Is anyone here a moral objectivist?
There have been a lot of threads here lately touching on topics of moral objectivism, relativism, nihilism, etc. I don't mean to rehash them all again here, but I'm getting a distinct impression that most people at this forum are moral relativists or nihilists, and I want to check if that's only because people only respond to argue about things they disagree with, or if it's actually the case.
Terms in this area can be murky and conflicting, so to clarify, by "moral objectivism" here:
- I don't necessarily mean what's also called "moral absolutism", the view that the same things are good or bad in all contexts no matter what. (So consequentialism and situationalism still count as morally objective in the way I mean here).
- I don't necessarily mean what's also called "robust moral realism", the view that moral sentences describe objective features of the world. (So ideal observer theory, divine command theory, universal prescriptivism, etc, still count as morally objective in the way I mean here).
I mean only what's also called "moral universalism", which is just the claim that, for any particular event, in its full context, there is some moral evaluation of that event in that context that it is correct for everyone to make, i.e. that the correct moral evaluation doesn't change depending on who is making it.
Terms in this area can be murky and conflicting, so to clarify, by "moral objectivism" here:
- I don't necessarily mean what's also called "moral absolutism", the view that the same things are good or bad in all contexts no matter what. (So consequentialism and situationalism still count as morally objective in the way I mean here).
- I don't necessarily mean what's also called "robust moral realism", the view that moral sentences describe objective features of the world. (So ideal observer theory, divine command theory, universal prescriptivism, etc, still count as morally objective in the way I mean here).
I mean only what's also called "moral universalism", which is just the claim that, for any particular event, in its full context, there is some moral evaluation of that event in that context that it is correct for everyone to make, i.e. that the correct moral evaluation doesn't change depending on who is making it.
Comments (238)
A précis on (an) 'objective (i.e. subject/pov-invariant) morality':
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/355166
So as a metaethical designation, I think of myself, at minimum, as a moral naturalist instead (probably due to the Randian association with the term "objectivist").
I don't see the obviousness, but I would certainly prefer it not to be true.
How would morality exist without free will?
Quoting Janus
As though the facts about well-being depended on who thought whose well-being mattered or something.
Well I would say there are facts about what constitutes well-being for any person or even organism. There are also facts about who thinks which human beings' or organisms' well-being matters.
That being said, different circumstances and different people do require different actions. For a big and strong man, it may be right to stay and fight the intruder, while a small and weak person should better run away. That is not moral relativism.
I doubt that some of the self-proclaimed moral relativists really hold that view. Everyone thinks that some actions are wrong.
I agree there's an inherent logic to morality, and not even necessarily in a "it's just common sense" way; often it's not common sense. All I have to say at the moment is that I've been consulting the I Ching fairly regularly over the past year, and have developed a sense of there always being a correct action, thought, or attitude to take at any given time. "Well being" as you say, occurs when the correct path is taken, and does not occur when it's not taken. That's the logic of morality; a simple 1 or 0. A sort of pure logic that doesn't have to be guided by emotion. So yeah, I voted yes.
The question then is which of those facts matters for determining the morality of something. If several people disagree about whose well-being matters (or about what constitutes well-being), are none of them wrong, some of them wrong, or all of them wrong? Only “some” means moral objectivism.
Given that I think there is no purely rational, or unbiased, way of justifying proposals that some deserve moral consideration and others don't, then I would say that anyone who says that some should be privileged are wrong. So, among those "several people" you referred to only those saying that the same moral consideration is deserved by all would be correct.
I subscribe to a hard deterministic reality.... meaning, I do believe in objective truth seen through a subjective lens.Perspective and communication focus that Lens.
I call myself a "moral relativist"( for lack of a better term), This consists of:
-My belief, that my goals and motivations are the very best tool I have for improving my perceived situation.This being the fundamental basis of confident choice making.
-My belief, that through increased mindfulness I can make rational decisions about my goals in specific situations based on critical thinking and reflection.My fundamental process for in the moment assessment.
-My belief, that there are common attributes shared by groups, these attributes dictate proper ethical behavior within those groups. There are groups within groups that dictate differing dynamics for optimum goal completion(ex. religious people within secular organizations). In essence, we are all humans on this planet that breathe eat and sleep in very similar ways... This puts all humanity within a large group that dictates some very specific optimal methodologies for improving situations: Breathe, eat, sleep etc. As you begin dividing that group into subgroups, more nuanced methodologies will emerge as you become aware of the specific layers of groups you fall into for your current situational calculation.
-My belief, that all people act within their own perceived best interest (you too, Gandhi!)
-My belief, that If you can see yourself as part of a collective whole, and appreciate that you are an integral part of that whole, you will act within your best interest to make that whole better. I addition, as you develop this way, you discover that the most efficient sustainable change begins within yourself and moves outward
So, in summation:
I think "NO" but am not sure as I haven't really tried to draw distinctions between labels for our moral compass.
I don't think your reasoning works... it seems to presume that all moral options are either objectively well ordered, or have no ordering. As such, your reasoning is easily defeated by an objective partial ordering. For example, suppose it's simply the case that among 5 possible options A, B, C, D, and E; that A is worse than each of C, D, and E; and B is also worse than each of C, D, and E, and that these are the only objective orderings.
In this situation, we don't have an objective morality in the sense defined in the OP:
Quoting Pfhorrest
...because whether C, D, or E is the best option may depend on particular value sets... so it's (at least relatively) relative. Yet, we also don't have an anything-goes situation, because either of C, D, or E would be preferable to either of A, B; and hence, there would still be such a thing as morality.
FYI, I'm not attempting to convince you of moral relativism here... I'm simply claiming that your reasoning seems to be based on a hidden assumption of a well ordering of moral judgments of options.
What exactly are these moral options? Concrete actions, for instance?
They are, exactly, abstract perfectly spherical cows; they are hypothetical fictitious moral options highlighting a gap in a specific line of reasoning... no more, no less.
I can't see how purely hypothetical moral options are useful in dealing with morality.
Can you see how reasoning properly is useful in dealing with morality?
Yes, I doubt anyone is questioning that.
Quoting Janus
That sounds like moral objectivism as I mean it, then. :up:
(To clarify, the "some" option before didn't mean that only some people matter, but that at least some people in a disagreement about who or what matters must be wrong, because there is such a thing as being right -- in your case, and mine, the right ones being reckoned those who think everyone matters. The "all of them are wrong" option would be moral nihilism, and the "none of them are wrong" option would be moral relativism, which I'd argue is tantamount to nihilism anyway).
Most of what you're saying about partial orderings is morally objectivist in the sense I mean. It's only when you get to that C, D, and E might be "correctly" ranked differently by different people that you get relativist. If it is correct for everyone to assess C, D, and E as equally permissible, and A and B as equally impermissible, then that is a morally objective evaluation. It only becomes relativist if, for example, C is better than D according to one party, and D is better than C according to another party, and both of them are correct about those orderings "to each other" or something.
Good... then we agree. This is just a tool to help with the reasoning.
Hopefully this won't feel like too much of a breach of your request that I don't respond to any of your discussions, but I'm curious as to who these people are. I've got the distinct opposite impression such that I can't think, off the top of my head, of a single contributor here who's a moral relativist apart from myself. Who else are you thinking of?
I have a vague sense that there have been plenty more in the past, but I'm generally terrible about remembering names anyway, so I can't say who off the top of my head.
@Pfhorrest
If not, just answer “no”.
This doesn't really answer what I was asking. If it's not correct because I or anyone says so then just what what is it that determines whether or not a moral evaluation is "is correct for everyone to make".
Quoting PfhorrestI think it's possible for some propositions to be 'correct' regardless of anyone's opinions or feelings (that's pretty much what objective means).
Different kinds of moral objectivism will give different answers to that. I’m not here in this thread to discuss my answer (already doing that elsewhere), just wondering how many people think there is some answer vs how many don’t. If you think there isn’t or can’t be any such answer, just vote “no”.
Quoting ChrisH
Some moral propositions, not just non-moral ones? If so, vote “yes”.
I don't much care for forum polls, but I thought that this was pretty clear formulation of the question.
No, I don't think I am a moral objectivist (which does not make me a "relativist" in the usual sense - see Pfhorrest's explanations).
Quoting Congau
Way to beg the question!
Then are you a nihilist?
Ok. I think I now understand what you were getting at in your OP.
What you were asking for in your explanation of what you meant by a "moral objectivist" was simply anyone who believes there are "correct" moral evaluations regardless of anyone's opinions or feelings. I mistakenly thought you were attempting to get at something more nuanced.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Just non-moral propositions.
Yep, you got it.
More like subjectivist.
Well, it follows that moral thinking is going on.
I don’t see why that would cause a problem for the definition. OP states thatQuoting Pfhorrestand in your example there is clearly some evaluation
You evaluate that both A and B are worse than C, D and E. That is a universal claim, it is enough to call it objective. There are certainly many instances where only a partial ordering is possible, and that’s sufficient to identify it as a moral issue and therefore give it objective validity. C, D and E may very well be morally indistinguishable and then it doesn’t matter which one you choose, but you should definitely avoid A and B.
A moral relativist could never make any universal moral recommendations, not even partially. He could only say “whatever feels right for you” (or maybe not even that since it sounds like a universal recommendation to follow one’s feelings)
He could also not recommend to others what feels right for himself, since he would immediately be aware of his irrational bias.
However, such a person hardly exists. I think anyone would recommend me not to kill random people on the street just for fun, but a relativist would have to say: Well, to me it feels like a bad thing to do, but I know I’m being irrational, so my more rational and tolerant self must accept your indiscriminate killing.
But what would morality consist in if not moral thinking and the actions proceeding therefrom? Or are you suggesting that moral thinking cannot be correct or incorrect, and that hence there is no morality, that is no good or bad behavior?
Quoting Pfhorrest
The correct moral evaluation does change depending on who is making it, given how they are. A child is not responsible for things an adult is. All things being equal though (an imaginary abstraction), I would say I believe that morality applies universally.
I remember a few years ago admiring W. D. Ross' theory of prima facie duties. It seemed to fit better than any other moral theory I had read. There are a plurality of goods and duties, like beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, self-improvement, gratitude and fidelity. These are objective things that give us reasons to perform actions but often contradict each other. So while the right thing to do exists, it is not always clear what it is.
And the actions proceeding therefrom. Morality is not just "moral thinking". Morality has to do with the rightness and wrongness of actions. If free will is impossible, then talking about the rightness or wrongness of what a person does would make as much sense as talking about the rightness or wrongness of what a blender does. A machine is a machine and without free-will, we're just biological machines.
Are you saying that you've never heard the expression "My blender's gone wrong"?
Is blending a salad wrong?
Maybe, but that would be the problem of the person who put the salad in, not the blender which blended it. Blenders are supposed to blend whatever is contained in their receptacle (provided it is blendable) when the button is pressed. So long as they do that, they are working. If they stop doing that, they've gone wrong. The point was just that we can no less say this of people even if we turned out to be entirely deterministic machines. Part of that machinery is clearly to have a view on what other such machines are 'supposed' to do, and so part of that machinery can still clearly form a view that such other machines have 'gone wrong'.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Relativism is most commonly associated with the view that what is moral is defined by the moral standards of one's culture. In that sense it still has an objective component - it just makes morality more granular and more entangled with human subjectivity than a thoroughgoing objectivist like Kant or Mill might like.
In a more general sense, relativism can collapse into subjectivism when the granularity of the group that is setting the moral standards is increased to the limit of a single individual. But there is a qualitative jump that occurs at that point, in that much of moral metaphysics becomes redundant. It is no longer necessary to ask oneself whether X is actually right, as opposed to just right, because there is no contrast to be drawn here. An extreme relativist might say that there are as many moral truths as there are people. I would just find it odd and unnecessary to qualify a moral attitude as "true" when all I want to say is that I regard X as right and Smith regards X as wrong (which means that Smith is wrong by my lights - but that is redundant to say).
I think you're interpreting this a bit more broadly than intended. Consider that A, B, C are wrong, D, E are permissable, to Joe, if you're Joe. A, B, D are wrong, C, E are permissible, to Jack, if you're Jack. I would consider "A, B, C are wrong; D, E is permissable" a moral evaluation in the full context. I think you're reading this as "A, B are wrong" is "some moral evaluation" and therefore this is moral objectivism, but I don't think that's correct.
See Pfhorrest's clarification:
Quoting Pfhorrest
Compare to this from Noam Chomsky, per the link to moral universalism in the first post:
Quoting Chomsky
In this particular abstract scenario, the intention is that there's room for a partial relativist interpretation; where everyone agrees A, B are less preferred, but there's more moral evaluation on top of that in this context that they would disagree on. To truly address a complete moral objectivist interpretation, everything that is wrong for a person should be wrong for everyone; and everything right for a person should be right for everyone (w qualifications; see that link). (Again, same qualification; I'm not arguing for partial moral relativism; I'm just saying your argument doesn't cover this possibility).
If it's along the lines of Rorty or Berlin, or even Chomsky for that matter, they usually call this pluralism to differentiate with relativism, which is usually referenced as the "relative the individual and what the individual thinks or feels".
Pluralism contextualizes things to cultures and groups, but does not deny the requirement of some absolute moral standards (many cultures can be "good" in very different ways with some moral onus to respect the culture one is in, but this does not mean all cultures are good).
The problem with pluralism, or "group relativism", as a moral foundation in itself, is that it does not resolve any particular ethical issue. Since cultures aren't static and "what is good" even within one culture is always in motion, any particular ethical issue we can always claim to be simply ahead of our times and the culture will catch up and vindicate us. So, even within pluralism we can always extend the logic to collapse to individual relativism on any particular issue.
Pluralists authors generally don't deny this problem and that one still needs individual commitment to some absolutist ethical standards to function (from which different cultures can simply become "bad"; which is a feature we generally want as we do want to say Naziism was simply bad and Nazi's don't make a credible defense in saying their culture was pro-genocide).
Pluralists such as Berlin, Rorty, Chomsky want to avoid unnecessary conflict through intercultural respect and understanding, insofar as their pluralism goes, but they do not view pluralism as a moral foundation in itself; they would all reject "my culture tells me this is ok, therefore it is ok".
Berlin (in my view) is the most clear minded about this. Rorty and Chomsky seem much more reluctant to articulate that pluralism does not resolve one's own ethical problems, as they seem to want to avoid getting into any "Kantian style" categorical imperative debates (though for radically different reasons; Rorty rejects the idea of "truth correspondence" theories full stop, which makes universal moral claims a dubious enterprise; whereas Chomsky seems to want to have "correspondence truth" but only scientific and that therefore his "universal values" that make pluralism work are somehow coming from social evolution, "wide agreement" or a "narrow part of the spectrum" or similar phrasing, at least in his debate with Foucault that's what I understood).
Of note, Rorty goes to some lengths to argue against identity politics as a form of "multi-culturalism" and seems to view Chomsky as too radically pluralist.
Another notable author in the pluralism debate is McIntyre, who seems to agree with pluralism in principle ... but because it doesn't work (results in unresolvable differences) we must go back to being good Catholics.
I'm not sure we have a disagreement on these points, or it's simply adding some points to your points.
I would also like to emphasize what other's have pointed out, that we have "universalism" and "absolutism" to refer to ideas of the "true-true" about ethical principles, and that using the word "objectivism" is simply associating oneself with Randianism and the argument "objectively we should still use the word objectivst even if we don't agree with Rand" isn't really convincing as we already have other words and "objective" isn't a good word about moral truths as "being objective" connotes looking at a situation and trying to see the physical facts for what what they are (i.e. what are the physical objects as independent from my own subjective interpretation as is possible to achieve). No philosopher posits that moral truths, if they exist, are the same kind of thing as physical objects of which it makes sense to be "objective" about (that we can simply go and measure a moral truth as 5kg, 50cm tall and 40cm wide); indeed, the whole point of the word "objective" is in the context that we have different values, goals, and experience but can still agree on some physical facts about the real world (if we both make a good faith attempt at "being objective" and collaborate on at least this issue to start as common ground); so, as it is normally used it's simply a self contradiction to be "objective" about said values and goals (which remain, in essentially any philosophy, subjective things that we cannot observe in the same way as a chair, regardless of what justifications we have for said values and goals).
Universally correct, better read as “consistent”, for me to make, as a autonomous moral agent, because of my particular moral evaluation, does not, in itself, grant the same license to everyone. In this sense, my moral universalism in strict accordance to my moral law, is not the universal moralism implicit in the characterization given. Precedent abounds for correct moral evaluations which are not necessarily universally correct amongst moral agents in general.
Still.....the last thing I need to know, in the event of necessary moral determination, is to which -ism I belong, or to what kind of -ist I subscribe. Just because I personally favor the transcendental deontologist doctrine doesn’t mean I’m locked irrevocably into being one, even though I actually do think any moral decision I ever make will absolutely and inescapably be a product of pure practical reason.
Quoting boethius
I was leery about going along with "objectivist," but I thought Randianism was obscure and disreputable enough that there would be little chance of confusion. But yes, if there are well-established terms, it's better to use those.
Quoting boethius
I think @Pfhorrest is apt to treat moral propositions much like a physicalist would treat propositions about the physical world, and he believes that we can use something like a scientific method for discovering moral truths. In any case "objective morality" is a term of art, though I wouldn't have a use for it.
What do you actually mean by “A is right for Joe”? Do you mean “Joe thinks A is right and therefore I think Joe should do A” or do you mean “I think Joe should do A whether or not he thinks it is right”? The first position is relativist, the second is objectivist.
Objectivism is not about reaching a common agreement. If you think Joe should do A, and both Joe and everyone else in the world disagree, you are still claiming that A is the objectively right thing to do for Joe. If you leave the decision entirely to Joe, you take a relativist position. That is not to say that an objectivist would not find it necessary to look into Joe’s special circumstances to reach a conclusion. It might be the case that Joe’s doing A would be immoral while Jack doing the same A would act morally. (Say Joe was poor and let his wife and children starve to spend money on A, while Jack was rich.)
The main point for an objectivist (and I hope and think most of us are objectivists) is that nothing is ever right just because someone thinks it is right.
Moral relativists have complete freedom, there are no real logical conclusions that can be drawn from it. It is absolutely possible to be the most bigoted, aggressive moral relativist who believes in the righteousness or pragmatism of their ideas and will want the harshest penalties for offenders.
:100: :up: :clap:
I'll add my applause :clap:
The point here being to complete your argument, so pick the one that makes your argument least complete.
Quoting Congau
Correct; from the link in the OP (i.e., the wiki page):
Quoting Moral_universalism
Quoting Congau
Okay, but we can still devise a moral meta-ethic where some things are objectively wrong and others are relatively wrong, and such would avoid the issue by your metric of not being a moral system but can still hold that some things are indeed right just because someone thinks it right. What I'm really interested in is your argument against those positions.
That doesn't seem quite right.
What about the situation where “I think Joe should do A whether or not he thinks it is right” because I think it is right. I don't think that makes me an objectivist.
