never entirely clear which part of the equation you are addressing. Pfhorrest operates in a more traditional moral philosopher mode in producing a recipe with statements of fact as inputs statements of ought as outputs. With you I cannot tell whether you are even making a distinction between the two.
At first there appears to be a clear exception to the pattern: the injunction against a hypocrisy that is stated as a purely moral rule. But then you hasten to disclaim that that is just a matter of "statistics," that is that too is a matter of fact.
Not at all. My approach hinges entirely on the is-ought gap. The whole idea behind my approach is to look at how we handle “is” statements in science, and then handle “ought” statements in a completely separate but also entirely analogous way.
Quoting SophistiCat
Where do I ever take statements of fact as inputs? I’m vehemently against the relevance of any statements of fact to moral reasoning. If you’re thinking of the most recent thread where Kenosha, Isaac, and I were discussing my views, you’ll note my main critique of Isaac’s view was in trying to reduce all moral discourse to discussion of facts.
Got to account for the effects of legal systems, education, conditioning, which you started to touch upon when mentioning memetics I think. Human values radically vary by culture and subculture, also evolutionarily diverge and converge massively. Morality is a cognitive interpretation of behavioral consequences, and even caring to begin with depends on the indoctrinating of our capacity for reason by example etc., leading us to interpret cause and effect in particular kinds of socially conscious ways. Social arrangements, even those of kinship or close contact, have always selected against empathy as much as in favor of it due to inevitable situational factors, and this countervailing pressure is only surmounted by relatively intellectual learning, which is what sustains, fosters or degrades the ideals that legitimize communities, institutions and civilized authority. I don't view ethics as existentially derived from simple instinct at all, though the conditions which generate it are effectively infinite in their subtlely minor diversities, so that values might superficially look personal.
No, I haven't seen that thread.
Your facts are what you like to call "hedonic" whatsit, which you are supposed to collect, optimize and process and in some way as part of your moral recipe. They are still matters of fact that can be obtained with a sociological survey or something like that.
As I said myself, there are aspects from which one can derive something kinda like some well-known moral laws (I give the example of the golden rule). I'd say the kingdom of ends is perhaps less a good fit. I'd break it down in two separable ways.
First, the categorical imperative is not strictly reciprocal. It is reciprocal insofar as any moral decision I make would be fit for a universal law, such that I might benefit from such a law. This is much more idealistic than our natural bent toward reciprocal altruism, based on the survival benefit of helping an individual such that that individual would reciprocate specifically to me.
Second, it is unsurprising that moral biological capacity evolved in those groups survives within us for consideration by an intelligent and experienced human in 18th century Prussia, but that is a one-way street: the moral problems Kant had to address are not obliged to be within our natural moral capacity. Moral philosophy, it seems to be, is not a means of addressing moral problems; it is a symptom of incompatibility of moral beings evolved on one environment trying to make sense of a different one. One should expect difference, and one should not account for either the similarities or differences by recourse to intrinsic knowledge (unless one is being extremely broad in the definition of 'knowledge', e.g. storage of information) if one is to take seriously what knowledge we do have and know we have.
Quoting Mww
Not clear what you mean. Do you mean that you interpreted e.g. "never step in to ... resist others who harm" as a rule, or that the rule "resist those who would harm others" is a rule with no possible exception? Either way, "resist those who would harm others" (or its contrary) may be the rule of an individual, consistent with having a drive to protect those in one circumstance who do not generally exist in the individual's circumstance, but "resist those who would harm others" cannot be a rule because of its practical impossibility. In a large world full of strangers, it is simply unfeasible to obey such a rule. That is the style of the problem in a nutshell.
Quoting Mww
But can you truly understand yourself and not know why it happens? I can understand a TV in a functional way: you plug it in, switch it on, press a button for a channel, hey presto: commercials! But I'm not really understanding the TV, I'm understanding how to use the TV. If you haven't already, and fancy being shown yourself in a way you did not understand, I thoroughly recommend (as I do to everybody) Daniel Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow. I can't think of a more successful item to disillusion people of the notion that they understand themselves, and I say this without hypocrisy: I do not understand me as well as he does.
Quoting Mww
No more than freedom begs the question of how I choose what to do with it, I think. There is a crucial difference between the morality problem and existentialism. In existentialism, I have freedom, personal sovereignty, and I have no compulsion to employ it in a particular way. It's like having all the tools and no particular thing to use them on. Our problem is that we have outdated tools. Any use of them is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. There really isn't much justification for kindness to a stranger beyond those of natural moral aspect (1): the hit of oxytocin feels good, and I may torment myself if I don't. But there's no justification for the beef and vegetable pie I'm about to make either, on which... gotta run!
Quoting Mww
Thanks! Coulda been worse. It's messy (it was an editing nightmare) and there's expressions I'm already cringing at, but there's a sort of thing there I think. I'm pleased that you even entertain the notion that a priori moral knowledge isn't so necessary. Peace back to the Mww most high!
Nope. These are the two halves of the analogy:
Something or another is the correct thing to believe (there is an objective reality) ~ Something or another is the correct thing to intend (there is an objective morality)
All beliefs are initially to be considered possible until shown false (epistemic liberty) ~ All intentions are initially to be considered permissible until shown bad (deontic liberty)
Any belief might potentially be shown false (epistemic criticism) ~ Any intention might potentially be shown bad (deontic criticism)
The way to show a belief to be false, besides simple contradiction, is to show it fails to satisfy some empirical experience, an experience of something seeming true or false (phenomenalism about reality) ~ The way to show an intention to be bad, besides simple contradiction, is to show it fails to satisfy some hedonic experience, an experience of something seeming good or bad (phenomenalism about morality)
Never do descriptive statements, that assert beliefs, thoughts about reality, factor into the process of justifying prescriptive statements, that assert intentions, thoughts about morality.
True enough, insofar as one would have to existentially be in a position to decide something about the trolley switch in order for such scenarios to have a priori practical interest. But they can and do illuminate vagaries and ambiguities in both moral theory, and the humans that indulge in them.
But theory aside, as long as it be given humans are naturally moral agents, re: there are no non-moral human beings, then no matter the social inventory, he must determine an object, taken to mean some willful volition, corresponding to a moral dilemma, and if this object, or volition, which translates to a moral judgement hence to a moral action, is in tune with his nature, he remains true to his moral constitution. If it is opposed to his nature, he is untrue, hence immoral.
The devised scenarios illuminate, not the difficulty in choosing volitions but rather, the necessary dedication to a moral constitution. Problem is, people get stuck on which choice to make, when they should be considering what the agent’s constitution demands.
It follows that there are no unreal or non-sensical scenarios; there are only choices virtually impossible to understand if you are not the one called on to actually make them. Anything else is mere unwarranted supposition.
So.....will your counter-point be that humans do not have a moral constitution? In keeping with your non-metaphysical inclinations, I’d guess you would say we do not. At least, qua constitution. Maybe something like it. Or not.
I totally agree. I think if the OP proves anything, it's that bypassing it leads to a weaker, less coherent description of the moral problem. But power alone is such a huge topic, I'd have never finished. I get the sense education is a place you'd start?
Quoting Enrique
Well that's one of the interesting things. I'd say yes and no. Yes, insofar as it seems that empathy requires experience -- we are not born with functioning empathy -- and can be suppressed (empathy fatigue). No, insofar as evidence suggests that even if you are raised a racist, you will still have some empathetic response to a person of different skin colour in distress. That is, it is not that you lack an empathetic response, but that other -- so-called counter-empathetic responses -- suppress or reduce oxytocin production. It's complex.
I think what we can safely say is that if human ancestors evolved empathetic responses, those responses must have at least been amenable to the kinds of socialisation our ancestors underwent at the time. Nature isn't wasteful.
Oh, absolutely. It was never intended to be. It is nothing but a measure of best-case-scenario, where it would work just fine if every moral agent granted himself the same maxim, that is, subjective principle, from which the imperative arises. But the chances of that, sufficient to make meaningfully reciprocity, is slim and non-existent. We’re just too individually different in our mutual congruencies. The imperative reduces to......be-the-best-I-can-be, and may the rest of y’all live with it.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Correct, on the first, the particular moral problems of a bygone era may no longer be pertinent.
But, in the second, if it be granted that humans have not evolved, in the truest sense of the concept, one iota since, how we handle our own moral problems hasn’t changed. We still love and hate, give and take, think and feel, are inclined or persuaded, need and want, just the same, even if the objects of all those have changed, some quite considerably. Hence, a worthy moral philosophy address the handling of problems no matter what they are, which makes the time of them, moot.
And theoretically, as soon as one adopts a moral philosophy, he should be well-enough armed by it, to accommodate moral dilemmas of any era. But that can never be shown to be the case, so we are not realistically allowed to use that possibility for our current justifications. As you say, environmental circumstance contributes significantly to moral dispositions from being members of a community, if not innate moral constitutions from being an individual (100% physical!!!!) rational subject.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
A rule is contingent, as you say, but a law cannot be contingent because it is subsumed under a necessary principle. By admitting to a contingent moral rule, law is forsaken, but quantifying the rule with “never” this or “never” that, which broke no exception elst would not qualify as “never”, admits to no contingency whatsoever. In effect, you’ve possessed the rule and the law with the same power, which is contradictory.
Minor point in itself, but nonetheless sets the ground for a possibility of moral philosophy predicated on law, insofar as if there are conditions which abide no contingency whatsoever, giving your moral rule some real teeth, then we have a moral philosophy operable under any empirical happenstance, including those “unreal and nonsensical scenarios” you mentioned.
Just sayin’......
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
This reflects back to my assertion that understanding is the first conscious activity. With that, if I know myself, I already understand how I acquired that knowledge. In other words, for any “I know what to do about this”, or “I know what I think about that”, the understanding of this or that is already given. Assuming intellectual honesty and integrity, of course. Assuming I’m not kidding myself, or merely wishfully knowing or thinking. Or trying to impress, which in days loooooonnnng gone, might have been the case. (sigh)
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yeah, that damn freedom thing. First of all, one don’t choose what to do with freedom, in the proper deontological moral philosophy. Freedom is its own thing, it’s there, but you don’t technically do anything with it. Which is why “free will” is a conceptual abomination. (Shrug)
With that out of the way, such an abstraction can never be more than a logical necessity, never susceptible to empirical proofs. Anything that abstract can only be something to believe in, or, grant the validity for. If one grants it validity, it doesn’t beg the question, but because the concept has no real ground other than a logic one may have no solid reason to accept, it does beg the question.
And here is where your non-metaphysical inclination draws its power: that which is accepted merely for what is inferred from it, and has no possibility of sustainable viability except that, shouldn’t have any value. Its only theoretical accomplishment is to terminate rational infinite regress, being said to make the necessarily autonomous human will, possible.
Bring your own salt.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
My turn: not sure what you mean. A priori knowledge is absolutely necessary for exposition of a credible moral philosophy, but your “natural morality” doesn’t incorporate a theory, but a post hoc behaviorism. I think. Right?
Returning to your opening salvo, “a priori moral rules and moral objectivity are redundant at best, inaccurate always, and damaging at worst”, I might be inclined to agree a priori moral rules being not so necessary, certainly not accurate, but only because the a priori rules I do agree with, don’t relate to morality, but to the human cognitive system in general.
One of my favorite principles: philosophy is the science of splitting hairs.
Next.....
Quoting SophistiCat
I'm not sure if you're taking from this that nature has somehow given us some knowledge of the rule. But what I hope is evident is that this is absolutely unnecessary. You and I as people with ideas of moral imperatives and (incomplete) knowledge of evolutionary biology can look upon the drives toward empathy, altruism, and intolerance of antisocial behaviour and say they conform to a general rule: do not suffer hypocrites. It shouldn't be implied that this is elementary or that we need be in any way cognisant of it. That's the grand trick with evolution: it makes us do the "right" thing without needing us to know why (blink to clear eyes, shiver to warm up, vomit to expel toxins, etc.) And it can make us do so in many, more fundamental ways. Empathy seems a strong example of that. At root it is not one thing, and at origin it has nothing to do with kindness.
The project of my OP was not to find natural reasons to innate or mysterious knowledge, but to attempt to show that any such thing is unnecessary. I perhaps, in the edit, switched between the biological foundations of morality and how we think of their effects too suddenly.
This is an entirely subjective belief.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Another entirely subjective belief.
So you really are ignoring the is/ought divide. You’re giving a great explanation of what is, why people behave the way we do. And your implicit assumptions about what is or isn’t good fit well enough with my (and I expect many here’s) views on that topic. But your description of what inclined us to do those good things doesn’t address the question of whether they actually are good and why or why not.
If you just mean we cannot objectively prove whether or not there is anything objective to prove, then sure. But we cannot help but act on a tacit assumption one way or the other. If we assume there is nothing objective, then should we be wrong about that (we did merely assume it after all), we will never find out what it is that is actually objective, or even get approximate that. If on the other hand we assume that there is something objective, then we still might be wrong about that, but if we are wrong, we’re no worse off than otherwise, and if we’re not wrong, then we stand a chance of at least approaching an answer to what that objective thing might or might not be.
So which do you choose, assume it’s hopeless and give up completely, or assume there’s some hope out there and at least try to find it?
Sometimes, sure. My feeling is that people who hang around train tracks in groups get what's coming to them :naughty: Moral conundrums like this are useful, I agree. They allow the individual to better understand where they stand and discuss their position with others and maybe be convinced otherwise or convince others otherwise (part of socialisation). But they tend to be cast in terms of moral imperatives, at which point they become make-believe again imo.
Quoting Mww
For sure. Any such person is either attempting to get more out of society than they put in (e.g. freeloaders, presumably not traditionally welcomed) or else is ripe for exploitation. (Hypocrisy can go to the other end of the selfish-selfless spectrum too, and we would not say such people were immoral, quite the opposite. We would think there was something wrong with them though, and, in prehistoric times, nature would have weeded them out. Their rarity makes sense.)
As for he must, I beg not. Unless you mean "inaction is an action", in which case that's true enough, but not due to moral considerations.
Quoting Mww
The other problem is that they tend to focus on individual scenarios, whereas, since we cannot act on all situations, it is always reasonable to walk away from a particular one. If there were true moral compulsion, we would be exhausted to death. We can obviously ponder how we'd act if so inclined (in the mood, not in a rush, without a personal care, etc.), but any judgement based on perceived obligation is very wrong to me. Again, the artifice of the question creates the wrong impression.
Quoting Mww
There certainly are: a society of mostly antisocial actors being one. But it is usually not the scenario that is at fault so much as the question around it. Whether I flip the switch or walk away is up to me: it is a freedom, not an ought. I can rationalise which is best if I have time, but there isn't a wrong answer.
Quoting Mww
Yes, I think that's going to be my motto, isn't it: it's like morality, but not. I'd say our social apparatus if anything is on surer footing. That, together with socialisation... it's enough like a moral constitution for me.
This is a logical non-sequitor. One can still investigate what might exist even without assuming objective existence. And even if one does assume that something objective does exist this doesn't mean one can also determine unequivocally what it is that does exist.
Cultural conditioning is a broad and difficult topic, not like I'm an expert, but I would basically argue that the human mind radically acclimates to what it is familiar with, recalibrating in novel situations until behavior is appropriately effective. A few issues:
Bad examples provided by media, combative communities, badly run organizations and elsewhere leading to antisocial behavioral inclinations.
Situations where biochemistry changes such that individuals are put into drastic disalignment with their social environments, such as a failing marriage, not infrequently with drug abuse, etc.
Societies, classes and subcultures that have intrinsically (but perhaps not irremediably) incompatible or antagonistic standards and principles.
Institutional frameworks susceptible to blowing themselves up or becoming so corrupt that ethical standards and real community solidarity are impossible.
If you've got the solutions, I've got a million bucks!
Without explicitly saying so sure. But if one were to assume otherwise, then there would be no point to doing such an investigation. To the tacit assumption implied by doing the investigation is that there is some answer or another to be found.
Quoting A Seagull
True, hence the rest of the principles, being open to all the options until some are foreclosed, and how to reach agreement on which are actually foreclosed.
Society of monks, hermits, or peoples who otherwise avoid eachother for whatever reason. Or perhaps, the go to example, a society of open slavery are examples of a society engaging in antisocial or otherwise subhuman/dehumanizing behaviors are they not?
Fantasy becomes reality all the time. An early society of homogeneous peoples discussing the idea of "other people just like us but different" somewhere in the universe. Traveling the ocean. Space travel. Instant communication between peoples halfway around the world. Too many to list. You're using a floor as a ceiling by reducing the idea of society or reality-inducing change as "fantasy" in order to preserve belief.
That's a really nicely written piece. I agree with a substantial portion of what you say, but agreement is boring so...
I'm not so sure that you can move as smoothly as you do from the biological description of empathetic pain to the non-hypocritical maxim of the new globalised society we find ourselves in. That pain has not gone away, and I don't think it can be as easily cast aside - socialisation can dictate behaviours, but it is less successful in undermining physiological processes. No matter what level of socialisation determines that priests behave celibate, nothing can fully eradicate their desire for intimacy because it's more physiological. The pain of others is still a cause of affective pain in those with even limited empathy (see Tania Singer's work), so I don't think you can so easily escape from the physiological consequences of ignoring the pain of others just by believing others morally justified in ignoring yours.
I believe, instead, what happens in a globalised society is that we construct flexible and overlapping 'virtual' small-groups, and it is these we use to to determine valuation. Studies showing 'parochial altruism' (the tendency to be altruistic to in-groups than out-groups are notoriously conflicting and one possible explanation is that these groups are not fixed in modern society (not even from moment to moment). So what's happening is that we're using the very same moral decision-making approaches you list in your first half, unaltered. What's changing is the determination of in-group and out-group which is now highly flexible and circumstantial. Evidence for this comes from studies of how people assess the degree of pain they are prepared to tolerate to help alleviate the pain of others (again, mostly Tania Singer's work at UCL). Most decisions seem to have to traverse the nucleus accumbens which is involved in evaluating the status of others, and the degree of activation in that area is correlated with signs on in-group membership (the more obviously in-group, the less activity).
If this statement referred only to your own instantaneous "hedonic experience" then depending on details your theory might be something like emotivism (or a tautology.) But your theory involves some kind of integration over the experiences of all people in all circumstances. At which point those experiences become data and you are squarely in the is-ought transmutation business.
On the contrary, we are built for it. Obviously we cannot have reciprocity -- an outcome -- in our DNA, but we evolved to each be altruistic in an environment where, each being similarly altruistic, altruism would very likely be reciprocated.
Quoting Mww
I think it's changed completely and irrevocably. We are built for reciprocity, but not for strangers or people apt to see things very differently to us. Nor are we built for the sheer scale of opportunities for altruism we are confronted with. We weren't built to handle this many people, let alone this many strangers.
Quoting Mww
It's worth reiterating that such drives do not constitute a moral philosophy. In their natural environment, there's no philosophy to be done. Even our socialisations would, while evolving themselves, likely have been uniform and with unknown justifications. Moral philosophy starts when our social biology no longer fits our environment.
Quoting Mww
Good. Then if it can be shown that you don't, the assertion is shown to be false, surely. I think that this sort of thinking derives from a time when we knew that some things we do automatically benefit us, i.e. appear to be intended to help us, but whose triggers we could not explain. They are pre-Darwin ideas and, as such, it is completely understandable that some kind of forgotten understanding must have made us, say, feel fear when we are in a strange place in the dark. What we have learned scientifically since is that no such understanding is required by us. Instead it needed to be the case in the past that a certain behaviour is a) statistically beneficial for survival and b) within our genetic space.
We are then in a possible position of rationalising why we behave the way we do and, being not consistently or not only rational creatures, rather than say "It is unknown, let's postpone judgement," we invent, and, on a bad day, invent gods.
Quoting Mww
In the existential sense, and it was existentialism I was comparing our post-social situation to, freedom is a lack of "ought". It is in the sense that any choice we make, giving that freedom, is absurd by virtue of the fact that our freedom cannot justify one action over another (Kierkegaard), and in the sense that the necessity to perform that absurdity it is a symptom of human beings beings incompatible with their environment (Camus).
Quoting Mww
This feels like metaphysics justifying metaphysics once again. I believe the OP is consistent with the polar opposite interpretation: that this need never enter our reason at any point to show its truth, and that any logic derived from it is likely to be based on inaccurate assumptions about it. Square peg, round hole.
Quoting Mww
I just meant this:
Quoting Mww
In terms of discerning my and Pfhorrest's views, which seem to have comparable outputs, I'll contrast and compare Pfhorrest's breakdown of his philosophy with my biological treatment.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Humans are ultrasocial animals built for empathy, altruism, and intolerance toward antisocial behaviour. Such drives are social -- beneficial for the social groups existing at the time of our making -- but we do naturally not know their purpose. These drives compete with selfish drives (sometimes the same mechanical processes), giving us a degree of freedom to behave on the selfish-selfless spectrum according to which drives win out. Socialisation is a means of creating uniformity out of that freedom. For a given individual with a given socialisation, there are some things that are the correct thing to believe, others that are incorrect, and most things will not have been considered.
Quoting Pfhorrest
We are statistically biased toward doing what is right for the social group without necessarily making or having any kind of belief system about it. Hypocrisy is not shown through rationalism, and need not be shown through actually causing harm, though that will do it. Stimuli for empathetic responses can be hypothetical (e.g. reading a novel) for instance. Naturally, to commit an antisocial act is to place ourselves outside of the social group with all that that encompasses. Socialisations may spontaneously or by devising favour certain behaviours to certain groups over certain other behaviours to certain other groups. Devised socialisations are effective at making something "bad" (antisocial or hypocritical) appear "good" or, at least, efficacious. Our natural social biology without any guiding or corrupting belief system would tend us toward what is good for our social group (genetic "good").
Liberty comes afterwards, after constraint. Natural social drives are not strictly constraining, merely biasing toward survival (genetic "good"). However, those drives are numerous and acting against them has severe consequences, which is a lesser constraint, if we cannot subdue them. To what extent our social drives compete with our presocial ones is part nature, part nurture, the nurture part being our socialisation, for which we are biologically equipped for. Socialisations are more constraining and more arbitrary, although one must assume on grounds of natural selection that, at some point, they were a good fit for our social apparatus. Socialisations can have the form of belief systems without the necessity of an elementary belief.
Quoting Pfhorrest
All beliefs (socialisations) are arbitrary but some conflict with our social biology, i.e. are antisocial and most will conflict with other people's socialisations. Since both are arbitrary, so long as neither are hypocritical, both may be equally valid for an ultrasocial animal.
Quoting Pfhorrest
:100:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
By "morality" do you also mean norms & principles as well as conduct? Isn't "cannot have top-down rules" a top-down rule?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This caricature certainly doesn't apply to what's called 'virtue ethics' (i.e. eudaimonism) from the Hellenes through the (neo)Thomists down to moderns like Spinoza ... G.E.M. Anscombe, Alasdair McIntyre, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Owen Flanagan, et al.
Current moral philosophies informed by moral psychology (+ cognitive sciences, social psychology, human ecology (systems paradigm), etc) has in recent decades moved away from 'friction-free' non-natural/non-empirical inquiry.
Well, the first & last are features not bugs: "existentialism" is just Kierkegaardian 'subjective idealism' (i.e. decisionist fideism), which is just coin-flipping (à la "Two-Face" or "Anton Chighur"), and "relativism", in so far as it's a truth-claim (negative or positive) is self-refuting; solid grounds to excise them from ethics.
If by "pluralism" you mean multiple, situated, ways of applying moral judgments, whichever other sins they're guilty of, Pragmat(ic)ism, Utilitarianism, Consequentialism & Virtue Ethics do not, in the main, "deny ... pluralism".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Agreed. We're an eusocial species as a rule so to speak.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Disembodied, non-ecological cognition? Solipsistic fallacy (if it ain't, it should be). More Berkeley, I guess, than Kierkegaard?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Natural. Selection. Shake-n-bake variation by descent sans teleology.
Exhibit 1: the 3+ billion year old fossil record.
Exhibit 2: nucleogenesis and planetary systems formations.
Exhibit 3: "junk DNA", spandrel traits, etc.
Exhibit 4: cosmic expansion (towards) thermodynamic equilibrum or maximum disorder (heat death) --> heat itself.
Etcetera ...
(I might need to come back and clean up some of my "waste".)
I'm not sure I'd even go that far. Nature, in a way, has declared them "good" in the good-for-the-society-therefore-good-for-you sense. Natural selection is a wonderful optimisation algorithm and we should probably take it seriously except, as I said, we are no longer fit for our environment, so we also need to see its limitations.
The distinction I prefer is social/antisocial. The hypocrisy of the presocial behaviour of an ultrasocial animal in a social group is antisocial behaviour proper. We are not meant to tolerate it. It is a rule insofar as our social apparatus as a whole -- that which makes us social -- biases us toward it. It was presumably a good rule, insofar as it was selected for in an environment for which is was suited.
I did, perhaps regrettably, try and cast these things in terms of how a moral philosopher might see them, but that shouldn't put the cart before the horse. We should not take the rule as the foundation; it is a character of the true foundation of our morality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I am rejecting it outright. I am saying it's a rationalisation based on ignorance that bears no resemblance to reality. If we still lived in small social groups, we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place. This conversation is a symptom of the fact that we have social apparatus honed for one environment but exist in another. If we still existed in small social groups, we would act out the good-for-the-group morality that we are built and conditioned for (assuming, rightly, that no small social group could develop an antisocal socialisation) without the necessity of an is/ought divide, and, had small social groups given rise to moral philosophers (which I maintain they could not), such moral philosophers would be as advised by our natural history that what is "good" is "good for the group".
I'll go further and say that, of those moral philosophers outside of our selected-for environment who nonetheless maintain a position consistent with living without hypocrisy, who stand by the golden rule, who would seek justice for victims and against the antisocial, are almost certain to have their definition of good overwhelmingly influenced by their biology and, should they seek to define the character of objective truths and a priori knowledge, will oblige themselves to do so according their biology. I am not attempting to show that everyone's idea of good is wrong, but rather that it is, at best, a redundant post hoc rationalisation.
:100:
Quoting Enrique
Or antisocial organisations themselves. A cigarette manufacturer, for instance, robs you blind, slowly kills you, and lies to you about it the whole time. Somehow this goes unpunished. A natural response might be to hang the manufacturers from lampposts and set fire to their factories, but even a heavily moderated action on this instinct would go severely punished. This tells us a lot about our law and about power. We of course did not hang cigarette manufacturers from lampposts or set fire to their factories, and obviously a lot of that has to do with self-preservation, knowing as we do that our actions would have unwanted consequences for us.
But I believe that a lot more of it has to do with our socialisation particularly with respect to law. The judicial consequences of retaliation are the stick, but you can teach a person, a group, a whole country on a statistical level, to have their own (even if unconscious) moral position on breaking the law, and that's much better than merely punishing people. (Compare to every protester in Hong Kong that knows they are likely to be arrested but does so anyway because they know what they are doing is right, or every black protester in the US now that knows that even black journalists will be arrested and/or assaulted, or every protester in the UK student protests who knew they would be physically assaulted and tortured but went anyway.)
Media and politicians in recent history (Fox News, Dubbya, Blair, et al) that tell us up is down, left is right, bad is good, good is bad, are clearly exploiting the fact that socialisation can move us along the selfish-selfless spectrum on the whole. But they are also doing so after an extremely long history of that socialisation process being seen as up for grabs. It is obvious to those more along the selfless end of the spectrum that this is happening; it is less clear how that framework came about. My instinct is to say power through violence. This seems to be the old school way of convincing people to socialise their children in a certain way. If you can get someone to travel hundreds of miles and risk their lives to kill a foreigner in the name of good 1000 years ago, it is perhaps a testament to our biological morality that a) the occasional Hitler is the worst we can do and b) we correct ourselves 1000 years later.
It's worth bearing in mind that, while people can be compelled to champion antisocial ideas and vote for politicians who will implement them, this is quite an abstract way of being antisocial. It's not like, on a statistical level, these people are going out and murdering each other, stealing from each other, etc. They are mostly pretty sociable people, and society coheres well enough. Those that do trample over everyone to benefit themselves, like cigarette manufacturers, are a small but powerful and protected minority.
An candidate popular antisocial position is to not act on climate change. This is tricky, because "the good of the group in 100 years" is not something that nature can select for in a gradual way. It might end up selecting for it in a catastrophic way if we carry on. I think this sort of morality does require rational thought, but the "good" is a rationalisation of our innate altruistic capacity.
Quoting Enrique
This is weaker territory, since the sorts of environments we have are not those that could have been selected for. It's not obviously a socialisation issue either, though one presumes its something that could be socialised for. It's not like the monthly cycle didn't exist when we lived in small social groups. We must've dealt with it somehow. *ducks*
Quoting Enrique
On the incompatible standards point, again I think this is unlikely to have happened when we lived in small groups, since small groups are unlikely to support diverse standards. But, yes, we now meet people with different socialisations on a daily basis, and our social instincts selected on the basis of the good of reciprocal altruism no longer meet their original (unknown to us) purpose.
As for antagonistic cultures, like far-right racist organisations and terrorist groups, they are at least under the impression they are acting for the good of the group they belong to. One of the most interesting experiments I've read on this is that such people are not generally less prone to neurological empathy responses toward out-groups. There is instead a competing counter-empathetic response. One can put this down to socialisation (raising a child to be a racist or a terrorist) so far, but tribalism is so common across animal species in their natural environments that some of these counter-empathetic responses surely have to be genetic in origin.
Quoting Enrique
You mean things like the protectionism of violent racist cops and Catholic paedophile priests? I'm not sure I completely agree. It is a credit to the majority that they are appalled, protest, and demand reforms. The Catholic church is a bit different insofar as Catholics themselves aren't meant to be critical of it, so you get a lot of apologism. Within that community, yes, that socialisation clearly has some corrupting effect, but again it's not like Catholics went "Okay, anything goes then" and all started buggering alter boys. Whether they wish to acknowledge it or not, they exceed the antisocial standards of their leaders.
And I think that is probably most often the case because psychopaths to positions of power are like moths to a candle. The majority of us are much more social, even if we don't know how to positively use that sociality, at least in a rigid way. The instinct of a cardinal to protect a paedophile priest is obviously strong, but he's just one jerk in a stupid hat. The instinct of the majority is to not tolerate it, so something of our social nature must be withstanding the onslaught of bad memes.
Quoting Enrique
Okay, let me just see if I can find someone to provide solutions for up to $900,000 and I'll get back to you :rofl:
Re-reading my response to you I noticed two things. First, shit that sounded terse! Sorry, I was distracted and should have responded when I could give you the attention your reply deserved. Second, for likely the same reasons, I'm not sure I took from your point what you intended. Do correct me if there was a disjoint.
Hermits are properly solitary animals, yes, so by definition you cannot have a society of hermits: any social aspect is the extent to which they are not solitary. There are btw social-but-solitary animals within the subsocial animals.
You can have a society of monks. I am pretty sure they live together, work together, feed together and would help one another if needed. They might not be chatty, but neither were our ancestors.
Can you have a society of mostly slave owners and slave traders? I would say not. I think your rationale is that slave owners behave antisocially toward their slaves but, while it pains me to use the phrase "in defence of slave owners", in defence of slave owners they would not have thought of slaves as being inside their social group. Emancipation was part of the on-going process of extending empathy and altruism via legal rights to more and more people, an ultrasocial (i.e. human) response to the replacement of small social groups with a world-of-strangers.
So, yes, I agree that slavery was an antisocial behaviour, to the extent that it appealed only to the pre-social instincts of slave owners and traders and jettisoned that which makes us human. Slavers and slaver owners were, I believe, behaved as subhuman animals. But society was not largely comprised of slave owners, but of people who either did or did not tolerate them.
I think this is problematical. Humans are plainly - empirically, even - different to any other animal, in terms of their capabilities, intellectual and otherwise, and certainly in terms of self-awareness. And that's both a blessing and a curse - a blessing in that self-awareness, combined with language and the ability to seek meaning, opens horizons of being that are simply not available to animals. And a curse, in that we can contemplate the meaning of our existence and our death.
(Actually this point was made by Alfred Russel Wallace in his essay Darwinism Applied to Man, although it's generally accepted that this was Wallace the quaint Victorian spiritualist rather than Wallace, co-discovered of natural selection.)
That said, I think your approach makes sense as a code of civil ethics (and is also terrifically well-written) but really it falls under the heading of utilitarian ethics, doesn't it? Greatest good for the greatest number? Or the best set of principles for the cultural situation we live under? Nothing intrinsically the matter with that, but clearly those who accept, as Wittgenstein said, that ethics is transcendental, will not be inclined to settle for it.
Cheers Isaac! Yeah, kick it in its vulnerable parts, that's the right way.
Quoting Isaac
Overall, yes, I agree, and did not mean to suggest otherwise. It seems quite clear that you can raise animosity toward certain people, and it is experimentally evident that this subdues our natural empathetic behavioural responses, even if it does not seem to subdue our initial empathetic neurological response. So to that extent, socialisation can be perverted to make us do antisocial things. But you're right that we still have those capacities and drives, so we cannot statistically be antisocial. We are biased toward altruism, and that bias has to be compensated for to make us selfish.
And I think this wins out in the history of our cultures. Conservativism relies on violence to stop itself from losing ground, as we see now in Hong Kong and in the protectionism of the US police forces, without which the trend always seems to be to extend our altruism to an ever widening diversity of strangers.
I think that introducing new out-groups has a catastrophic quality. Because we clearly can't have traditionally had overriding empathetic responses to strangers (the suggested counter-empathetic responses to out-group members), and because we cannot have reigning socialisations that bias us one way or another to specific new out-groups (although we can have blanket positions on general ones), powerful nations have historically not treated new peoples humanely... at first. Those few who seem always inclined to exploit new out-groups tend to get in there while we have no substantial moral position on the matter. But exposure to these injustices always seems to incline us toward ending them rather than adopting them as good-for-us, which, and in this I agree 100% with you, is a testament to the robustness of our humanity (our ultrasociality) on a statistical level.
Being a statistical phenomenon, it is prone to its peaks and troughs, it's Martin Luther King Jr.s and its Hitlers. But we don't seem to be winning the war on the ideological perversion of our social capacities by powerful minorities very quickly, which itself is a testimony to the power of socialisation. Hopefully this too is just a weird fluke, but given the lifespan of archaic memes, I fear not.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, absolutely, but the important point is:
Quoting Isaac
I have a friend, we'll call him Alex, who has a friend, we'll call him Bob, who is very Nigel Farage (I'm British) and constantly posts nationalistic ass-hattery on social media, a lot of it about Polish people. He has a good Polish friend, call him Cris. How does Bob rationalise this? "I don't mean you, mate, it's everyone else." This is an excellent working example, because there are many virtual social groups in play. There are Bob's actual friends (including Cris), then there is his social media group, then there are his political affiliations and associates, and they conflict with one another. He is losing actual friends (including Alex who has distanced himself) via social media because of his political affiliations. The inconsistency is a clear sign of hypocrisy: Bob would not agree to the persecution of Cris, but agrees with the persecution of Polish people. This, I would say, is typically antisocial.
But yes other people might be more consistent across their virtual groups. However, I do question whether, when one's virtual social groups geographically encompass the world, one can actually maintain e.g. racist or nationalistic viewpoints without hypocrisy. It seems to me that out-groupism was on its surest footing back when social groups were small and other groups were largely existential threats. In-groups do not typically suffer existential threat from out-groups, whatever lies they may tell. It also seems to me that those who exploit our unpreparedness for dealing with new out-groups (as in slavery), or raise our animosity against existing ones (e.g. Hitler), in any other way tend to comprise a minority of powerful psychopaths.
Part of the obvious wooliness in this part of my OP comes from lack of space, because this is such an expansive and complex topic, part from my own ignorance, and part probably from the ignorance even of our most knowledgeable experts. What would, say, American white-black relations have been like if more representative people, who had not inherited racist or slavery-affirming socialisations, had mediated them from the start? This starts off looking like a simple question that suggests that maybe if power wasn't so concentrated always among psychopathic opportunists, things might have been better. But of course slavery had been accepted as natural since the middle ages, in no small part thanks to religion, and in no small part thanks to its legal status, so its still likely that even normal people might have gone the same route.
My feeling is that, whatever initial difficulties there might have been in encountering new out-groups, in the absence of socialisations that push us toward pre-social behaviours and suspend our social capacities, and in the absence of a credible existential threat from such out-groups, our natural altruism would tend toward inclusivity. The main evidence I see for this is that, despite everything that powerful psychopaths have tried to pass off as fair game, and despite the methods of socialisation obviously employed to pass them off as good, we have always tended toward inclusivity as the geographical boundaries of our social groups have expanded.
1.) Quoting Kenosha Kid
2.) Quoting Kenosha Kid
1a.) Ultrasocial can be attributed to over-population and/or economic dictates, which implies adaptability and/or small-scale tactical necessity, rather than an evolutionary progression. That we are social animals is sufficient.
2a.) Decisions grounded in those heritable capacities denote compatibility, rather than morality.
3a.) Granted, insofar as 1.) and 2.) are more related to consequentialist ethics, a psychological domain with respect to some arbitrary conduct in general, rather than moral determinism, a purely metaphysical domain with respect to innate human qualities under which mere capacity is subsumed, which first generates, then judges, what the specific conduct will be.
