Relative vs. objective morals
BlinkyLight
places, it makes more sense to me to start a single thread on the
subject. Paul and others, feel free to not respond to my other posts.
For purposes of this thread, I assume readers/posters agree that
actions can be labelled "right" or "wrong," i.e. that nihilism is
false.
Why Morals are Relative
The argument for moral relativism is essentially that morality exists
but there is no objective standard for it. Rather than simply argue
against objective morality, I will attempt to make a positive argument
for relativism.
Morality is relative because it corresponds to things such as beauty:
practically everyone agrees it exists, and as was pointed out on the
Middle East thread, everyone readily understands what is meant by
"good" and "evil," yet people have trouble defining it or agreeing on
a comprehensive standard for it. There are "good actions" in the
sense that there is "good music," "good art," etc. Everyone has an
opinion on which actions are right and which are wrong, just as
everyone has an opinion on whether a painting or musical composition
is good or bad. There is consensus to some extent: nearly everyone
agrees that sadism is bad, or that a toddler banging pots is bad
music; nearly everyone agrees that helping an elderly lady carry her
groceries is good, or that the Mona Lisa is good art. Yet there is
also widespread disagreement (abortion, captial punishment; rap,
country/western; modern art).
Also, we form our judgments of music, art and morality based on
reactions within ourselves. Some people may have ethical systems
founded primarly on emotional reactions (e.g. "I feel sorry for those
starving children, I'll donate money to Oxfam"), which are practically
subjective by definition. Others invent or decide on ethical
principles which "make sense to them" and build their individual
ethical systems from that (e.g. Steve Joyce's explanation of
humanism), yet those founding principles are either invented by the
individual or are something he/she learned and were ultimately
invented by another individual (as atheists, we presumably agree that
some person or group created the Bible and invented the moral rules in
it). (BTW, this is loosely based on the "thinking/feeling"
distinction from the Myers-Briggs test; I don't mean to knock either.
See http://keirsey.com/pumII/tf.html)
There is therefore reason for viewing morality as we do
music/art/beauty. People have strong opinions about all these things,
yet we have no justification for saying a person's view is flat-out,
absolutely wrong.
If Lisa prefers Elvis on velvet to Monet, some would say she has "bad
taste," but few if any people would go so far as to say, "There is an
objective standard of good art and Lisa has failed to follow it; her
choice is *wrong.*" While people often do make such statements about
morality, this can be attributed to the much greater personal and
emotional impact that morality has on people. Compare discussions of
music: in our culture musical taste is associated with people's
popularity and personal identity and hence discussions of music become
very emotional. Similarly, discussions of food usually don't become
emotional unless a food is somehow tied to a person's identity or
stature in society (e.g. "milk is for babies," or someone disparaging
an ethnic cuisine to someone else of that ethnicity).
Why Morals Aren't Objective
Morals aren't objective because there is no objective standard by
which we can determine right or wrong. We can propose that morals
that society reaches a consensus on are the objective standard by
which actions should be measured, yet not only do these agreed-on
morals change, there is often agreement by modern societies that
agreements reached by past societies were "very bad" (for instance,
the consensus of white societies of 200 years ago that people of other
races were not human or subhuman and could therefore be owned as
animals could be).
It could be the case that an objective standard exists but that we
simply aren't aware of it and can't determine what it is. If so, we
would still be justified in treating morality as relative, for the
standard would have no possible influence on us and we would still be
without justification in saying another person's morals were
absolutely right or wrong -- if we have no way of knowing what the
standard is, we have no way of comparing a moral to it and judging it.
I therefore propose that in order to fully support the claim of
objective morality, it must be shown that an objective standard exists
*and* that there's a way to determine what it is.
So far the only (secular) arguments I've seen for objective morals are
Paul's:
1. If there really is nothing to distinguish true moral claims from
false, that implies nihilism is correct, not relativism.
2. There are other kinds of claims that don't clearly correspond to
anything out in the universe, such as mathematical claims and
counterfactuals, that we
don't therefore treat as lacking truth values.
3. Moral statements are simply medical judgments. They correspond or
fail to correspond to the reality of which people out in the universe
are sick.
1. This is a strawman argument (using India's definition of
"strawman"). Relativism (or at least my version of it) doesn't state
that there is no way of distinguishing right from wrong; rather, all
existing ways are subjective. For instance, there is a way of
determining which color is the most beautiful: I look at all the
colors and form an opinion. That's a subjective standard. It *is* a
standard of something that exists and can be measured -- everyone
agrees that there are beautiful colors and ugly colors -- but the
standard is subjective. Another person will pick another color, and
there's no way for anyone to determine who is absolutely right or
wrong -- any given person can only add their opinion, which comes from
within the self and is thus subjective.
2. After doing a bit of looking up of "counterfactuals" I'm not sure
what Paul means in this context, but I will guess he means logical
statements that can only be debated in theory, not demonstrated in the
real world. It could be argued that logic is an abstraction of
principles which are demonstrable in real life. For instance, we
observe that a person cannot simultaneously have tea and no tea (at
least, not without having his/her logic synapses removed -- anyone
play the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game from the 80s?), hence
we have reason for establishing the law of non-contradiction. There's
no corresponding way of determing moral principles, though. We can
observe which things tend to cause pleasure or pain in humans, which
things increase or decrease their chances of survival, etc. yet we
have no basis for establishing "things which cause pain are morally
bad" or "things which increase survival are morally good" as objective
moral principles.
Similarly, mathematics is based on real-world observations, given a
definition of a counting system -- if I pick two apples, and later
pick three more, I get "five" when I count them. Even highly abstract
mathematics can be externally verified in a sense, when it's applied
to engineering and used to build machines which accomplish goals in
the real world, thanks to the predictions of math. But how do we
check the veracity of "capital punishment is right (or wrong)" or even
"hurting people is wrong," outside ourselves?
3. As I understand it, this amounts to, "The standard for determining
the correctness of a moral principle is to see if the people who
follow (or believe?) the principle are moral or immoral." This is
circular reasoning. How do you determine if someone is "morally
sick"? What's the standard for determining the standard?
Blink
Earle Jones
blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote:
> Rather than my arguing relative vs. objective morality in numerous
> places, it makes more sense to me to start a single thread on the
> subject.
[...clip to save bandwidth...]
*
Thanks, BlinkyLight, for your thoughtful posting.
When I think of morality and especially the standards of morality, I
tend to think of two overlapping circles, one circle includes the set of
all "Sins" and the other, the set of all "Crimes". (Mathematicians call
this a Venn diagram.)
If we (oversimply) define a sin as the breaking of a religious law, and
a crime as the breaking of a civil law, we can look at our overlapping
circles like this:
There is a significant overlap area that includes all acts that are both
sins and crimes: murder, robbery and the like. Outside the overlap
area but within the "Sin" circle are those acts that are sins, but not
crimes: Coveting, worshiping the wrong god, homosexuality, etc.
Outside the overlap area but within the "Crime" circle are those acts
that are crimes, but not sins: Owning slaves, killing "witches", etc.
This arrangement is not fixed in concrete. Both crimes and sins change
with the times. Blasphemy was at one time both a sin and a crime; today
(at least in the USA) it is only a sin.
My own ideas of morality tend to come from the Crime circle and not the
Sin circle. If I remember correctly, the old English Common Law, which
is the origin of law in the US and other countries, had a fairly simple
basis: It was divided into Common Law, which included those
"self-evident" (relative) truths, and Legislated Law, which was voted on
and written down (objective) truths.
First, in order for a crime to exist, there had to be a victim.
No victim -- no crime.
There were two simple principles: Don't hurt another person or his
property. From this principle comes what we call "tort" law, which
includes everything from trespass to murder.
The other principle was this: Do what you promise to do. From this
principle comes our contract law.
In my mind, morality has a large amount of commonality with law. First,
there must be a victim.
Is masturbation immoral? How do we answer that? Is there a victim?
Just offhand, I would say "No" -- Unless the act is excessive and begins
to affect the physical health of the individual.
Is blasphemy immoral? No victim, no crime. Is slave ownership immoral?
Absolutely yes, clearly there is a victim. Is coveting my neighbor's
property immoral? No.
As you see, I tend to align my ideas of morality with the law of the
land, which is more objective than relative, but not completely so.
Thanks for starting up this thread.
earle
*
"The Judaical and Christian theology show us a partial god who chooses
or rejects, who loves or hates, according to his caprice; in short, a
tyrant who plays with his creatures; who punishes in this world the
whole human species for the crimes of a single man; who predestines the
greater number of mortals to be his enemies, to the end that he may
punish them to all eternity, for having received from him the liberty of
declaring against him."
--Denis Diderot, Footnote to d'Holbach's "The System of Nature"
Russell Turpin
> Rather than my arguing relative vs. objective
> morality in numerous places, it makes more sense
> The argument for moral relativism is essentially
> that morality exists but there is no objective
> standard for it. Rather than simply argue against
> objective morality, I will attempt to make a
> positive argument for relativism.
People argue this back and forth tirelessly. Yet
I cannot recall ever seeing decent definitions of
when a moral (theory? claim? standard?) is relative
or objective. I suggest that that is the place to
begin, just to make sure that we are not confusing
ourselves by language.
Eric Pepke
> Rather than my arguing relative vs. objective morality in numerous
> places, it makes more sense to me to start a single thread on the
> subject. Paul and others, feel free to not respond to my other posts.
My problem with this is that subjective versus objective has been applied
to so many things and found wanting.
Take, for example, color. Color is certainly subjective, at least for
normally sighted people versus the umpteen versions of color blindness.
And even for normally sighted people, there's no way of telling that what
I see is the same as what you see. This is all terribly obvious, and no
doubt many of us were fascinated by these questions as children.
However, I can go out and buy a little device made by Pantone and point it
at something and get some numbers out of it. Then I can type these numbers
into my Mac and, if I have the Pantone color correction set up right, I can
print out something that looks to almost everybody damn near exactly like
what I pointed the Pantone wand at. I don't even have to use my eyeball to
compare colors. So, even this highly subjective thing called color has a lot
that is objective about it. It isn't even the wavelength of the light, which
you would assume to be objective--it makes use of a physiological color
perception model.
On the other hand, I can't go out and buy a Morals box. The only things I can
get about morals are gut feelings, a bunch of words, and some arguments. Some
are based on evolution or the Prisoner's dilemma or something that are in
favor of the idea that there is *some* objective morality but which don't
really explain very precisely what it is or why a lot of people differ about
it. Others are, well, a lot like yours.
As a result, what happens is that the terms "objective morality" and
"subjective morality" become too ill defined to have a meaningful debate about.
The person who argues against "subjective morality" invariably assumes a
different meaning from the one who argues in favor of it.
Even the term "morality" is too poorly defined. Take the people who think
that morals are objective because they evolved. Try to figure out what they
mean by morality. Usually, the answer will have something to do with murder
and theft. However, go out on the street and ask people to give you an
example of a moral transgression. Usually, it's going to have something to
do with lying or adultery or blow jobs or homosexuality. The very things
that people first think of when they hear the term "moral" are things which
people widely differ on the meaning of.
This is complicated by the fact that, while the terms are poorly defined,
most people seem to have such a strong black-and-white opinion about them
that it gives them the illusion of their being well defined. How can it
be ill defined when they know it, for sure? And so any statement seems
stronger, and possibly even is considered a personal affront, not because
what it says is well defined enough to be interpreted that way, but just
because of the ding-dong effect. As a result, supercilious wordplay takes
the place of any actual argumentation. ("I said 'objective,' not 'consensus.'
They're different, ya bozo!")
As such, of course, they're what Usenet is all about. Rotsa ruck actually
getting anywhere, though.
BlinkyLight
> People argue this back and forth tirelessly. Yet
> I cannot recall ever seeing decent definitions of
> when a moral (theory? claim? standard?) is relative
> or objective. I suggest that that is the place to
> begin, just to make sure that we are not confusing
> ourselves by language.
In my experience, any newsgroup/forum/mailing list with a membership
of more than one person is incapable of agreeing on the definition of
"tennis ball," let alone any word which is actually the subject of an
intellectual discussion. Nonetheless, you and Eric Pepke have a
point.
Rather than start a whole discussion of definitions, let me just say
what I'm looking for in starting this thread. What I'm interested in
determining is whether or not there is an Objective Standard of
morality out there. Not just any objective standard, for various
people have pointed out that a person or society can choose something
to be a goal or standard and evaluate moral decisions based on that
standard. But *the* Objective Standard -- one that, if it exists and
is knowable, would enable people to evaluate a moral statement and say
it's absolutely right or wrong, not simply wrong according to them or
wrong in that it fails to achieve an arbitrary goal. One reason I say
morals are relative is that I can't see how I can say that my views on
morality are definitely right or that someone else's views are
definitely right or wrong. If morals are truly objective, in the same
sense that mathematics is objective, then I want to know how I can
evaluate my moral claims and find out if they're right or not. If
there's no standard or procedure for determining this, then I ought to
continue treating morals as opinions.
In short, if I say "A is right" and someone else says "A is wrong," is
there a way to determine who's correct, just as in math class there's
a way to determine who got the right answer on the homework? Or
should we say, "Well, it seems that way to me, but that's my
opinion."?
Blink
M G
<snip introduction>
> For purposes of this thread, I assume readers/posters agree that
> actions can be labelled "right" or "wrong," i.e. that nihilism is
> false.
Our knowledge of what is harmful and beneficial to people is rooted in
"objective" facts. For example, it is harmful to be denied equal
opportunity to achieve goals or express thoughts because of gender or
race or creed.
Conduct which benefit people overall are "right" and those which harm
people overall are "wrong". This criteria for labeling actions as
right or wrong is thus rooted in our objective knowledge of what is
harmful or beneficial.
Morality is making the distinction between right and wrong in conduct.
Therefore, morality is rooted in objective knowledge.
> Why Morals are Relative
>
> The argument for moral relativism is essentially that morality exists
> but there is no objective standard for it. Rather than simply argue
> against objective morality, I will attempt to make a positive argument
> for relativism.
Relative means that there is a relationship to something else. The
opposite of relative is absolute. Objective means real, actual. The
opposite of objective is subjective. Relative and objective are not
in competition, they are distinct and unrelated. Relative and
objective is just as likely as relative and subjective. Making a
positive argument for relativism fails to imply objectivity.
> Morality is relative because it corresponds to things such as beauty:
> practically everyone agrees it exists, and as was pointed out on the
> Middle East thread, everyone readily understands what is meant by
> "good" and "evil," yet people have trouble defining it or agreeing on
> a comprehensive standard for it. There are "good actions" in the
> sense that there is "good music," "good art," etc. Everyone has an
> opinion on which actions are right and which are wrong, just as
> everyone has an opinion on whether a painting or musical composition
> is good or bad. There is consensus to some extent: nearly everyone
> agrees that sadism is bad, or that a toddler banging pots is bad
> music; nearly everyone agrees that helping an elderly lady carry her
> groceries is good, or that the Mona Lisa is good art. Yet there is
> also widespread disagreement (abortion, captial punishment; rap,
> country/western; modern art).
Morality is relative in the sense that it is context sensitive and
situational.
The good and/or bad impact of conduct depends on the context.
People trained in music theory can look at the written notes on staff
paper and make a determination as to whether what they are looking at
qualifies as noise or decent music. This is because good music
follows rules. Some combinations of notes clash and others don't and
music theory explains which is which and why. This are objective
facts. The written notes corresponding with the sounds from the
toddler banging pots are noise because the sounds are dissonant and
without melody, harmony, or rythem and these things all have tangible
properties that can be factually (objectively) identified. Think of a
book with random letters and spaces and periods. Just looking at it
you know it isn't a good book because it doesn't form words or
sentences or paragraphs. There is no syntax or grammer. This is
objectively determinable. Morality is like this too.
Between the extremes of noise and music, novels and random letters,
virtuous and wicked, there can be much disagreement of what is better
or worse because not everyone is adept at making finer distinctions,
or because there is uncertainty in the impact of conduct, or because
there is subjectivity in weighing the harm relative to the benefit,
not because these more ambiguous or difficult choices are not rooted
in something objective. Objectivity is not absent simply by virtue of
disagreement.
'This versus that' (objective vs subjective, relative vs. absolute)
questions can be resolved at least three ways:
1) It is all this and none that.
2) 100%=%this+%that, %this>0, %that>0.
3) It is an interdependent combination of this and that. Percentages
cannot be assigned to this and that.
You seem to be taking the approach that it can only be resolved by 1).
In fact moral decision making is too complicated to fit resolution
method 1). "comprehensive standard" or "definition" is not needed to
resolve the question of something's relative/absolute or
objective/subjective nature. On the contrary, to determine if
something has an objective basis one needs only to identify the a
common criteria that roots the concept in real things. Morality is
rooted in harm and benefit to people which is real and thus has an
objective basis.
> Also, we form our judgments of music, art and morality based on
> reactions within ourselves. Some people may have ethical systems
> founded primarly on emotional reactions (e.g. "I feel sorry for those
> starving children, I'll donate money to Oxfam"), which are practically
> subjective by definition. Others invent or decide on ethical
> principles which "make sense to them" and build their individual
> ethical systems from that (e.g. Steve Joyce's explanation of
> humanism), yet those founding principles are either invented by the
> individual or are something he/she learned and were ultimately
> invented by another individual (as atheists, we presumably agree that
> some person or group created the Bible and invented the moral rules in
> it). (BTW, this is loosely based on the "thinking/feeling"
> distinction from the Myers-Briggs test; I don't mean to knock either.
> See http://keirsey.com/pumII/tf.html)
Emotional reactions are not subjective by definition. On the
contrary, feelings of hunger, for example, are rooted in not consuming
adequate food which is a real fact and thus objective. If someone
persistently fails to feel hungry when re has not consumed adequate
food or conversely, if someone is persistently hungry even when re has
consumed more than enough food, then that person has a defect. This
is objective, not subjective.
Moral principles are derived from experience and logic. Moral
principles invented with no basis in real experience and logic are
almost guaranteed to be wrong just like a book composed of random
letters, spaces, and periods is almost guaranteed to be bad. The more
the moral principle comports with experience and logic the more likely
it is to be a good moral principle.
> There is therefore reason for viewing morality as we do
> music/art/beauty. People have strong opinions about all these things,
> yet we have no justification for saying a person's view is flat-out,
> absolutely wrong.
Sure we have justification. Someone says physically injuring people
as recreation is moral and you cannot say re is flat-out wrong? Is
injuring people beneficial or harmful to people? You cannot say
because this is too subjective? You sound nihilistic to me.
> If Lisa prefers Elvis on velvet to Monet, some would say she has "bad
> taste," but few if any people would go so far as to say, "There is an
> objective standard of good art and Lisa has failed to follow it; her
> choice is *wrong.*" While people often do make such statements about
> morality, this can be attributed to the much greater personal and
> emotional impact that morality has on people. Compare discussions of
> music: in our culture musical taste is associated with people's
> popularity and personal identity and hence discussions of music become
> very emotional. Similarly, discussions of food usually don't become
> emotional unless a food is somehow tied to a person's identity or
> stature in society (e.g. "milk is for babies," or someone disparaging
> an ethnic cuisine to someone else of that ethnicity).
People make such statements about morality because harm and benefit to
people is objectively determinable. Insulting people can suggest
ill-will which tends to correleate with a proclativity for harmful
conduct. People are sensitive to this because being oblivious to it
tended to result in failure to pass on one's genes to the future
generations.
> Why Morals Aren't Objective
>
> Morals aren't objective because there is no objective standard by
> which we can determine right or wrong. We can propose that morals
> that society reaches a consensus on are the objective standard by
> which actions should be measured, yet not only do these agreed-on
> morals change, there is often agreement by modern societies that
> agreements reached by past societies were "very bad" (for instance,
> the consensus of white societies of 200 years ago that people of other
> races were not human or subhuman and could therefore be owned as
> animals could be).
There obviously is exactly such an objective standard: Harm and
benefit. Morals are thus meta-consensus: A society can agree to
conduct that is immoral. Indeed, there can be some incentive for
societal consesus to be immoral towards distinct minorities within
their society or towards other societies.
> It could be the case that an objective standard exists but that we
> simply aren't aware of it and can't determine what it is. If so, we
> would still be justified in treating morality as relative, for the
> standard would have no possible influence on us and we would still be
> without justification in saying another person's morals were
> absolutely right or wrong -- if we have no way of knowing what the
> standard is, we have no way of comparing a moral to it and judging it.
> I therefore propose that in order to fully support the claim of
> objective morality, it must be shown that an objective standard exists
> *and* that there's a way to determine what it is.
We are aware of what is harmful and beneficial to ourselves and
others. On this basis we have justification for judging and saying
another person's conduct is morally flawed. Of course, weighing
multiple competing harms and benefits, evaluating the probablity of
various outcomes, and the like are at least partly subjective.
Morality is not 100% objective. Properly understood, it is
objectively rooted with subjective elements.
> So far the only (secular) arguments I've seen for objective morals are
> Paul's:
<cut this>
> Blink
Tony Griffin
> When I think of morality and especially the standards of morality, I
> tend to think of two overlapping circles, one circle includes the set of
> all "Sins" and the other, the set of all "Crimes". (Mathematicians call
> this a Venn diagram.)
>
> If we (oversimply) define a sin as the breaking of a religious law, and
> a crime as the breaking of a civil law, we can look at our overlapping
> circles like this:
It gets a bit more interesting if you add another circle, labelled "really wrong
things". How you define "really" here goes to the subject matter of this thread,
but for any given person its going to have a strong correspondence with his own
"gut feelings".
So, you will have things that are "sins" in the eyes of some religion, those
that are "crimes" according to some system of law, and those that are "really
wrong". I'll bet that for just about everyone there will be some things in each
section of the Venn diagram. The only exception I can think of is the religious
fundie that believes "religious law" equates exactly to "really wrong" (because
God determines right and wrong). Even these should understand that the two
categories are congruent, rather than being the same thing.
Tony
Russell Turpin
> In my experience, any newsgroup/forum/mailing
> list with a membership of more than one person
> is incapable of agreeing on the definition of
I understand your concern. A lot of definitional
arguments are silly, in my opinion. If you want
to use "foo" in one way, and I want to use it
in a second way, all we have to do is keep track
of the two uses. There are even some standard
notations for distinguishing foo<1> from foo<2>.
That's nothing much to argue over, unless the
difference reveals something deeper.
This is your question, and I really don't have
a preferred sense of "objective" in this context.
My question isn't whether you're choosing the
"right" definition, but whether you can even make
sense of what the word means. That sounds more
accusatory than I intend. Lots of people talk
about "objective morality." But that doesn't
mean there is a real notion behind that phrase.
Its ubiquity may be more because of its use as a
rhetorical stick or political device than as
reference to a substantive concept.
> What I'm interested in determining is whether
> or not there is an Objective Standard of
> morality out there. Not just any objective
> standard, for various people have pointed out
> that a person or society can choose something
> to be a goal or standard and evaluate moral
> decisions based on that standard. But *the*
> Objective Standard -- one that, if it exists
> and is knowable, would enable people to evaluate
> a moral statement and say it's absolutely right
> or wrong ..
Well, yeah, this is why the stick is wielded,
rhetorically. People want a way to say "my moral
outlook is the RIGHT moral outlook, and the hell
with yours!"
But. There is this little problem. You have said
what you want an "objective morality" to do. And
I think it conforms to what most people want an
"objective morality" to do. But you still haven't
defined what "objective" means, except to bring
in another and similar term, "absolute."
Of course, a fair response is that you are defining
an objective morality just to be one that does what
you describe, that let's one person say "dammit, MY
morality is the RIGHT one." That can serve as a
definition as much as anything. The question then
becomes: What enables this? And the answer is
pretty obvious. All it takes is the ego to say it.
If your ego isn't big enough, if you don't have
enough cojones or hubris, then you have to invent
a god -- or better, The God -- to carry your
absolute morality. The historical trump card is to
kill of the people who have a different god and
different objective morality.
> In short, if I say "A is right" and someone else
> says "A is wrong," is there a way to determine
> who's correct, just as in math class there's
> a way to determine who got the right answer on
> the homework?
But it can't be in the same way. If it were in
the same way, then morality would be purely a
matter of logic, a part of mathematics. It's also
not empirical. So a morality CANNOT be correct
the way the Pythagorean theorem or the Archimides
principle is correct. So now there is one more
term that needs definition in this context, along
with "absolute" and "objective."
Tony Griffin
[Snipped for brevity, I am replying to your whole post]
> We are aware of what is harmful and beneficial to ourselves and
> others. On this basis we have justification for judging and saying
> another person's conduct is morally flawed. Of course, weighing
> multiple competing harms and benefits, evaluating the probablity of
> various outcomes, and the like are at least partly subjective.
> Morality is not 100% objective. Properly understood, it is
> objectively rooted with subjective elements.
Interesting, I would say close to the reverse: morality is subjectively rooted
and just about totally objective once the roots are established.
First, I need to make it clear what I mean by "subjective" in this context. It
can be argued (I think you did) that our thoughts and feelings are objective
because they are effectively the functioning of our brains, endocrine systems,
and so on. Given this, all morality is objective, as it can certainly be
determined by a correct analysis (currently beyond our ability) of our brains,
and whatever other bodily parts contribute to our thoughts and feelings. Looked
at in this way, morality would be objective even if everyone had a different set
of morals.
This, however, is not what I mean by subjective. Something is subjective by my
definition if it is determined solely by our thoughts and emotions.
Thus, we determine what is good and bad subjectively. Once this process is
complete, morality is indeed objective. It is the practical rules that we
formulate in an attempt to maximise what we have determined to be good, and
minimise what we have determined to be bad. It is quite objective in that it can
be measured, in theory at least if not always in practice, by observing how well
these objectives are attained.
Your example of harm and benefit as the root standard of morality I would
counter by suggesting that the *idea* that harm is bad and and benefit good is
in itself subjectively determined. Thus there is a root more basic than your
roots. :)
Tony
John Secker
<ma...@tidalwave.net> writes
>> For purposes of this thread, I assume readers/posters agree that
>> actions can be labelled "right" or "wrong," i.e. that nihilism is
>> false.
>
>Our knowledge of what is harmful and beneficial to people is rooted in
>"objective" facts. For example, it is harmful to be denied equal
>opportunity to achieve goals or express thoughts because of gender or
>race or creed.
>
many people in the past, and indeed many even today, would disagree with
this in particular instances.
>Conduct which benefit people overall are "right" and those which harm
>people overall are "wrong".
> This criteria for labeling actions as
>right or wrong is thus rooted in our objective knowledge of what is
>harmful or beneficial.
>
knowledge, not even a broad consensus in many cases.
>Emotional reactions are not subjective by definition. On the
>contrary, feelings of hunger, for example, are rooted in not consuming
>adequate food which is a real fact and thus objective.
>> There is therefore reason for viewing morality as we do
>> music/art/beauty. People have strong opinions about all these things,
>> yet we have no justification for saying a person's view is flat-out,
>> absolutely wrong.
>
>Sure we have justification. Someone says physically injuring people
>as recreation is moral and you cannot say re is flat-out wrong? Is
>injuring people beneficial or harmful to people? You cannot say
>because this is too subjective? You sound nihilistic to me.
>
You sound like someone who has just invented a strawman to me.
--
John Secker
M G
> M G wrote:
>
> [Snipped for brevity, I am replying to your whole post]
>
> > We are aware of what is harmful and beneficial to ourselves and
> > others. On this basis we have justification for judging and saying
> > another person's conduct is morally flawed. Of course, weighing
> > multiple competing harms and benefits, evaluating the probablity of
> > various outcomes, and the like are at least partly subjective.
> > Morality is not 100% objective. Properly understood, it is
> > objectively rooted with subjective elements.
>
> Interesting, I would say close to the reverse: morality is subjectively rooted
> and just about totally objective once the roots are established.
> First, I need to make it clear what I mean by "subjective" in this context. It
> can be argued (I think you did) that our thoughts and feelings are objective
> because they are effectively the functioning of our brains, endocrine systems,
> and so on.
That is not my argument, although the indivisibility of the human
physical, emotional spheres has signficance regarded the domain of
morality. Morality isn't confined to only one of these domains, it
must encompass all three because they are interelated.
My argument is that our feelings have an objective basis when they
relate to something objective regarding our welfare. Thus feelings of
hunger are objectively rooted because this feeling relates to our need
for food. I claim morality is objectively rooted because (properly
understood) it relates to our objective physical, mental and emotional
welfare much like hunger relates to our objective physical welfare.
There are obvious differences between hunger and morality. One
difference is that hunger is an individual feeling whereas morality is
a social concept that generalizes from the individual to humanity as a
group (and arguably to a lesser and varying extent from humanity to
other living things but lets not complicate this discussion and lose
our focus). But these differences are unrelated to, and therefore do
not undermine, the objectivity vs. subjectivity analogy between hunger
and morality.
> Given this, all morality is objective, as it can certainly be determined by a
> correct analysis (currently beyond our ability) of our brains, and whatever
> other bodily parts contribute to our thoughts and feelings. Looked
> at in this way, morality would be objective even if everyone had a different
> set of morals.
That is not my argument.
> This, however, is not what I mean by subjective. Something is subjective by
> my definition if it is determined solely by our thoughts and emotions.
Again, I claim that morality, properly understood, is determined by
our experience and logic and rooted objectively in harm and benefit to
people.
So your definition of subjective is consistent with my claim.
> Thus, we determine what is good and bad subjectively.
There are at least two kinds of good and bad, one kind relates
primarily to human welfare and the other kind primarily to subjective
personal preference. Choosing music is not a moral decision (the
lyrics may be a moral issue, but not the music itself). You may
decide what music is good and bad subjectively, but that doesn't
generalize to how you determine good and bad in all situations.
Otherwise you would live in some fantasy land disconnected from
reality. Is starving good or bad? If you cannot decide, then does
that mean you have trouble choosing whether or not to eat? Morality,
properly understood, pertains to the human welfare kind of good and
bad, not the personal preference kind, and that is how it is
objectively rooted.
> Once this process is complete, morality is indeed objective. It is the
> practical rules that we formulate in an attempt to maximise what we have
> determined to be good, and minimise what we have determined to be bad. It is
> quite objective in that it can be measured, in theory at least if not always
> in practice, by observing how well these objectives are attained.
I disagree 100%. If you start with garbage instead of good or bad
then you end up with garbage, not morality. It is garbage in, garbage
out. Morality is first and foremost based on correct concepts of good
and bad as it relates to human welfare which is determined by our
experience. The logic then translates this identification of harm and
benefit into procedures, methods, rules to avoid the harm (or promote
the good). If the logic is faulty then so is the morality. If the
identification of the good and bad is incorrect then the morality is
incorrect. It is not a "hard" science, but it doesn't have to be to
have experiential and logical basis.
> Your example of harm and benefit as the root standard of morality I would
> counter by suggesting that the *idea* that harm is bad and and benefit good
> is in itself subjectively determined. Thus there is a root more basic than
> your roots. :)
If you think that declaring harm to be bad and benefit to be good is
subjective then it makes must make no difference to you whether you
are harmed or benefited. I don't believe that you think it makes no
difference. If you really think it makes no difference, be my guest
and make no effort to avoid self-harm or seek self-benefit, just don't
expect the rest of us to adopt your masochism.
Ideas are not automatically subjective just because they are ideas
anymore then feelings are automatically subjective because they are
feelings. This is because ideas and feelings are not automatically
_solely_ determined by the idea and feeling. The idea or feeling can
be derived from, and thus rooted in, something real or true. We are
real, our needs our real, and harm and benefit is real.
Tony Griffin
> I disagree 100%. If you start with garbage instead of good or bad
> then you end up with garbage, not morality. It is garbage in, garbage
> out. Morality is first and foremost based on correct concepts of good
> and bad as it relates to human welfare which is determined by our
> experience. The logic then translates this identification of harm and
> benefit into procedures, methods, rules to avoid the harm (or promote
> the good). If the logic is faulty then so is the morality. If the
> identification of the good and bad is incorrect then the morality is
> incorrect. It is not a "hard" science, but it doesn't have to be to
> have experiential and logical basis.
In order to decide that a given person's ideas of good and bad are garbage and
another's is correct, you need other criteria to determine which is which. Your
own feelings that harm is bad and benefit good won't do. In short, you have
assumed your conclusion (that harm is bad) in deciding that moralities that
assume something else are garbage.
Human welfare, though tempting to adopt as a standard is still quite subjective.
I could construct a morality where it would be a good thing if the entire human
race were wiped off the face of the Earth (I'm not saying I hold such a
morality, but I can imagine a thought process that would lead to it).
> If you think that declaring harm to be bad and benefit to be good is
> subjective then it makes must make no difference to you whether you
> are harmed or benefited. I don't believe that you think it makes no
> difference. If you really think it makes no difference, be my guest
> and make no effort to avoid self-harm or seek self-benefit, just don't
> expect the rest of us to adopt your masochism.
Doing things to oneself has nothing to do with morality. Its just common sense
or stupidity, based on one's viewpoint. A masochist is not immoral if he hurts
himself, or allows (or encourages) others to hurt him.