Yes, my remark was vis-a-vis the OP. I don't have a problem with OP's defining their own terms ... but I don't have a problem criticizing those term selections either.
If you have never lived in the US then Randianism does seem completely disreputable and irrelevant. However, for those in the US, the word "objectivist" has clear Randian connotations, and insisting on the idea that "still, morals can be objective; objectivism as such can still make sense" I would interpret to be closet Randianism (a basic empathy with the Randian objective, but without committing to defending her arguments directly, as that hasn't worked out well).
Quoting SophistiCat
Yes, I understand the basic idea of the program, but clearly morals aren't discoverable by a physicalist process as such, moral principles are clearly not objects like a chair or a fork. Universal morals can still only exist subjectively, just with the qualifier of being true for all subjects (such as a categorical imperative binding all moral agents), and clearly cannot exist as an object with measurable properties; we can never settle a moral principle debate by simply weighing or timing or measuring the distance or angle of some apparatus with respect to some physical object.
Normally, I don't care so much about such labels, I'd be willing to roll with it as you have been doing and being content to just note traditions that have used other words for the same idea, but in this case the label more or less contains the basic error in reasoning which is a misunderstanding of the scientific process, and so I think it is worth dwelling upon. The word "objectivist" simply sets up all sorts of bait and switch fallacy as it's associated with the scientific method (that clearly "works") but also employed colloquially as a sort of "virtue" of removing one's biases; however, neither does the scientific method nor attempting to remove biases conclude with any moral principles. In the case of science as such the scientism fallacy is well trodden ground, but the more colloquial interpretation of "being objective" is a more subtle fallacy in the category of the virtue moral distinction (more subtle as pertaining to inner qualities, so at least on the same side, or the perhaps somewhere in the middle if we view our faculties as objects, of the subjective-objective divide, and clearly closely related to moral principles as such as we require virtues to implement any moral project effectively); the usual examples being discipline and courage being a virtue we can understand the import of but doesn't resolve any moral debate as to what goals one should pursue with discipline and courage, and so dedicating oneself to such virtues as somehow fundamental is simply a ruse to avoid reviewing one's actual moral values and activities; such as the Nazi's for whom discipline and courage was everything -- and, to make no mistake, I would closely associate with Randianism: it's all about feeling better than other people, in the case of Rand having the virtue of "being objective" (a more "modern" virtue than the ancients listed, and therefore quite sophisticated), which for her meant despising altruism and a basic misunderstanding of the idea of collective action, makes you better than other people.
FWIW, a quick Google for "moral objectivism" shows only #6 out of the top ten results having anything to do with Rand, and the rest using the more general sense that I'm using here.
That's because Randians put some effort to reformulate Randianism without explicitly defending Rand (as she said the quiet pars out loud, and that becomes a nuisance in the long term). Turning the "O" in "Objectivism" to an "o" is another small step in this process. I have simply never encountered the term "objectivism" outside the Randian tradition (i.e. people who have read Rand and appreciated her work, empathize with her and her protagonists and agree with the main point).
Quoting Pfhorrest
I ran the same experiment, so here we can be objective about something.
#0
[quote=Moral Relativism and Objectivism;http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~alatus/phil1200/RelativismObjectivism.html]
This site can’t be reached, www.ucs.mun.ca took too long to respond.
Try:
Checking the connection
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[/quote]
#1
Quoting Moral objectivism - wikipedia
So either talking about something we already have a word for ... or talking about Rand.
#2
Quoting Moral Objectivism -
"Philosophy Index" is made for homeschooling by North Gate Academy. Essentially every link is broken; going to the home page and clicking "Camus" (or any other philosopher) just gets to a "404 not found" page. According to North Gate Academy: "Northgate strives to foster a culture of excellence in learning based on biblical teachings, in a flexible and nurturing online learning environment." So, not dedicated to philosophy as such.
If this is google's second choice, rather than Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or Oxford, or even just any university online material ... maybe this tells us something, but moving on.
#3
[quote=Introduction to Ethics - Indian Hills community colledge;http://www.indianhills.edu/_myhills/courses/PHI105/documents/lu03_moral%20objectivism_relativism.pdf]
On a side note: Don’t confuse moral objectivism with Objectivism. Objectivism is an ethical theory
proposed by Ayn Rand which is related to Ethical Egoism, a theory we will discuss later in the course.[/quote]
I can only help but notice the close association with Rand and that Randiasm will be taught in this "introduction to Ethics".
#4
[quote=Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism - Mitchell Silver
;https://philosophynow.org/issues/83/Our_Morality_A_Defense_of_Moral_Objectivism]
Among the rules that can motivate actions and determine judgments are those that classify all possible actions as either permissible or impermissible. I call such rules ‘categorical permissibility rules’ (henceforth, simply ‘permissibility rules’). Common examples of permissibility rules include: it is always impermissible to act in a way that will not increase overall happiness or reduce overall suffering (John Stuart Mill promoted that one); it is always impermissible to treat someone merely as a means (a favorite of Immanuel Kant’s); never do to others that which is hateful to you (the Talmudic version of a commonplace in religious ethics); always obey whatever the priest tells you God has commanded (another commonplace in religious traditions); and, never act against self-interest (Ayn Rand). Less common, but equally possible permissibility rules include: never run for a bus (Mel Brooks); and, never act against Mitchell Silver’s interests (no one, alas). There are an endless number of possible permissibility rules.]
This is simply a bizarre essay in terms of making new labels for things referred to within the essay.
Why makeup the term "categorical permissibility rules" without explaining how it is either exactly the same or then in some way different than Kant's "Categorical Imperative", and, moreover, go onto to reference Kant as an example of a categorical permissibility rule in the next sentence? Also, if all these previous authors such as John Stuart Mill, Kant, Talmudic authors, common place religious traditions, Ayn Rand, Mel Brooks, it makes us wonder whether there was a term for these contrasting ideas with moral subjectivism (which the author clearly doesn't understand that moral principles existing subjectively does not necessarily imply they cannot be universal, as they can nevertheless be true for all subjective view points in one way or another; so he is just ignorant about the subject matter) and to contrast with moral relativism.
The author also doesn't follow the above quote with the obvious followup claim that insofar as these "categorical permissibility rules" are incompatible with each other, some or all of them are wrong and have no justification for believing in them, but rather goes on to defend commitment to one's chosen "permissibility rule" as a reasonable thing, which is moral relativism.
We could go on, but the casual mention of Ayn Rand along side Kant, Mill, the Talmud, is clearly someone who is self consciously reformulating the foundations of Randianism (either to attract that Randian audience or then to show Randianism as "reasonable" for the authors own empathy with Rand). We can also notice in passing how the only principle mentioned in "other religions" is to " obey whatever the priest tells you God has commanded" rather than "do onto others as you would have them do onto you" (Jesus) or "Love the whole world as if it were your self; then you will truly care fore all things" (Tao) or "Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity" (Buddha) ... but nope, the "commonplace belief" in religion outside the Talmud is "do as the priest says".
#5
Quoting What is the Objectivist Position in Morality (Ethics)? - Atlas society
I suppose this is the one of the six that was indeed associated with Rand.
#6
... just, wow. Xism is X, Yism is Y, Zism is Z; I assume Y and Z both mean not-X; I don't know if this is true ... so in case it's not I'm stipulating it anyway??? :(
Sigh, again, subjectivist approach to ethics can be simply that moral principles are properties of subjects, not objects, but this does not stop moral claims from being true for all subjects (universal to all moral agents).
Michael Huemer has long essays critiquing Rand's "Objectivism" while building his alternative "objectivism", and is really a great example typifying this group of people in the US who see Rand as worthy of lengthy reflection and critique, whether water to fill one's vase or an anvil to sharpen one's blade.
General Conclusion:
On just the quality of the sources and authors alone, without reviewing the content, one can conclude that "objectivist" isn't really a thing in world philosophical debate; it is confined to the US and not associated with major publications nor major authors and philosophers.
If we look into the content, we find the authors specifically reference Rand in their discussion of "objectivism". It is simply the history of the term that it was posited by Randians as a more "proper philosophical" reformulation of the basic Randian approach (inventing a philosophical tradition after Rand in which Rand is just one formulation; that Rand was right for being a "moral objectivist" even there's some fault in her particular "Objectivism"; but then denying small "o" objectivism has nothing to do with Rand is like positing small "k" kantianism has nothing to do with Kant; it's just juvenile hair splitting of terminology distinctions that have no basis in history and clearly don't make sense; it's simply not reasonable to use the label small "k" kant, have a similar starting point and terminology, a "Categorical Permissibility" if you will, but refuse any relation to the big "K" Kant). The labels of moral universalism, moral absolutism, moral rationalism, deontology, moral naturalism, already exist, so to rename one or all of these concepts "moral objectivism" without any need is, in the contemporary scene, to place oneself in the Randian tradition and not these other traditions (in searching around "objectivism" was used a bit as an expression, but was synonymous to moral naturalism; "objectivism" as simply moral universalism is not naturalism, as there are universalist moral theories not founded on nature but logic and "moral agents" in the most general sense or then founded on the divine, neither of which are based on nature as we find it).
Equating "objective" with "reasonable" is a Randian invention, and all the top 6 google hits for "moral objectivism" are American sources or authors, most mention Rand explicitly.
The small "o" objectivists I have encountered are people who are trying to reformulate Rand's basic program (wittingly or unwittingly), are deep in her frame as red pillars would say, and see "objective" as the natural alternative to "relativism" based on the mistaken association of relativism with subjectivism (they see Rand's basic terminology, aka false dichotomy, as making sense but want to draw slightly different conclusions than Rand; rather than see Rand as total nonsense and joining the philosophical conversation and using the common terminology, and lack of an obvious false dichotomy between "subjective" and "universally true", found within the debates that happened between Aristotle and Rand as a superior idea; and, to be sure, we should also be clear that Aristotle didn't view moral principles as similar to physical objects).
All philosophers of note view moral principles as subjective, a property of subjects and not objects, because it's obviously true; how we subjects might justify moral principles and are those justifications true of all subjects (through reason or divine decree or happenstance) or then fundamentally arbitrary or then individually contingent (somehow neither arbitrary nor universal) being the key contentions. Likewise, nearly all philosophers would say their approach is "reasonable", and so whatever moral principles they decide on (for themselves or for everyone or for some) follows reasonably from reasonable things to believe; moral relativists are also saying their moral principles, which they are free to choose, follow from the reasonable conclusion that moral relativism is true and they are thus free to choose (just as having a preference for blue over red without insisting everyone have the same preference doesn't make one unreasonable; so, another false dichotomy to say moral objectivism views morality as derivable from reason in contrast to moral relativism that does not).
Philosophers have proposed similar "sense experience" of moral principles as we have with objects, but have been quite cognizant that such "moral sense" is not the same kind of sense as heat or sight; there's also already a word for such a proposed sense, "our conscience"; this "conscience" would be the closest philosophical idea of morality being objective (we can sense moral principles just as we can sense objects; i.e. we can be objective about both and "sense the truth" in some sense and in a similar way; the difference being we cannot use an apparatus to settle a debate about whether one moral principle is weightier than another as we can use an apparatus to settle a debate about whether this rock is weightier than this log, and it is this lack of apparatus to settle debates that leads such philosophers to be clear moral principles are not objects); this lack of an apparatus to measure an object is the main difficulty these philosophers try to contend with, and so again, even if there is a proposed "moral sense" such moral principles to be sensed are not objects (if Rand or her "objective" followers read any philosophy, they would have realize simply saying "I'm the objective one" doesn't suddenly conjure the truth out of thousands of years of philosophical debate between different subjects). So, simply following our conscience in a naive way (our altruism if we feel it) would be the theory most inline with "objectivism" based on what it means to conclude about something objectively (through our senses).
I don't know why you make so much of this. I am obviously not well-read in this area, but even a cursory search shows that the word "objective" and its forms are routinely used in relation to ethics in philosophy and psychology literature, with no reference to Rand, e.g.
Moral realism and the foundations of ethics
Moral realism: A defence (36 uses of 'objectivist,' 'objective,' etc. in just the first two chapters)
Ethical intuitionism
The third link you post is a book by Michael Huemer, who I've already cited, and who has long critiques of Rand.
Quoting Critique of The Objectivist Ethics - Michael Huemer
The first link you post is indeed more scholarly but is arguing for moral realism, as "objective in some way". Perusing the book (what pages are available for free), a central theme is analyzing "rational egoism" and different analytical approaches, but mainly seems to be refuting "objectivism" as a justification for believing something is true. From what I gather, a main purpose of the book is to demonstrate that moral realism is not "objectivism". My guess is the author is aware of the popularity of Objectivism arguments, as the book is published in 1989 by an American author, and the rejections of "objectivism" in various specific contexts, and focus on "rational egoism", but transposed into scholarly terms, is a terminology chosen to be both scholarly and analyzing "big O" Objectivism at the same time (big "O" Objectivism is not worth considering directly, but the basic themes of rational egoism and universal moral truths based on realism, which we can call "objective" if we want, are still relevant for analysis).
Quoting SophistiCat
The reason I dwell on this point is that there's simply lot's of Randians in the US (on the Supreme court to boot), and simply using the term "objectivism" they clearly view as some small victory for Rand, whether they are explicit or closet supporters. I've had lot's of debates with explicit or closet Randians and setting up the terminology "Objectivist" is a very important starting point, and since it sets up false dichotomies (as they use it, such as in the OP here), I find it's best to simply keep to this point than to accept the terminology and then try to explain later that subjective truths can be universal. I have simply never encountered the term "Objectivist" outside people influenced by Rand. In doing some digging, the term does appear from time to time before Rand, but for different things, not in the way the OP uses it; opposing "objectivism" to "subjectivism" seems pretty clearly a framework started by Rand and is a false dichotomy as it pertains to morals, as I've explained (so, perhaps why the term was not used in this way before).
As the OP states:
Quoting Pfhorrest
However, moral universalism is compatible with moral subjectivism formulated in the sense that moral properties (where moral principles are said to "exist") are a matter of subjects and not objects. So, to use the terminology "moral objectivism" as equivalent to "moral universalism" seems to quite clearly setup either confusion or straight-up contradiction when talking about moral universalism that is also moral subjectivism. Likewise, if we try to more rigorously define "objective", a usual formulation is simply what different subjects will agree to, so objective depends on subjective, just many subjects perhaps debating for many a time; so, if we have a sort of Popperian view of objective built upon subjects, it's again simply confusing to then say objectivism is opposed to subjectivism. Of course, if we view "objective" as only a process or a quality that can be said of objects, measurable things, then we avoid all such confusions. If we're not using "objective" in anyway apart from saying "it's true" then it's just a confusing extra emblem that contains no meaning, as it then takes time to determine that nothing is meant more than "it's true"; but then, of course, everyone will claim to be objective in this way, including moral relativist (they are just "being objective" that no moral truths are universally true; i.e. everyone is objectivist).
I voted no, because I have never seen a good account for how to determine what is objectively moral, or how to adjudicate between different moral views stemming from different values.
The only argument that moral objectivist seem to have is that they can't accept the conclusion that there might be different views on morality, typically including views they find hard to accept,... which is no argument at all really, because what we would want doesn't necessarily have implications for what is true.
My view is that we construct and (tacitly) agree on morals in (local) groups, and that is what we have for better or for worse.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Note that this definition seems problematic in a number of ways. For the moral constructivist there also is a correct answer, if we are to take the "full context" into account... because full context also implies moral conventions and personal obligations that may apply in that particular situation. If we are to take the full context into account there doesn't seem to be a whole lot left of what one would consider universal.
And in any case the fact that there may be a correct moral course of action, doesn't have to imply that there is something objective about it. If you want to say morality is not merely a matter of personal opinion aka 'subjective', sure I can agree with that to some extend, but there are plenty of things that are not merely a matter of personal opinion that are not objective. To give but one example, the rules of any sport are not objective, we didn't find them in the world by making any kind of observation... we created them, but that doesn't make that only a matter of anyone's personal opinion.
I get that we want to use words like objective and universal to fend off the boogeyman of relativism and nihilism, but ultimately that's not what those words mean. Meaning, although not objective, is also not only a matter of anyone's personal opinion ;-).
Consider the account linked below and point out its shortcomings:
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Right, I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I wouldn't say a fully fleshed out morality directly follows from that. Morality is a bit more concrete and contextual. How we get from that general naturalistic background of human flourishing to more concrete morals in a given situation, is somewhat of a creative act which is not fully determined by our biology and allows for variations... and that wouldn't qualify as objective i'd say.
"Objective morality" is often used interchangeably with "moral realism," but that doesn't clarify things much. As Crispin Wright quipped, "a philosopher who asserts that she is a realist about theoretical science, for example, or ethics, has probably, for most philosophical audiences, accomplished little more than to clear her throat." (But the same can be said about many philosophical terms of art.)
The difference of import here is whether a particular event, the same event, can be simultaneously good and bad to two different observers, both of whom are correct in that judgement. So, somewhere in the world some old man owns a little girl as his personal sex slave. His neighbors thinks that’s fine. Other people half a world away think that’s morally atrocious. Is at least one of those judgements of the same event wrong, or not?
That’s a different question from whether keeping sex slaves is okay if it happens in one country and not okay if it happens in another, i.e. different details of different events.
No it can't because the same event is subject to the same set of circumstances, which includes the same particular (moral) conventions that may apply.
Edit: You can critique certain moral conventions of other cultures which you find atrocious.
And if that culture disagrees with your critique (as they would), is at least one of you wrong in your judgement?
Sounds like something someone in a simulation would say.
If there exists a simulation for someone to be in, then solipsism isn’t true.
It loaded for me, and this is what it says:
Quoting boethius
I’m actually responsible for that page being only a disambiguation page. It used to be a messy article that wasn’t sure whether it was talking about minimal (universalist) or robust realism, with a few Randians acting like it was about their thing. Shuffling that content off into their respective articles (that already existed) and making that one a disambiguation was part of a general cleanup of metaethics articles I did over a decade ago.
Quoting boethius
That says that ethical egoism will be taught, not Rand specifically. And like with the Wikipedia article, it does seem appropriate to note that Randians also use this term differently, and distinguish that sense from the generic one.
My Google has 2 and 3 switched compared to yours, FWIW... though I seem to be getting different results now than I did last night, as that one Rand article is now at spot number 10 instead of 6. Above it are two SEP articles that it seems you didn’t get down to:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/
and
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-objectivity-relativism.html
Which both use “objectivism” throughout to mean the same thing I do here: non-relativism.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Broad agreement with those things. Will have a go at saying what I think about ethics and meta-ethics in general.
There is an argument that goes; (1) moral evaluations depend upon minds and mind derived structures, therefore (2) there are no objective imperatives. I agree with the premise and the conclusion (with some qualifications), but think the implication from (1)=>(2) is false.
Regarding the premise: I find the observation that moral evaluations vary with culture and upbringing persuasive - so I'd agree that moral evaluations depend upon social facts. But that dependence strongly underdetermines moral conduct.