Acceptable?
————-
Square Two:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
How in the Holy Dickens can you reconcile these two assertions? Now, given that your “such understanding” relates to my “understanding is the first conscious activity”, you still have to demonstrate that the understanding we still use to assess threats, isn’t the same understanding science has shown we no longer require. “Negotiations of subsocial and social animals” leaves out “ultrasocial” animals, sure, but “ultrasocial”, being an extravagance anyway, if nothing else, puts understanding right back in the picture, by your own admission. Which is a good thing, because no otherwise rational or moral agent is going to function properly without it.
The problem is, of course, what you mean by understanding, such that we used to need it but now we don’t, and what I mean, such that it is absolutely needed, always. That is to say, understanding the benefit of staying clear of Sabre-tooth cats and warlords is exactly the same as understanding the benefit of staying clear of dump trucks and panhandlers.
Acceptable?
———-
Square Three, for Tic-Tac-Toe and the win:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Prison.
TA-DAAAA!!!!
Thanks a lot! You were the first member I followed on here, so it means a lot.
Quoting 180 Proof
Cannot "support" might be better phrasing. It is outside the capability of natural selection to implement such top-down rules, so even the top-down rule "No top-rules!" cannot be a natural rule. It's just a description of natural limitations.
Quoting 180 Proof
In terms of social altruism, sure, and of course the existentialists who defied such oughts long before my parents were born. The eudaimonists are still concerned with "oughts" though. They are in the same situation of having moral capacity unsuited to their environments, they just come up with different answers. Within the scope of what is salvaged from our sociality, I'd vouch for them. It seems at least as justifiable to me to act to increase personal well-being, so long as it is not at the expense of others, than it is to concern oneself principally with others. The divorcement of good-for-self and good-for-the-group cannot justify one over the other. Extending that to antisocial behaviour that is good for personal well-being at the expense of others, well, it's no longer your personal well-being when you have not only have the others to contend with but the empathetic masses who you have hurt via them. Provided you have sufficient power, e.g. sufficient legal protection or maybe a small army to protect you from the consequences of the harm you do in the name of personal fulfilment, you'll be okay. For a while anyway.
Quoting 180 Proof
See:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting 180 Proof
I think this is where the OP differs from quite a few of the more metaphysically-minded, and by design. It is not necessary for relativism to justify relativism, i.e. it need not be an elementary moral theory. In fact that's the point: no moral theory will be both elementary and true. Relativism is a default of a naturalistic depiction of morality that observes that our moral drives and capacities cannot be exhaustively or accurately fulfilled in the environment they now exist in (existentialism), and that, beyond the existence of these drives and capacities, there is no natural justification for one schema of how and when one act above another.
Small social groups cannot maintain diverse social mores, and so the origins of relativism lie in the non-overlapping memetic histories (to whatever extent they might have been less uniform) of disparate social groups. Large social groups, or large networks of virtual social groups, comprised of modern equivalents of social groups, clearly do maintain diverse social standards. Some can be dismissed on antisocial grounds, i.e. the politics of subhuman animals. Some can be dismissed on practical grounds (e.g. most deontolies, such as Kant's notion of duty, and probably all consequentialisms). Between those, a lot of moral philosophies can exist that are practical, socially consistent, and different. Our nature cannot tell us which to choose (because our nature is unaware of our circumstances) and I argue that, since our morality derives from natural selection of social drives and capacities, no fucker else can either. Relativism then is a description of nature, including in unnatural environments, not an ab initio theory.
Quoting 180 Proof
I was thinking more of the French existentialists. Kierkegaard had higher, and in my view imaginary, authorities. French existentialism is ethically solipsistic to an extent, and in some ways terminally so: no sooner do existentialists announce freedom, they try and find an "ought" (God, overcoming, communism, personal experience) to fill the void. I'm hoping to avoid the same mistake here. I can vouchsafe someone's freedom to behave antisocially, to be inhuman. It is possible and that can't be pre-moderated by others. I just can't vouchsafe their personal safety from the empathetic masses afterwards. Unfortunately, others can.
Quoting 180 Proof
I disagree with the shake-n-bake analogy; I think it very inaccurate. Natural selection is not simply a random searching of genetic space. That is just mutation and combination, and even that is heavily constrained. Natural selection is much more: it is an optimisation algorithm that minimises a cost within that space of function without it. One needs noise (mutation) for it to find non-local optima and one needs a means of exploring combinations of parameters to move along the space, but the power, both explanatory and in terms of building complexity, is really in eliminating the unfit via competition for resources, which is definitively not random.
Damn. You drew me into the natural selection debate and I said I was not going there. :scream:
I think you may have a different definition of ulrasocial going on. I meant it in the typical neuroscientific sense of ultracooperative social groups, such as in Neurosciences in the Human Person by Battro et al, rather than later e.g. agricultural or technological solutions to living. These are understood in terms of evolutionary biology and psychology.
Quoting Mww
If you are saying that natural capacities for empathy and altruism have nothing to do with morality, I would have to disagree strongly. If you are disputing that these natural capacities are identical with any metaphysical idea of morality, yes, hopefully, because I believe one is real and one is not.
Quoting Mww
Not sure what you mean. From the imagined perspective of natural selection as a designer, yes, our natural more apparatus developed because it gave us greater odds at survival. But our moral apparatus is as unaware of its origin as our ancestors were. It is not a consequentialist philosophy of human beings. It is biology as a consequence of natural selection. Is that what you mean?
Quoting Mww
I'm struggling to see where the apparent contradiction could lie. The first refers to the understanding of another's likely perspective or feelings given to us by our empathetic apparatus. The second refers to an understanding of how that apparatus did it and why. Again, I can use a TV without knowing how it works. Likewise I can "use" empathy and gain insight, without knowing how or why it works.
Quoting Mww
The "understanding" of the danger of sabre-tooth tigers, as well as of spiders, rodents, and other pests, the dark, the unusual, the sheer, etc. was also selected for. We don't really understand why a spider is to be feared, especially when it is evidently unscary ("It's more scared of us than you are of it!"). Unfortunately our ancestors had better reason to be scared of spiders and apparently weren't scared enough.
It's the rationalism trap again, big-R Rationalism as @Pfhorrest corrected me: someone does something, therefore they must have worked out that that was the best thing to do using their reason alone and, if it was the wrong thing, they made a rational error. In reality, if your ancestor had attempted this in the face of an oncoming sabre-tooth tiger, you almost certainly wouldn't have been born because rational thought is slow while pattern recognition and rules of thumb are fast. Meanwhile, thanks to my ancestor having the wisdom to mate with a flight creature, I wouldn't have anyone to talk to about this :( There was an excellent survival reason why your ancestor legged it, but that wasn't your ancestor doing the deciding, that was natural selection.
The important difference between what you’re picturing and what I’m actually saying is that on my account we are not merely to base moral reasoning on people’s self-descriptions of their hedonism experiences. Just like we don’t base science on people’s self-descriptions of their empirical experiences, but rather we replicate those circumstances first-hand for ourselves and see if we ourselves experience the same thing. Likewise on my account of morality, we are to replicate others’ hedonic “observations” to confirm for ourselves that it actually does seem bad. So we’re never starting with a description and getting to a prescriptive conclusion. We’re always starting with a prescriptivists experience (an experience of something seeming good or bad), and getting to a prescriptive conclusion.
Of course even in science we don’t all always replicate every observation everyone reports (apparently there’s a bit of a crisis of nobody doing nearby enough replication), and I’m not suggesting we have to do that with mora reasoning either. But in the case of science, when we don’t replicate, we take the (descriptive) conclusion at its word, rather than taking a description of the empirical experiences someone had at someone‘s word and then coming to the same conclusion ourselves on the ground that someone has some experience. Likewise, if we don’t replicate a hedonic experience, we’re just taking the prescriptive conclusion of the person who had it at their word — trusting them that such-and-such does actually seem good or bad — and using that in our further moral reasoning. We’re never taking a description of an experience that someone had and reaching a prescriptive conclusion from it, and so not violating the is-ought gap. We’re just trusting someone’s prescriptive claim, and drawing further prescriptive conclusions from it; or else verifying that claim with our own prescriptive (hedonic) experiences and drawing prescriptive conclusions from them.
In that case you are not so much ignoring the is-ought divide, as just ignoring the ought side of it completely. You are only describing why certain behaviors did in fact contribute to the survival of our ancestors and consequently why we are in fact inclined to behave that way still, but you’re not giving any account at all of why it’s good to survive and so good that we behave in that way today.
You’re also overlooking that the same tacit “passing on your genes is good” premise hidden under all of this would justify many antisocial behaviors too. Genghis Khan did a lot of antisocial stuff, a bunch of murders and rapes, and his genes are all over the world population today because of that. So does that make rape and murder good, in the right context where you’ll get away with it and have lots of successful offspring? I suspect you’ll be inclined to say no, but while you’ve given an account of how rape and murder are antisocial and so what causes lots of people to condemn them, you haven’t given any reason (not cause, but reason) for you to condemn them in the case of Ghengis Khan, for whom they were quite a successful reproduction strategy.
As I said, I am not ignoring it: I am rejecting it completely.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, nor should I. You're looking for another, more fundamentally moral "good" so that we can say: "We agree with nature, it does happen to be morally good to survive." I can't think of anything more redundant. It's the other way around: we think altruism is good because it historically improved our chances of survival. We think it's good because we want it (a drive) and it makes us feel nice (a hit of oxytocin) and it benefited us (reciprocal altruism). Selection first, then rationalisation: that is the order I believe is correct.
You can, as we have discussed before, attempt to step outside of our biology and take the cosmic insignificance stance. There is nothing invalid about this. In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter if I kill a man for a loaf of bread and spend 20 years in prison for it and let down my family who end up on the street. However, I do exist within a society far more immediately than I exist within a cosmos. The cosmos does not cause me pain, for instance. So I shan't. Also, thanks to that biology again, I do not wish to.
Looking for a moral reason to follow one's biological impulses is like looking for consciousness in a neuron. At the scale where you find an underlying cause, there is no "ought" beyond a the outdated selection criterion of an unconscious natural process.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Competing selfish (pre-social) drives are covered in the OP, albeit briefly. Happy to delve into it more, as has been done in a number of responses in this thread already. I assure you I am not overlooking them.
Quoting Pfhorrest
As in good-for-me, yeah sure. But I'm not suggesting that our morality derived from good-for-me, rather from good-for-the-group, namely the biological capacities for altruism and empathy. Again, I'm not proposing that what's good for our genes is a foundation of a moral philosophy. I am proposing that we have moral philosophy because what's good-for-the-group is not actionable anymore.
As long as we're getting into some detail and wow, substantive thinking!, I'd be interested in your analysis of corruption, which ties in with the account of cultural conditioning necessary for any theory of ethics. I would claim that contemporary society is devolving into early antiquity's stage of civilization, an era where values were in turmoil and societies vulnerable to extreme inefficiencies or even collapse. Maybe this outlook is excessively doom and gloom, with the situation being less dire than I tend to surmise, but you guys tell me! The following is a somewhat lengthy summary of the perspective I have in mind. With this thread, I might actually have a chance of well-considered critical analysis.
The simple influence of concentrating into a large population can deeply explain why embarking upon civilization had such seachanging effect. In the quintessential hunter-gatherer village on the cusp of transitioning to a civilized way of life, perhaps consisting of about a hundred individuals as a rough estimate, all its members are living off surrounding countryside, hunting, gathering nuts and berries, with perhaps a bit of rudimentary crop-raising thrown into the mix. They live on self-subsistent surpluses that require the same type of tool-making and tool-use to sustain everyone in the tribe. There is some primordial division of labor, as a shaman may fabricate implements of spiritual significance and provide guidance in exchange for food supplies, a chief may also have his needs met by the rest of the group as a perk of leadership, but most households are engaging in almost the exact same essential behaviors, supporting their families by nearly identical means, and can usually function on their own just as well as in commerce with the collective barring competition with rival tribes and warring. As population increases, some families set out on their own and found a new village with approximately the same lifestyle a distance away.
Once humans closely packed into towns and cities, conditions were much different. The same amount of land had to support greatly enlarged populations, so almost full transition to larger scale production of farming occurred. In order for farming to keep up with a swelling quantity of residents, this profession needed to become more technological, requiring specialized tool-making by nonfarmers in town, and conversely necessitating that food producers devote the majority of their working life to tending the fields, altogether greatly reducing degree of self-subsistence. Agricultural food supplies are susceptible to changing seasons and climates, so although huge surpluses could sometimes be achieved, as in large amounts of grain and so on stored year round, sustenance of the population is impossible if crops fail, and at this juncture of development they inevitably would at some point. The first civilizations were putting all their eggs in one basket when it came to the food supply: if agriculture collapsed, specialized populations of high density did not simply hunt or gather instead nor pick up the whole operation and move to a new area, but either dispersed, calling it quits, or starved.
Between 10,000 and 6,000 B.C.E., most civilizations went through periods of at least temporary dissolution that were probably induced by mercurialities of long-term climate; this was especially true of the ancient Americas with their sometimes severe El Nino and La Nina effects. But by around 6,000 B.C.E., relatively stable growing seasons in numerous Old World regions well-watered by river systems, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and many parts of Europe, prolonged an advancement in farming and food distribution methods sufficient to permanently settle thousands of square miles.
Infrastructure and trade were indispensable for this full commitment to an agriculture-based lifestyle of specialization in large communities. At first, the erecting of integrated economies must have been quite local, an arrangement along the lines of Greek city states with their small satellite colonies, pockets of high population at strategic spots such as river basins or areas particularly defensible from attack. Some light trading probably took place along stretches of river, modest impetus for large-scale organization, but the key event in the move towards a globally enculturated antiquity was emergence of strong central authority, for it enabled civilizations to pool resources in service of massive engineering projects such as civic construction and man-made canals for irrigation or travel. Supremely powerful government was also more capable of securing vast, sprawling economies against inclement conditions - nomadic migrations, opportunistic invasions by rivals, regional food shortages, and so on - with enhanced military and commercial organization.
Though large-scale civic legislating offers some logistical advantages when suitably technologized, it originated with the obligation that populations give up their independence in order to seek, resist or capitulate to imperial conquering, and many of the first rulers and ruling classes considered themselves elites, committed to enforcing sovereign superiority over the general public. Popular psychologies that upheld this lopsided inequality across vast spans of time probably involve some subtle variety, but the basic conditioning factor in their persistence is elementary enough to conceive, for it similarly obtains in the contemporary age. A civilized society in which almost no citizens live a self-subsistent lifestyle depends on law and order for its very survival. If efficient distribution and protection of goods and resources is not possible due to inadequate military control or incompetent civic upkeep, famines, wars and so on are more threatening to the population's way of life, a greater vulnerability to natural cataclysms as well as violence from hostile cultures. Civilizations in perpetual political chaos, a state of uproar and unrest, will eventually be overrun by more unified outsiders as it is recognized that exploitative actions will not be capably resisted. Citizens also often consider cultural traditions sacred in some sense, with human minds in antiquity all the way up to the present day seeing a connection between viability of social structures and the will of deities or their declared representatives, so that fear of divine wrath or belief in spiritual mandate lead to consent for all but the most egregious, sacrilegious, immoral or traitorous oppressions. Thus, though no one likes to be herded around by pugnacious authority, individuals are usually agreeable to suppressing some level of disgruntlement in order to ward off potential for utter catastrophe.
In a large populace, various distinctly civilized dynamics take effect. Loss of self-sufficient living off of reliable surpluses in communal territories providing for each household’s equivalent way of life means that individuals are more susceptible to misfortune from changing natural and economic conditions. Citizens also simply differ more, as they are living divergent professional and personal lifestyles, often with unintegrated ancestry that introduces the further divisive effect of language barriers and variant manners, a partition of society into separate subcultures. Citizens sometimes lack common financial or cultural interest with many in their own or other neighborhoods, and may even be unable to engage in the most basic spoken communications. Materially, particular citizens matter less to sustenance of the community as a whole, with occupational roles quickly filled by someone new when practitioners are no longer able to render professional services, and large benefits often accrued by elimination of rival tradesmen from the economy. Value placed on individual lives diminishes in an overall milieu of less trust, empathy, and solidarity against community detriments such as poverty or abuse of power.
In antiquity, acquiescence of populations to rulers often involved a conspicuous absence of oversight by commoners, which contributed to a tendency for leadership to become corrupt, living large at the expense of subjects or mischievously manipulating public opinion for personal gain. But logistical crises inevitably happen, the most flagrant neglects of the public good tend to get exposed, and when citizenries become dissatisfied enough with the conduct of those in power to overthrow a government, opulence is practically helpless against popular revolt, especially if conditions grow so bad that even military discipline disintegrates. Exploitative unaccountability is a tough sell, and the earliest authorities stemmed the tide of opposition to their more or less unjust social status with immediate and extremely harsh measures designed to scare so-considered “rabble” into apprehensive obedience, usually nipping any inclination towards social disorder in the bud. Combined with general lessening of empathy in civic settings of anonymity, competition, and subcultural differentiation, the administering of punishment waxed more than a little insane.
Modernizing globalization had been in its preliminary stages during the Enlightenment 18th century, with most of the civilian world not yet technologized to the level of Europeanized societies, and even the main body of Europe’s population lacking access to higher education. A predominant upper class existed in every civilized culture, sustaining exclusivity as the most wealthy, learned, and politically powerful demographic, possessing a primary role in determining the course of culture. As economic advantage amongst the home territories and countries of Europe’s empires came to be seen as reliant on a populace optimally mobilized for technical competence, civic-minded humanism gained more traction with intellectuals. The rich began to realize their security depended on committing to some concessions for the sake of the general population’s well-being and satisfaction, leading to groundbreaking philosophies that promoted pursual of egalitarian institutions. This would stimulate transition towards more democratically representative systems, initially intended as a mechanism by which to uphold certain universal legal equalities so that political organization would better serve everyone’s interests, making civil unrest obsolete.
Despite the best efforts of enlightened thinkers, conflict erupted across the globe in the 19th and 20th centuries as lingering imperialism struggled to sustain a grip on rebellious locals, citizenries in Europe and elsewhere fought violent battles to overthrow the vestiges of autocratic rule, and economically or culturally oppressed demographics everywhere confronted persecution with civil disobedience and demonstration. The quest for egalitarianism had splintered into aristocracies and in some regions bourgeoisie also warring for sustainment of their way of life, a proletariat seeking to free itself from the chains of economic exploitation, and innumerable subcultures whose very survival was at stake.
In the early and mid 20th century, as population exploded and turmoil escalated in many locales, declining egalitarian idealism and rise of a survival of the fittest competitive principle, already well underway, broke through remnants of moral and political tradition, washing over the human race in a monstrous wave of devastating power plays. Fascist Germany quickly overran all of Europe and began to genocidally exterminate minority demographics in many countries. Imperial Japan severely subjugated the Chinese during its WW2 era occupation. After the war, the Stalinist Soviet Union executed many millions. China’s new communism governed its population with surpassing strictness. Corporate capitalism in the Western world became less obligated to promote social welfare and more engrossed in consolidating financial control with every passing year. By the beginning of the 21st century, commitment to progressive civic reform in the mold of both religious and secular enlightenment had been largely derailed, devolving into brazenly exploitative cultural imperialism.
In the contemporary world, finance only stokes the flames of a growing nihilism (in the Nietzschean sense) that is despoiling ethical tradition. Profit models utilized by large corporations judge success based on rate of fiscal growth, with exponential expansion in wealth being the quantitative standard of viability in a company’s business strategy, for it guarantees larger salaries amongst top officials, indicates a trend towards market dominance via monopoly, and allows investment in additional sectors of the economy, a diversification which insures conglomerates against commercial misfortune in any particular venture. Unfortunately, there are many aspects of society that are difficult to quantify and thus do not figure into profit assessments: quality of life, values of a culture, financial security of the general population, organizational integrity of political systems, and so on.
Neglect of more intangible factors that contribute to a society’s health has pushed some parts of the world way beyond what unadulterated, long-standing traditions permitted even a couple generations ago. Shameless greed and general acquisitiveness are much more prevalent in populations than they used to be as corporate leadership spars for hegemony, and ordinary individuals fight to remain solvent in an environment where money is sucked out of their pockets at maximal levels by manipulation of the market. Transmission of memes has lost all sense of overall ethical purpose, usually mimicking the vitiated nature of advertising and character portrayals in corporate media, a shallowness, subversiveness and rapid-fire contradictoriness. Imagery and related behavioral mimesis in many cultures is much more gratuitously violent and sexual than it used to be, which desensitizes citizens to exploitation. The empathetic dimension of ethical responsibility is degenerating due to desensitization, and its rational dimension rarely matures as inducement of superficial decision-making proves most effective in stimulating consumption. Individuals are less concerned with cogent political discourse and vigilant about the ideological direction of their countries, political systems radicalize as they are infused with a market-driven bankrupting of values, pushing much of the modernized world towards invasive, exploitative authoritarianism within largely acquiescent populations.
In the United States, monopolizing in the private business domain is expropriating many of the country’s institutions in order to consolidate financial control and maximize profit. The most sobering factor in this contemporary capitalism is its intersection with media and democracy. Whatever suspect, probably self-defeating economic thrust is being made, media seems to be one of the main vehicles, with mechanisms of publicity often devoted to the purpose of producing an illusion that unifying mass movements are taking place, most likely deflecting attention of some demographics away from declines in wealth, security, freedom and quality of life. Democracy has largely been assimilated into this circus of hype, so that political discourse is becoming more civically incompetent, endless jabbering about manufactured scandals that have no connection with what is really going on in the world. Decadence of official information has become so dire that it is impossible to discern from traditional communications mediums such as news, T.V. shows, big budget internet websites and so on what exactly the status of the social system is. A network of independent publicity consisting in personal postings such as blogs, messaging and video is rapidly coalescing as a replacement for exploitatively compromised popular culture, but this format is extremely disorganized, so diverse that the overall course being set is almost incoherent, making it to this point only marginally capable of countering imperialistic finance.
Deterioration of the American value system, economic hardship hitting the majority increasingly hard, and rampant disinformation have worsened some long-standing institutional issues in the country. The justice system has always been liable to discriminate against the poor and especially minority ethnicities, with these demographics the most arrested, falsely convicted and harshly punished, while the financially well off have better legal representation and are more apt to obtain lenience. Health care is of exorbitant cost in the U.S., requiring similarly expensive insurance that usually must be paid for as a perk of employment at the top-tier companies, so-called “benefits”. This makes medical treatment prohibitive for a large proportion of the citizenry, ruling out preventative care that would mitigate incidence of many life-threatening illnesses commonly associated with aging, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The country is quite multicultural, and tensions between those of very different background can occur in many areas. These hot button issues have been inflamed by a less civic-minded lifestyle with accompanying disintegration towards “fend for yourself” and “take care of your own” social mores, exploding into greater divisiveness along class and racial lines, a subcultural isolationism which foments bullying, crime, hostility towards immigrants, political factionalism, smeared reputations, and prejudicial profiling along with stereotype-based accusations, all placing great strain on law and order as well as applying pressure to subvert or dismantle basic legal equality as the working standard for society’s progress.
If this is an accurate assessment, the species' prehistoric instinctuality is almost negligible to the fate of civilization, and our increasing, declining or lack of capacity to reason in mutualizing ways has become the core factor in moral incentive and agency, a situation that education might be able to deeply influence. We are considerate of those around us on a large scale when our intellects manage to convince us it is beneficial and motivate us, especially with regards to long-term decision making. Modern society is trending towards conditions within which collaborative progressiveness seems extremely unfavorable for our fitness in the short-term as we reason about culture, though this is catastrophically maladaptive for humanity's long-term prospects. The issue then is how we get human beings committed to cooperative reasoning. Relativism is a veneer of complacency, though it draws upon the truth in a disingenuous or misguided way.
Nature doesn’t say it’s morally good to survive. Nature just says things that kinds of things that survive more successfully tend to be the kind of things we continue to find around.
This is why I mean by ignoring the ought side. You say you’re denying it, but rather you’re just declining to answer a certain kind of question, instead giving an answer to a different question.
If someone asks whether something ought to happen, a statement to the effect that something does (or does not) happen gives no answer at all to that question. So to insist on discussing only matters of fact, and trying to twist all discussion of norms into discussion of facts, is simply to avoid answering any normative, moral questions at all, and so implicitly to avoid stating any opinion on morality at all, leaving one in effect a moral nihilist.
You’re clearly not actually a moral nihilist in practice, but if you got into a moral disagreement with someone, it sounds so far like you couldn’t give any reason why they should agree with you; you could only state the causal origins of your moral intuition and the probability that they share those intuitions given your shared heritage.
Scientism like yours responds to attempts to treat normative questions as completely separate from factual questions (as they are) by demanding absolute proof from the ground up that anything at all is objectively normative, or moral, and not just a factual claim in disguise or else baseless mere opinion. So you end up falling to justificationism (rejecting anything that can’t be proven from the ground up) about normative questions — and so denying that anything is actually moral, instead only talking above why we think things are moral — while failing to acknowledge that factual questions are equally vulnerable to that line of attack.
Someone could just as well demand an infinite chain of proofs that anything is real, and it would be just as impossible to prove it. But we accept that some things sure seem real or unreal and take that at face value and then try to sort out what seems real regardless of viewpoint and so is objectively (i.e. without bias) real. Why not likewise just accept that some things sure seem moral or immoral (as you do) and then take that at face value, act as though some things actually are moral or immoral and that that’s not just a baseless opinion that it was useful for our ancestors to have, and then try to sort out what seems moral regardless of viewpoints and so is objectively (i.e. without bias) moral?
Allow me to clear up two ambiguities at once, then, "With utmost redundancy, we deduce that moral good is identical to that good for the survival of the group found in selected-for human social capacities."
How you could possibly have concluded from all I've said that I believe natural selection itself has moral goods, I will never know.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I can't give you the answer you want because your question, as with all such questions, is in my view based on false premises.
Consider sight. I look a tree, I see a tree. I look at the human genome and point a load of genes and say these are responsible for this bit of eye, that optical cable, these bits of the brain, etc. You're basically asking me where the picture of tree is. It's not there. The image of the tree is a consequence of the capacities of sight I have inherited via genes selected for because this way of seeing trees is better than my distant ancestor's for human survival.
In fact, it's worse because there's always been trees as long as there have been human eyes to see them. Our moral biology is for an extinct way of life. Not only are those moral "oughts" I derived not there in the genes or the selection history where you want me to point to them, they're not even here in the world anymore except as baffled relics in our own behavioural constitution.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This misses the point that you clearly don't need to know any of this stuff to be a social person. Biology bypasses understanding and knowledge. A baby turtle does not have knowledge that it needs to head to the sea, it just does it. In the same way I don't need to cite the reasons why my ancestors had good cause to fear arachnids in order to assess the potential danger of a house spider, I don't need to work through the evolutionary history of my species to deduce that I ought to help a person in need. I just do it. Or not. Depending on the circumstances. Our bodies have this covered, as they do with so many things, without solely relying on rational input, and irregardless of our post hoc rationalisation. Much to the chagrin of rationalists, natch.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't think anyone is expecting ground-up proof of normative questions any more than they're expecting proof that God wears a yellow hat. Your counter-argument here seems to be that to weigh up, say, whether we should be a welfare state or not be a welfare state, first we must question our social biology which in turn necessitates that we must refer to the human genome which in turn suggests we must figure out our evolutionary history. Is it your impression of science that when people want to determine the mating habits of African elephants they first solve the many-body Schrodinger equation for two elephants?
If people statistically want a welfare state, they'll probably get one eventually. That seems to be the trend. You don't need an ought for a welfare state. What you need is a population with empathy and altruism to, generation and after generation, press for a welfare state because enough of them want it individually and because conservativism against it cannot withstand indefinitely. Why do enough of them want it? Because they're altruistic and empathetic. Why are they altruistic and empathetic? Because nature made them that way for different reasons. There are powers to overcome that are not for shifting. They're the ones who need the "oughts". The altruists have numbers and genetics and time. They don't need "oughts". "Oughts" are for memes and, while memes of moral "oughts" can be appeals to our social biology, they're mostly attempts to turn us away from it. Sometimes both, leading to cognitive dissonance: "Thou shalt not kill! Now kill, kill, kill!"
Quoting Pfhorrest
Sounds beautiful! In principle, anyway. If there was an effective means of establishing what seems moral to the time-averaged altruistic majority as moral ab initio, then the world that had these lets-pretend morals would probably be a nicer place to live in. But I think that a world in which the time-averaged altruistic majority had this sort of influence wouldn't need those moral truths any more that baby turtles need to know to head to the sea.
Unfortunately, the danger of accepting objective moral truths is precisely that they're not honed by statistical trends of natural behaviour. There's quite a lot of killing that goes into making laws, and religions, and other ideologies because the ideas themselves don't really present any merit to the majority. However when you've frightened enough people, killed enough, tortured enough, bribed enough, incarcerated enough, you can convince people to brainwash their own children into believing in objective moral truths and, no surprise, they're not very human ones, because anyone who frightens enough people, kills enough, tortures enough, bribes enough, incarcerates enough, is an absolute psychopath.
Yeah, looks like. I don’t know anything about neuroscience or ultracooperative social groups, so to me, ultrasocial is just somewhat more social than social. Doesn’t matter; they’re all still just a bunch of individuals.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes. I don’t see any reason to include heritable traits in the metaphysical idea of morality. But the metaphysical idea of morality is just that, an idea, hence will never be real in the sense of morality in which heritable traits serve as the criteria for personal or social conduct.
An idea is nonetheless real in the sense of its thought. And it is obvious everybody, without exception, thinks, regardless of their social status, even to the extent they don’t have any, therefore it would seem much more opportune to consider the rational aspect of conduct over its existential or natural aspect.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
That we are moral beings may be a consequence of natural selection, insofar as evolution granted us the apparatus sufficient to enable the kind of being we are to become morally inclined. So yes, our moral apparatus is unaware of its origin. So what, I ask. We are concerned with being moral, not with where moral being came from, which grants that our moral apparatus is not a consequentialist philosophy.
If I’m still with you, it appears you’re claiming our moral apparatus is the same, or given from, our heritable traits, such that Quoting Kenosha Kid
Even if that is the case, it remains how that biology, that moral apparatus, is used by the individual subject in possession of them, in order to satisfy the criteria that describes what it means for him to be moral. Again, that it is used is given, because that we are moral beings is given, but we want to know how. We want to know whether our morality can be controlled, and how much, if at all. Mostly, we want to know why we feel we’re better people than those other guys. That we are altruistic and empathetic and whatnot is because science felt the need to inform us of stuff we already knew without calling it by name.
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On rationality:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Now we’re gettin’ downright serious. That is a little bit categorical error and a whole lotta misplaced concreteness. I’m here, therefore he didn’t get killed by the cat, but he did die.
But none of that is sufficient to prove that he couldn’t possibly have rationalized the danger. It is every bit as likely he did, therefore I’m here. The human thought process is, after all, virtually instantaneous. Not like he had to ask the cat to wait a minute.
Rationalism trap. As in, trapped by rationalism? Being trapped by that which is impossible to escape, seems like a mischaracterization of terms, doesn’t it?
You’re doing an outstanding job of trying to defeat metaphysics with scientific principles. Thing is, the only way to defeat a metaphysical position, is with a better one.
Yes, and there is evidence for similar biological inheritance of social strata for the sizes of groups you seem to mean which were presumably also selected for on the basis of group benefit which might go a long way to explain the long-term persistence of desires for caste systems and make it even more difficult to derive a set of moral truths from our nature.
Quoting Enrique
Not necessarily in the generation that spawned those superstitions. I find memetics has tremendous explanatory power in this area. One of the interesting characteristics of superstitious practise is that it tends either to the pleading or the hysterical. One can rationalise this as apt for what the practice's aims are, but one can also see this as an origin: you've got one person among many who are desperate for rain go mental and it rains. That guy is going places. "Geoff, do the crazy stick-shaking thing again, that'll work!"
At the other end you've got dogma: claims to truth with no basis in fact that parents convince their children they must observe if they want the rains to come. In between, it's likely much as you say, with those too disgruntled making obvious scapegoats when the rains don't come (just like every natural calamity is the fault if the gays in the US), pushing further toward a reigning meme.
Quoting Enrique
Sounds familiar.
Quoting Enrique
I think this is kind of where @Pfhorrest is coming from. Given that we aren't in an environment in which our natural altruism has dictated some moral order, would it not be efficacious to base a competing, better set of morals from our more social inclinations? And to the extent that it is, we obviously have done this without knowing anything of why we think altruism and empathy are good, but with plenty of rationalisation about it.
I remain to be convinced that moral philosophy is as useful as it seems. The political among a disillusioned group will rally people around ideas, perhaps to overcome their existing social mores. But I suspect that, say, in the build-up to the French revolution, a country of starving people ruled by a nobility enjoying excess had more to do the implementation of democracy than the philosophy itself.
Quoting Enrique
Yes, this is gloomy. I'm more optimistic. I mean, I know you lost most of Obamacare, but you *had* Obamacare in a country in which corrupt politicians and media had your people brainwashing kids on their behalf that helping people was communist and communism is evil. That's a hell of an achievement! And things like this keep happening which suggests to me that our natural instincts for altruism and empathy, in part via whatever philosophies they inspire that counter regressive philosophies I grant you, might actually make all the difference to the trend. We've abolished all but civil war in Europe, given up overt colonialism, abolished slavery, mostly abolished the death penalty, promoted rights for people who, in your more enlightened times, had none or few, and damn it man we got McDonald's selling salads. They might seem trivial now we have them, but altruism and empathy (and salads) persist against all the regressive, antisocial memes that those with power can muster.
So I think what is more likely is that the competition between regressive ideas that make virtues of our presocial instincts and the progressive ones that favour our social instincts will continue, with battles fought and won on both sides, but with a long-term tendency for the former to cede ground to the latter. Today's racists are not slapping men in the street and calling them 'boy'. It's a better place for the inclusive altruist to be working from.
How do you deduce this? This is precisely the is-ought problem. You have social capacities that are "good for" (contribute to) the survival of human groups, and an explanation for why humans today have those traits (they are the traits that our ancestors had, who became out ancestors because they survived, thanks to having those traits).
But still, someone asks "What ought we do?" and your answer is "We are inclined to do these things." If they ask "Yes, we are inclined that way, but is that right?" and you say "It's what helped our ancestors survive", you're still dodging the question. Saying something "is" in response to a question of what "ought" is a non-answer, unless you and the audience already agree on some "ought". You give an account on why we probably do agree on some "oughts", but that account isn't itself any answer to an "ought" question; you could just as validly point out simply that we already agree on an "ought", with no explanation needed, and then proceed from there. The evolutionary cause of our agreement isn't relevant; just the agreement itself is sufficient.
It's like if I ask what flavor of ice cream I should buy, and you tell me "chocolate is popular". Okay? Does that mean I should buy chocolate? Or that I shouldn't buy chocolate? Is popularity a good thing or a bad thing? In this case, the question is a stupid one to begin with, because the person asking the question has way more information about what flavor of chocolate would best please them than anyone else, and the question is probably rhetorical anyway. But that aside, telling them a fact about people's ice cream preferences is irrelevant, unless they already are of the opinion that they ought or ought not follow the crowds. You could tell them some evolutionary fact about why people evolved to crave certain flavors, but still that's not going to help them answer their question.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That's a poor analogy, because you're still entirely within the domain of "is".
A better analogy would be to flip the is-ought divide around the other way. You ask someone a scientific question about how the world is. They reply by telling you about different cultures beliefs on that topic and how it influences their way of life. You ask which if any of those cultures is actually correct about the question of fact you're asking. They tell you a story of how these cultures came to hold those views, because of the way that holding those views influenced their political or moral or other cultural development. You ask again, What is the truth of this matter?, but all they will tell you is why different people think it's good to believe this or that is the truth. Because they're a social constructivist, who believes that all of reality is a social construct, nothing is actually true or false, there's just different beliefs that are held in different cultures because believing this way or that is important to them for this or that normative reason.
That's really frustrating, isn't it? Someone who won't give you a straight answer to your "is" question, and instead will only tell you why people think you ought to believe this or that answer to it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
For the most part this is also true of descriptive beliefs about factual matters. We just observe what we observe in our lives and our brains just intuit what's real and what isn't. And yet there have been huge disagreements about the nature of reality across history, and we eventually developed a method of paying really close methodical attention to the experiences that inform those evolved intuitions in order to settle those disagreements, and in doing so developed a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of what is or isn't real than our ancestors had done with hundreds of thousands of years of using the same exact brains with the same exact intuitions and getting by well enough to at least survive on that alone.
I am not saying that we have to do a bunch of heavy thinking about morality every time we make any decision, any more than we need to do controlled experiments to perceive distances from other vehicles on the road: we can just see where things are with our evolved intuitions, on that scale at least. I'm only suggesting that by paying really close methodical attention to the experiences that inform our moral intuitions, we can make progress settling the huge disagreements that those intuitions have failed to settle, and in doing so develop a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of what is or isn't moral than our ancestors did with hundreds of thousands of years of using the same exact brains with the same exact intuitions and getting by well enough to at least survive on that alone.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No, I don't want to bring up social biology or genes or evolutionary history at all. You're the one bringing that up as though it justified any "ought" claims. It explains why people intuitively have the "ought" opinions that they tend to have, sure, but explaining the cause of having an intuition isn't justifying content of that intuition.