Morality starts when you consider doing things to others. And here people can,
and have, decided that hurting other people is perfectly OK. Its still a
morality, even if you and I have a conflicting one.
>
> Ideas are not automatically subjective just because they are ideas
> anymore then feelings are automatically subjective because they are
> feelings. This is because ideas and feelings are not automatically
> _solely_ determined by the idea and feeling. The idea or feeling can
> be derived from, and thus rooted in, something real or true. We are
> real, our needs our real, and harm and benefit is real.
Indeed, but different people can experience the same real "thing" and experience
quite different feelings concerning it. That's what makes it subjective. A
determination of "good" or "bad" is not externally verifiable like the size of a
viewed object.
Tony
BlinkyLight
> Morality is first and foremost based on correct concepts of good
> and bad as it relates to human welfare which is determined by our
> experience. The logic then translates this identification of harm and
> benefit into procedures, methods, rules to avoid the harm (or promote
> the good). If the logic is faulty then so is the morality.
Most of us would agree that promoting human welfare is good, but
that's because we all have a strong instinct to survive and "human
welfare" includes our individual welfares. My root question is, how
do you know it's really an absolute good and not simply your
preference? If members of PETA were to come along and say, "No,
you're basing your morality on the wrong thing, we must consider
animal welfare just as much as human welfare," what would be your
basis for saying they're wrong and ought to adopt your view?
Blink
BlinkyLight
> But. There is this little problem. You have said
> what you want an "objective morality" to do. And
> I think it conforms to what most people want an
> "objective morality" to do. But you still haven't
> defined what "objective" means, except to bring
> in another and similar term, "absolute."
>
> Of course, a fair response is that you are defining
> an objective morality just to be one that does what
> you describe, that let's one person say "dammit, MY
> morality is the RIGHT one." That can serve as a
> definition as much as anything. The question then
> becomes: What enables this? And the answer is
> pretty obvious. All it takes is the ego to say it.
I meant one that would give people a *real* reason for saying their
morality is the correct one, not simply an excuse for saying it. One
in which a third party to a moral dispute could (theoretically, at
least) determine which person was correct.
> > In short, if I say "A is right" and someone else
> > says "A is wrong," is there a way to determine
> > who's correct, just as in math class there's
> > a way to determine who got the right answer on
> > the homework?
>
> But it can't be in the same way. If it were in
> the same way, then morality would be purely a
> matter of logic, a part of mathematics. It's also
> not empirical. So a morality CANNOT be correct
> the way the Pythagorean theorem or the Archimides
> principle is correct.
Why can't it be? Why do you think morality is not ultimately a form
of logic? (I'm not saying it is, necessarily, I'm merely raising the
question.)
Blink
BlinkyLight
> Relative means that there is a relationship to something else. The
> opposite of relative is absolute. Objective means real, actual. The
> opposite of objective is subjective. Relative and objective are not
> in competition, they are distinct and unrelated. Relative and
> objective is just as likely as relative and subjective. Making a
> positive argument for relativism fails to imply objectivity.
Ok, I'll let www.m-w.com decide this one:
Relative (3): not absolute or independent : COMPARATIVE
Subjective (3a): characteristic of or belonging to reality as
perceived rather than as independent of mind : PHENOMENAL -- compare
OBJECTIVE 1b
Objective (1b) : of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or
condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of
individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality
independent of the mind
You're correct, "subjective" is a better counter to "objective" than
is "relative." (For those who desired definitions, I believe these
definitions of "subjective" and "objective" should suffice for our
purposes.)
> Morality is relative in the sense that it is context sensitive and
> situational.
> The good and/or bad impact of conduct depends on the context.
I agree that if there is an objective standard, it could be relative
as you describe (a given objective rule could be applied differently
in different situations).
> People trained in music theory can look at the written notes on staff
> paper and make a determination as to whether what they are looking at
> qualifies as noise or decent music. This is because good music
> follows rules. Some combinations of notes clash and others don't and
> music theory explains which is which and why. This are objective
> facts. The written notes corresponding with the sounds from the
> toddler banging pots are noise because the sounds are dissonant and
> without melody, harmony, or rythem and these things all have tangible
> properties that can be factually (objectively) identified. Think of a
> book with random letters and spaces and periods. Just looking at it
> you know it isn't a good book because it doesn't form words or
> sentences or paragraphs. There is no syntax or grammer. This is
> objectively determinable. Morality is like this too.
Yet it's not entirely so -- people can disagree on whether
Stravinsky's (sp?) Rites of Spring, various electronica works,
"abstract music" created by academics, etc. are music or noise. Some
of these pieces are purposely dissonant and unpredictable, and some
people like that, even if most people don't. And if someone *did*
happen to consider a toddler's banging a form of music, would we be
justified in saying s/he was wrong?
> 'This versus that' (objective vs subjective, relative vs. absolute)
> questions can be resolved at least three ways:
> 1) It is all this and none that.
> 2) 100%=%this+%that, %this>0, %that>0.
> 3) It is an interdependent combination of this and that. Percentages
> cannot be assigned to this and that.
>
> You seem to be taking the approach that it can only be resolved by 1).
> In fact moral decision making is too complicated to fit resolution
> method 1). "comprehensive standard" or "definition" is not needed to
> resolve the question of something's relative/absolute or
> objective/subjective nature. On the contrary, to determine if
> something has an objective basis one needs only to identify the a
> common criteria that roots the concept in real things. Morality is
> rooted in harm and benefit to people which is real and thus has an
> objective basis.
Ok, there could be an objective standard which is applied and
interpreted subjectively. But for my purposes, the important question
is what the basis/foundation of morality is. If its basis is an
objective standard, and the standard can be determined to some extent,
then we are justified in saying another person's morality is right or
wrong. If its basis is a subjective notion -- e.g. deciding as a
personal preference that "moral" means "beneficial to humans" -- then
even if moral decisions are made objectively with reference to that
notion, morality is ultimately subjective. You can measure whether or
not an act achieves your goal of benefiting humanity (or whatever your
goal may be), but you have no justification outside your own instincts
for saying you picked the "correct" goal.
> > There is therefore reason for viewing morality as we do
> > music/art/beauty. People have strong opinions about all these things,
> > yet we have no justification for saying a person's view is flat-out,
> > absolutely wrong.
>
> Sure we have justification. Someone says physically injuring people
> as recreation is moral and you cannot say re is flat-out wrong? Is
> injuring people beneficial or harmful to people? You cannot say
> because this is too subjective? You sound nihilistic to me.
Of course I can say sadism is wrong. I strongly believe it's wrong.
But I don't have any reason for saying my belief is ultimately more
than my opinion. I can't prove it's wrong, unless I start with
postulates like "hurting people is wrong." But where did those
postulates come from, if not from my own subjective
feelings/instincts?
A question's being important doesn't mean it necessarily has an
objectively determined answer.
Blink
M G
> M G wrote:
>
> In order to decide that a given person's ideas of good and bad are garbage
> and another's is correct, you need other criteria to determine which is
> which. Your own feelings that harm is bad and benefit good won't do.
Harm and benefit are the "other" criteria. Your simply declaring this
criteria is my own feeling rather than objective is what won't do. I
made an argument that is at least partly objective, and you have not
refuted it. I will make it again below.
> In short, you have assumed your conclusion (that harm is bad) in deciding
> that moralities that assume something else are garbage.
If harm isn't bad, then you have no basis for objecting to be harmed
as a general principle. Until I hear an argument from you why harming
you is not bad you have no grounds for claiming I have assumed
anything unfounded.
> Human welfare, though tempting to adopt as a standard is still quite
> subjective. I could construct a morality where it would be a good thing if
> the entire human race were wiped off the face of the Earth (I'm not saying I
> hold such a morality, but I can imagine a thought process that would lead to
> it).
>
I agree there is subjectivity. I identified specific places in the
moral evaluation thought process where subjectivity is introduced in
my previous post. But it is not entirely subjective either. You are
completely fail to acknowledge my argument that morality is not all
objective or all subjective but a combination and keep arguing as if
it must be all subjective because it isn't all objective. This won't
do.
We can imagine a lot of thought processes. What we (or at least those
of us that are thoughtful) don't do is argue that because a thought
process is possible therefore it is valid, just like we don't argue
that everything imagineable exists (otherwise we wouldn't be
atheists). An argument that it would be a good thing (and thus moral)
to wipe the entire human race off the face of the Earth is one or both
of an immoral or incorrect argument. You have to make a destroy
humanity is good argument that you think is moral and correct if you
want to argue otherwise. Just claiming that there is such an argument
won't do.
> Doing things to oneself has nothing to do with morality. Its just common
> sense or stupidity, based on one's viewpoint. A masochist is not immoral if
> he hurts himself, or allows (or encourages) others to hurt him.
I am proposing that you put your money where your mouth is and
demonstrate that you really mean what say. If harm isn't objectively
bad, then tell me why _we_ shouldn't harm _you_. If you can't do
that, then your argument that harm isn't bad is baseless, which of
course it is.
> Morality starts when you consider doing things to others. And here people
> can, and have, decided that hurting other people is perfectly OK. Its still a
> morality, even if you and I have a conflicting one.
To make a morally defensible argument for harming other people you
have to show that harming them prevents harming others, that there is
no way to reduce or avoid the harm to them to achive the moral goal of
avoiding the harm to the others, that the harm inflicted on them is
less than the harm prevented, that them are morally culpable for the
harm to others, and the like. If there is not an argument along these
lines to be made then it isn't moral and it doesn't matter what
people can, and have decided to the contrary. Under certain
circumstances there is room for disagrement because of uncertainties
in outcomes, because of imperfect information, because of different
weights applied to competing considerations that have similiar
magnitude of impact. I acknowledged that there are such subjective
considerations in my previous post. That there are subjective
considerations, however, doesn't deny that morality is has an
objective basis in avoiding harm and promoting benefit to human
welfare.
> Indeed, but different people can experience the same real "thing" and
> experience quite different feelings concerning it. That's what makes it
> subjective. A determination of "good" or "bad" is not externally verifiable
> like the size of a viewed object.
Your argument fails because you don't show why it is sensible to
consider harm to human welfare to be better than benefit to human
welfare as a general criteria.
M G
> ma...@tidalwave.net (M G) wrote:
> Most of us would agree that promoting human welfare is good, but
> that's because we all have a strong instinct to survive and "human
> welfare" includes our individual welfares. My root question is, how
> do you know it's really an absolute good and not simply your
> preference? If members of PETA were to come along and say, "No,
> you're basing your morality on the wrong thing, we must consider
> animal welfare just as much as human welfare," what would be your
> basis for saying they're wrong and ought to adopt your view?
That's a good example/question. Morality is defensible as long as it
is practical. Morality is practical when we give human self-interest
priority. "Animal" is a very broad catagory that includes locusts and
microscopic mult-celled organism. What is their justification for
excluding plants and bacteria? How exactly would we implement this
morality? Is it possible to give multi-celled microscopic organisms
and locusts the same consideration we give to humans without
completely undermining our consideration for human welfare? And if
they exclude multi-celled microscopic organisms or locusts, then what
is their justification for excluding those while still including other
other non-human animals.
M G
>
> Ok, there could be an objective standard which is applied and
> interpreted subjectively. But for my purposes, the important question
> is what the basis/foundation of morality is. If its basis is an
> objective standard, and the standard can be determined to some extent,
> then we are justified in saying another person's morality is right or
> wrong. If its basis is a subjective notion -- e.g. deciding as a
> personal preference that "moral" means "beneficial to humans" -- then
> even if moral decisions are made objectively with reference to that
> notion, morality is ultimately subjective. You can measure whether or
> not an act achieves your goal of benefiting humanity (or whatever your
> goal may be), but you have no justification outside your own instincts
> for saying you picked the "correct" goal.
Morality is making the distinction between right and wrong in conduct.
Conduct which benefits people are "right" and that which harms
people are "wrong". Do think as a general principle it is right for
us to opt to harm you? If not, then on what basis do you persist in
calling this a subjective notion or goal for morality? You can't have
it both ways.
> Of course I can say sadism is wrong. I strongly believe it's wrong.
> But I don't have any reason for saying my belief is ultimately more
> than my opinion. I can't prove it's wrong, unless I start with
> postulates like "hurting people is wrong." But where did those
> postulates come from, if not from my own subjective
> feelings/instincts?
The postulates come from your experience of what harms and benefits
you and those around you. It is objective because it is empirical.
You feel pain. Stubbing a toe hurts. Therefore striking someone's
toe harms them, therefore it is wrong. If you are not willing to
argue that it is right for people to harm you then I don't see any
basis for your claim that this is a subjective postulate.
M G
> You could start by demonstrating that this is an "objective" fact. Very
> many people in the past, and indeed many even today, would disagree with
> this in particular instances.
It's a generality, exceptions weaken but don't deny the claim. The
number of adherents for a given claim doesn't necessarily constitute
and arguement for it. Consensus is a particularly weak argument on
behalf of moral claims. If you want to discuss this, then present the
counter-example and defend it. Don't hide behind other people.
> As I said, this is simply incorrect. There is no such "objective"
> knowledge, not even a broad consensus in many cases.
Your declaration makes an argument? Consensus is your
counter-argument?
> >Sure we have justification. Someone says physically injuring people
> >as recreation is moral and you cannot say re is flat-out wrong? Is
> >injuring people beneficial or harmful to people? You cannot say
> >because this is too subjective? You sound nihilistic to me.
> >
> You sound like someone who has just invented a strawman to me.
He claimed it was not possible to declare a moral claim as "flat out
wrong". This response provided an example of a "flat-out wrong" moral
claim. You sound more hostile than thoughtful to me with your single
sentence attacks.
Paul Filseth
> Morality is relative because it corresponds to things such as beauty:
> "good art," etc.
This analogy seems to assume, first, that the similarities to
beauty are more significant than the differences, and second, that
there's no such thing as objective beauty. I disagree about the
first; I have not yet issued a ruling on the second...
> There is consensus to some extent: ... Yet there is also widespread
> disagreement
Disagreement doesn't disprove objectivity. People disagree about
evolution vs. creation and that's objective.
> Also, we form our judgments of music, art and morality based on
> reactions within ourselves. Some people may have ethical systems
> founded primarily on emotional reactions (e.g. "I feel sorry for
> those starving children, I'll donate money to Oxfam"), which are
> practically subjective by definition.
We may be getting distracted by multiple meanings of words here.
The primary issue, it seems to me, is whether it's possible in a moral
debate for one side to be right and the other side wrong. It may be
that "objective vs. subjective" isn't the right way to describe that
question. Emotions are a biological phenomenon; whether you experience
fear is an objective question about a subjective feeling. That some
judgments are based on reactions within ourselves in no way implies
they aren't objectively right or wrong. If you see an orange and
judge it purple, you're objectively color blind, even though "purple"
is a category caused by human retinas -- it's not a segment of the
electromagnetic spectrum.
> Others invent or decide on ethical principles which "make sense to
> them" and build their individual ethical systems from that (e.g.
> Steve Joyce's explanation of humanism), yet those founding principles
> are either invented by the individual or are something he/she learned
> and were ultimately invented by another individual
Yes. There are two objectivity questions to be asked: "Is whether
an action conforms to a proposed rule objective?", and "Is whether the
rule is correct objective?"
> (as atheists, we presumably agree that some person or group created
> the Bible and invented the moral rules in it).
Theists agree with that too. (Except they may balk at calling
God a person; but relabeling doesn't change the implications.)
> If Lisa prefers Elvis on velvet to Monet, some would say she has
> "bad taste," but few if any people would go so far as to say,
> "There is an objective standard of good art and Lisa has failed to
> follow it; her choice is *wrong.*" While people often do make such
> statements about morality, this can be attributed to the much greater
> personal and emotional impact that morality has on people.
De gustibus non disputandum. Whatever it is that causes people
to claim what they do, it makes no logical sense to argue the merits
of matters of taste. If you say Lisa has bad taste, that's one thing;
but if you're prepared to explain why that taste is bad, that's quite
another. People who do the latter are either (a) talking about some
aspect of art they think of as objective, or (b) talking about art
on the surface, but really talking about something else, or (c) being
irrational.
> Compare discussions of music: in our culture musical taste is
> associated with people's popularity and personal identity and hence
> discussions of music become very emotional.
Exactly. That's a case of (b). If you say Lisa has bad taste
you're probably really talking about whether she fits into the social
circle you identify with or into one you look down on, not whether
pictures of Elvis are better art than Monets. Then again, maybe you
subscribe to an objective theory of aesthetics. (And maybe it's some
mix of the two. It's entirely logically possible that art could have
some objective and some subjective aspects. If nothing else, it's
surely true that to create something like a Monet one would have to
train longer and paint more carefully than the average Elvis painter
needs to to achieve his results.)
So the question is, do _you_ make moral claims and argue about
their merits with people who don't share your views? If you do that,
is it really something other than ethics that you're arguing about?
If you do, and it isn't, and you really think morals aren't objective,
then, as Walt Whitman might have put it, you are large, you contain
multitudes. :-) And the same is true if you offer arguments on the
merits of artwork.
> Morals aren't objective because there is no objective standard by
> which we can determine right or wrong. We can propose that morals
> that society reaches a consensus on are the objective standard <snip>
You can't show something doesn't exist by exhibiting things that
aren't it.
> It could be the case that an objective standard exists but that we
> simply aren't aware of it and can't determine what it is. If so, we
> would still be justified in treating morality as relative...
We aren't if there's a logical problem with doing so. There are
arguments in mathematics called "pure existence proofs", in which
you assume something doesn't exist and derive a contradiction. The
mathematicians called intuitionists insist that those are no good, and
an existence proof shouldn't be taken seriously unless it tells you
how to "construct" the thing it says exists. But this seems like an
unreasonable philosophical position to me. I've seen and understood
pure existence proofs and they convince me. If I'm playing a game for
which I've seen a proof that I can win, but the proof tells me nothing
about _how_ to, then yes, it's true that I can probably play the game
just as well if I nonetheless assume there's no winning strategy and
simply hope the other guy makes a mistake. But that doesn't change
the fact that I'll be _wrong_, and have the inconsistent beliefs to
prove it.
In any event, this isn't a two-way fight. If there's an objective
standard but we can't find out it exists, that might justify treating
morality as non-existent rather than relative. Relativism has to be
defended on its own merits.
> if we have no way of knowing what the standard is, we have no way
> of comparing a moral to it and judging it.
So what? That's not the only thing its good for. Maybe _we_
have no way to know what the standard is but our descendants won't
always share our limitations -- *unless we stop researching the
question because we decide there's no answer to be found*. If we
give future thinkers dwarfs to stand on the shoulders of, they won't
see further than others.
> > If there really is nothing to distinguish true moral claims from
> > false, that implies nihilism is correct, not relativism.
>
> 1. This is a strawman argument (using India's definition of
> "strawman"). Relativism (or at least my version of it) doesn't state
> that there is no way of distinguishing right from wrong; rather, all
> existing ways are subjective. For instance, there is a way of
> determining which color is the most beautiful: I look at all the
> colors and form an opinion. That's a subjective standard.
You're quite right -- using India's definition, the argument that
began "This is a strawman argument" described itself flawlessly. :-)
If forming an opinion qualifies as distinguishing true from false then
you must mean something by "true" other than what I meant. Those who
judge red the most beautiful cannot thereby be distinguishing the true
aesthetic claim "Red is the most beautiful color." from the false one
"Some other color is more beautiful than red.", because "Red is the
most beautiful color." is not a true claim, going by my understanding
of what "true" means. So you are imputing your meaning of "true" into
the sentence of mine you propose to refute; hence you misunderstood
my position and argued against a false version of it. I at no point
suggested that people are physiologically incapable of forming
subjective judgements of morality if morality isn't objective; I
merely argue that anyone who does this is making a mistake.
If truth vs. falsehood is a property moral claims _have_, then it
makes sense to form an opinion about where a moral claim lies on the
truth vs. falsity dichotomy; and such an opinion can be right or wrong
depending on whether it matches the actual truth or falsity the moral
claim has. But if truth vs. falsehood is a property moral claims _do
not have_, then agreeing or disagreeing with a moral claim is a classic
category error, no different from forming an opinion about whether
coffee is even or odd. And aesthetics is no different. It's an error
to agree with "Red is the most beautiful color.", unless beauty is at
least to some degree objective or you mean something by that sentence
other than what it says. I'm not overly concerned with which; but if
what you mean when you make _moral_ claims is different from what they
say, share.
If your position is that truth vs. falsehood is a property moral
claims _do_ have, but that this property is relative to whether the
person evaluating it agrees with it, so a moral claim can be true
for one person and false for another, that's just another way to say
this property is not a property *of the claim* -- it's a property of
the {claim, evaluator} pair. And that means the category error
argument applies with full force.
This assumes, of course, that "agrees with" means "thinks is
true". That's what I mean by it. If that's what you mean too, but
you hold that it is *{claim, evaluator} pairs* that have truth or
falsehood depending on whether the evaluator agrees with the claim,
that means you're implying that moral claims are only true when
people are making mistakes -- an evaluator can't think a claim is
true without making the category error, because the claim hasn't
got a truth value. Let's plug one of *your own* moral beliefs into
that formula. (I take it you have some, since otherwise you'd be
advocating nihilism.) Then {X, Blink} is true if and only if Blink
evaluates X and thinks X is true; and since X isn't the sort of
thing that can be true all by itself, that means {X, Blink} is true
only if Blink is wrong. So if "agrees with" means "thinks is true",
all your morals are wrong. :-)
So perhaps "agree" means something different to you. Perhaps
it means an evaluator agrees the moral claim has some other property
than truth. The obvious candidate is "subjective truth", i.e. the
evaluator agrees that the claim has the property of being a member of
a true {claim, evaluator} pair, with himself in the starring role.
But that can't possibly be right -- it requires a closed causality
loop to implement it. In order to agree with a claim, an evaluator
would have to observe himself agreeing with the claim.
So what is there left for a subjective moral claim to mean? What
is it an evaluator is supposed to be evaluating claims *for*? If he's
not testing them for some property, then moral claims are meaningless
noise and the nihilists win again. So if you want to make a case for
relativism, you need to come up with a credible candidate for what the
property of moral claims is that people making moral judgments are
judging whether they have.
> everyone agrees that there are beautiful colors and ugly
> colors -- but the standard is subjective.
I agree there are colors that please me. Green, for instance.
I live in the woods. But I don't agree that "Green is a beautiful
color." is a "true aesthetic claim".
> > There are other kinds of claims that don't clearly correspond
> > to anything out in the universe, such as mathematical claims and
> > counterfactuals, that we don't therefore treat as lacking truth
> > values.
>
> After doing a bit of looking up of "counterfactuals" I'm not sure
> what Paul means in this context <snip>
I meant statements of what would have happened if what did happen
hadn't happened. E.g. "You caught the ball; but if you hadn't caught
it it would have hit the ground." It contains a premise known to be
counter to fact, hence "counterfactual". There's no way to replay the
universe and prevent the ball from being caught the second time around
so we can see whether it hits the ground, so counterfactuals are immune
to empirical testing. They likewise can't be tested by applying pure
logic -- there's no a priori reason somebody couldn't secretly have
been watching you who would have vaporized the ball with artillery if
you missed it. Yet people make claims like that all the time and
treat them as matters of fact, not subjective taste.
> Similarly, mathematics is based on real-world observations, given a
> definition of a counting system -- if I pick two apples, and later
> pick three more, I get "five" when I count them. Even highly
> abstract mathematics can be externally verified in a sense, when
> it's applied to engineering and used to build machines which
> accomplish goals in the real world
But lots of math has no connection to the real world. According
to my Projective Geometry professor, the field was invented precisely
for that reason, by people who missed classical Euclidean proofs that
were made obsolete by the power of algebra on Cartesian coordinates.
Or take group theory. They say there's no sporadic group bigger than
the Monster. How could you conceivably verify that by looking at the
world? How could you even understand what it means based on sensory
experience?
> > Moral statements are simply medical judgments. They correspond or
> > fail to correspond to the reality of which people out in the
> > universe are sick.
>
> As I understand it, this amounts to, "The standard for determining
> the correctness of a moral principle is to see if the people who
> follow (or believe?) the principle are moral or immoral." This is
> circular reasoning.
You could say that about any medical condition -- you could say
the standard for determining if atherosclerosis is a disease is to
see if people who have arteries hardened by fat deposits are sick or
healthy, and that's circular reasoning, so it's just a matter of
taste. That isn't your position, is it?
Deciding what's right and wrong and inhibiting wrong actions is
something members of some species do. They do it because they have
some neurons in their brains whose job is to do that, just like any
other instinctive behavior. These neurons are an organ. Every other
organ is subject to diseases; why should that one be exempt? Because
one of its jobs is to diagnose disease in the corresponding organs in
others? Because it's not an artery but a brain, and psychiatry isn't
a "real" science? Where's the dividing line, anyway? My sister had
a patient who tended to fall down all the time. It was neurological,
not an inner-ear problem. People in the room with Sara had to be
careful not to excite her since that tended to bring on bouts. Is
whether that's a disease the same as whether Mozart is better than
Bach, a matter of whether we think falling down is "subjectively
good"?
Someday we'll figure out what causes moral diseases like
sociopathy -- which neurons are sending the wrong signals and what
broke them. But we can recognize diseases before we know why they
happen. Doctors knew about heart attacks before they knew about
coronary artery blockage.
> How do you determine if someone is "morally sick"? What's the
> standard for determining the standard?
The same as the standard for any medical condition. Complicated
characteristics of living organisms, such as body parts and instincts,
have functions. Figure out what the function is. Arteries are there
to move blood. Hardening interferes with an artery's ability to move
blood. Therefore atherosclerosis is a disease, whether we happen to
prefer Bach or Mozart or moving blood or unmoving blood. In order to
answer your question, therefore, the problem to be solved is to figure
out what morality is *for*.
I have some ideas; but I don't really know what it's for. But
how to tell right from wrong is not the question on the table; the
question is whether it's relative or objective. To answer that, we
don't need to know what morality's function *is*; we only need to
know whether it *has* one.
Morality is complicated. It's adaptive. It's expensive. It's
been developing for tens of millions of years. We see pieces of it
in lots of other species. That sort of thing is always the result of
natural selection, not just a chance mutation. And natural selection
doesn't do that sort of thing as a joke. So we can be reasonably
sure morality is for *something*.
--
Paul Filseth Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only
To email, delete the x. proved it correct, not tried it. - Donald Knuth
Tony Griffin
M G wrote:
> > If members of PETA were to come along and say, "No,
> > you're basing your morality on the wrong thing, we must consider
> > animal welfare just as much as human welfare," what would be your
> > basis for saying they're wrong and ought to adopt your view?
>
> That's a good example/question. Morality is defensible as long as it
> is practical. Morality is practical when we give human self-interest
> priority. "Animal" is a very broad catagory that includes locusts and
> microscopic mult-celled organism. What is their justification for
> excluding plants and bacteria? How exactly would we implement this
> morality? Is it possible to give multi-celled microscopic organisms
> and locusts the same consideration we give to humans without
> completely undermining our consideration for human welfare? And if
> they exclude multi-celled microscopic organisms or locusts, then what
> is their justification for excluding those while still including other
> other non-human animals.
As a PETA member, I can answer with some authority (though I'm not speaking on
behalf of PETA here). :)
I personally draw the line where suffering becomes possible. To take extreme
examples, I believe you can certainly be cruel to chimpanzee, but not to a
bacterium. It becomes more difficult as you attempt to define the exact position
of the line, but one does one's best.
We implement this morality by not eating animals, not experimenting on them, not
wearing their skins and not destroying their habitat. How is that so
impractical?
By your argument, I guess we should give up trying to achieve world peace,
eliminate hunger, and so on as these objectives don't seem very practical at
present.
Tony
BlinkyLight
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote in message news:<402d54b.02082...@posting.google.com>...
> >
>
> Conduct which benefits people are "right" and that which harms
> people are "wrong". Do think as a general principle it is right for
> us to opt to harm you? If not, then on what basis do you persist in
> calling this a subjective notion or goal for morality? You can't have
> it both ways.
My opinion is that it's wrong to harm others (with a few exceptions,
like self-defense). If other people agree with my opinion and we all
decide to adopt it as a rule for ourselves/our society, that's cool.
But I have no reason for saying, "'Don't hurt people' is an objective
moral principle."
> > Of course I can say sadism is wrong. I strongly believe it's wrong.
> > But I don't have any reason for saying my belief is ultimately more
> > than my opinion. I can't prove it's wrong, unless I start with
> > postulates like "hurting people is wrong." But where did those
> > postulates come from, if not from my own subjective
> > feelings/instincts?
>
> The postulates come from your experience of what harms and benefits
> you and those around you. It is objective because it is empirical.
> You feel pain. Stubbing a toe hurts. Therefore striking someone's
> toe harms them, therefore it is wrong. If you are not willing to
> argue that it is right for people to harm you then I don't see any
> basis for your claim that this is a subjective postulate.
"Paul Filseth" <pg...@lsil.com> wrote:
> So the question is, do _you_ make moral claims and argue about
> their merits with people who don't share your views? If you do that,
> is it really something other than ethics that you're arguing about?
> If you do, and it isn't, and you really think morals aren't objective,
> then, as Walt Whitman might have put it, you are large, you contain
> multitudes. :-) And the same is true if you offer arguments on the
> merits of artwork.
Ok, for the sake of the discussion let's pretend I'm arguing with
someone who thinks hurting people isn't wrong. I am going to attempt
to persuade him it's wrong, because it's in my best interests (though
whether or not hurting me is a good or bad thing is ultimately a
matter of opinion. :)
Why do I think hurting people is wrong? When I hurt someone, I feel
guilty, and I dislike feeling guilty, so I avoid hurting people. This
is the main reason I think it's wrong: it feels wrong to me. When I
hurt someone, they're likely to hurt me in return and to not like me.
Logically, then, it doesn't help me or accomplish anything if I hurt
someone, so there is logical reason for me to adopt "don't hurt
people" as a principle in my personal morals: it helps me achieve
something which feels right to me.
If I were to argue with someone about this, I would ask him if he felt
guilty when he hurt people, and if he wanted to get along in society
and not have people be likely to hurt him. If he says "yes" to
either, I have a chance of persuading him, because we have shared
feelings and/or goals to work with. What makes sense to me might also
make sense to him. If he says "no" to both, I don't have any grounds
for persuading him to change his mind. He has different feelings and
goals than I do, and there isn't anything I can do about it, for
there's no objective standard of morality that I can refer to. I can
maintain my opinion that his morality is bad, but what basis does he
have for throwing out his opinion and adopting mine? If I had his
feelings and preferences instead of mine, would I not feel as he does?
How then can I condemn him? I can't. I can only disagree with him,
and put my moral opinions into practice by defending myself should he
decide to act on his opinions and hurt me or others.
Blink
BlinkyLight
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote in message news:<402d54b.02082...@posting.google.com>...
> > that's because we all have a strong instinct to survive and "human
> > welfare" includes our individual welfares. My root question is, how
> > do you know it's really an absolute good and not simply your
> > preference? If members of PETA were to come along and say, "No,
> > you're basing your morality on the wrong thing, we must consider
> > animal welfare just as much as human welfare," what would be your
> > basis for saying they're wrong and ought to adopt your view?
>
> That's a good example/question. Morality is defensible as long as it
> is practical. Morality is practical when we give human self-interest
> priority.
Why is only practical morality defensible? How do you know that "is
practical" is an objectively good criteria for evaluating morals?
What reason do you have for thinking it's more than your opinion that
it's a good criteria? I could argue that "world peace" is not a
practical goal, yet in my opinion it is a moral goal. But maybe we
don't mean the same thing by "practical"?
> "Animal" is a very broad catagory that includes locusts and
> microscopic mult-celled organism. What is their justification for
> excluding plants and bacteria? How exactly would we implement this
> morality? Is it possible to give multi-celled microscopic organisms
> and locusts the same consideration we give to humans without
> completely undermining our consideration for human welfare? And if
> they exclude multi-celled microscopic organisms or locusts, then what
> is their justification for excluding those while still including other
> other non-human animals.
My understanding is that such morality is based on not causing pain to
any creature which is capable of feeling it, namely mammals (including
humans), birds, reptiles, amphibians. Some people may include fish
and/or insects.
But my point is, you have your own reasons for why you adopt a
human-first morality, and they have their own reasons for why they
adopt a humans-and-animals morality. You have "must be practical" as
a goal or guideline; they might have "what doesn't make me feel
guilty" as a goal or guideline. Maybe they have a stronger empathy
for animals than you do, or maybe you have a more logical approach
than they do. What reason is there for me, a third party, to decide
which of you is right or wrong, except by deciding which of your
opinions most closely resemble mine? How can you say they're
objectively wrong, or how can they condemn you for not sharing their
feelings?
Blink
BlinkyLight
>
> Disagreement doesn't disprove objectivity. People disagree about
> evolution vs. creation and that's objective.
Sure. And neither does consensus disprove subjectivity.
> We may be getting distracted by multiple meanings of words here.
> The primary issue, it seems to me, is whether it's possible in a moral
> debate for one side to be right and the other side wrong. It may be
> that "objective vs. subjective" isn't the right way to describe that
> question. Emotions are a biological phenomenon; whether you experience
> fear is an objective question about a subjective feeling.