By moral conduct, I mean actions undertaken by agents which have intelligible proximate consequences for self and others that depend upon both what the act is and how the act is done. By moral evaluations, I mean any judgement concerning the adequacy of moral conduct by any standard. In that vocabulary. I believe culture is a strong influence on the distal causes of moral evaluation but not on the proximate consequences of the moral conduct those evaluations concern. For example, a religion might tell you abortion is wrong, but it won't force your hand into disowning your daughter for having one. There are always relevant contextual factors that shape moral evaluations that are not fully specified by the culture the moral conduct is embedded within. In other words culture facilitates standards of evaluation, rather than fully specifying any instance of evaluation. The standard is a mere part of judgement.
It is also worth lingering a minute on the impersonal character of social facts. The existence of Amazon the company existentially depends upon the collective action of humans, but it does not depend existentially upon the individual action of individual humans. It does not disappear if an individual ceases to have it in mind, it does not cease to exist when unwatched. It only ceases to exist if it ceases to function as an institution. That old Philip K. Dick quote about reality applies to institutions as much as it applies to nature; "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.". Emphasis on the "you".
So I characterize the dependence of moral evaluations upon minds as really being the dependence of moral evaluations on social facts. So I agree with premise (1) in this aspect. Another caveat I have is that social facts; like institutions; can be moral agents. This because their agents' aggregate actions have intelligible proximate consequences for themselves and others; their conduct is moral conduct as previously defined. If something's conduct is moral conduct, I believe it should be characterised as an agent and vice versa.
Because social facts; like institutions; partake in and structure the terrain of moral conduct, there is no problem of bridging the "is" of the universe's indifference + social mores to the "oughts" of what we do. Is and ought already intermingle when normativity is involved. In other words, since moral conduct's character depends upon social facts, we and our evaluations already operate on one side of the split. A stone tablet does not need to care about the commandments installed upon it, only we do. And we do. That we evaluate conduct in a manner constrained by social facts short circuits the need for a Platonic Good to sanctify our evaluations using an indifferent nature in the same breath as it undermines the relevance of the non-social to our conduct; which is always already social insofar as it can be subject to moral evaluation. All human conduct is the terrain to which moral evaluation is applied, and moral evaluation is part of that terrain. ("It is wrong to consider abortion wrong!")
There is then the question of the nature of this underdetermination of moral evaluation by social facts; what remains after stipulating that the social circumstance has an average shape. Fixing the social ontology we inhabit still leaves a broad domain of variation which we navigate in day to day life. An example; a shit day at work might make me prickly with my partner when I return home, but the facts of the shit day don't determine the specifics of how I treat her. And those specifics are, for the most part, what we live in.
When we go sufficiently fine grained that we've fixed societal structure, cultural structure, and even the antecedent/proximate events of our conduct - there is still moral evaluation to be done. If I call my partner names and take my day out on her, I would regret it. We would both agree that I could have treated her better. That is, it is a fact that I could've treated her better. So I would try to. So I agree with (2) insofar as it concerns purported context invariant "oughts" that apply to actions, but only because doing better is both contextual and a matter of an agent's skill. Objectivity in that sense sets the bar much higher than the demands that require us to do better.
Unfortunately, the resources available to us for such problems are rather limited; we can't discern The Optimal Way to act from the suite of apprehensions, misapprehensions, errors and cognitive blindspots we bring with us into everyday life. But that doesn't make "I could've done better" any less true; just makes doing better a difficult matter of improvisation, bodging, checking and negotiation.
That invites a problematic of moral character; how can one live so as to make that process of failing forward more adapted to the needs of those whom the moral conduct proximally effects? Which is simultaneously an intellectual endeavour - you gotta know what you need to try next and for who - and an empirical one - you gotta find out how and why you fail. What I will do depends on how I think, but those thoughts do not brand what I do as an improvement with necessity (given sufficient fixing of context). That connection between thought and improvement of moral conduct is a matter of moral character. Which is learnable, since it consists in the execution of skills; knowing how to read a situation, knowing what's relevant and irrelevant to improving your conduct, knowing how to enact the improvements so thought. Kairos is always matter of the right thing at the right time in the context, and "universalising" such a thing makes it about the agent (character) than the act (conduct). We cannot and should not expect the right thing at the right time to be the right thing for all time and all contexts.
The inherently contextual nature of moral conduct gives moral evaluation constraints to remain within the same context while evaluating - you have to ensure you're dealing with the problem on its own terms. Evaluating something's moral conduct can only be done while retaining enough of the context's social ontology to make failure and success states meaningful. "Should Mechanical Turk have some kind of labour protections?" should not be answered with "But what if Amazon never existed?"; the social facts and antecedent that make the evaluation make sense cannot be varied arbitrarily without making a nonsense of any moral evaluation. It is required that we think sufficiently proximately for the conduct in question, though there is a lot of leeway in that. "Should Mechanical Turk have some kind of labour protections?" may be answered with "No labour protections should be required for any job in a private business, outside of what is agreed in contract with the employers" and "Yes, but labour protections would undermine the very operation of Mechanical Turk - its business model requires that contractors be compensated at well below poverty rates". Similar to Anscombe's examples regarding owing someone money in a shop; it is true that one ought to pay the cashier (given the context's social facts). I doubt there can be a complete classification for what parts of the social ontology can be varied without making category errors for arbitrary conduct, but I believe it is a reasonable principle regardless.
I definitely agree that, on first sight, "objective" seems to be harmless enough as meaning "it's true of reality". However, if we're formulating moral realism as "there are real moral truths out there ... but they are not physical things ... not physical objects" then if we use objective as a substitute for realism we arrive at "objective truths about things that are not objects". It's clumsy speech at best, which is why, in my opinion, it simply didn't catch on. Rand chose "Objectivist" precisely because it wasn't referring to a clearly defined philosophical tradition at the time (and is a good contrast to bleeding heart liberals and other collectivists, bringing their subjective empathy for the poor into things), as she viewed herself as skipping over and superseding all of philosophy since Aristotle, she was fairly clear about not being part of any philosophical tradition since Aristotle.
Though I agree if one was not really aware of Rand it can seem fine to start an analysis with defining "objective moral truths" to mean "universal moral truths" (until one starts to analyse moral principles as clearly pertaining to subjects and not objects, and sticking to "objective" will simply cause confusion), but if one is aware of Rand, then defining small "o" objectivism seems very clear to me a form of historical revisionism to place Rand in a broader philosophical tradition to relate her to other more well regarded philosophers (possibility for the reasons that they made more sense).
So, this historical revisionism is of curious interest to me, but also that this particular "term of art" sets up directly the false dichotomy with moral subjectivism. And it's not only me that has pointed out the association with Randianism.
There is simply none of the "great philosophers" I am aware of that uses this term small o "moral objectivist", so creating the taxonomy tree with "moral objectivist" as the broad class of theories in opposition to moral relativism is clearly a contemporary attempt, that considering the close association with Randianism, I feel it's entirely valid to question the claims that it's not associated with Randianism and a revisionist or apologetics or nudge-nudge-wink-wink to Randians in some way. It seems pretty clear to me this whole "moral objectivist taxonomy projects" is a clear favour to Randians of putting their precious foundational identity word "objective" as a shining star atop of the mighty moral Christmas tree.
Clearly, 'moral facts' are simply not like 'physical' facts, but differ in very critical ways, and the example of Kant that immediately follows this is very debatable a "factual statement". It's also debatable as simply truth, if we want to quibble and say facts are just any truth, independent of what anyone thinks, as clearly the requirement to will the principle to be a universal law is a thought dependent process.
No where does Kant say moral facts are similar to physical facts.
Kant goes to some lengths to justify going from physical facts (sense data) to physical principles, and that this is not a simple extension of our collection of facts (Hume is fundamentally right about induction) but transcends all our facts to arrive at principles that we believe to be universally true (we nevertheless are justified in basically ignoring the problem of induction as everyone usually does, we'll just take 900 pages to do so on this occasion).
Kant uses or develops terms such as a priori, posteori, synthetic a priori, categorical, judgement as opposed to sense data, pure reason, practical reason, transcendental idealism, and so on, precisely because his views cannot be expressed as simply stating "physical facts" and "moral facts".
The categorical imperative is built on all these distinctions and arguments to arrive at true moral principles we must transcend our moral feelings about situations in the most general sense to arrive at a duty towards all moral agents as ends in themselves. It's misleading to say the categorical imperative leads to moral facts or is itself a moral fact; its simply not clear what facts mean outside verifiable physical phenomena just as "being objective" has no clear meaning if we're not "being objective about things that are objects" (to illustrate, it's not clear what it means to say "this painting is objectively more beautiful than this other painting" whereas it is clear what we mean when we say "this table is objectively 2 meters long as opposed to my subjective feeling that it was shorter than 2 meters").
As you may know, there's lot's to argue about, but whatever these arguments about what Kant really means (and if so, was he right), it is simply a complete misrepresentation of Kant to describe him as viewing ethics as discovering 'moral facts' similar to 'physical facts'; the situation is much more complicated than viewing 'moral facts' akin to 'physical facts' even insofar as we believe they are true independently of our own minds (which transcendental idealism we can interpret to preclude in principle the independence from our own minds; that we cannot actually get out of our minds and ideas to an objective view, the actual noumena, of even mundane facts if we're now interpreting facts as agreed on phenomena, but must transcend, which is opposed to just asserting whatever we believe are facts in a naive realism that 'moral facts' seems to imply).
Now, this definition may simply be reporting how people (since Rand and who have read and largely like Rand) have been defining "moral objectivism", and so accurately reporting this usage, but that does not make the usage "have nothing to do with Rand" nor even imply the usage makes any sense. It seems pretty clear to me Objectivists made "moral objectivism" a thing and by using this terminology introduced themselves this moral taxonomy in introductory material that they can now point to and say "see, moral objectivism is a thing". People who have not thought through that it's simply not a good term as simply doesn't relate to objects if we're talking about moral principles, may also adopt the terminology as they see it elsewhere, which is fine as far as it goes, but seems to me also fine to point out the confusions that immediately arise from this classification structure, likely influence of Rand one may expect around any corner once hearing "objectivist", and pointing to the alternative definitions that seem more current in the history of philosophy and in the rest of the world.
I hadn't thought of it in this way before, but I suppose I am a theoretical Moral Objectivist, but a practical Moral Pragmatist. I assume there is universal moral Truth in the same sense that there is ultimate Mathematical Truth. My worldview requires an absolute state or principle that most people call "god". Only a transcendent omniscient Observer would have an Objective perspective on all human moral agency. This has been the traditional role of a monotheist deity : to be an "all-seeing eye" in the sky, or a Santa Claus "making a list of good little boys & girls". But I no longer think in those terms. Instead my Absolute is a logical necessity, just like Mathematical Truth. In theory, all partial real values will add-up to a final universal Evaluation : all things considered, the Moral Equation should add-up to Zero, i.e. perfect balance.
The pragmatic Moral rule in effect in the world is some form of Relativism, in which moral judgments are made by your collective human peers about your individual inter-personal behavior. But the ideal rule is that a complete holistic universal judgment is made at the highest possible level of discernment. So, Moral Objectivity requires an Idealistic worldview, such as that of Plato's Logos (perfect proportion & reason) . However, in the Real world, we don't have access to Absolute Knowledge, so we have to make-do with ever-changing human judgments of Right & Wrong, Good & Evil. And we use relativistic rules of thumb, like the Golden Rule, to imagine our behavior from another person's perspective.That's about as close to Objectivity as we can get. :smile:
PS__I didn't check a box, because of my BothAnd philosophy, which let's me have it both ways. Either-Or thinkers will find that to be morally evasive. But I find it philosophically useful for keeping an open mind. There is no absolute Certainty in human mathematics, but Mathematicians must assume there is an ultimate correct answer to every question or equation.
Uncertainty Principle : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
The small o "objectivist", or even just the word "objective" itself, does not appear in wikipedia's entry on "normative ethics", and if you click through to the usual suspects of "deontology", "consequentialism", "virtue ethics", you do not get appearance of small o "objectivists".
Simply going through such material should be enough to convince oneself that small o "objectivist" is not a popular terminology; it is not usual to say of universalist ethical theories that they are "objective".
Where we do find a notable "objective" (though not small o "objectivist") is in the entry on meta-ethics under the heading "moral realism":
Quoting Meta-ethics
And, of note, both these moral realisms listed, use of "objective" is referring to objects, and employed in this way it has a clear meaning that we somehow "observe" these moral properties like we do other properties about objects (either we have a moral sense, or the moral information is derivable from the empirical information); a clear meaning that follows from "object" in the word "objective", but is not synonymous with "universal"; moral rationalism is opposed to moral naturalism, yet both can be formulated to be making universalist moral claims: that universal moral claims are justified through appeals to reason for moral rationalism, and that universal moral claims are justified with respect to sensing the physical world in some way in the case of naturalism. So, this is completely compatible with what I have stated in previous comments: that to say moral principles are "objective" makes sense if we're talking about sense data in the same way we have sense data of other physical objects (that we sense what is right and wrong, whether directly or through some synthesis of such data without invoking an implicit deontological or conequentialist or vitue based evaluation that is not itself derived from sense data in a similar way).
That's not a false dichotomy though, that's exactly what is meant by it: not "subjective" in the sense of relative to any particular subject.
Even empiricism about reality is "subjective" in that it has something to do with subjects: empiricism appeals to sensory experience, which is had by the subjects of that sensory experience. But besides radical empiricisms like subjective idealism or solipsism, it's not "subjective" in the sense that what any particular subject experiences matters more than any other; the objective empirical truth is that which is available to all subjects' sensory experience, without bias.
Likewise, even if (as I agree) morality has something to do with we subjects, that doesn't mean it has to be "subjective" in the sense that solipsism or subjective idealism are, a sense opposed to "objective". It can just be "subjective" in the sense that empiricism is "subjective", and still possibly be "objective" in the sense that our usual empirical realism is "objective", i.e. unbiased.
Also, "object" in general doesn't only have the one sense that we use of physical objects, as a "being" or "entity". It can also mean "end", "purpose", "aim", "goal", etc. (As in, "the object of this exercise is ..."). A moral object is something that something can be good for. It's basically just a good, a thing to be sought after, what to work toward. Moral objectivity implies that there is something that is actually good to strive for and work toward, rather than just whatever various subjects feel like doing; just like factual objectivity implies that there is something that is actually real to know and understand, rather than just whatever various subjects perceive.
It's wrong in my judgement, yes, but I'm not the authority on everything that is right and wrong, everywhere. I would acknowledge that my judgement is also a product of my particular context. But at the same time I would also acknowledge that some case can be made from the 'telos' that follows from our biology as I also said in a reply to 180proof. So I agree that there's a naturalistic background we can fall back on to formulate such arguments, and in extreme cases like sex slavery this seems like a an easy case to make, but there are plenty of other less clear moral issues where you could go in different directions.
But maybe the point is this really. If we have to create or construct morals, as I think we do, and therefore it's not merely a matter of finding, or worse just knowing what the correct morals are, than we have a continuous responsibility (as contexts change) of putting in the effort to do so. That is thinking about it rationally, getting into dialogue with other people and trying to convince them with good arguments... which ultimately seems like a more productive approach than just insisting on you being objectively right and them being objectively wrong.
Sorry, I guess I phrased that ambiguously.
I meant, is at least one of those judgements (either yours or theirs) wrong?
It can be true of a particular subject, doesn't exclude that it is true for other subjects or even all subjects.
If we're saying it's true for all subjects, the common terminology is to say "it's universally true" or "true for all moral agents". If all we're maintaining is that it's true for all subjects, it's clearly awkward to say that such a claim is "objective".
Now, if we're claiming it's true for all subjects due to the properties of objects or then due to some sense that is akin to how we sense objects (a sense object just like other sense objects like a chair), then it is less awkward to say we are "being objective". This diction choice makes sense, but is clearly not equivalent to universal moral claims and theories in general that are not referencing objects (as sense data or then as simply things existing independently of subjects).
Now, you can stick to a terminology where "objective" just means "universally true" or "true for all moral agents"; obviously nothing's stopping you. But clearly more effort is then needed to be clear that there's not necessarily any "object" with respect to which we are being objective; there could be only subjects and they're ideas that we're dealing with under the category of "objective", as nothing is stopping me from placing great emphasis on everything we can possibly say about this word choice.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You seem here just illustrating how opposing "objective" to "subjective" creates a false dichotomy. The use of the word "subjective" does not immediately imply that one experience matters more than another; this is easily a straw man of "subjective" theories such as "transcendental idealism" of Kant. Saying something is subjective can simply mean it is a property of subjects and not objects, which in turn doesn't exclude objects being subjective properties of a particular insistent kind of which there seems relatively easy agreement between different subjects (again, agreement subjectively experienced).
This "objective is what many subjects will agree about" (what the expression "objective" usually means: we and other agree this chair weighs 5 kilos), is clearly still dependent on subjective experience and so in contradiction to the definition of of objective as "independent from what people think". In otherwords, we can get to an objective belief about the situation, but still posit the object we are objective about has a existence apart from such an objective process; i.e. the "thing in itself".
Facts do not usually reference "things in themselves" (as independent of experience) but rather the conclusions that we are able to draw from our sense experience. Saying "it's a fact" implies there's at least some subjective experience somewhere justifying the belief; a fact is clearly dependent on what people think. It is just sloppy to say "claims that are true for all subjects; universally true claims" are "claims that are true independent of what anyone thinks"; these are two different assertions which could overlap but need not to.
For instance, a "claim that is true independent of what anyone thinks ... simply because no one has any experience at all about the object of that claim", maybe true, but is clearly not a "fact" in the sense of something we know (seems irrelevant to say there nevertheless exists a fact no one knows about this object no one has any experience about about, but we can presume they exist for the sake of argument), but more importantly, by definition, whatever facts we presume to exist about the unknown are not and cannot be universal claims true for all subjects (that all subjects should make such a claim that no subject knows anything about, because the claim is about something detached, and thus independent, from all subjective experiences).
Kant uses the term "thing in itself" to refer to the objects existence or essence independent of people's thoughts and ideas about it (the noumena which Kant claims we can never know as it truly is); it's clearly making a mess of things to then claim Kant's beliefs about things and moral principles are "objective" in the sense of being things or claims independent of thoughts (he is very clear we can know nothing, i.e. have no specific belief, of the noumena, we can only form belies about the phenomena; we presuppose the noumena exists but we do not come to "know" the noumena itself, only the phenomena, which does depend on our minds). And this is only for "the physical world", it's pretty clear Kant does not view the categorical imperative as noumena.