Oh okay, well maybe not. To the extent that I can't really differentiate, in my ignorance, between human physiology and sheep physiology, and to the extent that antisocial behaviour is just antisocial, not anti-ultrasocial, behaviour, you're quite right. But with the caveat that statements I make about human biology don't necessarily extend to non-humans.
Quoting Mww
Oh, of course! If metaphysics factored that sort of thing in, it would cease to be metaphysics.
Quoting Mww
No need to tell me. My argument is not against moral ideas, but moral ideas with claims to a priori knowledge or an objective right-wrong moral world. If moral philosophy is an artefact of having moral biology evolved in one environment give ambiguous or unfeasible drives in our current environment, there is good reason for moral questions. However those don't have to be based on fantasies, thanks to our scientific understanding.
Quoting Mww
And that's the Catch-22. In small groups, our morality would give right/wrong answers to moral questions that need not be asked because the answers are not rational answers but physiological and neurological responses. In the world-of-strangers, those answers are not well-defined, so we rely on instead on rationality to try and figure out the answers. And we fail, because morality is not rational, and because the only moral answers we have pertain to a world we do not live in.
And this is why, in my view, the correct approach is the existential, relativist, pluralist approach. We can derive moral limits on the basis that that there are still things inconsistent with our moral instincts. We cannot dispense with the notion of morality because we are driven toward it. Morality is based on good-for-the-group altruism and empathy, so anything that jettisons those for reliance on pre-social drives is ipso facto immoral and subhuman. Otherwise we cannot define a moral answer to a question about strangers or a world with effectively limitless harm and limitless need. Any philosophical question about what we should actively do to limit harm and satisfy need in a given situation is faulty in its foundation.
Quoting Mww
Is the metaphysics apologist demanding proof?!? ;) It is well understood that rational thinking is slower than pattern-recognition and instinct. It is far from instantaneous.* Since we have a flight instinct, it follows that a lot of our ancestors' cousins died for lack of one.
Quoting Mww
It is not only true that not all human responses are rational, it also seems to me to be true that the rational mind takes credit for a lot of stuff it doesn't do.*
Quoting Mww
Many thanks! *bows* But I think another way to defeat a metaphysical position is to make it redundant. Historically, that seems to be the case.
* Again, I thoroughly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow. It goes into all this stuff in a lot more detail and with compelling tests for you to do yourself. Psychology has made a lot of ground in understanding how the mind works.
With utmost redundancy, that's the point. As for how you can deduce it from first principles without reference to urgh-sticky-irrational biology, you don't, that's the other point. In reality, moral philosophies have principles based on biological phenomena, while pretending to be based on something else. Metaphysicians are extremely sympathetic to themselves. They want a God? They can prove He exists. It won't be a great proof, but it suffices for them.
The OP is the nearest I can get: since our morality derives from social biology, any truly moral philosophy has to be based on altruism and empathy. Any philosophy not based on empathy and altruism is not social, and therefore not moral. But that cannot define an exhaustive set of oughts, rather a smaller set of ought-nots if one wishes to be social at all, nor can they be seen as imperatives (due to feasibility).
Quoting Pfhorrest
It is a matter of the questioner's belief that there must be an ought. If the believer cannot get their heads around the fact that there isn't one, that's their intellectual limitation. If the questioner maintains that a false positive answer to their answer-less question based on false belief or lies is better than an honest non-answer, then they are merely insisting on an echo chamber around their dodgy belief system.
The OP is not a schema for deriving moral imperatives. It's a description of why such questions arise but have no well-defined answers, with a recommendation to proceed accordingly. Complaining that it doesn't give you instructions on how to behave is to completely miss the point. Nature is not obliged to implement anyone's metaphysics.
Quoting Pfhorrest
As you pointed out, it's a inapplicable analogy. If your argument depends on it, it can be dismissed on those grounds. If there is something to salvage, then perhaps make the effort to provide a better analogy.
However I will set fire to the straw man: at no point have I suggested that that which is popular becomes the answer to a moral question. I have described how outcomes can arise from statistical moral inclinations, such as trends over time toward altruism and empathy, but that is purely descriptive precisely because it does not depend on outright moral truths to exist in order to occur. And that's another salient point. In our natural environment, we did not need to ask or answer these ought questions. Our moral biology took care of that for us, and is still in effect now, giving us the moral conundrums -- the quest for oughts -- that we now have. Where that moral inclination comes from is not popular opinion, although that can act to reprioritise a perspective. Where it comes from is genetics. Everything else is rationalisation and propaganda.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I can't stop you re-characterising my position, in which normative questions do not generally have well-defined answers and are themselves products of erroneous thinking, as mere question-dodging or being a frustrating jerk for the sake of defending a position, simply on the basis that you feel you need answers to normative questions anyway. If that seems a valid approach to you, then fill your boots of course. It will severely constrain the bandwidth of intelligent debate, though.
Quoting Pfhorrest
As are you. You are not asking "ought" questions but "is" questions about "oughts". At this stage in your argument, any ought is better than no ought. But nature, which provided you with your moral capacities, did not provide you with any.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I agree that experience is important, precisely because of the large degree of freedom that we have in prioritising selfish and selfless drives, because that experience is obviously so crucial to developing our moral capacities, and because our experience tells us that moral positions are abundant. While our biology is a given, a) it doesn't follow that we stand by our actions, and b) it doesn't follow that the net behavioural response on an individual in a given circumstance is determined by genetics alone, even if the difference is itself a genetic trait. I said as much in the OP:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If your point is that any fundamental element of our individual morality must be informed by experience, then that's just another unjustifiable metaphysical belief which I will reject on the grounds of it being inconsistent with scientific evidence. If you're merely asserting that our morality as a whole is impacted by experience, then you're not contradicting my view, but nor are you showing how my experience that leads to my moral frame of reference is less justified than yours.
[EDIT: Missed a bit]
Quoting Pfhorrest
Sounds familiar. "How does the idea of a 6000 year old Earth explain the geological records?" "Oh, I don't want to bring up geology."
You're posting on a thread about naturally selected social biology. It's gonna come up. If you're just feeling obliged because I mentioned you in the OP, honestly it's fine. It's nice that you came, but I didn't aim to piss you off with a subject you don't want to talk about, and it's fine to pass.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quite the opposite of what I said. And you've given me reason to believe that you understand this.
Nahhh....any metaphysician worth a decent pointy hat knows better, but still stands his ground when, for instance, the existential dogmatist offers unreliable suppositions relative to ancestral behavior.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Agreed on a right-wrong moral world. There is only a world in which right or wrong manifest, and manifest not because of the world as causality, but only because of it as possibility.
Ideas are predicated on a priori conceptions, that is, that for which there is no real object of sense. If the conception is thought, it is immediately known to the subject that thinks it. Thus, all moral ideas involve a priori knowledge, not of moral things, which are the possible manifestations of the moral ideas, but of conceptions which validate the moral idea.
Altruism and empathy are no less ideas than morality, for there is no object which belongs to any of them, but only phenomenal manifestations derivable from them for which they can be said to be the causality. That is to say, there is no object in the world to which these can be a property.
(Keeping in mind the condition for, is not the same as a property of. The rational being is an object in the world, but absent certain conditions, it remains an object, but absence certain properties, it does not so remain)
None of these have claims to a priori knowledge, but none of them would exist as valid conceptions if not understood by the subject that thinks them, which he can never do except by cognizing them a priori, and then only as logical inference given from phenomenal exhibition.
It’s good that you’re not against moral ideas. And as altruism and empathy are every bit as metaphysical, as mere conceptions, as morality, I’m baffled as to the rejection of metaphysical explanations for any of them. It is completely irrelevant that each is a social instinct, trait or drive as evolutionary consequence, they are nonetheless purely a priori conceptions, which demands they be treated by metaphysical constructions. One shouldn’t mistake the foot for the boot.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
It must be the case that all responses for anything are predicated on physiological and neurological grounds. We are brain-bound, right? So putting that aside, and while it is true small groups won’t have the same ethical questions as large groups, it is nevertheless inconsistent with the idea of moral dispositions to restrict its questions to the size of the group from which the questions arise. Otherwise, we find ourselves in the possible situation whereby an agent, say wandering aimlessly, not a member of a community thus having no moral determinations with respect to it, subsequently finds himself in contact with a community. Now we must consider the parsimony as to whether he initiated a sense of morality merely from contact, or whether he was already a moral agent before the contact. I reject he became moral for no other reason than he has opportunity for it, as opposed to possessing the intrinsic capacity whether he displays it or not. If the latter, the size of the group becomes immediately irrelevant, from which it follows necessarily that all moral answers are rational, because if he is already a moral agent he must be capable of rational moral answers whether or not the occassion arises.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don’t accept the major in that proposition, insofar as morality is to be considered a personal human condition, therefore morality is based on the good of the individual. I would accept that which is based on the benefit for the community be named ethical jurisprudence, which is the compendium of moral subjects included as members. The reason for this, is in the consequences. The consequences of violations within a group being physical manifestations of some kind, but the consequences of violations within the individual are subjective manifestations alone, in the form of feelings. Being illegal is not necessarily being immoral, but being unethical is always immoral.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
True, not all human responses are rational, but even irrational responses are derived from reason. Just poorly. Irrational responses, or, which is the same thing, irrational judgements, are nothing but a case of the understanding mistaking the conceptions in its synthesis. (Have fun with that one!!)
I submit, Good Sir, the rational mind, better known as reason, does everything; it just doesn’t always do it well.
Point/counterpoint. May the games continue.......
Flight/fight behaviours aren't exactly a grey area; they're well studied. Humans and chimpanzees are particularly wired for it. The comparative slowness of rational thinking is also pretty well established, and that it accounts for a small percentage of human decision-making. So when you suggest that your ancestor had no such response and instead thought her way out of the sabre-tooth tiger situation rationally, I'm inclined to believe that that's where the unreliable supposition is happening.
Quoting Mww
Abstracted away from the individual, sure. But that's not what the OP is talking about. The physio/neurological systems that underpin the empathetic and altruistic responses of an individual are built for that individual alone from genes it inherited. Those things aren't in the wild and abstract: they belong to that individual. The statistical conformity between social biological systems is in part due to their heritability, in part due to natural selection, which tends to whittle variance down. So my empathy and altruism are strictly mine, albeit copies of ancestors common to us both.
Quoting Mww
Because it puts the cart before the horse. Metaphysics rationalises natural human responses post hoc, then claims a discovery, because it is inclined to ascribe to rationalism everything it cannot understand. It is at best a redundancy. I understand more about morality from cognitive psychology, neurology, physiology, and evolutionary biology and psychology than I can get from any strokey-beard blighter trying to find a way to derive "do not harm others to benefit yourself". Nature derived that hundreds of thousands of years ago without a brain, and gifted it to us without a clue.
The other issue I have is that, since no metaphysical theory of morality is actually rationally justified (which, at least, it has in common with natural morality) but relies instead on claims to magical knowledge and disingenuous linguistic contortions, none is rationally justified more than any other. The worry is that antisocial propaganda is not obviously worse than truly moral philosophy on metaphysical grounds. If you can convince someone that metaphysics is worth a damn, you might convince someone that bad metaphysics is worth a damn, that gays are evil, for instance, or that you will have to spend an eternity without your unbaptised child, or that black lives don't matter as much as white ones.
While history has put social altruism on bad enough footing, it has at least kept us as altruists. Metaphysics puts altruism on an even weaker footing by making it contingent on non-existent truths ("because God said so") or comprised of metaphysically unjustifiable ones ("altruism is good in itself") to which some other, more antisocial strokey-beard blighter can say "actually it's not, prove me wrong". At least knowing that altruism is part of what makes us human, that it is an unavoidable part of us selected to help us, alleviates justification, for you need not justify what you are, only the beliefs you hold.
Quoting Mww
We have a central nervous system, yes. We are not rationalism-bound though. Reason is hugely overcredited. But I don't mean it to be taken that rational thought is not part of the decision-making process. We have a rational mental system precisely for figuring out things like "How can I help this hungry person when all I have is this bre- oh!" But all of the build-up to that need not be conscious at all, and indeed most of it won't be. We do not rationally learn to invoke cognitive empathetic responses; we do learn by experience, but the mental process for associating empathetic responses to certain patterns is not conscious. At least, I have no memory of how I did it, and haven't met anyone who has. ;)
Quoting Mww
Ahh no, sorry, I was obviously unclear. I'm not saying that smaller groups pose different challenges and therefore different moral questions. I'm saying that small groups, for which our social responses were evolved, bypass the need for moral questions altogether. Smaller groups were what our social responses were adapted for. The responses must therefore be sufficient, otherwise nature could not have selected for them. That is distinct from now where our social responses, inclined toward outcomes of reciprocal altruism with relatives and neighbours, no longer determine the moral course of action. Yet we still respond to empathetic stimuli in the same way. Our social biology is for small groups, and did not alter for large ones.
Quoting Mww
Good-for-the-group was good-for-the-individual at the time we evolved altruism and empathy. Individuals in cooperative groups had greater chances of survival (covered a bit in the OP). The difference is that it didn't depend on a human ever figuring out that good-for-the-group was good-for-me (which is fortunate given the state of politics after hundreds of thousands of years of progress); those disinclined to good-for-the-group -- antisocial elements -- could not compete for resources with cooperative animals that shared them.
Quoting Mww
Agreed. In the same way that not observing the sabbath is not necessarily immoral, or not claiming that your country/race/class is better than others is not necessarily immoral. These are moral frames of references. It would be immoral for a police officer who fines people for speeding to himself speed on his day off (hypocrisy). It would be immoral for a Rabbi who preaches the shabbat to put in a few extra hours one Saturday (hypocrisy). But it is always immoral to stab a child in the back, that is, there is no frame of reference in which this could not be hypocritical.
Quoting Mww
This is meant merely as a statement of a belief, I assume, not of fact. My understanding of the psychologist's current thinking is that reason comprises about 2% of human decision-making. Rationalism, as far as I can make out, is claiming the other 98% is also rational, then trying to figure out how. Just found this:
[quote=Wiki]Modern cognitive science and neuroscience show that studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no affective feelings, for example, an individual with a massively damaged amygdala or severe psychopathy. Thus, such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. However, scholars may productively appeal to the idealization as a point of reference.[/quote]
No citation given :( but sounds about right.
I never meant to suggest you did. The “chocolate is popular” hypothetical response was just another example of giving an “is” answer to an “ought” question.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Everyone who ever has to make a reasoned decision about what action to take needs an answer to a normative question, because that’s exactly what normative questions are about. The only beings who never need to ask normative questions are those that act entirely in a straightforward stimulus-response way, with no reflective, contemplative function mediating the relationship between their experiences and their behaviors. Are you suggesting humans are like that? That we just do whatever we’re going to do and there’s no thinking about it to be done? I didn’t think you were suggesting that, and if you’re not then you are already admitting that normative questions matter, likely just misconstruing them as something more than they are. (The repeated references to metaphysics, the comparison to questions about God, and the talk of whether there “is” an ought, all suggest that you think normative questions are questions about some nonphysical moral entities, when they’re not at all; they’re just a different kind of question about the same ordinary stuff).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Nope. See above.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It did, precisely as much as it provided me with some elementary “is” answers. My ideas of what is come from my empirical experiences: my first notion of reality is of the stuff that I can see rather than what I can’t, and every later notion of what is real is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it. Likewise, my ideas of what ought to be come from my hedonic experiences: my first notion of morality is of stuff that feels pleasant rather than painful, and every later notion of what is moral is a refinement of that nature-given intuition about it.
One of my philosophical principles is basically just to not reach beyond mere refinement of those nature-given intuitions. Don’t start invoking the will of god or spiritual purity or things like that. I think we broadly agree in that respect. But another principle of mine is to proceed on the assumption that with enough effort and care we can establish an arbitrarily-much unbiased refinement like that. You seem to think that the latter means a negation of the former, and I think that that’s just a result of you reading unwarranted baggage into the terminology used to state the latter.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I didn’t say I don’t want to talk about that, I said that I’m not the one bringing it up, in response to you suggesting that I think we need to dig into all of that in order to answer a much more superficial moral question. You said:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And I’m saying no, I’m not arguing that we have to do that. You brought those things up, not me. I don’t think they have any bearing on whether we SHOULD be a welfare state or not; and you seem to be saying they don’t either, because you’re saying “should” questions can’t be answered, it seems. You give an explanation on account of all that biology of why we might (or might not?) tend to be inclined to be a welfare state, and I’m not contesting any of that. Just pointing out that it doesn’t answer the “should” question.
I’m not pissed off BTW, and I’m not here because you mentioned me in the OP, but because of a comment about the is-ought divide later in the comments. My angle here isn’t that anything you wrote in the OP about biology is wrong at all, but just that that is all an answer to an “is” question, which doesn’t answer any “ought” questions at all.
I read the book; it’s at academia dot com from a bing title search. I dumped my write-up commenting on it, being wrong on one count and superfluous on the next.
Thanks for the referral anyway.
Metaphorically speaking, I understand; Nature doesn’t derive and Nature doesn’t have a brain. It is true Nature gifted us, but just like getting a gift for Christmas, it stands perfectly well as gift, but is completely useless unless unwrapped.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
As my reason is mine. We all have a variation of each of them.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Post hoc, yes, because experience is always the ground. Metaphysics doesn’t claim a discovery, as much as posit an explanatory methodology for that experience. Metaphysics doesn’t permit knowledge of future moral actions, but only what future moral actions should be, and then only if one remains aligned with his subjective values.
We do moral things without the need to ask why, but if we do ask, we can only ask ourselves and only ourselves can answer. I grant the intrinsic circularity, always have. Like I said....blame Mother Nature. And if we do ask, is never our altruism or empathy receiving the query; we can ever only ask our reason.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
If altruism and empathy were naturally selected predicated on small groups, but we no longer inhabit small groups specifically, did altruism and empathy evolve in keeping with the evolution of group size?Just be becoming reciprocal? And if we evolved from small groups in which moral questions were bypassed, what made moral questions become relevant? Just because of the group size? Seems to me if moral questions become relevant for some reason, either the members of the group became moral agents for the same reason, or they were already moral agents-in-waiting. I reject that an individual suddenly becomes moral just because he inhabits something more than a small group. How small is small? Is a hundred people a mall group? There never were 8M people in a large group until relatively recently, so.....seems altogether arbitrary to me.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Your hypocrisy is my immorality. No matter its name, it is that which goes against the good. My immorality’s frame of reference is lawful obligation, herein the violation of it, and is a subjective condition. What is the frame of reference that is not violated by hypocrisy?
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
It is neither. I don’t do belief, but rather cognize relative certainty, and, it isn’t a fact any more than the concept of reason is a fact. Something undeniable goes on in our head all the while we’re awake and aware; we call it reason just to call it something. It is a fact something is happening; it is not a fact it is reason that’s happening.
Conscious decision making is judgement, in which things are related to each other and a conclusion is drawn. Judgement is a facet of reason, and we make judgements every time things relate to each other. Daniel’s S1 and S2 working together, so to speak.
No autonomic system decisions are judgements, hence are not facets of reason, which means that of the total of all possible decisions a human could be said to make, conscious or autonomic, not all of them come from reason. Call it 2% if you like, but all I would say about it is the percentage is determined by the time we are awake and aware. We must be awake and aware to make irrational judgements, which means they are facets of reason.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
All human thought is by means of reason, hence is rational. Reason influenced by the sensibility is a posteriori, reason without any influence from sensibility at all, is a priori. And yes, then cognitive metaphysics tries to figure out how, in exactly the same way as we try to figure out how to change a flat tire.
In the exact same sense which surgeons, ecologists (e.g. sylviculturists, hydrologists, habitat preservationists), fitness coaches, for example, use "oughts" as, what Kant coined, hypothetical imperatives - to wit: if you want/need A, then B rather than C - if fitness, then exercise & diet rather partying & gluttony; if viable ecosystem, then sustainable caretaking, resource-use/extraction with smallest optimal footprint, rigorous pollution restrictions; etc.
Eudaimonism (very primatively) says: if well-being (optimal capabilities/readiness for moral conduct), then habitualize virtues by (a) exercising them and (b) avoiding/abstaining from exercising vices; the "ought" prescribes a moral agent's readiness and not which preferences / rules / actions are or are not applicable to any given (or hypothetical) situation. In other words, what's 'hypothetical' for eudaimonists is derived from the conditional goal and not how to resolve the situational dilemma/tradeoff.
True. But nothing entails such "divorcement". In fact, eusociality requires convergence - complementarity - of self & group more often than not (as you point out vis-à-vis "antisocial behavior").
Ok.
No. "Relativism" is too arbitrary, or reactive, to be as reliable as a morality needs to be for efficacy over many circumstances and thereby for mimetic success (e.g. cultural transmission). The mismatch between "moral drives and capacities" and a dynamic, or artifical non-adaptive, "environment" is an unsolvable problem that ethics deploys 'practical reason' to manage pragmatically. "Relativism" is, at best, a suboptimal 'whatever is clever' management approach or stance.
The "naturalistic default" - my metaethical naturalism is kicking-in - implied by this mismatch of drives & environment is pluralism, or logical space to game-out heuristically many different approaches to managing this drives-environments mismatch and ranking them by their utility ranging over variably many circumstances over time; there are [some number] X ways in [some number] Y situations with [some range] Z reliabilities, and ethics - moral philosophy - reflects / speculates on the plurality of these paths rationally [inventories the universe of tools] and selects the most optimal path pragmatically [assembles a toolbox for eusocially sharing a commons of scarce goods, services, opportunities]. Ethical naturalism entails that not only are we eusocial agents but also, more fundamentally, we are ecosystem agents (i.e. a species)
There is, to my mind, no such thing as a "natural justification" that is not a naturalistic fallacy (and thereby an ideology).
We're an animal species. As such, each of us is constituted by the same functional defects: physical, affective, social, cognitive, etc which, if not maintained and sustained, lead, often rapidly, to deprivation and on to permanent or fatal dysfunction. I'd say our functional defects inform us as to (1) what harms us as well as (2) what harms other animals like us to the degree they are like us; true this, as you say, "cannot tell us which to choose" but that's because our species-functional defects are constraints which constitute homeostasis, affection, eusociality (or sustainability) & adaptivity, respectively (re: list above) AND NOT "OUGHTS" THEMSELVES, providing a 'natural' baseline for, or (basic) facticity of, moral judgments & conduct. Thus, negative utilitarianism, etc (vide Philippa Foot + Karl Popper ... + Spinoza).
I'm afraid, KK, collapsing the is-ought distinction has left "Natural Selection" to fill your "existentialist void" (i.e. scientism-of-the-gaps).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Maybe the notion of "group" is too top-down and can be reconceived as bottom-up community (ecosystem). How do you account for, or understand, the salience of Hillel the Elder's "That which is hateful to you, do not do to anyone"?
I think the human mind has an incredible capacity for hypocrisy. We do not, despite post hoc rationalisation to the contrary, act in a unified and consistent manner. As you have correctly pointed out, 'reasons' are formed after the behaviour that was going to happen anyway, and it's only reason that has to be consistent. I get what you're saying here, but perhaps has more faith (and so less hope) in the capacity for 'creative' thinking. If racist or nationalistic actions become social norms for large enough numbers, then I think we'll go a long way before running out out post hoc rationalisations no matter how convoluted they have to be to fit our new globalised status. One thing that you left out of your account (perhaps, as you say, just for brevity) is the extent to which existing social norms dictate behaviour. Put together with the process you already mentioned, where behaviour determines beliefs, and you have a situation where existing behaviours can determine beliefs. We can come to believe some group of people deserve some treatment simply because we see that group of people being dealt that treatment.
So how does this relate to treatment of outsiders? Well, if one's own social group is consistent (ie most of the people you meet most of the time are within the same social group and treated with the same level of compassion) then most of the behaviour you'll see happening will be compassionate. This will make it harder to find non-compassionate behaviour tolerable (even when it seems to be required - ie war). I believe this is the situation with wide-ranging tribal communities - which makes them so open to strangers, and we see the opposite in more close to tribal communities (such a Papua New Guinea) where a state of almost permanent war was the norm.
One of the issues in modern society which allows for non-compassionate behaviour (and therefore it's post hoc rationalisation in racism etc) is the fact that it is seen acted out on a day-to-day basis. The relatively wealthy walk straight past the homeless (when Sitting Bull toured with the rodeo for a time he apparently gave away his wages to the destitute in the cities - it's not that he was more saintly than the rest, just that he'd not been inculcated into ignoring them).
Hunter-gatherer communities are notoriously lax with their children, letting them do almost anything. The one exception in most cases is that sharing is enforced. One of the ways egalitarianism is maintained is that non-egalitarian behaviours are simply never seen, and so can't be normalised, and so resist rationalising belief formation, and so are forcibly admonished, and so are never seen...
We broke that cycle.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Interestingly, slavery used to be non-racist. Slaves were taken from defeated territories, from those in debt, or just random enemies. It wasn't until Christianity made the subjugation of one's enemies less noble that a new justification was needed and so sub-human races were invented. The behaviour persisted because it was seen and copied, all that was need was a new post hoc justification to match other beliefs (formed from other behaviours elsewhere).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I agree. In a similar vein I always dispute people who think we're naturally greedy and selfish. If that were the case why would we need advertisements every 45 minutes telling us to buy stuff. Organisations work incredibly hard to get us to behave certain ways, which I see as a fairly clear indication that we wouldn't behave in those ways if left to our own devices. I think the same's true of altruism. We'd rather include as many people as don't present a threat. The trouble is twofold 1) we are surrounded by non-compassionate behaviours which create belief systems to justify it, and 2) there are people whose objectives are advanced by leveraging those belief systems toward some particular group.
I don't necessarily want to get into this again, but for the thread as much as anything else, you are either very abnormal or absolutely wrong here and this may be the crux of the problem. Virtually all the psychological and neuroscientific evidence we have so far contradicts your assessment. One's ideas of what ought to be do not come from one's hedonic experiences, and one's first notions of morality do not come from notions of stuff which feels pleasant rather than painful. Yours might, I'm not claiming to know your individual mental processes, but if they do you'd be an anomaly, based on the research to date.
One's ideas of what ought to be come from a very complex interaction of the behaviours one is surrounded by, the degree of innovation or conservatism one is feeling at the time (or perhaps even genetically disposed to), the multiple affects (of which pleasure and pain are only two), one's self-narrative (which itself is a construct bourne of dozens of other influences in life), one's value judgement of whomever is going to be affect by one's immanent behaviour, the judgement of others, the degree of engagement of the mirror neuron system (which, again, is actually a result of several preceding factors)... plus probably a handful of other factors I've forgotten. Most importantly though, the vast majority of this goes on sub-consciously and what you have is simply a feeling that acting that way "wouldn't be you".
Just like religious people think that science is more "base" or "unenlightened" for caring only about empirical observations. Religious belief is like conventional morality. Science is like post-conventional morality. And those stuck in the middle can't differentiate the end from the beginning.
"Before you walk the path to enlightenment, chairs and chairs and tea is tea. Upon the path to enlightenment, chairs are no longer chairs and tea is no longer tea. Upon reaching enlightenment, chairs are again chair, and tea is again tea."
Kohlberg's stages are about the justification for moral-type behaviour, not the cause of it.
Notwithstanding that, I do disagree with a lot of his work, (see Margret Donaldson, for example, or later Alison Gopnik - Kohlberg's work, and Paiget's, was ill conceived with very young children) but that disagreement isn't relevant here. Kohlberg's stages are, I'd say, not the most prevalent, or up-to-date theories of moral development (look to Gopnick or Tania Singer for those), but they are still adhered to by some. The main point is the one above. They are justificatory, not explicatory.
Sure, if I want to know how to make a pie I should consult a recipe. Even in questions of executing moral decisions, I still need to decide how I should go about them. And, as I've said, there are pre-social and social drives in competition and, while the question of what I should do need not be reasoned, it could be reasoned about. I might reason, for instance, as to whether I will get away with an antisocial act.
But these are a far cry from the sorts of normative questions you want answers to which are, if I understand you, blanket, objective answers to all moral questions justified with respect to something other than "well, that's just the way we're built". Our current environment and our unfitness for it does appear to incline us to produce new normative moral questions. It doesn't mean that answers to those questions come fully justified. (By the way, this is not particular to the OP. Kantianism, utilitarianism, liberalism, hedonism, etc. have no firmer justifications. Adopting a position is not the same as justifying it.)
As for the false dichotmy, we are mostly stimulus-response, however our conscious mind is largely concerned with rational, algorithmic thinking so we tend to overemphasise this role in our decision-making. Part of the thesis of the OP is that, when our ancestors existed in small social groups, questions of what the morally good thing to do is would not have existed, as the role that moral oughts are supposed to play now would have been played by largely biological factors (and, to the extent that it was not biologically determined, the remainder dictated by homogeneous socialisation, which also needs no rationalisation). This is justified by the fact that nature could not have selected for altruistic characteristics if our actual outcomes were dictated instead by rational thought unless that rational thought itself had a bias that could be selected for. Considering moral choices to be essentially rational, as rationalists do, is imo nonsensical.
Now it is different. Our social impulses do not come close to determining a response equivalent of a moral ought, since they did not evolve to yield optimal survival outcomes for strangers with different socialisations. The onus is then put on what remains -- rationalism -- to determine not only how we should act to realise a moral good, or whether we wish to, but what those moral goods are.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This seems to be a diversion that we might both be regretting. Asking where the 'oughts' are is not an 'ought' question. An ought question presupposes that there is there is an ought. I do not. It is your presupposition I believe to be invalid.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Very young children do demonstrate no or limited capacity for empathy, i.e. it is not switched on at birth. Environmental factors play an important role in children developing empathy, as of course do genetic factors. This is why the lack of possible variance in small social groups is an important prerequisite to reason-free social behaviour, as is necessary for nature to select for.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If you reject the possibility (quite rightly) that mere biology -- the circumstance of our birth -- can justify a moral position such as altruism, you must reject that the natural hedonism of your birth can justify a hedonistic moral position. I believe you're just rationalising an 'is', not deriving an 'ought'. I see no reason here to accept your definition of 'unbiased' as, itself, unbiased.
But I do not believe the notion that our personality is refined rationally by effort and care to be in any way realistic. If I meet an alien with an extendable neck, I will probably be nice to it, not because I have derived a be-nice-to-aliens morality through attention and care to the world, but because ET made me cry when I was a child, and I'm stuck with that. That is how susceptible our socialisations are. Epiphanies, fundamentalism, and brainwashing are not gradual refinements to our moral positions but forceful paradigm shifts -- re-programmings, figuratively and literally -- in response to experience, for instancel.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm glad. I thought you sounded disinclined but obliged.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think there's been a misunderstanding, because I used impersonal but you read personal 'you'. I didn't mean that you think the above, rather that you think the above characterises my argument. It does not. If you were not making this point, then I don't know what to make of this:
Quoting Pfhorrest
which seems to be suggesting that, given the viewpoint of the OP, an answer to a moral normative question would be something like the OP. That would be a straw man.
That was bloody quick!
Quoting Mww
Ummm. So I know the experiment you're referring to. It typically shows that unconscious pattern recognition is responsible for our answers to such questions. People see $1.10. They see $1. They're asked to calculate a difference. They say $.10. This is not a rational solution to the problem, which is an insanely easy maths problem. And yet people believe they've answered the question rationally. When the rational answer is given, they usually see their error. You seem to have gone one step further and rationalised a new mathematics, which is atypical.
Quoting Mww
What do you mean supposed? With reference to what order do you require the word 'left' to always appear on the left of a page and the word 'right' to appear on the right? Do you demand this of novels? The subject is 'supposed' to follow instructions. If they agree to that, and cannot, what does that say about the action or efficacy of their rational minds?
Quoting Mww
Yes, do. I'd like to defend at least the spirit of the OP, if not the specifics. Of course, part of that spirit is to base our thinking on the best knowledge we have. But there are some excellent 200 year old ideas that still stand up today. The Origin of Species is pushing 200.
Interesting. Where are you still seeing my comment?
I deleted everything, by this, as you say here....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
....admitting to being wrong, and by this.....
Quoting Kenosha Kid
.......as being superfluous. I didn’t encounter anything in the book that relates to your half of this conversation, hence my commentary on it being superfluous with respect to the OP. Which leaves me to think you just wanted me to be exposed to modernization. So, thanks.....I guess. (Grin)
Oops! I should have reloaded the page before responding yesterday. Now I'm superfluous! :rofl:
Quoting Mww
The bat & ball example was the sort of thing I had in mind. It is not that we get the answer wrong -- most do, and that isn't particularly interesting other than to show that human decisions aren't typically rational decisions. The interesting part is how the rational mind rationalises the irrational answer. People swear blind they thought it through rationally, i.e, worked out the answer mathematically, and yet they clearly didn't. That's what I find fascinating. We are not only irrational, we lie to ourselves about it, without knowing that we're lying to ourselves.
Quoting Mww
And our reason swears blind that it worked out the ball cost $0.10. It will swear blind that it worked out altruism is good too (most of the time, not Ayn Rand, obviously). But, as I said to Pfhorrest, there isn't much more redundant than an altruistic animal working out that altruism is right.
Quoting Mww
It's a really interesting question. Humans are still evolving other than in arbitrary (e.g. sexual selection) way, but they tend to evolve quickest in isolated groups still, such as the evolution of genetic mutations to exist at high altitudes as seen in Tibet. Whether a larger social group could evolve traits for surviving in larger social groups depends on how long that group stays roughly that size: if the population expands faster than evolutionary timescales, it seems unlikely.
Humans have, for 90% of their existence, lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. The agricultural era of humanity is only about 12,000 years old. However this is long enough (Tibetans evolved to high-altitude existence in the last 3,000 years) if a selection criteria exists that prefers e.g. social stratification over reciprocal altruism (since we can't all be farmers in an agricultural society). As it happens, other primates and ancestral mammals already have such social strata, so there was likely an existing genetic amenability that nature could hijack for the neolithic revolution, which would speed things up. On the other hand, people started dying much less after agriculture (hence our population explosion), which gives nature a much more limited means of selection, which in turn means that evolutionary timescales are prolonged. 12,000 years might not be enough for any meaningful changes to how we organise, although there is evidence that we have evolved in the agricultural era to get better as certain tasks.
Quoting Mww
Small enough such that a) socialisation is approximately homogeneous, and b) the people one meets on a given day are more likely to be relatives or neighbours. At that point, empathy becomes more accurate (the person you encounter is more likely to respond like you), and altruism becomes sufficiently reciprocal that nature can do something with it. If humans had evolved in sufficiently large social groups that socialisation was diverse and most people you encountered were strangers (e.g. from some large social group of primates), then empathy would not be accurate enough to be selected for and altruism not reciprocal enough to be selected for. I put that in bold because it's a good rewording of my key argument.
Note, it is not the individual that changes from group size to group size, nor has the quality of the moral hardware altered one iota. If you took moral philosopher from Paris and put him in a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania (I have hunted with one such tribe, but too briefly to anecdotally verify there were no philosophers :rofl: ), he would not change. There are not genes for switching between modes depending on environment (that I know of). There are genes specifically for small social groups that would make rationalisation of moral truths redundant.
Quoting Mww
The cosmological frame of reference, in which nothing we do matters, would be one in which it is as reasonable to be a hypocrite as to be social.
Quoting Mww
Defining judgement as per the first emphasised point, the second is where I differ with empirical justification. Or rather I would not leave this open to the interpretation that our decision-making (conscious or not) is the judgement being made consciously. The way S1 and S2 work together is that S2 consciously verifies the decisions of S1 while believing them to be S2's decisions.
Imagine a programmer with inconsistent amnesia. Every day he opens his project and there's some work that's been done. The programmer looks through the code and says, 'Yes, this is what I would have done, so I must have done this.' Occasionally he spots a bug and says, 'What was I thinking? This isn't right,' but most of the bugs he misses (as does any programmer: they are terrible at self-reviewing). Then he goes home, and another programmer sits at his desk, working hard not smart, adding to the first programmer's code.
Rationalism is purely the first programmer's point of view. I'm not saying he doesn't also write code, just that he's mostly just unconsciously taking the credit for another programmer's work, good or bad.
Moral philosophy is the first programmer coming to work and finding that he (thinks he) had started work on a new class consisting of boolean methods.
and he's like "What the f*** was I trying to do here?!?" unaware that the second programmer had misunderstood the problem.
I don't see how this gets you away from the is/ought gap. If the criterion of moral evaluation of something is whether it seems right or wrong, then you haven't said or proposed anything at all, you've just stated a tautology. However, as soon as you substitute some pseudo-scientific procedure of data collection and calculation for a moral judgement, Hume shows up with his guillotine and demands to know what this procedure has to do with the rightness or wrongness of the thing. The data that you collect is not an ought; it is a record of observations or reports - an is.
I like this wording of it a lot. "Readiness" is a good way of thinking about a moral position because it might be "I have a pre-prepared rational answer" or just an instinct.
Quoting 180 Proof
And yet it is nonetheless divorced. Helping a stranger today would generally lower my chances of my genome's survival, not increase it, were it not for the fact that a) I'm not likely to die from losing the competition for resources anymore (thanks welfare!), and b) we already think altruism is good from back before the divorce, so not being a selfish a-hole is a good in itself now (e.g. may be more attractive to members of the opposite sex).