Ok.
> That some
> judgments are based on reactions within ourselves in no way implies
> they aren't objectively right or wrong. If you see an orange and
> judge it purple, you're objectively color blind, even though "purple"
> is a category caused by human retinas -- it's not a segment of the
> electromagnetic spectrum.
I can live with calling color definitions objective. But according to
the definitions I posted earlier, subjective is "characteristic of or
belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind."
So I'd say judgments which are based on our personal reactions are
subjective until proven objective.
>
> De gustibus non disputandum. Whatever it is that causes people
> to claim what they do, it makes no logical sense to argue the merits
> of matters of taste. If you say Lisa has bad taste, that's one thing;
> but if you're prepared to explain why that taste is bad, that's quite
> another. People who do the latter are either (a) talking about some
> aspect of art they think of as objective, or (b) talking about art
> on the surface, but really talking about something else, or (c) being
> irrational.
Or (d) talking about their views and persuading each other on the
basis of shared feelings or opinions. If Mary thinks "good taste" in
art means selecting pictures which inspire
thought/imagination/feeling, and she talks to Lisa and discovers that
Lisa really likes Elvis and is in some way inspired by seeing his
portrait, she may decide that Lisa does have "good taste," though it's
not exactly the same as her own. Or Mary could share why she finds a
particular painting meaningful, causing Lisa to also see meaning in it
and change her opinion of it. On the other hand, if Lisa chooses to
decorate with Elvis over Monet because Elvis means something to her
and haystacks and lily ponds don't, and Mary chooses the opposite
because her criteria is the skill of the painter, regardless of
subject, then they have nothing in common regarding art, and their
discussion would go nowhere.
Though the determination of which criteria (artistic skill, ability to
inspire thought, visually or emotionally pleasing, etc.) to use in
evaluating art and their application are largely (or even entirely)
subjective, people can still have a meaningful discussion about art.
> So the question is, do _you_ make moral claims and argue about
> their merits with people who don't share your views? If you do that,
> is it really something other than ethics that you're arguing about?
> If you do, and it isn't, and you really think morals aren't objective,
> then, as Walt Whitman might have put it, you are large, you contain
> multitudes. :-) And the same is true if you offer arguments on the
> merits of artwork.
See above plus my response to M G.
> You can't show something doesn't exist by exhibiting things that
> aren't it.
True. I was anticipating the sort of counter-argument that's come up
where someone arbitrarily picks a moral principle or goal and then
uses that to say morality is objective.
> We aren't if there's a logical problem with doing so. There are
> arguments in mathematics called "pure existence proofs", in which
> you assume something doesn't exist and derive a contradiction. The
> mathematicians called intuitionists insist that those are no good, and
> an existence proof shouldn't be taken seriously unless it tells you
> how to "construct" the thing it says exists. But this seems like an
> unreasonable philosophical position to me. I've seen and understood
> pure existence proofs and they convince me. If I'm playing a game for
> which I've seen a proof that I can win, but the proof tells me nothing
> about _how_ to, then yes, it's true that I can probably play the game
> just as well if I nonetheless assume there's no winning strategy and
> simply hope the other guy makes a mistake. But that doesn't change
> the fact that I'll be _wrong_, and have the inconsistent beliefs to
> prove it.
Ok, if we have such an existence proof of an objective standard, then
we'd be aware of the standard's existence. But if we have no way of
knowing what it is, we can't determine what's objectively right or
wrong any more than if we didn't know it existed. So when we make a
moral claim, we can only say it's right in our opinion, and we have no
basis for outright condemnation of those who disagree with us.
Suppose we determined, by way of existence proof or whatever, that
there exists a definition of the perfect unicorn. You and I may argue
about whether the perfect unicorn is white or pink, visible or
invisible, etc. We would know there was an objective answer to those
questions, and we might even have good reasons for our views. But at
the end of the day, our views would only be our opinions on what the
standard was, and we would have no way of proving who was correct or
incorrect.
So do you have an existence proof, or any proof, for the existence of
an objective moral standard?
> So what? That's not the only thing its good for. Maybe _we_
> have no way to know what the standard is but our descendants won't
> always share our limitations -- *unless we stop researching the
> question because we decide there's no answer to be found*. If we
> give future thinkers dwarfs to stand on the shoulders of, they won't
> see further than others.
And what am I doing now, but researching whether an answer can be
found?
So do you not have a way of determining what this standard you believe
in is?
> If truth vs. falsehood is a property moral claims _have_, then it
> makes sense to form an opinion about where a moral claim lies on the
> truth vs. falsity dichotomy; and such an opinion can be right or wrong
> depending on whether it matches the actual truth or falsity the moral
> claim has. But if truth vs. falsehood is a property moral claims _do
> not have_, then agreeing or disagreeing with a moral claim is a classic
> category error, no different from forming an opinion about whether
> coffee is even or odd. And aesthetics is no different. It's an error
> to agree with "Red is the most beautiful color.", unless beauty is at
> least to some degree objective or you mean something by that sentence
> other than what it says. I'm not overly concerned with which; but if
> what you mean when you make _moral_ claims is different from what they
> say, share.
> <snip>
> So what is there left for a subjective moral claim to mean? What
> is it an evaluator is supposed to be evaluating claims *for*? If he's
> not testing them for some property, then moral claims are meaningless
> noise and the nihilists win again. So if you want to make a case for
> relativism, you need to come up with a credible candidate for what the
> property of moral claims is that people making moral judgments are
> judging whether they have.
In other words, objective truth or falsity is a property which morals
either have or don't have. Ok, fine. I see no reason to believe
morals have such a property.
What I know about morals boils down to what actions would make me feel
guilty if I committed them and what actions would make me feel proud
if I committed them. Since there are actions which inspire such
feelings in me, I say that morality, as I understand it, exists. If I
say "A is right," I mean that performing act A would cause me to feel
proud, that I had "done good." If I say "A is wrong," I mean that
performing act A would cause me to feel guilty. This seems to me to
be the most likely candidate for the property you requested.
>
> I meant statements of what would have happened if what did happen
> hadn't happened. E.g. "You caught the ball; but if you hadn't caught
> it it would have hit the ground." It contains a premise known to be
> counter to fact, hence "counterfactual". There's no way to replay the
> universe and prevent the ball from being caught the second time around
> so we can see whether it hits the ground, so counterfactuals are immune
> to empirical testing. They likewise can't be tested by applying pure
> logic -- there's no a priori reason somebody couldn't secretly have
> been watching you who would have vaporized the ball with artillery if
> you missed it. Yet people make claims like that all the time and
> treat them as matters of fact, not subjective taste.
Then I'd say counterfactuals are reasonable assumptions which can't be
conclusively proven. We can't conclusively prove we're not living in
The Matrix or that the sun will rise tomorrow, but those statements
are 99.999...% certain.
But how would we achieve this level of certainty with regards to
morality?
> But lots of math has no connection to the real world. According
> to my Projective Geometry professor, the field was invented precisely
> for that reason, by people who missed classical Euclidean proofs that
> were made obsolete by the power of algebra on Cartesian coordinates.
Funny, IIRC that's what my abstract algebra prof. said about abstract
algebra -- theoretical mathematicians liked it because they were sure
it was so abstract and theoretical that it couldn't have any
real-world applications. (I'm with them -- I *hate* applied math. :)
And then I took a cryptography course, and found out abstract algebra
and number theory played a big part in it.
But math is essentially logic applied to what we've defined as
numbers. Logic, when correctly applied, has served us humans well
over the years. Logic applied to observations of the world gives us
the scientific method, and science gives us lots of real-world,
testable things. There's no reason to think logic or things based on
logic are subjective. Morality can be objective to the extent that
it's based on logic, as MG has been saying; the problem is that it has
subjectively-chosen postulates. If you can show me that morality can
be completely determined by logic, and that its postulates are
reasonable assumptions rather than subjective preferences, I'd most
likely be persuaded that morality is objective.
> You could say that about any medical condition -- you could say
> the standard for determining if atherosclerosis is a disease is to
> see if people who have arteries hardened by fat deposits are sick or
> healthy, and that's circular reasoning, so it's just a matter of
> taste. That isn't your position, is it?
What I'm saying is that your original statement above is like
answering the statement "There is no objective standard of health"
with "Statements of health correspond or fail to correspond to the
reality of which people are sick." But the question is, what's "sick"
and what's "healthy"? How does your original statement differ from
"Morals are objective because we can objectively measure them"?
> Deciding what's right and wrong and inhibiting wrong actions is
> something members of some species do. They do it because they have
> some neurons in their brains whose job is to do that, just like any
> other instinctive behavior. These neurons are an organ. Every other
> organ is subject to diseases; why should that one be exempt?
If so, then is there an organ for determining "visually pleasing"?
Can we hope there will be treatment available one day for people like
Mimi of the Drew Carey Show?
> My sister had
> a patient who tended to fall down all the time. It was neurological,
> not an inner-ear problem. People in the room with Sara had to be
> careful not to excite her since that tended to bring on bouts. Is
> whether that's a disease the same as whether Mozart is better than
> Bach, a matter of whether we think falling down is "subjectively
> good"?
"Healthy" and "sick" are fairly well-understood terms. No one is
arguing that we can't objectively measure the effect something has on
a person's physical well-being.
> Someday we'll figure out what causes moral diseases like
> sociopathy -- which neurons are sending the wrong signals and what
> broke them. But we can recognize diseases before we know why they
> happen. Doctors knew about heart attacks before they knew about
> coronary artery blockage.
Let me ask you the same question you asked me above: do you make moral
claims and argue about
their merits with people who don't share your views? If so, given
your view that immorality is a disease, do you really expect that to
be any more productive than telling a blind person to see?
>
> The same as the standard for any medical condition. Complicated
> characteristics of living organisms, such as body parts and instincts,
> have functions. Figure out what the function is. Arteries are there
> to move blood. Hardening interferes with an artery's ability to move
> blood. Therefore atherosclerosis is a disease, whether we happen to
> prefer Bach or Mozart or moving blood or unmoving blood. In order to
> answer your question, therefore, the problem to be solved is to figure
> out what morality is *for*.
>
> I have some ideas; but I don't really know what it's for. But
> how to tell right from wrong is not the question on the table; the
> question is whether it's relative or objective. To answer that, we
> don't need to know what morality's function *is*; we only need to
> know whether it *has* one.
>
> Morality is complicated. It's adaptive. It's expensive. It's
> been developing for tens of millions of years. We see pieces of it
> in lots of other species. That sort of thing is always the result of
> natural selection, not just a chance mutation. And natural selection
> doesn't do that sort of thing as a joke. So we can be reasonably
> sure morality is for *something*.
That sounds like a nice argument. But it sounds like an argument that
there isn't anything which is subjective (though perhaps you don't
disagree with that). Every thought/feeling/sensation we have comes
from some thing, some organ or whatever, in our body. All organs we
have came about via evolution/natural selection, so it's reasonable to
believe the organ and the sensations it produces serve some purpose,
which is most likely involved with propagating our genes or our
relatives' genes. (What other purpose would there be for anything we
have which humans have had for thousands and thousands of years of
evolution?) Therefore our tastes, emotional reactions, sense of
humor, color preference, etc. are the products of organs, of which it
can be determined that they're functioning correctly or incorrectly.
Blink
John Secker
<pg...@lsil.com> writes
> If truth vs. falsehood is a property moral claims _have_, then it
>makes sense to form an opinion about where a moral claim lies on the
>truth vs. falsity dichotomy; and such an opinion can be right or wrong
>depending on whether it matches the actual truth or falsity the moral
>claim has. But if truth vs. falsehood is a property moral claims _do
>not have_, then agreeing or disagreeing with a moral claim is a classic
>category error, no different from forming an opinion about whether
>coffee is even or odd.
category error if the speaker intends the words odd and even to have the
same meaning as they do when applied to integers. If one does not
believe that moral claims have an objective truth value, then by
definition a statement that a particular moral claim is "true" or
"false" cannot be referring to the same meaning of these words as they
would have if applied, say, to a mathematical statement.
> And aesthetics is no different. It's an error
>to agree with "Red is the most beautiful color.", unless beauty is at
>least to some degree objective or you mean something by that sentence
>other than what it says.
moral claims are subjective, then you know that my use of the word true
is not referring to an objective true/false dichotomy.
>I'm not overly concerned with which; but if
>what you mean when you make _moral_ claims is different from what >they
say, share.
>
> If your position is that truth vs. falsehood is a property moral
>claims _do_ have, but that this property is relative to whether the
>person evaluating it agrees with it, so a moral claim can be true
>for one person and false for another, that's just another way to say
>this property is not a property *of the claim* -- it's a property of
>the {claim, evaluator} pair. And that means the category error
>argument applies with full force.
>
word "true" in the sense that YOU have chosen. But by definition, if
they are subjectivists, they are not.
> This assumes, of course, that "agrees with" means "thinks is
>true". That's what I mean by it. If that's what you mean too, but
>you hold that it is *{claim, evaluator} pairs* that have truth or
>falsehood depending on whether the evaluator agrees with the claim,
>that means you're implying that moral claims are only true when
>people are making mistakes -- an evaluator can't think a claim is
>true without making the category error, because the claim hasn't
>got a truth value.
true, and then accusing them of a category error. It is as if you heard
me describe a golf club as a "closed group", and accused me of a
category error, because you are thinking of the word group in the
mathematical sense.
> Let's plug one of *your own* moral beliefs into
>that formula. (I take it you have some, since otherwise you'd be
>advocating nihilism.) Then {X, Blink} is true if and only if Blink
>evaluates X and thinks X is true; and since X isn't the sort of
>thing that can be true all by itself, that means {X, Blink} is true
>only if Blink is wrong. So if "agrees with" means "thinks is true",
>all your morals are wrong. :-)
>
"true" in relation to moral claims is this (using your notation): {X, Y}
is true iff Y replies "Yes" when asked "Is X true". Now you may well ask
HOW I decide whether to say Yes or No when asked such a question, given
the rather circular way in which it is arrived at, but I don't see how
it is a category error.
> So perhaps "agree" means something different to you. Perhaps
>it means an evaluator agrees the moral claim has some other property
>than truth. The obvious candidate is "subjective truth", i.e. the
>evaluator agrees that the claim has the property of being a member of
>a true {claim, evaluator} pair, with himself in the starring role.
>But that can't possibly be right -- it requires a closed causality
>loop to implement it. In order to agree with a claim, an evaluator
>would have to observe himself agreeing with the claim.
>
good, I observe myself enjoying (or otherwise) the food. You offer me a
moral proposition, I taste it with my moral organ, to use your phrase,
and see whether it tastes true or false. If it tastes true, I say it is
true. What is wrong with that? So long as you remember that I am not
using true in the sense that "1+1=2" is true
> So what is there left for a subjective moral claim to mean? What
>is it an evaluator is supposed to be evaluating claims *for*? If he's
>not testing them for some property, then moral claims are meaningless
>noise and the nihilists win again. So if you want to make a case for
>relativism, you need to come up with a credible candidate for what the
>property of moral claims is that people making moral judgments are
>judging whether they have.
>
evaluate moral claims, make judgements on whether they are true or
false, and that these judgements often vary from person to person. You
are attempting, I think, to show that these people are all mistaken,
that they are making category errors because if morals are relative then
the judgements of "true or false" are meaningless. But this is only the
case if all such people also hold that their "true or false" judgements
are objective. Now many people do, especially religious people, but
many, I would say most, recognise that their "true or false" judgements
are subjective, and so they are not making that category error.
<snip>
> Someday we'll figure out what causes moral diseases like
>sociopathy -- which neurons are sending the wrong signals and what
>broke them. But we can recognize diseases before we know why they
>happen. Doctors knew about heart attacks before they knew about
>coronary artery blockage.
>
>> How do you determine if someone is "morally sick"? What's the
>> standard for determining the standard?
>
> The same as the standard for any medical condition. Complicated
>characteristics of living organisms, such as body parts and instincts,
>have functions. Figure out what the function is. Arteries are there
>to move blood. Hardening interferes with an artery's ability to move
>blood. Therefore atherosclerosis is a disease, whether we happen to
>prefer Bach or Mozart or moving blood or unmoving blood. In order to
>answer your question, therefore, the problem to be solved is to figure
>out what morality is *for*.
>
particular formation, alteration or mutation of an organ (including a
moral organ) may be adaptive in certain circumstances, and not in
others. Many organs in the body are "for" lots of different things. You
are assuming that a moral organ is "for" just on thing, or set of
things, and that these are invariant in different circumstances and
different individuals.
> I have some ideas; but I don't really know what it's for. But
>how to tell right from wrong is not the question on the table; the
>question is whether it's relative or objective. To answer that, we
>don't need to know what morality's function *is*; we only need to
>know whether it *has* one.
>
> Morality is complicated. It's adaptive. It's expensive. It's
>been developing for tens of millions of years. We see pieces of it
>in lots of other species. That sort of thing is always the result of
>natural selection, not just a chance mutation. And natural selection
>doesn't do that sort of thing as a joke. So we can be reasonably
>sure morality is for *something*.
>
thing for every person? Or indeed that morality is a single thing? My
problem with your logic is that it would suggest that the vast majority
of people, the ones with healthy moral organs, would agree on what is
right, and only a few would disagree. But whatever moral proposition you
put forward, there always seems to be a substantial disagreement, either
within societies (for example, is abortion morally wrong), or between
societies - whatever moral outrage you dream up, I will bet you can find
a society which regarded it as normal and right. How does this fit with
a moral organ evolved for some specific purpose?
--
John Secker
John Secker
Sorry, they do. If your "objective" rule has exceptions, then you need
to state them in advance. Simply making up the rules as you go along
makes your system into a subjective one.
> The
>number of adherents for a given claim doesn't necessarily constitute
>and arguement for it. Consensus is a particularly weak argument on
>behalf of moral claims.
If you are claiming that your morality is objective, then a consensus
would seem to be required. If large numbers of people disagree with your
claim, how can it be objective? that is what subjective means - that
different people, presented with the same situation, will disagree.
> If you want to discuss this, then present the
>counter-example and defend it. Don't hide behind other people.
>
What do you mean by a "counter-example"? You have made a claim, that
your definition of morality is objective. My observation that many
people disagree with your definition seems a very adequate counter
example, if that is what you are looking for, but you don't seem to
agree. So tell me, how would you distinguish between an objective and a
subjective definition?
>Your declaration makes an argument? Consensus is your
>counter-argument?
Yes and yes. If people disagree, then by definition we have a subjective
issue. And it seems to me that the person making a declaration and
regarding that as an argument is yourself.
>He claimed it was not possible to declare a moral claim as "flat out
>wrong". This response provided an example of a "flat-out wrong" moral
>claim. You sound more hostile than thoughtful to me with your single
>sentence attacks.
I suggest that you take a look at your own style of argument, and
consider why it provokes hostility. Why is it "flat out wrong"?
Demonstrate this, using objective criteria, rather than simply making
the same claim in a more and more dogmatic way. You do realise that you
are claiming that boxing, for example, is flat-out wrong, and claiming
that it is impossible to disagree? Some people will agree with you, many
will disagree, and this in itself proves that this is not an objective
matter, and that the original poster was exactly correct.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<blinky...@yahoo.com> writes
<snip>
>But my point is, you have your own reasons for why you adopt a
>human-first morality, and they have their own reasons for why they
>adopt a humans-and-animals morality. You have "must be practical" as
>a goal or guideline; they might have "what doesn't make me feel
>guilty" as a goal or guideline. Maybe they have a stronger empathy
>for animals than you do, or maybe you have a more logical approach
>than they do. What reason is there for me, a third party, to decide
>which of you is right or wrong, except by deciding which of your
>opinions most closely resemble mine? How can you say they're
>objectively wrong, or how can they condemn you for not sharing their
>feelings?
>
morality" argument in the bin. Whenever someone comes up with a claimed
objective measure of morality, others will immediately come up with
examples which test or break the definition. Admittedly this particular
attempt was very simplistic, but even where considerable thought has
gone into it, I have never seen a definition of morality which would
cause people to agree "yes, that is right".
Of course that does not entirely wrap it up for objective morality - it
is possible that no-one has yet discovered or invented the definition
which will settle the matter, an objective setting out of what is moral
and what is not, with no room for doubt or disagreement. However I don't
expect it.
--
John Secker
Tony Griffin
> If you see an orange and
> judge it purple, you're objectively color blind, even though "purple"
> is a category caused by human retinas -- it's not a segment of the
> electromagnetic spectrum.
It isn't? There isn't a range of frequencies of the EM spectrum (somewhere on
the borders of what we label "red" and what we label "blue") that we
consistently label "purple"?
> So what? That's not the only thing its good for. Maybe _we_
> have no way to know what the standard is but our descendants won't
> always share our limitations -- *unless we stop researching the
> question because we decide there's no answer to be found*. If we
> give future thinkers dwarfs to stand on the shoulders of, they won't
> see further than others.
But are we just making a subjective judgement that an objective moral standard
would be a "good" thing and then making an objective decision that we should
keep looking for it, regardless of how likely it is that we will succeed? Like
the Philosophers' Stone? :)
(BTW, what is your reaction to the idea that an demonstrably objective moral
standard might turn out to be contrary to everything you hold dear? Would you
accept it and follow its rules, hating everything you did in the process?)
> So perhaps "agree" means something different to you. Perhaps
> it means an evaluator agrees the moral claim has some other property
> than truth. The obvious candidate is "subjective truth", i.e. the
> evaluator agrees that the claim has the property of being a member of
> a true {claim, evaluator} pair, with himself in the starring role.
> But that can't possibly be right -- it requires a closed causality
> loop to implement it. In order to agree with a claim, an evaluator
> would have to observe himself agreeing with the claim.
As this is my candidate, I'll defend it. What a subjectivist would mean when he
said "I agree that red is the most beautiful color" is something like "My
personal feeling about the beauty of red accords with yours". This is not a
statement about objective truth, only about his own feelings, and their
correspondence with those of the other person. In most cases of aesthetic
discussion, I think people know perfectly well that this is what is meant
(though I agree about the categories you stated).
Translating this to a moral statement, I would claim that the same thing
applies, except that most people *don't* agree on the subjectivity of their
statements, as most people assume an objective morality.
I don't follow your logic about closed causal loops. Its perfectly possible to
observe oneself thinking or feeling - ever reacted angrily to something and
simultaneously wondered why you did so? Your argument would seem to suggest that
it is somehow impossible to correctly state "I feel X". But maybe that's not
what you mean?
> I meant statements of what would have happened if what did happen
> hadn't happened. E.g. "You caught the ball; but if you hadn't caught
> it it would have hit the ground." It contains a premise known to be
> counter to fact, hence "counterfactual". There's no way to replay the
> universe and prevent the ball from being caught the second time around
> so we can see whether it hits the ground, so counterfactuals are immune
> to empirical testing. They likewise can't be tested by applying pure
> logic -- there's no a priori reason somebody couldn't secretly have
> been watching you who would have vaporized the ball with artillery if
> you missed it. Yet people make claims like that all the time and
> treat them as matters of fact, not subjective taste.
Unless they are speaking loosely, don't they include all sorts of unstated
provisos? Like, the ball would have hit the ground assumimg that the laws of
gravity continued to function in that area of spacetime and no other factors
intervened? This allows pure logic to be applied, not so?
> They say there's no sporadic group bigger than
> the Monster. How could you conceivably verify that by looking at the
> world? How could you even understand what it means based on sensory
> experience?
How could you even understand it using a dictionary?? "Fruit flies like a
banana". In case Blink doesn't ask, what the heck is a sporadic group and a
monster? :)
> Morality is complicated. It's adaptive. It's expensive. It's
> been developing for tens of millions of years. We see pieces of it
> in lots of other species. That sort of thing is always the result of
> natural selection, not just a chance mutation. And natural selection
> doesn't do that sort of thing as a joke. So we can be reasonably
> sure morality is for *something*.
This is a nice argument. Here's my concern, which I'm not totally sure is a
counter argument, but I think might be. Evolved traits tend to be fairly easy to
relate to survival. Even what look like self-destructive behaviors (like male
mantises mating and being eaten) can be seen as survival-oriented when it is
understood that it is the genes that are surviving, not the creature. Now, this
has at least two consequences that I can think of.
First, how do you differentiate behaviors that are "morals" from all the others?
Like, is our rule against murder "moral", but a male lion's killing the cubs of
a previous Pride leader "not moral" (I mean not part of a system of morality,
not "immoral")?
Second, objective morality is going to be limited to behaviors that are
supported by gene survival. This would exclude, for example, voluntarily
limiting our reproduction in order to preserve what is left of the other species
on this planet. This may or may not be a good example, but what I am getting at
is that morality must be limited to behaviors that benefit a group of genes, at
most our entire species. We would not, to attempt another example, be capable of
evolving a morality that considered the well-being of an alien race with which
we were unable to interbreed, beyond the consideration of how our treatment of
them affected us.
Tony
M G
> ma...@tidalwave.net (M G) wrote:
> > blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote in message news:<402d54b.02082...@posting.google.com>...
>
> practical" is an objectively good criteria for evaluating morals?
> What reason do you have for thinking it's more than your opinion that
> it's a good criteria? I could argue that "world peace" is not a
> practical goal, yet in my opinion it is a moral goal. But maybe we
> don't mean the same thing by "practical"?
>
reasonable and sensible are related. What is the point of making
unrealizable conduct a standard of conduct?
World peace is a condition that appears to define a theoretically
achievable ideal state of conduct between all societies and peoples.
People choose to attack or not to attack and the not to attack option
is technically viable under technically achievable conditions. And
although there is no reason to believe it is achievable anytime soon,
progress that is short of achieving the entire goal can be made at the
present time. So we can agree to call that an practical long term
objective.
> My understanding is that such morality is based on not causing pain to
> any creature which is capable of feeling it, namely mammals (including
> humans), birds, reptiles, amphibians. Some people may include fish
> and/or insects.
You started by citing a moral standard that made no distinction
between non-human animals and humans (you identified this position
with PETA, I am not so sure PETA members would all agree). So I
responded by pointing out why that wasn't practical. Now you set the
standard as "not cause pain" and applying to "mammals". Well, I said
from the beginning "varying and lesser" standard for non-human
animals. So now you seem to be more in agreement with me. So it
appears that you do recognize that practicality is an important
criteria for morality even though you don't admit it. Otherwise why
introduce the limitations "mammals" and "cause pain"?
> But my point is, you have your own reasons for why you adopt a
> human-first morality, and they have their own reasons for why they
> adopt a humans-and-animals morality. You have "must be practical" as
> a goal or guideline; they might have "what doesn't make me feel
> guilty" as a goal or guideline. Maybe they have a stronger empathy
> for animals than you do, or maybe you have a more logical approach
> than they do. What reason is there for me, a third party, to decide
> which of you is right or wrong, except by deciding which of your
> opinions most closely resemble mine? How can you say they're
> objectively wrong, or how can they condemn you for not sharing their
> feelings?
Do you think this is relevant to the issue of whether the concept of
morality has some objective basis? I don't. This is more about how
to generalize the concept by drawing the lines that define where and
how the concept applies, which is a more subjective aspect.
Your general point that there is subjectivity in the decision where to
draw the line that defines what is required and not required and what
fits and does not fit under the umbrella of moral conduct is correct.
Standards of conduct necessarily have subjective components for a
number of reasons. Another reason is that no one has complete and
perfect information regarding the future impact of one's conduct. We
never disagreed over this. When I said "human welfare" I
paranthetically added that morality also had broader applicability to
non-humans and that my focus on humans was intended to keep the
discussion simple and manageable. So we don't disagree that "human
welfare" is too limited and simplistic either. The subjectivity of
putting moralilty into practice is an important component of what
defines us individually as different personalities.
We appear to disagree on at least two points:
1) I claim that we don't have to identify every individual's decisions
as unequivocally morally wrong or right to claim that morality has an
objective basis. I claim that to show that morality has an objective
basis it is sufficient to provide description of such an objective
basis. You seem to me to think that morality must be either all
objective or subjective and that since there is much disagreement and
subjectivity in practice therefore it cannot have any conceptual basis
that is objective.
2) I claim that avoiding harm to human welfare (and promoting benefit)
provides an objective basis for morality (albeit oversimplisticly
because of its exclusive focus on humans). You dispute that it does
(I find your counter-argument unconvincing).
Paul Filseth
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight):
> > But *the* Objective Standard -- one that, if it exists and is
> > knowable, would enable people to evaluate a moral statement
> > and say it's absolutely right or wrong ..
>
> Well, yeah, this is why the stick is wielded, rhetorically.
That's one reason. It's also wielded because if it doesn't exist
then there's nothing of substance to argue about. Moral debates would
have no more subject matter than two atheists arguing about whether
atheists can be "spiritual".
> People want a way to say "my moral outlook is the RIGHT moral
> outlook, and the hell with yours!"
That cuts both ways. People could equally say "Your outlook
can't be any more right than anybody else's, so I'll just go with
mine, and the hell with yours." Why would anyone ever need to
consider the possibility that he's wrong if "he's wrong" doesn't
refer to any potential state of affairs?
> But you still haven't defined what "objective" means,
... or what a "relative" moral claim means, either.
> If your ego isn't big enough, if you don't have enough cojones or
> hubris, then you have to invent a god -- or better, The God -- to
> carry your absolute morality.
But that doesn't help, in any logical sense. Even if there
really is an absolute morality and there really is a/the God, that
provides zero justification for supposing the two have anything to do
with each other. That's just simple assertion by theists. It takes
exactly as much hubris to claim your God is an authority on the matter
as to claim you are, because they're _the same_ claim. All "The God"
does is help arrogant people take pride in make-believe meekness.
So if you think there's an absolute morality and your ego really
isn't big enough to say "My outlook is RIGHT!", then you just have to
admit "Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe your outlook is closer to
the truth than mine. Let's hear your reasons."
Russell Turpin
>>> But *the* Objective Standard -- one that, if it
>>> exists and is knowable, would enable people to
>>> evaluate a moral statement and say it's absolutely
>>> right or wrong ..
Russell:
>> Well, yeah, this is why the stick is wielded,
>> rhetorically.
Paul Filseth:
> That's one reason. It's also wielded because if
> it doesn't exist then there's nothing of substance
> to argue about. Moral debates would have no more
> subject matter than two atheists arguing about
> whether atheists can be "spiritual".
I respectfully disagree. People with differing
moral views could nonetheles have a very fruitful
discussion. They could explore where their views
overlap and where they differ; something that often
is not obvious since common moral terms carry
different meaning to people who embed in them in
different moral frameworks. Where they differ, they
might search for a reasonable compromise, if not in
adopting a common moral view, then in minimizing
practical conflict from their difference. Someone
who doesn't believe their morality absolute is open
to the likelihood that various conflicts are
embedded in their moral view, and they have more
thoughtful alternatives open to resolving these than
merely patching a contradiction with exegesis. They
can discuss the relative importance and practical
consequences of different elements of their moral
views. Some of these consequences might include the
impact on the holder's psychology, how it affects
his personal relationships, how it moderates his
social behavior, and the beneficial or harmful
aspects of that on others, and the moral outlook's
social impact if adopted at large. AND, thinking
about these practical consequences might cause them
to rethink their moral views.
In fact, it seems to me that it is those who believe
they have an absolute morality whose moral discussions
are sparse and fruitless. Very quickly they identify
where their respondent deviates from their moral code,
and then condemn them, saying, "THIS is what is good,
and since you disagree, you're bad." While Usenet
devotees seem capable of endlessly cycling on that
trope, in fact it closes the door to any substantive
discussion.
Russell:
>> People want a way to say "my moral outlook is the
>> RIGHT moral outlook, and the hell with yours!"
Filseth
> That cuts both ways. People could equally say "Your
> outlook can't be any more right than anybody else's,
> so I'll just go with mine, and the hell with yours."
That happens. Not nearly as much as the other way
around. But I grant the point. The counter, as I've
tried to suggest above, is that there are reasons for
discussing morality that have nothing to do with it
being absolute.
BlinkyLight:
> I meant [by absoluteness] one that would give
> people a *real* reason for saying their morality is
> the correct one, not simply an excuse for saying it.
Again, that only says what you want an absolute
morality to do, not what "absolute" means.
Interestingly, I can think of lots of reasons why
people can and do change their moral view. They
consider examples where a practiced moral principle
has perverse consequences. So they refine the
principle. Life experience teaches them that some
moral principles are more important than others. They
see that some moral principle, even though it serves
well in each individual's life, has a corrosive
effect on society on a whole when practiced in
aggregate. They come to realize that some of their
moral principles conflict, perhaps logically, or
perhaps in some practical sense. All of these are
REAL reasons people change and evolve their moral
outlook. Interestingly, I think this kind of moral
growth is more difficult for those who view their
own morality as absolute. (The good news about most
codes of morality that claim their own absoluteness
is that they are also quite murky. As a result,
their adherents are able to go through this same
kind of moral growth while CLAIMING an absolute
morality, thinking that they are simply reaching a
better understanding of it, rather than rewriting
their own moral views!)