There is further confusions that can arise as it's only a "universal moral truth" in Kant's system to carry out a duty to other moral agents as ends in themselves; there is still potential of a plurality of moral principles that satisfy the categorical imperative (if it means respecting others as having intrinsic value and not being a hypocrite, there maybe many moral principles with respect to many situations that satisfy this conditions). So again, it's not clear if the specific moral principles we need to make decisions are "facts"; being a hypocrite is wrong, but there remains many ways to be right (again, we can stretch the definition of fact if we want to cover this, but we're clearly far removed from physical facts; so far removed that it's just simply recipe for confusion; we do not have all these considerations when we ask "what the facts are" of a situation).
In other-words, "objective" isn't used by Kant to describe his moral theory, and doesn't appear in discussions of Kant's moral theory by major sources, and the reason maybe because it's better to follow Kant's reasoning through all these nuances rather than redefine what his theory means in terms of objective truths and facts.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Sure, you can redefine "being objective" as "pursuing a goal" rather than "facts", but all the examples covered so far have been quite clearly using "objective" as relating to "facts"; the hypothetical that another meaning could have been used that is less confusingly related to morality as just stating basically morality is about "goalism" (... and relativists can also have goals ... so the whole point of the distinction with relativism no longer makes any sense), is simply more confusing.
Again, no one's stopping you from using confusing terminology and "striking true" regardless, but no one's stopping me from pointing out the potential confusions so people are prepared to evaluate the success or failure of the undertaking.
The answer is still the same, their judgements is wrong from my point of view. I have my moral views as I've been raised in a particular moral tradition. But it's not not like there's a overarching universal standard to which I can measure whether their judgement is wrong outside of my point of view, other than maybe pointing out inconsistencies in their view. The question doesn't make sense in a constructivist view, as you are probably well aware.
Basically, might you be wrong right now, even though of course you currently think you are right, or is thinking that you are right all that there can possibly be to being right, such that if you later change your mind, what is right then has just changed, but what you’d thought was right before WAS right before (because you thought so), rather than you having been wrong before and now being, at least, less wrong?
That is not objective in the relevant sense. If it matters who or how many people think something, then it’s not objective.
Let’s construct a relativist argument even an objectivist would seem to agree with: “Joe thinks it is right for him to study philosophy, therefore it is right for Joe to study philosophy.” (How a person treats himself is also a moral issue.) This could be based on the assumption that anyone should pursue whatever calling seems right to them, and that does appear to be a common relativist standpoint that even objectivists could subscribe to. But let’s suppose Joe can’t even read. A relativist would still have to recommend him as a philosophy student, while the rest of us realize that that wouldn’t be such a good idea. What seems right to the person isn’t really right. Let’s now suppose Joe is highly qualified for pursuing philosophy. In that case we would be more likely to recommend it for him, but just like in the first instance, the reason for our recommendation is not only his personal idea of what is right. We do look at objective factors and if we let Joe’s own idea weigh heavily, it is because in this case it is indeed an indication that it is objectively right, but we are aware that it is only an indication and it may be wrong.
So, this sense of objectivity meaning just impartiality, neutrality, unbiased-ness, and opposition to "subjectivity", comes from way before Rand.
Quoting Meta-ethics
If so, morality will begin with, first, a dissatisfaction/satisfaction - a particular action that we like/dislike - and then, second, either an encouragement of what we like or a prohibition ofP what we dislike. This, in my humble opinion, clarifies the matter of all morality being a system of oughts.
It appears that there was/is no rational basis to our likes/dislikes; however, these likes/dislikes seem to lead to an empathy-based morality: I dislike being insulted, ergo, I ought not insult someone else; I like being helped, ergo, I ought to help others; and so on. This is the so-called golden rule - treat others as you would like to be treated.
The reason why an empathy-based, golden rule type morality has no rationale is because if it so happened that, for no particular reason, I happen to like being insulted or dislike being helped, the moral system I endorse will be reversed, flipped on its end. No one can reason with me and convince me otherwise regarding my moral beliefs.
What of utilitarianism and deontic ethics? Don't they provide systems of objective morality and provide morality with a rationale, a logic?
Well, utilitariainism does make an effort, in addition to making happiness morally relevant, to elucidate those things that should make us happy; nonetheless, these are, on analysis, just another one of the countless possible combinations of what are eventually our likes/dislikes
Deontic ethics too is ultimately about our likes/dislikes which have been formulated into principles that shouldn't be violated at all costs.
I think you are conflating facts about moral evaluations, moral conduct, and all that which influences them - with moral facts:
[1] It is a fact that moral conduct depends on social facts.
[2] It is a fact that such and such conduct is right.
Of these only [2] would be a moral fact (if it were fact).
Psychopaths can be quite competent with factual knowledge about moral agency, but that doesn't make them competent moral agents themselves. As with other empirical knowledge, knowing facts about the way people make moral evaluations can help you anticipate moral attitudes and predict moral conduct in other people and even in yourself, but that knowledge cannot tell you what you ought to do - not without some bridge principles or intuitions.
No I don't take anyone's personal point of view, or even a cultures morals as the end of the story. Arguments can be made, for instance by appealing to our biology, to try to change the moral rules, but this more a question of convincing other people, of rethorics, rather than strictly proving something is right or wrong.
The 'moral force' of morals comes from agreement in a certain group, not directly out of rational arguments. To take a contemporary example to illustrate this maybe, mouth masks. A couple of months back the idea in my country seemed to be that the covid-virus was not necessarily airborne, but spread mostly by touching surfaces or sneezing, and so the emphasis was on keeping distance and washing hands etc... not so much on wearing masks. The moral consensus seemed to be at that time that it was ok not to wear a mask. Now experts do seem to think that the virus does spread via the air in closed environments more so that via touching surfaces etc... and so the moral consensus is shifting towards obligatory wearing of masks in public places. But the fact that we have gained more scientific insight that sheds a new light on a moral rule we previously had, doesn't retroactively render not wearing a mask back then immoral. It was the moral consensus we had at that time, which was based on the incomplete knowledge we had then.
And you find it unpersuasive that the event corresponding to "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" entails that I ought to try and satisfy the agreement? I think the bridge from what we do to what we ought to try is already operative within what we do as implicature. What would (A) "my partner and I agree I should try and be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" mean if it did not entail (as implicature) that (B) I ought to try and be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work? I suggest that the use of (A) requires moral commitments like (B), on pain of (A) not meaning the same thing as it does. What more is required?
How does "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" differ from "my partner and I agree I ought to try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work", and thus render the entailment a tautology?
A reached agreement should be followed? Otherwise it's not an agreement.
What I'm trying to get at is whether a reached agreement is anything more than just a state of two parties having the same idea about what course of action will be tried next. If so, then I'm not quite seeing any way in which it avoids subjectivism. The mere fact that you both agree about your intentions doesn't make those intentions objective, they just happen to coincide at that time. I may be missing the point, but it seems you might want to make the 'ought' objective by saying it's a property of the agreement (which is a state of the world). But it seems to me that that agreement is about the state of each other's minds (where the 'ought' resides), and so is only a temporary symmetry in an otherwise fluid landscape of mental states.
I don't think that a course of action is specified in the agreement above. In my experience, whenever I should improve my conduct or avoid doing something based off of an agreement, the details of what to do are always left up to me. The agreement doesn't commit me to a specific course of action, just that I try something relevant and be more mindful.
Quoting Isaac
If you want to think of it as a property of the agreement, I think my point in that framing translates to it's a property of the agreement without which the agreement could not be understood. An agreement necessitates that it be followed. If the moral imperative to try and satisfy it wasn't a property of the agreement, it would not have been an agreement.
Quoting Isaac
The agreement isn't about her mind or my mind, it concerns how I treat her. Whether what I do succeeds or fails to satisfy the agreement (and brings about an improved relation between us) does not succeed or fail based upon my intentions or thoughts, it succeeds or fails based upon my change of conduct. The mind states don't suffice. Consider:
Partner: "You said you'd not take a bad day at work out on me any more."
Me: "Oh, I thought I was succeeding at that"
Partner: "You weren't."
Me: "No, you misunderstand, because I thought I was, I was."
Partner: "..."
Me: "If I think I'm not mistreating you, then I'm not mistreating you"
Partner: "You were very prickly just now."
Me: "So if you think I'm taking my day out on you, I am taking my day out on you. But if I think I'm not taking my day out on you, I still am taking my day out on you?"
Partner: "..."
The fluidity of that landscape requires that it is under-determined by the mental states of both me and my partner; it really depends upon a lot of contextual factors. We'd have to assess the situation, I'd have to trust that I was prickly, and maybe there's some factor that explains my partner's sensitivity on that day.
I think the broader point I'm making is that moral imperatives aren't mysterious things carved in stone tablets, nor are they properties of an indifferent nature, they're part of our social fabric. If we're willing to deflate morals into social facts, then we should treat them like social facts.
I've probably confused things a bit by talking about intentions. I'm trying to avoid the word 'ought' because it seems to beg the question.
Is not "trying something relevant" a course of action? I don't think the lack of specificity detreacts from the point that the 'ought' (ought to try something relevant) is already present in the two agreeing minds rather than being something which emerges from agreement over some other matter. The matter over which there is agreement is that you ought to try something relevant. Keeping the 'ought' firmly in individual minds.
Quoting fdrake
I can definately go along with this, but only with the huge caveat that social facts also massively underdetermine. There is a huge quantity of moral dilemmas the resolution of which do not have existing social facts regarding them. My concern with moral realism is a political one really, a leveraging of the authority 'facts' carries to enforce socially novel, ideological moves.
I think it's pretty close to question begging too. Moral imperatives show up as part of social contexts. Maybe one way of phrasing it is that function of social contexts comes along with a moral component - of commitments, responsibilities, duties, pledges, plans and attempts to change toward better functioning. If we look in an entirely external realm to social contexts for a validation procedure for our moral conduct, we're no longer attending to the nature of moral conduct.
Maybe inverting Heidegger is useful here (from SEP Heidegger article):
Looking to an entirely external realm from social conduct for a validation procedure for our actions actually does violence to the very intelligibility of moral conduct, since it is social! In other words, moral conduct is part of the regional ontology of social life. Thus we should not go looking for moral values beyond this (rather vast) territory. Or expect that looking "beneath the hood" of the regional ontology of moral values into nature will sanctify any prescriptions based on accounts that come from looking beneath the hood.
I still think there is an intersection between our "indifferent nature" and moral conduct. If we didn't need food, we wouldn't have social means of resource access+distribution that are more or less adequate for our food/health needs, and we would not evaluate that adequacy based on morally inspired criteria. Negotiating those criteria is a moral+political problem.
Quoting Isaac
I think that underdetermination is radically anti-authoritarian, no? A social fact might engender that a person or institution acts in some way, but by itself it does not make that act satisfy any criteria other than those included within the behavioural commitments of the person or institution involved in the act. IE: "I did what I had to do because I thought it was right" always comes along with the possibility of critique. The question of identity between the social fact and the standard of moral evaluation that says the behavioural commitments that come with that social fact are always right will always be open since the sheer contextuality blocks the equivalence between what I did and what was "objectively" right; there will always be contextual defeaters that block the equation of what I did and The Good.
Which is why I was focusing on doing better; it's much easier to establish flaws and improvements to attempt than whether what one did was The Best Possible Thing in context. It will always be true that I can do better regardless of the context. Moral realism through trying to be less wrong.
:up: :clap:
“...The vice** entirely escapes you as long as you consider the object. You never can find it till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation which arises in you towards this action. It lies in yourself, not the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious**, you mean nothing but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it....”
(THN, 3.1.1., 1739)
** or, its complement, virtue, implied.
“....Nor could anything be more fatal to morality than that we should wish to derive it from examples. For every example of it that is set before me must be first itself tested by principles of morality, whether it is worthy to serve as an original example, i.e., as a pattern; but by no means can it authoritatively furnish the conception of morality....”
(F.P.M.M., 1785)
“...Do. Or do not. There is no try...”
(Yoda, 1980)
The object of the ought to try, is the trying; the proper object of the ought to agree, is the agreeing.
Trying does not necessarily include a volition of will, but only suggests trial and error in the thinking of it, which is hardly the means to a determination in which mutually congruent self-interest as ends, is given, for it necessarily excludes the best interests of the subject to whom the ought ultimately relates. Unless the trying succeeds at first instance, which equates to already knowing, which isn’t trying at all.
The proper object of the agreeing, the agreement, is a set of mutually congruent willful volitions, in the form of judgements, but as yet, still does not suffice as evidentiary reconciliation of mutually exclusive self-interests, insofar as the agreement remains to become conscious acts.
The agreement does concern “how I treat her”, iff the volition from which the ought to agree arises, translates to its corresponding act, but is nevertheless strictly given from the practical reason of both subjects, which implies “is not about about her mind or my mind” contradicts the reality of its establishment.
All of which raises the question........why does there need to be an agreement? That an agreement is necessary to satisfy particular ends says nothing about how the disparity in ends came about in the first place. Which is why examples serve no purpose in moral discourse, other than to illuminate moral effects (1785), but without any examination of moral causality (1739).
So either the example never was a moral dilemma, which seems odd because it has as its bottom the question of worthiness of personal happiness (I do this because I’m the warrant for her unhappiness”), intimating a permanent solution, or, hypotheticals are themselves sufficient for pragmatic reconciliations, which is itself odd because these reduce to nothing but the pathetic contingency of sheer inclination out of desire (if I do this I get the bitch off my back”), intimating nothing whatsoever about what happens tomorrow.
Editorializing.......for what it’s worth.
If I’d seen that first..........(sigh)
Needs unpacked.
Rests upon drawing and maintaining a meaningful distinction between what counts as a "mind derived structure" and what does not. That path is long, winding, and unnecessary.
Drop "mind derived structure" in favor of focusing upon just what it means to be dependent upon a mind. I would even take it one step further and clarify... existential dependency. All mind derived structures are themselves existentially dependent upon a mind. However, the converse is not the case. Not all minds are themselves existentially dependent upon mind derived structures. So, the former exhausts the latter.
Then there's the bit about being objective...
Nothing objective can be dependent upon a mind in any way, shape, or form. All things ever thought, believed, spoken, written, uttered, and/or otherwise expressed are existentially dependent upon a mind. Therefore, nothing ever thought, believed, spoken, written, uttered, and/or otherwise expressed has been(or can be rightfully/coherently called) objective.
So, regarding the 'argument'...
All moral evaluations are existentially dependent upon a plurality of minds. Not all moral imperatives are existentially dependent upon moral evaluations. All moral imperatives are existentially dependent upon a plurality of minds. Nothing objective is itself existentially dependent upon minds. All moral imperatives are. Therefore, there are no objective moral imperatives
I agree with the statement called the 'premise' and the statement called the 'conclusion'. However, there is no immediate and obvious implication between the two. The second does not follow from the first.
Hm? I wonder how such an argument would go?
I meant our biology in the widest sense, including what general kind of psychology that comes with that.
For instance the whole covid-crisis is an interesting case for moral philosophy I think, because you can see how morals are created and evolve... almost in real time. One of the discussions concerning the crisis was around the whole distancing and lock-down measures that should or should not be taken. A lot of arguments in that discussion come directly from the effects the virus has on our biology. How lethal is the virus for us, how easy and in what way does it spread etc etc... But then we also know that social isolation is generally harmfull for us. All of those biological and psychological facts played a part in determining how we should adjust our behaviour to best deal with the pandemic... but they also don't fully determine what kind of norms that should be adopted as is evident by the different reactions in different countries.
But so a simplified version of such an argument would be:
- we know the virus has certain adverse and lethal effects on us
- we generally agree that those effects are bad and should be prevented as much as possible
=> Therefor we should have a moral norm that people should stay indoors as much as possible and otherwise keep their distance if they can't.
Again, I don't see the determinism here that any kind of moral realism or universalism would require.
To me there's two things going on here. There's the question of what is/isn't morally good. For a large number of questions I think there's a right answer to that question. It's a linguistic question, no different to asking "what is the correct way to use the term 'morally good'". In proper Wittgensteinian sense the answer is not clear cut, it's fuzzy at the edges, but this fuzziness cannot be resolved ever. Likewise with social contexts. When the grocer delivers potatoes, you 'ought' to pay him because that's the meaning of the work 'ought'. It means 'that action which the social context places an imperative on you to do'. So if someone were to say "When the grocer delivers my potatoes I ought to punch him in the face" they'd be wrong. That's not what 'ought' means.
The rights and wrongs of question 1 can be resolved by studying language use. Similar to this is another type 1 question about determining one's next actions "what should I do next". Here it's obviously not about the meaning of 'should' because language need not be involved. As you know I advocate the active inference model of mental activity, so for me there's only inputs, predictions, and resolutions. The inputs here might also be social information, they might be internally generated. In each case they are an attempt to model the cause of some collection of affective states "why am I feeling this way?". The grocer delivers his potatoes and I feel an urge to pay him (or in some other way resolve this indebtedness). The best model for that is moral obligation, we pay him to test this prediction, he goes away smiling, all is well, we've resolved the uncertainty. Likewise with empathy, a desire to cooperate etc.
So with you and your partner, you have this conversation, it results in a series of affective states in your physiology, one of which is this desire to act in accordance with the spirit of the agreement made. You model this, resolve it by acting in that spirit and (hopefully) get the expected result.
But...
These are all type 1 questions - what to do, what can be said. The second type of question, which often gets conflated with the first, is - why, when we ask, does everyone else come up with a similar/different answer in the same context. We can ask this of models about the physical world, morality, logic, aesthetics...
With models about the physical world, the best answer is 'there's an external reality'. That's why I think that dropping my keys will cause them to land on the floor, and so does everyone else, because we're all interacting with the same external world which has patterns and rules.
Asking this question of morality is where questions of moral realism come in. The how of making moral decisions is not via any meta-ethic. We can prove that using fMRI scanning, we definitely do not need to consult areas of our brain responsible for things like meta-modelling to make moral-type decisions. There does seem to be some similarity in some moral decisions, there's also a lot of dissimilarity. So there's an interesting question as to what causes this. My preferred answer is long and complicated because I tend to think morality is a messy combination of numerous, often conflicting, models. The point is, though, that whatever model we come up with to explain the similarities/dissimilarities, it has no normative force for exactly the reason you gave.
Quoting fdrake
The objectivism being discussed here is an attempt to take a model of why there are similarities and dissimilarities, and then treat the model as if it were the source of the moral imperatives we're investigating in our second order question. It speculates that the similarities are because there's and objective universal 'ought' among us, the dissimilarities are the result of inadequate thought given to accounting for other people's 'oughts'. It does this with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, but that's another matter. The important thing is that it then treats this model as if it were the source of the moral imperative it was originally collating. That if the model predicts your 'ought' is one of the dissimilarities, the your 'ought' is wrong. We know the dangers of treating outliers as errors just because they don't fit the model.
So basically, I agree with you completely that "looking to an entirely external realm from social conduct for a validation procedure for our actions actually does violence to the very intelligibility of moral conduct". Meta-ethical models cannot tell us what is right and what is wrong, nor even how to work that out, because meta-ethical models are outside of the social context within which morality makes sense. That's why I'm so opposed to them.