Quoting 180 Proof
This is, I'm guessing, based on relativism's arrival in philosophy, thus judging it on its memetic fitness within the context of other memes. But I'm not suggesting relativism needs to be argued for at all. We're more than aware that moral absolutism, such as that which is supposed to derive from an intelligent creator, is the King of Memes. It's still BS, though, and you can intelligently, using evidence-based methodology and, yes, rationalism, dismiss the meme as simply unjustified, however attractive it is. What I'm saying by "relativity is the default" is that we can just keep going until all we're left with is what nature gave us and the environment we find ourselves in: a drive to be altruistic, and no basis to choose who, when and how, i.e. freedom. It's less a derivation than a process of elimination.
Quoting 180 Proof
Selects on what basis? A purely pragmatic optimal will be the easiest thing to do. We must have a desire to satisfy in order for an outcome to be the best. Also, you are characterising moral philosophy here, not individuals generally, right? I don't think people spend their time generating hypothetical scenarios in order to prepare themselves for the real world; rather, they are informed as to the pragmatic option (or multiple options) for the future chiefly by experience of successes and failures in the past. It is mostly reactive rather than proactive, beyond whatever values are instilled in us by authority. We can and do sometimes rationalise about moral correctness in hypothetical situations, but we cannot derive the morally good outcome, only the morally best outcome(s) by a pre-existing notion of good (feel free to hit me with a counter-example).
Quoting 180 Proof
Except, as I've said often, I am not proposing justifying a moral ideology on natural grounds. It is not that I am justifying relativism by appealing to nature. The effort is purely descriptive, and starts from nature, not relativism. I do justify social behaviour, not as an objective good, but as a classification issue: we humans are social animals; to be antisocial is to be subhuman. One can still be so if one wishes.
Quoting 180 Proof
Quite the opposite. The lack of an objective ought, not a justification of it, is precisely my point. Also, I start from natural selection, and proceed from there.
Quoting 180 Proof
Good-for-the-group in this context is any genetic feature selected for on the basis that good-for-group behaviour is good-for-me. It can only be re-rationalised as top-down; it cannot naturally be so, just from the mechanics of it.
Quoting 180 Proof
I covered this in the OP. First, one cannot oblige nature to verify moral philosophy; one can only ask why we are moral (as I'm trying to explain to Pfhorrest). Second, in this case, the golden rule is a rationalisation of something we already did without the need for moral philosophy or rational moral decision-making. In the absence of a competing and contrary philosophy, one may as well say, "Use thine eyes, not thine ears, for sight." The difference is that the reason we already did this did not apply to the general global population; while empathetic responses were not apparently subdued in the presence of out-group members, oxytocin production was and is subdued by other, counter-empathetic responses.
So one can contrast Hillel with, say, Hitler (sticking with names of the form Hi*le* for s'n'g), who believed it was absolutely brilliant to do that which was hateful to him to his fellow, if one allowed 'fellow' to include Jews, which he did not. It seems that Hitler prioritised his counter-empathetic (largely pre-social) responses, while Hillel emphasised his social ones.
Ok, I get it. I look at it somewhat differently, although the end result was the same.....I was wrong. I did insist I worked it out rationally, re: no matter what the ball costs, the bat costs a dollar more, therefore the bat costs a dollar. Says it right there...the bat costs a dollar. The irrational insistence comes from neglecting the difference between costs a dollar and costs a dollar more. Such error follows from a cognitive neglect, the causality for which is merely a language game.
I hesitate to say thinking it out rationally involves the math, because it was the math that proved to me my judgement was irrational. It is a simple equation, after all, but the equation wouldn’t have even been necessary as an empirical proof, had I not overlooked the categorical signifier “more”.
I did get a kick out of the word/placement test though. Daniel asked me to tell myself whether the words he chose for me, were to the left or right of center of the columns in which they were listed. Of course, the words under test were “left” and “right”. Now, my thought process is such that I never do anything without cognizing something about that which I am supposed to do, in this case place words, which I must first cognize as particulars representations of conception. OK, so I see the word “left”, my reason tells me “left” and that is the very first thing I am aware of so I think “left”. But the word “left” I see is to the right of center. In effect, the “left” I think is not the placement “left” I’m being tested on. I’ve been tricked into exchanging my thought, for a test score. And the reason it is a language game, is because it is highly doubtful I’d have been wrong in my word placement if the words had been anything other than “left” and “right”.
Anyway.....it was fun. And does highlight some of reason’s deficiencies.
—————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Good that we have established the validity of that condition.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Redundant compared to....what? And what is a moral truth? Morality is a rational enterprise, sure, but mere rationalization doesn’t necessarily give truth. If morality is qualified by its good, truth could only apply if and when a moral disposition is truly good, which is a blatant redundancy, for there is no such thing as a good that isn’t good truly. But it certainly can’t be the case that genes are responsible for that redundancy.
—————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
True enough, if it should become established we are in a cosmological frame of reference, at the exclusion of any other frame of reference. I suppose to claim all humans are in a moral frame of reference suffers the same dilemma, but it is still much more parsimonious to suggest, and indeed much more evident, that we are moral beings, than it is to suggest nothing we do matters. Hell....I’m taking great care to make myself understood with these words, for no other reason whatsoever than I think it matters. I mean...it’s a moral obligation of mine not to subject you to confusion or to force you into an unaligned response, by which you would possibly feel unflavored.
I would need much more than mere cosmological predicates to ascertain the value of hypocrisy.
—————
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Understood; empirical psychology in juxtaposition to cognitive philosophy. I trust your exposition herein, because I don’t know any better, and suffice it to say, from my point of view.....close enough. I might point out that your justification is not quite the same as my judgement. It’s like....judgement is a conclusion, justification is the demonstration of a conclusion. They are both rational activities, and therefore both susceptible to irrationality.
As regards this inconsistent amnesiac, here we see why psychology branched from philosophy. The latter makes no room for dysfunctional impairment, while the former requires it. My philosophy tells me how I think, your psychology wants to tell me how wrong I am. Yours tries to warn me of pending mistakes, mine doesn’t warn me at all, but forces me change my thinking because of them. Difference being, of course, while. neither warnings nor experiences are always heeded, experience always carries the much more severe penalties and, even more importantly, carries the higher likelihood for change.
—————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Now that (bold) I understand and accept without equivocation. But we evolved from small groups, thus there is empathy and altruism and they are purposeful affectations. If we could only come to terms on how that relates to morality, we’d be off to the rodeo.
No more than a claim of empiricism is a tautology. Which it very well could be taken to be: the claim that any supposed thing the existence or non-existence of which would make absolutely no noticeable difference to what appears to be real, is not real. That sounds pretty tautological. But note how it’s distinguishing between what people might nominally think is real, and what the experience of reality is like. It’s saying that if you think X is real but the existence of X makes no difference in any experience of reality, then you’re wrong.
My claim of hedonism is like that. It’s just saying that if you think something is or isn’t good, but that thing makes no difference in what does or doesn’t feel good to anyone, then you’re wrong. Besides that negative proposition, yeah, it’s pretty tautological, the good is what feels good, just like empiricism, reality is what looks real.
Quoting SophistiCat
This just seems like you didn’t read the post you’re response to. Either you verify the hedonic experiences yourself, and get “oughts” directly from them (as a hedonic experience just is one that motivates an “ought” opinion, in the same way that an empirical experience motivates an “is” opinion: they are precisely the experiences of things seeming respectively good/bad or true/false). Or else you just take someone else’s “oughts” they claim to have derived from experience, without checking them. One way or another, what you end up with is a list of “oughts” to start from, and then you build more “oughts” out of them. You never start with any “is”.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Asking that question presumes you known what is or isn’t moral, which is exactly the question at hand. Can we know that? If so, how? What does that even mean? It it just means some certain kinds of behavior we evolved to do, then you’re just giving an account of how we evolved to do what we do, leaving open the question (or else presuming an answer) to whether that stuff we evolved to do is moral.
'Moral' is a word, we use to do some job. We didn't pluck the concept out of some platonic realm and then wonder what things fit it. We already know what things fit it. If we didn't have some broad collection of similar things to define we'd never have invented the word in the first place.
Quoting Isaac
Even saintly people must walk past the homeless. It is unfeasible to try to help everyone -- that's precisely the problem with having an outdated social biology -- and so one must choose who to walk by. And then you have empathy fatigue, wherein a person knows they can help, but just struggles to care any more. And then, yes, you have the normalisation of homelessness as a condition, and people who, normalised or not, just couldn't give a flying one.
Lots of people do dedicate their time, effort and money to helping the homeless too. While we cannot rely on the altruism of everyone, we can currently rely on sufficient altruism, and that's a factor too: not so much not my problem as someone else has got this. I think your concern is that an idea can grab enough people to make this proportion insufficient?
Whether someone is one of those that cannot help everyone, or that get empathy fatigue, or that never help, I think they mostly feel guilt arising from their empathy. (People explicitly point to this in the case of the homeless, and in the case of TV commercials for charities: "Without your five dollars, this cute but patently diseased and malnourished orphan will die!"... "They make us feel so guilty!!!") Individualism, to me, is best summed up as an ideology designed to console and, eventually, subdue guilt (by stimulating counter-empathetic responses, for instance) arising from systematic antisocial attitudes toward people outside of our virtual social groups. I think it serves much the same purpose as racist ideology serves to console and subdue guilt arising from one's instincts for dealing with out-groups. It is an antisocial philosophy endorsed by a powerful antisocial minority and subscribed to by otherwise perfectly social people grateful for an appeal to their pre-social instincts.
So I think it's perfectly reasonable, if one is fit to be part of society unbegrudgingly, to fight against this, to not tolerate the antisocial elements that sell individualism, to raise the consciousness of those who normalise or don't question the need for the vulnerable classes, and to do that one obviously can't just rely on the better angels of our nature, durable though they are, and must construct counter-individualistic, pro-altruistic memes to combat antisocial ones. In other words, with an already existing idea of 'good' based on naturally-selected for social drives, moral philosophy is a somewhat important pragmatic tool (e.g. as an idea to rally people around and a tool for debating). Metaphysics, on the other hand, weakens that fight by making 'good' as easy to undermine as anything we might consider 'bad', such as the doctrine of individualism.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, exactly this. You do see it in social animals in natural history documentaries: one individual breaks the rules and gets a beating/exiled/killed. Some monkeys are particularly scary at this, for instance. So that's one reason it will be rare. The other, as you say, is the homogeneity of egalitarian behaviour in social groups: that's what children learn from, and we don't have that anymore. We're in a memetic competition, and not all of our better angels are winning. It's quite telling that things like individualism and animal rights can be simultaneously successful ideas, often in the same individuals. "F*** everyone else. Except dolphins, dolphins are cool."
Quoting Isaac
Good point. I guess I made an unconscious distinction between the enslavement of individuals (opportunistic slavery) and that of e.g. races (systematic slavery). My thinking could only really apply to the latter.
Quoting Isaac
Exactly my thinking. I don't think it's 100% clean-cut us-v-them. 'They' are appealing to instincts, some of which will also have been developed in social groups (out-grouping, even social stratification), that exist within us. And I think even left to our own devices, we would still probably be negligent about a dominating culture such that consciousness-raising would still be required. After all, these are not natural circumstances to find ourselves in, i.e. nature could not have selected for skills to deal with it. But yes, in terms of behaviour toward individuals, I think our altruism would dominate.
I think this is quite untrue. We don't even need someone else's conclusions to have our own moral reactions. We are prone to empathise even with fictional characters in fictional circumstances. It is precisely the descriptions we react to in both real and hypothetical situations, allowing us to draw our own conclusions by rationalising our own reactions. One of the recurring features of the Abu Ghraib investigations was that soldiers were taking part in abuses against their own moral judgement. They knew it was wrong, i.e. they did not accept the conclusions of the persons with previous experience and reached their own, but perpetuated the problem out of fear of leaving themselves vulnerable.
Putting experience aside, prescriptive conclusions are inculcated from others' conclusions in abstract ways, by pedagogy, rhetoric, etc. But it is not generally possible to describe Othello dispassionately and just tack on 'Wasn't Iago a hero?' to seed an anti--mixed-marriage moral. People are naturally equipped to see what is good (social) and bad (antisocial), and learn from their own reactions, even if the describer drew the opposite conclusion.
Yes, this was a mere accident. An unusable data point. For the record, I also said 10 cents. Most do.
Quoting Mww
It would be redundant in the same way that a verbal rule: "You should see with your eyes" would be redundant. We're all already doing that. Likewise defining a 'good' to be e.g. 'help those in need according to your means' would be likewise pointless since people already had a physiological, i.e. non-rational altruistic reaction to people in need.
Quoting Mww
:up:
Quoting Mww
Now? Sure, now it's a different redundancy, because we do have moral drives and we don't have a fit environment to use them in. We use our rationality to make up the difference (not necessary or meaningful in small, isolated, homogeneous groups). Rationally, we are ignorant and find nothing rational to justify a moral axiom, or rather find lots of things that fail to. I believe that, if, with a snap of a finger, we returned to hunter-gatherer environments tomorrow, in a few generations we would once again have no need to define 'good'. We would return to simply reasoning which of our desires -- selfish or selfless -- we were going to prioritise in a given situation, and how.
Quoting Mww
It is also much more pragmatic. We immediately exist in a society. The cosmos is the stuff of documentaries and books, and lacks that immediacy. It's a valid frame of reference, but a poor choice nonetheless.
Quoting Mww
And knowing about it doesn't change much anyway, except in edge cases. I am as in error now when my rational mind verifies an inappropriate pattern-recognition result to an algorithmic problem as I was when I was ten, maybe a bit more mindful of it from time to time. I would bear it in mind, for instance, when writing exam questions. But I think philosophy is the kind of place where this sort of thing genuinely is useful. Philosophy is vested in rationalism. It would be good to have as many facts as possible, if only to identify which ideas are not useful to consider.
Quoting Mww
That's the biggie. I don't think I've argued sufficiently well for this. My feeling is that OP has created confusion as to what I'm saying. I will sleep on it. N'night!
Oh btw did you have some references in mind? You mentioned some in the message you deleted.
Similarly, if my girlfriend tells me she saw an adorable squirrel eating seed in the middle of a bunch of pigeons down the street from my house, I'll believe her account without needing to confirm it, because I already know from experience that that's a kind of thing that can happen.
But, for example, when an ex-girlfriend long ago complained to me that someone she saw at work told her to smile, from that description alone I didn't understand why that was bad. I imagined myself being at work and someone telling me to smile, and I imagined that I would take it as a friendly gesture, someone trying to help cheer me up. She had to talk me through all the other experiential context in order for me to understand why, in her circumstances given her history and the world as she generally experiences it, a strange man telling her to smile is demeaning and unpleasant. She had to explain what is different between her and me that would explain why she would experience displeasure in that context when I wouldn't.
If someone tells me that someone they know got injured or something, I can extrapolate from my own experiences with pain to know that that's a bad thing, without having to get injured myself and see that yes in fact having cuts and bruises and broken bones does indeed feel bad.
But my girlfriend couldn't understand why I not only wanted but needed to pop my neck and back sometimes; to her imagination, that sounds like something that would be unpleasant, and she couldn't understand why it would be pleasant, because she hasn't had the kind of spinal problems I've had and doesn't know what a relief it is from a kind of pain she's never felt. Not that it's a level of pain beyond anything she's felt, but she has no experience of pain just from joints inside her body being misaligned, with no cuts or bruises or breaks or anything. To her imagination, the neck-popping seemed like it should feel like a break, and so be bad; while to my actual experience, the neck-popping alleviated a different kind of pain, and so was good.
Your discussion here gives a good solid account of why we have a lot of "ought" intuitions, why we evolved to be eager to accept that certain things are good or certain things are bad, and so to easily agree with at least some other people when they claim that something is good or bad. But that evolutionary account doesn't establish that or why those things are good or bad, just the cause of us often thinking so. And despite that frequent agreement in the contexts where such agreement was evolutionarily advantageous, we also have frequent disagreements, especially now (the evolutionary "now", past 6-12Ka) that we live lives so different from the ancestral environment.
Moral objectivism is only the claim that those disagreements can be rationally (small-r, not big) resolved: we can talk about why (as in reasons, not causes) one person or group thinks something is good or bad and another thinks otherwise, and work out some kind of unbiased conclusion. My kind of moral phenomenalism is only the claim that the reasons we should appealing to in those disagreements are the things we have common (as in shared) experiences of seeming good or bad. Thus objective phenomenalism about morality, which is to say, altruistic hedonism, is just the two of those things together, saying that we should listen to and be concerned about each other's claims that something feels good or bad, and try to work out together some course of action that feels good and not bad to everyone.
(And the other principles of liberalism and criticism together just mean that by default everything is permissible until it can be shown wrong, and it is always up for debate whether something or another genuinely can be shown wrong or not. These seem to be the counter to what you think "objectivism" means, as in absolutism, necessitarian, a priori, unquestionable moral dictums. But that's not what it means).
Yes, I think the mere existence of more than a handful of homeless is testament to the fact that it already is insufficient. Plus, I think in many cases (though I wouldn't say all), even the people helping the homeless are still subject to the same influences by social norm. Many social workers, for example, are cruel to their own children on their return from work - stressed out by a hard day 'altruistically' helping others, they lash out at their own families when they get home. What would explain this phenomena if these people just happened to be more in touch with their empathy than others? I think a better explanation is that they've joined a social group whose norms are the helping of others, but when at home they follow the very family-management norms they've just spent the whole day observing.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, absolutely. The tendency is used to manipulate people into acting in the favour of those doing the manipulation. I think though, that the tendency would arise naturally just as a result of our social arrangements, maybe just in a lesser form. With a few notable exceptions, inequality (not meeting the needs of your fellow) is unheard of in nomadic hunter-gather tribes, but as soon as there is settlement (the ability to store surplus) we start to see the emergence of it. This suggests some purely circumstantial element to the emergence of selfishness as a tactic. Interestingly though, not all settled groups abandoned egalitarianism. Selfishness only become a possible tactic, it's not mechanical environmental-determinism, there's still a social group of complex humans involved, it's just that something which was previously off-the-table as an option is now a consideration.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Interesting. I don't exactly disagree, but this runs somewhat counter to my personal understanding which is more about actions than words. I genuinely don't think it is even possible to debate someone into being more altruistic. As I believe you've mentioned, most rationalisation is post hoc, we try to understand the behaviours we're inclined to do (and the objectives and affects we're inclined to feel) in terms of a narrative which attempts to unify what are, in reality, a completely disparate set of urges/feelings. I think persuasion has to be more subtle than philosophical debate ever is. It has to present an attractive alternative narrative, one which makes the undesirable behaviour stand out as incoherent. Then there's a concomitant need to present an alternative set of social norms (as behaviours, not theories) for people to feel comfortable with, and a social group whose identity is dictated by those behaviours. Only all three aspects will work, I think. Narrative, social norms, available social group identified by those norms.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ha! Exactly. The 'rules of membership' for social groups are not in any way designed, or intended, to be consistent. That's the point I was making about the social worker, and it seems you and I might be on the same page here. We wear different masks for different social roles.. there's nothing wrong with that, until one of the masks seems to so wildly contradicts another that we feel there's no possible unifying narrative. That seems to make us uncomfortable. Part of the reason why I believe that available social norms and groups are so important is that people seem quite genuinely distraught about conflicting social roles and yet feel powerless to do anything about it. If the solution were available to them easily by thought alone, I think they would have found it. There seems to be a need for some practical element too.
Again, same mistake as you seem to be making in the other morality thread. 'Good' and 'Bad' are not platonic ideals which we discover and then afterward try to find out things that fit them. They are words we use to describe, or associate things already thus grouped. We learnt how to use the word 'good' by being told the sorts of things it could be applied to. To suggest now that there's some question over what is 'good' is merely to claim that one does not know how to speak English.
Are you implying that there are no longer any social groups, or that individuals belong to too many social groups such that those groups no longer matter?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm not going to treat your experiences head-on as they are yours, rather I'll look for something similar in my own experience and see if there's common ground. I recall how sceptical I was of the cat-calling/car-slowing/horn-tooting problem that women face here on an hourly basis because I just didn't see it, and it that case magnitude is a factor. Of course, I did see it, I just didn't consciously see it, i.e. I didn't notice it. The brain is very good at hiding from itself what it sees as normal. Once my consciousness had been raised, I started to see it everywhere. And I was angry as hell, partly at myself of course, but mostly at the white-van--driving douchebags who hassle women. That anger arises without reasonable consideration: it is an automatic reaction that I did not have until I had had an empathetic response to victims of douchebaggery.
I think this is likely typical, and gives a rough sketch of what actually happens when we acquire new empathetic responses. While the trigger for 're-programming' myself came from consciousness, the mechanism of wiring in that automated response to stimuli is unconscious. The action of the reason is to see harm which was not previously detected; it does not redefine my notion of 'good', rather it refines the way my brain detects external harm. Does that sound similar to you?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Agreed. Like with any other theory of morality, you cannot justify a particular notion of 'good' or 'bad' with regards to good-for-survival, especially an outdated good-for-survival. Often, the resolution to this is just to subscribe to a position. Here, we need not necessarily do that. By understanding the real processes taking place (and that have taken place in the past), the relationship between those processes and the benefit to social groups, and the relationships between sociality and our conceptions of morality, I believe we can see what those conceptions are analogues of. You give the conceptions primacy, I feel. I give the biology primacy, and see no reason why rational minds that have woefully incomplete knowledge of their own operations and origins ought to have their conceptions of morality taken more seriously.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, understandably, since we are surrounded by people who are unlikely to (have the opportunity to) reciprocate and have very different moral frames of reference to us. Part of my thesis is that such disagreements would not have been frequent or rationally debated (even with oneself) within socially homogeneous hunter-gatherer groups.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Moral objectivism to my understanding is the claim that what is right or wrong doesn't depend on what people think is right or wrong. It is the assumption that there is a (potentially inaccessible) correct answer to a particular problem that is independent of the moral frames of reference of the people affected by that particular problem. Getting the views of the people affected would be redundant to the objective moral value, but it is the only pragmatic way of resolving the issue when an objective moral, should it exist, is unknown to all involved.
As we've discussed before, the assumption of an objective reality in science is predicated on it being the best explanation for the seeming objective reality that allows for predictive modelling. Beyond that, it would be an arbitrary belief. Moral objectivity has no such feature since we cannot test the values of objective morals, only of individuals. There does not seem to be an objective morality in practise, that is: no process is consistent with only its existence. Any approach -- which is any pragmatic approach -- that factors in the moral values of the individuals involved in a particular conflict is, as far as I can see, relativistic. Ultimately whoever has the power to resolve the conflict is taking on board the evidence of others but making a judgement from their (hopefully now evolved) frame of reference. There is no non-subjective mechanics involved. Since objectivity does not enter into the mechanics, it does not strike me as useful or realistic.
That is the moral objectivity I argue against, and the reason why I think the realistic description is (heavily biased) moral relativism. There is an extent at least to which your conception of moral objectivity coincides with the above, insofar as you have previously stated that, if a conflict arises, at least one party must be in error. To the extent that your conception of moral objectivity allows for negotiation, mediation, understanding the other's point of view, and relies on some subjective mind making a decision or failing to, and with no reason to believe by the end of it that they have an objectively correct answer, it appears consistent with my conception of natural moral relativism. Perhaps it would be easiest to consider cases where moral relativism is clearly not in play.
This is still predicated on the assumption of a top-down moral objectivity. The question is meaningless in a bottom-up naturalistic description. What is moral is what my social drives make me feel is moral. If I hurt someone, I feel emotional empathy: I feel pain. That is 'bad'. If I do good for someone, I do so with a hit of oxytocin which feels nice. That is 'good'. If I do something that I know is perceived antisocial, for instance refuse to torture a prisoner in Abu Ghraib, I feel anxiety. That is 'bad', but is it as 'bad' as harming others? If I do something that I know is perceived social, such as share 'My thoughts and prayers with the victims of whatever' on social media, I feel included. That is 'good', but is it as good as not posting BS and doing something?
So far as I understand, what you're asking is: by what external measure do we affirm that these are good or bad, better or worse? And this completely misses the point. Our rational conceptions are a) overwhelmingly advised by our feelings, i.e. not that rational, and b) beyond that based almost entirely on ignorance and invention. You and I seem to have almost identical moral values but cannot, so far as I can see, agree on a single aspect of how those values are obtained. It is simpler to assume that our differences boil down to idiosyncratic rationalisations and what we have in common -- our values -- have an underlying bias.
I think this is an interesting example because, as noted in e.g. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy, which argues for rational compassion, we are supposed to be biased to extend empathy more to those who are biologically close to us. (I also disagree with Paul Bloom's conclusion, and find that he makes the error of mistaking outcomes with capacities.)
I had this sort of thing in mind when I mentioned my nationalistic, anti-immigration friend-of-a-friend to, I think, Pfhorrest. A social worker who is abusing their child is a hypocrite. They have, as you say, one virtual social group (the nuclear family) in which one set of moral values is championed, and another (the industry they work in) in which a different and contrary set of values is championed. The person cannot rationally argue for one and the other: they might, for instance, work against another person abusing their child.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, to my knowledge, surplus is really only an issue after the neolithic revolution, in which roles must be assigned (social stratification: we can't all be farmers in an agricultural society) and which can't be supported by small social groups, so we're already moving from an environment in which our social genes are fit to one in which they are not.
Given how common social stratification is in other primate species, even just considering the usual alpha-omega structures, it seems reasonable that a bias toward social stratification could be selected for, which would require some rewording of the OP wherein morality and sociality are pretty much synonymous. But maybe not. As far as I can tell, there's no consensus that we are genetically driven toward social stratification in the literature, unlike, say, bees. Which begs the questions: why does social stratification arise?, and why does it not arise in human hunter-gatherer groups?
A stratifying bias (which may be nothing more than in-group bias + emergent specialisation) might be subdued in small groups by socialisation, e.g. in reverse dominance (https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways) but then one would expect the majority of hunter-gatherer tribes to still be bent toward stratification. Perhaps humans are just different to many other primates in that respect.
Quoting Isaac
Yes. The sort of thing I had in mind were the philosophies of the French revolution, which appear to have focused social unrest arising from systemic corruption and inequality, exacerbated by the failing agricultural system and bad financial management by a minority of wealthy, powerful people who did not share in the suffering of consequences. My feeling is that individual reactions to the situation under traditional monarchistic-nationalistic socialisations that could no longer subdue both selfish and selfless responses cannot have been uniformly rational of the form: This is bad because it is against liberty, or This is bad because it is inequality. Those moral philosophies, themselves influenced by human social drives, appealed to the outraged masses who were both victims (selfish) and witnesses (selfless) of a society collapsing under a condition of antisociality. Any vestiges of the prior reigning socialistion -- you cannot kill a King -- fell to this more appealing one.
Contrast that with the recent global economic crisis, again caused by a failing industry and the mismanagement of the economy by a powerful, wealthy minority who did not generally share in the consequences of their failures (the odd suicide notwithstanding). Our response was similar, and yet much more muted because it was, on the whole, abstract. I personally suffered very little from the economic crisis. I continued to be paid, have good job security, I never went hungry, and the misfortune I saw was largely limited to the closing down of a few nice shops and bars. I did have a sense of injustice, but it was more a) in line with existing social mores and b) quite abstract and less empathetically stimulating. One can perhaps imagine how much injustice and inequality people under a very different socialisation will suffer, and did suffer in France, before they go nuts.
There are no longer single, small, homogeneous social groups for which our social drives were developed. We have a different kind of environment now. The idea of a social group persists in a more malleable way: the nuclear family, work colleagues, friends, social network, my church (I don't have one) or other community. Less so these days, we have communities centred around neighbourhoods. This is no longer one social group but many 'virtual' groups. We no longer inhabit them immediately and unavoidably, but dependently.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ok. But having a non-rational altruistic reaction, says nothing about the possibility, or indeed even the validity, of determining a moral action because of it. Is it correct to say an altruistic reaction is merely a recognition of an empirical condition external to the witness of it? If so, we are still left with what to do about it. Help others may be a general rule of altruism, understand others may be the general rule of empathy, but both of those do not instantiate the rational prerogatives of the subject who merely understands the rule., but knows not, because of it, how he should act concerning it.
I grant altruistic and empathetic reaction, and accede to their respective non-rationality, but take issue with them being sufficient for moral claims. Sufficiency is authoritative enough to grant that a moral response ought to be forthcoming, but not necessarily authoritative enough to determine the act which objectifies the morality of it. This is because non-rational enterprises elicit feelings directed towards something outside oneself, that is, facilitated by an external causality, but moral dispositions elicit feelings directed towards the agent himself, facilitated by an internal causality, re: his will.
That is how I would reconcile your iteration of redundancy, in that ever-present, naturally evolved, non-rational altruism and empathy, being posited as the current ground for moral responses, are insufficient for that purpose, when, as plausible theory, moral responses themselves, are always and necessarily determined a priori.
————-
Context is usually important, but must be omitted here.
Daniel:
“.... You probably knew you could solve this problem with paper and pencil if not without...
1787:
“...of which we may become more clearly convinced by trying large numbers....”
Daniel
“...automatic activities of System 1...”
1787
“....in which it immediately relates...”
Daniel:
“....System 1 continually generates suggestions...”
1787
“.... the matter of all phenomena that is given to us....”
Daniel:
“...System 1 and System 2 are both active...”
1787
“...Through the first an object is given to us; through the second, it is thought....”
Daniel:
“....System 2 adopts the suggests of System 1....”
1787:
“....a conception never relates immediately to an object, but only to (mediately to) an intuition....”
Daniel:
“....the highly diverse operation of System 2....”
1787:
“...assemble themselves into a more or less extensive collection...”
....the list is quite extensive, but, as I deleted, from altogether distinct domains. Still, if harsh and perhaps even unwarranted, it permits the philosopher to say to the psychologist....you’ve taken what I’ve given and made a gawd-awful mess out of it. (Kidding. Nobody really says that. Do they?)
This still presumes there must be an external validation of it, which is erroneous (albeit understandable) in my view because the morality itself derives from biology, history and statistics. The possibility of validation is an illusion arising from being thus biased and not knowing why, in an environment in which that bias cannot logically be satisfied. (By logically, I mean the logic of natural selection, not the logic of the rationalist.)
Quoting Mww
Exactly! Et voila: moral philsophy is born!
Quoting Mww
And this would have been the case too in groups of 20-50 people. Your social drives cannot tell you how to help, they only give you the desire to help, which is rationalised now as 'good'. The 'how' is not a moral problem. It is not qualitatively any different from 'how do I get my kite out of the tree,' itself following from a desire to reunite with one's kite. This is also true in most philosophical rationalisations: "maximise the benefit" does not tell you how to maximise the benefit.
So this 'how' is not the redundancy. The imperatives were the redundancy. It's worth reiterating that our social drives are no longer fit for our environments for the most part. Figuring out the how has always been an issue, but now the what (different socialisations) and the when and the who (non-feasibility of obeying imperatives) also require rationalisation. Moral philosophy (of the what/who/when kind) is not necessarily redundant now, is rather a symptom of the lack of its own redundancy.
Quoting Mww
Yes, I'm saying it. I'm saying the metaphysician has taken what nature has given them and made a gawd-awful mess out of it. The psychologist discovers only what nature has given, incrementally, with limited accuracy and no hope of completeness.
Given that moral philosophers are biased by their own nature (as we all are) and given that their job (unbeknownst to them) is to rationally reconcile that bias plus their idiosyncrasies with what is actually needed in our contemporaneous environment (no longer the same thing), one might expect the cleverest of them to hit the nail close the head sometimes. Even DK isn't 'truth', just a fairly minimal approximation to it. However given that each of them is now more unique in their thinking and experience than any possible interlocuters 20,000 years ago, one must also expect that they disagree. They can't mostly be consistent science, and none are apt to be consistent with science all of the time.
Yeah, the notion that is the theme of this thread applies here too. We're set up to be biased to extend empathy more to those who are biologically close to us, but yet again we find ourselves in an environment where children spend most of their life at school, are in near constant conflict with parental objectives and are often disciplined harshly. All of which undermines the natural empathy we are set up to feel.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Do you think this has much influence on them? I mean, if this hypocrisy was pointed out, do you imagine it would make them uncomfortable enough to want to change, or is our capacity to invent new narratives too slippery to catch that way?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I only have the paper citation, but have you read Sapolsky's research on baboons (Sapolsky RM, Share LJ (2004) A pacific culture among wild baboons: Its emergence and transmission)? It's quite revealing about the role of culture even in animals like baboons in maintaining social systems. My feeling is that only a very basic framework is actually genetic, more like the boundaries of playing field, the resultant system is largely brought about by culture. It raises interesting questions about how social groups create and maintain behavioural norms (well, interesting to me anyway).
It seems to me that social groups have two systems for creation and maintenance of behavioural norms. One is active, the other passive. The active one is about influencial members trying to stand out, the passive one is like a game of Chinese whispers, each member simply trying to copy the other (to reinforce group identity) but making small errors in doing so. Over time, these small errors become magnified and end up as behavioural norms which no one conciously planned and which may even be detrimental to the group. I think this is how some of the more unusual moral rules come about. Of course, how they are then rationalised is another matter.
For what...morality and/or moral responses? In what regard? An act is technically validated immediately upon becoming one. Even if it is an immoral act, it is still validated as being external to the agent that willed it. To me, “externally validated” might mean physically exhibited, manifest outside the agent himself. If it means “shown to be correct (or appropriate, or consistent) externally”, that is a sort of a redundancy, because the primary purpose of willful volitions is to conform to innate disposition, hence the act has already been validated as being a moral act.
External validation for altruism is easy....actually helping somebody immediately validates it. Empathy....maybe, maybe not. Being empathetic towards someone is a rational activity, so....not much external validation there. Unless altruism is amended to it, but then, that’s not necessarily externally validating one’s empathy, for he couldn’t tell whether or not his altruism wasn’t just working solo.
I’m confused.
—————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yeah....born first, I might add. Right? What’s the earliest proper exposition of your altruism/empathy social drives?
—————-
Quoting Kenosha Kid
DK.....(stabbing haphazardly)....direct knowledge? If so, then agreed. Try this on for size:
“...(truth) is the accordance of a cognition with its object.....” Given a set of predicates, should I cognize ‘57 De Soto from them, then the truth is it’s exactly a ‘57 De Soto. Couldn’t be anything else.
So where do we go from here?
Yes, discomfort is the problem, and I recognise that in myself too. I think hypocritical values and a history of guilt are a heady mix. But people calm down eventually.
Quoting Isaac
I thought I had when I saw the title, but reading it now, I don't think I have. It's an interesting mixture of factors: large catastrophic event, leading to a shortage of males; changes in sexual selection (focus on competition with similar-ranking members); changes in environment that lead to physiological changes in the group members (e.g. the stress reduction in unattacked low-ranking members)... and then of course the resultant effects on social behaviour that the young learn from. I liked this in particular:
[quote=Sapolski]For example, juvenile rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) housed with stumptail macaques (M. artoides) assume the latter's more conciliatory style (de Waal and Johanowicz 1993).[/quote]
They say people become like their dogs! :rofl: One of the interesting points:
[quote=Sapolski]A number of investigators have emphasized how a tolerant and gregarious social setting facilitates social transmission (e.g., van Schaik et al. 1999), exactly the conditions in F93–96.[/quote]
which suggests, looking back the other way, a conservativism of socialisation in intolerant, unequal, or stressful environments, which I think describes humans pretty well too. (Stress, depression, and anxiety lead to anti- or asocial behaviour, self-centredness.)
While it is obvious why low-ranking baboons had an easier time of it, one thing I haven't really gotten my head around yet is why the loss of all of the most aggressive males led to increased aggression between similar-ranking males. One would have thought that, if anything, the high female-to-male ratio would make competition between males rather slight.
One thing to bear in mind is that we carry with us much of the genetics of our ancestors, and when we see a social group at a given time, we are seeing how individuals behave in that specific environment, including that group's reigning socialisation. What the above shows is how quickly group members change when the environment and the socialisation suffer catastrophe. Behavioural characteristics that were not very important in one generation might become dominant in the next, or the next but one.
Quoting Isaac
In hunter-gatherer groups, reverse domination acted specifically to stop an individual standing out and becoming dominant. This was one of the means by which social groups ensured egalitarianism. It seems more likely that individuals were able to become influential once homogeneous socialisation was weakened by having larger, more intermingling groups. That said, plenty of other primate species have alpha males, and we have relatively recent common ancestors with them. I wonder if we evolved a distrust of alphas, perhaps the origin of lampooning :)
The Chinese whispers thing is very true though, and the indoctrination of children into religions for their supposed benefit is always the example I think of, since it is essentially the banana-ladder experiment but real. More positively, I'm not sure if I brought it up here or elsewhere but Dennett's summary of various anthropologists looking at the origins and developments of culture are along these lines, which is why I think that memetics is the best descriptive tool for that sort of thing. (Dennett's memetic description of culture focuses on a fictitious illustration based on real anthropological findings, in which, when an artefact of culture, such as a fishing boat, is shown to be more successful, all of its features are imitated, including ones that had nothing to do with its success. I'll dig out my copy of From Bacteria to Bach and Back for the citations.)