Paul Filseth:
> Why would anyone ever need to consider the possibility
> that he's wrong if "he's wrong" doesn't refer to any
> potential state of affairs?
If you think morality is a state of affairs, that it is
somehow written into the structure of the universe, I
would like you to decribe for me how things would appear
tomorrow, if morality were factually changed overnight.
Suppose an omnipotent god pulls a switch, and at midnight
murder IS morally good. How would things look different
tomorrow morning? Note well, that I am not asking how
things would be if people VIEWED murder as morally good.
The gedanken requires that you assume people's views
stay just what they are. Everyone (or almost everyone)
STILL thinks murder is bad. It is just the "fact of the
matter" that I want you to imagine changed, and tell how
that changes the "state of affairs" in which we live.
India
> Paul Filseth wrote:
> > So what? That's not the only thing its good for. Maybe _we_
> > have no way to know what the standard is but our descendants won't
> > always share our limitations -- *unless we stop researching the
> > question because we decide there's no answer to be found*. If we
> > give future thinkers dwarfs to stand on the shoulders of, they won't
> > see further than others.
>
> standard might turn out to be contrary to everything you hold dear? Would you
> accept it and follow its rules, hating everything you did in the process?)
Knowing Paul's great respect for the teachings of the Vatican, one can
only imagine what would happen to him should he one day find it
indisputably proven that the Pope's decrees are infallible... <evil
chuckle> (Though actually, being a Protestant, I don't think I'd fare
any better than Paul in that case.
:-)
--India
====
Personal AAM FAQ: http://www.rationalchristianity.net/offsite/aam_faq.html
Official AAM FAQ: http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html
BlinkyLight
> If you are claiming that your morality is objective, then a consensus
> would seem to be required. If large numbers of people disagree with your
> claim, how can it be objective? that is what subjective means - that
> different people, presented with the same situation, will disagree.
As I'm posting in response to Tony, I think it likely that no one
would agree with the morality defined by the Objective Standard, if
such exists. Besides, lack of widespread acceptance of something
objectively demonstrable doesn't make it not objectively demonstrable.
Europeans in Galileo's or Copernicus' day didn't exactly go around
slapping themselves on the forehead saying, "By Jove, that's it, the
Earth revolves around the sun! Of course!"
Blink
BlinkyLight
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote:
> >
> > Why is only practical morality defensible? How do you know that "is
> > practical" is an objectively good criteria for evaluating morals?
> > What reason do you have for thinking it's more than your opinion that
> > it's a good criteria? I could argue that "world peace" is not a
> > practical goal, yet in my opinion it is a moral goal. But maybe we
> > don't mean the same thing by "practical"?
> >
> Since morality is about standards of conduct, what is practical,
> reasonable and sensible are related. What is the point of making
> unrealizable conduct a standard of conduct?
>
> World peace is a condition that appears to define a theoretically
> achievable ideal state of conduct between all societies and peoples.
> People choose to attack or not to attack and the not to attack option
> is technically viable under technically achievable conditions. And
> although there is no reason to believe it is achievable anytime soon,
> progress that is short of achieving the entire goal can be made at the
> present time. So we can agree to call that an practical long term
> objective.
Nearly all moral goals are theoretically achievable, but many will
never be achieved. World peace on a planet which contains more than a
handful of people is, IMO, only possible in theory. It's unrealizable
conduct, but an ideal conduct which is good to have as an ultimate
goal (IMO).
At any rate, this is getting away from the original subject. I
understand your desire for a practical moral standard which can be
acted on, but the question at hand is whether or not there's a
standard which is *objective in origin,* not whether or not a given
standard is practical.
> You started by citing a moral standard that made no distinction
> between non-human animals and humans (you identified this position
> with PETA, I am not so sure PETA members would all agree).
You're taking my statement too seriously. I refered to PETA members
as an offhand example of people who might agree with the statement
"animal welfare is just as important as human welfare." I didn't mean
to say all PETA members would agree with it.
> So I
> responded by pointing out why that wasn't practical. Now you set the
> standard as "not cause pain" and applying to "mammals". Well, I said
> from the beginning "varying and lesser" standard for non-human
> animals. So now you seem to be more in agreement with me. So it
> appears that you do recognize that practicality is an important
> criteria for morality even though you don't admit it. Otherwise why
> introduce the limitations "mammals" and "cause pain"?
Because that makes it well-defined. If any moral statement is to be
evaluated, it has to be well-defined. You sounded like you thought it
was ill-defined, or wanted more definition, so I arbitrarily defined
it further.
Impractical statements may still be moral statements when compared
with the (still imaginary) objective moral standard. It may well be
that the objective standard includes the principle "it is wrong to
kill any living thing which can experience pain, including insects" or
"it is wrong to kill any living thing, period." We can't ever live up
to either of those, but neither can the world live up to world peace.
But then, this too is beside the original point.
> Your general point that there is subjectivity in the decision where to
> draw the line that defines what is required and not required and what
> fits and does not fit under the umbrella of moral conduct is correct.
If the standard is subjective, any moral judgment can only be
objective in relation to the subjective standard.
> The subjectivity of
> putting moralilty into practice is an important component of what
> defines us individually as different personalities.
I agreed with you previously on this.
> We appear to disagree on at least two points:
> 1) I claim that we don't have to identify every individual's decisions
> as unequivocally morally wrong or right to claim that morality has an
> objective basis. I claim that to show that morality has an objective
> basis it is sufficient to provide description of such an objective
> basis. You seem to me to think that morality must be either all
> objective or subjective and that since there is much disagreement and
> subjectivity in practice therefore it cannot have any conceptual basis
> that is objective.
The *foundation* of morality is either objective or not. Sure, you
can come up with an arbitrary, subjectively chosen standard, measure
moral statements with it, and call that measurement objective, but
it's not *objective in origin.* You could also define a standard of
beautiful colors by picking a shade of blue and saying the beauty of a
color is measure by how close it is to the shade you picked. Then you
have an "objective standard" for measuring the beauty of a color, but
the standard is subjective in origin -- you have no logical
justification for saying someone else's beauty measurement, which uses
their favorite shade of green instead, is *absolutely wrong*. It's
wrong relative to your subjectively chosen standard, not wrong in the
same universal sense that 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong.
> 2) I claim that avoiding harm to human welfare (and promoting benefit)
> provides an objective basis for morality (albeit oversimplisticly
> because of its exclusive focus on humans). You dispute that it does
> (I find your counter-argument unconvincing).
Which it does -- to the same extent that "music in the key of F major
is good" provides an objective basis for judging the merit of musical
compositions.
Blink
BlinkyLight
> Paul Filseth wrote:
> > If you see an orange and
> > judge it purple, you're objectively color blind, even though "purple"
> > is a category caused by human retinas -- it's not a segment of the
> > electromagnetic spectrum.
>
> It isn't? There isn't a range of frequencies of the EM spectrum (somewhere on
> the borders of what we label "red" and what we label "blue") that we
> consistently label "purple"?
I knew blue and red were at opposite ends of the spectrum, but
apparently the blue end extends into "violet" and then "purple" is
actually a combination of the red and blue wavelengths. (See
http://acept.la.asu.edu/PiN/rdg/color/color.shtml)
> (BTW, what is your reaction to the idea that an demonstrably objective moral
> standard might turn out to be contrary to everything you hold dear? Would you
> accept it and follow its rules, hating everything you did in the process?)
Everyone disagrees with everyone else on some aspect of morality. I
hypothesize that if there were an objective moral standard and we
could discover what it is, everyone would reject some or all of it
because it wouldn't match his/her standard (which cuts down on the
possibility of our discovering it, if it exists).
> > They say there's no sporadic group bigger than
> > the Monster. How could you conceivably verify that by looking at the
> > world? How could you even understand what it means based on sensory
> > experience?
>
> How could you even understand it using a dictionary?? "Fruit flies like a
> banana". In case Blink doesn't ask, what the heck is a sporadic group and a
> monster? :)
Try http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SporadicGroup.html (though if you
don't know anything about group theory, this may not help you much.
Not that I knew what a sporadic group was before looking it up just
now. :)
> Second, objective morality is going to be limited to behaviors that are
> supported by gene survival. This would exclude, for example, voluntarily
> limiting our reproduction in order to preserve what is left of the other species
> on this planet. This may or may not be a good example, but what I am getting at
> is that morality must be limited to behaviors that benefit a group of genes, at
> most our entire species. We would not, to attempt another example, be capable of
> evolving a morality that considered the well-being of an alien race with which
> we were unable to interbreed, beyond the consideration of how our treatment of
> them affected us.
Precisely. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I'd think if an
objective moral standard existed, it would cover interspecies
relations. People have strong feelings about the treatment of
animals, whether they're vegetarians or medical researchers.
And what reason would we have for evolving the moral "torturing
animals is wrong," which appears to be a fairly commonly-held moral?
Most people feel it's okay to eat animals, and killing animals for
food and resources has benefited humans for most/all of human history.
Feeling empathy for animals interferes with our ability to kill them.
Yet even among those people who have to kill animals themselves to
provide food for their families or their society, I doubt very many of
them would approve of needlessly torturing the same animals they
killed for food. (Boiling lobsters comes to mind as a
counter-example, but according to
http://octopus.gma.org/lobsters/eatingetc.html lobster meat goes bad
so quickly the lobster must be cooked while alive. Actually, this
page turns the counter-example into an example, for the next paragraph
starts, "How to cook a lobster in the most humane manner has been a
concern of guilt-ridden chefs for generations.") You'd think
evolution would have primed us to have no compulsion about killing
animals in any manner, so long as it didn't ruin the meat or fur or
whatever and we didn't exhaust the food supply. Hunters and butchers
(and lobster-cookers) who are guilt-free and enjoy their job are
better hunters and butchers and would improve gene propagation chances
for themselves and/or their society, no?
Then again, our feelings of guilt and such affect our actions to such
a degree that I can hardly imagine the guilt-producing section of our
brain not being part of natural selection. So, Tony, where do you
think "hurting animals is wrong" feelings come from?
Blink
M G
<cut my comments>
> Nearly all moral goals are theoretically achievable, but many will
> never be achieved. World peace on a planet which contains more than a
> handful of people is, IMO, only possible in theory. It's unrealizable
> conduct, but an ideal conduct which is good to have as an ultimate
> goal (IMO).
>
> At any rate, this is getting away from the original subject. I
> understand your desire for a practical moral standard which can be
> acted on, but the question at hand is whether or not there's a
> standard which is *objective in origin,* not whether or not a given
> standard is practical.
<cut my comments>
> You're taking my statement too seriously. I refered to PETA members
> as an offhand example of people who might agree with the statement
> "animal welfare is just as important as human welfare." I didn't mean
> to say all PETA members would agree with it.
<cut my comments>
> Because that makes it well-defined. If any moral statement is to be
> evaluated, it has to be well-defined. You sounded like you thought it
> was ill-defined, or wanted more definition, so I arbitrarily defined
> it further.
That was not my thinking. A moral code based on treating all animals
exactly alike is impractical because we do not see microscopic animals
such as zooplankton. We digest and kill zooplankton when we swallow
water while swimming in a lake. We know such a moral code is
impractical precisely because animal is well-defined. This is not
just nit-picking. I am making a bigger point about morality having an
objective basis. If moral codes have no objective basis then it would
make no difference whatsoever whether a moral code makes distinctions
between different animals or not. But it does make a difference and
this is because morality has an objective basis. That is why a moral
code that says it is more moral to harm animals that don't feel pain
makes more sense than a moral code that says it is more moral to harm
animals that feel pain.
The very fact that you recognize this distinction presupposes what you
are refusing to acknowledge - that morality has an objective basis.
The definition you came up with wasn't completely arbitrary on your
part even though you deny it. There is a common basis for your moral
code examples, and that common basis is the objective basis of
avoiding harm and promoting benefit.
> Impractical statements may still be moral statements when compared
> with the (still imaginary) objective moral standard. It may well be
> that the objective standard includes the principle "it is wrong to
> kill any living thing which can experience pain, including insects" or
> "it is wrong to kill any living thing, period." We can't ever live up
> to either of those, but neither can the world live up to world peace.
Moral statements can be more or less encompassing regardless of
whether or not there is an objective basis for morality. The fact
that the more encompassing moral statements tend to be less practical
than the less encompassing moral statements is consistent with
morality having an objective basis.
<cut my comments>
> If the standard is subjective, any moral judgment can only be
> objective in relation to the subjective standard.
If their is an objective basis then any moral judgment should be
evaluated in accord with this objective basis, even though the
judgment itself may be largely subjective and accordingly may be one
several alternative judgements which accord with the objective basis.
<cut my comments>
> I agreed with you previously on this.
<cut my comments>
> The *foundation* of morality is either objective or not. Sure, you
> can come up with an arbitrary, subjectively chosen standard, measure
> moral statements with it, and call that measurement objective, but
> it's not *objective in origin.* You could also define a standard of
> beautiful colors by picking a shade of blue and saying the beauty of a
> color is measure by how close it is to the shade you picked. Then you
> have an "objective standard" for measuring the beauty of a color, but
> the standard is subjective in origin -- you have no logical
> justification for saying someone else's beauty measurement, which uses
> their favorite shade of green instead, is *absolutely wrong*. It's
> wrong relative to your subjectively chosen standard, not wrong in the
> same universal sense that 2 + 2 = 5 is wrong.
It is derived from morality being about distinguishing good and bad
conduct. The assumption is that good and bad conduct can be
identified in relation to harm and benefit to people and other living
things. Harm and benefit to humans and other living things isn't
arbitrary. Living things are real, harm and benefit are real, we
learn about harm and benefit from our experiences which are real.
Your calling it arbitrary doesn't make it so.
<cut my comments>
> Which it does -- to the same extent that "music in the key of F major
> is good" provides an objective basis for judging the merit of musical
> compositions.
This is an example of exaggeration. It may be incomplete, but not
that incomplete.
John Secker
<spam...@rationalchristianity.net> writes
>> (BTW, what is your reaction to the idea that an demonstrably objective moral
>> standard might turn out to be contrary to everything you hold dear? Would you
>> accept it and follow its rules, hating everything you did in the process?)
>
>Knowing Paul's great respect for the teachings of the Vatican, one can
>only imagine what would happen to him should he one day find it
>indisputably proven that the Pope's decrees are infallible... <evil
>chuckle> (Though actually, being a Protestant, I don't think I'd fare
>any better than Paul in that case.
>:-)
>
incompatible, this would require incontrovertible evidence that the
rules of logic are wrong. Given Paul's well-known respect for the rule
of logic, I imagine that in those circumstances he might well choose to
follow the teachings of the Vatican. Seems like a pretty far-out
hypothetical, though.
--
John Secker
John Secker
<blinky...@yahoo.com> writes
>Everyone disagrees with everyone else on some aspect of morality. I
>hypothesize that if there were an objective moral standard and we
>could discover what it is, everyone would reject some or all of it
>because it wouldn't match his/her standard (which cuts down on the
>possibility of our discovering it, if it exists).
>
common standard of morality in the absence of an objective test. If an
objective morality exists (whatever that might look like) then surely
most people would judge by the evidence. No doubt there would be some
holdouts, depending on how easy the objective evidence was to grasp - as
with evolution, where most people have accepted the objective evidence
and adapted their world-views in a more or less radical way, but some
simply refuse to accept it at all.
--
John Secker
John Secker
and who were capable and interested enough to understand it did almost
exactly that.
--
John Secker
Tony Griffin
> > (BTW, what is your reaction to the idea that an demonstrably objective moral
> > standard might turn out to be contrary to everything you hold dear? Would you
> > accept it and follow its rules, hating everything you did in the process?)
>
> Everyone disagrees with everyone else on some aspect of morality. I
> hypothesize that if there were an objective moral standard and we
> could discover what it is, everyone would reject some or all of it
> because it wouldn't match his/her standard (which cuts down on the
> possibility of our discovering it, if it exists).
An objective morality would be provable in the same sense that any scientific
fact is provable. No honest intelligent person would be able to deny that, if
his morality was different from the objective morality, his own morality was
*wrong*, no matter how uncomfortable that might be.
There would of course be a group of "flat-earthers" that would deny the whole
thing. I suspect, as you suggest, that group would be the most of us. That
doesn't mean that the objective morality wouldn't be correct of course. The
Earth went round the Sun even when 99% of the population believed the opposite.
My difficulty is more with how we would ever establish that the morality was
objective. Unless we can invent some equivalent of a radio to detect "morality
waves".
> > How could you even understand it using a dictionary?? "Fruit flies like a
> > banana". In case Blink doesn't ask, what the heck is a sporadic group and a
> > monster? :)
>
> Try http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SporadicGroup.html (though if you
> don't know anything about group theory, this may not help you much.
> Not that I knew what a sporadic group was before looking it up just
> now. :)
I looked it up and still don't. I note there is a "baby monster". Cute little
thing with pretty little tentacles. :)
> (Boiling lobsters comes to mind as a
> counter-example, but according to
> http://octopus.gma.org/lobsters/eatingetc.html lobster meat goes bad
> so quickly the lobster must be cooked while alive. Actually, this
> page turns the counter-example into an example, for the next paragraph
> starts, "How to cook a lobster in the most humane manner has been a
> concern of guilt-ridden chefs for generations.")
There's no practical problem with eating a diet that does not include lobsters,
so this is IMO no more than a rationalisation. Lobsters taste good, so any
consideration of their suffering inevitably loses out.
> You'd think
> evolution would have primed us to have no compulsion about killing
> animals in any manner, so long as it didn't ruin the meat or fur or
> whatever and we didn't exhaust the food supply. Hunters and butchers
> (and lobster-cookers) who are guilt-free and enjoy their job are
> better hunters and butchers and would improve gene propagation chances
> for themselves and/or their society, no?
>
> Then again, our feelings of guilt and such affect our actions to such
> a degree that I can hardly imagine the guilt-producing section of our
> brain not being part of natural selection. So, Tony, where do you
> think "hurting animals is wrong" feelings come from?
Good question. My personal hypothesis is that its a spill-over from our evolved
protective feelings towards our own children. Animals (for those that feel that
way) seem helpless and in need of protection. Its no coincidence IMO that we
care more for endangered species than numerous ones. The protection of Spotted
Owls stopped logging in certain areas, but there is less mileage in the argument
that millions of more common birds lose their habitat when other areas are
logged. Note how our attitude to big game hunting has changed. Once, lions and
tigers were seen as dangerous. No protection required. Now we see them as
victims, even though few would wish to face one without a gun (or even with
one).
Tony
Paul Filseth
> > So the question is, do _you_ make moral claims and argue about
> > their merits with people who don't share your views? If you do
> > that, is it really something other than ethics that you're arguing
> > about? If you do, and it isn't, and you really think morals aren't
> > objective, then, as Walt Whitman might have put it, you are large,
> > you contain multitudes. :-)
>
> someone who thinks hurting people isn't wrong. I am going to attempt
> to persuade him it's wrong, because it's in my best interests (though
> whether or not hurting me is a good or bad thing is ultimately a
> matter of opinion. :)
What do you mean by the "It's wrong" you're trying to persuade
him of? Are you trying to get him to believe it's objectively wrong,
even though you don't think it is, because it's in your interests for
him to believe it? Surely not. You can't be trying to get him to
believe "it's wrong to you", whatever that means; you're trying to
convert him, not just self-express. Are you trying to get him to
believe "it's wrong to him"? If so, do you personally believe "it's
wrong to him"? If you don't, you'd be trying to trick him into a
belief you think is false for your own advantage, just as in the
"objectively wrong" case. If you do believe "it's wrong to him", how
can you believe that if you're a subjectivist? Isn't he the best
qualified judge of what's "wrong to him"? What evidence do you have
that "it's wrong to him" to outweigh the fact that he says it isn't?
And if none of those are what you mean by "It's wrong", what do you
mean by it?
Or maybe you aren't trying to change his _beliefs_ at all; you're
trying to get him to _do_ something different. Are you trying to
motivate him to stop hurting people if he does that? If he doesn't
hurt people because he doesn't feel like it, but thinks there's
nothing wrong with it if somebody else wants to, are you arguing with
him in order to get him to act hostile to people who hurt people? If
it's anything like that, why do you think of this as persuading him
that "hurting people" has some property you call "wrong"?
> Why do I think hurting people is wrong? When I hurt someone, I feel
> guilty, and I dislike feeling guilty, so I avoid hurting people.
> This is the main reason I think it's wrong: it feels wrong to me.
I imagine there are other feelings you dislike, though. Do you
like feeling depressed? I don't. I find prison movies depressing, so
I avoid them. But I don't therefore infer that it's wrong to watch
prison movies -- people who are into that sort of thing can go right
ahead as far as I'm concerned. Aren't there any feelings you dislike
and avoid inducing, but that you don't attach moral judgment to? If
there are, then your dislike of feeling guilty must not be the main
reason you think hurting people is wrong.
> When I hurt someone, they're likely to hurt me in return and to not
> like me.
Not if they never know you're the one who did it. What if you
can be sure of getting away with it? Does that make it okay?
And on the flip side, what if someone deserves to be hurt?
Suppose you're on a jury and considering sending somebody up the river
for five years. If you do that he won't like you; and there's always
a chance he'll do something about it when he gets out. Does that make
it wrong to convict him?
> If I were to argue with someone about this, I would ask him if he
> felt guilty when he hurt people,
So he says:
"Sure. I feel terrible about it. Most of the people I've killed
and maimed didn't volunteer to risk death, like I did. They
just wanted to go home. But I can't let that stop me. Mullah
Omar drafted them to fight for his evil regime. You want I
should let dictators use their own troops as hostages? Then the
world would end up run by dictators -- the world has governments
like the Taliban in it, and if we let them get away with killing
Americans there will be no end to it. So I fight for my country,
because it's right, even though it means hurting people. And I
always feel guilty about it, and I see those poor guys' faces at
night, and that's my problem to deal with. All I can do about
those men's tragedy is make sure there's one dictator who never
does it to anybody again."
> and if he wanted to get along in society and not have people be
> likely to hurt him.
And he says:
"Of course. But would you tell all the gays they should pretend
to be straight, so they can get along and have people not hurt
them? What about standing up to wrongdoers? Do you think what's
right is just whatever makes you personally better off, that you
keep talking about which feelings you dislike and how to have
people not want to hurt you? If I thought right and wrong were
about that I wouldn't have volunteered to get shot at."
> If he says "yes" to either, I have a chance of persuading him,
> because we have shared feelings and/or goals to work with.
Persuading him *of* something or *to do* something? Persuading
him that some "it's wrong" claim is right, or persuading him to quit
the military and become a pacifist and argue other soldiers into
quitting, or what?
BlinkyLight
> In article <402d54b.02090...@posting.google.com>, BlinkyLight
> <blinky...@yahoo.com> writes
> >Everyone disagrees with everyone else on some aspect of morality. I
> >hypothesize that if there were an objective moral standard and we
> >could discover what it is, everyone would reject some or all of it
> >because it wouldn't match his/her standard (which cuts down on the
> >possibility of our discovering it, if it exists).
> >
> Do you think so? Surely this applies more to the challenge of agreeing a
> common standard of morality in the absence of an objective test. If an
> objective morality exists (whatever that might look like) then surely
> most people would judge by the evidence.
There are at least a couple of possibilities. One is that the
objective standard is a set of guidelines or general rules (hurting
people is wrong, etc.), and everyone would accept the generalities as
true but disagree on how to implement them. This is essentially the
situation today, except that we don't know if the generalities most
people agree on are objective principles or commonly held opinions.
Another possibility is that we can determine with a fair degree of
accuracy what the objective rules are for specific things (e.g. under
what circumstances, if any, abortion and capital punishment are
moral). Imagine a group of moral scientists discovering the objective
standard and its application to today's hot issues. Conservative
religious types would almost certainly reject it to the extent it
contradicted ther views. But what if it contradicted most people's
deeply held beliefs? What if it said slavery was morally neutral or
even good? What if it said women were inferior to men and could be
treated as property? What if it said the typical Westerner was highly
immoral?
Morality is a highly personal, emotional issue. When people's
emotions get involved, they think less clearly and are prone to bias.
Why is evolution controversial when so many other scientific theories
aren't? Because fundies take it as an attack on the foundation of
their *personal* belief system. So however clear the supposed
objective standard may be, people will react emotionally to it and may
refuse to accept it.
Blink
BlinkyLight
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote:
> > > So the question is, do _you_ make moral claims and argue about
> > > their merits with people who don't share your views? If you do
> > > that, is it really something other than ethics that you're arguing
> > > about? If you do, and it isn't, and you really think morals aren't
> > > objective, then, as Walt Whitman might have put it, you are large,
> > > you contain multitudes. :-)
> >
> > Ok, for the sake of the discussion let's pretend I'm arguing with
> > someone who thinks hurting people isn't wrong. I am going to attempt
> > to persuade him it's wrong, because it's in my best interests (though
> > whether or not hurting me is a good or bad thing is ultimately a
> > matter of opinion. :)
>
> What do you mean by the "It's wrong" you're trying to persuade
> believe "it's wrong to him"? If so, do you personally believe "it's
> wrong to him"? If you don't, you'd be trying to trick him into a
> belief you think is false for your own advantage, just as in the
> "objectively wrong" case. If you do believe "it's wrong to him", how
> can you believe that if you're a subjectivist? Isn't he the best
> qualified judge of what's "wrong to him"?
People don't know everything about themselves, and they often make
reasoning errors (e.g. in determining whether or not an action will
achieve their goal). Kids often form opinions of food they've never
tasted before and insist it's yucky. Parents insist on their kids
trying new foods, and in some cases the kids reverse their opinion
once they try it. Parents don't have some special ability that
enables them to know what food their children will like, but they do
know what foods are commonly liked by children and people in general,
and they also know their children are making a reasoning error when
they assume a food that looks gross to them will also taste gross.
I certainly wouldn't say that I'm a parent and other people are
children when it comes to morality, but the above example illustrates
that there are cases where someone can "convince" someone else of a
purely subjective matter. As for actual moral discussions, it may be
that a person hasn't thought enough about how an action makes him feel
-- he may be trying to avoid realizing he feels guilty so that he can
continue to do what his peers do, for instance. Or a person who wants
to do only what's in her own best interests may make a reasoning error
and decide to go with the short-term benefits of theft, not realizing
she will most likely be caught and imprisoned.
So to answer your question, I'm trying to see if what's wrong to me is
also wrong to the person I'm talking to, and if I think it is I'll try
to get him to consciously realize it. If it turns out it's not wrong
to him, but it's something that impacts me emotionally or physically,
I'll try to see if I can convince him there's a better way of
achieving his goals. If the action *is* his goal -- if we're
discussing whether hurting people is wrong, and he's a sadist whose
goal is to enjoy himself and who finds the most pleasure in torturing
people -- I can't persuade him of anything; we simply have two
different opinions on the matter.
> Or maybe you aren't trying to change his _beliefs_ at all; you're
> trying to get him to _do_ something different. Are you trying to
> motivate him to stop hurting people if he does that?
If possible, yes.
> If he doesn't
> hurt people because he doesn't feel like it, but thinks there's
> nothing wrong with it if somebody else wants to, are you arguing with
> him in order to get him to act hostile to people who hurt people? If
> it's anything like that, why do you think of this as persuading him
> that "hurting people" has some property you call "wrong"?
In the particular example you give, I probably wouldn't argue with him
at all. Well, I might ask him if he wants to be hurt by someone, and
if he thinks persuading hurters not to hurt wouldn't help achieve his
own goal of avoiding hurt -- for his persuading hurters not to hurt
helps me in turn. But maybe he simply doesn't want to, or thinks
there's something wrong with doing so. In that case, again, we have
two different opinions.
Is this persuading him that "hurting people" has a "wrong" property?
He and I both agree in this case that hurting people is wrong --
meaning that for both of us, to hurt someone would cause us to feel
guilty (or that it does for me, and that it meets his criteria for
"wrong," whatever that may be). The discussion would only be over
whether or not we "should" try to get others to refrain from hurting
people. To me, "persuading hurters to not hurt when possible" is
"right," but as I said it may or may not be "right" to him.
> > Why do I think hurting people is wrong? When I hurt someone, I feel
> > guilty, and I dislike feeling guilty, so I avoid hurting people.
> > This is the main reason I think it's wrong: it feels wrong to me.
>
> I imagine there are other feelings you dislike, though. Do you
> like feeling depressed? I don't. I find prison movies depressing, so
> I avoid them. But I don't therefore infer that it's wrong to watch
> prison movies -- people who are into that sort of thing can go right
> ahead as far as I'm concerned. Aren't there any feelings you dislike
> and avoid inducing, but that you don't attach moral judgment to? If
> there are, then your dislike of feeling guilty must not be the main
> reason you think hurting people is wrong.
I didn't say I felt bad, I said I felt *guilty.* It's the guilty
feeling which I use to determine if something feels wrong to me, just
as the ouchy-hot feeling is the one I use to determine if putting my
hand on a heated object is a good idea or not.
> > When I hurt someone, they're likely to hurt me in return and to not
> > like me.
>
> Not if they never know you're the one who did it. What if you
> can be sure of getting away with it? Does that make it okay?
One, I said they're *likely* to hurt me in return. Even if I try to
get away with it, there's always a chance I'll be caught. Two, that's
not the only reason I think it's wrong -- there's the guilt feeling I
mentioned above. So even if I were guaranteed to get away with it and
not experience the (outward) negative consequences, I would still feel
guilty.
> And on the flip side, what if someone deserves to be hurt?
> Suppose you're on a jury and considering sending somebody up the river
> for five years. If you do that he won't like you; and there's always
> a chance he'll do something about it when he gets out. Does that make
> it wrong to convict him?
Of course not. If I think he committed the crime, and I feel five
years imprisonment is a just response, then I won't feel guilty about
voting to convict. My feelings of guilt (and self-respect) are the
primary indicators of what's right or wrong to me; my self-interest
plays a part, but in many if not most cases I would give my moral
feelings priority in determining what to do. Besides, it's less
likely that the convict would go after me personally than that someone
who I physically attacked would.
> > If I were to argue with someone about this, I would ask him if he
> > felt guilty when he hurt people,
>
> So he says:
>
> "Sure. I feel terrible about it. Most of the people I've killed
> and maimed didn't volunteer to risk death, like I did. They
> just wanted to go home. But I can't let that stop me. Mullah
> Omar drafted them to fight for his evil regime. You want I
> should let dictators use their own troops as hostages? Then the
> world would end up run by dictators -- the world has governments
> like the Taliban in it, and if we let them get away with killing
> Americans there will be no end to it. So I fight for my country,
> because it's right, even though it means hurting people. And I
> always feel guilty about it, and I see those poor guys' faces at
> night, and that's my problem to deal with. All I can do about
> those men's tragedy is make sure there's one dictator who never
> does it to anybody again."
Then I would say, "You're doing what you think is right, and you don't
sound like you have any reason to shoot me, so I have no argument with
you."
Did you think I was saying hurting people is wrong in every situation?
If I were this man, his action might well seem like the best one to
me as well.
> > and if he wanted to get along in society and not have people be
> > likely to hurt him.
>
> And he says:
>
> "Of course. But would you tell all the gays they should pretend
> to be straight, so they can get along and have people not hurt
> them? What about standing up to wrongdoers?
It depends on the situation. If my gay friend is about to walk into a
bar which I know is full of drunken homophobes, I'll advise him to not
advertise his orientation, because I don't want to see him get hurt
(I'm doing what's right to me, since I would feel guilty if I didn't
try to prevent his being hurt). If he feels that being openly gay,
even in such situations, is for him the right thing to do and/or will
be effective in ending homophobia, that's his opinion and he can act
on it; for my part I will try to protect him. On the other hand, if
he tells me his orientation is a huge secret and is afraid of letting
other friends, colleagues or relatives know, and I think he would
ultimately benefit from telling people about it, I would talk to him
about coming out of the closet. Of course, as you pointed out above,
I'm not necessarily a better judge of what's best for him than he is,
though I may see things he misses. His goals and moral feelings may
be different from mine, though, in which case I have no grounds for
persuading him to change his behavior.
> "Do you think what's
> right is just whatever makes you personally better off, that you
> keep talking about which feelings you dislike and how to have
> people not want to hurt you? If I thought right and wrong were
> about that I wouldn't have volunteered to get shot at."
Yes, though "better off" includes my emotional and psychological
well-being, not simply material or physical well-being. That's what
seems right to me. Because of my guilt and empathy feelings, what
makes me better off is often what makes others better off -- helping
my gay friend in the above example also makes me better off, because
it makes me happy to see my friends happy and because doing things
which increase my self-respect feeling instead of my guilt feeling
make me better off. So in practice my morality is a fairly
conventional one, not Objectivism or some such system.
Why does that seem wrong to you (Paul, assuming the soldier's words
reflect your feelings)? How do you decide what right and wrong are?
Do you not include your personal feelings or goals in your moral
decisions? Do you not seek to do what benefits you
emotionally/psychologically by making you feel proud rather than
guilty?