Quoting fdrake
Exactly. To be anti-authoritarian it needs to remain under-determined. The opposite of the 'we can work out what is morally right/wrong in every case' project. Moral 'oughts', as they actually exist in the wild, are complex, but always take the form of parameters, never pointers. One cannot continue to be 'less wrong'. One eventually reaches a point where one is simply no longer wrong. everything within that category is equally 'not wrong'.
Logically entails (or implies), yes.
I don't think that what you are talking about here is the same as what the OP and the rest are talking about. I like to think of "objective morality," or moral realism, as a kind of correspondence theory. Just as with the non-moral correspondence theory, where the truth of a proposition is judged by its degree of correspondence to a putative true (physical) state of the world, a moral proposition is supposed to be true to the extent of its correspondence with some true normative state - this "objective morality." And this correspondence cannot be trivial; it cannot simply be implied by what the words mean - otherwise, of course, seeking moral truths would have been a trivial matter.
For your moral attitudes to be really, truly, objectively right it would not be sufficient for you to have them, nor would it be sufficient for them to be consistent with other moral attitudes that you might have, such as acceptance of social commitments. They have to be true to this third thing that is independent of what you or anyone else thinks about it (the reality that doesn't go away when you stop believing it).
To take a stock example, in a Nazi world where everyone believes that it is right to kill Jews (which beliefs would of course manifest in social facts, i.e. people committing to act together on their beliefs - guard concentration camps, manufacture poison gas...) it would still be objectively wrong to do so.
Quoting fdrake
There is a difference between accepting the reality of other people's beliefs (and the social facts, such as institutions, that depend on those beliefs) and being a participant in those beliefs. An anarchist is well aware of the existence of the state as an actual institution, even though she doesn't believe in states. A psychopath is usually aware of the existence of moral forces that act on other people, even if he is not subject to them himself. He still has to contend with how those moral forces impinge on his life through the social facts that they create, and the most socially adept psychopaths can live quite comfortably in this world (just look at Trump).
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Then why single out biology? Why not geology, for example?
- we know that building in a seismically active zone has certain adverse and lethal effects on us
- we generally agree that those effects are bad and should be prevented as much as possible
=> Therefore we should have a moral norm that people should build earthquake-resistant houses in seismic zones.
All moral norms are entangled with non-moral facts, otherwise they would have no relevance, like those Jewish laws about sacrifice in the Temple.
I don't see what you mean by "not objective in the relevant sense".
The sense in the case I was describing was the contemporary use of "objectivity" as referring to the agreement of different subjects on a topic (whether contemporary subjects, such as witnesses in a case or experts in a field, or some hypothetical indefinite discussion between subjects - that what we mean by scientific truth is what scientists will eventually agree on given enough time). When a judge talks about the "objective facts" he is referring to the agreement of the participants in the trial, and not in a process of full consensus but in a process of further layers of agreement on who is acting in good faith and who may be lying. Likewise, when scientists talk about the "objective facts" about an issue they are referring to what a community of scientists (with some tangential support from exterior credible critical thinkers) agree about, and again excluding bad faith actors (which refers to some similar parallel agreement on who is acting in good faith or bad; that there is no experiment to differentiate between good and bad faith actors, is the crisis of contemporary science).
The point of bringing up the use of objective in this sense (the sense of objective as it's normally used in society: an assertion of agreement between good faith actors) is that it's clearly dependent on subjects and not independent from subjectivity. If we want to define "objective reality" as independent of subjective experience, we are essentially talking about the noumenon (of which, most philosophers would agree, we know nothing about as it exists independently of our experience, other than, for some, to presuppose that it does indeed exist somehow). If we want to define "objective reality" as simply the agreement of good faith actors - independent of the people that might be lying or delusional about it - then this is begging the question of how do we know who's lying or delusional (the concept still makes sense, and is what I mean when I talk about "objective reality", but it's not a simple concept, but bring with it nearly all the nuances and complexity of both past philosophical debate as well as what we debate now and may imagine debating in the future).
The point is, none of these definitions of "objective" can be applied to make a definition of "objective morality" that is clear and simple, and redefining a word far from what it normally means is a recipe for confusion.
The reason "universal morality" does not lead to such confusions is because it's simply stating that there are moral assertions that are true for all subjects; this still leaves open exactly why they are true for all subjects (because these moral assertions exist in some way independently of the subjects whether abstractly or by some common sense-data, or because all moral agents should eventually arrive at the same moral conclusions though entirely dependent on what it means to be a subject, or because God has so decreed all moral agents God has created are bound by the morality God has also created, or by any other argumentative structure that results in "there are moral assertions true for all moral agents").
"Objective morality" does not have the same on first appearance meaning as "universal morality", and so equating the two, sets up all sorts of bait and switch fallacies that now need to be constantly guarded against (for instance, "objective morality" seems to imply some secular scientific like reasoning process arriving at "facts", so seems to imply divine command or divine creation morality as not "objective", but "universal morality" easily includes divine command or creation morality; so if we need to constantly remind the reader that by "objective" we are not excluding a divine source for morality, then this is confusing at worst and simply clumsy at best).
I'm not singling out biology, it was just an example. I agree moral norms are entangled with non-moral facts.
:up:
Quoting Isaac
:up:
Quoting Isaac
Hm. Looks similar to this:
Quoting SophistiCat
Let me see if I can make an argument that consolidates both your points. You both seem okay with how I've used the terms "moral conduct" and "moral evaluation", broadly anyway.
Quoting fdrake
(1) In order for "moral objectivism/universalism" to be true, there would need to be true statements about moral conduct.
(2) In order for a statement to be true, it has to correspond to some (physical or external) state of affairs.
(3) A statement can be true or false when and only when it concerns some (physical or external) state of affairs.
(4) Statements concerning moral conduct do not concern any (physical or external) state of affairs.
(5) Therefore statements concerning moral conduct cannot correspond to some (physical or external) state of affairs (3,4, putting the negation through the when and only when).
(6) Therefore statements concerning moral conduct cannot be true or false (5,3).
(7) Therefore there are no statements concerning moral conduct which are true or false. (6, restatement)
(8) Therefore "moral objectivism/universalism" is false. (7,1)
Does that reflect what you both think?
It's difficult to say. Largely because of the caveats about moral statements being somewhat definitional. "Hitting babies is morally wrong" can be true by virtue of the fact that 'morally wrong' is an expression in the English language and whilst it's meaning might be a bit vague at the edges, hitting babies isn't it. I'll try to answer each, but within this framework.
Quoting fdrake
First hurdle. True statements about moral conduct might be definitional, as per my example above. It is true to say that hitting babies is not morally good. It's true by virtue of the meaning of the term 'morally good', which does not include hitting babies. But this does not lead to universalism. To borrow from Wittgenstein again. If I describe my teacup as a 'game' I'm wrong, that's not what a game is. But having established, say chess is a game, and so's badminton, opinion about which is most a game is not universal. Once the criteria is met for fluid communication, there's no further objectivity from a definition. Likewise with 'morally right'. Once two behaviours can both correctly be described as 'morally right' by definition, there's no further objective measure to determine which is more 'morally right'.
Quoting fdrake
I don't want to sound like a stuck record, but I'd tackle this one linguistically too. 'True' is just a word and so it's correct use is governed by the community of language users. I think 'true' as used just means 'I really, really believe this', but for most people that's because believing it has the expected effect on external states of affairs, so yes, we could go with this one.
Quoting fdrake
See above. Yes, but with caveats.
Quoting fdrake
This is the trickiest because you've said 'statements concerning', this could cover a lot of statements some of which might well concern external states of affairs. The accepted moral code of a culture is an external state of affairs (it's just not a universal one), the meaning of the term 'morally good' is also an external state of affairs (just not a clear one).
"Abortion is always morally wrong" would be an example of a statement about moral conduct which does not concern external states of affairs. It's clearly beyond cultural reference, and the definition of 'morally good' is not specific enough to cover it.
"Rape is morally wrong in modern society" would be an example of a statement which concerns external states of affairs on both grounds. Modern society certainly has such a moral code and rape is definitely outside of the modern definition of 'moral', you'd simply be using the word wrong. As such "Rape is morally wrong in modern society" is true.
---
Essentially though I think the problem with universalism comes down to one of direction of fit. It's perfectly feasible (though not the case), for the term 'morally good' to be a very specific technical term with a clear meaning, and for all cultures to have identical moral codes. If that were the case then all moral statements would either be universally true, or universally false. But...the moment any of that changed, it would not be the case that the new culture was now wrong, it would be the case that we'd need to update our models to reflect this new reality. Like when a word changes meaning. For a while it's just being used wrongly, but after some time of coherent use it's the outdated dictionary that's wrong, not the language users.
What we decide to do in moral dilemmas is determined by several mental models, some of which are virtually impregnable from birth, others resulting from culture and upbringing almost as difficult to shift. A few are flexible and responsive to discourse. Almost none are meta-ethical, by which I mean derived from some calculated algorithm for how to make such decisions. As such, any such meta ethic as 'universal moral laws' can only ever be descriptive at best. It has no normative force. If it concludes that something is morally wrong which is nonetheless described as 'morally right' by a community of language users, then it is wrong, not the aforementioned community.
I don't agree with Isaac that what is moral is Quoting Isaac
But I probably shouldn't hijack the thread to debate the point. I don't have a problem with the rest though.
Quoting fdrake
...
Quoting fdrake
It should be made clear that by statements being true in this context we specifically mean truth in the sense of correspondence with some external/objective state of affairs. There is an old-standing debate in moral philosophy about whether moral statements are truth-apt (moral cognitivism/non-cognitivism). I find that much of this debate is essentially over philosophical language and coherence with this or that analytical framework. I don't get exercised over such controversies; I am happy to use "true" in its ordinary sense, so that if I am willing to make an affirmative statement, I am also willing to say that the statement is true (otherwise we would find ourselves making Moorian paradoxical pronouncements like "It's raining, but it is not true that it's raining.") But when I say "Hitting babies is wrong" I don't mean it in the same way as when I say "It's raining." There is no referent implicit in the former statement. Its truthmaker is my moral attitude.
Quoting SophistiCat
Isn't the difficulty with this the very point that Wittgenstein was driving at in passage at the end of the Tractatus that 'ethics are transcendental'?
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus/6
I think that's probably why considered as a 'mere theoretical proposition', such questions tend to become meaningless. They're only meaningful if you can see what makes them meaningful, and that looks suspiciously like what most people would call a faith, or a sense of value originating from over our cognitive horizons. (Which is why I say that Wittgenstein's acclaimed 'silence' is apophatic.)
Quoting Isaac
The problem with this is, that interpretation of fMRI scanning is a matter of judgement, and yet in this question, 'judgement' is the very faculty which you're attempting to capture, via an apparatus. Again, there's a circularity involved here. You have an assumption that technology - neuroscience, presumably - will be arbiter of what ultimately is objectively the case. Presumably some kind of brain state or configuration of neural matter. But again, all such judgements are exactly that: judgements. And judgement is precisely what is at issue in such questions. That is what I mean by saying that there are some judgements you can never get outside of. And yet we want to make the very nature of judgement something which can be explained scientifically [sup]1[/sup].
I don't think this thread has a point as such (it's just a poll), so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
Quoting SophistiCat
This seems at odds with
Quoting SophistiCat
Is it that your moral attitude is not a 'thing', or is it that your moral attitude is not an 'opinion'. Absent either of those things it does seem as though you're agreeing with the latter statement. The thing which serves as the truthmaker for your moral statement would correctly be identified as your opinion.
I don't understand what you're having trouble with. We associate certain areas of the brain with certain types of mental activity because they consistently correlate - the subject reports some type of activity, or is placed in some recognised situation and the same area consistently registers. We can also use lesion studies where damage to some part of the brain consistently results in absence or inadequacy in the same type of mental activity. Plus we can measure endocrine responses and test cellular reactions to those hormones.
Obviously if I'm looking at an fMRI I have to use some judgement to assess it, but that's happening in my brain, not my subject's brain, so I don't see any cause for concern there either.
I'm a bit uneasy attaching right and wrong to arbitrary ought statements myself; I don't like ought statements to begin with. It construes "ought" as an operator on "is", and "is" contains all the truth conditions in that framing.
I think that this comes down to an argument about the type of states of affairs, and whether that type excludes relationships between agents, dispositions and states of affairs.
Truth conditions have to be a statement of an event. Characteristic instances of the type are like "it is raining" or "the ball fell through the hoop", physical facts like "an ionic bond occurs between sodium and chlorine to make salt", and descriptions like "snow is white". The motivating intuition for grouping these things together is that their truth conditions do not depend in any way upon a human's disposition toward them. This facilitates a sharp division between states of affairs (under a description) and attitudes agents have towards them. Morality is aligned with a pro attitude of judgement towards a state of affairs, like {Sally, thinks this is wrong, hitting a baby} - the morally valanced component is all in the middle term, rather than the state of affairs of baby hitting.
I don't think the sharpness of this division between dispositionally dependent and independent content survives the enmeshment of social facts and dispositions. From the social facts side, consider the event "Sally and Lizzy are in love", this will be true when Sally and Lizzy are in love. However, Sally loves Lizzy is a disposition of Sally regarding Lizzy. Lizzy loves Sally is a disposition regarding Sally. If we must take dispositions regarding states of affairs as separate from states of affairs, then "Sally and Lizzy are in love" must either not be truth-apt or false as by assumption neither disposition corresponds to a state of affairs that can be included in a truth condition so their composition cannot either. Regardless, Sally and Lizzy are in love, so it should be true, no?
I think this forces us to consider dispositions as a component part of states of affairs rather than parsing them simply as attitudes towards states of affairs. If moral evaluations are a type of disposition (as assumed above), this makes moral evaluation a state of affairs. This leaves room for an account of what it means for a moral evaluation to be a state of affairs.
I take a pragmatic view of what it means to hold a disposition. A disposition has pragmatic consequences. So "Sally and Lizzy are in love" entails behavioural commitments which manifest as proximate consequences for both agents, and the type of behavioural commitments + proximate consequences depend upon the dispositions held and the agents.
So for an agent to hold a moral evaluation is for them to commit themselves to behaving in a manner consistent with the moral evaluation they hold. However holding that commitment does not suffice for the proximate consequences engendered by holding the commitment being adequate for upholding the commitment's intended proximate consequences. Only the actions manifested in accordance with the commitment are adequate for it, as they are what yield the proximate consequences of the commitment. IE, there are moral errors (infelicities of moral conduct) that arise in the mismatch of a moral evaluation and the actions used to satisfy it, and moral skill (a good enough fit between the evaluation and the actions). If the actions do not satisfy the evaluation in virtue of being infelicitous in some way, then it is true that they do not satisfy the evaluation. And vice versa. The truth condition there isn't a type of disposition held by the agent, it's whether the actions were adequate for the disposition or not.
The sense of adequacy is facilitated by the moral evaluations of engaged parties; those which really are affected by the proximate consequences of an agent's actions, including the original agent. Events concerning stakeholders to the actions and evaluations thereof. Objectivity (it really being true that one's actions can be in/felicitous in context) without universalism (contextual dependence of all moral conduct and evaluation).
Quoting SophistiCat
So I don't think the moral attitude suffices; it doesn't give a good account of moral error and conduct being adequate. Whether the actions cash out the disposition. And I don't think the picture of dispositionally independent states of affairs is in accordance with moral conduct's immersion in social contexts, "external/objective" truth conditions break when considering the truth conditions of collective actions/institutional facts/social facts.
The drawing of such implications from fMRI studies, especially psychological or ethical implications, is precisely where many major issues of replicability have been found in the ‘replication crisis’. See this review.
But, step back a bit. Where fMRI and brain science is genuinely useful is in the diagnosis of disorders. It has immense therapeutic benefits. But here, we’re actually talking about ethical judgements. So saying that such technologies can say anything about moral judgement, or rational thinking, is of a completely different order to saying that they can help diagnose pathologies or neurological disorders. Reason is not a pathology. And saying that reasoned ethical argument can be isolated or analysed in terms of brain imaging is treating it as if it was. There is no ‘brain configuration’ that equates to judgement - or rather, if there were, you would have to be using the very faculty which you’re trying to ‘explain’, in order to explain it. You can’t see reason ‘from the outside’, as it were. That’s why it’s not something objective in itself - rather, it is reason that is the faculty that is used to determine what is objective.
What you’re wanting to do is ground moral judgement in empirical science. But, read the quote from Wittgenstein again - this is saying that is precisely what cannot be done. ‘The sense of the world must lie outside the world’ - you’re not going to square that with naturalism.
As ever, a lack of certainty in the sciences is not a reason to accept even less certain conclusions from just 'having a bit if a think' about it.
Quoting Wayfarer
How? You've not drawn any rational analogy between the correlation of brain activity with mental activity and pathology. Where's the link?
Quoting Wayfarer
So. I'm using my faculty to identify the same in someone else. Where's the problem?
For example, people with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus have trouble with categorical syllogisms. How do you explain this if not via an assumption that this part of the brain is involved in that aspect of reasoning? I, in part, use my functioning left inferior frontal gyrus to reason about the correlation between this subject's brain damage and his inability to do exactly what I'm doing in assessing him.
Quoting Wayfarer
Read what I've written rather than make lazy assumptions. That's exactly what I'm arguing against.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think so. I think he's just saying that values cannot be of the world, they must if they exist at all (crucial contingent), be of outside the world. But the world is all there is, so they must be transcendent, ie nonsense. They might be important nonsense, but they are not sensical.
“Neither the Tractatus nor the Notebooks contains any argument or reasoning to establish the existence of values or their absolute character."
World and Life As One, Martin Stokhof
Where ‘sensical’ means....?
Quoting Isaac
I stand corrected.
Something about which propositions can be formed.
Edit - I'm not saying I agree with Wittgenstein here. I'm just saying that standard interpretations do not have him saying that ethical values exist or are absolute. In saying their values must lie outside of the world, he's not saying they exist but in some other realm. He's saying they don't exist in the sense that we can talk about.
It is clear enough that brain damage can interfere with speech, thought and language - as I said, that is for question of pathology. I don’t think it says anything specific about the nature of reason, other than that a healthy brain is required to grasp it.
It does. It says that a healthy left inferior frontal gyrus is required to grasp that particular bit of it. Which is all I'm saying about using fMRI scans to tell us about how we process moral decisions. Particular parts of the brain are used for particular aspects of reasoning. This is the best, most well-supported theory of how we reach reasoned conclusions.
The corollary of this is that if we see certain brain areas active/inactive during mental activities we can draw a very reasonable conclusion that certain aspects of reasoning are involved/absent.
The review I linked to draws on a large study of fmri data and raises fundamental questions about its accuracy and replicability in many respects.
The study it refers to is here.
And consider this: are the fundamental terms of logic and reason - the structure of syllogisms or logical rules such the law of the excluded middle - a product of neural processes. Or are they principles which it takes a functioning brain to understand? Surely such principles hold regardless of whether this or that individual has the mental competence to grasp them.