Gray, who I linked an article by earlier, seems to think that reverse domination and the like are socialisations rather than particularly selected for. My scepticism about this is based on the uniformity of "fierce egalitarianism" in hunter-gathered groups.
Another anthropologist even believes that dominance hierarchies might themselves be socialisations:
The idea seems to be that dominance is genetic, and whether that dominance is hierarchical or reverse is modal.
Roughly. But "harmful" and "bad" seem to me roughly synonyms. That is the "notion of good" that we share, and exactly why I say to appeal to hedonic experiences as the common ground for determining what in particular is good. It's those contingent particulars that we to sort out in order to make moral progress. To realize the harm that people are experiencing and the relationship of that harm to our behaviors.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, but that doesn't make it independent of anyone's experiences of it, just of their interpretation of those experiences, their thoughts on the matter. Just like reality isn't independent of empirical experience, but it is independent of what anyone thinks is or isn't real.
This is exactly the conflation of phenomenalism with nihilism that I think underlies half of the views I'm against, and I'm actually kind of grateful to you for showing me such a clear and self-professed example of it in the wild.
Let's consider objectivism about reality for comparison, where you inversely conflate objectivism with what I call "transcendentalism" (which conflation is exactly logically equivalent to that conflation of phenomenalism with nihilism, because transcendentalism is just anti-phenomenalism and objectivism is just anti-nihilism). When you say there is an objective reality, you (seemingly) don't just mean that there is some possible unbiased account of all of our empirical experiences taken together; you (seem to) mean there is something else besides just the persistent potential for those experiences, some transcendent thing out there behind those experiences, which makes possible the unbiased account of all of them. I on the other hand don't mean that; I distinguish the objectivity, the unbiased-ness, from the transcendentalism, the something-beyond-what-we-can-experience-ness. There is an objective reality, but there is nothing to it besides the things that we can observe about it.
Likewise, when I talk about an objective morality, I'm not saying there is some transcendent thing beyond all our experiences that makes possible some unbiased account of the total of our (hedonic in this case) experiences. I'm just saying that such a complete unbiased account is possible. Which you seem to agree with: we can in principle empathize with everyone's suffering and make progress toward eliminating it all, and that total elimination of all suffering would be the complete triumph of good, no? Our only point of disagreement really seems to be that in calling that "objectively good", I just mean that it's good without bias -- it's not only good because someone thinks so -- while you seem to think that means that there is some kind of ontological thing out there somewhere that's making that possible.
I find it unclear what 'virtual' or 'malleable' are supposed to mean here. It seems like an effort to negate the multiplicity of social groups in favour of one global social group. The reason for my question was that it appears you are simply re-labelling good and bad behaviour as social and anti-social behaviour, which leaves open the question of what counts as social and anti-social behaviour. This question is probably somewhat easier to answer in the case of one global social group, but is more complex with multiple social groups. Evidence of multiple social groups with real effects for one group vs another is easily found in the actual groups that you mention above, or in relation to current issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement or recent events in Hong Kong. What is social or anti-social for one group may not be the same for another, especially when those groups are in conflict.
The idea is that the loss of the alpha males leads to an opportunity which was not present before and so the stress and aggression is ramped up to try and capitalise on that opportunity. Again, encultured responses to a situation outweigh rational considerations. One of the things I like about Sapolsky is that he never seems to be trying to prove some theory, he'll regularly throw in the anomalous evidence, just to remind us that we don't have it all worked out yet. The main take-away is that much of social structure is the result of learnt behaviours and so is culturally mediated. It's parameters are set by the tools we use (the hard-wiring), but within those parameters, there's considerable scope and modifications to the environment or social structures reveal those other options. In essence, human could be pro-social simply because we're pro-social - no other reason. Our children grow up in pro-social environments observing pro-social behaviours and so they become the next generation of pro-social actors to act as an example for their children. If this is true, it's really worrying because it means that changes to the social interactions children are exposed to could genuinely alter pro-social behaviour and potentially become 'sticky' in cultural terms.
One of the consequences of the 'Chinese whispers' theory of social norm development is that the larger the group becomes the more scope there is for error. Usually with innovators (the active development of social norms), a smaller group size leads to greater diversity as there's less of a tendency to revert to the mean (we see this in some of the seemingly bizarre cultural practices in isolated tribes). What the Chinese whispers idea of social norm development is show how the same can happen in large groups via a different mechanism.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I think I've perhaps been unclear. The process I was talking about was innovation rather than dominance. The two are actually quite different in terms of social status. A dominant person can instruct others by virtue of some form of positive or negative reward system (what we call operant conditioning), an innovator, however, is typically an outcast without means of instructing others, they only become relevant at a time of environmental or social upheaval where conservatism fails.
Outside of that misunderstanding, I tend to agree with your analysis fo fierce egalitarianism, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say social dominance was therefore selected for. I think it's sufficient that it remain a threat. If you see social behaviours as the result of culturally propagated norms, then it only need be the case that anti-social behaviours be possible for there to be an advantage to fierce egalitarianism. It need not be the default position. Like a handrail on scaffolding, it's sufficient that someone could fall to justify it's presence, it's not necessary to say that they will fall by default without it.
No.
I think this is what a lot of the disagreement comes down to with your meta-ethical position. Only some people believe that the complete elimination of suffering would be the complete triumph of good. Others believe otherwise. As I believe @SophistiCat has been trying to show - the complete elimination of all suffering is an 'is' we measure suffering - we might do so by questionnaire (taking people's word for it), we might do so by fMRI scan, empathy...whatever. These are only the means by which we do the measuring, what we end up with, after that measurement is taken, is a fact, an 'is'.
You have then taken a step to say that this is the the state of affairs we 'ought' to aim for. Again, you further seem to qualify that with something about taking into account everyone's meta-ethical positions and coming to some 'more right' meta-ethical position, but a) I've yet to establish how this actually happens, and b) even then, the sum total of everyone's meta-ethical positions is still an 'is', there's nothing to say we 'ought' to take that to be our meta-ethical position.
Ah I think I misunderstood you and covered this elsewhere in my response to you. Yes, I agree, having a biological social drive cannot tell you how to satisfy that drive. We do need reason to figure out how to do e.g. the good thing, in the same way we need reason to figure out which roads to take on a drive. The reasoning is not moral, it's just generic problem-solving.
Quoting Mww
That tells us that someone was compelled (be it external, biological or willed) to behave altruistically. It does not validate that altruistic drives are "good". Which is what I thought you were saying.
Quoting Mww
Empathy is a neurological response we are unaware of taking place in our brains. It cannot be rational. We can rationalise with it, but it appears to be a dumb, conditional, stimuli-response phenomenon.
Quoting Mww
Individually, they're largely pre-homo. Cognitive empathy likely did not develop as a social mechanism, but as a means of gauging the threat or vulnerability of an individual in sub- or even pre-social mammals. Altruism itself certainly developed as a parenting skill, not a social one. These traits are present in other mammalian species. This article concludes that humans had a unique evolutionary pathway for social altruism, in addition to socialisations and their psychological adaptations, whereas the one I quoted above to Isaac seems to suggest common genetic heritage with modal behaviours to explain the universality of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer tribes. Obviously they're not the same behaviours: egalitarianism does not necessitate altruism.
Since ultra-cooperative behaviour is seen only in humans among mammalian species, it's not possible to study earlier potentially ultra-cooperative groups, since all the contenders are extinct. A more complete understanding of the genetic basis of why we are so social might allow us to posit that earlier homo species of similar group sizes were also socially altruistic, but unfortunately we can never verify it. by studying e.g. homo erectus in situ.
Quoting Mww
Haha I meant Daniel Kahneman :rofl: My bad.
Quoting Mww
Do you mean in this discussion or as a species?
Because you are a socially-inclined human being. If your pre-social drives were dominant, it might seem that "harm" and "opportunity" were synonyms, or "harmed" and "non-threatening". Harmful and bad only seem synonymous for a pre-existing, altruistic definition of "bad".
Quoting Pfhorrest
Right, and what in particular is good is a question arising from the lack of a pre-existing answer given by innate biases and homogeneous socialisation. It depends on those innate biases having no fitness in your environment and your socialisation being incomplete or incompatible with another's. In a small group, these questions would not arise, only the questions of whether to do good/bad (priorities) and how to do good/bad.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Someone or something keeps banging at the door. Everyone says, "Holy crap, a monster." (an unjustified interpretation of a real phenomenon). Parents teach their kids, "Don't open the door!" A few people toy with the idea that there's no monster at the door. "Are you mad? You can hear the monster banging! How can you be nihilistic?!"
One day a little girl sneaks upstairs and peeks through a window. She can't be sure, but it looks like there's tree branch banging against the door in the wind. She goes downstairs and says it looks like there's no monster. "Nihilist! She says nothing is banging against the door." (error: NOT (A+B) implies NOT B). She tries to explain, no there is something banging, it's just a tree branch. "Then how do you explain the monster with your tree branch?" She can't.
This is essentially the conversation we're having. I believe in the banging, I just believe it isn't a monster doing it. (I believe in the objective reality of the phenomenon underlying our rational conceptions of morality, I just don't believe in the objective reality of a given rational conception.) You therefore identify an error correctly: the conflation of phenomonalism (I see a tree branch banging against the door) with nihilism (there's nothing banging against the door), but you misidentified the person doing the conflating.
Yep, which draws us ever closer to the crux of the matter: the use of reason, which everybody knows, is nothing if not rationality writ large. So.....yes, we do need reason to figure out the how of doing everything, moreso initially, then tapering downward with repetitive experience. The how-to-do is not moral reasoning, of course, and while we’ve progressed to acknowledging reason as the means for doing, we have left the reasoning for what-is-to-be-done behind. And that will always be moral reasoning, when the thing to be done is primarily qualified by the goodness of it.
Before heading off on that dialectical tangent, does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires? In other words, does your “generic problem solving” type of reasoning distinguish itself from the type of reasoning that grounds your “compelled to behave”?
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On another note......
Quoting Kenosha Kid
.......is a surprise to me. It is so counterintuitive I don’t know what to do with it. If empathy boils down even the slightest, to understanding, it must be a rational activity, because understanding itself, is exactly just that. If empathy boils down to mere recognition, which requires something to be observed, apparently negating being unaware. A philosopher will naturally balk at any phenomenon that does not present itself to our rationality, especially a stimuli-response example of it.
Not to mention, if we can rationalize with it, how can we not be aware of it? Or must we now separate being aware of, from being conscious of?
Plus, we have cognitive empathy and affective empathy. As if one or the other wasn’t enough. Still, we got more than one quality of reason, so...ehhhhh....why not.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Jeeez, it sucks getting old. After spending all that time with a book written by him, it never even crossed my mind. Predispositions. (Sigh) If I’d been proper and used his last name with all those equivalences, I might have got it right.
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This discussion. We control the discussion; Nature controls the species.
Yes, I agree it must be cultural in part. It might also be modal. Large groups subdivide, hence rankings. Relations within ranks might have been more egalitarian for the same reason that smaller groups are more egalitarian. Rather than naturally extending egalitarianism to the whole group after the catastrophe, less aggressive males mimicked the now deceased aggressive males as a cultural replication, not toward lower-ranking males but toward the peers who were previously dominated by high-ranking males perhaps.
Quoting Isaac
I'd go slightly further. The mode of the culture might be quite arbitrary, and I think how arbitrary is highlighted in the baboon case where there is absolutely no benefit to what they did, but uniformity of social structures typically speaks to an underlying cause. This could in principle be a common culture, which would suggest similarity of cultures, or another predisposition, which would allow for diversity of cultures.
It's worth pointing out that the emerging inter-rank aggressive culture that Sapolsky described is likely a transitory effect of a catastrophic event. Generally, animals who expend large resources and take mortal risks to zero benefit or their own detriment do not prosper. The more stable culture is likely the lower-rank egalitarianism arising from reduced stress. As per the Boehm article, it is a predictable response to a smaller group size and greater resources, and it won't hurt that the self-harming dominance of higher ranking members will be evidentally bad in an egalitarian culture.
Things change when you bring power back into the equation. If high-ranking individuals attacked, exiled or killed egalitarian members, there would then be benefit in conforming to this nonsensical culture and it would persist longer. This covers quite a few human cultures, I feel, and speaks to the power of culture over sense.
Quoting Isaac
I'm aware of this happening due to outside influence (trying to build runways made of logs to summon planes full of food, or building harbours to attract boats). I'm not aware of any cases of this occurring, spontaneously or gradually, within a small isolated group. Did you have anything in mind?
To my knowledge, innovation in tribes (without outside influence) is generally mimetic, not pedagogical, i.e. the innovator has no authority and, to boot, is not necessarily aware of why their innovation is successful (Dennett's boat builders again). I'll firm up on this in a subsequent post, but if you have counter-examples ready that'll save me the effort (laziness is my moral virtue).
Quoting Isaac
Boehm's modal dominance seems reasonable to me, and he seems to think that a biological basis is the consensus. But, even though human groups have mostly been small, we may have evolved from large precursor species groups, so it's not a given that, if there is a biological basis for dominance, it is particularly for dominance of the group over the individual.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, well put, and I think this is the problem with the 'ought' complaint. There are no more justified schemes for deriving oughts, only less justified ones. As far as I've ever been able to tell, such objections are not only predicated on unjustifiable assumptions, they fail their own burden-of-proof criteria.
And as I keep explaining, I’m not starting from the “is” that is the description of those people’s experiences, but from the “oughts” those experiences directly give rise to in those people. Every experience someone has that feels bad to them, i.e. that hurts them — not their emotional or cognitive judgement of the morality of something they perceive, but the immediate experience of a bad sensation, where the sensation itself conveys its own badness, i.e. pain etc — take that to be bad (an “ought not”), as it seems to be, and add that to the list of things that are bad (a bunch of “ought nots”), which then demarcates the boundaries of what still might be good (“maybe ought”).
It’s really not though. There being something banging on the door is there being something that is actually (objectively) moral; in contrast to the door-banging, or morality, being merely some shared illusion. You’re giving an account of why we’d all partake in such a perception of something banging on the door, while at the same time denying that anything actually is banging on the door. I’m not saying there’s a monster — plenty of other people might — I’m just saying that the persistent shared experience of something banging on the door is all there is to there being something really banging on it. So there is something really banging on it. What that might be is up for debate. But to agreed that there is this persistent shared experience of something banging on the door, yet deny that anything is really banging at the door, because of a doubt that monsters exist, is to conflate any belief in SOMETHING banging at the door with a belief in monsters specifically doing so.
Yes, I feel the crux upon us. So this is the rationalist view of morality: I am presented with a situation, I rationally deduce what the good outcome will be, and I rationally deduce how to realise that outcome. But where did the quality of goodness come from? What makes that outcome "good"?
Quoting Mww
Problem-solving is already vague enough. System 1 is a problem-solver. There's all sorts of problems it solves that I have no consciousness of. The rational mind is to me an algorithmic problem-solver.
Behaviour is an outcome, physiological and neurological responses to stimuli are drives, some of which drive behaviours, some drive changes of internal state. Some of the those drives will require rational consideration to become behaviours. Basically, my impression of the rule-of-thumb is: if you have time or ambiguity, you need reason.
The last part of the OP is that, on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour because there is ambiguity. I might make a joke in all virtual social groups bar one, perhaps a NSFW joke. I have to modulate my behaviour based on what is good for work. This is precisely what arises from not existing among relatives and neighbours with the same social mores in a small social group.
Quoting Mww
I don't think you can speak for all philosophers. After all, all scientists are just natural philosophers with a methodology. But, yes, that's what I am saying: empathy is an automatic process in which the unconscious mind mirrors the circumstances of another in order provoke emotions and insights, and it is these outputs that we are conscious of, if we are conscious of them at all.
Quoting Mww
Whenever you see an optical illusion, you are unaware of the things your unconscious mind has done to the image before presenting it to your consciousness for consideration. You can still use what is provided to your consciousness for consideration, you just can't get back to the original image or know what was done with it.
Quoting Mww
Nah, my bad. I'm still impressed you read it so quickly. I've been reading the same book for months. (More in a music rut atm.)
That is not the whole truth. As all other animals, our mental capacity is limited and it is the limits of our mental capacity that makes our morality a problem. If this is not understood we have serious problems with our moral decisions, laws, and justice.
We are limited to knowing about 600 people and when a population becomes larger than this we dehumanize those we do not know to cope with the overload of too many people. The result is being more moral with some people than others and more reliant on impersonal laws and the enforcement of laws that limit or completely take away our liberty.
Failure to accept evolution and the sciences that study our humanness is a very serious morality problem with social, economic, and political ramifications.
But this is describing individuals. It does not describe objective "oughts" and "ought nots" but rather those arising from the experience of each person separately/
Quoting Pfhorrest
Then you're making no differentiation between an empirical fact and a belief. It is an empirical fact that something is banging on the door. Objective morality is not an empirical quantity: it cannot be detected, or verified. It is only a belief, like that there is a monster at the door. What I can measure are my moral feelings: how I feel when I see a child in distress, or a person being attacked, etc. I have no access to any objective moral truths, but I do have access to scientific evidence that those feelings are explicable in terms of physiological drives. I have a window to see what it is that is banging on the door, and whether, knowing this, the belief is justified.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Right, and the beliefs we generate about it aren't the thing itself. Likewise something objective concerning morality exists, but it need not be what we believe it to be. Asking how the branch could explain the presence of a monster is like asking how natural social responses and drives can explain what we morally ought to do. They cannot, because those moral oughts are statements about beliefs that morality is essentially teleological rather than reactive.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Right, and the little girl doesn't deny that there's something banging at the door, she just denies the beliefs of what that thing is. And this is where we're at. I don't deny that we are moral beings. I deny that there is one objective set of moral values. I accept that we can do statistics with morality, which is the closest you and I come I think.
For me, the drives are the real thing, and they objectively exist, insofar as they are amenable to scientific enquiry and, as I've said before, the simplest and best explanation for the success of science is the existence of an objective reality (which scientific models are analogous to in aspects and with limited accuracy). To that extent, real morality is objectively real. What is consciously experienced is not that, but the second-hand, partial results of that, in the same way that what we consciously see in an optical illusion is not what is in front of us, nor what our minds receive, but the outputs of unconscious processes. We can but rationalise and create beliefs about that moderated, partial data. But those beliefs cannot be more accurate than what is really going on; however they can be significantly less accurate. If those beliefs assign teleology to something that is fundamentally non-teleological, those beliefs are wrong. The thesis of the OP is that everything essential is non-teleological. There are no fundamental, rational "oughts", only selected-for (genetically or memetically) responses and drives.
We operate in a state of illusion or delusion most of the time.
Thinking demands huge amounts of energy and to conserve energy for most of our waking time we are in fast thinking mode. That means we are operating instinctively or habitually and on very little information. It would not be possible to function if most of the time we were not in the fast thinking mode, where our minds work with very little information.
Personally I think we should be all be working with an understanding of human nature and Daniel Kahneman's explanations of our thinking and why we make bad decisions. We might be much more tolerant of each other if we more fully understood the problems with being human. I have concerns that religious explanations of being human have been a serious problem to civilization.
Well said. I agree with the worry about the ramifications of non-empirical moral metaphysics. I think that understanding what we are, and why we are that way, should shed light on which ethics are consistent with human society and which aren't.
Oh yeah, it would make a huge difference! Unfortunately, especially in the US, Christianity has had a lot of control of education and has aggressively prevented the education essential to a higher morality.
There is a direct relationship between racism and Christianity and the problem with education that we have experienced, preventing our democracy from being fully realized besides having a prison system based on false beliefs and the highest number of incarcerated people in western culture. The belief system supports the military-industrial complex and the notion that our military is serving God. That is a bit of a moral problem with serious ramifications.
Kinda depends on what scale you’re talking about, doesn’t it? Even so, the lack of epistemological certainty on any scale, doesn't necessarily imply rational delusion.
Yes, Anglicanism is not what Christianity once was. (Worth remembering that Christianity was the moral revolution of altruism and empathy, until it itself acquired might.) Do you believe Christianity to be the chief cause rather than just another symptom? I'm unsure. Your country was the first major secularist country in the world. You had founding fathers who were quite incredulous about the notion of God in general and of Christianity in particular. Your country was religiously diverse while remain that secular too. It seems to me that nationalism was the American illness, and Christianity one of the government's rallying points for nationalistic sentiment.
Read, but not studied. Always been a fast reader with rather good retention. Nowadays, only one of those is still evident. (Shrug) So don’t be all that impressed.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Where does any human quality come from? That the human has qualities is irrefutable, so what does it matter where they come from as long as it is tacitly acknowledged they are present? There is no intrinsic contradiction is supposing the quality of good is every bit as present as the quality of altruism or empathy. If these are all present, and it is absurd to suppose they are present without objective representation....otherwise why would they be there....objective representation herein meaning simply that there is some way for them to be demonstrated, then it follows logically that they all have representations of their own.
Altruism is represented by selfless acts, empathy is represented by your “emotions and insights”, good is represented by my “moral dispositions”.
Nevertheless, I will accede to your point, in that the opening sentence of my moral bible posits an declaration even I recognize as highly tentative:
“....Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will....”. If one accepts this, the moral philosophy following from it holds. If not, then not.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Agreed, in principle. For the sake of argument, grant the validity of the faculty of sensibility. Sensibility, then, in humans, is the synthesis of sensations to intuitions, completely beyond our consciousness, synonymous with the transition from e.g., physiology of the eye to the information in the optic nerve. We are aware of none of that, from which my “understanding is the first conscious activity” arises.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I submit that reason must be used to determine anything of which determination is possible. Ambiguity merely regulates the certainty of the determination.
So is there an answer to “does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires?”
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
This suggests my unconscious mind actually does something to the picture of shaded squares. Preventing me from cognizing the correct identity of the shades is something my unconscious mind can do? By extension, then, my unconscious mind has as much power as my conscious mind. I understand you may find that entirely plausible, but I reject it out of hand, for it is quite obvious the conscious mind is responsible for understanding both correctness on the one hand, and error/ error-corrections shown to it on the other.
Why couldn’t optical illusions just be an error in judgement, given from improper understanding of that which is the cause of it? We merely judge incorrectly because we have made rationalizations inconsistent with the truth. In which case, the unconscious mind is at least redundant, or at most, irrelevant.
It's a bunch of small pieces of the one big objective "ought", in the same way that individual observations are only small pieces of the one big objective "is". Being only part of the total truth doesn't make something untrue or only subjectively true, and likewise things being only part of the total good doesn't make something bad or only subjectively good.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You're still talking about "objective morality" as though it's a descriptive, existing thing out there somewhere, like a monster, that someone might believe in, with or without evidence. That just evidences the confusion I'm trying to clear up here. You seem to place "objective reality" in the same category: that objective reality isn't the unbiased total of all possible empirical experiences, but it's some thing out there somewhere that causes all those experiences. I reject that exactly as much as I reject what you mean by "objective morality", but that's not all those words can mean, and saying it is is precisely the conflation of objectivism with transcendentalism you deny. There doesn't have to be something transcending all experience for there to be possible an objective, unbiased accounting of all experiences together.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You have "no access to any objective reality" either by those standards. You only have the small pieces you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say is looks true, looks true). Similarly, you only have the small pieces of "objective morality" you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say feels good, goods good). In both cases, objectivity just means accounting for all of those experiences together without bias.
You can never finish accounting for all of them, and you can never eliminate all bias, but if there is any possible way of measuring progress in accounting for more of them and reducing bias, then that points the way toward the concept of objectivity: what lies at the end of that process, even if it's never reachable. Saying that objectivity is possible is just saying that such a process can be conducted; and saying it's not is just saying it can't be. You clearly think it can be, and that's all that's required for objectivity. There doesn't have to be some magical invisible thing in an abstract realm acausally causing things to be moral or something bizarre like that.
I acknowledge that something is present (the banging at the door). When I see an apple, feel an apple, taste an apple, even though these are all indirect ideas of an apple, I happily acknowledge that something is present. However I don't have this sense of a priori moral knowledge or of moral objective existence. I feel pain when I see someone suffering -- that pain is present. I feel glad when I help them -- that gladness is present. And the things I suggest in the OP are consistent with that.
What I reject are beliefs about where these things come from, where they exist, what values they can have, what values they must have, what qualities they have, that proceed from no data but one person's sensations and a lot of imagination. The artefacts of moral metaphysics (and I don't just mean Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, but any metaphysical origin story for my moral values) are not present like an apple is present. My feelings are.
Quoting Mww
An assumption of the OP is that this is not justified. The social imperatives of each individual human (bar exceptions) explain too much of why certain broad classes of acts (those that cause suffering) cause us pain and another broad class (those that reduce suffering) cause us pleasure for a separate, independent quality of good or bad to coexist. Occam's razor again: one of these things is superfluous, and by no coincidence one of these things has no empirical evidence.
If we have this social biology and we independently have a priori notions of good and evil, then there's been some crazy double-counting. We ought to be exceptionally moral with all this moral guidance. So I feel it really is a choice: follow the evidence, or stay true to beliefs.
Also, is altruism represented by selfless acts? If I think altruistic thoughts but, say, I cannot act upon them, am I no longer an altruist? Another position of the OP is that one cannot act on all possible altruistic impulses. There are too many people in our world now. I don't feel this makes people non-altruistic, just realistic and pragmatic.
Quoting Mww
These are contradictory. If one accepts that human decisions are sometimes made unconsciously, one cannot hold that reason must be involved in every human determination.
Quoting Mww
Prior to a determination, the correct course is necessarily ambiguous, else no determination would be necessary. There would be no problem to solve at all. If I am a dumb machine that only has one function, there is no need to determine which function to execute. Multiplicities of possible 'whats' and 'hows' are themselves ambiguities.
Quoting Mww
Different to problem-solving? No, I don't think so. I've been racking my brain for a counter-example (looking at a painting? teaching a class? watching a film?) and can't think of a single thing that reason does that doesn't reduce to some kind of problem to solve. There are certainly things that reason has that aren't problems to solve in themselves but are factors of problems: the evidences of our senses, our feelings. But these are inputs. The outputs are decisions.
Quoting Mww
Indeed it does. The unconscious mind does a lot. It filters out unimportant noises like traffic. It interprets patterns in shapes. It shifts all the colours of what you see, if it can, such that the ambient colour is closer to white (which is why filmmakers can't use normal lightbulbs for interior shots: everything comes out yellower, because that's the actual ambient colour of your room... you can try this yourself). It gives images 3D depth (a common basis for optical illusions). It assesses body language and provokes emotions that your consciousness receives as feelings. It gives us proprioception. It turns impure notes into pure ones. It guides you to work based on pattern recognition so you don't need to think about how you get there. And all that and much more while regulating your entire body. It's a legend! The rational mind is an employee hired for solving certain problems that now thinks it's the boss!
Quoting Mww
For one thing, the uniformity of the errors. If it were down to judgement, one would expect good judges and bad. For another, well, do you recall making such a judgement?
No examples contrary to this, no. It's perhaps just a little clumsiness of expression. The memetic, non-pedagogic sense you refer to is exactly the sense I mean when I say 'influence'. The fact that it's described as 'active' might be a point of confusion, perhaps? 'Active' here just means that the influence is directed toward an activity - person A (our influencer) thinks of some activity, and the resultant culture eventually contains that same activity, albeit my gradual adoption. There's a famous example of a chimp who put a blade of grass in her ear, within a few years, all the other chimps in her band were doing it.
'Passive' influence here does not mean non-pedagogic, it means undirected, where the resultant activity is not the thought of any individual at all, the theory is that it emerges as a result of a series of mistakes attempting to copy an 'active' influence.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes, I think it's very much still an open question. there's a ton of fascinating research on the possible origins of our moral sense. I've read stuff about pair-bonding, group size, language-use, co-operative hunting, rapid environmental change, even monogamous mating. For me the only key elements I have as my foundation are that it has to be pre-human (Frans deWaal's work on primates and Sapolsky's peaceful baboons seem compelling evidence to me that pro-social behaviour is pre-human), and it has to be largely culturally mediated - by which I mean learnt through childhood, with perhaps some limits and constraints set by evolved predispositions.
I think philosophically, as far as meta-ethics is concerned, those limits and constraints are key, because they explain the otherwise suspicious degree of homogeneity in our moral sentiments. As far as actual morality is concerned, however, I think they drop out of significance. I think we still (just like we did in small hunter-gatherer groups) don't have to discuss issues outside of those parameters, no one is even considering them (in a moral sense) in the same way as we don't have to discuss whether the bridge is 'real' before we cross it. It's just not something we doubt. The interesting bit of morality is the culturally mediated bit. That, I think, would have been less the case in pre-agricultural times, not because they relied more on the defaults, but because there was only one culture to learn from, there was a strong line of non-pedagogic influence (mixed ages), a relatively stable environment, small group sizes (minimising Chinese whisper effects), no strong advantage to selfishness, no virtual social groups (which are too easy to manipulate).
Given that it is secondary information, it becomes an 'is'. You can have a feeling that something 'ought' to be the case. That someone else thinks something 'ought' to be the case is, to you, a fact about the external world. Whether that fact (about what someone else thinks/feels) should affect how you think/feel remains an open question.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You're still conflating 'bad' (in the sense of pain, negative hedonic feelings) with 'ought not', and this is the equivalence which people are arguing is unjustified. Not all matters that people think ought not to be the case are related to immediate hedonic sensations, even of themselves, certainly not of others.
Using the approach you set out above, what you would have is a list of things which feel bad to you (things you'd rather were not done to you) and a list of things which would feel bad to you were you in the same shoes as the person you're considering. That list is a fact about the world.
Now - why ought I not cause any of the things on that list?
Individual observations do not speak to the efficacy of a belief in an objective reality. Is the the regularity, the predictability that suggests such a thing. There is no equivalent thing in morality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I can learn about my ideas of an objective reality by checking (observing the same phenomenon again), by consensus (observing agreement or disagreement with others), and by generalising (observing new phenomena). Doing this iteratively reinforces the assumption of an objective reality without truly necessitating one.
To generalise this to morality, it is insufficient to simply say: "Objective reality of external phenomena has been well justified, so we're safe to apply the same assumptions to morality." You need to infer an objective moral reality in the same way. But when I check my moral values, I do not see the same consistency. I do not react the same way in similar situations each time. I do not find that I generally agree with others who have been in the same situations. And I do not find that learning not to hit people gives me an automatic knowledge of the morality of horn-tooting douchebags. It seems in all respects a subjective, irregular phenomenon, and the assumption of objectivity is not supported.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That is accurate, and I believe it is justified for the above reason. By "out there somewhere", I mean independent of our observations of and beliefs about it, i.e. independent of subjective experience. I think this is an uncontroversial definition of "objective" but I can see that we have meant different things by "objective reality".
If it is your belief in your objectivism that, had no conscious entities every existed in the universe then the universe would not exist, then yes we are defining "objective" and "transcendental" in opposite and incompatible ways. If you believe that the universe pre-existed conscious experience of it, then you too believe that the universe has an objective (independent of subjective experience) existence. There is an analogue here in the OP: the non-teleological natural selection of characteristics that underlie our moral conceptions also pre-existed them. They are the objective (independent of those conceptions) reality of those conceptions. To the extent that the latter are not good approximations of the former, those conceptions do not themselves have an objective existence.
I do not consider the objective universe to be defined by the sum total of our experiences of it, but rather the latter is merely our best knowledge of the former. As I have said before, models, including mental models, merely approximate aspects of reality. You cannot derive the objective thing itself from those models.
I completely agree with your analysis here
It's important to distinguish, though, between the correct identification of a thing and the correct prediction of its function. The former is just a question of language. "Is the thing in front of me really a keyboard?", just means "Am I using the word 'keyboard' correctly?". The question "will this thing in front of me make corresponding letters appear on my computer screen?" is a question about predictable responses of the world to my interactions with it.
A lot of the confusion about objective morality seems to me to be of the former type "what is 'morally good'?". That just dissolves to a question about whether we're using the words 'morally good' correctly. When someone says that a cold-blooded murder is morally good, the appropriate response is "No, you're not using the words correctly, that's not the sort of thing we call 'morally good'". It's no different to when a child uses 'red' to refer to something 'green'. We just correct them. We don't argue about what 'red' really is.
Moral arguments of the second type are about what we expect behaviours to result in. If I cold-bloodedly murder someone, I expect a different response from the world than if I give money to the homeless. It's only in this second sense in which it even makes sense to ask if morality is objective. Your comment above shows that it almost certainly isn't, but I don't think most of the discussion about morality has even got to that point yet, I think it's still stuck at the first stage where we should be talking about language, but instead we're talking about platonic forms.
No doubt. All that is the empirical mode of perception. That altruism, empathy, and good...justice, beauty, liberty, etc., are not detected by the senses, even if objects of them are, indicates some other mode of presence must be possible.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And there it is. A different mode of presence. In addition to the empirical mode given to your senses by the person, the person also presents to your rational mode some activity of his that elicits a feeling in you not given by the person as an object, but by what the person is doing.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Dunno about a sense of qua feeling or emotion, but anything a priori is absent any and all matters of experience. From that, any cognition resulting from the conjoining of conceptions is thought only, hence a priori. If the conceptions represent moral ideas or notions, the cognitions have moral explication. I am certainly conscious of my own cognitions, hence my moral cognitions represent my moral knowledge. Or, if you wish, knowledge of moral consciousness.
On the other hand, if I exhibit an action, such action is a physical manifestation in the world, hence has objective existence, with myself as causality for it. Anyone can observe the object of my action. If that action has been determined by my lawfully deterministic will, it is a moral action. And indeed, possibly an immoral one.
Thus, particular moral objective existence is given, but that does not grant moral objective existence in general, as a condition found in the world independent of moral agency.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Not a contradiction, but a confusion of source: reason used to determine moral things, reason used to determine all things........unconscious decisions. Again, determinations are judgements, of which we are always conscious, but when a decision is from the unconscious mind, it is not a proper judgement. I remember saying not too long ago, reason is not used for whatever happens unconsciously.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ok. Are there different kinds of problems?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Reason, the method, has things of a sort, yes: intuition, conception, understanding, judgement, cognition, and finally, knowledge. I wouldn’t call those factors of problems. Factored into problem solving, perhaps? Still leaves room for different kinds of problems, which hints at a different kind of reason.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Odd, isn’t it? That reasoning is absolutely necessary as causality for the idea of solving the problem of rationality? So the unconscious mind is responsible for all sorts of stuff of which our conscious selves have no clue. Ok, fine. That still leaves rationality fully in charge of that of which we are conscious. As far as I can see, the unconscious mind is a trickster, seeking to unseat the unwary. My unconscious mind is not the me I know, so if it causes errors in me, then the rational mind I know should be the boss. At least then, I’d know exactly who to blame.
That they think it is an “is”, but the thing they think is an “ought”. I’m talking about either replicating their own experience to get your own copy of their same “ought” if you doubt their claim, or else just accepting their “ought” claim on its face if you can’t be bothered and just want to trust them. At no point are we to take a step back and talk about the “is” fact that they hold that “ought” opinion; we stick to the “ought” opinions themselves.
Quoting Isaac
And not all “is” claims about reality relate to empirical observables either. I’m saying precisely that both of those are problematic kinds of opinion, because they lead to irreconcilable differences, baseless claims that nobody can reasonably interrogate, having instead to just take someone’s word for it or not. I’m saying that regarding both “is” questions and “ought” questions, we would do best to concern ourselves only with possible answers that we can test against our experiences: empirical in the former case, hedonic in the latter.
You keep conflating the moral equivalent of perception with the moral equivalent of sensation, missing the point that I’m saying precisely to disregard the former for the latter, because the former is only a fallible, subjective interpretation of the latter. What you’re saying is like arguing that someone who looks at the order of the natural world and sees it as evidence of intelligent design has “empirically observed God”. That’s not an empirical observation, it’s an interpretation of them.
Likewise, seeing some people doing some stuff and passing moral judgement on them isn’t a direct experience of something “seeming bad” the way that pain is. That’s an interpretation, a “moral perception”. It remains an open question whether that interpretation is really an accurate model of all the “moral sensations” involved, exactly like it remains an open question whether the perception of intelligent design is an accurate interpretation of all the sensations (observations) involved.
Every individual observation rules out some possibilities about what might be objectively real. An account of objective reality has to account for every single observation, otherwise it’s not actually objective.
It kind of sounds like you’re implying confirmationism here, that enough observations can prove something to be true, rather than the falsificationist view that anything might be true that has not yet been observed false. If you’re likewise thinking of objective morality that same way, thinking I’m talking about proving that certain things are always good, then maybe there’s the problem. I’m not, regarding either reality or morality.
There being an objective reality means that something can be actually false, not just disbelieved; and there being an objective morality means that something can be actually bad, not just disliked. Neither means that you can ever prove anything to be true or good in all circumstances and beyond all doubt. Just that there is some unbiased standard against which to judge and weed out things that we can tell are false, or bad.
Yes, I believe the God of Abraham religions are the chief cause of some of our most serious problems because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mean living with false beliefs and not science. To be fair, our potential to do better is rather new to us. Not that long ago we did not have the science to do better. Unfortunately, now that we have the science to do better, we are not making the progress we could make because so many people's heads are full of false beliefs and they would rather kill than change their beliefs.