In fact, I believe the soldier is ultimately doing the same thing. At
first, it seems he is conflicted: he feels guilty about shooting men
on the other side, yet he feels he is doing the right thing (and
presumably has some good feelings about that). Would he be better off
if he left the army? It sounds like his feelings of guilt would be
worse if he left than if he stayed -- he sounds like the sort of
fellow who would feel he was cowardly, abandoning a just cause and his
rightful duty, abandoning his fellow soldiers, etc. Even though he
feels guilt on an instinctive level when he fires his gun, he has
reasoned that killing people in this case will ultimately lead to less
pain and suffering for a greater number of people in the future, so he
is not really acting contrary to his personal creed and therefore has
a lesser level of guilt.
Blink
Paul Filseth
> I can live with calling color definitions objective. But according
> to the definitions I posted earlier, subjective is "characteristic
> of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent
> of mind." So I'd say judgments which are based on our personal
> reactions are subjective until proven objective.
Well, color judgments certainly belong to reality as perceived.
Whether they're independent of mind depends on where in the brain you
think "mind" begins. So maybe subjective/objective isn't the best
way to characterize the debate. I can live with calling morality
subjective as long as that isn't construed as meaning there's no such
thing as a wrong answer.
> > If you say Lisa has bad taste, that's one thing; but if you're
> > prepared to explain why that taste is bad, that's quite another.
> > People who do the latter are either (a) talking about some aspect
> > of art they think of as objective, or (b) talking about art on
> > the surface, but really talking about something else, or (c) being
> > irrational.
>
> Or (d) talking about their views and persuading each other on the
> basis of shared feelings or opinions. If Mary thinks "good taste"
> in art means selecting pictures which inspire
> thought/imagination/feeling, and she talks to Lisa and discovers that
> Lisa really likes Elvis and is in some way inspired by seeing his
> portrait, she may decide that Lisa does have "good taste,"
That isn't an alternative to my list of possibilities, though;
it's just a way of exercising it. If Mary is prepared to explain
why what makes taste in art "good taste" is whether you're seeking
inspiration rather than something else, then she must think choosing
art on the basis of, say, its prospects as an investment or its
conformity to Koranic rules, is objectively inferior or unartistic;
or else she's being irrational.
> Though the determination of which criteria (artistic skill, ability
> to inspire thought, visually or emotionally pleasing, etc.) to use in
> evaluating art and their application are largely (or even entirely)
> subjective, people can still have a meaningful discussion about art.
Not and have it be about who has better taste.
> Ok, if we have such an existence proof of an objective standard, then
> we'd be aware of the standard's existence. But if we have no way of
> knowing what it is, we can't determine what's objectively right or
> wrong any more than if we didn't know it existed. So when we make a
> moral claim, we can only say it's right in our opinion,
Well, in the first place, we'd still be way ahead compared to
saying it's right in our opinion while not having anything for "right"
to mean. In the second place, a pure existence proof is a handy
motivator in the search for a constructive proof.
> and we have no basis for outright condemnation of those who disagree
> with us.
We don't have that regardless. We should never condemn people
outright just for disagreeing with us. Opinions aren't what morality
is about -- it's about behavior. As Kant said, it's practical reason,
not pure reason. You can't infer someone is a liar just because he's
Lutheran and Luther approved of lying. There were Nazis who helped
Jews escape.
> So do you have an existence proof, or any proof, for the existence of
> an objective moral standard?
You've seen the existence proof, such as it is. It relies on
your stipulation that nihilism is wrong, since it's only an argument
for why relativism is wrong. It also relies on the premise that there
is nothing for relativistic moral claims to mean that satisfies logic
and that matches what's really going on in the minds of people who
make them. This is an expression of simple skepticism on my part,
just like my opinion that there was no intelligent being who created
the visible universe. As they say in Missouri, "Show me".
(I also have empirical/inductive arguments against nihilism
and for an objective standard, rather than proofs. Those are the
evolutionary and medical arguments you've seen.)
> So do you not have a way of determining what this standard you
> believe in is?
Scientific study of the moral sense. This includes cross-species
comparative psychology, psychiatric examination of criminals, and,
most important, the systematic long-term testing and optimization of
possible moral rules using the reasoning and consciences of ordinary
people. Law is the best ethics laboratory ever invented.
> > So if you want to make a case for relativism, you need to come up
> > with a credible candidate for what the property of moral claims
> > is that people making moral judgments are judging whether they
> > have.
>
> What I know about morals boils down to what actions would make me
> feel guilty if I committed them and what actions would make me feel
> proud if I committed them. Since there are actions which inspire
> such feelings in me, I say that morality, as I understand it, exists.
> If I say "A is right," I mean that performing act A would cause me
> to feel proud, that I had "done good." If I say "A is wrong," I
> mean that performing act A would cause me to feel guilty. This
> seems to me to be the most likely candidate for the property you
> requested.
If so, what are you arguing about when you argue moral questions
with someone else? Are you trying to convince him that, say, hurting
people makes you feel guilty? Are you trying to convince him that
hurting people makes _him_ feel guilty?
> > I meant statements of what would have happened if what did happen
> > hadn't happened. ... counterfactuals are immune to empirical
> > testing. They likewise can't be tested by applying pure logic ...
> > Yet people make claims like that all the time and treat them as
> > matters of fact, not subjective taste.
>
> Then I'd say counterfactuals are reasonable assumptions which can't
> be conclusively proven. We can't conclusively prove we're not
> living in The Matrix or that the sun will rise tomorrow, but those
> statements are 99.999...% certain.
Exactly. The point is, _how_ can we be 99.999% certain, when no
counterfactual has ever been tested? And yet we are that certain, of
many of them. Mathematics, science, and counterfactuals may simply
be separate (though related) divisions of reality. Some philosophers
have suggested that moral truth is just another one; so if there's no
way to get an ought from an is, that doesn't prove there's no such
thing as a wrong answer.
> But how would we achieve this level of certainty with regards to
> morality?
There may be no reasonable way to become that certain -- this is
psychology, not physics. But that isn't the issue. If we can justify
being even 51% certain, it's because there's a truth we have a 51%
chance of matching.
> Morality can be objective to the extent that it's based on logic, as
> MG has been saying; the problem is that it has subjectively-chosen
> postulates. If you can show me that morality can be completely
> determined by logic, and that its postulates are reasonable
> assumptions rather than subjective preferences, I'd most likely be
> persuaded that morality is objective.
You'll have to talk to MG about that -- it's not what I'm
arguing. I'm arguing that morality doesn't have subjectively-chosen
postulates because it doesn't have postulates. Postulates are for
top-down ethical theories, where you justify judgments in particular
cases based on general rules. I'm arguing for bottom-up ethics. The
sorts of claim you call postulates, like "Don't hurt people" or "Make
people better off", are in fact *theories*: attempts to generalize
from what's good or bad in particular cases. Far from being either
subjectively chosen preferences or reasonable assumptions, what they
really are is more mundane and more useful. What they really are is
*wrong*. They're just approximations, handy semi-reliable rules of
thumb. To infer that morality is subjective because you can't prove
something like the Golden Rule correct is to mistake the map for the
territory.
> What I'm saying is that your original statement above is like
> answering the statement "There is no objective standard of health"
> with "Statements of health correspond or fail to correspond to the
> reality of which people are sick."
I was basing the objectivity of ethics on the premise that health
is objective. That's different from basing the objectivity of health
on the same premise. One's just a premise; the other is circular
reasoning. If you want to dispute my premise, go for it.
> > Every other organ is subject to diseases; why should that one be
> > exempt?
>
> If so, then is there an organ for determining "visually pleasing"?
> Can we hope there will be treatment available one day for people
> like Mimi of the Drew Carey Show?
We can _always_ *hope*. :-)
> "Healthy" and "sick" are fairly well-understood terms. No one is
> arguing that we can't objectively measure the effect something has
> on a person's physical well-being.
But that's not what "healthy" and "sick" mean. There are
situations where a sick organ is keeping you alive and a healthy one
will get you killed. For example, if BJ and Hawkeye are trying to
cure you so you can go back to the front lines.
> > Someday we'll figure out what causes moral diseases like
> > sociopathy -- which neurons are sending the wrong signals and what
> > broke them. But we can recognize diseases before we know why they
> > happen. Doctors knew about heart attacks before they knew about
> > coronary artery blockage.
>
> Let me ask you the same question you asked me above: do you make
> moral claims and argue about their merits with people who don't
> share your views? If so, given your view that immorality is a
> disease, do you really expect that to be any more productive than
> telling a blind person to see?
There are three answers to that. First, usually it's not a case
of telling a blind person to see -- it's a case of two doctors arguing
about whether it's cataracts or optic nerve damage. Immorality is
disease; but disagreeing about moral claims isn't immoral.
When it is a case of trying to fix something, people can often
learn to compensate for problems. As an analogy, there's a circuit
in people's brains for applying grammatical inflections. When it's
injured, English speakers stop putting "ed" on their verbs. But they
get the irregular ones right -- they conjugate "fly, flew", "cry, cry".
When the same area is genetically malformed the symptoms are different.
Then people use "ed" correctly on all the common words and only leave
it off unusual ones: "cry, cried" but "ply, ply". Children who grew
up with the condition learned to use the part of their brain that
handles irregular forms to simply memorize "cry, cried" the same way
the rest of us memorize "fly, flew". It's unusual for the morality
part of the brain to be completely shot -- most criminals still notice
injustices not perpetrated by themselves. So maybe there's a way to
make the part that's working right override the part that's giving
screwy output.
And finally, moral errors are sometimes based on simple ignorance,
reasoning errors, or emotional distance; so arguing is basically just
a matter of getting somebody's attention.
> > Morality is complicated. It's adaptive. It's expensive. It's
> > been developing for tens of millions of years. We see pieces of it
> > in lots of other species. That sort of thing is always the result
> > of natural selection, not just a chance mutation. And natural
> > selection doesn't do that sort of thing as a joke. So we can be
> > reasonably sure morality is for *something*.
>
> That sounds like a nice argument. But it sounds like an argument
> that there isn't anything which is subjective (though perhaps you
> don't disagree with that). Every thought/feeling/sensation we have
> comes from some thing, some organ or whatever, in our body. All
> organs we have came about via evolution/natural selection, so it's
> reasonable to believe the organ and the sensations it produces serve
> some purpose, ... Therefore our tastes, emotional reactions, sense
> of humor, color preference, etc. are the products of organs, of
> which it can be determined that they're functioning correctly or
> incorrectly.
That's true; but it doesn't mean everything is objective. It may
be that some behavioral trait was never under selective pressure and
is simply a side-effect of something else. For instance, maybe we
have an ear for music because that's something that just naturally
comes with having an ear for picking up a mother tongue by listening
to people talking. If so, then since variation in what kind of music
you like has no effect on whether you can learn to talk, there's no
basis for calling preference for jazz a symptom of a disease.
Paul Filseth
> M G <ma...@tidalwave.net> writes
> > It's a generality, exceptions weaken but don't deny the claim.
Actually they strengthen it -- when you discover an exception and
incorporate it into your claim, you have a more accurate claim.
> Sorry, they do. If your "objective" rule has exceptions, then you
> need to state them in advance. Simply making up the rules as you go
> along makes your system into a subjective one.
Physicists thought nature was left-right symmetric. They even
said so and made predictions on that basis. Then they found out
there's an exception -- the weak nuclear force is just a little out
of balance. A few more beta emissions come from south poles than
north poles. So they made up a new rule to allow for this. That
makes the "Standard Model" of particle physics subjective? Stating
the rules in advance is for fundamentalists.
Paul Filseth
> This is the whole point, and to me it very nearly puts the
> "objective morality" argument in the bin. Whenever someone comes up
> with a claimed objective measure of morality, others will immediately
> come up with examples which test or break the definition.
But that's circumstantial evidence *for* objectivity. If
there's no right answer to the issue, how could an *example*
break a definition? Why would anyone even think of proposing
a counterexample, rather than just saying "Nah, I don't feel
that way."
Paul Filseth
> > If you see an orange and judge it purple, you're objectively color
> > blind, even though "purple" is a category caused by human
> > retinas -- it's not a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum.
>
> It isn't? There isn't a range of frequencies of the EM spectrum
> (somewhere on the borders of what we label "red" and what we label
> "blue") that we consistently label "purple"?
For those of us who are male and normally only use eleven words
for colors, there is such a range on the border of blue; but it isn't
on the border of red. We use "purple" not only for frequencies higher
than blue but also for mixtures of red and blue, because our so-called
"red" cones are actually sensitive to red and also to the "ultra-blue"
light people with more color words call "violet". Violet stimulates
our "red" cones because they're really red/violet, and it stimulates
our blue cones because violet is close to blue; so we can't tell the
difference between violet and a red + blue mix, even though the reason
the red/violet cones fire is totally different in the two cases. This
is how a linear range of frequency gets converted into a color wheel.
So the perception-term "purple" covers a wider category of phenomena
than the physics-term "violet".
> > Maybe _we_ have no way to know what the standard is but our
> > descendants won't always share our limitations -- *unless we stop
> > researching the question because we decide there's no answer to be
> > found*...
>
> But are we just making a subjective judgement that an objective moral
> standard would be a "good" thing and then making an objective decision
> that we should keep looking for it, regardless of how likely it is
> that we will succeed? Like the Philosophers' Stone? :)
That was an answer to Blink's hypothetical -- I wasn't stipulating
anything. In that hypothetical case, your characterization is correct.
Blink seemed to be invalidly implying we should discount the concept
unless we could figure out its content.
> (BTW, what is your reaction to the idea that an demonstrably objective
> moral standard might turn out to be contrary to everything you hold
> dear? Would you accept it and follow its rules, hating everything you
> did in the process?)
That would depend on whether I found the demonstration persuasive.
This is unlikely. What you're describing is basically just severe
insanity. Sometimes insane people realize they're insane and want to
get better; sometimes not. If I'm completely insane it's unlikely I
have enough grip on reality to recognize this; so it would be up to the
sane people to figure out what to do about me. :-)
> > But that can't possibly be right -- it requires a closed causality
> > loop to implement it. In order to agree with a claim, an evaluator
> > would have to observe himself agreeing with the claim.
>
> As this is my candidate, I'll defend it. What a subjectivist would
> mean when he said "I agree that red is the most beautiful color" is
> something like "My personal feeling about the beauty of red accords
> with yours". ... I don't follow your logic about closed causal loops.
> It's perfectly possible to observe oneself thinking or feeling...
That's not what I'm saying is impossible. In your example, you
agree because you observe yourself feeling, not because you observe
yourself *agreeing*.
What I said is just another way of saying if you define "true" for
a moral claim to mean "Some subject thinks the claim is true", then you
either have a content-free circular definition or are equivocating on
"true". If the subject really meant _that_ by "true", he'd go into an
infinite loop trying to make up his mind.
> Translating this to a moral statement, I would claim that the same
> thing applies, except that most people *don't* agree on the
> subjectivity of their statements, as most people assume an objective
> morality.
That is a *huge* "except". It sounds like you're saying when
you call some behavior "bad", what you mean is to tell others about a
certain feeling you have about the claim. But when most people call
one "bad", they _don't_ mean to tell others about feelings they have.
They mean to tell others about a property of the behavior, not a
property of themselves. So you and they mean two completely different
things by "bad". Let's call theirs "bad_1" and yours "bad_2". Why did
you pick the sound "bad" to stand for "bad_2"? Did you grow up in a
subculture that consistently uses it for that? Or did you hear people
use it to mean "bad_1" and misunderstand them, thinking they meant
"bad_2"?
(In the event that you are suggesting there is no "bad_1" and
"bad_2", and you and the majority mean the same thing by "bad", and
it's just that most people are simply mistaken about what they mean,
because there's no objective morality and the claims they call "bad"
are just the ones they have that certain feeling about, then that's an
ordinary sense/reference fallacy. Even if it's true that there's no
objective morality, that doesn't change what they mean by the words
they use. The way they decide what to call "bad" is to consult their
feelings but that doesn't mean they're talking about their feelings.)
> > I meant statements of what would have happened if what did happen
> > hadn't happened. ... They likewise can't be tested by applying pure
> > logic -- there's no a priori reason somebody couldn't secretly have
> > been watching you who would have vaporized the ball with artillery
> > if you missed it. Yet people make claims like that all the time and
> > treat them as matters of fact, not subjective taste.
>
> Unless they are speaking loosely, don't they include all sorts of
> unstated provisos? Like, the ball would have hit the ground assuming
> that the laws of gravity continued to function in that area of
> spacetime and no other factors intervened? This allows pure logic to
> be applied, not so?
If people think of such provisos, aren't they also claiming that
the provisos would probably have been satisfied? If you hadn't caught
the ball, nobody would have vaporised it, gravity would have continued
to function, all other intervening factors would have failed to stop
the ball; and it would have hit the ground. How does pure logic decide
that?
> First, how do you differentiate behaviors that are "morals" from all
> the others? Like, is our rule against murder "moral", but a male
> lion's killing the cubs of a previous Pride leader "not moral" (I
> mean not part of a system of morality, not "immoral")?
Good question. I think we have to start with the instinct to make
moral judgments in the first place, and work out from there. If we
have an instinct to judge others by how they scratch themselves then
that's part of morality; if we instinctively ignore how they scratch,
and pay attention to, say, whether they return favors, then scratching
isn't part of morality. As far as I can tell cats don't judge one
another, so there's no system of morality for killing the cubs to be
part of.
> Second, objective morality is going to be limited to behaviors that
> are supported by gene survival. This would exclude, for example,
> voluntarily limiting our reproduction in order to preserve what is
> left of the other species on this planet.
But limiting our reproduction doesn't conflict with gene survival;
sometimes it helps. Lots of animals tune their reproduction rates to
the carrying capacity of their environments. Kangaroo mothers kill
some of their own babies if there isn't enough food for all of them.
Humans have at least two physiological contraceptives -- infertility
during nursing and menopause. If there are instincts not to breed too
much if it's too crowded, that's just more of the same. If we have
that kind of instinct, it's a good candidate for incorporation into a
system of morality. If good animals are limiting their reproduction
and bad animals aren't, that will make goodness genes lose out in the
gene pool; so a mutation that makes good animals notice animals who
over-reproduce and treat it as anti-social behavior is likely to be
adaptive.
That's apt to kick in even when it isn't necessary for our own
survival. So if it becomes popular to save the whales and your friends
and neighbors start practicing family planning to do that, people who
don't will still look anti-social to an instinct tuned to pick up on
that. Unless there are so few of you you're at risk of extinction,
what counts to selfish genes is their proportion in the gene pool, not
their absolute numbers.
In any event, the fact that you're trying to save the whales
because they're charismatic megafauna is probably invisible to
evolution. As far as your Cro Magnon-derived instincts are concerned,
if you care about preserving whales it's because you're planning ahead
for when you'll need to eat one.
> ... what I am getting at is that morality must be limited to behaviors
> that benefit a group of genes, at most our entire species. We would
> not, to attempt another example, be capable of evolving a morality
> that considered the well-being of an alien race with which we were
> unable to interbreed, beyond the consideration of how our treatment
> of them affected us.
Sure we could. Evolution has no foresight. For example, an
instinct to help people who need it can evolve because the people you
help often return the favor. So you instinctively help your friend,
when he's packing up to move to another country and you'll probably
never see each other again. Australopithecines had no experience with
people a thousand miles away. There was no way that an instinct to
make that kind of distinction in their decision-making procedure could
be selected for merely because such a distinction might be useful
to their descendants' genes, three million years later. Likewise,
Australopithecines never met space-aliens, so they never had a chance
to evolve a rule telling them morality doesn't apply to space-aliens.
Of course, they had every opportunity to evolve morality telling
them it didn't apply to the tribe on the other side of the valley. If
that happened, space-aliens could easily get subsumed under rules for
dealing with earth-aliens. What our instincts are on that subject is
an empirical matter. It seems to me history shows we're getting mixed
messages. We seem to be suspicious of foreigners; but once we get to
know another group of people and convince ourselves they're willing
to act morally toward us, we'll generally act morally toward them: as
we all learn more about foreign lands, our circles of people we treat
as in-group rather than out-group get wider and wider. This makes
sense from an evolutionary point of view. The genes for morals exist
to replicate themselves. But they can't sense who _has_ copies of
them, just who _behaves_ like he has copies. So the obvious algorithm
to use is to classify strangers based on whether they exhibit signs of
being moral. So if we're nice to any aliens who are nice to us, our
instincts will have done their job.
> In case Blink doesn't ask, what the heck is a sporadic group and a
> monster? :)
A "group" is a way of doing algebra that satisfies a few simple
rules like (A + B) + C = A + (B + C). Ordinary integer addition is a
group; addition of real numbers is a different group. The exclusive-or
operation in Boolean algebra is a group; Rubik's Cube is a group; and
so forth. Most groups belong to a few infinite systematic categories
of groups. For instance, one infinite category is to do arithmetic but
only pay attention to a number's remainder when divided by 2, or 3, or
4, etc. In addition to the list of predictable infinite categories,
various mathematicians have tracked down 26 goofy off-the-wall ways to
do algebra that surprised everybody by satisfying the rules. They were
named "sporadic groups". Somebody proved there aren't any more besides
those 26. The most complicated one is called "The Monster". I picked
this as an example of pure math, because to find out anything about it
empirically we'd have to live in a 196,883-dimensional universe. :-)
Paul Filseth
> > ... if truth vs. falsehood is a property moral claims _do not
> > have_, then agreeing or disagreeing with a moral claim is a classic
> > category error, no different from forming an opinion about whether
> > coffee is even or odd.
>
> I think this is where I start to part company with you. It is only a
> category error if the speaker intends the words odd and even to have
> the same meaning as they do when applied to integers.
Not only then. It's also a category error if he means something
completely different by odd and even, and that different thing happens
to be some other property coffee doesn't have. When it's his own
premises that imply coffee doesn't have that property, it's no good
for him to plead "But I didn't mean it in the mathematical sense."
> If I say that "Genocide is wrong" is true, and you know that I hold
> that moral claims are subjective, then you know that my use of the
> word true is not referring to an objective true/false dichotomy.
I don't know that. That's just one possible explanation. It's
also possible that you're being inconsistent.
> > If your position is that truth vs. falsehood is a property moral
> > claims _do_ have, but that this property is relative to whether the
> > person evaluating it agrees with it, so a moral claim can be true
> > for one person and false for another, that's just another way to say
> > this property is not a property *of the claim* -- it's a property
> > of the {claim, evaluator} pair. And that means the category error
> > argument applies with full force.
>
> Only if you insist that the person making the claim must be using the
> word "true" in the sense that YOU have chosen. But by definition, if
> they are subjectivists, they are not.
The category error argument doesn't depend on a specific meaning
of "true". It depends only on the number of inputs taken by whatever
predicate "true" stands for. In my experience, relativists tend to
treat "true" as a one-input predicate in ethical arguments and as a
two-input predicate in meta-ethical arguments. That's not caused by
me insisting on anything.
> > This assumes, of course, that "agrees with" means "thinks is
> > true". That's what I mean by it. If that's what you mean too, but
> > you hold that it is *{claim, evaluator} pairs* that have truth or
> > falsehood depending on whether the evaluator agrees with the claim,
> > that means you're implying that moral claims are only true when
> > people are making mistakes -- an evaluator can't think a claim is
> > true without making the category error, because the claim hasn't
> > got a truth value.
>
> Again, you are forcing the claimer to use your definition of the
> word true, and then accusing them of a category error.
No I'm not. There's no definition there. There's none implied.
I explicitly rely on the claimer using _his own_ definition. If he
were using my definition there'd be no category error. Subjectivism
has a problem even if subjectivists use "true" to mean *blue*. If
"agrees with" means "thinks is blue", and an evaluator agrees with a
moral claim, then he thinks it's a blue moral claim. If you think color
is a property moral claims don't have and only a {claim, evaluator}
pair can have a color, then *your* premises imply the evaluator made a
category error. And if blue {claim, evaluator} pairs are just those
for which the evaluator thinks the claim is blue, then all cases of
moral "bluth" involve people making mistakes.
> I evaluate "Genocide is wrong" and decide it is true.
"It". Whatever you mean by "true", your "true()" predicate is
taking _one_ input in this case.
> My definition of "true" in relation to moral claims is this (using
> your notation): {X, Y} is true iff Y replies "Yes" when asked "Is
> X true".
"{X, Y}". Whatever you mean by "true", your "true()" predicate
is taking _two_ inputs in _this_ case. Either one or the other of
your applications of the predicate was a category error; or else
you're using "true" in two different senses. If you are, can you
explain the other sense too?
> Now you may well ask HOW I decide whether to say Yes or No when
> asked such a question, given the rather circular way in which it is
> arrived at,
I did, in my Aug. 13 post. If you replied, it didn't propagate.
> but I don't see how it is a category error.
If you meant the above definition when you decided "it" is "true"
then it's a category error because you gave "true" the wrong number
of inputs. If, while offering that definition for it in relation to
moral claims, you meant something different, that's an equivocation
fallacy, not a category error.
> > So perhaps "agree" means something different to you. Perhaps it
> > means an evaluator agrees the moral claim has some other property
> > than truth. The obvious candidate is "subjective truth", i.e. the
> > evaluator agrees that the claim has the property of being a member
> > of a true {claim, evaluator} pair, with himself in the starring
> > role. But that can't possibly be right -- it requires a closed
> > causality loop to implement it. In order to agree with a claim,
> > an evaluator would have to observe himself agreeing with the claim.
>
> And what is wrong with that? In order to decide whether a meal tastes
> good, I observe myself enjoying (or otherwise) the food.
"Enjoying the food" does not equal "deciding it tastes good".
"Agree with a claim" equals "agree with a claim". Things don't cause
themselves.
> You offer me a moral proposition, I taste it with my moral organ, to
> use your phrase, and see whether it tastes true or false. If it
> tastes true, I say it is true. What is wrong with that? So long as
> you remember that I am not using true in the sense that "1+1=2" is
> true
Whatever sense you're using it in, it appears to be a sense that
takes one input. You also have a two-input sense that you defined
above. Concept labeling is arbitrary, so let's avoid equivocating
and use different words for the one-input sense and the two-input
sense. Since your moral organ says it tastes "true" and you're not
likely to get it to pick a different word, I suggest relabeling the
two-input concept and saying {X, Y} is "gazork" iff Y replies "Yes"
when asked "Is X true".
> You are attempting, I think, to show that these people are all
> mistaken, that they are making category errors because if morals are
> relative then the judgements of "true or false" are meaningless. But
> this is only the case if all such people also hold that their "true
> or false" judgements are objective.
Huh? The judgments are meaningless if they're *circular*, as
they are when the definition of "true" is "Y thinks it's true". If
relativists held that their judgments were objective, that would
break the loop, so what they say could mean something. (This would
also imply they had inconsistent beliefs, of course.) Other things
could break the loop too, of course. Equivocation, for one.
> > So if you want to make a case for relativism, you need to come up
> > with a credible candidate for what the property of moral claims is
> > that people making moral judgments are judging whether they have.
>
> Do you? Surely all you have to do is to observe that people do in
> fact evaluate moral claims, make judgements on whether they are true
> or false, and that these judgements often vary from person to person.
How would that support relativism? People evaluate claims about
whether humans and elephants share any common ancestors, make judgments
on whether they are true or false, and these judgments often vary from
person to person. Do you infer from this observation that whether
such animals ever existed is a subjective matter with no right answer?
> > Arteries are there to move blood. Hardening interferes with an
> > artery's ability to move blood. Therefore atherosclerosis is a
> > disease, whether we happen to prefer Bach or Mozart or moving
> > blood or unmoving blood. In order to answer your question,
> > therefore, the problem to be solved is to figure out what morality
> > is *for*.
>
> OK, so is having sickle-shaped red blood cells a disease or not?
I'm a little fuzzy on the mechanics of the protection from
malaria one copy of the gene for SCD gives you. Does that give you a
few sickle-shaped cells and are they what protects you? If so, then
having a few isn't a disease and having too many is. If it takes
two genes to turn them sickle-shaped and a single gene protects you
via some other mechanism, then yes, having them is a disease. Either
way, the two-recessive-genes condition is a disease and the one-copy
condition isn't.
> A particular formation, alteration or mutation of an organ (including
> a moral organ) may be adaptive in certain circumstances, and not in
> others. Many organs in the body are "for" lots of different things.
> You are assuming that a moral organ is "for" just one thing,
Not at all. A liver has hundreds of functions and if its
formation interferes with any of them then it's sick. If an organ
is adapted to alter itself under certain circumstances then those
circumstances have to be allowed for in determining whether a function
is being performed properly. This would presumably show up in moral
organs as "It's moral to do X in situation A and Y in situation B."
> > ... natural selection doesn't do that sort of thing as a joke. So
> > we can be reasonably sure morality is for *something*.
>
> Very true. But does that mean that we can be sure it is for the same
> thing for every person?
No. But we all have the same ancestors. It's been developing
for millions of years and the human race split up only over the last
few tens of thousands of years. So variation should be at most on
the order of 1%. Possibly 2% between men and women, if men's missing
half-dose of X-chromosome makes much difference.
> Or indeed that morality is a single thing?
It probably isn't. But it seems to have a logic and coherence to
it. That's probably created by the recursive way it promotes itself
in the gene pool -- it motivates people who have the parts to reduce
the reproductive prospects of people who don't. So any behavior that
people tend to judge others on gets tuned until all the pieces work
well together.
> My problem with your logic is that it would suggest that the vast
> majority of people, the ones with healthy moral organs, would agree
> on what is right, and only a few would disagree.
It is my perception that this is in fact the case. There's far
more agreement than would be expected if people's moral judgments were
really controlled by the principles they say they believe in. This
is why you can refute pretty much any broad ethical principle simply
by thinking up a scenario where you disagree with it -- chances are
the guy who propounded the principle will agree with you about the
scenario (although he's liable to insist that his principle doesn't
give the wrong answer you think it gives.) Whether he agrees that
he's been refuted or not is just a rhetorical matter -- the critical
point is that your morals are a better predictor of his morals than
his own principles are. It takes a vast amount of agreement to make
that work.
(I should add that there's no reason to assume the vast majority
are healthy. Most people have things wrong with them. Most people
have tooth decay. It's easy to imagine a situation where most people
are morally sick -- put an evil dictator in power who actively tries
to induce it and kills anyone who seems resistant. Hitler appears
to have succeeded -- most of the German people seemed to be okay
with his activities. And of course, there are apt to be a lot of
different moral diseases, just as with other organs. If Hitler could
induce (exacerbate, really -- the signs were there in the 1800's) one
disease, that would make his victims systematically louse up some
kinds of moral judgment while being unimpaired in others. So if
I'm right there should be a lot of agreement even with most diseased
people. Sociopaths are off the scale, naturally.)
> But whatever moral proposition you put forward, there always seems
> to be a substantial disagreement, either within societies (for
> example, is abortion morally wrong),
But ripping moral propositions from the headlines is a guaranteed
way to get a biased sample. Let's talk about whether when a merchant
offers to sell you a book for six dollars and you hand him a twenty,
he ought to give you change or say "Score!".
> or between societies - whatever moral outrage you dream up, I will
> bet you can find a society which regarded it as normal and right.
> How does this fit with a moral organ evolved for some specific
> purpose?
It doesn't. Therefore I'll have to take that bet. Can you find
a society that regards it as normal and right for its members to trade
the society's military secrets to the enemy for personal gain? If you
can, that's empirical evidence against my hypothesis.
John Secker
<pg...@lsil.com> writes
>> Sorry, they do. If your "objective" rule has exceptions, then you
>> need to state them in advance. Simply making up the rules as you go
>> along makes your system into a subjective one.
>
> Physicists thought nature was left-right symmetric. They even
>said so and made predictions on that basis. Then they found out
>there's an exception -- the weak nuclear force is just a little out
>of balance. A few more beta emissions come from south poles than
>north poles. So they made up a new rule to allow for this. That
>makes the "Standard Model" of particle physics subjective? Stating
>the rules in advance is for fundamentalists.
>
discovered, a new rule (or an extension of the existing one) is worked
out. It is then tested to see if it successfully predicts reality better
than the old rule. If it proves to match better then it has indeed
strengthened the rule. The situation I was arguing with was one where
the poster was essentially observing a moral situation and then deciding
what the result was - making it up as he went along. In my opinion a
moral rule which says "Minimise harm, and Joe will decide what that
means when presented with difficult cases" is not an objective standard.
--
John Secker
John Secker
>> This is the whole point, and to me it very nearly puts the
>> "objective morality" argument in the bin. Whenever someone comes up
>> with a claimed objective measure of morality, others will immediately
>> come up with examples which test or break the definition.
>
> But that's circumstantial evidence *for* objectivity. If
>there's no right answer to the issue, how could an *example*
>break a definition? Why would anyone even think of proposing
>a counterexample, rather than just saying "Nah, I don't feel
>that way."
>
(subjective) moral taste. If a large number of people conclude that the
rule produces results which are unacceptable to their taste, then it is
fair to say that the rule has been disproved - in the sense that it does
not match what most people feel is moral.
--
John Secker
BlinkyLight
> > So do you not have a way of determining what this standard you
> > believe in is?
>
> Scientific study of the moral sense. This includes cross-species
> comparative psychology, psychiatric examination of criminals, and,
> most important, the systematic long-term testing and optimization of
> possible moral rules using the reasoning and consciences of ordinary
> people. Law is the best ethics laboratory ever invented.