And so original objection stands. As Thomas Nagel says,
I don't understand why you're having such trouble with this concept. Uncertainty in one approach is not a reason to adopt an alternative approach unless it can be shown to be more certain. Do you have an alternative method for understanding mental activity which passes replicability tests?
Quoting Wayfarer
I would say obviously the latter. This makes no difference whatsoever to the assessment of which brain areas are responsible for understanding which principles. As such it has no bearing whatsoever on my argument that activity in certain areas of the brain can give us good cause to conclude which of these principles are being used at the time.
Quoting Isaac
OK. First, rules of communication and social rules, like rules for purchasing goods, are not necessarily moral. Knowingly transgressing such rules can be a moral act, but it is the act of following or breaking rules that is moral, not the rules themselves. Second, disagreements about moral questions are not similar to disagreements about the meanings of words.
Quoting Isaac
Yeah, I realize I was courting confusion with this talk about truthmakers. Let me put it this way: there are different kinds of assertions. Some assertions - assertions made about the world - imply a referent and at least a theoretical possibility of checking their truth against this referent. A moral assertion carries no such ontological commitments, at least not implicitly.
Quoting SophistiCat
You seem to have just restated your conclusions, I was more wondering how you got there. No bother if they're just basic bedrocks for you, but if not, I'm interested in the thought processes which lead you there.
With what is 'moral', for example. How does someone who feels differently to the rest of the population about, say, violence, learn what the term 'morally right' refers to? All they're going to see growing up is people using the term to refer to 'good' stuff (being kind to old ladies etc). I don't understand how you imagine they'd ever learn that their preferred behaviour (hitting people) is somehow the same thing in essence that everyone else in their language community is really referring to when they use the term to describes helping old ladies etc.
Like I said, I meant only ordinary, colloquial senses of right/wrong, true/false. Formal analyses of truth, I feel, rarely touch on matters of human interest. I understand your worry about the truth conditions for moral assertions. But it is precisely this ambiguity of moral expressions (never mind whether we explicitly assert their truth; what matters is that moral talk does not much differ from empiric talk) that prompted my crackpot theory about what motivates moral realism.
Quoting fdrake
I don't see this as a problematic enmeshment of dispositions and states of affairs. The statement can perfectly well refer to something empirical, such as observed behavior or verbal report. And of course Sally and Lizzy having the disposition of being in love is itself a state of affairs. A statement that refers to a disposition as an existing state of affairs (e.g. "Sally and Lizzy are in love," or "fdrake believes that hitting babies is wrong") would be comprehensible and defeasible.
Quoting fdrake
Well, you go on to distance morals from their consequences by pointing out how the latter are not always true to the former (when we fail to act in accordance with our original dispositions). And of course moral attitudes are perfectly comprehensible even in the absence of any notable effects. Whether or not one's conduct is adequate to one's beliefs and attitudes (when there even is a conduct to speak of) is a separate question from whether beliefs and attitudes are right or wrong.
Quoting Isaac
With this I was just trying to restate my position without appearing to contradict myself, i.e. without appearing to refer to some state of affairs that non-trivially validates moral beliefs.
Quoting Isaac
I seems like you are talking about moral vocabulary, such as the meaning of the words "good" and "bad." I don't really see the connection to the present subject. We learn how to use such words by correctly matching them to the respective classes of good and bad things. But the identification of members of the class is not just a matter of learning to use words correctly, surely?
The class 'good behaviour' has certain membership criteria. That's the same thing as the definition of 'good behaviour'. It's perfect definition is 'everything in that class'.
Natural language terms are not like taxonomic terms. There's no acknowledged authority determining class membership. No one decided what 'game' was going to mean and then everyone else went around finding activities which fit the definition. It's the other way around, we call a loose collection of things 'games' a fit new thing to the category on the basis of how similar they are to the other members.
I don't see why it would be any different with 'morally good' we call a loose collection of behaviours (or characteristics) 'morally good' and then any new behaviours are labelled according to their similarity to existing members.
If I decide the activity of filling in my tax return is a 'game' I've just made a mistake. If I were a new language user you'd correct me, probably by telling me the sorts of things 'games' are. Why would 'morally good' be any different? If I say punching old ladies is 'morally good' I've just made a mistake, that's not similar to the other things in that group.
If a foreign student learning English pointed at someone hitting an old Lady and said "stroking", you'd be inclined to say "no, not 'stroking', that's 'hitting'". If they then said "morally good", why would you not similarly correct them and say "no, 'morally bad'"?
If a foreign language student sees someone hitting an old lady, intervenes, and says "No, no. Morally good," we have a likely a language problem. - A linguistic failure
If you see a foreign language student hitting an old lady, intervene, and he says "I understand that you think it's morally wrong to hit an old lady, but I disagree," we likely do not have language problem. - A moral disagreement
If you see a foreign language student hitting an old lady, intervene, and he doesn't understand why, we likely do not have language problem. - A moral failure
There can obviously overlap, but that's the gist of it.
The relation between discursive ethics and pratical morals is a rather interesting topic on its own, I'd say.
So if, in the first example, the student says"I understand that you think it's 'hitting' to push my fist toward an old lady this way, but I disagree," why does no one treat it as a disagreement? It's not, he's just flat out wrong about what hitting is.
Well, he's certainly flat out wrong. Whether or not he, in addition, disagrees is an empirical question. Personally, decontextualised like in this thread, I'm more likely to imagine irony designed to dismiss your intervention.
If it really is a disagreement about the word "to hit", I'd be inclined to think that he's trying to find a "loophole in the law" rather than to act morally. But that, too, is an empirical question. Very unusual people do exist.
You haven't answered the question though. I wanted to know why you confidently allowed the student to have his own private meaning for the term 'morally good', but you're deeply suspicious if he tries to claim his own private meaning for the term 'hitting'?
What if, next week, he decides that 'morally good' is a type of potato, is he still just in disagreement, or is he now just wrong about what kind of thing 'morally good' refers to? If he's wrong about it referring to a potato, but he's just 'in disagreement' about it referring to hitting old ladies, then where's the line, and why is it there?
We're social creatures. we're completely embedded in a culture, just to talk requires a huge amount of cultural cooperation. Why would we be at all surprised to find social rules entwined with our language?
Yes, they are. We don't just put together a random collection of things and give it a name; we group things for a reason. This isn't an exact science, but neither is defining the boundaries of biological taxa.
There is considerable diversity within moral outlooks, which results in different people using moral terms somewhat differently. This is the direction of fit, not the other way around. Moral valuation is not just a matter of labeling: it goes along with certain mental attitudes, the actions that they inspire and the social facts that they bring about. "Good" and "bad" are natural kinds, to put it crudely. Playing around with labels doesn't change what they are.
Well then who are the experts who determine the status of certain behaviours? In Britain, if there's a dispute over the taxonomic status of a plant, a Cambridge Professor called Clive Stace has the final say. His book 'The New Flora of the British Isles' contains all the definitions, but they're based on (largely) seed structure and chromosome number. So...
Quoting SophistiCat
The difference is that the 'reason's for grouping things into the category 'morally good' are varied and inconsistent an historical accident of cultural evolution, religion, politics... Not at all like taxonomy, which may well have it's disputes, but they are over largely agreed upon criteria with established authorities, as the example above.
Quoting SophistiCat
There may well be a certain way in which they are, but given the history of language evolution would you not find it extremely unusual that two such loaded terms as 'Good' and 'Bad' were purely the result of our identification of some Platonic essence and not in the least bit influenced by culture or social dynamics? I certainly would.
And if we accept the above, then how would a person learn how to correctly apply the term 'morally good' only to those things which met the criteria of this Natural Kind? How would we ever know which 'Natural Kind' our community of language users were referring to if their only use of the term is the one loaded with cultural and psychological biases?
Whether I personally fell inclined to pursue what is 'good' and avoid what is 'bad' is entirely another matter. Unless you have a good contrary argument, we already know that we cannot have private meanings for words, so the meaning must be that which the community of language users collectively maintains, it cannot privately mean that which I find to be appealing or repellent. Yet that maintenance is a mash-up of natural kinds, politics, biases etc. it would be impossible to distinguish which part of the definition refers to a natural kind even if we were to accept the existence of such a thing.
This is why I think it's important to distinguish the three aspects of moral-talk.
There's what actually counts as morally 'right' and 'wrong'. This is definitional, it's our social group as language users which define this, we cannot meaningfully say they have it wrong because we cannot have a private meanings for words, it makes no sense.
There's an investigation into why certain behaviours are labelled 'good' and 'bad' by our community of language users (as you say, we don't do so arbitrarily). IT would be incredibly surprising here if the answer we came up with was anything like taxonomy - that despite all the complexity of religion, politics, culture and psychology we somehow ended up with our definitions being a pure reflection of some natural kinds. Nothing in this investigation has any normative force over what the definitions 'ought' to be. There's no reason at all why definitions should be anything other than what they are.
Finally there's your own personal inclinations to act. You may be inclined toward behaviours which are 'bad', or you may be inclined toward those which are 'good'. You may be inclined to reprimand or impose on others for their behaviours. But none of this has any normative force either. Your own private inclinations cannot determine the meaning of socially mediated terms. We cannot have private meanings for words, language is a social game.
I didn't anser that question, because that's not what I intended to say, and - to be honest - I don't think I I did. I called it a linguistic failure. Being wrong about "good" (he's not wrong about morally; the adverb's appropriate to the situation) and being wrong about "to hit" are both instances of linguistic failure. (I do allow him a private meaning for both words in some limited context - say, a diary written in code.)
Basically, I misinterpreted your question, and I'm still not sure why you'd think I allow a private meaning for the term "morally good".
You do seem to mingle language and morals at a deep level, in a way I don't quite understand. Sure, they're entwined, as you say, but it's generally not hard to follow the distinct threads, horrid tangles notwithstanding. Also, both language and morals involve social rules, so if you abstract enough you may end up in a place where they're the same, but they also use a lot of their usefulness at terms.
For example:
Quoting Isaac
This seems needlessly hard to parse or outright wrong. I don't know which.
Because you said
Quoting Dawnstorm
In order for the student to merely 'disagree' here, rather than be wrong about the meaning of the term 'morally bad' he must have his own private meaning of the term 'morally bad', one which is in disagreement with the one the rest of the language community uses. If, on the contrary, he does not have a private meaning of the term 'morally bad', then he must acquiesce to the meaning determined by the language community, and that does not include hitting old ladies.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Hopefully the former, especially as I wrote 'work' where I meant to write 'word' (new phone, different keyboard).
I didn't even notice the typo (so much for careful reading...). And I'm still not sure what you're saying here.
Quoting Isaac
"Morally bad" represents a "negative moral evaluation". "Hitting old ladies" is a state of affair prone to moral evaluation. A person who doesn't evaluate hitting old ladies negatively would be using the term "morally bad" incorrectly if he said from his perspective that hitting old ladies is morally bad, but he would be using "morally bad" correctly if he said from his society's perspective that "hitting old ladies is bad". Moral evaluations are always tied to a perspective. The meaning of "morally bad" isn't private; the personal evaluation tied to the word is, independently of whether there's agreement or disagreement (or indecision, or indifference).
You're seem to be getting rid of a useful distinction, and I can't figure out why? What do we get in return?
I think we agree 'bad' doesn't mean anything on its own beyond a vague indication toward a negative. One can be a bad actor, but a good person. One can be a bad person but a good actor. So bad and good only mean anything relative to some objective or ideal. Something which is morally bad is bad relative to ideals of morality (behaviour, character...). If I've understood you correctly, we're on the same page here.
The word 'moral' has to have some public meaning for it to be useful. It has to identify some publicly available set of behaviours or ideals IR characteristics, otherwise it would serve no purpose and be impossible to learn how to use. So I don't see how it can mean 'whatever behaviours you think fit'. That would be a private meaning.
You might want the public meaning to be something more than just an arbitrary set of behaviours, maybe publicly available membership criteria such that our violent student could make an argument that his behaviour fits the definition. But, as I said to @SophistiCat, it seems highly unlikely to me that the meaning would be so pure, given the language's history, but even it was, it would still have to have boundaries in order to be a useful word at all.
So we're left with the public meaning of 'moral' being a messy cocktail of ideals, religion, culture, psychology etc, but overall being exclusive in some way that is publicly agreed on, otherwise it's useless. We each might want it to mean something else, something more easy to police, but it doesn't and we, as individuals, don't get to just declare what words mean.
Hitting old ladies is far from any of the ideals or standards within the general public definition of moral, so doing so is morally bad.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Not entirely sure what distinction you mean here.
I'm not convinced that holds up.
In analogy, many or most of us have two arms with five fingers each.
However, that does not mean that such "arm+finger'ness" somehow exists independently of the lot with such limbs.
Should an extinction occur, such "limb'ness" may no longer exist (per se), but could re-emerge again.
In such an event, the likes of love and hate may equally have vanished, but could be rediscovered again.
Why would our moral sentiments be exempt?
It seems that morals are by and for and applicable to experiencing minds (at large).
Surely we don't speak of rights (and justice and virtues) for rocks? :)
Much like the other examples, morals can exist independently of any individual, but seemingly not independently of the lot of moral agents.
This does not itself entail that morals are ad hoc, random, arbitrary, discretionary, mere matter of opinion.
I imagine that two people being in love is a rather vague thing involving the dispositions, acts, social context... It'd be hard to draw a line around a bunch of phenomena and go "Yep, that is the truth condition for X and Y are in love". Are you suggesting that dispositions aren't included in that blurry-at-the-edges web? I imagine that "X and Y are in love but X does not have any dispositions regarding Y." would be another of those Moorean puzzles of assertion; a violence against the phenomenon by failing to reflect a vital aspect of it.
Quoting SophistiCat
I don't think it's separate; if we separate an action's pragmatic consequences on stakeholders its agent's disposition from evaluations of rights and wrongs, it isn't clear that we're still talking about the same thing. All I'm trying to say are that statements like "You're right, I shouldn't've treated you like that" can be true! And they don't need to refer to some purely extra-human thing to be so - their truth value turns on whether the action concerned was or was not adequate in context. Rather than an extra-human goodness or rightness.
How can we expect any statement about humans to be true if it has to correspond to event type which does not vary with the actions and perspectives of humans?
Easy things first. I'm talking about the distinction between being wrong about language, and being wrong about morals. I can't figure out how to read you and still be able to tell the difference.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, as far as I can tell, we're on the same page here.
Quoting Isaac
That one, I think, needs some unpacking. First, I think this is the place where I should lay open my bias. I've studied sociology on university, but the discipline I fell in love with was linguistics. So while I'd roughly agree that the word "moral" has to be useful when referring to the public, I also think it has to be applicable on all social levels from the individual, upwards, since a person has morals, and any grouping has morals, and there's no guarantee that they're the same, since not every behaviour that differs from public morals is immoral or amoral.
A person's bahaviour that doesn't conform to the public set of rules, for example, can be classified in three distinct ways:
a) moral (person acts according to private moral compass)
b) immoral (attempts to act according to a moral compass, but fails, maybe due to a lack of will power)
c) amoral (psychopaths see morals as an external imposition)
Now those are psychological terms, as they pertain to the way individuals make choices. There's a social level, too:
a) moral (in accordance with some superindividual set of rules - a culture or subculture)
b) immoral (deviant)
c) amoral (actions that have no moral import; chosing to eat a hotdog over a burger)
The easiest way to resolve this via separate lexical entries. (During analysis we'd be calling only one of those sets "moral", but we'd have to decide beforehand which one, to avoid confusion.)
I've noticed about myself that I when I say someone acts morally, I mean that the person acts according to an inner moral compass, regardless of whether that compass is aligned with the morals of a greater group. When I mean to say that someone acts in accordance with a group's morals, then I say it like that. So a psychopath may act in accordance with his cultures morals, but he doesn't act in accordance with any inner moral compass. My speech habit is to say a psychopath doesn't act morally, even he chooses to stick to his culture's rules.
If possible, I'd like to find a way to use the word moral on both the personal and social level, via some coherent theory, but... it's hard. I believe that people recreate social structures in their daily conduct, and by that I mean that a culture usually incorporates not only typical moral rules, but also typical moral conflict (e.g. pro-choice vs. pro-life). As such parameters shift, but some rules are more stable than others. Lines like "abortion is murder" or "(online-)piracy is theft" are emotional appeals to less controversial rules, but you can craft rational arguments about why this should be the case. And these discussions are part of the environment in which we develop our personal morals, the younger the more potent, I think.
I lean towards a dynamic meaning of moral that has something to say about all the levels. Individuals who move through space-time as social vortices who accumulate and disseminate morals through their behaviour. And any analysis should account for all levels, if possible.
So a person who personally thinks he should follow all of society's rules, and has not particular confidence in his own judgement, would act in accordance with society's morals, but he's also likely to encounter plenty of criticism as a "stickler for rules", and will be asked to lighten up. You cannot analyse this under the aegis of morality, if moral only has the public meaning.
I feel like I've been rambling, but I'll leave this as is, or I'll never finish this post. To summarise, I definitely think that the term "moral" needs to deal with the public sphere, but I think that ideally it should deal with the entire social spectrum.
Quoting Isaac
Nah, I'm perfectly fine with it all being messy. As I said above, though, I think we need to be careful about the word's scope. I consider morality to be some sort of never ending process where specific rules are both input and output of thinking-feeling agents' actions. It's going to be messy (not sure about the extent to which it is arbitrary).
Quoting Isaac
In moral discussions, people tend to chose non-controversial rules, so controversies are going to feel implausible. You need to suspend disbelief, though, if you're going to use such examples for thorough study of what the concept could mean. If my personal morals demand to hit one old lady per week, and I do that, I'm not acting amorally. I'm not acting immoraly with respect to my own moral compass, but I am acting immoraly with respect to society's standards, and I'm going to have a hard time hitting old ladies in prison. (Maybe I'm secretly relieved, because I don't like hitting old ladies?)
There's really nothing you can say beyond that, if you're not aiming for universalism.
Ah, OK. Then yes, I'm saying there isn't a difference. In short, morality is a social concept, the language used to describe it is social too and so private meanings make no sense. One can only speak about one's morality using the public definition of what morality is and that definition cannot refer to a private feature otherwise it's not a useful word. Wittgenstein's beetle and all.
Quoting Dawnstorm
How would they know? As per the private language argument, unless their behaviour is publicly acknowledged to be labelled 'moral' how would they privately maintain a criteria for their behaviour to class as moral and still expect the word to play a meaningful role in communication? How would they distinguish a 'moral' compass, for example, from any other compass, without a public definition of 'moral'?
Say I declare that hitting old ladies is moral. I follow my own moral compass which is to do whatever makes me feel good. How can I now use 'moral' in a conversation? It's taken on an entirely private meaning which might not even be the same meaning I had for it yesterday (I wouldn't know). No one would know what I meant, I would not know what they meant and I couldn't even be sure what my own diary entry meant from yesterday.