I wish our understanding of democracy was tied to the ancient Greeks and Romans, instead of talking about it as though it started with America. Then we would have a better understanding of what science has to do with our liberty and morality and the wild idea that democracy is good for humanity. Wild idea that democracy is better than religion and dependency on a king who is the human being closest to God. Our democracy in the control of Christians, and the Christian mythology about democracy coming from Christianity, prevents us from correcting our wrongs and has created us as an immoral and hated nation.
The relationship we have with Christianity now is a terrible perversion of both Christianity and democracy and this follows replacing liberal education with education for technology. You are correct about the problem. So many evils have followed the change in education. The Christianity we have now is not the same as Christianity with education in the Greek and Roman classics. When it was tied to the Greek and Roman classics it could support democracy instead of pervert it. Bottom line, it is not Christians who gave us democracy!
That is the difference between slow thinking and fast thinking.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
My notions of our morality are based on science and the study of both animals and humans. If our morality has a metaphysical origin than that is true of animals as well. Our morals are present like an apple is present when we use science to understand them.
What is that? A hedonic sensation? Looks like an added on judgment call that maybe should not be there? Our sensations are the same as other animals.
I looked up hedonic and I am shooked by this Puritanical understanding of being human and the lack of historical correctness.
True hedonism is about avoiding pain and feeling good, but it is also directly associated with making good moral decisions because if we make a bad moral decision, that will lead to pain. It would not be a bad moral decision if the consequence was not bad. A moral is a matter of cause and effect, and as Cicero said, no prayers, rituals, burning of candles, or animal sacrifices will change the consequences of doing the wrong thing.
Yes, I agree: homogenous socialisation is a necessary condition for unambiguous social behaviour, and small group sizes is a necessary condition for homogenous socialisation. Historically, since we were small tribes, it is possible for nature to select on the basis of that, even if homogenous socialisation itself were an emergent effect rather than a genetic bias in its own right.
However we do have to factor in that small social groups appears to have been preferred through our history, prior to the advent of agriculture. Unlike baboons, we did not naturally expand in group size. As with the all of these matters, the real question is: why the uniformity?
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I think most of our individual social drives are pre-human. Like I said in the OP, we inherit from our social ancestors... and our presocial ones. But humans are still uniquely ultracooperative (unique among mammals). There is, either by combination, circumstance, cultural innovation, or genetic innovation, something longstanding within us that makes us more inclined to high levels of cooperation within social groups. Having a single joint goal, such as in hunting, between so many individuals is unique. Part of this is likely mental capacity, but part must come from a higher confidence that members of your group think as you do, and members who do not are identifiable on the whole -- i.e. greater empathy. This goes well beyond the social behaviours of primates for me.
The more I think about it, while I do think culture is extremely important, 100,000 years of seemingly stable, small group sizes seems too long to have a generic cultural explanation. Cultural timescales are expected to be much, much smaller. The point of Chinese whispers is that it changes, but we didn't seem to change in this respect until 12,000 years ago. It begs the question: what kept those aspects of culture constant and uniform over so much time and so many different, disparate social groups?
Quoting Isaac
Yes, that is a logical error. The person in question is already speaking of objective moral truths not their own feelings ("I like hurting people" -- Mary Bell). While a belief that murder is objectively bad is understandable, a belief that it is objectively good makes no sense.
Ok. I’ll be long past needing a brain, by the time anybody figures out how it works.
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Quoting Athena
Ok. I rather think the difference between reading and studying isn’t the speed of the thinking, but the quality of the comprehension.
But an 'ought' is a feeling that some state of affairs should be the case. It's an emotional response to an imagined state of affair (in the case of a positive 'ought'), or to a state of affairs one dislikes (in the case of a negative 'ought not'). You can't literally 'have' that feeling, it makes no sense. You have the feeling you have towards the state of affairs in question. If someone else has a different feeling the most you can do is know this as a fact. If I like vanilla ice-cream, I can know others like chocolate, but I can't just will myself to feel that way, I can only know it, as a fact about other people.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Well then you're already not talking about morality. As I've said before, morality is already a word. You can't just say it shouldn't mean what it does, it's like me saying we shouldn't use the word dog to refer to canines but instead should call them cats, it makes no sense. The topic here is morality. Morality is a word we apply to a range of behaviours, character traits and intentions. What @Kenosha Kid has given an account of is the origin and function of those cultural aspects. If you're not addressing those, but rather are addressing only that which makes us feel immediately good or bad, then you're talking about hedonism, not morality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes it is. 'Seeming bad' in moral terms often just is the fact that my culture disapproves of that behaviour, so observing them doing that very disapproval is as direct evidence as I'm ever going to get. The way I learnt to use the word 'tree' was by seeing people use the word in reference to the large woody plant, the fact that I learnt it by observing the behaviour of others rather than directly 'feeling' the relationship myself doesn't make the word's meaning too vague and fallible to make use of, we all get by perfectly fine using it despite the fact that we all learnt it that way.
Again, you seem to be just replacing actual morality with something else, you're not coming up with a theory of morality, you're saying "Ignore morality, I've a theory about empathetic responses to pain instead, it's a lot easier". Well, yeah. It is a lot easier, and I agree that is exactly how we identify what will hurt others - put ourselves in their shoes and imagine if it would hurt us. But that's not what morality is about.
Yes. again, I'd be tempted to look to cultural reasons. We have a limited capacity to reliably remember the trust status of individuals (the infamous 150 person limit - a bit of an urban myth, but with some basis in actual psychology). Group dynamics which rely on trust - prisoner's dilemma games - cannot exceed this limit and still function. If I can't remember whether you co-operated or cheated last time I interacted with you, I can't use my 'wary trust' tactic in our interactions. For groups which don't use those tactic anyway, they don't need to worry about size limits (though they are limited by other factors).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don't think so. It's difficult to prove this without begging the question. we don't, at first, know what behaviours are culturally mediated and which are biologically inherited (limited work on feral children gives us some idea, but that, if anything, points to virtually everything pro-social being cultural). Given this difficulty, we can't point to any example cultural practices (as opposed to biological ones) and say "look, see how short-lived these are" because we don't know whether they represent all cultural practices or just some short-lived subset.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But we did. cultural practices varied enormously according the what little evidence we have from archaeology. If you take modern tribes to be a proxy for our past (a very tentative exercise, but useful her I think) cultural practices vary widely. It's just that certain key practices are constant - egalitarianism, autonomy, mutuality. I don't think the mere length of time is sufficient to say these common practices must have some other source, only that some practices are vulnerable to rapid divergence, whereas other converge. Where I do agree with you is that this convergence needs to explained, and it needs to be explained in a way which tallies with its demise over the previous ten thousand years. I just think that environmental changes (agriculture, settlement, globalisation) are reasonable contenders, which means that environmental stability could equally be an explanation for the stability we see over the previous 100,000 years. It need not be that some practices are hard-wired, it might be that some practices are more vulnerable to environmental changes than others.
I don't want any of this to undermine the broad level of agreement we have though, because I think your point about the biological origins of moral feeling is very important. The fact that I see them more as parameters or tools, where you see them perhaps more as urges, I think is actually less important here than acknowledging that they are the biological source of our feelings, but that they are insufficient alone to maintain an egalitarian, autonomous and mutual culture.
But my point was that something is present to my consciousness, just not anything like a priori knowledge. It is not a rational thing present, but emotions and attention biases. I am presented with a vision of a child in danger, and senses of panic, distress, focus, and urgency. I am not presented with some voice or inter-title: "One ought to help the child."
Quoting Mww
Of course! As per the OP, we are in an environment in which moral actions must be rationalised. But my consciousness being presented with moral drives is not the same thing as my reason having their essence.
Quoting Mww
This is the old-fashioned rationalism I reject. There is a very real analogue to this in our physiological responses that can bias us in a given direction, and the empirically-verified existence of these negates the need for other sources of moral knowledge. But this is not "knowledge" in itself.
Quoting Mww
I just knew you had a dark side :rofl: For sure, moral actions are objective. I either did it, or I didn't: that is a matter of fact rather than pathological. But those rational decisions are still based on not a priori knowledge but unconscious reactions to stimuli (whose results are inputs to our rational decisions). Good is pre-determined for the conscious mind: it is left with the question of whether to act on it, what the desired outcome is, and how that desired outcome is best realised. These are all issues of ambiguity based on an already-provided notion of good, or a real, social analogue to it.
Quoting Mww
My first quote was wrong. Never mind. Point being if you accept that some decisions are not made rationally (and I think the current consensus is this is all but a few percent of human decisions), it cannot follow that a moral decision has to be rational. It may be, and is for most of us today, but needn't have been in the past.
Quoting Mww
Sure.
Quoting Mww
Yeah, 'twas what I meant.
Quoting Mww
Yes, except the conscious mind is also a very bad quality-checker of unconscious decisions, as per the (typical reaction to the) bat & ball problem. So not everything the rational mind thinks it is in charge of either.
Quoting Mww
According to the conscious mind, which does think it's the boss. It's a scary thought, isn't it: we are mostly not the thing we think of as 'I'. This is why psychology is illuminating: we learn things about ourselves, otherwise no one would bother with psychologists.
And that's just the brain. Don't even start thinking about how we are colonies of bacteria in an awesome self-aware organic landcraft. :joke:
And that's the point. Objective nature is inferred from generalisation, not a single data point.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I have repeatedly said quite the opposite of this, that the existence of an objective reality is the best and simplest explanation for empirical facts, but it is by no means proven, rather than a better or simpler explanation is not forthcoming. This is not the case for morality, where the existence of objective moral truths is an neither accurate of our experiences nor the simplest explanation for them.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Indeed, not just true or false for each person individually but "out there". And what is compelling about science is that laws hold as if they were true, not just believed ("The great thing about facts is...") That is, you can present empirical evidence to someone with a belief and show them that that belief is credible or not. You cannot do this with morality. If someone disagrees with me, there's no means by which I can refer to a fact that makes one of our beliefs incredible.
If I believe it is better to give to charities in Africa than in Britain, and my friend believes that it is wrong to ignore misery on one's own doorstep in favour of classier 'TV' charities abroad, I might refer to facts of efficacy (my charity has achieved more change than his) or statistics, but I have no recourse to a piece of evidence that says one of us has a more compelling case. Assuming the existence of such inaccessible source of truth cannot be justified. Assuming the existence of, say, gravity can be, even if the objective truth about gravity is very different from our theories.
You all are going to discuss Natural and Existential Morality without an understanding of nature? Perhaps I am in the wrong room?
What it is that makes problems of different kinds?
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
Agreed. I am not presented with....yet.
Emotions, the general term for a compendium of related objects, are all present in consciousness, are part of the contents of it. That shouldn’t be contentious. My thought is that morality is an even stronger innate condition than emotion and attention biases, or, which is the same thing, have a greater presence, but regardless, will still have its objects in similar fashion. If such is the case, then one of the objects of morality may be some arbitrary ought, which reflects upon and sufficiently characterizes an empirical circumstance, should one be present, or merely a possible circumstance not yet presented. In effect, the presentation of some arbitrary ought is an effect of innate qualities in general and morality in particular, as connected causality. And while common rationalization is yet not present, the idea of its possibility, is, and is represented by some contingent moral activity related to the ought. In this case, “help”. That I ought to help is naturally qua morally given, but what that help entails, what form I think that help should take, is not.
Agreed, as yet, a priori knowledge has made no appearance onstage, because rationality has not either. Natural predisposition is more like it, I would say.
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Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is confusing. I suppose you to mean moral drives being present in consciousness, or, consciousness being present with its moral drives included. Ehhhh.....I wouldn’t affirm either of those, for me consciousness has content in the form of intuitions or conceptions, everything we think, feel or experience, but moral drives are not those, but rather, depend on them. Nevertheless, I agree reason doesn’t have the essence of moral drives, reason is solely and necessarily the means to do something with them.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You reject it, but do you testify that you never use it? I admit to being influenced by authors informing me about possible methodologies for my thinking, but do you honestly reference analogues given from test subjects specifically designed to show error, to inform you of your thinking? As far as I’ve been able to discern, knowing the mistakes we make in thinking hasn’t been countermanded by demonstrations regarding the strictness of methods for correct thinking. Being shown the errors in perceiving shades of gray doesn’t tell me what happens when I perceive a mountain, and knowing cognitive errors are natural doesn’t alter what beautiful means to me.
Yes, religion in itself has terrible effects. I do think it is immoral to produce people who cannot discern between fantasy and reality. I consider that "harm". I merely meant that some of those things you see as effects of religion are more like effects with religion having common causes. There is an impressive correlation between religion, conservativism, prejudice, nationalism, anti-intellectualism and capitalism, but that doesn't necessarily mean one in particular causes the other. Historically, nationalism seems to stand out as the unifying force, although each will influence one another. But yes for an even more stark lesson in how religion can destroy societies, look east.
Correct, but only by me. Well......sorta correct. I appreciate the brain for its fascinating complexity, and I only care about information on how it works as it characterizes the importance other people give it.
Quoting Athena
Don’t need to understand Nature in general to discuss natural morality as a very small part of it. How does one understand Nature, anyway?
Is the fact/value distinction isomorphic to the map/territory distinction when considering descriptions of evaluations of valenced (pleasant/unpleasant) events?
@Pfhorrest says no, because there are oughts in the territory; our bodies' sensations and their congruent expectations to be satisfied, These are based on descriptive content, and can thus be synthesized into heuristics that accurately describe the oughts in the territory.
@Kenosha Kid says yes, because oughts in the territory can only ever be mapped, so the fact/value distinction says they are devoid of the theoretically synthesised imperatives the investigation seeks to produce. Even if they concern morals.
Do facts about values say those values are right? No.
Do facts about values say those values are ours in a qualified way? Yes.
If there's a universal core of oughts that applies to everyone - a privileged flavour derived from necessities of human functioning by an intellectual synthesis, it seems @Pfhorrest wants to say these are true since they describe the deep structure of our oughts, and they are binding because they are actually occurrent. @Kenosha Kid comes in at this point and says because they are descriptions, you can't get behind the map of our oughts to get at the territory of any universal principles of morality without it ceasing to be a map.
Two different flavours of immanence accusing each other of different sorts of transcendence ("You can't get behind the map!" says K to Pf, "You can't get outside the theory ladened!" says Pf to K), each relying on precisely what is accused.
But you can collaborate such that progress is achieved mutually, improving both your perspectives on charity and as a consequence the practical approaches that arise from them. That's all fact-based objectivity is in any sphere, inanimate, behavioral or whatever, the constructive convergence and equilibrating of theoretical viewpoints attained by a united front of revisionary, synthesizing experimental processes. Objectivity isn't "out there" to be irresolvably disputed depending on your point of view, it is a kind of cultural paradigm that creates joint truth by human sharing. That collectivizing outlook is the essence of rationality, why reasoning rendered into this value system we call "rationality" is the core of ethics, and why our ethical ideal is subordinance of the unconscious to reasoning in many contexts. Rationality is the engine that drives objective knowledge long-term, no matter how fallible or inapplicable reasoning proves to be at any particular moment.
But every single datapoint matters, and all we have access to are a bunch if single datapoints.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If they agree to consider empirical experiences as evidence. If they don’t agree on the methodology then you can’t convince them. Arguing why they should agree with that methodology is a philosophical, not empirical issue.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There is if they agree on a methodology by which to judge what is or isn’t moral. Arguing why they should agree with a particular methodology is s more general philosophical issue, not a moral issue.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You do if you both agree on what counts as evidence, which is not a moral question but a more general philosophical one.
Sure, but the timescales of that cultural variation are typically generational, maybe millennial. But 100,000 years of staying in group sizes of 20-50... that's a tall order for culture alone.
We don't have historical data to confirm or deny this, but the thought experiment that keeps running through my head is this: A tribe of 20 or 30 people operates ultra-cooperatively, with fairly homogenous socialisation across two, three generations that reinforce the social biases we have. The group grows to the point where a) individuals cannot mentally manage networks that large and b) some non-negligible variation of culture can be sustained. This threatens the very basis of their social instincts, since no one can be sure that the person their dealing with is sufficiently like them to have the same values and react the same way. Disputes arise, confusion, aggression, stress, distrust, perhaps a polarisation of the group.
Baboons handle this by the strong imposing hierarchical structures which keep the weak stressed and subordinate. Naturally, it seems, we don't. Our cooperativeness appears to be effectively an intolerance to diversity that separates social cultures as they occur, like a schism in a religion. Whether that schism is violent or peaceful, who knows? We seem to have filled up the globe, so I'm guessing we generally divided peacefully.
The nature and consistency of this divisiveness seem very in line with those same inherent traits I discussed in the OP, which, to be selected for, required the likelihood of trust, accurate-enough empathy, and reciprocity. It is these things that would break down if social mores (from biases and mimesis) became plural and group sizes became cumbersome. It seems more reasonable to me that culture, if it gave rise to different socialisations, would have been divisive rather than unifying.
I think instead that cultures that eventually did unify larger groups, such as specialisation, law and hierarchy, did so because individuals had or thought they had something to lose by striking out alone. Agriculture meant that particular individuals within a social group were food-providers. Individual skill, more than teamwork and accurate mimesis, suddenly mattered and, if you wanted to eat, you had to be a farmer or be in his favour. The law does this too: it gives you much to lose by disagreeing. The church does this best: earthly punishment plus promise of eternal punishment afterward. And hierarchical groups do this by having the strongest fighters enforce social roles with violence.
In each case, the culture that unifies does so by having and asserting power. That sort of culture I can buy keeping us together for thousands of years, but these are largely variants of baboon culture. Deep down, we're small-town egalitarians. And I say this as a fervent multiculturalist myself.
They're not even descriptions, but illogical abstractions. A description ought to be of something, but the only moral subjects are minds and, says the moral objectivist, these are unimportant. Minds are reduced to entities that can make true or false claims, or have true or false claims made about them.
There are two maps in my view: a map between potentially unknowable genetic and cultural is-statements and subjective ought-statements, and a map between subjective ought-statements and objective ought-statements. The first is characterised by a severe loss of information, as the rational mind builds conceptions about itself as a moral agent in the world to answer non-moral ought-statements and, latterly, moral ones. This is a loss because necessarily the agent has no information about why they are compelled to answer such questions. We rationally answer them, but we do not rationally decide that such questions are asked, rather we are compelled physiologically and neurologically on the basis of natures and nurtures that we are not typically knowledgeable about. The OP largely concerns this, and descriptions here are relevant at both ends.
The second map is where description gives way to imposition. It is pragmatic to agree a set of objective laws to limit edge case behaviour within a group, but these laws impose, rather than describe, moral truth values. Moral objectivity goes a step further and generalises individual or popular subjective conceptions to everyone ever according to some mysterious out-there law. There is no descriptive aspect to this. It might be advised by some descriptions about the person arguing for the rightness or wrongness of an act; it might be advised by some descriptions of consensus witnessed by that person, but the outputs are still proposals of imposition, not description. There are occasions when they might seem descriptive. I would predict that, while historically people have argued that the proposition 'slavery is good' is true, one could expect that almost no one would argue that 'it is good to be a slave' is true (hypocrisy) from which one might make Pfhorrest's case that the proposition is false with those attesting it to be true being either deceitful or in error. However, there are other reasons why the second statement is universally false. It is illogical to generalise from such consensus that a) the proposition is false uncontingently and b) all such values are similarly predictive, predictiveness being the reason for accepting other kinds of claims of objectivity (viz. science).
The lack of justification in this generalisation from subjective to objective values is proportional to the lack of clarity in the metaphysical thesis itself which, unlike other claims to objectivity, has no interest in how such propositions can be objectively true, why they have the values they have, how they relate to -- let's remind ourselves -- the only moral subjects in existence, or how we can ask questions to infer what their properties are, which is precisely why comparison to objectivity in the hard sciences is bogus in my opinion.
Certainly. Via discussion, two people can synthesise their independent conceptions to progress the beliefs of both. But that progress is still per person, and is manifest in them each.
Quoting Enrique
I don't think this is a meaningful definition of objectivity then. If all of it is contained within the subjectivities of each mind, that is still plural subjectivities, not one objectivity. If you're considering some net measure of plural subjective knowledge, history and belief to be objectivity, e.g. statistics, then that is not mind-independent and we have no disagreement except on terminology. I think I've been clear that my objection is to the belief in mind-independent moral objectivity by which a proposition can be deemed objectively true or false. Your definition of objectivity does not have this character.
But it would not be reasonable to deduce from this that a) we can therefore generalise from a single data point (or biased subset of data points) or b) that the veracity of that generalisation is data-independent. Again, the compelling argument for assuming an objective existence to gravity is not that we can make observations and gather testimony from others and generalise to other phenomena. It is that we can do so predictively. The assumption of objective moral truths has no equivalent reassurance.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But you recognise that this isn't in any way objective? As in, this would not be something presumed to hold irrespective of the thoughts of those exact people agreeing. This would be two people defining and occupying a common frame of reference, if indeed they do reach agreement. Nothing has changed but their particular beliefs.
Very nicely said. The OP classifies us as animals and goes on to explain oxytocin. At the moment I don't think a lot of oxytocin is being produced. I think Scandanavia may be experiencing more of it than the US? I don't think Trump is an oxytocin guy but more of a testosterone guy. When men watch football their testosterone level increases and our colleges spend more on football than public speaking skills and democracy depends more on public speaking skills so if we were promoting democracy we might want to spend more on public speaking? Perhaps culture has a role to play in the flavor of nationalism? AND we might want to pay a lot more attention to what stress is doing to the world? I am afraid some nations are like bombs about to go off because of the pandemic and follow economic problems.
Religion can play a huge in this depending on the flavor of religion. Oh my, you say religions can destroy societies. They are also strongly associated with war. People can turn to religion for comforting and increase the hormonal impulse to care for each other, or religion can flip people into an intense state of war. Our willingness to kill the other person is highest when we believe God favors us and will assist us in war, and even wants us to fight the war.
And Kenosha Kid, never before did I think of the relationship of our hormones, and things that cause economic collapse, and war, but now I do! This is where the OP and your post has lead my mind. And back to the notion that religion is only part of the mix. If it prevents us from understanding ourselves as animals and prevents us from working with our hormonal reality, the explosion of protest and tearing down of statues and burning buildings may continue to spin out of control. A president who is divisive and yells those in power must dominate might succeed as well as Hitler did because the state of the nation is tense, fearful, and angry- bad hormones! And this is a really good thread!
But this might be our path into the New Age, like giving birth to a child involves the pain of giving birth? I am not overly sure of anything, but think the thinking in this threat is progress.
Information on how the brain works includes knowledge of our bodies and hormones and the part our bodies play in our judgment. A failure of the Enlightenment was a lack of information about our animal nature. Neither, classical information, as civilizing as it is, nor being saved by Jesus, is going to make us different from how nature has made us.
How do we understand nature? At the start of the Enlightenment, people relied either on the Bible or on the Greek and Roman classics to understand nature. Aristotle was the authority on most things and he was not always right. After many years of Scholasticism based on the teaching of Aristotle, there was a huge backlash and there was a growing argument that truth means studying nature itself, not what an authority says about it.
The Protestant Reformation was a rebellion against all authority and we were liberated to determine truth for ourselves. That kind of got messed up with education for technology and specialization. Education for technology is not exactly education for science and liberal education included education for science. I think specialization was necessary to get to where we are today, but specialization is also very limiting so now we have to pull all the different studies together. All the different ways to study nature are exhausting! We can study animals in nature and compare them to humans and we can dissect them and learn about brain structure and hormones. At the time of the Enlightenment, we did have enough information for a good understanding of nature, but our growing information has improved our ability to understand nature. And this information is very important to good moral judgment.
We desperately need to evolve into a New Age, because up until now we have functioned on very poor information. A moral is a matter of cause and effect, and that makes knowing the truth essential to good moral judgment. We are in a revolution of consciousness that will separate the New Age from the past.
Moral claims aren’t in the business of trying to predict anything, so it’s not clear what you would even want from them to be the equivalent of “able to do so predictively”. It would have to be some kind of projection of past oughts to future ones. “X oughtn’t have happened, Y oughtn’t be happening, so Z oughtn’t happen in the future.” But to tell whether or not that “moral prediction” is true, you need a way to judge each “ought” in it, which is exactly what’s at question.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There is nothing different in this scenario than the parallel scenario with regard to judgements about reality. Scientifically minded people, religious fundamentalists, and postmodernist social constructivists all disagree on how to judge truths about what is real. Only the postmodernists say that that means reality is relative. (You don’t want to be like them do you?) The fundamentalists still disagree with the scientists on how to judge truths about reality, even though both agree that something is objectively real. The scientist can never convince the fundamentalist of particular claims about reality until he can convince the fundamentalist to follow a more scientific epistemology. But that doesn’t make all the claims of science relative, does it?
What part did your body play, with respect to the judgements regarding what to cognize before exemplifying it in the writing of your comment? Your brain played the greatest part, no doubt, but I’m gonna go ahead and bet $100 you had no clue what your brain was actually doing.
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Quoting Athena
This presupposes the Enlightenment failed. Your intimation appears to be, that if the Enlightenment had more information about our animal nature, the tenet sapere aude which grounds at least Enlightenment philosophy, would be powerless. Hence, the Enlightenment would have been powerless. But it wasn’t.
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Quoting Athena
Perhaps, but only if one thinks an understanding of nature is a.) possible, and b.) relevant. I am of the mind that the only part of nature we’re entitled to understand, is the incredibly minor part our species-specific cognitive system permits, and, moral judgements are directly related to exactly that.
Quoting Athena
...from which it follows that the cognitive system we have, is exactly how nature made us. Better, methinks, to figure out some understanding of that, and what to do with it, then further muck things up by abandoning it.
It is not that I want them to be predictive. It's that this quality is what makes theoretical models compelling contenders for (partial, with limited accuracy) approximations of an objective reality, which necessitates the existence of objective reality. You compare the methodology of science and moral philosophy as if the methodology was the crucial thing. It isn't: it's the predictive power of an assumed objective reality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Precisely. And the difference between the first and the second is that the understanding of the first is evidence-dependent, whereas the beliefs of the second are evidence-independent. If one's moral beliefs aren't affected by further evidence about morality, they are analogues of the second. The metaphysical thesis does not care about mechanisms, therefore is stoic in the face of evidence. A naturalist formulation of moral theory, on the other hand, ought to be evidence-driven.
It’s not about you “wanting“ them to be so, in that sense. I’m asking what would a “moral prediction” even look like? What is the thing you are looking for as potential evidence for an objective morality, but not finding?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Moral relativism is neither of those though; it’s the third. You seem stuck thinking that the only options are that or the second: if you’re not a moral relativist then you’re some kind of moral fundamentalist. My position is the moral analogue of the first, the scientist: neither relativist nor fundamentalist. And I absolutely do say to take into account evidence for one’s opinions about morality: things feeling bad is evidence of them being bad, just like things looking true is evidence of them being true.
Of course you immediately come back and ask “where is the scientific evidence that things feeling bad actually is bad?”, but that’s confusing meta-ethical conclusions with first-order ethical conclusions. That’s like asking for the empirical evidence that science is better than religious fundamentalism or postmodern social constructivism, when the very acceptance of empiricism is a defining difference between those things. When you push the question back to the second order and ask how you answer first-order questions, you can’t demand or accept first-order evidence for second-order answers. That is exactly where philosophy begins.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Is there a meaningful distinction that we can draw and maintain between something or other being believed to be, hence sincerely called "good" and being good? I think there is. The historical facts and current facts support that answer quite well. Our moral belief, as humans, has evolved. Morality has evolved. There's no good reason to claim otherwise, and/or deny that that evolution continues. So, sometimes we're wrong, and what we once thought to be good is no longer believed to be.
Morality, if that term refers to codes of acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour, is relative, but it is so in broad-based universal fashion. All morality is subject to influence by individual social, cultural, and/or familial particulars. Again, history supports this quite nicely.
I'm not claiming that believing and/or saying that something is good, makes it so. I'm not saying that what's good is relative to the believer in any way that makes moral claims true by virtue of being believed to be. Rather, I'm saying that we come to acquire knowledge of what's good over time with trial and error, and I am only pointing out that we've made and will continue to make our fair share of mistakes along the way.
Touching upon the origen, and/or how morality emerged onto the world stage...(nice OP, by the way)
All thought about what counts as "the good" is borne of language use. It consists completely of correlations drawn between that particular language use and other things by the user themselves. Hence, the relative('subjective') nature mentioned earlier. Again, I'm not advocating moral relativism or moral subjectivism. Rather, I'm merely granting what ought be obvious. There are no thoughts about "goodness" or "the good" unless they are formed within a language user skilled enough to either learn how to use the name to refer to other things, or within a language user skilled enough to begin questioning/doubting such adopted use.
We all adopt, almost entirely, our first worldview. That is replete with moral belief and talk of "good". The problem is that we've already begun forming belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour long before.
So... talk of "good" comes later. Here, I am touching upon the timeline skirted around earlier regarding morality and how it relates to that particular language use.
On rational thought, mimicry, and morality...
Some rational thought - and all discussions of morality - consist(s) entirely of language use. Some rational thought does not. Some rudimentary thought about acceptable/unacceptable does not as well. Rational thought happens long before spoken and/or otherwise uttered language use; long before one adopts the moral aspect of their worldview.
Either that or mimicry as a means to get attention or as a means to seek affirmation during language acquisition does not count as rational thought, because we most certainly mimic prior to properly speaking. We mimic as a means of language acquisition.
That's rational thought being employed in language acquisition. So, not all rational thought requires and/or consists entirely of language use, particularly talking in terms of "goodness" or "the good", or any other commonly used terminological framework/dialiect/jargon commonly called "moral discourse".
Individuals mimick an other for a wide range of different reasons. Sometimes, this mimicry happens long before the actor(they) is(are) capable of talking about what they're doing in terms of it's moral import. They can describe everything it is that they are doing, but struggle to talk about where they picked up the idea that the behaviour being put on display is acceptable. This is the sort of mimicry that happens after language acquisition but before metacognitive endeavors meant to isolate and discuss pre-existing moral thought and belief.
We first learn to call things "good" by learning what is already called such by the community we're borne into. This is considerably different than deliberately delving into moral philosophy. I'm of the well considered opinion that that distinction has not been kept in mind near enough throughout the last several centuries.
Prelinguistic thought about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Linguistic thought and belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Thinking about pre-existing thought and belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.
Three distinct manifestations. All qualify as moral thought and/or belief. That needs parsed out, for it is very nuanced. For now, I leave it until someone shows an interest in doing so. It is quite germane given the topic and OP.
Quoting Isaac
While I readily agree with the relevancy of those two 'systems', I find that that suggested dichotomy is far from adequate. As it stands, it seems like an overgeneralization. I mean, it seems incapable of taking proper account of all the different ways we create social norms that do not rightfully qualify as either of those two suggested(exhaustive?) systems. I've said some things that speak to that tangentially. More directly...
Maintaining a social norm(rule of behaviour) is acting to do so, which is endeavoring in a goal oriented task of maintaining some norm for the sake of it. The problem, it seems to me, is that many social norms emerge and remain to be continued in practice without any deliberate intent to keep them in place for the sake of keeping them in place. Particularly regarding creatures without complex langage capable of talking about the behaviour.
So, the framework above cannot properly account for some of what happens that gives rise to morality.
There are also issues with drawing broad-based conclusions about all situations where we copy/mimic others based upon one particular situation thereof... the game of Chinese whispers.
Some copying is not like the game of whispers. If some copying is not like the game of whispers, but all copying passively creates and/or maintains social norms, then there can be no copying as a means to stand out... but there is. It is a common occurrence amongst young language learners. If copying another's behaviour is passive, and nothing passive is active, then no copying could be for the reason of making oneself stand out. If what is being proposed here were true, then it would be impossible for one to copy another's behaviour in order to stand out.
The problem, of course, is that that happens all the time. I would guess that it happens each and every day, without fail. Since we sometimes copy an other as a means to get attention and/or stand out, it is clear that the suggested dichotomous framework is found lacking.
This is not meant to completely discredit the proposed account, only to limit it's use to only certain conclusions. Keeping this in mind will help us to account for a wider range of everyday behaviours, and thus improve our account b beng able to do so. The suggestions do most certainly put a finger on a few important situations where social norms are being cultivated, created, and/or maintained. Just not all.
I think so as well. It is the distinction between what it means for something to be good, and what it means for good to be something. Have to admit, though, drawing and maintaining the meaningfulness of it, is a lot harder than merely granting its possibility.
I think this would be highly unlikely. We can't even agree on what constitutes a 'game', or where exactly the boundaries of 'here' are. The idea that our word 'good' picks out exactly one unified and inviolable concept identical in every mind which conceives it seems ludicrous.
Then perhaps it isn’t a word or a concept with which we should be concerned. Any possibility implies either an object that accords with it, or not. If an object, then what the possibility entails because of it, and if not, the possibility is abandoned as unintelligible.
The question reduces to whether or not the human animal is imbued with something common to all its members. Only if there is such a thing, is it then reasonable to suppose there are differences in its manifestation.
The usual understanding, the historical precedent, begins with the objects, which are always seemingly different, and that difference prevents the investigation into the source of those objects, insofar as a great enough plurality seems sufficient to negate a non-empirical connecting commonality, re: Hume, Bradley, Hobbes. If one begins from the notion of a common source as given, however, in the form of a natural human-specific fundamental condition, the difference in objects follows naturally from it, even if by different means, re: Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer.
Still, rejecting the possibility of a fundamental human condition is very far from proving there isn’t one. It then becomes nothing but a matter of the stronger propositional argument.
What about several different objects? Like several quite different things are 'games' but my teacup here definitely isn't one of them. Could it not be that we refer to one of several things when we speak of the moral 'good', and yet it still be true that if we refer to my teacup we've made a mistake (that's definitely not one of the things)?
Quoting Mww
Absolutely. I think most moral realists are misunderstanding how language works. There is not some reified concept 'the good' which we then go about finding out which thing belong in, we use the term 'good' to perform some language tasks. It's only requirement for being allowed to remain part of our language is that it continues to perform those tasks.
The human animal is imbued with several things common to all its members, several things common to large groups, and a few quite unique to the individual. Some varying collection of these things are referred to by the term 'moral good' at different times, in different conversations, to different effects.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Three questions:
Would you agree that when you're saying "genetic is statements", you have in mind a broader category concerning body and mind functions? Or do you actually want to do the reduction of non-cultural is-statements - which I take are is statements that do not concern cultural stuff but do still concern humans - to statements about genetics?
I don't think you've constrained the ultimate output space enough to ensure that all true hypotheticals of this form are lost:
(If human is in configuration X) then (human should do Y)
IE, despite the losses of information there are still true imperatives of that form.
EG: "If a human wants to avoid losing the functioning of their hands then said human should not hold their hands in a fire for 15 minutes"
And humans want to avoid losing the functioning of their hands. So humans should not hold their hands in a fire for 15 minutes.
And if in principle there are very generic configurations of human bodies and minds that are also X, then (human should do Y).
"do humans want to avoid losing the functioning of their hands"? is a question you could answer with a survey. It might also turn out that there are contextual defeaters, like a would you rather game: "would you rather lose functioning of your hands or kill everybody else on the planet?" - that still facilitates the imperative being true so long as the context isn't a defeating context. So it's not necessarily true, it's contingently true for all plausible scenarios, and if you're gonna base moral principles on human behaviour and wants, it's going to output contingently true statements at best anyway.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The last question is about where rationality - deliberative thinking here I guess - fits in. You've made a reduction of the territory of human values to psychological drives and cultural norms, but in that reduction you've also got our capacity to plan and deliberate. In my experience, deliberation and planning often plays a pretty big role in evaluating how best to treat people. You've already got reason in analysed territory, and it already links to emotions and sensations. Seems strange to me to make such a reduction away from reasoning when you've thrown reasoning in there - presumably justified by it being "subjective" when it concerns human norms (more later).
Well, I guess I have another question; you're using the words "subjective" and "objective" a lot when talking about this, how do you understand them in this context? I ask because so many arguments on the forum that lead to a qualified sense of moral nihilism ultimately turn on their interlocutor having this distinction in the background:
What's objective is invariant of human belief.
What's subjective varies with human belief.
And with that framing in mind, it becomes impossible for anything normative to be objective, because it depends on human action to sustain it. If humans believed brutal violence was a great conflict resolution strategy, then it would be a great conflict resolution mechanism. Just as justified as do no unnecessary harm, because both lack the pre-requisite objectivity to be admitted into the big boy's club of representational knowledge.
Despite that any representation knowledge varies in a trivial way with human belief (it's knowledge! It's normative!), and even the content depends upon language for its articulation even if it's true - or a great approximation to the truth. But subjective stuff has that property too, it depends upon articulation and human behaviour for its production... Any facts about human behaviour have to vary with human behaviour, so that would make them subjective - whereas more precisely they're contingent and about humans.
Something can be contingent and still universally applicable to its domain; like it just so happens that everyone who lives in Scotland lives in the UK. It seems to me you don't think moral principles can be like that because they're not objective; I'd suggest that Pforrest's approach seeks to generate something much more similar to that kind of statement than anything carved in stone tablets. And I think you're expecting any moral realist to bottom out in stone tablets, when moral realism is generally more focussed on the enmeshment of bodies, practicalities, norms, cognition and wants.
Similar objects of the same kind are just examples of the thing in question. And several dissimilar objects are examples of different questions. What we’re looking for, is that which is that thing because it couldn’t be anything else. As such, it is necessarily irreducible.