Er, so what's that mean in practice? Maybe you could give an example
of how you decide whether a complex, controversial action (abortion,
capital punishment, whatever) is right or wrong?
How do you know a law is right or wrong, and if the criminal deviant
whose psychology you're studying isn't defying an unjust law?
Blink
Skeptic
> Tony wrote:
> Doing things to oneself has nothing to do with morality. <snip>
> Morality starts when you consider doing things to others.
I couldn't disagree more. Almost every moral system I know of
considers self distructive behavior to be immoral. Thus suicide,
drinking, gambling are considered moral vices.
Skeptic
> "M G" <ma...@tidalwave.net> wrote:
> > blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote:
> > Since morality is about standards of conduct, what is practical,
> > reasonable and sensible are related. What is the point of making
> > unrealizable conduct a standard of conduct?
> >
> > World peace is a condition that appears to define a theoretically
> > achievable ideal state of conduct between all societies and peoples.
> > People choose to attack or not to attack and the not to attack option
> > is technically viable under technically achievable conditions. And
> > although there is no reason to believe it is achievable anytime soon,
> > progress that is short of achieving the entire goal can be made at the
> > present time. So we can agree to call that an practical long term
> > objective.
>
> Nearly all moral goals are theoretically achievable, but many will
> never be achieved. World peace on a planet which contains more than a
> handful of people is, IMO, only possible in theory. It's unrealizable
> conduct, but an ideal conduct which is good to have as an ultimate
> goal (IMO).
> Blink
Although my position has been pretty much with MG on this thread I
would have taken a different tact on this sub-issue.
I don't think 'World Peace' is a moral goal merely because it is not
practical. There are other more important reasons. I think it is a
mistake to even think of it as a moral goal. Moral goals are for
actors who have control over their actions. Hence they are goals for
individuals. I don't see how an individual is going to achieve world
peace. This however does not mean it world peace would not be
achievable if every individual followed certain other individual moral
goals. However, all it takes is one individual to screw this up by
breaking the objective rules that would result in this outcome. The
fact that people can individually break these rules does not however
make them any less objective.
I don't think world peace (in and of itself) is a moral goal anyway.
I think there are practical ways to achieve world peace that are
hardly moral. Just l ook at this Miss USA aspirations speech: "I
want to go on to become the first female president. My first act
will be total nuclear destruction of the planet destroying every human
on earth, therefore, for the first time, achieving total world peace'.
When we speak of groups as moral actors we are speaking in metaphors.
"The U.S. is striving for world peace" is poetic but hardly useful.
Some individuals are and some are not. People always act as
individuals even when participating in a mob.
Skeptic
Would you agree that "is determines ought"? I don't mean in the
sense that gets some philosophers riled with accusations of
"Naturalist Fallacy!". Not in the sense of "might makes right" or
"I've got mine so I deserve it".
Instead I mean more in the sense of, there is a reality out there that
determines what morality is. Along with all the caveats of our
infallibility in judgement, difficulty in determining outcomes, and
just plain old subjective differences in what would be beneficial to
us individually. I think an important aspect of this is to put aside
particular subjective or circumstantial benefits in light of more
general benefits to be had from adhering to principles even in
situations where the benefit may not be obvious or may be potentially
harmful.
Skeptic
> Well actually yes, they did - those to whom the evidence was presented,
> and who were capable and interested enough to understand it did almost
> exactly that.
Quite evasive. Think up your own example of an objective fact that
is disputed. I don't like your definition of subjective at all. Are
you saying that all disputed facts become subjective? That's what
you seem to be saying and is how you took advantage of the word
subjective in your prior arguments. If you aren't using that
definition then you will need to go back and revise the arguments.
Skeptic
>
> Similarly, mathematics is based on real-world observations, given a
> definition of a counting system -- if I pick two apples, and later
> pick three more, I get "five" when I count them.
I wouldn't get too hung up on this. Mathematics is for modeling and
does not neccesarily conform to reality even in these simple counting
cases. Suppose you have two apples in a pile and pick a googleplex
more apples to add to the pile. Do I end up with a googleplex plus
two apples or a neutron star due to their gravatational attraction?
How about if I picked a googleplex raised to the googleplex power more
apples. Do I end up with a black hole or perhaps the collapse of the
universe. I'm not sure but the universe might collapse just with a
plain old googleplex of apples.
What I am getting at is, don't get too hung up with the limitations of
morals or the objective nature of mathematics. You may be able to
show that morals are not applicable in certain circumstances but that
does not mean they do not apply elsewhere. Thus, moral dilemmas are
not disproofs of the objectivity of morals. They only show that
moral models break down under certain extreme circumstances.
Do you think the counting system is any less objective now that I have
shown you a real world "counting dilemma"?
Skeptic
> And what reason would we have for evolving the moral "torturing
> animals is wrong," which appears to be a fairly commonly-held moral?
considered wrong from the aspect of self-preservation (an important
aspect of natural selection).
You must remember that humans have evolved a very sophisticated brain
that can recognize quite remote dangers.
a) Animals can and do recognize individual humans to a greater or
lesser degree and do act on the crude principle of revenge.
b) Tortured animals present a general threat to everyone. Therefore
if someone else sees you doing such behavior it will be percieved as a
indirect threat against them. They may attempt to take action
against you. Why bring this on yourself.
c) It's a waste of energy unless you are gaining something valuable
from it. People who go out of their way to capture and torture
animals are not as selectively fit. This is not trivial for larger
and more dangerous animals.
d)At a higher level people make judgements about each other. If you
demonstrate an enjoyment for torturing animals other people are
possibly less likely to trust you. You need others trust in order to
participate in alliances and voluntary cooperation agreements which
are valuable for survival.
Note that these arguments generally coincide with our judgements.
Most people don't get too upset about a kid frying ants with an
magnifying glass. However the same kid teasing a dog at the end of
his chain will get repremanded.
Sometimes these things get reversed. In times of war in may be
neccessary to convince your comrades that you have the will to kill or
torture other men. A little animal torture will go a long way towards
this goal.
Unfortunately this is where I think a belief in a single objective
standard breaks down. I think instead we need to think in terms of
multiple objective standards all based on "harm" to individuals. If
one is a member of a tribe surrounded by many other hostile tribes I
think it does little good for you to be a pacifist when attacked by
one of those other tribes. Morals are survival strategies and as
with all strategies it is very hard to pick the optimal one even if
circumstances were static. Unfortunately they are not. This however
does not mean that morals are subjective. They do have a basis.
I also disagree with certain statements often made about certain moral
systems being "invented by man". I think a better discription would
be that moral systems have "culturally evolved". The first guy to
write the bible didn't invent the rules layed down therein. He
probably attempted to write down as accurately as possible the stories
that had been passed down to him. So not only is there a genetic
component to this evolution but also a cultural one and I mean from an
evolutionary point of view ala a meme. However, I do not share
certain beliefs with Dawkins about memes. I think that there is a
certain selective pressure put on memes that can make them correspond
to reality quite well. Thus I disagree with him in believing that
religions are totally maladaptive. In fact I think they are quite
adaptive. That does not however mean they are correct. Believing
there is an angry god living in a volcano may be adaptive (keeps you
out of danger) and also quite throughly incorrect.
Thus I think of morals in terms of evolving systems and not merely as
whims. Thus they are in a certain sense objective, relative, and
subjective. Different moral systems have their advantages and
disadvantages and they compete. So although both a cheeta and a bear
are objectively good predators it is a question as to which is
"better". That depends on circumstances. What are the prey items
available, etc. Under certain circumstances both are equally good an
can coexist. This does not mean however that we always have ties.
Some predators are just objectively better over a wide range of
habitats.
Now the question is what kind of morals do you want to have. Do you
want a moral system that is a specialize predator that eats only, say
toads. Or, do you want a moral system that is more generalist.
Remember that if toad go extinct you do also. Do you want the moral
system of say a Mafiosa. You then hold yourself to be a different
moral species than other men and feed upon them. You restrict
yourself to being a predator of men. Quite a dangerous selection for
man is a dangerous prey. Plus, other individuals sharing this moral
niche are competitors. This is why they are constantly taking
contracts out on each other. The niche is also small since you must
be less in numbers than your prey in order to survive. Thus, I think
it is not such a good choice.
I think over time the better moral systems have evolved to become more
an more inclusive. There is advantage in numbers and thus universal
morals. Like "all men are create equal" tend to be better
competitors.
BlinkyLight
> Tony Griffin <tgri...@pipeline.com> wrote:
> > Translating this to a moral statement, I would claim that the same
> > thing applies, except that most people *don't* agree on the
> > subjectivity of their statements, as most people assume an objective
> > morality.
>
> That is a *huge* "except". It sounds like you're saying when
> you call some behavior "bad", what you mean is to tell others about a
> certain feeling you have about the claim. But when most people call
> one "bad", they _don't_ mean to tell others about feelings they have.
> They mean to tell others about a property of the behavior, not a
> property of themselves. So you and they mean two completely different
> things by "bad".
So? Surely you don't mean to argue that objective morality exists
because lots of people instinctively assume it does?
Devout Xians (and presumably theists of other varieties, but I only
have experience with Xians) talk about their "relationship with God"
and the things they experience when they "talk to God." You and I
know there is no God for them to talk to, and therefore these
"experiences" are some sort of reaction they've unconsciously brought
about themselves. But when most people say God did this or that, they
don't mean to tell others about feelings/reactions they have, they
mean to tell others about a characteristic or act of God. Surely you
wouldn't say God exists because lots of people instinctively assume
he/she/it does?
Blink
Paul Filseth
> BlinkyLight:
> >>> But *the* Objective Standard ... would enable people to evaluate
> >>> a moral statement and say it's absolutely right or wrong ..
>
> >> Well, yeah, this is why the stick is wielded, rhetorically.
>
> > That's one reason. It's also wielded because if it doesn't exist
> > then there's nothing of substance to argue about. Moral debates
> > would have no more subject matter than two atheists arguing about
> > whether atheists can be "spiritual".
>
> I respectfully disagree. People with differing moral views could
> nonetheles have a very fruitful discussion. They could explore
> where their views overlap and where they differ; ... Where they
> differ, they might search for a reasonable compromise, ...
People disagreeing about "spiritual" can do likewise. Perhaps
"substance" was the wrong word; but when I'm discussing an ethical
question with someone and he starts reinterpreting things I say so as
to fit into his right-answer-free meta-ethical theory, if I go along
with that the discussion will cease to be about a subject matter I
can perceive as ethics. Whether you consider the sort of discussion
he's capable of having with me while doing that reinterpretation to
have a subject matter of substance or not, it's not the subject matter
I was expressing my views about. My choices are therefore to express
the opinion that his meta-ethical theory is erroneous, or to allow him
to put words in my mouth. That's one reason I "wield the stick", as
if that were a fair description. There are other reasons. The
following is not one of them:
> People want a way to say "my moral outlook is the RIGHT moral
> outlook, and the hell with yours!"
Lots of Christians accuse atheists of arrogance too. I'm not sure
what they think doing so accomplishes. The charge is baseless; and
even if it were true it's still an ad hominem argument.
> In fact, it seems to me that it is those who believe they have an
> absolute morality
Blink's stated subject matter for this thread was:
"whether or not there is an Objective Standard of morality
out there"
This is a question of existence, not of whether some particular person
has it. You seem to be equating those who think such a thing exists
with those who think their own opinions are it.
> whose moral discussions are sparse and fruitless. Very quickly
> they identify where their respondent deviates from their moral code,
> and then condemn them, saying, "THIS is what is good, and since you
> disagree, you're bad."
That's a stereotype. Some do and some don't. Some subjectivists
condemn people for disagreeing with them too.
> > That cuts both ways. People could equally say "Your
> > outlook can't be any more right than anybody else's,
> > so I'll just go with mine, and the hell with yours."
>
> That happens. Not nearly as much as the other way around.
No doubt -- realists are more numerous than subjectivists.
> If you think morality is a state of affairs, that it is
> somehow written into the structure of the universe, I
> would like you to decribe for me how things would appear
> tomorrow, if morality were factually changed overnight.
> Suppose an omnipotent god pulls a switch, and at midnight
> murder IS morally good. How would things look different
> tomorrow morning? Note well, that I am not asking how
> things would be if people VIEWED murder as morally good.
All right, I will.
> The gedanken requires that you assume people's views
> stay just what they are. Everyone (or almost everyone)
> STILL thinks murder is bad. It is just the "fact of the
> matter" that I want you to imagine changed, and tell how
> that changes the "state of affairs" in which we live.
That's an addendum that appears to be derived from the premise
that *your* meta-ethical theory is correct. It's you who believes
that people's views on ethics are not the result of perception of
moral reality, not I; and it isn't my job to explain why your theory
makes sense. If we lived in a world where murder was morally good,
most humans would recognize that. The existence of wiring in human
heads to tell right from wrong is hardly evidence against objectivity.
(That said, if the god is omnipotent he can induce mass insanity,
so everybody's moral opinion ceases to relate to what's going on in
front of his face.)
Here's how the world would be different. The omnipotent god, at
midnight, would reveal himself retroactively -- he'd alter people's
memories so the new state of the universe is how people remember it
having been all their lives. In the new universe, everybody believes
in god. They can't help it -- he's the guy who whips everybody every
ten seconds. Life sucks. Everyone is in terrible pain all the time.
Fighting back only makes it worse -- the god's omnipotent. Everybody
desperately wants to die. But if you kill yourself, he just resurrects
you, ups the whipping frequency to every second, reads your mind to
find out who your friends are, gives those people extra whippings too,
and carves the words "Friend of a Suicide" into their flesh. But if
you kill *somebody else* then the god lets him stay dead. In that
world, murder is morally good.
Tony Griffin
> Would you agree that "is determines ought"? I don't mean in the
> sense that gets some philosophers riled with accusations of
> "Naturalist Fallacy!". Not in the sense of "might makes right" or
> "I've got mine so I deserve it".
>
> Instead I mean more in the sense of, there is a reality out there that
> determines what morality is. Along with all the caveats of our
> infallibility in judgement, difficulty in determining outcomes, and
> just plain old subjective differences in what would be beneficial to
> us individually. I think an important aspect of this is to put aside
> particular subjective or circumstantial benefits in light of more
> general benefits to be had from adhering to principles even in
> situations where the benefit may not be obvious or may be potentially
> harmful.
Maybe I've misunderstood, but did you actually say that we should follow rules
where the benefit is not obvious, or where the results may be harmful, in
pursuit of some "more general benefits"? How are these determined? My mother
used to consider it "wrong" to hang out laundry on Sunday. I could never get any
sensible reason from her. All she would say was "people don't" or some such.
Additionally, if "is determines ought" then you should be able to demonstrate
the chain of causuality that leads from "is" to "ought". Can you do so? You will
certainly win the argument if you can.
Tony
Tony Griffin
> Would you agree that "is determines ought"? I don't mean in the
> sense that gets some philosophers riled with accusations of
> "Naturalist Fallacy!". Not in the sense of "might makes right" or
> "I've got mine so I deserve it".
>
> Instead I mean more in the sense of, there is a reality out there that
> determines what morality is. Along with all the caveats of our
> infallibility in judgement, difficulty in determining outcomes, and
> just plain old subjective differences in what would be beneficial to
> us individually. I think an important aspect of this is to put aside
> particular subjective or circumstantial benefits in light of more
> general benefits to be had from adhering to principles even in
> situations where the benefit may not be obvious or may be potentially
> harmful.
Maybe I've misunderstood, but did you actually say that we should follow rules
Tony Griffin
I agree.
My moral system, however disagrees with them. It values self-determination
higher than whatever benefit may accrue from an individual's being prevented
from hurting himself.
This could be an interesting test. Assuming you agree with the moral systems
that consider self-hurt to be wrong, try to convince me of it. I will do the
opposite. If one of us succeeds, that would be evidence for an objective
morality. If we end up agreeing to differ with words like "Well, I still feel my
view is correct", then we might consider that evidence for subjectivity. ;)
Tony
Paul Erickson
wrote:
>John Secker <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> This is the whole point, and to me it very nearly puts the
>> "objective morality" argument in the bin. Whenever someone comes up
>> with a claimed objective measure of morality, others will immediately
>> come up with examples which test or break the definition.
>
> But that's circumstantial evidence *for* objectivity. If
>there's no right answer to the issue, how could an *example*
>break a definition? Why would anyone even think of proposing
>a counterexample, rather than just saying "Nah, I don't feel
>that way."
I'm sure that we all feel like our own moral ideas are objective.
That's almost part of the meaning of "moral idea". But there are so
many different "objective" ideas of what morality means that you have
to wonder: does the multiplicity of objectivist moralities suggest
that morality is _really_ objective, or that morality is more like
strong opinion amplified into hard-headed certainty?
Practically everybody _argues_ morality in an "objective" vein.
Somebody comes up with a claimed objective measure of morality, then
somebody else brings up an "exception", expecting that the other
person will see the exception as valid -- as an example of _true_
morality that the original generalization didn't cover. That kind of
thing shows that we feel -- deeply -- that each individual's _true_
morality ought to match with that of every other individual -- however
different their formulae might be.
But it doesn't show that everyone's true morality really _does_ match
on a deep level. It only shows that most of us have a compelling
feeling that everyone _must_ match at that level. Whatever "that
level" means: some fundamental -- perhaps intrinsic -- aspect of
humanity or of the universe, I guess.
But, anyway, what I've been saying has not been completely relevant to
the question of _objective_ morality. That people argue morality with
each other on the basis of supposed common -- or even universal --
agreements does not mean any more than that they presuppose such
agreements and act as if they were real. It doesn't prove that they
are real or complete. And even if "bottom-level" moral agreements
were clearly universal and always complete, it would not prove that
there is an objective morality -- only that there might seem to be a
universal _human_ morality.
I don't see how a universal human agreement about anything would make
that agreement _objectively_ true...
Paul Erickson
Russell Turpin
>> The gedanken requires that you assume people's
>> views stay just what they are. Everyone (or
>> almost everyone) STILL thinks murder is bad.
>> It is just the "fact of the matter" that I want
>> you to imagine changed, and tell how that
>> changes the "state of affairs" in which we live.
Filseth:
> That's an addendum that appears to be derived
> from the premise that *your* meta-ethical theory
> is correct. It's you who believes that people's
> views on ethics are not the result of perception
> of moral reality, not I; and it isn't my job to
> explain why your theory makes sense. If we lived
> in a world where murder was morally good, most
> humans would recognize that. ..
Hmmm. I'll have to think on that. I see your point.
But even so, your example I think misses my
challenge.
> Here's how the world would be different. .. Life
> sucks. Everyone is in terrible pain all the time.
> Fighting back only makes it worse -- the god's
> omnipotent. Everybody desperately wants to die.
> But if you kill yourself, he just resurrects
> you, ups the whipping frequency to every second,
> reads your mind to find out who your friends are,
> gives those people extra whippings too, and carves
> the words "Friend of a Suicide" into their flesh.
> But if you kill *somebody else* then the god lets
> him stay dead. In that world, murder is morally
> good.
Have you really changed the moral rules in this
example? Or only the material circumstances? It
seems to me (a) that you believe assisted suicide
or euthanasia are morally acceptable under some
circumstances, and (b) that you have envisioned a
world where such circumstances are universal.
My challenge was not to have an omnipotent god
change the material circumstances of our world,
but to change the objective moral rules, while
leaving the material circumstance unchanged.
The omnipotent god flips a switch, and everyone
wakes tomorrow, and the objective rules of
morality are different, but the trees, rocks,
biology, physics, etc. all remain the same. Since
you believe people perceive morality, how do
they learn this change? What's different?
Skeptic
> Skeptic wrote:
> >
> > Tony Griffin <tgri...@pipeline.com> wrote in message news:<3D6AB8CB...@pipeline.com>...
> > > Tony wrote:
> > > Doing things to oneself has nothing to do with morality. <snip>
> > > Morality starts when you consider doing things to others.
> >
> > I couldn't disagree more. Almost every moral system I know of
> > considers self distructive behavior to be immoral. Thus suicide,
> > drinking, gambling are considered moral vices.
>
> I agree.
> My moral system, however disagrees with them. It values self-determination
> higher than whatever benefit may accrue from an individual's being prevented
> from hurting himself.
I don't see the conflict between self-determination and considering
self destructive behavior immoral. I don't think that vices are
crimes. Just because something is immoral doesn't mean it needs to
be outlawed. I think we could come to an agreement here. I don't
think that we can forcibly intervene when someone is hurting
themselves unless there is credible evidence that they are not in a
rational state of mind (and I think it is perfectly rational to kill
yourself under certain circumstances).
See my other post where I talk about moral systems - I don't think
morality can be classified as simply as saying it is subjective or
objective or relative. It's a little of all three.
John Secker
<pg...@lsil.com> writes
> Here's how the world would be different. The omnipotent god, at
>midnight, would reveal himself retroactively -- he'd alter people's
>memories so the new state of the universe is how people remember it
>having been all their lives. In the new universe, everybody believes
>in god. They can't help it -- he's the guy who whips everybody every
>ten seconds. Life sucks. Everyone is in terrible pain all the time.
>Fighting back only makes it worse -- the god's omnipotent. Everybody
>desperately wants to die. But if you kill yourself, he just resurrects
>you, ups the whipping frequency to every second, reads your mind to
>find out who your friends are, gives those people extra whippings too,
>and carves the words "Friend of a Suicide" into their flesh. But if
>you kill *somebody else* then the god lets him stay dead. In that
>world, murder is morally good.
>
actually an example of what was requested. It seems to me that what you
have created here is a scenario in which our current morality would
agree that murder is correct. But there are more realistic situations in
the "real world" where the same moral judgement would apply (under the
current rules). For example if someone is trapped in a burning car it
may be morally right to shoot them rather than extend their suffering.
Switching off the life support on a terminally ill or vegetative person
also falls into this category.
Note that this does not mean that I think you are wrong, but I don't
think you have described what the world would be like if the
(hypothetically objective) rules of morality were suddenly changed - in
the way that one could describe a universe in which the laws of gravity
were suddenly changed. What you have done is describe a situation in
which the existing laws produce unfamiliar results, which is a different
thing altogether.
--
John Secker
BlinkyLight
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote in message news:<402d54b.02090...@posting.google.com>...
> > And what reason would we have for evolving the moral "torturing
> > animals is wrong," which appears to be a fairly commonly-held moral?
> I can think of several reasons why torturing animals would be
> considered wrong from the aspect of self-preservation (an important
> aspect of natural selection).
>
> You must remember that humans have evolved a very sophisticated brain
> that can recognize quite remote dangers.
>
> a) Animals can and do recognize individual humans to a greater or
> lesser degree and do act on the crude principle of revenge.
> b) Tortured animals present a general threat to everyone. Therefore
> if someone else sees you doing such behavior it will be percieved as a
> indirect threat against them. They may attempt to take action
> against you. Why bring this on yourself.
I was assuming that the animal torturer would eventually kill the
animal, not set it free.
> d)At a higher level people make judgements about each other. If you
> demonstrate an enjoyment for torturing animals other people are
> possibly less likely to trust you. You need others trust in order to
> participate in alliances and voluntary cooperation agreements which
> are valuable for survival.
It would seem animal torturers are more likely to hurt humans whereas
meat-eaters aren't -- torturing animals is one of the warning signs of
psychopathy -- so maybe we evolved an instinct to avoid/condemn them.
So I will withdraw my point.
> Unfortunately this is where I think a belief in a single objective
> standard breaks down. I think instead we need to think in terms of
> multiple objective standards all based on "harm" to individuals.
I'm not using the term "objective standard" to refer to a single moral
rule, but rather a complete set.
> Morals are survival strategies and as
> with all strategies it is very hard to pick the optimal one even if
> circumstances were static. Unfortunately they are not. This however
> does not mean that morals are subjective. They do have a basis.
If we define moral behavior as that which makes the individual and/or
species more likely to survive and produce a next generation, then we
have an objective definition. But most people object to defining
morality in those terms -- it's "selfish" and many people believe
altruism is a moral good. Richard Dawkins even starts out _The
Selfish Gene_ with a disclaimer that he's "not advocating a morality
based on evolution."
This is something I find puzzling. Whatever instincts, abilities,
etc. we have, we got through the process of natural selection,
mutation, etc. I can't imagine that morality -- meaning our
instinctual feelings of guilt and what I will call "justified pride"
when we do certain things -- didn't evolve, when it obviously affects
our behavior to a great degree. And since it evolved, it must have
evolved because it helped us survive/reproduce in some way. Its
purpose is survival, as you say. So why should so many people have an
instinctive reaction against the statement "morality is about
survival," and think morality should be based on something "nobler"
like "doing good for its own sake"?
Blink
BlinkyLight
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote in message news:<402d54b.02081...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > Similarly, mathematics is based on real-world observations, given a
> > definition of a counting system -- if I pick two apples, and later
> > pick three more, I get "five" when I count them.
>
> I wouldn't get too hung up on this. Mathematics is for modeling and
> does not neccesarily conform to reality even in these simple counting
> cases. Suppose you have two apples in a pile and pick a googleplex
> more apples to add to the pile. Do I end up with a googleplex plus
> two apples or a neutron star due to their gravatational attraction?
>
> What I am getting at is, don't get too hung up with the limitations of
> morals or the objective nature of mathematics. You may be able to
> show that morals are not applicable in certain circumstances but that
> does not mean they do not apply elsewhere. Thus, moral dilemmas are
> not disproofs of the objectivity of morals. They only show that
> moral models break down under certain extreme circumstances.
>
> Do you think the counting system is any less objective now that I have
> shown you a real world "counting dilemma"?
No, but that wasn't the point of the discussion. Paul tried to make
the point, "there are objective truths which don't correspond to
anything in the real world, so morality could also be an objective
truth that lacks external reference." I countered that basic
mathematics can be externally verified, and that math is applied to
many real-world things. Math is a system with rules, and we can
combine it with science to predict results and then verify those
results. While someone can argue that we made it up, it's not on the
level of, "Gee, I just have this feeling that 2 x 6 = 12."
If there are objective moral rules, it may be that there are
situations where people disagree on how to apply them. I don't have
"everyone must agree on every moral question" as a requirement for an
objective moral system.
Blink
Tony Griffin
> > I agree.
> > My moral system, however disagrees with them. It values self-determination
> > higher than whatever benefit may accrue from an individual's being prevented
> > from hurting himself.
>
> I don't see the conflict between self-determination and considering
> self destructive behavior immoral.
Self-determination is "good" (it may need to be limited if it conflicts with
another's self-determination but its still "good"). Considering only the aspect
of self-determination, self-destructive behavior should be allowed because it is
an exercise of self-determination that does not conflict with others'
self-determination. If self-destructive behavior is "bad" (for some other
reason) then there's a conflict, assuming you agree with the judgements of
"good" and "bad".
> I don't think that vices are
> crimes. Just because something is immoral doesn't mean it needs to
> be outlawed.
Ummmmmm. I would prefer to say that they are not immoral wherever possible.
Addiction is not immoral, its an illness. Truly immoral things should be made
crimes, IF that is an effective way of preventing them. My argument against the
"War on Drugs" is two-fold - much drug-taking is not immoral, and its simply
*not working* and causing a great deal of misery and injustice as a
side-effect.
> I think we could come to an agreement here. I don't
> think that we can forcibly intervene when someone is hurting
> themselves unless there is credible evidence that they are not in a
> rational state of mind (and I think it is perfectly rational to kill
> yourself under certain circumstances).
We have to be careful here. Its all too easy to consider someone irrational
*because* they are hurting themselves. But OK.
I didn't read a justification from you that hurting oneself is immoral, which
started this discussion (you said "I couldn't disagree with you more"). Do you
have one? In the last quoted paragraph you seem to be agreeing with me.
>
> See my other post where I talk about moral systems - I don't think
> morality can be classified as simply as saying it is subjective or
> objective or relative. It's a little of all three.
I agree that we can find examples of all three things in moral systems. What I
(and Blink) are arguing is that the underlying basis of morality is subjective.
Tony
BlinkyLight
> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote:
> > I can live with calling color definitions objective. But according
> > to the definitions I posted earlier, subjective is "characteristic
> > of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent
> > of mind." So I'd say judgments which are based on our personal
> > reactions are subjective until proven objective.
>
> Well, color judgments certainly belong to reality as perceived.
> Whether they're independent of mind depends on where in the brain you
> think "mind" begins. So maybe subjective/objective isn't the best
> way to characterize the debate. I can live with calling morality
> subjective as long as that isn't construed as meaning there's no such
> thing as a wrong answer.
But my original question was whether or not there is (in your terms) a
wrong answer. Or, whether there is any justification for saying an
act is objectively right or wrong. You can call the "no" answer to
these questions whatever you like.
> > and we have no basis for outright condemnation of those who disagree
> > with us.
>
> We don't have that regardless. We should never condemn people
> outright just for disagreeing with us. Opinions aren't what morality
> is about -- it's about behavior. As Kant said, it's practical reason,
> not pure reason. You can't infer someone is a liar just because he's
> Lutheran and Luther approved of lying. There were Nazis who helped
> Jews escape.
Then rephrase my statement as "we have no basis for outright
condemnation of other's moral choices" if you like that better.
If there were an objective standard and hence justification for moral
judgment of another, shouldn't opinions be condemned as well as
actions? What you describe sounds like stereotyping and not what I
was talking about. If someone says in all seriousness, "Abortion
doctors are evil and they should all be killed," and that's an
objectively wrong moral statement, shouldn't you condemn it? The
people who shoot abortion doctors are the ones who make statements
like that (though all people who make such statements don't
necessarily carry them out). People who disagree with that statement
probably aren't going to be bombing clinics or shooting doctors
anytime soon. True, there is often a disconnect between people's
moral statements and their moral actions, but it's not as though one
has nothing to do with the other.
> You've seen the existence proof, such as it is. It relies on
> your stipulation that nihilism is wrong, since it's only an argument
> for why relativism is wrong. It also relies on the premise that there
> is nothing for relativistic moral claims to mean that satisfies logic
> and that matches what's really going on in the minds of people who
> make them. This is an expression of simple skepticism on my part,
> just like my opinion that there was no intelligent being who created
> the visible universe. As they say in Missouri, "Show me".
Odd that you should label your belief in objective morals as
"skepticism." You're the one who posits the existence of something.
I'd say your position has more in common with theism than atheism.
You believe something exists, even though you can't prove it exists or
even fully define it. All you have are some arguments about why it
might be reasonable to believe it exists, the merits of which are
currently being debated, and maybe a gut feeling and/or desire for it
to be true.
> (I also have empirical/inductive arguments against nihilism
> and for an objective standard, rather than proofs. Those are the
> evolutionary and medical arguments you've seen.)
Er, that looked to me like a single argument: morality evolved, so it
must be a system/organ/instinct with a purpose (presumably
survival/reproduction), thus we can determine if a person's moral
organ is healthy or sick (i.e. if they are objectively moral or
immoral) by determining if his/her moral feelings are helping or
hindering him/her evolutionarily. Did I miss something?
> If so, what are you arguing about when you argue moral questions
> with someone else? Are you trying to convince him that, say, hurting
> people makes you feel guilty? Are you trying to convince him that
> hurting people makes _him_ feel guilty?
Answered elsewhere.
> I'm arguing that morality doesn't have subjectively-chosen
> postulates because it doesn't have postulates. Postulates are for
> top-down ethical theories, where you justify judgments in particular
> cases based on general rules. I'm arguing for bottom-up ethics. The
> sorts of claim you call postulates, like "Don't hurt people" or "Make
> people better off", are in fact *theories*: attempts to generalize
> from what's good or bad in particular cases.
It doesn't seem that most people think that way. Maybe their general
rules came about by generalizing specific cases as you say, but if you
ask people why they did or didn't do something, you usually get a
general rule back in response.
Blink
Paul Erickson
wrote:
>John Secker <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> M G <ma...@tidalwave.net> writes
>> > It's a generality, exceptions weaken but don't deny the claim.
>
> Actually they strengthen it -- when you discover an exception and
>incorporate it into your claim, you have a more accurate claim.
>
>> Sorry, they do. If your "objective" rule has exceptions, then you
>> need to state them in advance. Simply making up the rules as you go
>> along makes your system into a subjective one.
>
> Physicists thought nature was left-right symmetric. They even
>said so and made predictions on that basis. Then they found out
>there's an exception -- the weak nuclear force is just a little out
>of balance. A few more beta emissions come from south poles than
>north poles. So they made up a new rule to allow for this. That
>makes the "Standard Model" of particle physics subjective? Stating
>the rules in advance is for fundamentalists.
But is morality a kind of thing that can be objective? To me all
moral statements seem to involve _goals_, desires, wishes. To say
that something objectively _should_ be this way or that way seems to
mean that some objectively authoritative will wants it this way or
that way. I don't see how any objective situation can demand
particular goals or desires from us, or how any will can be
objectively authoritative. Morality is about _what to do_; _what to
do_ is about goals, ultimately -- about what we _want_, not directly
dependant on what actually is. At least that is the way it seems to
me. I suppose it seems different to you, but I don't see exactly
how...