Quoting Dawnstorm
How do you know? I mean how do you know it's a 'moral' compass, and not just any old compass?
Quoting Dawnstorm
Fair enough. I studied psychology with a research interest in group belief adoption, so that's our biases laid out.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yeah, that's actually where I'm going with this. Once we accept that 'moral' is a publicly defined term, we simultaneously accepted the mess and the dynamism (like your definition here, by the way), we have to accepted that one a thing is 'moral', that's alk there is to it. There's 'moral', not 'moral', and 'sort of moral, fuzzy at the edges'. But there's no way if working out that fuzziness, there's nothing most moral, it just us what it us, a messy, community defined group.
Moral objectivism has a few qualities I struggle to reconcile (maybe someone can help me here):
- If a moral evaluation of some event is to be made by an individual, it is by definition subjective. A group of individuals will tend to disagree (partially / fully) on what the correct moral evaluation of an event is.
- If a moral evaluation of an event were to draw upon some objective "truth" (a correct moral evaluation that is not contingent on the individual and exists objectively), I struggle to see how one would know or come to understand of this truth.
This isn't a beetle-in-the-box situation. We do different things with morals than with language. which was my first post in this thread was meant to demonstrate. "Using a wrong word" is not a moral failure.
Quoting Isaac
I do think you have a point there somewhere, but I also think my focus is somewhat different and we're not entirely talking abou the same thing.
Any real-life decision is utlimately private, and only through lots of private decisions is there something like a public sphere. I don't think action points only upwards, so to speak. It's no more warranted to impute a public sphere than it is to impute private experience.
And even private experience is partly socially formed. My conscience is a home-grown trace of my social history, for example, but it's also partly informed by my personality (I don't like conflict, for example, and that would certainly have an influence on what I'd feel bad about; "I should confront this person, but I don't have the energy."). Some basic urges are socially formed. Toilet training comes to mind. Walking on the sidewalk, too.
Few actions are purely moral. Most have an instrumental aspect, too. Whatever we theorise about the socially accepted moral goods is abstract, anyway, and needs to filter through your private decision making process to become an action (or a tragically long hesiation).
On the other hand, when it comes to meaning I'm not looking for similarity between people so much as compatibility: as long as our actions proceed without a hich it doesn't matter what the beetle-in-a-box is like (if it's even there). But, well, incompatibilites do occur, and at least for me it's not always easy to spot whether there's a misunderstanding or a disagreement. See this discussion for plenty of examples.
Quoting Isaac
Okay. I'm hungry. There's a banana on the table. I don't like the banana and decide to hold off on eating it. There isn't a moral component in the decision I can find.
I know my little sister is looking forward to eating the banana. Now a moral component enters my decision. I have one more "excuse" not to eat the banana. I like to think well of myself, so I'd like to frame it as a moral decision. But this also makes me de-emphasise that I dislike bananas. Then I can ask why I'd think better of myself if my motives aren't "being picky" (oh hey, there has been a potentially moral angle on it all along, and I didn't notice) but being "considerate". My motivation is a sort of compound, though, so whatever I wish to think about myself isn't all that important. A panel of disinterested observers could tell me how I consistently act, though...
Yeah, how do I know? Maybe I'm just not hungry enough to eat a banana. But there is a constellation, and the ways to arrange the pieses are, to an extent similar, and extended observation can get you a clearer picture. I don't think purely moral actions exist, and I also think completely amoral actions are rare. So the question is most likely "how do I know the ratio?"
I probably don't, but I can guess and feel hurt when other people laugh at my guess and guess again.
Quoting Isaac
So where do you place protests, criticism, and conflict, if the moral realm is all public sanction? Don't forget that every single one of us is part of each other's context, even if only in some very minuscle way. How do topics (like, say, trans rights) enter the public discourse? I can't imagine explaining any of that without morally interested agents. (Meme theory maybe?)
The problem is that it is both subjective and objective, or maybe better even that this whole objective/subjective divide is not helpful in understanding morality.
We create morals, as a group or collective. Since we create them, and this creation happens based among other things on peoples opinions on morals, you can't really say it's not subjective. But then there are also a whole bunch of objective background constraints that make it so that it generally goes in certain directions... so there are 'objective' aspects to it too.
And then once morals have been created, which is a matter of agreement/convention, it is not a matter of subjective opinion anymore whether a person breaks a moral convention or not. It's objectively true that people agreed upon a certain moral convention, and objectively true or not whether that convention is broken.
What you describe as objective background constraints I would rather call the "environment" to avoid the term objective. I otherwise agree.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I agree that you can say that an agreed upon convention can be objectively said to be broken or not. In my eyes however, and more importantly, the convention itself is not reaching at some objective moral truth. You're back to a kind of subjective consensus about what is right or wrong.
Yes, I'm not a moral objectivist.
Were you going to vote "yes" before that, because you are an "objectivist" in some other sense ruled out by that definition? If so, what sense of "objectivist" do you mean?
A strong one is one which we recognize it comes from the self and a weak one is one which we project where the moral system comes from.
Unfortunately, I don't believe in a fully natural objective morality.
No, we do different things with some of our desires than we do with language. Calling those desires 'moral's is a linguistic event. It's you talking to me at the moment, It's a social interaction and so it has to involve only social meanings for us to be able to communicate.
Quoting Dawnstorm
I agree with you here once the definitions are sorted out, but I was actually asking about the definition in the first place. You gave the example of someone who's actions do not chime with modern society's moral, but whom you accept is "following their own moral compass". what I was asking was how you knew then that it was a 'moral' compass he was following. He's clearly following some objectives, why have you attached the term 'moral' to them? IF you're not going to use the public definition of what sort of objectives are 'moral' ones, then why use the word at all? What differentiates 'moral' objectives from just any old objective?
The answer for me is that society has labelled certain types of objective 'moral' ones, just like it's labelled certain wavelengths of light 'blue'. We don't get to just choose our own wavelengths to call 'blue', We don't get to just choose our own objectives to call 'moral'.
Quoting Dawnstorm
I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but I'll have a go at answering it.
The term 'blue' is a publicly defined term, we learn what things are 'blue' as we grow up by using the word more or less successfully. No amount of learning can tell us where 'purple' becomes 'blue' or where 'blue' becomes 'turquoise'. This is because those parameters were never set. There's no right answer. Society's fluid use of the term is what determines it's meaning (that it the truth-maker, or arbiter of it), and society's fluid use of the term hasn't given a judgement on the matter, so there is no right answer.
Which types of objective (or characteristic, or behaviour) are 'moral' ones is determined by society's fluid use of the term in communication. No amount of learning can tell us where ambiguous or disputed objectives become 'moral'. This is because the parameters were never set in that much detail. Some people call abortion 'moral', some call it 'immoral'. They all understand one another within their language communities, so both are right. No one calls hitting old ladies 'moral' (at least no fluidly communicating language community does), so hitting old ladies is not 'moral'.
None of this has any bearing whatsoever on what I want to get other people to do or allow me to to do. I am not dictated to by the meaning of the word (nor is anyone else). I might use it's rhetorical power to add persuasiveness to my argument, but that would be nothing but rhetoric. If the entire world got together and told me that what I wanted was called 'flurb', it wouldn't make any difference at all to whether I wanted it.
Okay, after around 1 1/2 hours of trying to puzzle out this paragraph, I think I might actually start to understand where you come from. Is you take on this issue derived from or at least compatible with Skinner's Behaviourism? How public events teach us to tease apart a holistic private experience into lingistic concepts.
When I hear "linguistic" my linguistics side takes over, so I was constantly looking in the wrong direction (if I'm right here).
Quoting Isaac
The way I use "moral" it's more akin to "colour" than to "blue". "moral" =/= "morally good".
I know you'd like a definition from me, but there a lot of things I haven't figured out yet, and I have no "research goal" to guide a provisional one. For example, I've hinted in this thread that I think psychopaths can't act morally, but I'm not actually sure I really think that (for example: does morality necessitate perspective taking, or is a consequentialist approach sufficient?). As a result, I may be inconsistent across posts. Were I to attempt a definition at this point, the problem would get worse.
Quoting Isaac
I disagree with nothing you said in the following paragraphs. I had the impression that you're taking the public sphere for granted, as if it weren't made up of lots of private experiences we face in behavioural aggregate. But if my Skinner epiphany is in any way getting me closer to your perspective, I have a direction to think in now. I'll need to let this settle for a while.
Well. Most people have given up on my paragraphs in the time it takes them to read the words (if not before), so I'm charmed by your persistence...
Quoting Dawnstorm
In the sense of your last sentence, yes. I don't agree with Skinner's behaviourism in general, but the idea here is that all rationalisation of our mental states and activities is mediated through socially defined parameters. There was an excellent thread a while back on Lisa Feldman Barrett's way of looking at emotions as socially mediated categories for raw affects. My view is more closely aligned with hers.
I just don't think it's possible to privately interpret one's mental states to an extent where one can form propositions about them without recourse to social modes of interpretation. So for me to say that my hitting old ladies is moral would require that I am first fluent in the social activity of interpreting some behaviours as 'moral' ones. This is an activity like any other, they do not arrive pre-labelled. The act of labelling (and this goes for any of our thoughts) is a piece of socially learnt behaviour. If I know how to ride a bike, I cannot claim falling off is doing so, even if it's what I intended to do. Labelling the sort of desire which motivates people to hit old ladies a 'moral' one is just doing the labelling wrong. No different to moving the bishop perpendicularly. Nothing stopping you, but it's just not chess anymore if you do.
Quoting Dawnstorm
I've sometimes used 'moral' as shorthand for 'morally good' so hopefully this shouldn't get in the way too much.
Thanks for the pointer. I'll check it out when I have the time and inclination.
Quoting Isaac
I'd agree to this. Just to be sure: I don't think of "society vs. person" as a dualism. Society is the result of lots of people interacting (when looked at from below), and "identity" (In a more basic sense than current identity politcs would have it) is a process of positioning yourself (when looked at from above). Because of this, I'd have to add that it's also impossible that social structures and artefacts exist if they're not being enacted/interpreted by knowledgable agents. There's something reflexive going on here.
When I convince you that the earth is flat, this is just as wrong as it was before. When I convince you that hitting old ladies is morally good, that's still wrong, but not in the same way. The entire system has just shifted a little to it being right. (Of course, it's very, very hard to convince people to begin with, and because of that it's unlikely to ever gain "critical mass", even in a subculure.) It's very likely always going to be wrong. But the dynamics involved make change possible in principle.
Quoting Isaac
So have I. It's hard to shed everyday usage.
Yes. That's it. Just like the word 'bully' (which used to mean something more like 'lover'). It would have been wrong to use it to mean 'someone who beats up weaker people' back then, but it's right to now. Things have to reach, as you say, a critical mass. That's where I think basic biological functions come in. There's certain positions which are unlikely to reach the required critical mass. At least not for any length of time. Although, looking at the world today l'm becoming more doubtful.
The key thing is we're talking about convincing people to do X, and to call it 'moral' despite that being wrong. Just like the first person to sincerely use 'bully' to mean more like our current negative connotation was actually using the word wrongly. They didn't just have a difference of opinion about what it meant, they knew exactly what it meant and were deliberately using it wrongly for some effect. Over time they'd have a small language group in which their idiosyncratic meaning would be 'right', though still 'wrong' elsewhere. Eventually the whole community of language users adopts the new meaning.
This may happen with hitting old ladies, but it hasn't yet, and so our violent geriophobe is 'wrong' to interpret his urges as 'moral'.
As Dawnstorm has pointed out, there are two aspects to moral valuation. There is the moral activity: judging the rightness and wrongness of actions and situations, actual and hypothetical. And then there are moral valuations that come as a result, which we often think of as properties of the things that we evaluate: whether they are good, bad or neutral (roughly speaking). I get the impression that you are mixing up these two aspects, perhaps deliberately, because you think of them in the same key.
When I was saying that morality is a "natural kind," I was talking about the activity of moral valuation: the having of pro and con attitudes, the influence that these attitudes exert on emotions, decisions, and social dynamics. This activity is fairly recognizable and relatable, so I don't think that it is subject to Wittgenstein's private language argument. I admit that, as you say, "all rationalisation of our mental states and activities is mediated through socially defined parameters." But although the boundaries are somewhat vague and mutable and culturally specific, and much can be made of uncertain relationships between morality and related categories like duty, social shame, etc., it is not completely arbitrary what gets grouped in the category of moral valuation. Nor is this category as mutable and capricious as moral vocabulary can be. Nor is it shaped by the same processes that shape the language (although there can be mutual influence between the two).
Quoting Isaac
I agree with this.
And I would say the same about so-called "objective morality." The language of "objective morality" is usually deployed as a kind of rhetorical cudgel, in lieu of banging the table. But thinking of this dispassionately, if I approve of something as morally right, and then someone assures me that it is not just my opinion, but the thing is objectively right, that wouldn't make it any more right in my eyes than it already is. And if someone tells me instead that it is objectively wrong - well, I would just disagree with whoever holds that opinion.
Sure, both the disposition of being in love and the associated behaviors and social context are blurry. But so are all things psychological and social.
Quoting SophistiCat
Quoting fdrake
I agree that acting or failing to act in accordance with one's moral dispositions is itself subject to moral valuation. ("I did as I thought should have done - Hooray!" "That which I should have done I did not do") But that comes in addition to the original disposition.
So, to clarify you seem to be saying that there's a mental activity of evaluating behaviours, and that the group we call 'moral behaviours' is a natural grouping within this, and that the values we give ('good', 'bad') are feelings toward these behaviours, themselves naturally grouped? We then put labels on these natural groups to talk about them and in doing so we may expose a little fuzziness around the edges, but there's still a core where the world dictates to us what the groupings are, not the other way around.
Is that roughly right? If so, I think I'd probably agree, but with a couple of very large caveats.
The first you've already said - "The boundaries are somewhat vague and mutable and culturally specific, and much can be made of uncertain relationships between morality and related categories like duty, social shame, etc.,". I think this is important because it's generally the boundaries where moral disputes are.
The second would be that there would have to be groups of evaluating behaviours, not one. I referred to it as such above, but I don't think you did, so I'm not sure what your thinking is here. Neurologically, it's getting increasingly difficult to make the argument that moral evaluation is a single process, it's almost certainly composed of several processes involving different parts of the brain in different contexts. This matters because if you want to argue that the groups we evaluate these behaviours into are themselves natural kinds, you have to have a different pair of natural kinds corresponding to 'good' and 'bad' for each process because the results are different in each case.
Say for example processing in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex will be the emotional response to options (patients with severe damage to this region consistently give purely utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, no emotional content even though they might be emotional in other ways). The result, therefore will be some emotional content which we will have to sort (say feel warm and cosy about it='good', feel sickened by it='bad'). But then another dilemma might involve more some area like the superior temporal sulcus which is involved in processing social perception. That might output - will be perceived negatively by my social group='bad', will be perceived positively by my social group='good'. I won't go on, but other areas might produce paired results like disgusting/attractive, salient to me/not salient to me, affects a valued member of my group/affects an outsider, conflicts with a learnt rule/complies with a learnt rule...
I don't think there's necessarily a problem with saying there are natural kinds for each of these groupings, just that it would be some job of work demonstrating the case.
I think we're closer here than it might seem. I said at the outset that I think there are two issues 1) what we call 'moral behaviour' - an language issue, and 2) what the reason might be for any similarity/difference we see in that language. You seem to be talking here about (2) - saying that the reason for the consistency in applying the term 'morally right' to certain behaviours, is partly that the biological function underpinning the speech act is tapping into some 'natural kinds'. ( the other part being the influence of culture, upbringing etc.). As I said, I'm inclined to agree with you here. We may differ over the relative extents of these influences, but we seem to agree on the fact they, together, explain the language terms dividing up the way they do.
The conclusion I draw, might be different though. My feeling is that as soon as we introduce a large quantity of biological function into the picture, then it becomes more proper to say of the extremes (say someone thinking hitting old ladies is morally 'right') that they are either damaged, or mistaken about the language. There's either something wrong with their brain - it's not assigning behaviours to the usual 'natural kind' (ie not working properly), or there's something wrong with their understanding of the language - they're describing what they get a kick out of doing and that's not the group of things we call 'moral', we call that group something else).
All of which is an interesting aside... The most important thing here, I think, is
Quoting SophistiCat
This is what riles me about moral objectivism too. It takes an incredibly complex process involving an almost impossible to disentangle web of emotion, socialisation, indoctrination, theory of mind, tribalism and self-identity and claims that some simple process can deliver the 'correct' answer better than the ones we already use. It's like throwing away most of the world fastest and most complex supercomputer (the human brain) and saying "we don't need all that, we can do this just with one small section at the front that deals with predicate logic". Why would anyone want to do that?... Rhetorical gain to help push an agenda.
I must say, you have really good arguments.....but a bigger really....is the fact that the vast majority of humanity to whom abstract concepts apply, very seldom, if ever, think of themselves as possessing supercomputers between their ears. That doesn’t mean they don’t have one, but if they don’t think of it that way, it is irrelevant to them what exactly that 7lbs of wetware actually does for them. Even if that glutinous mass is technically responsible for everything a human does, if it isn’t readily apparent as such, he should be forgiven for “listening” to that which is first, foremost and always, apparent to him.
Besides, given that cognitive neuroscience in general has limited access to fundamental brain mechanics, otherwise that which seems to the average smuck to stand as his personal identity, or “subjectivity”, is perfectly explainable from the predicates of natural law, and given that, by whichever name one wishes to bestow upon it, the otherwise competent human thinks for himself by means of some logically describable methodology of his own invention that has nothing whatsoever to do with brain mechanics at all, I think it more apropos that humans in general don’t throw away their supercomputers as much as that supercomputer is, for all intents and purposes, hidden from them.
Quoting Isaac
Been that way for all recorded human history, right? If there’s something inherently wrong with that kind of procedure, why haven’t we evolved out of it naturally, or, found a way to harness the supercomputer such that rhetoric and logical syllogisms and whatnot, loose their respective powers? In effect, why do we still think the same way we always have, insofar as our own brains don’t have any affect on us, by means of which we know it as such?
When you go to catch a ball do you 'do the maths' or do you just put your hand where you 'feel' the ball is going to end up? I'd say people listen to what their sub-conscious is telling them all the time. The artifice, in my opinion, is pretending otherwise.
Quoting Mww
I'm not quite sure what power you think logical syllogisms have here. I can't think of a single syllogism that describes any real life moral dilemma accurately. If you're asking why rhetoric works, that's much more simple to offer an answer for. The brain is the most calorie rich organ, doesn't matter much now, but it did in our past. It's simply more efficient to trust someone else to have worked a thing out than it is to work it out yourself, the majority are unlikely to be wrong. so long as one or two people in a tribe don't act this way, the tribe prospers as most of them have not had to commit to the calorie intensive work of calculating everything from scratch. Skip forward a few thousand years, we no longer have any means of knowing who to trust, we scramble about for clues as to who's in 'our gang' and rhetorical expressions often provide these clues.