So several examples may tend to justify the validity of the thing, but don’t say what the thing itself represents. A fundamental human-specific condition, in order to be sufficient to ground that which follows from it, cannot be reducible to the very examples for which it is meant to be the ground. This is why we may be looking for something not a conception at all, because we can only understand conceptions by means of their examples, their instantiation by means of things that represent them. Or, to be exact, their schema. “It is good to do this”, “this” being a yet-unspecified schema of that which is to be done.
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Quoting Isaac
Agreed. What we’re looking for cannot be a reification of anything. All we’re attempting, is to justify its possibility, and if that is accomplished, determining what may or may not logically follow from it.
Quoting Isaac
Agreed, but here, all that’s been done is posit examples of good. Moral good is just another representation, as is skill or wisdom. Why one is skilled or how he became wise is a hellava lot easier to characterize, then why is he moral. Perhaps the reason for that relative ease, is the former is grounded in experience, the latter in intelligence, both of which are contingently sufficient to represent his moral inclination, but lack the necessity to represent his moral constitution.
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What is a moral realist? Or, what would you say a moral realist is? How would I know one as such?
I don't think it's really relevant. The point is one can't simply compare similar methodologies and expect one to be justified because the other is. Science is justified by its predictiveness. Metaphysics are not justified by anything beyond the subjective attractiveness to the believer.
Quoting Pfhorrest
All of which is subjective, not objective. I take no issue with this aspect of your moral testimony: it is the same as mine. The above demands neither objectivity nor purely rational development of personal morality, in fact suggests quite the opposite of both.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I was perhaps unclear. Moral relativism is what's left when you dismiss moral objectivity as being inconsistent with or otherwise not held up by evidence. It's not a position that I feel directly needs defending; it simply emerges from what I consider a more realistic description of what morality is at root. I'm not a relativist because I find it attractive or persuasive on its own merits. It is simply a recognition that each of us are individually, from the bottom up, given moral capacity and biases, and each of us is socialised individually, with more localised and temporary biases. There are severe limits to what a personal 'readiness' (as 180 Proof put it) can be and still be considered social, but within that no one person has demonstrably more 'correct' moral beliefs than others and no one person is less justified in defending their beliefs than others, which is exactly the same as saying there are no objective moral truths outside of the social-antisocial divide. If there is any means of showing that this is untrue, I may yet convert to moral objectivism, but I imagine I would have heard it by now in this thread if not elsewhere.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, I ask for some equivalent for morality to the compelling reason to believe in the objective reality behind scientific law. It needn't be scientific, though if it is inconsistent with evidence, I will disregard it as such.
Quoting Pfhorrest
So far as I can tell, that's your question, not mine:
Quoting Pfhorrest
The first order is the fundamental drives and capacities that make us ultra-social animals. The conceptions we form around those -- the second-order -- are rationalisations of the first, lacking insight as to the nature of the first or the origins of the second. I am perfectly happy with this: I do not feel the need to justify the latter at all, any more than I need to justify Newtonian mechanics in the face of Einsteinian mechanics, i.e. on purely pragmatic grounds. I do observe that we are in a situation where those second-order questions inevitably must be asked, and look to empirical evidence in trying to establish a minimal boundary line between social and antisocial behaviour, the area that I believe has primacy in moral consideration. I'm not particularly wedded to my tentative attempt, but I am not inclined or obliged to take a two-tone approach and pretend that the second order is somehow more real, is accurate, or otherwise has primacy. The second-order questions, like the above, that you've thought I must answer from a first-order theory (from page 1) have struck me as questions based on false assumptions about what the second order really is.
As I said, if there's a single argument justifying why moral claims generally have objectively true or false values, the OP is wrong, and the relationship between morality and social biology would be extremely mysterious, since it would appear that humans have two very different sets of imperatives for doing the same thing: one they are born with, another they must discover for themselves. What purpose would either have, the other being assumed real?
What part did your body play, with respect to the judgements regarding what to cognize before exemplifying it in the writing of your comment? Your brain played the greatest part, no doubt, but I’m gonna go ahead and bet $100 you had no clue what your brain was actually doing.
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This presupposes the Enlightenment failed. Your intimation appears to be, that if the Enlightenment had more information about our animal nature, the tenet sapere aude which grounds at least Enlightenment philosophy, would be powerless. Hence, the Enlightenment would have been powerless. But it wasn’t.
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Perhaps, but only if one thinks an understanding of nature is a.) possible, and b.) relevant. I am of the mind that the only part of nature we’re entitled to understand, is the incredibly minor part our species-specific cognitive system permits, and, moral judgements are directly related to exactly that.
Neither (...) is going to make us different from how nature has made us. — Athena
...from which it follows that the cognitive system we have, is exactly how nature made us. Better, methinks, to figure out some understanding of that, and what to do with it, then further muck things up by abandoning it.[/quote]
If you want to know more about how much our bodies influence our thinking, you might read "Emotional Intelligence". Or just ask your gut if there might be some truth in what I am saying.
When doing research on middle-age women I came across a paper that explained our visceral reaction to going against what we believe is right, such as a mother leaving her child so she can take a job outside of the home. Today mothers don't seem to have as much trouble doing this as in the past when we were conditions to stay at home and put the family first. I have a granddaughter who has very weak mother instincts, so I am not saying nature made us mothers, because a large part of that is our conditioning. The point is, our sense of true or false, and right of wrong is visceral.
Who we vote for is more apt to be based on our feelings than our reason. Campaign ads and media in general appeals to us on an emotional leave. The more something causes fear or anger the more apt we are to remember it. Trump is very manipulative in this way and I would be surprised if a Trump supporter were in this forum because his supporters tend to do very little slow thinking. Trump himself sure is not a slow thinker and that means being impulsive not thinking things threw. While the brain plays a part in our thinking, it does not play the most important part. Our bodies play the most important part.
While the Enlightenment is still with us, it is not dominating us today. Utilitarianism is dominating us, and that isn't so bad, but our education is so bad! When we used the Conceptual Method, children learned to think. Math is about learning how to use our brains, but that is not new math. It is word problems dealing with everyday math needs. It has practical use and is not as abstract as new math. I have a problem with new math for young children before they have learned how to think. I want to stress "how" to think, not "what" to think.
Now the Behaviorist Method of education is about what to think. It relies on memorization and does not involve deep thinking. It is also used for training dogs. Education for technology relies on the Behaviorist method. Now we have people barking like dogs at anything that moves, and ready to tear someone's leg off because there is little tolerance for deviation from what is right, and no doubt that right is right. This is not the Enlightenment. Back to our bodies and thinking- how do you feel about what I said? Does your gut tell you this is ridiculous or maybe something that should concern us?
Would this be natural of existential morality?
I hate to make this post any longer, but if we knew what we know today, the ongoing battle between education to make us better, thinking human beings, or education focused on practical vocational training, might have maintained the lean favoring our human developed as creatures capable of good moral judgment and human excellence. Grade school being for our souls and specialization waiting until college.
I actually agree with your interpretation of the trend; it is a point I have made myself. However... you must be aware that local, temporary moral trends can occur in different directions. We have a growing trend currently toward nationalism, for instance. By your reckoning, then, nationalism must be more morally good, since you assume that, whatever morality is, we tend toward it with time.
I think there are actually strong reasons for holding that, in many ways, we are more moral than before; essentially it reduces to the hypocrisy argument of the OP. I also think there are strong reasons for believing that this trend should occur: we are physically biased toward social behaviour, and intolerant of hypocritical behaviour (viz. slave-trading or -ownership, wars for resources, etc.). I find reassurance in that.
However it is only by local, temporary standards that we judge earlier local, temporary standards to be less moral. We might yet find a very different optimum in which good-for-me outweighs good-for-the-world in all respects, and things like environmental action might be considered immoral for causing harm and barring help in the good-for-me moral paradigm. As a child of such a paradigm, you would, applying the same logic, hold that we are more moral in our individualism and competitiveness than we were back in those immoral self-limiting days of the late 20th, early 21st century. And if you want evidence that you could have such a mentality, chat with a Republican or a Tory.
It is from your frame of reference (one I share) that we have, on the whole, gotten better. There are plenty of people (mostly religious people afaik) who completely disagree with you. Some of those, especially in the Middle East, have indeed seen a trend toward what they see as a more moral paradigm of religious unity, gender division of legal rights, violent suppression of diversity, and violent ideological expansionism, while our co-ed schools are viewed as positively Satanic. Like you, they no doubt see history as being on their side.
Quoting creativesoul
Agreed. And in terms of origins, I don't see any area for contradiction here, since language preceded the advent of large social groups.
Quoting creativesoul
I'm wondering if you mean completely. In my experience, moral consideration is incremental. We are limited to the experiences we have had to date. I'd personally not call such a thing a worldview, since there will be many elements of the world about which, as a four-year old, I had no view at all.
Quoting creativesoul
It can and cannot. Mimicry does not need to be rational. 'Mirroring' for instance is an unconscious mimicry. But rationality is perfectly capability of deriving mimicry as an apt behaviour for certain situations too (one can consciously, deliberately mirror, for instance, knowing that it's more likely to make a date go well).
Same goes for language. Our early years language acquisition is based on mimicry and trial and error, but that doesn't negate the fact that I can look a new word up in the dictionary and understand its usage rationally.
Quoting creativesoul
Or in fear of the consequences of not doing so, which is a massive slice of the wedge if not the thick end.
Really, it is a ludicrous idea? I think we have a few agreements about what is good. Most of humanity until recently agreed family order and responsibility were good. There is in general an agreement in a civilized society that we don't kill our neighbors and eat them. Do unto others as you would have them do to you, is an agreed good in all religions that I can think of. It took the US awhile but we finally agreed our food supply should be safe and making it safe and saving lives was thought to be a good thing by most people. However, right now we are having a moral crisis in the food industry and hopefully, this will change with growing awareness. So what I am missing that would make the notion that it is a ludicrous idea that we can agree about good and bad? I think not to have some of these agreements is deviant and not the norm.
Given our greater knowledge of cause and effect, I am confident our moral judgment has improved and will continue to improve. I think Cicero was correct about our failure to do the right thing is because of ignorance and once we know the right thing we are compelled to do the right thing.
What I'm asking is what your justification is for saying this. Taking Wittgenstein's 'game' example, there is no 'thing in question' with regards to the word 'game' we apply it according to some rules, but the rules do not together represent 'game' because they do not all need to be applied at any one time.
What I'm saying is that words do jobs, they don't always refer to some 'thing' even if they appear to. It may be that appearing to refer to some thing is the job they're doing. The same word might do a different job in different contexts. So with a word which appears to refer to some thing, we might be looking for one thing, several things or no things at all.
Quoting Mww
I think a moral realist would have to be someone who thinks that moral 'goodness' and 'badness' are universals. But they would also need to have some sort of correspondence theory of truth. Anything less and they can't really apply 'true' to moral statements. Unfortunately both are nonsense!
I don’t have any feelings about it; my feelings weren’t affected. My thinking was affected, and from that, I can say I agree with a lot of what you say, disagree with some.
Agree:
.....Enlightenment is no longer predominant; our education is bad; stress how to think not what to think; sense of right or wrong is visceral...
Disagree:
Sense of true or false is visceral; (formal) education develops us as capable moral creatures; we normally vote from feelings.
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Quoting Athena
Only this.....
Quoting Athena
....which I fail to understand at all. I suppose you mean our gut is part of our body, which I reject as it relates to thinking. From here, if it were true, it would follow that feeling controls thinking, which in turn permits thinking to be rash, irresponsible and dangerous, exactly as much as it permits thinking to be beneficial. But the former is the exception to the rule, the latter being the rule.
Anyway, I have the utmost respect for educators, especially these days, when kids are generally just punk-ass renditions of their parents. And THAT....is what my emotional intelligence looks like.
I had in mind our genetic bias toward certain social behaviours and capacities, but I don't see these as qualitatively different from any other part of our evolutionary history. What did you have in mind?
Quoting fdrake
Yes, as I said to Pfhorrest, I don't mean this to extend to all normatives. In fact, I argue that normative rationalism is, in the case of morality in our current environment, inevitable and necessary. However, sticking with animal facts :) this is a perfectly true but redundant use of language. In practise, I do not wonder whether to keep my hand in the fire for 15 minutes. If I am, say, drunk enough to think that I have become superhuman, my body, with no rational input from me, will disillusion me of this matter within a second or two, and the resultant behaviour -- to remove my hand from the fire -- will likewise require no input from the drunkard in charge.
This is equivalent to the redundancy I spoke of earlier. Yes, one might wish to, as Pfhorrest invited me to, derive a moral philosophy from our instincts that holds social behaviour amenable to reciprocal altruism as objectively 'good' as well as good-for-the-group, good-for-us (indirectly) or good-for-survival-of-our-ancestors, but that would be as redundant as deriving that it is bad to put your hand in a fire for 15 minutes if you wish to avoid losing it. Nature got you covered there.
Quoting fdrake
This is fine, and, while the example is not something I would consider a moral question, there are, in my view, moral claims that are contingently true in all moral frames of reference (just as, say, rest mass is the same in all inertial frames of reference) . Behaviours and beliefs justifying them can be antisocial or social, and, in the schema of the OP, only the social ones underpin our ideas of morality (though the antisocial ones are certainly relevant). Moral frames of reference are based on our social apparatus of empathy and reciprocal altruism and must be self-consistent to be social. A frame in which it is okay for me to kill you for fun but not okay for you to kill me for fun is by definition not a moral frame of reference (and any frame of reference in which the rest mass is different cannot be an inertial frame). In short, we can place limits on what kind of frames of reference can be considered moral at all.
It is to this extent that I believe we can a) understand our conceptions of morality and tendency to generalisation them and b) since we must face moral problems rationally most of the time, derive, if not a complete set of moral truths, boundaries on what is considered universally immoral. [EDIT: and the value of liberalism within those bounds]
Quoting fdrake
I think this is one of those cases (and I see it in my discussions with Pfhorrest here as well) where we probably assume very different kinds of thinking of each other based on our respective histories, me coming from a non-philosophical formal education (albeit one I approached out of philosophical interest). You seem to be characterising my position as somehow wanting to limit the role of reason and looking for evidence to support it. As a person with a background where reason was pretty crucial, that really isn't the case.
I prefer to start from the evidence and see what makes sense. Where the evidence suggests that, in encountering another individual, we have unconscious neurological and physiological reactions to that encounter which bias us toward or away from certain behaviours on the whole, clearly that is not describing a rational process. Further, it is clear that such a process has no non-contingent need of rational outsourcing, hence my supposition that 'good' did not need to be rationalised in small social groups. We still have use of reason even within this limit upon ambiguity since we must sometimes reason a) what the desired outcome is, and b) how to realise that outcome. (Not always the case: I do not believe, as Mww does, that my ancestors had to bother reasoning whether escaping a sabre-tooth tiger was efficacious or how to do so: biology got us covered there too).
Clearly we do exist now with a need to rationalise those drives and biases: people we meet are largely strangers and have important cultural differences about social behaviour, and we exist within power relations (neglecting neither the chicken nor the egg). So I do believe that discerning what is 'good' in a given situation demands reason: I just don't believe that rational concepts about said drives and biases are fundamental, accurate, or have primacy. That we know what we know about those biological drives comes from reason, so this is an assault purely on rationalism, not reason itself, which is pretty great actually, if over-credited.
Quoting fdrake
Well, we actually hit upon the ultimate contingency (was that you or Pfhorrest? I forget): "X is objectively true... if you agree." That's as good a definition of relativism as any.
I come to this from quite a different angle (again!). We are substantially limited in how we can know the world, trapped by our own subjectivities if you will, and it is therefore important for claims to objectivity to be well justified. Subjective-by-default is my position. I am sufficiently impressed by the regularity, predictability and generality of material phenomena that I am quite convinced of an objective existence for what is around me (including my body, the world, you at the other end of this internet connection), even if I cannot know how well my subjective conceptions of them represent their true nature, and I see nothing like this in morality.
I think this is perhaps unusual: we are naturally inclined to look for the generally true in subjectively received evidences, and so the default seems to be an assumption of objective reality until proven wrong. Naturally I'm no better, but I do think we can learn not to trust claims of objectivity, and that this would save a lot of bother defending daft positions against evidence. (That's not a dig about this thread: I was thinking of the persistence of e.g. beliefs in objective space and time). As I said to Pfhorrest, if anyone can justify the objective existence of moral truths in the same way that nature has justified belief in an objective existence, the OP is wrong, and I am stumped as to what the evidence in hand can possibly mean.
My perspective on that is: we do react in some way, and reason is involved somehow. Well, more accurately cognition. The qualitative distinction between the functioning styles of system 1 and system 2 in that approach doesn't preclude both functioning at the same time - it's more a question of weighting, no?
And since it's a question of weighting, reason's involved to a greater or lesser extent depending on the act. This is why I find it strange that you're focussing on moral behaviour being non-cognitive when both systems are involved. Instances of action based on moral principles or conceptually relating to norms of conduct are in part deliberative.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I think I can see why you'd attribute that to me based on my response. My perspective on what you've said is you're throwing the baby (reason-cognition-deliberation-planning) out with the bathwater (reducing following moral principles to a certain homeostasis of non-cognitive sentiment). I just don't see good reasons to split cognition away from sentiment when we're talking about morality, that usually comes up in contexts when we're already trying to find out what best to do. Cognition's involved in that.
I do agree with you that if you transformed the terms of the argument to "emotion is an interaction between cognitive processes and sensorial processes", there would still be the weighting question, and I'd side with you that for the most part moral decisions are made transparently (absorbed coping-system 1 functioning-prethetically), that is they are already made by what we're already doing - but in cases where we're trying to find out what's right, cognition is way more involved and I don't think it's appropriate to call these moral problem solving behaviours non-cognitive. Always a question of weighting deliberation and reflex when exploring what to do.
So in essence, I don't think you're minimising the role of reasoning, I think you're collapsing a lot of distinctions into being much the same distinction. subjective/objective = system 1/system 2 = normative/descriptive = territory/map (in this context) = value/fact - when how we make maps from territories, investigate, deliberate, is already part of the territory of moral conduct since it is in part cognitive. It's like moral conduct is deficient since it's not objective (merely subjective), but it's actually both if you propagate all those distinctions through each other using an assumed structural symmetry.
The subject/object distinction is doing most of the work, rather than the scientific stuff you've carefully interpreted. How would you draw the conclusions you have without your framing of the subject/object distinction? You've given a bird's eye view from the perch of the objective, I'm not sure you can perch there when talking about human conduct - it always varies with human conduct, since it is human conduct. It's always subjective in that framing. It's like rigging the discussion.
It’s relevant because it’s the difference between them that you cited. If you can’t describe what that difference is, then it seems like a non-difference. Imagine a world where there was an objective morality as you mean it and moral claims were predictive as you mean it. What would be different about that world compared to the way you hold this one to be? If there is no difference you can articulate, then there’s no reason to think this isn’t just such a world.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I’m not talking about metaphysics at all, and if you think I am you’re severely misunderstanding me (as I already suspect).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
All evidence is “subjective” in that sense. It is being shared in common between everyone that makes it converge toward the objective. Again, exact same scenario with empiricism and reality as with hedonism and morality.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This isn’t any different than what I was saying, it’s just put the other way around. You’ve rightly ruled out the fundamentalist-like approach to ethics, but then gone straight to relativism as the only alternative, missing the possibility of a science-like approaching to it which is neither fundamentalist nor relativist. The fundamentalist would call it relativist, just like religious fundamentalists call physical sciences relativist too. But then the postmodern social constructivist, a kind of truth relativist, claims that the physical sciences are just another totalizing dogma just like the fundamentalist’s religion is.
Both the fundamentalist and the social constructivist fail to see how the physical sciences are not just the opposite between those two, but a completely different third option. You seem to me to be in the analogous place of the social constructivist, with regards to morality: you’re rightly against the fundamentalist, but missing that my kind of position is not over there with him, but also is not over with your relativism (as the fundamentalist would claim I am), but is rather a completely different third option.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That’s not the first and second order I’m talking about. The first order I’m talking about is “what should we do?” Answers to that are certainly often informed by the drives you mention. But the second order is “how do we figure out what we should do?”
Quoting Kenosha Kid
That’s not at all like anything I’m proposing.
Humans are also born with an innate sense of reality, grounded in empirical experience, but historically have wandered far beyond that in the search for a greater understanding of reality. The scientific method, such as it is, is an admonition not to do that, but to instead pay closer attention to and expand the range of that empirical experience we innately turn to, to find that greater understanding of reality. It’s not a choice between either just believing whatever you happen to believe or else getting lost in some dual epistemology and ontology. You can pursue a deeper understanding of reality without abandoning the innate sense of it you have, just by refining it instead.
Likewise, as you say, humans are born with an innate sense of morality. It’s grounded in a different kind of experience than our sense of reality. And we historically have wandered far beyond that in the search for a greater understanding of morality. My moral methodology is an admonition not to do that, but to instead pay closer attention to and expand the range of that experience we innately turn to, to find that greater understanding of morality. It’s not a choice between either just doing whatever you happen to feel you should or else getting lost in some dual morality. You can pursue a deeper understanding of morality without abandoning the innate sense of it you have, just by refining it instead.
Thing in question is just the subject of discourse. There is a subject of discourse referred to by the word “game”, something like.....that formal activity in which a relative competition arbitrates a standing goal, and consequently having for its objects the conditions consistent with the particular rendition of the concept the word represents, and all according to rules. The objects of baseball are different than the objects of pinochle, even if they are both subsumed under the subject represented....referred to.....by the word “game”, and the rules administering the objects of each are correspondingly different.
When the subject of discourse is something like “good”, none of that can apply, because all those are contingent on the peculiarity of the subject, whereas the subject “good”, being merely a possible human condition, or a possible integral part of human nature, can have no contingency whatsoever because it has no peculiarity. It either is the ground of that which would logically follow from it, or it isn’t, in which case, it is irrelevant.
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Quoting Isaac
I would agree with the first, with the amendment that words always refer to some thing because that is the only job they have. There is no reason to even invent words, without presupposing that to which they refer. Hence.... words being nothing more than the schema of conceptions. Don’t forget....we think up words; they are not given to us in the same manner as are phenomena.
Quoting Isaac
Of course: a foot is at the bottom end of your leg, or it is an assemblage of quantitative units. The word is still only doing one job in each case, that being relating a conception to its representation, context just informing what the conception is.
Quoting Isaac
Appears to refer to some thing still presupposes the possibility of the thing. With the parameters already set for the thing, we require it to be one thing. Anything more than that defeats its necessity.
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Quoting Isaac
Ok, thanks. I don’t have an opinion, myself. So.....just wondering.
The contentious pivotal matter, historically anyway, involves whether or not the 'quality' of goodness is somehow a property of all good things regardless of whether or not we believe it to be. Charitable donations are often discussed here. Giving to charity is good.
I do not see how talking about what it means for good to be something is helpful here. It reduces to naming and descriptive practices employing the term "good'.
I agree that the word "good" means different things to different people. Furthermore, it's meaning changes within an individual user's lifetime as their moral belief system grows in complexity. That speaks to the 'subjective/relative' aspect of the evolution of morality. However, that is irrelevant to the point being raised.
The point involves whether or not there is a difference between changing one's belief about what's good and being mistaken about what's good. I say there is. If it is possible to change one's mind about whether or not something counts as "good", and that newly formed belief is mistaken - still yet - then it is clear that our belief about what counts as good is not equal to what counts as good.
It's an interesting question, touching on something @Mww asked earlier. If I were to stab at an answer (and you should definitely attack this with big sticks as there's a strong potential for argument ab rectum here), it would be this: reason is invoked to solve particular problems, and provided with evidence that may or may not be relevant to those problems. This seems counterintuitive because we think we're always thinking, but I suspect that's a symptom of the fact that we lack immediate problems to solve that are not reliant on cognition. Survival is not usually an issue for us, so we are left with the general problem of how to occupy our minds.
Take that with a pinch of salt or, better yet, as an example of how one could answer the question. In terms of parallel processing and interaction, the brain is a parallel processor and one of the things among others it can manage simultaneously is algorithmic problem-solving and quality control: system 1 appears to send some of its conclusions to system 2, which then must take credit for the solution since it is unaware of system 1, and it also seems to send problems to system 2 to which system 1 cannot offer trial solutions, and it seems to send a great deal of evidence, more than will be useful.
Quoting fdrake
I think it's a coup getting someone to agree that some of it is non-cognitive. But to answer your question, I think the rational mind is a practical tool for decision-making. I am not absenting it from making decisions about moral behaviour: I am simply saying it is not the origin of its own conceptions of good and evil. That origin seems to me to fall into two camps: intrinsic, selected-for biological drives and reactions, and our socialisation from childhood.
Quoting fdrake
I'm really not sure whether you're talking about in small social groups or since. If the former, at the end of the day nature cannot select for behaviours that are derived rationally. A given characteristic must actually help the genome survive if it is to be part of that genome; it can't rely on us thinking it through. Fortunately, as we've established, the rational mind is a lazy quality-checker. If you're talking about since, no, I do think reason is probably always necessary for moral decision-making, for the reason that that self-same biology that gives us our sense of good is unfit for our current environment, and reason must pick up the tab.
I don't see not crediting reason for every human decision as throwing the baby out with the bathwater; it's simply giving credit where credit is due, rather than giving credit to reason by default. There is plenty of evidence that much more is going on in our brains than our conscious minds are aware of. If you're comfortable with that, I don't see anything controversial in the idea of social responses having a non-rational basis.
Quoting fdrake
Now, yes, because "what's right" is ambiguous. In small social groups with homogenous socialisations, "what's right" was likely not ambiguous at all, again on the basis that, if it were, reason would have been essential to making social decisions and, if reason were essential to making decisions, nature could not select for social characteristics. Whatever our nature is doing before we consider the question, that is, to my eyes, the basis for our conceptions of good and evil. Nowadays we must rely on reason even for determining "what's right", because generally we're dealing with people that cannot be relied on to respond to social stimuli in the same way we do.
Quoting fdrake
No, I don't think moral conduct is deficient because of the lack of moral objectivity. I think moral objectivity is a deficient description of moral conduct. Moral conduct seems to be taking care of itself.
Quoting fdrake
It is precarious, and worthy of a hammering. I proceeded on the basis that, at root, our moral conceptions derive from our social instincts (implemented as described in the OP). Morality is an abstraction, generalisation and approximation to what we do naturally, which is social altruism, empathy, and intolerance of non-reciprocal behaviour, presented to our rational minds as feelings mistaken for a priori knowledge.
Any one who behaves antisocially -- i.e. without empathy or with hypocrisy -- cannot therefore be behaving morally. This does not define a set of objective moral values, but does place limits on what sort of behaviour can and cannot be considered moral, i.e. considered consistent with human sociality. Within those bounds lies any empathetic, self-consistent set of values, which will be myriad, with no basis for saying that any are incorrect within or without that set of values (moral frame of reference).
The test case I suggested in another thread was of indoctrination of children into religions. To me, this is unambiguously immoral: the child is harmed by the process, with a reduced ability to discern (what we are justified in assuming is) reality from fantasy. I would not raise my child in a faith, I am grateful that I was not raised in a faith, and I can't but judge someone who raises their child in a faith. However I am also aware that, from a religious person's point of view, raising a child in a faith is a good thing to do, e.g. for the sake of their soul. A typical religious person would raise their child in their faith, is grateful they were raised in that faith, and deems it good that others raise their children in that faith, and perhaps bad when others don't.
Both frames of reference are self-consistent, that is: neither are hypocritical, and both consider the fates of others with care. From a strictly moral perspective, there is no reason to hold one as more moral than the other: that would be arrogance, or moral totalitarianism. The conflict might in principle be resolvable, but not on moral grounds. Any shift in the rightness of the action in question would require one person to be convinced of or against theological beliefs instead. But within our respective, broader, non-moral contexts, our moral frames of reference are each robust, and each person should feel justified in pursuing aims consistent with those frames of references. In other words, within the bounds of social behaviour, moral truths are relative, not objective.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
How has nature justified belief in an objective existence? Was it via rationalism or reason itself?
So when a child goes outside alone to have a 'game' of playing soldiers 'relative competition arbitrates a standing goal'?, When my nephew and his friends are playing 'silly games' it's according to rules? When I wind you up about something and then admit "I'm only playing games with you", that's a 'formal activity'? No, we derive what the speaker intends the expression to do by it's context.
Quoting Mww
Is it? People use the word 'good' to mean all sorts of things, I don't see any compelling reason to believe it always and in all places refers to a possible human condition or a possible part of human nature.
Quoting Mww
What does 'hello' refer to?
Quoting Mww
"Don’t ask a podiatrist to convert numbers to metric, they only are used to working with feet." Hilarious I know (I'm here all week). So which 'one job' is the word 'feet' doing in that particular use?
Quoting Mww
So "I took my married bachelor friend out for a drink last night", because it appears to refer to a married bachelor must therefore presuppose that such a thing is possible? Is it not just nonsense?
Have it your way. I’m not interested in tangential nit-picking.
I've reconciled that most of my mind is already sacrificed unto the Machine God on the altar of my body. I think of cognition similarly. It can dominate the generating processes of mind-body outcomes only when it's fueled with problems. Which, I'd agree with you, are of circumscribed character.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
There being a black and white of right and wrong actions is a poor description of moral conduct; tagging moral actions as purely right or purely wrong is part of the game of moral conduct. I don't think trying to come up with meta principles that filter actions into WRONG and RIGHT bags is a particularly justified endeavor, given that the pretense to universality is already part of the clusterfuck of moral conduct; it stays in the territory of moral conduct.
But, I still think it is possible to cultivate moral wisdom in that territory - that we can learn to be more right or at least less wrong in how we treat others. I'd guess you'd agree? In your conceptual landscape, you've got evolutionary machinery selecting over prosocial traits. Evolution's a much cleverer engineer than any group of humans, but its search space (pro-social behaviours, long term survivability tactics, highly replicable behaviours) is also something that can be explored in thinking and living. I'm not saying we're particularly good at exploring the search space, I'm saying that we've got access and do indeed explore it, although through a glass darkly.
Maybe if I put it like this: the situation is worse than it having a non-rational basis, rationality only comes online when called by non-rationality, non-rationality is partially constituted by cognitive interventions on sensorial flows of information around the body. So I'm not trying to make the claim that "morality is rational" in the manner that I could sit here in an armchair and come up with a correct Stone Tablet by the virtue of my "sovereign faculties", I'm coming at it from the perspective of imploding the distinction between rational and non-rational conduct - to replace it with a weighted mixture of the two whose relative weights depend on context.
"Is the moral value/conduct based on a good model?" is always a good question. An example - relationship advice from the social shut in fdrake. Base how you treat your partner on the information you have about their needs and constrain your proposed actions by your capabilities and needs. It doesn't really say very much, other than emphasise that moral values have a modelling component to them. As far as agency goes; reciprocity without modelling is blind, modelling without reciprocity is empty.
After that implosion, abstract principles of morality and a capacity to model "objective truths" are already in the territory of moral conduct; their grasping demarcates the contours of specific moral problems. Which, I think, goes some way towards what @Pfhorrest is positing; synthesize heuristics based on regularities, it's all theory ladened anyway (cognitive interventions on sensorial flows contextualise/regularise based on priors, theories all the way down man), and our bodies change slowly enough to be a fecund subject of moral inquiry. The mind can't even go fuck itself like the body can.
It's not tangential, it's fundamental to the arguments about moral realism. Holding to the idea that we use terms in a consistent and coherent way, when we in fact don't, is what leads to errors in thinking such as that there can be some universal mechanism for determining moral 'right'. If we acknowledge that the term 'morally right' is applied to different behaviours/characteristics for different reasons in different contexts, we can see that no such mechanism can possibly exist.
Morality, as a single measurable property of behaviours/characteristics is a fabrication of philosophy, it just doesn't exist among real human groups.
The fact that different people use the same word in different ways does not necessitate the conclusion that there is not a correct way to use it. It could be that they have just not learned the correct way. So your cited evidence supports a probabilistic conclusion, but it does not have the strength for your claimed conclusion "that no such mechanism can possibly exist".
Quoting Isaac
The issue here is one of judging the particular instance as suitable to be classed as a member of a specified general category. If a "real human group" (whatever "real" means in this context) has agreement amongst themselves, that a designated particular is a member of a specified category, how is this a fabrication of philosophy rather than a real attribute of that real group? I would think that if there was disagreement between two "real human groups", and a compromise was arbitrated by a philosopher, this would be a fabrication of philosophy. But what makes you think that it is philosophy rather than "real human nature", or something completely arbitrary, rather than philosophically directed arbitration, which produces such conventions?
In other words, why do you believe that a particular being a member of a general category (x is of the type A, for example), is something created rather than a natural fact? You seem to give no credence to the reality of types. But is it not true that there is a real difference in type between a human being and a chimpanzee, for example?
The tangential is the foolish devolution into silly language games. I mean......any fool can intentionally put words together in a proposition that reduces it to sheer absurdity. All that’s accomplished is showing how ridiculous it is possible to be.
“.....I can think what I please, provided only I do not contradict myself.....”
I don’t care about real human groups. No matter the group, is fundamentally nothing more than the composite of its individuals. It only stands to reason, that to understand the group, something about the individual must first be given. And even if the group admits to different characteristics than its individuals, they are nevertheless the causality for that difference.
Wanna know about a molecule? Figure out its elements.
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Quoting Isaac
Morality the concept, is a fabrication of philosophy, yes. And.......what about it?
Hmmmm.....come to think of it, what would be a reasonable, logical single unit of measurement for behavior, anyway? Surely not a mere fabrication of philosophy.
Ah, mea culpa. In that case, it occurs to me that I perhaps misunderstood your original "where are the oughts" as meaning "where are the moral imperatives" where you possibly meant "how do we get from drives to deciding on what to do?" If this is the case, then I think the majority of cases come down to reason, even in small social groups. However, this is not reasoning what 'good' is, but how we make the good thing happen. No argument from me that reason is chiefly involved in the latter, or that, these days, it is chiefly involved in the former.
Quoting Pfhorrest
My old responses to why both of these points are invalid still stand.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Fundamentalism is not necessarily antisocial. In fact, homogeneous socialisation is kind of fundamentalist in a way, although not necessarily deliberately so (which would involve a power relation, which in turn would undermine reciprocity and require larger group sizes). So, no, my argument is very much against objectivism, not fundamentalism. I do not labour under the impression that you know what the moral objects you believe in are.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Seems remarkably similar. I guess it is the word 'imperative" that makes the difference. I'm happy to reduce the strength of this to "truths". Either way, I don't object to the description of learning from experience, deliberately or otherwise. Encountering different people with different cultures, histories, local laws, etc. requires us to rationalise, as per the OP.
However, three things:
A) I do not think this changes our concept of 'good', based on our underlying social drives. We can learn of new ways to harm, of new cultures that require different consideration, of new scenarios where the desired outcomes and practical realisations of them have not previously been met, but this is applying the same moral principle to new situations, not uncovering some refined idea of 'good' or 'goods'. The thing it will uncover is that my moral sense is sometimes incompatible with that of others, from which alone we see no justification for an objective answer to a moral question.
B) Who judges whether a refinement to your moral readiness is good or bad? You do. How? Within your moral frame of reference. There is no guarantee even in a steady state moral universe that you are making progress on all issues. You might be getting worse!
C) There is no obvious termination point for new cultures, new harms, new frames of reference, bar the extinction of our species or a return to our natural environments.That is the way of genes and memes. The biosphere did not start diverse and naturally get thinner, although mankind is doing its best to make sure that happens. The potential for refinement would be effectively infinite and arbitrary, with, rather than a progression from ignorance to enlightenment, a moving staircase from almost-current to outdatedness. That certainly fits with typical testimony of people who started young and wanting to make the world a better place, became the people who benefited from whatever world they both inherited and helped forge, to eventually bemoaning a world gone to the feral dogs they once in fact were. Beyond the overall trends that I do think are manifestations of our extending empathy and altruism to those who are not like us, I would put money on the fact that we're mostly just trying and failing to keep up with a moving and arbitrary goalpost, because, within that ambiguity, there are lots of ways of being wrong, and no one way to be right: a moral problem of expansive multiculturalism (speaking as a multiculturalist).
By demonstrating herself to be accurately described, in part, by scientific models. If there was nothing "out there" underlying the phenomena we observe, we are left with needing a much more complex explanation for why those phenomena behave like there is.
Yes, we can rash, irresponsible, and dangerous. I think that someone most of us know, who is sitting a high place, is a perfect example of that. Men of action. Don't think about it too much. It is also fast thinking, which means not contemplating what we think but reacting to say, campaign ads like one of Pavlov's dogs. I think this is important to understand for a couple of reasons.
I want to begin by establishing "gut thinking" is not my idea.
Also, I want to establish awareness of thinking with our gut is a cultural matter. In the West we are under the influence of Stoicism but in Japan going on one's gut feeling is encouraged.
One reason this matters, is self-awareness. Being unaware of our feelings plays into ideas of subconsciousness. One day I was hungry and didn't notice that was why I absolutely had to have a cooking magazine that was in front of my face in the store. When we are hungry it can be hard to think of anything else. On the other hand, when we are in creative mode, we don't notice hunger or the passing of time. I think our culture pushes all of us to be in our heads instead of in our bodies.