What kind of objective situation could demand that we _want_ and _work
towards_ the realization of this or that? What kind of objective
situation makes it true that, eg, it is _better_ for life on earth to
survive a lot longer than for it to be exterminated immediately? I
can see that subjective opinion -- the subjective opinion of almost
everyone -- would mean that most of us would want and work for the
longevity of earthling life, but I don't see how any _objective_
situation, apart from the combination of all our subjective feelings,
would mean that we all "ought" to try to keep life going.
Really I don't even understand the _concept_ of objective morality,
distinct from the subjective wishes of individual wills, or of some
will that is somehow metaphysically inseparable from the universe (and
therefore somehow "objective" in what it desires). And even then I
would have my doubts. Shrug...
What I want to know is: WTF might you mean by objective morality? And
_how_ might it be objective?
Paul Erickson
Paul Erickson
wrote:
> The same as the standard for any medical condition. Complicated
>characteristics of living organisms, such as body parts and instincts,
>have functions. Figure out what the function is. Arteries are there
>to move blood. Hardening interferes with an artery's ability to move
>blood. Therefore atherosclerosis is a disease, whether we happen to
>prefer Bach or Mozart or moving blood or unmoving blood.
No, it is a disease because it causes pain to humans. Find an organ
whose function you can determine, and whose dysfunction doesn't hurt
anybody: that dysfunction is not a disease, whether such an organ
really exists or not. Function for an organ, as far as people are
concerned, is a matter of what that organ does for people. Not of
what its _objective_ function is (insofar as "objective function" can
be distinguished from the benefit an organ gives to people). The two
definitions of "function" -- "objective" (maybe evolutionary?) purpose
vs. "value in keeping people happy" are separate, however often they
might seem to coincide. The objective definition means nothing to
people unless they cherish some theory about how great objective
function is. Some definitions of disease involve the "objective"
functions of organs, etc, but our ideas of organs' objective functions
depend, really, on what _we_ want them to do for _us_. You might get
all Darwinian, and say that organs' functions are the things they do
that increase the chances of our reproducing, but that is not how
medical evaluation works. If some process in our testicles or ovaries
endangers our quality of life enough, we will want to get rid of those
organs, despite the subsequent certainty that we will never
reproduce... Objective? Well, I objectively want to be as happy and
filfilled as I can be. Is that desire itself objective? Shrug.
>In order to
>answer your question, therefore, the problem to be solved is to figure
>out what morality is *for*.
>
> I have some ideas; but I don't really know what it's for. But
>how to tell right from wrong is not the question on the table; the
>question is whether it's relative or objective. To answer that, we
>don't need to know what morality's function *is*; we only need to
>know whether it *has* one.
>
> Morality is complicated. It's adaptive.
If morality is adaptive it can't be strictly objective. Or at least
not in all phases of its development. Do you just want to say that
people have sufficient common feelings to justify moral reasoning,
education, punishment, etc? In that case I agree.
> It's expensive. It's
>been developing for tens of millions of years.
It has changed, then? Common human morality is not the same as
_objective_ morality. I'm sure that there was a time when all people
thought the world was flat. That did not make it objectively true.
Maybe you think there is something about morality that makes
nearly-universal agreement about it somehow _objective_, whereas the
same kind of agreement did not make the flat-earth assumption
objectiive. If so, I would ask you to explain it.
> We see pieces of it
>in lots of other species. That sort of thing is always the result of
>natural selection, not just a chance mutation. And natural selection
>doesn't do that sort of thing as a joke. So we can be reasonably
>sure morality is for *something*.
I have no doubt that morality is _for_ something. I am an unashamed
believer in the value of morality. But I don't see how a Darwinian or
any other kind of explanation of why we are here makes morality
objective. At _most_ (and this is asking a lot) it makes our morality
nearly universal. But, again, I don't see how even perfectly
universal moral feelings would necessarily be _objective_.
To say that they would be objective would, to my mind, be a concession
to subjectivism: if the whole human race feels this or that way about
morals, then that common subjective view becomes objective...
Shrug.
Paul Erickson
Paul Filseth
> > What do you mean by the "It's wrong" you're trying to persuade him
> > of? ... Are you trying to get him to believe "it's wrong to him"?
> > ... Isn't he the best qualified judge of what's "wrong to him"?
>
> People don't know everything about themselves, and they often make
> reasoning errors (e.g. in determining whether or not an action will
> achieve their goal). Kids often form opinions of food they've never
> tasted before and insist it's yucky. ... he may be trying to avoid
> realizing he feels guilty ... So to answer your question, I'm trying
> to see if what's wrong to me is also wrong to the person I'm talking
> to, and if I think it is I'll try to get him to consciously realize it.
That might work.
> If it turns out it's not wrong to him, but
> it's something that impacts me emotionally or physically, I'll try
> to see if I can convince him there's a better way of achieving his
> goals. If the action *is* his goal -- if we're discussing whether
> hurting people is wrong, and he's a sadist whose goal is to enjoy
> himself and who finds the most pleasure in torturing people -- I
> can't persuade him of anything; we simply have two different opinions
> on the matter.
Do you? In this scenario it's not wrong to him. Do you mistakenly
believe it is, and you've just given up getting him to know himself
better? Or has he convinced you it's not wrong to him? By this point
in the discussion he presumably believes it's wrong to you. So what
matter is there for the two of you to have two different opinions on?
> > If he doesn't hurt people because he doesn't feel like it, but
> > thinks there's nothing wrong with it if somebody else wants to,...
>
> Is this persuading him that "hurting people" has a "wrong" property?
> He and I both agree in this case that hurting people is wrong --
> meaning that for both of us, to hurt someone would cause us to feel
> guilty (or that it does for me, and that it meets his criteria for
> "wrong," whatever that may be).
Where'd you get that? It doesn't meet his criteria for wrong.
That's why he thinks it isn't wrong for somebody else to. He just
doesn't see it as promoting any of his goals; or maybe hurting people
is, like, work. :-)
But more to the point, suppose it did satisfy his criteria, but
they're totally different from yours. Suppose you and someone else
both call hurting people "wrong", but for unrelated reasons. Why
do you think of that as _agreeing_? Just because you use the same
sequence of sounds? Or do you both have in mind for "wrong" a common
meaning distinct from the criteria you use to infer it?
> > > Why do I think hurting people is wrong? When I hurt someone, I feel
> > > guilty, and I dislike feeling guilty, so I avoid hurting people.
> >
> > ... Aren't there any feelings you dislike and avoid inducing, but
> > that you don't attach moral judgment to? If there are, then your
> > dislike of feeling guilty must not be the main reason you think
> > hurting people is wrong.
>
> I didn't say I felt bad, I said I felt *guilty.* It's the guilty
> feeling which I use to determine if something feels wrong to me, just
> as the ouchy-hot feeling is the one I use to determine if putting my
> hand on a heated object is a good idea or not.
No problem -- I'm just trying to understand the significance of
you including your dislike of the feeling in your explanation. So if
you _liked_ feeling guilty, then you'd hurt people in order to get that
feeling but you'd still think hurting people was wrong?
> My feelings of guilt (and self-respect) are the primary indicators
> of what's right or wrong to me; my self-interest plays a part, but
> in many if not most cases I would give my moral feelings priority
> in determining what to do.
Do you mean self-interest plays a part in determining what to do,
or in deciding what's right or wrong, or both?
> > > If I were to argue with someone about this, I would ask him if he
> > > felt guilty when he hurt people,
> >
> > So he says:
> > "Sure. I feel terrible about it. Most of the people I've killed
> > and maimed didn't volunteer to risk death, like I did. They
> > just wanted to go home. But I can't let that stop me. Mullah
> > Omar drafted them to fight for his evil regime... I fight for my
> > country, because it's right, even though it means hurting people.
> > And I always feel guilty about it, and I see those poor guys'
> > faces at night, and that's my problem to deal with..."
>
> Then I would say, "You're doing what you think is right, and you don't
> sound like you have any reason to shoot me, so I have no argument with
> you."
> Did you think I was saying hurting people is wrong in every situation?
> If I were this man, his action might well seem like the best one to
> me as well.
Hey, I just work with what you give me. If you want to tune your
statement of what things are wrong, I'll tune my counterargument. The
point is, my fictional creation satisfies your _criterion_ for "wrong
to him". He feels all the guilt you could possibly hope for, quite
consciously. And yet it sounds like he's the one persuading you. That
suggests there may be something wrong with the "feeling guilty = wrong"
formula.
> > "Do you think what's right is just whatever makes you personally
> > better off, that you keep talking about which feelings you dislike
> > and how to have people not want to hurt you? If I thought right and
> > wrong were about that I wouldn't have volunteered to get shot at."
>
> Yes, though "better off" includes my emotional and psychological
> well-being, not simply material or physical well-being. That's what
> seems right to me. Because of my guilt and empathy feelings, what
> makes me better off is often what makes others better off
But not always? In the case of hurting someone for your own
benefit, it's a matter of how guilty you feel vs. how much you stand
to gain, and if you gain enough it stops being wrong?
> Why does that seem wrong to you (Paul, assuming the soldier's words
> reflect your feelings)? How do you decide what right and wrong are?
> Do you not include your personal feelings or goals in your moral
> decisions?
Of course -- provided I think the particular feelings or goals in
question are what they are because that's what's right. Some of my
feelings and goals appear to me to have nothing to do with right and
wrong, so I try not to consider those in moral decisions. (In the
event that I do consider them, I'm screwing up and rationalizing.)
> Do you not seek to do what benefits you emotionally/psychologically
> by making you feel proud rather than guilty?
Sure; but that means I have ulterior motives. Feeling proud or
guilty isn't what makes it right or wrong; it's the other way around.
Whether I think it's right or wrong influences whether I'd feel proud
or guilty. As Kant put it, "Morality is not properly the doctrine of
how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy
of happiness."
> In fact, I believe the soldier is ultimately doing the same thing.
> At first, it seems he is conflicted: he feels guilty about shooting
> men on the other side, yet he feels he is doing the right thing (and
> presumably has some good feelings about that). Would he be better
> off if he left the army?
It would certainly increase his life-expectancy.
> It sounds like his feelings of guilt would be worse if he left than
> if he stayed -- he sounds like the sort of fellow who would feel he
> was cowardly, abandoning a just cause and his rightful duty,
> abandoning his fellow soldiers, etc.
Let's ask him. :-)
"I've thought about that, and it's true I'd feel guilty if I quit.
It wouldn't be cowardice but squeamishness; but that can be just as
bad. My country needs me, and my buddies need me, and somebody has
to stop people like Mullah Omar and it might as well be me.
But if the Army has taught me anything, it's this: "Anybody who
thinks he's irreplaceable, ain't". If I quit, somebody else will
volunteer to take my place; and maybe he won't be as good at it as
I am at first, but he'll come up to speed. And I'd feel like I
could have done more, but the truth is, I'd get over it. I'd tell
myself I did more for America than most Americans, and it was my
tour-of-duty, not my life's work. And then I'd get a job that
didn't give me nightmares. So if this is about guilt-reduction,
according to my calculations I'd feel less guilt if I quit. I
think about it, but I never write that letter. I've got a country
to defend."
> Even though he feels guilt on an instinctive level when he fires his
> gun, he has reasoned that killing people in this case will ultimately
> lead to less pain and suffering for a greater number of people in the
> future,
"Yes, I have reasoned that. And then I reasoned that I was just
rationalizing and it was a load of BS. Suppose I were Swiss, and
Switzerland were the only country that hadn't been absorbed into
the Empire of Terra, and they invaded my country in order to
fulfill their dream of a single world government, in spite of our
voting against signing up. Then I'd willingly shoot American
troops to protect Swiss independence, even though knuckling under
would lead to a lot less pain and suffering for the imperialists
and there would be a lot more of them than us. That whole 'Logic
dictates the needs of the many...' business wasn't thought up by
any Vulcan, and I'm not fighting the Taliban for the greatest good
of the greatest number. I'm fighting so other rulers will know
not to harbor terrorists."
> so he is not really acting contrary to his personal creed and
> therefore has a lesser level of guilt.
Creed yes, guilt no; at least if you measure guilt by flashbacks
to what you feel guilty about.
Paul Filseth
> > > If your "objective" rule has exceptions, then you need to state
> > > them in advance. Simply making up the rules as you go along makes
> > > your system into a subjective one.
> >
> > found out there's an exception... That makes the "Standard Model"
> > of particle physics subjective? Stating the rules in advance is
> > for fundamentalists.
>
> Quite a different case. In the scientific method, when an exception is
> discovered, a new rule (or an extension of the existing one) is worked
> essentially observing a moral situation and then deciding what the
> result was - making it up as he went along. In my opinion a moral rule
> which says "Minimise harm, and Joe will decide what that means when
> presented with difficult cases" is not an objective standard.
I reread your exchange with MG and that doesn't strike me as a
correct characterization of it. There was no difficult case on the
table.
MG: "it is harmful to be denied equal opportunity to achieve goals or
express thoughts because of gender or race or creed."
JS: "Very many people ... would disagree with this in particular
instances."
MG: "It's a generality, exceptions weaken but don't deny the claim...
Consensus is a particularly weak argument on behalf of moral
claims. If you want to discuss this, then present the
counter-example and defend it."
JS: "Sorry, they do. If your "objective" rule has exceptions" [etc.]
You two are discussing exceptions in *broad abstractions*. There was
no moral situation for MG to observe. He can't very well propose a
new rule or an extension of the existing one before he sees the
situation where his first attempt fails. So there's no basis here for
suggesting that he was proposing himself (or "Joe") as a judge who
would simply decide all the difficult cases. If your description of
MG's theory is correct about how he deals with the particular instances
in which very many people would disagree with his statement about what
is harmful, and you want him (or us) to see that, then you need to put
one of those particular instances on the table so he can respond to it.
John Secker
<blinky...@yahoo.com> writes
>If we define moral behavior as that which makes the individual and/or
>species more likely to survive and produce a next generation, then we
>have an objective definition.
for the ideal physical design of a creature, too - that which makes it
more likely to survive and breed? The observed outcome of this standard,
however, is a bewildering variety of results, even in the face of
apparently very similar survival challenges. However that does not of
itself mean there is no objective rule, just that it may be fiendishly
complicated. The other problem is that, as with most moral rules, it is
easy to set up examples where it results in (apparently) immoral
behaviour - stranded on a desert island, I should kill off as many of my
fellow refugees as possible.
> But most people object to defining
>morality in those terms -- it's "selfish" and many people believe
>altruism is a moral good. Richard Dawkins even starts out _The
>Selfish Gene_ with a disclaimer that he's "not advocating a morality
>based on evolution."
>
>This is something I find puzzling. Whatever instincts, abilities,
>etc. we have, we got through the process of natural selection,
>mutation, etc. I can't imagine that morality -- meaning our
>instinctual feelings of guilt and what I will call "justified pride"
>when we do certain things -- didn't evolve, when it obviously affects
>our behavior to a great degree. And since it evolved, it must have
>evolved because it helped us survive/reproduce in some way. Its
>purpose is survival, as you say. So why should so many people have an
>instinctive reaction against the statement "morality is about
>survival," and think morality should be based on something "nobler"
>like "doing good for its own sake"?
>
morality which you proposed earlier. If that really IS the underlying
objective basis of morality, why do so many instinctively react against
it? Would you regard it as moral for a new husband to kill his wife's
children from a previous marriage? If not, why not?
--
John Secker
Tony Griffin
> If we define moral behavior as that which makes the individual and/or
> species more likely to survive and produce a next generation, then we
> have an objective definition. But most people object to defining
> morality in those terms -- it's "selfish" and many people believe
> altruism is a moral good. Richard Dawkins even starts out _The
> Selfish Gene_ with a disclaimer that he's "not advocating a morality
> based on evolution."
>
> This is something I find puzzling. Whatever instincts, abilities,
> etc. we have, we got through the process of natural selection,
> mutation, etc. I can't imagine that morality -- meaning our
> instinctual feelings of guilt and what I will call "justified pride"
> when we do certain things -- didn't evolve, when it obviously affects
> our behavior to a great degree. And since it evolved, it must have
> evolved because it helped us survive/reproduce in some way. Its
> purpose is survival, as you say. So why should so many people have an
> instinctive reaction against the statement "morality is about
> survival," and think morality should be based on something "nobler"
> like "doing good for its own sake"?
I'm going to try to answer this with two possibilities.
First the "evolution only" answer. The "selfish genes" "want"* certain
behaviors. They don't really care how they come about. So, if a feeling of moral
nobility is a more powerful motivator than a realization that its all about
survival, then that will be selected for. Another example might be the
willingness for parents to sacrifice themselves for their children. Its often
quite stupid when only the interests of the parents are considered, but we have
a very strong evolved need to do so. Genes that coded for this need survived
better than those that didn't, so we're stuck with it to the point that I'll bet
that most of my readers are feeling slightly annoyed that I should even
tangentially criticize such an "obviously" good impulse. :)
Second, the admittedly hopeful idea I have that maybe the selfish genes have
shot themselves in the foot by developing a moral sense that is capable of going
beyond mere survival to something approaching altruism. This can only survive in
an environment where non-survival traits are allowed to continue, and this seems
to be the case in the modern world.
Tony
* Its difficult to discuss this without attributing desires to the genes, or
adding endless parenthetical provisos. You know what I mean.
Paul Erickson
(BlinkyLight) wrote:
>TheEc...@hotmail.com (Skeptic) wrote:
>> blinky...@yahoo.com (BlinkyLight) wrote in message news:<402d54b.02090...@posting.google.com>...
>This is something I find puzzling. Whatever instincts, abilities,
>etc. we have, we got through the process of natural selection,
>mutation, etc. I can't imagine that morality -- meaning our
>instinctual feelings of guilt and what I will call "justified pride"
>when we do certain things -- didn't evolve, when it obviously affects
>our behavior to a great degree. And since it evolved, it must have
>evolved because it helped us survive/reproduce in some way. Its
>purpose is survival, as you say. So why should so many people have an
>instinctive reaction against the statement "morality is about
>survival," and think morality should be based on something "nobler"
>like "doing good for its own sake"?
Maybe because the moral feelings that evolved in us are not based on
our intellectual evaluations of survival value. Maybe it was less
complicated in evolutionary terms to evolve a number of basic no-no's
and yed-yesses (which "buttons" others could touch when by expressing
approval or disapproval -- which is not to say that they could _only_
be touched by approval or disapproval), or to evolve the capacity to
introject the moral feelings of our cultures, which have survived
memetically (I don't see why genetic evolution can't have been
influenced at any point by cultural phenomena -- if it can't have,
then how do you explain ants, bees, philosophers, etc). Or both, or
more.
And, maybe, the feeling of certain righteousness, changeable only by
logical demonstration involving an even deeper value, which usually
comes with sincere moral opinions, is an adaptation that allows
differing people in a group to come to a consensus about what they
ought to be doing, thereby forging feelings of unity and discouraging
strife. Shrug.
Personally I think most of us are born with something approaching
universal no-nos and yes-yesses, most of which can be channeled into
various complex arrangements by the families and cultures we come into
contact with as we mature, to the extent that we feel guilt or
"justified" pride as the cultural occasion demands.
That is not to say that everybody feels guilt or pride about the same
things. They certainly do not, however objectively unassailable such
opinions might feel to them (or to us).
Paul Erickson
Paul Filseth
John Secker <jo...@secker.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > > This is the whole point, and to me it very nearly puts the
> > > "objective morality" argument in the bin. Whenever someone
> > > comes up with a claimed objective measure of morality, others
> > > will immediately come up with examples which test or break the
> > > definition.
> >
> > But that's circumstantial evidence *for* objectivity. If
> > there's no right answer to the issue, how could an *example*
> > break a definition? Why would anyone even think of proposing
> > a counterexample, rather than just saying "Nah, I don't feel
> > that way."
>
> The example allows people to test the proposed rule against their
> own (subjective) moral taste. If a large number of people conclude
> that the rule produces results which are unacceptable to their taste,
> then it is fair to say that the rule has been disproved - in the
> sense that it does not match what most people feel is moral.
And when someone tests the rule against her own moral taste and
doesn't appreciate the taste, she tells the one believing in the rule
about the example, because she thinks he won't like its taste either.
She thinks her own moral taste will be a better predictor of his moral
taste than his introspective exposition of his taste is. She thinks
this because *it's usually the case*. This is what would naturally be
expected if there's a moral reality they both perceive. But if there
isn't, then it's kind of surprising that she knows him better than he
knows himself. So although there's undoubtedly some way to make a
subjective theory account for this curious situation, the fact that
people easily think of examples that break definitions is hardly a
strike against objectivity.
Tony Griffin
> For those of us who are male and normally only use eleven words
> for colors, .........
> So the perception-term "purple" covers a wider category of phenomena
> than the physics-term "violet".
Interesting, thanks.
> That was an answer to Blink's hypothetical -- I wasn't stipulating
> anything. In that hypothetical case, your characterization is correct.
> Blink seemed to be invalidly implying we should discount the concept
> unless we could figure out its content.
I agree, we shouldn't.
>
> > (BTW, what is your reaction to the idea that an demonstrably objective
> > moral standard might turn out to be contrary to everything you hold
> > dear? Would you accept it and follow its rules, hating everything you
> > did in the process?)
>
> That would depend on whether I found the demonstration persuasive.
> This is unlikely. What you're describing is basically just severe
> insanity. Sometimes insane people realize they're insane and want to
> get better; sometimes not. If I'm completely insane it's unlikely I
> have enough grip on reality to recognize this; so it would be up to the
> sane people to figure out what to do about me. :-)
But logically, the objective morality could be different from what we
generally
agree to be good and bad, so we might all be insane. There is a bogeyman
associated with subjectivism, "it means that everyone's opinion on morality is
equally valid and so no morality has any value". I think this is a bogeyman
for
objectivism - "no matter how distasteful the objective morality turns out to
be
we would be forced to accept it". :)
> That's not what I'm saying is impossible. In your example, you
> agree because you observe yourself feeling, not because you observe
> yourself *agreeing*.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying.
>
> What I said is just another way of saying if you define "true" for
> a moral claim to mean "Some subject thinks the claim is true", then you
> either have a content-free circular definition or are equivocating on
> "true". If the subject really meant _that_ by "true", he'd go into an
> infinite loop trying to make up his mind.
OK, what *I* mean by this is that the only thing we can attach the meaning
"true" to is the subject's statement of his own feelings. "I feel thusly".
This
can be established as true or false (he's lying or mistaken or he isn't). This
test can be applied individually to each holder of moral feelings. We can then
make true or false statements about whether A's morality equates to B's
morality, but that does not make objectivity.
>
> > Translating this to a moral statement, I would claim that the same
> > thing applies, except that most people *don't* agree on the
> > subjectivity of their statements, as most people assume an objective
> > morality.
>
> That is a *huge* "except". It sounds like you're saying when
> you call some behavior "bad", what you mean is to tell others about a
> certain feeling you have about the claim.
Yes.
> But when most people call
> one "bad", they _don't_ mean to tell others about feelings they have.
> They mean to tell others about a property of the behavior, not a
> property of themselves.
Yes again. What they (or I) mean to do is not necessarily what they are in
fact
capable of doing. If there is no objective "bad" they can't tell us what its
properties are because it doesn't exist. They can describe some hypothetical
object that they believe exists, but that doesn't make it spring into
existence
any more than a theist's description of a god creates one.
> So you and they mean two completely different
> things by "bad". Let's call theirs "bad_1" and yours "bad_2". Why did
> you pick the sound "bad" to stand for "bad_2"? Did you grow up in a
> subculture that consistently uses it for that? Or did you hear people
> use it to mean "bad_1" and misunderstand them, thinking they meant
> "bad_2"?
Sneaky! Did you grow up in a subculture that consistently disbelieves in Santa
Claus, as you don't believe in him (as a real person) now? If not, how can
that
be, as you once believed in him and now don't?
>
> (In the event that you are suggesting there is no "bad_1" and
> "bad_2", and you and the majority mean the same thing by "bad", and
> it's just that most people are simply mistaken about what they mean,
> because there's no objective morality and the claims they call "bad"
> are just the ones they have that certain feeling about, then that's an
> ordinary sense/reference fallacy. Even if it's true that there's no
> objective morality, that doesn't change what they mean by the words
> they use. The way they decide what to call "bad" is to consult their
> feelings but that doesn't mean they're talking about their feelings.)
They're not. They believe they are describing something objective. What I
don't
understand is how the fact that most people mean to convey something that (if
I
am correct) cannot be, is evidence for the existence of that thing. (The thing
being an objective property of badness, divorced from the feelings of the
person
making that judgement).
> > Unless they are speaking loosely, don't they include all sorts of
> > unstated provisos? Like, the ball would have hit the ground assuming
> > that the laws of gravity continued to function in that area of
> > spacetime and no other factors intervened? This allows pure logic to
> > be applied, not so?
>
> If people think of such provisos, aren't they also claiming that
> the provisos would probably have been satisfied? If you hadn't caught
> the ball, nobody would have vaporised it, gravity would have continued
> to function, all other intervening factors would have failed to stop
> the ball; and it would have hit the ground. How does pure logic decide
> that?
Its an IF statement. IF (A & ~B) THEN C. That can be evaluated logically.
>
> > First, how do you differentiate behaviors that are "morals" from all
> > the others? Like, is our rule against murder "moral", but a male
> > lion's killing the cubs of a previous Pride leader "not moral" (I
> > mean not part of a system of morality, not "immoral")?
>
> Good question. I think we have to start with the instinct to make
> moral judgments in the first place, and work out from there. If we
> have an instinct to judge others by how they scratch themselves then
> that's part of morality; if we instinctively ignore how they scratch,
> and pay attention to, say, whether they return favors, then scratching
> isn't part of morality. As far as I can tell cats don't judge one
> another, so there's no system of morality for killing the cubs to be
> part of.
Why must morality include conscious judgement? Example: Maggots are observed
to
cluster together in a carcase. One would think that this is counter-survival,
as
it would be better not to compete when there are other areas of the meat that
are available. In fact the maggots are secreting a substance that breaks down
the meat, and it is an advantage to all to work together in one area. This is
definitely social behaviour, and must have evolved, but there can be no
thought
on the part of an individual maggot as it moves towards the group.
As an aside which does not affect the discussion, lions live in social groups
so
I would be surprised if they had not evolved co-operative behaviours, though I
have no idea what these might be. Solitary cats would probably not need such
behaviours.
> But limiting our reproduction doesn't conflict with gene survival;
> sometimes it helps. Lots of animals tune their reproduction rates to
> the carrying capacity of their environments. Kangaroo mothers kill
> some of their own babies if there isn't enough food for all of them.
> Humans have at least two physiological contraceptives -- infertility
> during nursing and menopause. If there are instincts not to breed too
> much if it's too crowded, that's just more of the same. If we have
> that kind of instinct, it's a good candidate for incorporation into a
> system of morality. If good animals are limiting their reproduction
> and bad animals aren't, that will make goodness genes lose out in the
> gene pool; so a mutation that makes good animals notice animals who
> over-reproduce and treat it as anti-social behavior is likely to be
> adaptive.
Why are the ones that notice "good" and the others "bad"? One could argue that
the genes that code for large families regardless could win out when the
inevitable collapse occurred. If aggressive breeding has made mormons more
numerous than atheists before the resources run out, then, if an equal
percentage of both starve to death, there will still be a greater percentage
of
mormon genes in the reduced population. Its just competing strategies, isn't
it?
How do we decide which to label "good"?
>
> That's apt to kick in even when it isn't necessary for our own
> survival. So if it becomes popular to save the whales and your friends
> and neighbors start practicing family planning to do that, people who
> don't will still look anti-social to an instinct tuned to pick up on
> that. Unless there are so few of you you're at risk of extinction,
> what counts to selfish genes is their proportion in the gene pool, not
> their absolute numbers.
Yup, but you still need a mechanism to enforce the family planning on those
that
don't care about whales. If they are more numerous, then they are likely to
support their own social mores against the less numerous whale lovers.
>
> In any event, the fact that you're trying to save the whales
> because they're charismatic megafauna is probably invisible to
> evolution. As far as your Cro Magnon-derived instincts are concerned,
> if you care about preserving whales it's because you're planning ahead
> for when you'll need to eat one.
I'd agree with that. So, as you are suggesting that morality is determined by
evolution, can a wish to preserve a species because of asthetics or altruism
be
truly moral? :)
> Of course, they had every opportunity to evolve morality telling
> them it didn't apply to the tribe on the other side of the valley. If
> that happened, space-aliens could easily get subsumed under rules for
> dealing with earth-aliens. What our instincts are on that subject is
> an empirical matter. It seems to me history shows we're getting mixed
> messages. We seem to be suspicious of foreigners; but once we get to
> know another group of people and convince ourselves they're willing
> to act morally toward us, we'll generally act morally toward them: as
> we all learn more about foreign lands, our circles of people we treat
> as in-group rather than out-group get wider and wider. This makes
> sense from an evolutionary point of view. The genes for morals exist
> to replicate themselves. But they can't sense who _has_ copies of
> them, just who _behaves_ like he has copies. So the obvious algorithm
> to use is to classify strangers based on whether they exhibit signs of
> being moral. So if we're nice to any aliens who are nice to us, our
> instincts will have done their job.
Yes, I think this makes sense. I did say "beyond the consideration of how our
treatment of them affected us". We are nice to them if we (or our genes) think
it is in our own interest. Something I sometimes think about is whether we
need
to dump evolutionary considerations to attain a truly superior morality. It
ought to be possible for an entire species to commit suicide if that conferred
some overwhelming benefit to all the other species. This is nothing to do with
the discussion of course.
>
> > In case Blink doesn't ask, what the heck is a sporadic group and a
> > monster? :)
>
> A "group" is ..... I picked
> this as an example of pure math, because to find out anything about it
> empirically we'd have to live in a 196,883-dimensional universe. )
>
A good example certainly! Thanks for the explanation. Actually, I have a part
of
my brain that extends into at least that number of dimensions, so I'll observe
some facts about the monster group for you if you like. Unfortunately its time
dimension has a 1:1000000001 ratio to ours so you may have to wait a while for
the answer. :)
Tony
Paul Erickson
wrote:
>
> And when someone tests the rule against her own moral taste and
>doesn't appreciate the taste, she tells the one believing in the rule
>about the example, because she thinks he won't like its taste either.
>She thinks her own moral taste will be a better predictor of his moral
>taste than his introspective exposition of his taste is. She thinks
>this because *it's usually the case*. This is what would naturally be
>expected if there's a moral reality they both perceive. But if there
>isn't, then it's kind of surprising that she knows him better than he
>knows himself. So although there's undoubtedly some way to make a
>subjective theory account for this curious situation, the fact that
>people easily think of examples that break definitions is hardly a
>strike against objectivity.
The fact that people offer exceptions, expecting that the exceptions
will be sen as damning for some other moral viewpoint, suggests that
many -- probably most -- people believe in a fundamental morality (or
in various triths about morality) that is/are deeper than the systems
they have built for themselves. It shows that many of us expect
others to share deep values with ourselves and with the rest of
"moral" humanity.
They might be right. And in common situations I think they usually
_are_ right. But it is strange how hard it is to discover exactly
what those deep values are or might be. Maybe morality is
metaphysically objective, but nothing seems to prove that everyone's
morality ultimately values the same things. We all want everyone else
to agree with us about ultimate values, and almost everyone acts as if
we did agree, ultimately; but what reason is there to supose that we
all actually _do_ agree, since ages of moral argument have not
brought us to a consensus?
Maybe, despite all of the serious fundamental disagreements amongst
moralists, one camp is correct and the rest of them are incorrect.
Could be. But it seems that "correct" and "incorrect" in such cases
would have to depend on a "higher" moral rule -- one on a superior
plane. Eg survivability, utility, salvation-making quality, etc.
Which begs the question as far as I can see (sorry if this seems like
a strawman: I am just guessing). Maybe you have an objective standard
that is not itself subject to moral evaluation. If so I'd love to
know about it.
Paul Erickson
Paul Filseth
> > Scientific study of the moral sense. This includes cross-species
> > comparative psychology, psychiatric examination of criminals, and,
> > most important, the systematic long-term testing and optimization
> > of possible moral rules using the reasoning and consciences of
> > ordinary people. Law is the best ethics laboratory ever invented.
>
> Er, so what's that mean in practice? Maybe you could give an example
> of how you decide whether a complex, controversial action (abortion,
> capital punishment, whatever) is right or wrong?
Abortion: by intuition and by considering where intuitions come
from. I don't have an intuitive problem with killing a mindless lump
of protoplasm -- I do that every time I eat a piece of fruit. My
intuition on this looks entirely natural and healthy -- any monkeys
with moral objections to killing fruit weren't mankind's ancestors.
Why do antiabortionists have an intuitive problem with it? Because
they don't perceive embryos to be mindless lumps of protoplasm. Why
don't they? As near as I can tell, it's mostly because they've been
indoctrinated with a lot of superstitious nonsense about magic "souls"
that isn't consistent with clinical observation. My intuition wins,
unless somebody can come up with a reason to oppose abortion that
isn't based on make-believe.