If by “listen” it is meant to exhibit conscious attention, then by definition it is impossible to pay attention to that which is sub-conscious.
—————
Quoting Isaac
If I go by “feel”, why would I ever need to look? While the coordination part, synonymous with the brain “doing the math”, of the hand-eye coordination system may be autonomic, the eye part is certainly a conscious activity, which implies I put my hand where my brain informs me of my best chance of catch success. Something needs to tell the brain what “math” to do.
I never trust my feel for the ball; I use my eye and trust my brain.
———-
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Isn’t that a syllogism? Got your major, got your minor, got your conclusion. And by so doing, didn’t you at the same time, think to describe all moral dilemmas in general, even if not so much “any real-life moral dilemma” in particular?
———-
Quoting Isaac
True enough, yet we chastise others for argumentum ab auctoritate in dialectics, and argumentum ad verecundiam in the case of actions.
Anyway....thanks.
Well, this assumes that the determination of a "natural kind" is to be made by means of a reduction to the neurological framework and then checking whether the phenomenology can be accounted for by a single process or by a number of heterogeneous processes. There is some attraction in this approach, but it is debatable. I was actually thinking more in terms of phenomenology and its "folk" classification, which is more vague and squishy. But that's OK, I am not making an argument for some sharp Platonic ontology of moral phenomena.
Interesting research though.
Quoting Isaac
If someone says that he gets a kick out of hitting old ladies, but by "getting a kick out of smth" he actually means moral aversion (in the usual sense), then that is a language issue. If he is actually getting a kick out of it (in the usual sense), and no moral aversion, then I am still not sure what language has got to do with it.
Quoting Isaac
You make it sound like there is a 'correct' answer to be found, and our natural moral sense is just better at figuring it out than a rationally constructed ethical system. For that to be the case, there has to be an independently defined problem and an independent means of evaluating the fitness of the solution to the problem. But here is the thing: if you reject moral objectivism, then it follows that moral problems are framed by the very moral agent that has to solve them, and the same agent then has to evaluate the fitness of the solution. Is the answer actually 'correct'? Such question doesn't even make sense in the absence of an objective standard. Whatever answer you converge upon has to be the right answer (as far as you know), because rightness and wrongness are normative metrics, and a normative evaluation is exactly what you do when you answer moral questions.
I look at it from a somewhat different angle. If you are a naturalist about morality: no God's laws or other supernatural impositions - and many proponents of objective morality are naturalists - then why would you even suppose that for something as complex and messy as natural moral landscape appears to be, the Enlightenment-age paradigm of a simple, rational, law-driven system would be a good fit? A much better paradigm would be something equally complex and messy and organic - biology, neurology, psychology, sociology.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was that much of our brain's processing power is dedicated to mundane subconscious tasks like visual processing and motion control. Even when it comes to more conscious activity, much of it would be common to all people: language, social interactions. The more intellectually rarefied activities that we value so much don't occupy a proportionate place in the brain's architecture and power budget.
One can pay attention to the result (which are made available to the conscious), without paying attention to the process by which they're derived.
Quoting Mww
Not at all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000284/
Quoting Mww
The intention was to provide a list, hence no "single" syllogism.
Quoting Mww
We do, but note these are not necessarily fallacies, they're contextual.
Just that getting a kick out of something is a feeling we already have terms for and those terms are not 'moral duty' or anything similar. It's simply that 'moral' is not a term used to describe the feeling of 'getting a kick out of something'. It's not different to someone using the word 'pain' to describe something which they show signs of thoroughly enjoying. If they're smiling and laughing and saying "again, again!" we'd rightly just assume they're using the word 'pain' wrong, not that they had a difference of opinion about the sorts of things that were painful.
Quoting SophistiCat
I don't think so. A system performing better than some other need not be aiming at anything objective. It could simply perform better for the person, but do so in each and every case (or even just the majority of cases). I am actually a naturalist as far as moral facts are concerned, but I don't think this makes me an objectivist for two reasons - 1) I don't see it as universally correct, just mostly so - it's a rule-of-thumb. 2) I don't see it as being the answer to a question. I don't think there's a question in the first place. Most of the time there is no "What should I do?", there is only that which you are going to do and then a post hoc rationalisation of that. My naturalism describe the state of affairs as they are, not how they 'ought' to be.
Quoting SophistiCat
Very close to the way I think about it, but with the caveats above, one is still only trying to find the best solution for oneself, not for all of mankind, but there are very strong biological tendencies which will mean that the best solution will be similar across populations. It would not even be unreasonable, I think, to use this similarity to suggest solutions to people who are struggling with the ones they have - just always with an acceptance of the complex and fuzzy nature of any trend one identifies.
That's right, but the theory is that it's enough to make a difference. It's hard to explain the importance of synaptic pruning in child development without such a model. Other theories are that we have limited bandwidth and so must compromise other mental tasks to carry out such calculations, or that such calculations are more prone to yield errors in a stable environment. I prefer the simpler energy budget approach, but the others have their merits and it may be a combination of all three.
The reason is simple: people vary in knowledge and analytic capability. So, the objective good or evil of an act has nothing to do with how a particular individual should evaluate it. Thus, there is a difference between the objective goodness of an act and a person's subjective culpability.
Acts are good to the extent that they realize our individual human potential, i.e., to the extent that they make us more fully actualized human beings. As human potentials vary, so does their realization.
Sorry, late for the party. It depends what you mean, of course. If you simply mean the rejection of objectively true moral statements as per the OP, yes, I am an atheist of moral objectivity. In my experience, objectivists tend to use the term perjoratively a la Chomsky to mean something like a moral Zelig or to suggest a moral nihilism. I am neither.
Btw... who is making the judgement is an important part of the context of the moral statement. You can have context-independence, or you can have observer-dependence. I don't think both is logical.
Every act of knowing is both subjective and objective. There is no knowing without both a knowing subject, and a known object. So, the idea of purely objective knowledge is an oxymoron. Precinding from Omniscience, before it is encountered by a subject, the object cannot be known, only intelligible -- only able to be known -- and so potential rather than actual with respect to human knowledge. When it is encountered, the subject attends to some notes of intelligibility to the exclusion of others. That is abstraction. In no instance is human knowledge exhaustive and "objective." It is always relational, partial and subjective as well as objective..
When we judge moral acts, we must take them out of context to some degree. Our brains simply lack the capacity to represent everything that might be relevant. So, we are forced to deal with abstractions, treating what seems most relevant to us -- not the situation in its full complexity. That is why Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that we most not expect the same degree of exactness in all sciences.
So, if you want to discuss human judgements about human acts, you must consider the limitations of human knowledge.
Not sure if you made a typo here, but objectivism as I mean it is context-DEpendent but observer-INdependent.
Quoting Dfpolis
Yes, I was going to suggest looking at how we assess the moral value of an action taken by an actor in a given scenario, how, in order to estimate that value, it would be necessary to understand the actor himself. And in truth this is attempted in most courts of law in most progressive countries,albeit filtered by narrative-building.
The moral character of an action really comes down to whether that action was made in good faith, in bad faith, without moral dimension, or nonetheless without moral consideration (e.g. neglect), all of which grants primacy not to the action but to the perspective of the actor. Which is harder for philosophers to deal with, both in terms of complexity and incompleteness, because there is a limit to how much we can understand. And I think this is why relativism is rejected on grounds of taste. We want hard and fast rules, but pragmatically we have to assess each case separately to the best of our abilities, accounting for the perspective of he or she we judge. Allowing this degree of context-dependence in a moral objective framework strikes me as a covert admission that morality is not objective, that if a particular judgment can depend on the actor, it must necessarily depend also on the judge who seeks to understand it.
No typo:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The ability to make logical inferences between normative statements, or indeed any statements, says nothing about those statements' truth values.
People who hold a view close to this (@Isaac) tend to be truth-deflationist:
without circularity.
While I agree with most of what you say, I think this conclusion is unjustified. Acts can be objectively good and evil, even though we can't know the situation exhaustively. In other words, we need to consider two distinct, but related factors: the objective act, and the culpability of its agent(s). Objectively, acts further or inhibit the realization of our human potential (aka sel-realization) and that is the basis of traditional natural law ethics. Nevertheless, even the most informed and best intentioned human, can't know the situation exhaustively. The best rule-based ethics seeks to mitigate culpability by providing a framework that usually yields good results. Still, ethical rules are not infallible, and the better one understand the objective situation, the better one's moral judgements can be -- and the greater our culpability if we choose evil.
Welcome to the forum.
If you don't hit the "reply" button or mention the author of the post you're responding to, the author of that post probably won't know you've replied to them.
Also: don't assume everyone here needs lessons in classical logic. It should be pretty clear when that sort of thing is called for.
Any theory that assumes that the act itself has moral character will inevitably generate absurd moral statements. It doesn't take long to think of examples.
Morality reflects the agent's intentionality, not directly the good or evil (privation of good) of acts. A choice is moral if the agent intends to do good and avoid evil. The good of acts is an ontological, not a moral, property. It does not depend on the act's relation to the agent effecting it.
I would be glad to discuss your counterexamples.
Good and evil are moral categories. They do not admit non-moral elements. But this is a semantic issue. Point being, pushing a child is not morally positive or negative, but depends on whether the intention is to push them into or away from traffic :) For an example of the absurdity of endowing acts with moral dimensions see, for instance, this thread: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7660/natural-evil-explained
It is immoral, however, to pass off a bad tire as a good tire, because now we have brought in an intentional element -- the intent to cheat or deceive. So, there is a relation between metaphysical goodness (how well a goal is implemented) and moral goodness. Most clearly, it is moral to will the advance the good of human self-realization, and immoral to will to oppose it -- for example by not providing what a child needs to flourish.
In your example, intrinsically, pushing is neither good nor bad, but whether it was intentional or not, the risk of being in traffic is objectively evil. So, the evil of the situation does not depend on one's intention. Rather, it is the culpability of the agent that depends on the intention. Maybe the goal is to save the child from an even worse danger, or maybe there is an intent to harm.
You are confused. I am not saying that good or bad acts have a moral dimension independently of the intent of the agent, just that they are objectively good or bad.
I don't think you know what you're saying. Yes, a tyre can be good or bad. But it can't be evil. What value you think pointing out that a tyre can be bad to the argument that it is moral actors who have moral qualities is beyond me. Are you just saying that other, non-moral qualities may be objective? No argument from me, but it's irrelevant.
They'Quoting Kenosha Kid
I made no such claim. We were not discussing subjective moral character, but whether good and evil can be objective. If you do something that makes the world more defective, like polluting the air or poisoning the water, that is objectively bad, regardless of your intentions; however, if you intended to do good, you are not culpable for the evil you caused.
When we say cancer is an evil, it is poetic. It is not literally evil. Poetry makes sense subjectively insofar as cancer feels like an evil done to us or loved ones. This does not imbue cancer with an objective property of 'evil'.
Yes, it is literally evil -- a privation of good health. Evil is not a thing, but the absence of a good that should be present.
Human acts are good or evil in the same way -- they advance our self-realization or inhibit it. Physical and moral evils are both privations of good -- of the full realization of whatever it is we are discussing. Some goods and evils are moral because they are due to free will, but that does not change the basic character of good as a realized perfection and evil as the absence of an appropriate perfection.
Even that is with respect to the host, not of cancer in and of itself. Evil is not defined as a privation of anything. It is defined in terms of immorality or wickedness.
When we look at examples of evil, we always see a privation of some perfection -- of good health, of justice, of compassion, of rights, etc. So, while you may use words as you wish, I prefer to analyze examples to understand what terms mean.
A "privation of some perfection" is, again, poetry. If, for instance, you were to take pleasure in the pain of someone you did not cause, no one and no thing is literally being deprived. One might say that an ideal is being lessened, but this has no meaning outside of a poetic sense. And while I like poetry, it is metaphor. Having established the metaphor as metaphor, one cannot also treat it as literal.
Cancer in and of itself is a mindless and inevitable consequence of terrestrial biology. It was not created with purpose, does not proceed with purpose, and knows nothing of harm. It is only with respect to someone it impacts that it takes on the quality of evil and only in a poetic sense. It is our arrogance and bias that says we do not deserve it, should not have it, are being deprived. 'It is unfair because it effects *me*.'
As I say, I don't object to the poetry, but it mustn't be then treated as a literal example of evil. If one wishes to speak of harm or privation in a literal sense, whether by evil or by accident, those words are already accurate. I find it intensely egomaniacal to believe that anything that harms one is evil, like a teenager throwing a tantrum because they do not get what they want, when they want, and hang the consequences. (You might infer correctly that I am blessed with two such teenagers :D )
No, it is neither "poetry" nor a metaphor. It is a literal claim. If you took pleasure in harm to others, you would lack the disposition to empathize proper to a social animal, which humans are. So, you would be a defective human being.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
No thing is evil in abstraction, for existence is a perfection, and so intrinsically good; however, cancer does not exist in abstraction, but only in organisms. In an organism it interferes with physiological processes, depriving the organism of its health. This privation is not poetic, but literal.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I am not saying cancer is a physical evil because people don't like it or have an adverse psychological reaction to it, but because it deprives their bodies of their proper function.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
If I confined the application of the term "evil" to things that harmed only myself, I might be ego-driven. Clearly, I am not doing that. I'm saying that any privation, anything not properly formed, any lack of proper perfection, is an instance of evil -- not necessarily moral evil, but ontological evil.
That is perfectly reasonable as a description of cause. I behave this because I lack, e.g. empathy. The act itself is not its own cause.
Quoting Dfpolis
Again, this is not a description of the thing, but of the impact of the thing on the sufferer. Also, were we to die of nothing else, we would die of cancer due to the small carcinogenic properties of the very oxygen essential to our life. Death is not evil unless life is; it is built into life. Cancer is a fact. Death is a fact. Describing such things as evils is precisely the adolescent temper tantrum I mentioned, nothing more than an inability to accept facts that don't happen to suit us. There is little that is more subjective.
I never implied that it was.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
So? The evil is still a privation -- the lack of a perfection in a human being.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I did not say that it was evil because it might kill us, but because it interferes with our physiology.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I am not having an emotional outburst, but presenting a reasoned analysis. So, please refrain from demeaning mischaracterizations.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
This is also incorrect. I, and most other people, accept the fact that bad things happen. I do not wish to continue if you are going to engage in further ad hominem attacks.
I wasn't describing your discourse but the general railing against death of mankind.
Quoting Dfpolis
Actually you did, but if you agree that a cause of a thing is not the thing itself, then you agree yours was an irrelevant point since the claim is that a thing like cancer is objectively evil in itself.
Quoting Dfpolis
But again this is meaningless poetics. It isn't based on fact. If we are designed to rely on carcinogenic substances to live, thus assuring eventual deterioration of health, then there is no meaningful perfection of human life that is deprived by this deterioration. That's not evil, it's just irrational, immature, arrogant, egotistical railing against our own nature's. Again, not crediting you with this feature: it seems to be a constant.
This makes no sense. Cancer is a physical evil because it, itself, is a privation of health.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
First, we're not designed to live on carcinogens. If we were, they wouldn't harm us. Second, the very fact that you call it a "deterioration," means that it is a lesser state. i.e. one in which some perfection is no longer present.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It is not a moral, but a physical evil.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It is neither immature nor ranting to call things by their proper names. You are confusing accurate reporting with an emotional reaction.
Not quite. We can understand, scientifically, the purposes of many things, aka teleology. We know that if you have a defective heart, your blood will not circulation will be in adequate. It is on this basis, that we decide on norms for heart function. There is no circularity here, just openness to reality
This makes no sense. Something cannot have a property in and of itself if that property depends on other properties of other things. If the ball is objectively red, it is so independent of the state of any observer. To say it is red because people with red-green colour blindness see it as such is not a statement of its objective properties.
Quoting Dfpolis
We are designed to breathe molecular oxygen which is a mild carcinogen.
Quoting Dfpolis
That can't seriously be your argument. So if I say "There is no God," do you then think there must be a God in order for him to not exist? Fun! I was describing the absence of a deterioration, not a presence.
Quoting Dfpolis
Correct. But not pertinent here.
Quoting MMusings
The earlier formulations are prohibitive, not compulsions. Yes, Jesus would have a masochist hurt others, but you could not reach that conclusion from the others except Jainism.
I didn't appreciate til now what a mental midget Jesus was. Everyone managed to get it right for centuries and he still fluffed it.
Good and evil are relational. It is the relation between what is and what is adequate that makes things good or bad. There is nothing bad about cancer cells growing in a petri dish, only cancer cells interfering with health are a physical evil.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I am surprised to find that you think we are designed at all.
We are not designed to live forever, we are designed to be born, flourish for a while, and die. In the course of dying, our health will decline, and that is a physical, but not a moral, evil. So, what point are you making?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I can make no sense of your objection. If God did not exist, we would not say His existence "deteriorated." To deteriorate is to become worse. In other words, something was better and has now lost its previous perfection.
Exactly. Ergo there is nothing objectively evil about cancer, only subjectively evil about my cancer or the cancer of a loved one, or my general reduced life expectancy because of the existence of cancer (immature railing against death).
Quoting Dfpolis
In the blind watchmaker sense :)
Quoting Dfpolis
That there is nothing 'evil' about it. It's merely a fact of life, without which we'd have nothing to complain about... Or with!
Quoting Dfpolis
I was saying that nothing deteriorated.
Quoting MMusings
Was that in reaction to anything specific? If you want to complain about the running of the forum and moderation, there is a Feedback forum, or you can flag specific posts for moderators' attention.
No. Quoting Kenosha Kid
The fact that it is relational does not make it subjectively dependent. Whether or not you like it, cancer cells in people deprive them of good health.
There is absolutely no basis in reality for Dawkin's view -- a discussion for another time,
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Evil is not about complaining, it is about objective inadequacy. As we grow old, our bodies become increasingly inadequate to support a healthy life. That is an objective fact, whether or not one is reconciled to it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
But you did. Don't pull a Trump and deny what is on the record.
One can make an argument by way of analogy for a kind of teleology inherent in homeostasis and biological adaptation, but this "teleology" does not possess any normativity on its own, without us attributing it to these features of the natural world.
True, but in this case it is. The fact that it frame-dependent does mean that it is not objective.
Quoting Dfpolis
What, evolution?
Quoting Dfpolis
This is a straw man and I think you know that.
Quoting Dfpolis
No disagreement. We grow old, we die. No 'evil' involved.
Quoting Dfpolis
Yeah, I confused myself. Nothing is deprived. Point being, there is no perfect human state of health that we can be deprived of by cancer. Perfection is good for poetry and theology, it has no place in reason. We're rotting from the second we slop out.
On the contrary, you cannot have a normative proposition with a positive truth value without a fact being implied.
One ought to help old folk cross roads implies that old folk exist, roads exist, old folk sometimes wish to cross roads, and, with or without assistance, old folk can cross roads, all of which are factual propositions.