All of this goes with other cultural choices and notions of good and evil. It also goes with our judgment of philosophy, human behavior, education. One of our earliest education experts, James Williams, stressed the importance of teaching children to control their attention and bodies. The more we can habituate certain behaviors, the more free space there is in our minds for important thinking. Today it is obvious people think self-discipline is a violation of their liberty and being forced to sit still in a classroom was about industry controlling education and preparing future employees.
I say too much- I am trying to get to this point... When we realized most of us are not good at being stoic and pondering the good life, but we are impulsive and emotional, we turned away from Enlightenment goals and using education for well-rounded lives and independent thinking. We are now specializing, more reliant on memorization than logic, and lack self-control, moving us in the direction of a police state because humans are emotional and must have authority over them. Candidates and the media and producers of products put a lot of money into researching how to control our decisions and they are appealing to our lower selves and we are defenseless because we are unaware and poorly informed.
I don’t want to be on record as claiming that. Biology may take care of escaping, you know, ....run like hell....but that’s not the same as understanding how not be in a position to have to escape.
Ten days ago, so...bygones.
Notice the difference?
I don’t reject gut feelings in their relation to thinking. I reject gut thinking in its relation to anything.
As for the rest...informative and interesting opinions, so thanks for that.
*black and right :rofl:
I am not pointing fingers at absolutism in particular though. One can add a finite number of contingencies to a moral rule and still find disagreements that, were they between real people, could be put down to cultural differences. At the absurd limit, one could add further contingencies to uphold both. At the other limit, an objective moral rule could uphold one or none. At either end, moral objectivity fails to makes itself known.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, I think the schema I proposed in the OP could be better worded along these lines. It is much easier to state that something is objectively (contingently) immoral than it is to state that something is objectively morally. Killing gingers for fun is immoral: it is antisocial, hypocritical behaviour that causes harm for personal gratification and fails to demonstrate human social capabilities for empathy and altruism.
Perhaps a simple test case is the straightforward act of helping someone. At first approximation, one might say: while it is not immoral to keep one's head down and expect nothing of anyone, it is more moral to go out of one's way to help someone. Again, we can consider two cultures, A and B, each perfectly socially self-consistent individually, but utterly opposed to one another in every respect. Is it moral for an outsider to help A and not B? Depends on your point of view. If you were socialised by culture A, yes. If by B, no. If by another, it depends but mostly yes. One could apply this to the question of, for instance, whether to help an abortionist or a disruptive pro-life protest. (Just to clarify: I have my own moral frame of reference and it's a pro-choice frame. But I do not think pro-lifers are immoral.)
Quoting fdrake
Sure. The functionalist in me is saying that these distinguished operators are doing different things with different information though, and one of them is dealing with more raw data than the other, although I agree to the same end. If it helps to reclarify, I take no issue with the role of rationality after it has received the data: I do think rationality is vital. I just don't think it's the reliable source of our knowledge of what morality is that older-school rationalists like Mww claim it to be. It seems overwhelmingly likely to me that the non-rational remainder of us plays the actual role of what a priori knowledge was supposed by rationalists to be. Beyond that, I grant reason most of the credit any rationalist would, not just in determining what the moral outcome and means to realise that outcome are in any human situation, but in determining how an outcome can be considered moral or not in our current environment. It is necessarily rational, because stimuli-response behaviours cannot deal with this sort of ambiguity, that is: it is insufficient to feel what is right.
That aspect of the OP was aimed squarely at the notion of reason having a priori moral knowledge. However it is precisely the necessity of reason -- that ambiguity that our non-rational selves cannot deal with -- that advises my relativistic argument. I have a ways to go on this, but I think that our instinctive interpretations of what we are doing when scrambling around this moral space are inaccurate, commensurately so with the inaccuracy of our rational conceptions of moral knowledge. Beyond the limits that we all probably agree on (for me, the social/antisocial boundary), I think there's a sort of politician's fallacy about moral judgement. It is not the case that we have an incomplete view of the moral universe and must refine our views as our experience dictates. Rather, we have inconsistent views and must relax some, tighten others, move others, in order to figure out a way to fit in a new environment that contains those sorts of experiences lest our consciences cause us pain or our peers reject us. It is a practical issue using a practical tool, not something that needs to be subscribed to or that one can fall short of in any objective way. When we take on new experiences, it is part of reason's job to determine whether we can be flexible, or whether this would make us hypocrites too. Obviously this does not always work, or else antisocial ideologies would not exist in the first place, e.g. radicalisation could not occur.
For sure. :up:
I googled to see if anyone made a connection between our subconscious and our gut feeling and I found the following link. It is in agreement with "Emotional Intelligence" and also Daniel Kahneman's explanation of Fast and Slow thinking. Our gut feeling can save our lives and if we had to think through everything, slow thinking mode, we would not survive because we could not respond fast enough.
Tragically a father a shot and killed his daughter who returned from college a day early and was hiding in her closet when he came home, thinking it would be funny to jump out and scare him. She did not anticipate he would get his gun before investigating the unexpected presence of another person. Our defense system that saves our lives can lead to terrible mistakes too. I think understanding this is important to our moral judgment. Especially if we are a juror during a trial.
PS if you feel a strong attraction to someone of the opposite sex, it could be because of how that person smells. Considering this can lead to marriage and/or children, this subconscious response to an odor can have serious consequences. You feel you are in love but you are not aware of why and act on your feelings.
I was simply laying a bit of groundwork. Stating the obvious, as it were, that morality evolves over time, and that we've made mistakes along the way. I do not assume that "we tend toward" morality with time(whatever that's supposed to mean here). That actually doesn't make sense at all according to the framework I'm employing. I also do not equate morality with good, and that is crucial to keep in mind, lest there will be more misunderstanding than understanding. In fact, an astute reader can see for themselves that I'm not even using the term "moral" as a synonym for "good" or "acceptable". That said...
By my reckoning, the growing trend towards nationalism is prima facie evidence that morality evolves. Nothing more... yet. I personally find that talking of "nationalism" is misleading, at best. It's a term used to place some candidate or another in negative light, by virtue comparison to some historical 'bad guy'. All too often, the comparison is found sorely lacking. That's another subject though. The point about the quote above is that you've misunderstood my reckoning...
I've raised the point above in order to begin establishing the groundwork for an evolutionary timeline of morality. Pointing out that talking of "the good" is existentially dependent upon language use, whereas some other moral thinking is not shows us that talk of "the good" comes later. Thus, whenever someone wants to delimit the conversation about morality to such terms, they've already began using a linguistic framework that is incapable of taking proper account of morality, particularly how it emerges and evolves over time.
I meant what I wrote. During language acquisition itself, we adopt our first worldview.
Your apprehension here is based upon a self-defeating, untenable notion of what counts as a worldview. One need not have a view about all elements of the world in order to have a worldview. They are all limited... incomplete.
Welp. There go my aspirations of being the Stalin of Political Correctness.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I guess that's another case of the asymmetry of justification; it's much easier to falsify than verify. In another vocabulary; it's much easier to find necessary conditions for good conduct than sufficient ones (pace @180 Proof). I think there are good epistemic reasons to render an ""X is good" is true" claim necessarily suspect when X ranges over everything people do in every context, but as we seem to agree comparisons ""X is preferable to Y" is true" have better evidentiary status. I guess that this arises from contextual invariants regarding preference forming mechanisms behaving differently for each type of claim.
I think it's a bit sketchy, but it seems to me that ""X is good" is true" is more readily produced by codified systems of moral norms; they engender evaluating actions of specified types as wrong, in that context if you vary the system of moral norms you can create a defeater. A code of conduct with the pretense of covering all human conduct has no conduct left to fuel resolution/innovation of moral problems that arise within it - and if evaluation is predetermined, they can be predetermined some other way. On the other hand, comparative evaluations tend not to have that universality to them; they contrast within the context of evaluation rather than evaluate over all such contexts. This leverages the specificity of the here and now in the proposed solution ("I should do this rather than that", "I will change thusly") rather than futilely attempting to annihilate it. Contexts of evaluation can enact their revenge by showing that how we have changed our conduct in any given instance was flawed, but that flaw can be treated as another imperative to do better - another "I will change thusly".
I guess the idea that preference forming mechanisms that work on improvements are more context invariant than binning claims into right and wrong is what generates that distinction. It's harder to make a context sensitive system of knowledge arbitrary by acknowledging context sensitivity - it's a premise instead of a defeater.
My intuitions regarding moral claims is realist for the same reasons as I think knowledge is contextual; we can say something is right or wrong and be right in doing so so long as the context is appropriate.
Abstracting one level as you do, I think, with the subjective/objective distinction is what allows the anti-realism ("no moral claims are true") into your perspective, the contextual nature of (moral) knowledge becomes a mechanism for creating "moral frames of reference" that are external to the terrain we're in - like a meta ethics without an ethics. I think we agree on object level stuff (context sensitivity of moral judgement, differing codified systems of moral judgement are incompossible when universal and distinct), but I think that all this reasoning is part of the object level stuff too. Even the subjective/objective thing - emptying the context sensitivity out of moral judgement is going to make all the claims have defeaters or incompossible frames of reference and thus be false or indeterminate rather than the "true in practice, for now" we live in.
Social-vs-antisocial is a first-order difference (“what should we do?”). Fundamentalism-vs-science-vs-relativism is a second-order difference (“how do we figure it out?”). Any of the second-order methodologies could in principle reach any of the first-order conclusions.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don’t “believe in moral objects” at all, which again makes me think you’re not understanding what my position even if. I don’t believe that there exist somewhere in reality some kind of things that make moral statements true. I just think it’s possible for one moral claim to be more or less correct than another, in a way that doesn’t depend on who or how many people make that claim.
I wonder how familiar you are with the different possibilities in moral semantics, and I invite you to check out my ongoing thread on Meta-ethics and Philosophy of Language where we’re discussing it. It sounds like you think I’m asserting some kind of non-naturalist moral realism in contrast to your moral subjectivism, but both of those are kinds of descriptivism, and I actually advocate a non-descriptivist form of cognitivism.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I don’t see it, and if you do I miscommunicated. What you said sounds analogous to two kinds of knowledge, the empirical kind that everyone has and the mystical kind that only initiates to secret orders get. What I meant was supposed to be analogously to a spectrum of different degrees of empiricism, from the ordinary kind everyone uses in their day to day lives to the honed and refined kind that professional scientists use. Scientists aren’t using a different kind of knowing, they’re just better at using the ordinary kind. And my moral methodology isn’t supported to be a different kind of morality, just a better use of the ordinary kind.
Are you saying that mimicry as a means to get attention or seeking affirmation can and cannot count as rational thought?
:brow:
That bit of mine was simply to temper the claim of Isaac who suggested two systems of creating and maintaining social norms. Copying(mimicry) was classified as 'passive' as compared/contrasted with 'active' such as influential members making themselves stand out. The problem with that dichotomy is the same with many others, in that they cannot take proper account of that which is both, and thus neither. Mimicry, as above, is one such thing.
Seeing how the thread involves attempting to take proper account of morality while being amenable to evolution, and morality is a social norm, suggestions regarding how morality emerges, and/or is created are important to consider quite carefully...
And yet you said "almost entirely". That was what I was questioning. (I misquoted it as "completely" in my response.)
There is an inherent inadequacy hereabouts in the language being used to account for morality. Not all continued practice of some social norm amounts to "maintaining" them. A social norm can develop and be practiced - by some - out of fear of the unwanted consequences of not doing so, but maintenance of social norms is done for it's own sake. Performing an activity out of the fear of consequences of not doing so is practice for entirely different reasons than maintenance, which is done in order to keep them going, so to speak.
Punishment is maintenance.
I wrote "almost entirely" because there are undoubtedly some beliefs which are part of one's initial worldview that they do not adopt wholesale.
Yeah, you're outted now :rofl:
Quoting fdrake
I need to check I follow you correctly. The perceived additional context-dependence is that just because X > Y, it doesn't follow that Y is bad, right? Because obviously X > Y itself is not more contextualised than "Y is bad" or "X is good", just more forgiving of the less preferred element of that context. The extent to which this can be any more objective, even if forgiving, still raises the same question: if culture A prefers X to Y and culture B prefers Y to X, and both cultures are self-consistently social within themselves, who is to validate that X > Y?
"keeping one's head down is better than murdering gingers" is different, because the two are not just quantitatively different, which requires a metric which will always practically speaking be subjective, but they are qualitatively different: one is social (although one could argue that it's freeloader behaviour); the other is antisocial. The dividing line is categorical.
I think that in the past, before cultures collided often enough for it to matter, one could perhaps argue that "helping Stig and Steg is better than just helping Stig". But I think back then, if there was a choice to be made, the thinker would justifiably assume he was not the only one available to help Steg.
Quoting fdrake
This might be a good time to ask, if I haven't already: what is the difference between "x is objectively true in context A", "y is objectively true in context B" and "the truth of x and y are relative: true/false in A, false/true in B", since clearly a relationship exists between x and A and between y and B? (x, y here may be inequalities.)
Ah. Thanks for resolving the ambiguity.
Fundamentalism is an answer to the question "How do we figure it out?" Fundamentalism is itself a strict adherence to dogma about what we should and should not do.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I didn't mean it as analogous to physical objects; I merely meant whatever elements are in the morality you believe to be objective.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, and you've described the methodology (ish) but not the verification stage: how you know that the refinement you implement is parallel to an objectively better moral claim.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But, as I've said, it is not the kind of knowing that marks natural phenomena as distinct from moral realism: it is what they get out of it separates them. Science wouldn't exist unless phenomena could be modelled with predictive theories, such as the speed with which a ball dropped from the Tower of Pisa strikes the ground. What kind of empiricism tells you that a moral claim "X is preferable to Y" is likely true, such that it can impact your persona beliefs?
Ah. So by:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
it should be inferred that:
Quoting creativesoul
and not that the person maintaining the rule is "endeavoring" to do so, but rather that someone may be "endeavoring" to make them do so.
Yes, I agree, your language is sloppy. You seem very prone to making ambiguous statements in which the least likely interpretation ends up being the correct one. Which is fine, except you're quite rude about clarifying your ambiguities for some strange reason. Anyway, good knowing you. I'm sure you're busy.
:brow:
The suggestion that there are two systems of creating and/or maintaining social norms was not mine. I was pointing out the inadequacy of that suggestion/framework. In order to do that, I must use those terms. I've further clarified some of the problems with that use, while granting it's ability to explain some practices and/or situations where norms are 'created' and/or practiced. You're the one that drew a false equivalence between the maintenance of social norms and an adherence to practices due to fear of punishment. So...
Given that the task of the thread is to offer an account of all morality that's amenable to evolutionary progression, I'm simply doing what's needed. There's much overlap or agreement between the position I advocate and the OP; quite a bit actually...
The linguistic framework we employ here is crucial. In addition to the problems with the notion of "maintenance", the term "moral" is being equivocated by a plurality of participants. Consistent terminological use is imperative.
All morality consists entirely of thought and belief about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. All things moral are about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. All morality consists entirely of moral thought and belief.
That's a 'framework' capable of accounting for the evolutionary progression of what existed in it's entirety prior to the namesake "morality". We gave that name to our thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and/or statements regarding acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief and/or behaviour. Those thoughts and beliefs existed, in simpler form, prior to language itself. They gained in their complexity along with spoken/written language use via statements thereof, until we isolated them as a subject matter in their own right by virtue of even more complex language use(metacognition).
Is that clear enough?
I certainly do not mean to be. Perhaps it's easy to mistake short concise answers and/or explanations of problems with rudeness?
Just a friendly suggestion...
I wouldn't spend too much time arguing about some philosophical school of thought and/or position. It's much better to stop thinking in such comparative terms. Clearly, none of them have gotten morality right. Many have gotten some aspect or other right though! Much better to focus upon clearly laid out problems and/or arguments without the need to name where they came from, and/or how they may resemble some prior position or another.
With me anyway...
You may find that some things I say have been said before, but you will not find that the position I advocate suffers the same flaws as any historically well-known position. I'm unique in that way. Lovable too!
:wink:
Edit: Omg. Nvm.
I've also not received notices after replies. I'm sure we're not alone. They'll fix it.
Firstly, I get the sense that's not how morality works. We, as a social group, don't agree - or, at least, we aren't acculturated to accept/believe - that psychopathic serial killers should be allowed their own individual moral frame of reference. That would be dangerous to the rest of the social group. I therefore question this "statistical" argument and/or the relevance of differing levels of empathy.
Secondly, why is being a hypocrite such a terrible thing? Is it worse than killing people?
Thirdly, if the same moral truths are arrived at from either bottom-up or top-down approaches, then what's the difference?
If hypocrisy reduces to the intentional construction of false practices, and if human moral agency absolutely prohibits such intentions, otherwise the conception of morality itself becomes meaningless, then one can do nothing more to further falsify himself, or, which is the same thing, to be any more immoral. Killing, on the other hand, is not necessarily immoral, which makes explicit that killing, although most often at least distasteful, very far from always a self-falsification.
Another way to look at it, is the reality of possible exoneration from a killing, as opposed to the reality of impossible exoneration for the negation of self-respect.
—————-
Quoting Luke
This is the separation of cultural anthropology from moral philosophy, the former says it is true we are not acculturated from a social perspective, from which arises the empirical domain of certain judicial consequences, the latter says it is true each individual agency is its own reference frame, from which arise the rational domain of relative moral consequences.
—————
From the sense of human morality, bottom-up implies internal legislation, top-down implies external legislation. The former given from apodeictic personal virtue, the latter from mere contingent instruction. From which follows, no one knows a criminal until he acts criminally, but a person knows his immorality before he acts immorally.
As always.....for what it’s worth.
What is a "false practice"? What is the "intentional construction" of them?
Quoting Mww
Exoneration by who?
Quoting Mww
I did not mean to imply that we are not acculturated from a social perspective whatsoever; only that we are not acculturated to hold or accept a particular belief/attitude towards serial killers. Besides, I don't see any separation between cultural anthropology and moral philosophy in the OP.
This is oxymoronic. If psychopaths have no emotional empathy, and no cognitive empathy reflex, their frame of reference cannot be considered moral. How would describe the moral frame of reference of a chair, or a bucket of water, or the sequence of letters 'KJJDFHSLKLWOHPPBCA'? Naming something is insufficient to make it a moral subject. As per the OP, empathy, altruism, intolerance of antisocial elements, and socialisation are the ingredients of human sociality, which in turn is the basis of morality.
Quoting Luke
"hypocrite" here is as defined in the OP. It does not preclude the possibility that one hypocritical action can be worse than another. Killing people would usually be hypocritical, although there are exceptions (killing in self-defense, for instance, or killing Hitler's grandfather, or being as happy to be killed as to kill), which is why it's more useful to illustrate generalities than to endlessly refine specifics.
Quoting Luke
That is a good question. There are strong similarities between Pfhorrest's account of his conceptions of morality and mine. And yet we have entirely opposite descriptions of it. Some examples of why I think the distinction is also important:
Agreed, but it it's your oxymoron, not mine. As you stated in the OP:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This "statistical" argument is the only one you appear to offer for why the fundamental rule of hypocrisy is not objective. Do you now reject your statistical argument as oxymoronic? If so, then your fundamental rule of hypocrisy would appear to be objective...?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Okay, but why is hypocrisy so terrible?
Hey...just thinking out loud here. Give it fair hearing, make of it what you will.
Mea culpa! It's a long OP. There will be errors, sorry.
Quoting Luke
If you have no confidence that an altruistic deed will be reciprocated, there is no personal benefit in making them. Nature selected for altruistic drives precisely because what is good for the group is good for the self. But nature cannot guarantee outcomes. Group dominance is a purported selected-for trait that subdues hypocritical behaviour. Relativistically, it is "terrible" because we are built to treat it as such. Socially, it is terrible because it threatens the coherence of the social group. Naturally, it is terrible because it caused my ancestors to expend effort doing good deeds with no reciprocity, or, worse, with negative reciprocity, hurting their survival chances. If your question is Why is hypocrisy objectively terrible?, then the question has no meaning. As I've explained to Pfhorrest, it is unreasonable to revert to an objectivist idea of morality when investigating a scientific naturalist idea of the same: the two are incompatible on that level.
Re: exoneration, if I were able to forgive myself for an act of killing someone, then I think I would have little trouble being able to forgive myself for an act of hypocrisy.
To which "error" are you referring? It's not just a typo; it appears to impact your argument that the fundamental rule of hypocrisy is statistical rather than objective.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So you define hypocrisy as failing to reciprocate altruism or as being antisocial? That's not a typical definition, to my knowledge, but okay.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If you're making the claim that morality has a natural explanation via a bottom-up scientific approach, in which you describe hypocrisy as a "fundamental rule" (except for a statistical argument that you have since described as "oxymoronic"), then why is hypocrisy not objectively terrible?
As you recently told me, nature justifies belief in an objective existence by "demonstrating herself to be accurately described, in part, by scientific models".
Not at all, the difference between social and antisocial is categorical. Psychopaths are not outliers, they are qualitatively different. The word "moral" crept in from constantly typing "moral frame of reference" in that and the previous 116 drafts. You can accept that or not, it's no big deal.
Quoting Luke
It's the definition given in the OP.
Quoting Luke
No, I did not describe hypocrisy as a fundamental rule of naturalistic morality. If you read the OP in full (which, fair enough, is understandable if you don't), what is fundamental is the biological drives and capacities selected for by nature to improve our chances of survival. I then discuss how small hunter-gatherer groups would not need such rules to maintain coherence because such groups cannot sustain diverse socialisations. However if we from our post-agricultural, morality-obsessed vantage point wish to characterise how those drives and capacities work in conjunction with some constrained but otherwise arbitrary culture, those "fundamental rules" are how we might do it: i.e. they are the precursors of rational morality, not the foundations of socialisation.
Then your assertion of the OP: "Even the nearest to a fundamental rule -- do not be a hypocrite -- is not objective but statistical" is false.
The near-fundamental rule of 'do not be a hypocrite' is not statistical, but categorical: one is either social or antisocial. Yet your claim is that this rule is "not objective but statistical".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The "fundamental rule" (or near-fundamental rule) in question here is 'do not be a hypocrite' which you have defined or equated with being social or with not being antisocial. How is being social "not the foundations of socialisation"?
Why do you believe that statistics is impossible with categorical data? I do statistics with categorical data all the time. My point was that one cannot consider a psychopath to be immoral but rather amoral since they mostly lack the practical possibility of engaging in reciprocal altruism. An objective moral imperative, such as "A person must always maximise happiness in the world" cannot apply to a person who cannot infer happiness in the world but his own with any other result than he maximising his own happiness, potentially at the greater expense of others.
Quoting Luke
Because the rule does not drive our behaviour; our behaviour gives rise the observance of a rule. That's the entire point of the OP: that social biology precedes moral theory. Basic moral conceptions are ill-informed and often inaccurate approximations to sociobiological responses that we are otherwise unaware of. The question then asked is: what sort of moral rules can we suggest knowing what we know about our natural history and biology? Those are the ones I propose. You're mistaking something derived in a less certain schema with something empirically observed in a more certain one. I do associate them: I do not equate them.
I never said that "statistics is impossible with categorical data". However, if it's categorical then it's not a matter of statistics or degree. What is the cutoff for being amoral instead of immoral/moral? What determines that value judgement? A definite dividing line between those categories is not something "empirically observed" in nature.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Really? Was there a general consensus that sociality and altruism were bad prior to these scientific insights?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You defined them as synonymous. Is that not equating them?
If 99% of the population can practically follow a rule, the rule can hold statistically, not objectively. This is the point you are countering but I'm not seeing what you think the killer blow is.
Quoting Luke
To be immoral, you need to be capable of having moral agency. A chair is not immoral for tripping you up. A douchebag sticking his leg out to trip you up is.
Quoting Luke
However resolved the line is, it is there in nature. Chairs are not moral agents. Psychopaths are not moral agents. The reasons for both are the same: both lack a functioning sociobiological capacity.
Quoting Luke
Do you think that sociobiological drives for empathy and altruism will only switch on once we're aware of them? That's quite a ridiculous interpretation, and incredibly anti-scientific.
Quoting Luke
Where? In the OP I said that one underpins the other. I did not say they were equal; quite the opposite.
The "killer blow" is that you have excluded 1% of the population from consideration for being "qualitatively different": "Psychopaths are not outliers, they are qualitatively different." Or, as you put it earlier:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This means that 100% of the population under consideration are capable of practically follow the rule, making the rule categorically objective and not statistical. For them to act otherwise must be hypocritical, antisocial, non-altruistic, and thus objectively immoral.
That is, as far as your OP is concerned, because the "statistical" reason was the only exception you provided for why the fundamental rule of hypocrisy is not objective.
Like that guy on the news the other day, knowingly posing as famous people, saying send me money, I’ll send you back double. The hypocrisy is not the robbery, it’s the contrivance of posing. The guy may actually think robbery is fair play....share the wealth kinda thing. But he cannot think himself really to be one of those famous people.
—————
Quoting Luke
Forgiving yourself for hypocrisy would be like forgiving yourself for murder. Intention being the salient point.
You’re not being dismissive, but you’re missing my point. But that’s fine; it may not align with the general thesis anyway.
If I consider a population of 99 fully-functioning social humans and one psychopath, 99% of them are moral agents, not 100%. That is, if I, as a fully-functioning social human (says I!) were to attest a rule that one should behave reciprocally, knowing that 1% of the population cannot do this, I can only expect a maximum of 99% to follow that rule, not 100%. I think you've gone off on a mental tangent that might make sense to you, but has nothing to do with the OP.
100% of moral agents should behave reciprocally. That's the point. That's why it's objective and not statistical.
No, it's besides the point. This argument of yours is like responding "You're wrong, all bananas are curved" to the statement "Not all fruit is curved".
But, as the OP goes on to say, "100% of moral agents should behave reciprocally" is also wrong, for feasibility issues.
Not at all. You said in the OP:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The fundamental rule can apply only to moral agents. If psychopaths are excluded from being moral agents, then the fundamental rule cannot apply to them. Moral rules can only apply to moral agents. I don't see the relevance of statistics among moral agents.
This argument of mine is like responding "You're wrong, this moral rule applies to all moral agents" to the statement "This moral rule doesn't apply to all agents (both moral and amoral)".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'm gonna put on my analytic philosophy hat.
The difference is whether it's correct to say "X is better than Y" when in context C. Compare;
"X is better than Y" is true in context C.
To
"X is better than Y is true in context C"
The first thing takes statements, indexes to context, and evaluates them as true or false. Effectively asking whether "X is better than Y" evaluates to true in possible world C, where C is a possible context of evaluating a moral judgement. Corresponding to the question: "Does blah evaluate as true here?"
The second thing takes statements indexed to content with evaluations of true and false and... simply embeds it in a meta language. Corresponding to the inverse question: "Is there a world in which this evaluates as (false/true)?".
I think for you, in order for a moral claim to be objective, it has to be true in all contexts. If there is a context in which a moral claim is not true, it is not objective.
That space of all possible contexts has to be generated in some manner; what constraints are placed upon imagining a possible context of moral evaluation of a statement? It's a very flexible notion. If the sense of possibility was logical possibility (what can be imagined without a contradiction), then it's clear that there are no objective moral truths in the above sense since imagining a world where punching babies to death is morally obligatory entails no internal contradiction. That sense of logical possibility does not reflect how we reason morally, however, since when someone evaluates whether something is right or wrong, or whether they can improve on their conduct, they don't imagine an arbitrary possible world, they imagine a world sufficiently similar to this one. Sufficiently similar insofar as the world we are changing our conduct to shares a context of facts around the claim (it will concern the same actions and people, so the ontology in the possible world has to make sense) and it is also shares sufficient similarity with the current context of moral evaluation.
So it seems to me in order to describe our moral-evaluative conduct adequately, there needs to be a constraint placed upon the sense of possibility that connects contexts of evaluation and makes us revise our conduct - revision being a transition to a near possible world.
That sense of nearness brings in ideas of connection of moral-evaluative conduct; it may be that some possible worlds (moral-evaluative conduct) are unreachable from our current one; whereas they are reachable under mere logical possibility. If some aspect of human being curtails our moral-evaluative contexts to ones sufficiently similar to our current ones, there will be the question of whether these aspects block transition to evaluative contexts in which an arbitrary moral judgement is false. Conversely, it may be that our moral contexts all evaluate some claim as true. IE, sufficiently similarity of moral evaluative contexts engenders the possibility that enough is shared to allow there to be some context invariant moral truths. Effectively true by "fiat" of our human nature.
Given that the generation of moral principles is constrained by aspects of human nature, I would not like to rule this out. If we have commonalities in the generation of moral principles, we should not forget those when connecting up contexts of evaluation of moral claims.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I agree that talking about "X>Y is true" is much the same as talking about "X is true" when abstracting away from how we actually reason morally; they're statements which may be evaluated as true or false depending upon the context in the same way. I think comparisons highlight an aspect of moral conduct that is not well captured by a sense of modality (connection of possible worlds) that mirrors logical possibility. Comparisons include our ability to revise our conduct; do this because it's better than that, don't do this wrong thing any more. The daily contexts of moral dilemma are, in my experience, much more similar to this than "What I did was right!" and "What I did was wrong!"; aligning growth of character and moral wisdom with re-evaluating what we believe is right and wrong.
Growth paints a picture that aligns moral conduct not with the evaluation mechanism of moral claims over all possible evaluative contexts, but upon how one transitions between them.
So there are a few aspects to what I'm trying to say:
(1) Contexts of evaluation for moral claims have to be connected in a manner that reflects how they are connected IRL, and logical possibility will not do.
(2) Transitioning between contexts of evaluation is aligned with moral wisdom, and the conditions under which we transition are informed by the world's non-moral facts.
(3) (From previous posts) changing your mind about what you should do is in part a modelling exercise - it requires you know the situation you're in and what its effective/salient vectors of change are.
(4) (From previous posts) The modelling exercise component is consistent with cognitive mediation of sentiment in the production of evaluation. The causal sequence goes (affect+cognition)-> evaluation, rather than affect->cognition->evaluation.
I have intuitions that the (affect+cognition) being treated as a unit places constraints upon the sense of connection of moral evaluative contexts; they have to be "sufficiently similar", in a similar manner to people imagine a semantics for counterfactuals by imagining the "nearest possible world". We have to hold a background fixed in which we evaluate things, and most of that background is non-moral facts. The strict distinction between descriptive and normative is also quite undermined (replaced with a weighting) by undermining the distinction between cognition and affect; facts come with feelings and norms, norms come with feelings and facts and so on.
Very nice.
I appreciated that input immediately upon reading it. It felt right. It made sense. It did not pose any issues of incoherence and/or self-contradiction.
That's not making a different point. Me: "50% of the fruit is apples." You: "Actually, 100% of the apples are." ???
Can't be any worse than mine. :)
Quoting fdrake
I'd turn this around and say: isn't it simpler to postulate individual morality from common natural history and more or less arbitrary social history than worry about why and whether there are objective values for contexts that are possible but never realised? Especially given that that natural and social history is already extremely contextualised, removing the need to postulate an effective infinity of contingency-chaining variants of the same moral questions. That's the headscratcher of moral objectivity for me.
Quoting fdrake
Would you agree a) that this makes perfect sense if we evolved an amenability to be socialised by a single culture throughout our lifetimes, b) that this will likely have influenced the common view that moral questions, however contingent, in terms of absolute magnitudes or metrics, have single-valued answers, and c) that this common view might not have been thoroughly questioned by traditional moral philosophers?
Quoting fdrake
I'd put it more like affect plus optional cognition -> evaluation. Which is more or less in keeping with how Kahneman describes S2: an optional process that has less input than it makes us believe, but, when it does useful things, is brilliant!
An emotional stimulus resonant enough to change my position is also likely to be associated to that emotion thereafter. It's not a moral example, but I never particularly liked pigs. Then one night I had a very emotive dream about a pet pig. Now I love pigs! Point being, I never rationally concluded that pigs were great. I didn't "change my mind", except in a literal sense. I was conscious of all of the data, but reason didn't effect or affect the outcome. Most of my recent moral epiphanies seem very similar: a strong emotional reaction to some stimulus that similar stimuli resonate, with post hoc rationalisation. But yes sometimes you just gotta work it.
Quoting fdrake
I think this is a good way of putting it. The argument about how much is rational, how much associative, how much genetic is less important than accounting for it all.
Since the retraction of your OP statement that those with little to no empathy (again, what's the cutoff and how is it decided?) deserve their own moral frame of reference, I take issue with your remaining claim that the fundamental rule of hypocrisy applies only statistically. In response to my initial post on this matter, you compared such people as morally equivalent to chairs, buckets of water, and letter sequences. Do you also include those objects in your statistics?
Edit: If the rule of hypocrisy is statistical, then you need to explain what counts or doesn’t count as being a moral agent. Is it having a level of 0% empathy or more than 0%? How is that cutoff level decided and how is that empathy level measured? In short, if it’s statistical, then I think you need to better justify the exclusion of some agents from having to follow the rule.
I don't know, it might be both our confirmation biases talking. I look at the kind of evidence you posted in your OP; survivability strategies being selected on, the human body constraining the space of moral values we can have, and draw the opposite conclusion. The contingent facts of our nature constrain the generation of moral values. If we happen to share a social context, we will evaluate similarly or at least negotiably or be able to conflict over it. If that context is stable; informed by the needs and functions of human bodies relative to a shared social condition; we don't get to arbitrarily vary the context to produce a defeater. I think where you see arbitrarity, I see contingent and contextualised moral truths.
I think if I grant the "varying the context" procedure you're doing, it all gets arbitrary. I just think that we can't vary the context arbitrarily here and now. With your abortion example, we both live in the same possible world ontologically and there is political conflict between anti-abortion and pro-choice. What I believe is inappropriate is treating each of these as separate contexts of moral evaluation since there is contact between them - political conflict and "conversions" one way or the other even.
That comes down to how we're allowed to connect contexts of evaluation to eachother as a network of possible worlds; your procedure is close to logical possibility, I think mine is closer to causal contact with the addage that the moral furniture of the world comes along with its societal norms and non-moral facts (we can have disputes over food because we need food). Logical possibility lets you vary the content of the possible worlds way more than seems appropriate to me.
That plus the negotiation between cognition and affect and norm places a constraint, I think, on the kinds of connectivity we can posit between these moral evaluative contexts. Negotiation? Social structure change? Law? These can be varied arbitrarily in your framework, but we happen to share them. Commensurability vs incommensurability of conceptual schemes may be a relevant contrast, if you're aware of the debate. I'm siding with commensurability (political conflict and conversions between moral evaluative systems), I think you have to side with incommensurability to furnish the individuation of moral evaluative contexts in the production of these defeaters.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Eh, as much as emotion is disruptive of moral frameworks (eg: genitals vs God, genitals always win), reason re-stitches them - propagation of an insight is something cognitively involved.
Empirical moral datum (a ‘report’):
I've found that my moral epiphanies are both (1) very emotional (literally epiphanic, 'revealed)' and (2) usually precipitated out of saw-toothed reason-traps, slowly accreted over time. A pattern that seems to repeat: my present way of living and thinking about how I'm living (my intellectual and practical moral habitus) tends progressively toward some sort of insuperable, double-bind block. There's no way to progress. Lassitude, despair --- & then suddenly some sort of shift. I find that though this shift is often instantaneous and seemingly discontinuous, on reflection it seems like a leap out of an object level to a metalevel, where the object level had to run its course, wheeling itself into the paralyzing muck, in order to become receptive to the flash that (discontinuously establishing a greater continuity) connects it to a metalevel perspective (of course itself destined to become a future object-level double-bind)
The epiphany has to come as epiphany, but its sort of like a flash connecting two levels. It may be that at some absolute level the 'flash' exceeds any reason-sculpted context, but, as flash translates into new habitus, I find that I don't discard 'my dislike for pigs' in favor of 'a like for pigs' but rather incorporate each part. (Not quite true. In actuality, there's usually a foggy period in between, where I turn my arsenal of moral fury toward the last stage (often through projective online arguing.) This seems to have some purgative function. After that stage completes itself, the fog lifts, and I can see the continuity more clearly....and then feel morally bad about having turned that arsenal on my past self.)
Edit: the above is really just a gloss on what fdrake said about reason's 'restitching’
Edit2: I also find there’s another layer that is outside this cyclical progression which seems like a continuous, waxing understanding of the affective/cognitive states that correspond to each stage. Like: a better ability to catch the wind by putting up the right sails, or, on the other hand, recognizing when to batten the hatches and ride out a storm. It’s neither object nor meta level, I don’t really know how to characterize this layer.
Sorry, I went down a rabbit hole for a couple of months. I've produced three entire albums in the interim, with two more on the go. Insert caterpillar cliche here, heavily dosed with apologies for apparent rudeness.
Quoting csalisbury
My suspicion is that this is really just the post hoc rationalisation I referred to phrased in a way that is extremely generous toward reason. I'm not saying reason is uninvolved, just that it is more often after the fact and its importance is wildly exaggerated. It is a story we tell to ourselves and then to others to derive a position we already hold for entirely separable reasons. I think this is a very human compulsion, entirely unavoidable in fact, but it's helpful to me to understand that, had my experiences pushed me toward a diametrically opposed moral position, I would likely rationalise that position with equal fervour. The reasoning, then, is far less important than the experience in terms of explanatory power.