Capital punishment is a much harder problem. Monkeys have been
both killing and trying to protect one another for millions of years.
There's nothing obviously delusional about either the people who want
to kill murderers or the people who want to save them from the angry
mob. So to find out, take societies with juries, rule of law, and
precedent-based legal systems. Let the laws evolve for hundreds of
years and see what happens. This is how we figured out thieves don't
deserve execution. Extrapolating the overall trend seems to point to
total abolition; but it's really too soon to tell.
> How do you know a law is right or wrong, and if the criminal deviant
> whose psychology you're studying isn't defying an unjust law?
There are no guarantees in science; but we can minimize the
chance of such artifacts by picking clear-cut laws. Laws that have
been generally accepted in most societies for hundreds of years and
don't look like simple ruler's-self-interest are good candidates.
Study a mugger, not a political prisoner.
John Secker
<pg...@lsil.com> writes
>You two are discussing exceptions in *broad abstractions*. There was
>no moral situation for MG to observe. He can't very well propose a
>new rule or an extension of the existing one before he sees the
>situation where his first attempt fails. So there's no basis here for
>suggesting that he was proposing himself (or "Joe") as a judge who
>would simply decide all the difficult cases. If your description of
>MG's theory is correct about how he deals with the particular instances
>in which very many people would disagree with his statement about what
>is harmful, and you want him (or us) to see that, then you need to put
>one of those particular instances on the table so he can respond to it.
>
--
John Secker
BlinkyLight
> In article <402d54b.02091...@posting.google.com>, BlinkyLight
> <blinky...@yahoo.com> writes
> >If we define moral behavior as that which makes the individual and/or
> >species more likely to survive and produce a next generation, then we
> >have an objective definition.
>
> Persuasive, but doesn't that mean that we have an "objective standard"
> for the ideal physical design of a creature, too - that which makes it
> more likely to survive and breed? The observed outcome of this standard,
> however, is a bewildering variety of results, even in the face of
> apparently very similar survival challenges. However that does not of
> itself mean there is no objective rule, just that it may be fiendishly
> complicated.
You're correct. It would give us something of an objective
definition, in that we'd have a rule outside of ourselves to use for
judging whether or not a behavior is moral (or rather, evolution would
evolve our mores according to that rule). Yet it could be that it
resulted in multiple "right" answers to a moral dilemma rather than a
single one, which is what we usually think of when we talk of
objective morality. Maybe raising a few children in a monogamous
family context will produce about the same number of healthy children
growing to adulthood as living a promiscuous lifestyle and producing
numerous offspring who receive fewer resources. Maybe some
environments favor one strategy while others favor the opposite, so
whether lifelong monogamy, serial monogamy or promiscuity is the "most
moral" really depends on the environment one finds oneself in.
Yet I find myself rushing to say that I don't necessarily advocate the
above attitude, regardless of what my selfish genes would have me do.
:)
> The other problem is that, as with most moral rules, it is
> easy to set up examples where it results in (apparently) immoral
> behaviour - stranded on a desert island, I should kill off as many of my
> fellow refugees as possible.
There probably are such counterexamples -- I was discussing the
definition of morality proposed by Skeptic, not necessarily posing it
myself -- but I don't think this one is one of them. If you're stuck
on an island, your best bet for survival and reproduction is probably
to stick with those others who are likely to help you out, and either
find a way to get off the island or find a way to survive (and someone
to mate with).
> >This is something I find puzzling. Whatever instincts, abilities,
> >etc. we have, we got through the process of natural selection,
> >mutation, etc. I can't imagine that morality -- meaning our
> >instinctual feelings of guilt and what I will call "justified pride"
> >when we do certain things -- didn't evolve, when it obviously affects
> >our behavior to a great degree. And since it evolved, it must have
> >evolved because it helped us survive/reproduce in some way. Its
> >purpose is survival, as you say. So why should so many people have an
> >instinctive reaction against the statement "morality is about
> >survival," and think morality should be based on something "nobler"
> >like "doing good for its own sake"?
> >
> This is a fair question, and it tests the objective definition of
> morality which you proposed earlier. If that really IS the underlying
> objective basis of morality, why do so many instinctively react against
> it? Would you regard it as moral for a new husband to kill his wife's
> children from a previous marriage? If not, why not?
Precisely my point. No, I wouldn't regard it as moral for a husband
to kill his stepchildren, because I think it's immoral to kill any
children. But I can hardly argue against the fact that from a
survival/evolutionary standpoint, it's probably the thing to do. Why
keep children around who aren't yours, when they're going to compete
with your own children for the resources you provide? Particularly
when you get into a society that has a notion of inheritance. The
wife's objections might be what prevented this sort of thing, but in a
primitive society her objections may not have made any difference
(perhaps she didn't even have a say in choosing her new husband).
Blink
Paul Filseth
> > It sounds like you're saying when you call some behavior "bad",
> > what you mean is to tell others about a certain feeling you have
> > _don't_ mean to tell others about feelings they have. They mean
> > to tell others about a property of the behavior, not a property of
> > by "bad".
>
> So? Surely you don't mean to argue that objective morality exists
> because lots of people instinctively assume it does?
Of course not. I'm arguing above that relativism is wrong, not
that realism is right. This is a three-way issue, and the fact that
nobody is promoting nihilism doesn't mean it isn't one possibility.
If the people who instinctively assume there's objective morality are
mistaken, as we may well be, then there's no objective morality: and
that circumstance would provide precious little justification for
believing *relativism* makes a lick of sense.
> Devout Xians (and presumably theists of other varieties, but I only
> have experience with Xians) talk about their "relationship with God"
> and the things they experience when they "talk to God." You and I
> know there is no God for them to talk to, and therefore these
> "experiences" are some sort of reaction they've unconsciously brought
> about themselves. But when most people say God did this or that,
> they don't mean to tell others about feelings/reactions they have,
> they mean to tell others about a characteristic or act of God. Surely
> you wouldn't say God exists because lots of people instinctively
> assume he/she/it does?
That's a good analogy. Of course I wouldn't say God exists
because of what these people instinctively assume. But I would
certainly say the issue is objective. I'd say there's probably no
God, and therefore what theists say about their relationship with
Him is *wrong*. Not "right for them". But suppose, instead, I came
along after Xians and atheists have spent two thousand years debating
whether there's a God and debating what if anything He wants, and said
both sides are confused, and actually "God" refers to a subjective
feeling inside human brains, and this means God exists for theists and
simultaneously doesn't exist for atheists. And then I say judgments
of what's "holy to God" are subjective and mean whatever each person
cares about, so when two Xians disagree about whether last rites are
holy, each one is "right for him". How do you think rational atheists
and/or Xians would respond to that? Slap themselves in the forehead
and say "Oh yeah! What were we thinking?"? Or point out that all I
was doing was violently abusing the English language, and go back to
discussing the God hypothesis on its merits?
BlinkyLight
> BlinkyLight wrote:
>
> > This is something I find puzzling. Whatever instincts, abilities,
> > etc. we have, we got through the process of natural selection,
> > mutation, etc. I can't imagine that morality -- meaning our
> > instinctual feelings of guilt and what I will call "justified pride"
> > when we do certain things -- didn't evolve, when it obviously affects
> > our behavior to a great degree. And since it evolved, it must have
> > evolved because it helped us survive/reproduce in some way. Its
> > purpose is survival, as you say. So why should so many people have an
> > instinctive reaction against the statement "morality is about
> > survival," and think morality should be based on something "nobler"
> > like "doing good for its own sake"?
>
> I'm going to try to answer this with two possibilities.
>
> First the "evolution only" answer. The "selfish genes" "want"* certain
> behaviors. They don't really care how they come about. So, if a feeling of moral
> nobility is a more powerful motivator than a realization that its all about
> survival, then that will be selected for.
Occam's Razor: why should we evolve a "nobility" feeling when all we
really need is the drive to live and compete, which we got early on?
For instance: "I just helped that guy out, so now he's my friend and
he's more likely to help me out when I need it. Wow, I'm pretty
smart, I'm boosting my own chances of survival! <feelings of triumph
over competitors, pride, etc.>" "I thought I was going to get ahead
by stealing that guy's stuff, but instead I got caught, and now I'm
all bruised from being beat up! Boy, do I feel stupid. I could've
died in that fight. <feelings of "guilt" for not thinking of
long-range consequences, fear from brush with death, etc.>"
> Another example might be the
> willingness for parents to sacrifice themselves for their children. Its often
> quite stupid when only the interests of the parents are considered, but we have
> a very strong evolved need to do so.
That's just normal evolution, though. Once a generation reproduces,
its own survival isn't as critical. Parents with an instinct to care
for their kids at their own expense are giving their kids a better
chance of surviving than selfish parents, and obviously the kids of
the first parents will have received those parenting genes. There's
no need for parents to associate parenting with being noble, they only
need the gut instinct to protect their kids, just as we see in certain
animals.
> Second, the admittedly hopeful idea I have that maybe the selfish genes have
> shot themselves in the foot by developing a moral sense that is capable of going
> beyond mere survival to something approaching altruism. This can only survive in
> an environment where non-survival traits are allowed to continue, and this seems
> to be the case in the modern world.
Your having this hopeful idea only serves to illustrate what I was
talking about. Altruism is compatible with survival of self to some
extent, but why do we value pure altruism -- giving up things for
others, with no expectation of gain or even recognition -- at the
expense of survival? Why should we evolve genes that cause us to wish
those exact genes would shoot themselves in the foot, as you say? Are
our "selfish" morality genes practicing their own form of altruism?
:)
Blink
Skeptic
> Skeptic wrote:
Let me warn you I didn't have time to proofread or check spelling.
>
> > > I agree.
> > > My moral system, however disagrees with them. It values self-determination
> > > higher than whatever benefit may accrue from an individual's being prevented
> > > from hurting himself.
> >
> > I don't see the conflict between self-determination and considering
> > self destructive behavior immoral.
>
> Self-determination is "good" (it may need to be limited if it conflicts with
> another's self-determination but its still "good"). Considering only the aspect
> of self-determination, self-destructive behavior should be allowed because it is
> an exercise of self-determination that does not conflict with others'
> self-determination. If self-destructive behavior is "bad" (for some other
> reason) then there's a conflict, assuming you agree with the judgements of
> "good" and "bad".
I don't buy your line of reasoning here. I can say there is a
conflict between the statements "money is good" and "stealing is bad".
After all if I steal I can get money so isn't there a conflict.
However this ignores how you get the money. There are good ways to
get the money and bad. Your statement self-determination is good
ignores the subtlities of reality. I don't think that the statement
"self-determination is good" applies to children for instance. Let's
assume this applies only to able bodied rational adults. Well then it
still doesn't work. Some people are criminal and I don't think the
statement "self-determination is good" applies to them. There is good
self determination and bad just as there is good self-destructive
behavior and bad.
You might be surprised by the latter part of that last statement. How
could that possibly be. Well there are levels of self. There is
your genes, your body, your culture, your beliefs. Something that is
bad for one aspect of self may be good for the overall or *inclusive*
self.
I still do not see any conflict between self-determination and
considering self destructive behavior to be immoral. Look, I think
morality is evolved. I think the basis for morality is not behavinng
in ways that reduce your *inclusive* fitness. Thus under my beliefs
since self destructive behavior doesn't help your inclusive fitness it
is not moral behavior. Since I don't hold that all immoral behavior
should be outlawed I agree that self-destructive behavior should be
allowed. I just think that you are not taking inclusive fitness into
account when you use the term. I can kill myself in different ways
and some will be moral and some not. Thus if I kill myself to save
my twenty children then it was a moral act. If you look carefully at
those religions that consider suicide immoral they do not merely state
that killing oneself is immoral. It is how one kills oneself that
matters. It may be suicide to run into the twin towers to save
someone, however, it was not immoral.
If you start thinking of morality as an evolved thing a lot of these
"puzzles" just disappear. It will however lead to all sorts of new
interesting questions.
The other people are don't see the whole thing. You know the old saw
about the blind men examining the elephant from different
perspectives. One feels the trunk and says "aha a snake", another the
tail "aha a rope", another the leg "aha a tree".
> > I don't think that vices are
> > crimes. Just because something is immoral doesn't mean it needs to
> > be outlawed.
>
> Ummmmmm. I would prefer to say that they are not immoral wherever possible.
> Addiction is not immoral, its an illness. Truly immoral things should be made
> crimes, IF that is an effective way of preventing them. My argument against the
> "War on Drugs" is two-fold - much drug-taking is not immoral, and its simply
> *not working* and causing a great deal of misery and injustice as a
> side-effect.
I think that addiction is immoral only if one was aware of the
possibility of addiction prior to taking the drug and if the drug was
taken voluntarily and if the addiction is self-destructive. If
someone snuck an addictive substance into your food then you are not
morally culpable. However if you had ample warning then the
addiction is your own responsibility. In and of itself it may not be
immoral. Suppose you have a good reason to value some aspect of the
substance more than the resulting addiction. Then for you it might be
moral to get addicted. You might for instance have a genetical
predisposition to chemical imbalances in your brain. You may find it
hard to function. Taking the addictive substance might make you a
more functional person. But this is just another case of "is
determining ought".
> I didn't read a justification from you that hurting oneself is immoral, which
> started this discussion (you said "I couldn't disagree with you more"). Do you
> have one? In the last quoted paragraph you seem to be agreeing with me.
I gave you one justification. Of those persistent moral systems we
find in world almost to a one they consider self-destructive behavior
to be moral. Thus it is you who is taking a provocative and not well
established position. These are the same authorities that establish
that hurting others is immoral. If you throw one out then why not
both. Once you do that then what the heck does morality mean anyway?
You seem to think it is some arbitrary collection of rules. The way
I see it these moral systems generally have a system of beliefs and a
collectiion of rules. The rules are designed to be good for you in
terms of the beliefs. Thus you go to church to get into Christian
heaven. Or you kill 3000 infidels to get into the Muslim heaven.
Do you believe that your moral beliefs are bad for you? If so then
why don't you change them?
> > See my other post where I talk about moral systems - I don't think
> > morality can be classified as simply as saying it is subjective or
> > objective or relative. It's a little of all three.
>
> I agree that we can find examples of all three things in moral systems. What I
> (and Blink) are arguing is that the underlying basis of morality is subjective.
I wouldn't say that. The underlying basis is not subjective. I would
say that the underlying basis for morality is *inclusive* fitness.
This makes things extremely complicated however it does not render
morals completely subjective. See the post of John Secker. He got
it when he stated "The observed outcome of this standard, however, is
a bewildering variety of results, even in the face of apparently very
similar survival challenges. However that does not of itself mean
there is no objective rule, just that it may be fiendishly
complicated."
There are many levels of complication to the game - retailation,
understanding others belief systems, convincing other of your
conviction of belief, trust, fallibility, subjective situation,
abilties. Plus you have many different aspects of self which are
part of the survival game, which to value and when? You are a
combination of genes, body, mind, and culture. Each has value to you
and each can suffer differently under different choices.
Having a objective basis is a very different thing than being
objective. Birds wings have an objective basis but they are hardly
the objectively only method of transportation.
Also moral rules do not exist in a vacuum. Thus it may be bad for you
to hang your clothes out on Sunday because of the bad opinion of you
that will result. This will then have other bad repercusions in that
others who believe will not trust you and may not bargain with you as
often. This is how it is fiendishly complicated. Just because there
are different collections of compatiible attributes for animals does
not mean that they are subjectively based. We can't just stick wings
on the body of a whale and expect it to fly. Certain moral rules go
together in the same way. It may not be immoral to have a drink of
beer since it may be mildly beneficial however if you are living in a
Muslim country then it becomes immoral for a different reason, it is
immoral because you are indangering yourself - you might be locked up
thus depriving your children of a father. Thus it is moral on one
level and immoral at another.
Skeptic
> <snip> "more general benefits"? How are these determined? My mother
> used to consider it "wrong" to hang out laundry on Sunday. I could never get any
> sensible reason from her. All she would say was "people don't" or some such.
>
> Additionally, if "is determines ought" then you should be able to demonstrate
> the chain of causuality that leads from "is" to "ought". Can you do so? You will
> certainly win the argument if you can.
The chain of causality from "is" to "ought" is one of natural
selection. This chain of causality does not neccesarily lead down a
single path. Nor does it neccesarily have a end point. However it it
not completely wily-nily in a subjective sense.
Think about it. Since I believe that morality is evolved then I am
discussing this at a meta-level. I am not coming up with a
particular objective morality. What I am coming up with is an
objective basis for any morality. This is exactly what the theory of
evolution does. It doesn't say that humans are the best survival
machines. Bacteria are also perfectly good survival machines.
Different things work but it is not just anything goes. You may come
up with some moral system that says "Jumping off buildings is good"
however such a morality will be short lived in the world. In
addition from a selective position doesn't matter why a morality
influences behavior but only how. If going on the volcano is
dangerous then believing there is an angry god there is going to work
just as good as knowing it is an actual active volcano.
General benefits in the real world are very complex and can be
determined by whatever strategy works. Remember also that life is a
game of survival so you have to take your costs of computation into
account. Just one more fiendish complication. Mimicry may be a
perfectly good survival strategy. It is low cost and often works.
You can ponder for hours about the best thing to do in certain
situations and you will find that the chance to act is gone.
Predetermined principles help in that arena. Often rules that worked
for ones parents are good for oneself therefore "honor thy parents" is
a good working strategy. Trial and error is another good stratgy. I
prefer a scientific strategy however it is quite costly. Thus I
often get into discussions with others about morality ... wasting
precious time I could spend reproducing? However I think the benefits
gained might outweigh the costs and might be passed on to my offspring
by means of mimicry - thus amortizing the cost over my decendants.
I think your mothers answer was sensible it's just that you may not
have been a very sensible boy at the time. Given that most everyone
in the community probably believed in Christianity and had certain
norms then don't you suppose hanging wash on Sunday might have some
repercussions?
Not all moralities were born equal, some are more fit than others and
some less fit depending on the environment. They also compete. Thus
the morality of the Muslim - bred to the max and kill the infidel -
may or may not be a winning strategy depending on what other
moralities are out there. If their general disregard for other
cultures leads to war and they end up losing out due to other traits
(such as suppression of science) then maybe we can say that it was
objectively a worse morality. I can and have argued in the past that
certain traits of moral systems lead to objectively bad outcomes over
time. Thus moral systems that accept things like polygamy and
slavery, tend to lose out over the long run to other similar systems
that lack these attributes. Having a lot of sexually frustrated
males running around in ones society tends to cause trouble.
Skeptic
> > >blink writes:
> > >If we define moral behavior as that which makes the individual and/or
> > >species more likely to survive and produce a next generation, then we
> > >have an objective definition.
> >
> > Persuasive, ...<snip>... The observed outcome of this standard,
> > apparently very similar survival challenges. However that does not of
> > itself mean there is no objective rule, just that it may be fiendishly
> > complicated.
> You're correct. It would give us something of an objective
> resulted in multiple "right" answers to a moral dilemma rather than a
> single one, which is what we usually think of when we talk of
> environments favor one strategy while others favor the opposite, so
> whether lifelong monogamy, serial monogamy or promiscuity is the "most
> moral" really depends on the environment one finds oneself in.
>
> Yet I find myself rushing to say that I don't necessarily advocate the
> above attitude, regardless of what my selfish genes would have me do.
Now you guys are stating to get it. However I don't see why Blinky
wouldn't advocate the above attitude. You now have an objective basis
for morality so you can come up with different sets of rules.
However it is a lot more loose than you expected. However, it is not
just "doing things for the genes". You have to remember that the
"memes" also have a *say*. The cooperative between the genes and the
memes is a whole different ballpark.
There can be moral rules for preserving the memes too. Thus "Do not
take gods name in vain", the story of doubting thomas, the concept of
faith, don't hang the laundry on sunday.
> > The other problem is that, as with most moral rules, it is
> > easy to set up examples where it results in (apparently) immoral
> > behaviour - stranded on a desert island, I should kill off as many of my
> > fellow refugees as possible.
>
> There probably are such counterexamples -- I was discussing the
> definition of morality proposed by Skeptic, not necessarily posing it
> myself -- but I don't think this one is one of them. If you're stuck
> on an island, your best bet for survival and reproduction is probably
> to stick with those others who are likely to help you out, and either
> find a way to get off the island or find a way to survive (and someone
> to mate with).
Well actually, I think the moral dilemma problem works to my
advantage. All other moral systems have no explaination for why their
objective based moral systems break down under such extreme
circumstances. However mine does. There is no selective pressure on
our moral organs for such extreme cases because they are so rare. It
might benefit a insect blown out to sea to be able to breath salt
water but that is the rare occurance and so there is no selective
pressure to cope with it. Even if such an insect did happen to be
better at coping with the salt water environment it would be less fit
for another environment.
> > Would you regard it as moral for a new husband to kill his wife's
> > children from a previous marriage? If not, why not?
>
> Precisely my point. No, I wouldn't regard it as moral for a husband
> to kill his stepchildren, because I think it's immoral to kill any
> children. But I can hardly argue against the fact that from a
> survival/evolutionary standpoint, it's probably the thing to do. Why
> keep children around who aren't yours, when they're going to compete
> with your own children for the resources you provide? Particularly
> when you get into a society that has a notion of inheritance. The
> wife's objections might be what prevented this sort of thing, but in a
> primitive society her objections may not have made any difference
> (perhaps she didn't even have a say in choosing her new husband).
No you guys aren't thinking correctly here. You forget revenge,
retribution, grudges, reputation, etc. In this scenario, what good
is it for the new husbands genes and memes if his wife sets fire to
him in his sleep. What about the ex-husband? Don't you think he
might get revenge. What good is having cleared out the prior
children if the new husband is rotting in jail.
You have to think of the best strategy, on average. Thus, principles.
You may think you are going to get away with something but on
average people don't.
John Secker
<TheEc...@hotmail.com> writes
>Not all moralities were born equal, some are more fit than others and
>some less fit depending on the environment. They also compete. Thus
>the morality of the Muslim - bred to the max and kill the infidel -
>may or may not be a winning strategy depending on what other
>moralities are out there.
Christian morality too, if you wish to characterise them at such a
superficial level. There is a disturbing amount of casual anti-Muslim
abuse thrown around on this group, understandable perhaps given world
events but unpleasant and ultimately not very useful.
> If their general disregard for other
>cultures leads to war and they end up losing out due to other traits
>(such as suppression of science) then maybe we can say that it was
>objectively a worse morality. I can and have argued in the past that
>certain traits of moral systems lead to objectively bad outcomes over
>time. Thus moral systems that accept things like polygamy and
>slavery, tend to lose out over the long run to other similar systems
>that lack these attributes. Having a lot of sexually frustrated
>males running around in ones society tends to cause trouble.
>
themselves pretty successful on a historical basis. No doubt all three
will die out eventually, but getting beyond a thousand years is a fair
yardstick of success. On that basis, of course, Judaism has a fair claim
to be the most successful culture in history, and it is interesting to
note that this success for the culture has come at the expense of much
suffering of its hosts. The features of Judaism which have served to
keep it going through the centuries have also made the people who
carried the meme the targets of prejudice and oppression. Individuals
who abandon their culture and adopt the dominant one generally have an
easier life.
--
John Secker
Tony Griffin
> Tony Griffin <tgri...@pipeline.com> wrote:
> > First the "evolution only" answer. The "selfish genes" "want"* certain
> > behaviors. They don't really care how they come about. So, if a feeling of moral
> > nobility is a more powerful motivator than a realization that its all about
> > survival, then that will be selected for.
>
> Occam's Razor: why should we evolve a "nobility" feeling when all we
> really need is the drive to live and compete, which we got early on?
> For instance: "I just helped that guy out, so now he's my friend and
> he's more likely to help me out when I need it. Wow, I'm pretty
> smart, I'm boosting my own chances of survival! <feelings of triumph
> over competitors, pride, etc.>" "I thought I was going to get ahead
> by stealing that guy's stuff, but instead I got caught, and now I'm
> all bruised from being beat up! Boy, do I feel stupid. I could've
> died in that fight. <feelings of "guilt" for not thinking of
> long-range consequences, fear from brush with death, etc.>"
CAVEAT: The following are my opinions, based on a fairly general knowledge of
the process of evolution.
Well, there's conflict. At a certain level of development there's no choice.
Male Praying Mantises are going to continue to mate despite the fact that they
get eaten every time because they have to. Once intelligence has evolved, it
gets more complicated. Our intelligence, that is so valuable in so many ways,
allows us to question urges to do things that have in fact proven to aid
survival of the group, but might not be so good from an individual viewpoint. A
pretty powerful emotion might be needed to overcome this, hence the feeling of
nobility. (Actually this seems to work also through a need for the approval of
others, but whatever). Your guy might help someone else then be badly let down;
it happens. So his intelligence tells him never to help anyone again. He might
steal and get away with it; this happens too. His intelligence tells him that
this is a pretty good way of life. The genes don't want that, because its
overall better for them if everyone keeps plugging away at cooperation.
>
> > Another example might be the
> > willingness for parents to sacrifice themselves for their children. Its often
> > quite stupid when only the interests of the parents are considered, but we have
> > a very strong evolved need to do so.
>
> That's just normal evolution, though. Once a generation reproduces,
> its own survival isn't as critical. Parents with an instinct to care
> for their kids at their own expense are giving their kids a better
> chance of surviving than selfish parents, and obviously the kids of
> the first parents will have received those parenting genes. There's
> no need for parents to associate parenting with being noble, they only
> need the gut instinct to protect their kids, just as we see in certain
> animals.
Parenting is certainly a very basic characteristic, for some species at least.
(Others seem to lack it entirely and do pretty well by having very large number
of offspring that fend for themselves). The same argument applies to some extent
though. When the blasted kid has been howling for three consecutive days and
nights and the parents are feeling like smothering it, perhaps the gut instinct
needs some help. :)
>
> > Second, the admittedly hopeful idea I have that maybe the selfish genes have
> > shot themselves in the foot by developing a moral sense that is capable of going
> > beyond mere survival to something approaching altruism. This can only survive in
> > an environment where non-survival traits are allowed to continue, and this seems
> > to be the case in the modern world.
>
> Your having this hopeful idea only serves to illustrate what I was
> talking about. Altruism is compatible with survival of self to some
> extent, but why do we value pure altruism -- giving up things for
> others, with no expectation of gain or even recognition -- at the
> expense of survival? Why should we evolve genes that cause us to wish
> those exact genes would shoot themselves in the foot, as you say? Are
> our "selfish" morality genes practicing their own form of altruism?
> :)
Because characteristics take time to be tested in the world of selection and
traits that may ultimately be weeded out can exist for a while, particularly in
an environment where selection is not running at full steam. Altruism is a
natural extension of the urge to cooperate IMO. It might well disappear in an
environment where fierce selective competition existed. We allow people with all
sorts of non-survival charactistics to not only survive but breed.*
Tony
* PLEASE no-one start accusing me of supporting eugenics or anything like that.
I'm just noting a fact.
Paul Filseth
> > If there's no right answer to the issue, how could an *example*
> > break a definition? Why would anyone even think of proposing
> > a counterexample, rather than just saying "Nah, I don't feel
> > that way."
>
> That's almost part of the meaning of "moral idea".
There's nothing almost about it -- it's part of the meaning. To
not see this is to miss the whole point of moral claims.
> Practically everybody _argues_ morality in an "objective" vein.
To argue in a subjective vein is to argue something other than
morality.
> Somebody comes up with a claimed objective measure of morality, then
> somebody else brings up an "exception", expecting that the other
> person will see the exception as valid -- as an example of _true_
> morality that the original generalization didn't cover. That kind of
> thing shows that we feel -- deeply -- that each individual's _true_
> morality ought to match with that of every other individual -- however
> different their formulae might be.
Exactly.
> But it doesn't show that everyone's true morality really _does_ match
> on a deep level.
And of course they really don't.
> It only shows that most of us have a compelling feeling that everyone
> _must_ match at that level.
"Must" only in the normative sense -- we feel everyone ought to
match. If two people don't match in fact, the logic of morality
implies there's something wrong with one person or the other: e.g.,
ignorance, reasoning error, insanity, brainwashing, a character flaw,
etc.
> But, anyway, what I've been saying has not been completely relevant
> to the question of _objective_ morality. That people argue morality
> with each other on the basis of supposed common -- or even universal --
> agreements does not mean any more than that they presuppose such
> agreements and act as if they were real.
What they presuppose isn't that there *is* agreement, but that
there *should be*. When somebody offers an exception to a proposed
rule, she isn't assuming the other guy's true morality is the same as
hers; she's just guessing that it probably is and what's wrong with
him is he reasoned incorrectly to arrive at his erroneous rule. The
exception is a way to bypass his hypothesized reasoning error and
probe his true morality. If she finds it's not just his formula but
his true morality that doesn't match hers then she discards her first
hypothesis and considers the other possibilities.
> I don't see how a universal human agreement about anything would make
> that agreement _objectively_ true...
It wouldn't. Agreement is neither necessary nor sufficient for
objectivity.
Paul Filseth
> I don't think that this scenario, entertaining as it is, is
> actually an example of what was requested.
And I thought I was doing so good. :-(
russell...@hotmail.com (Russell Turpin) wrote:
> ...your example I think misses my challenge.
You asked for "at midnight murder IS morally good." That's what
I delivered. If you didn't ask for what you meant... :-)
> Have you really changed the moral rules in this example? Or
> only the material circumstances?
Moral rules depend on material circumstances. It's wrong to
drive on the left in America, and it's wrong to drive on the right
in England, because the material circumstances are different: in
America driving on the left is likely to get somebody killed, and
likewise on the right in England. You could say the moral rule is
really "Don't endanger people's lives." and it's the same in both
countries. But that's just relabeling -- it's still wrong to drive
on the left in America, and that looks like a moral rule to me.
Ethics is situational.
> My challenge was not to have an omnipotent god change the material
> circumstances of our world, but to change the objective moral rules,
> while leaving the material circumstance unchanged.
Do you have an argument for why this has to be possible in order
for morality to be objective?
> The omnipotent god flips a switch, and everyone wakes tomorrow, and
> the objective rules of morality are different, but the trees, rocks,
> biology, physics, etc. all remain the same. Since you believe people
> perceive morality, how do they learn this change? What's different?
Nothing's different. It's theists who think morality comes from
gods flipping metaphysical switches, not me. Since people perceive
with their physical brains, they can't possibly know about the settings
of any metaphysical switches that have no effect on physics. So they
can't deserve blame for breaking rules that only exist because of such
switches. But blameworthiness is part of what it means for something
to be a moral rule. So what you're describing is impossible. Moral
rules are determined by the material circumstances of the world and
not even an omnipotent god can change ethics without changing boson
and fermion trajectories. If the rocks are the same, the rules are
the same.
India
> Abortion: by intuition and by considering where intuitions come
> from. I don't have an intuitive problem with killing a mindless lump
> of protoplasm -- I do that every time I eat a piece of fruit. My
> intuition on this looks entirely natural and healthy -- any monkeys
> with moral objections to killing fruit weren't mankind's ancestors.
> Why do antiabortionists have an intuitive problem with it? Because
> they don't perceive embryos to be mindless lumps of protoplasm. Why
> don't they? As near as I can tell, it's mostly because they've been
> indoctrinated with a lot of superstitious nonsense about magic "souls"
> that isn't consistent with clinical observation. My intuition wins,
> unless somebody can come up with a reason to oppose abortion that
> isn't based on make-believe.
FYI, there are secular arguments against abortion:
http://www.l4l.org/library/intro.html - articles by Libertarians for Life
http://www.godlessprolifers.org/library.html
--India
====
Personal AAM FAQ: http://www.rationalchristianity.net/offsite/aam_faq.html
Official AAM FAQ: http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html
Russell Turpin
> Moral rules depend on material circumstances. It's
> wrong to drive on the left in America, and it's
> wrong to drive on the right in England, because the
> material circumstances are different: in America
> driving on the left is likely to get somebody killed,
> and likewise on the right in England. You could say
> the moral rule is really "Don't endanger people's
> lives." and it's the same in both countries. But
> that's just relabeling -- it's still wrong to drive
> on the left in America, and that looks like a moral
> rule to me.
I think it is a little more than relabeling. Here's
one explanation. Your first sentence above might be
interpreted as saying there is a function M that
maps every material circumstance, s, into some rule
for behavior, r:
M(s) -> r
Very clearly, M and r are not the same. Yes, r
depends on material circumstance. For s<0> "driving
in Britain and a few other places," we get r<0>,
"drive on the left." For other values of s, we get
different values of r. As you point out:
> Ethics is situational.
The interesting philosophical questions, though,
are more about M, whether it exists and where it
originates. When two people find themselves in
conflict over their moral principles -- high-level
moral principles that have already abstracted out
the particular physical circumstance -- how do
they discuss this? Is there what BlinkLight
requested, "a *real* reason for saying [one]
morality is the correct one"? What does "correct"
mean in this context?
Keep in mind we're NOT discussing the rule "drive
on the right in the US," but the abstract principles
that might cause a person to adopt such a rule, such
as "do unto others as you would have them do unto
you," or "follow the laws of properly constituted
governments." These principles lead to different
driving rules depending on the current material
circumstance, but themselves do NOT depend on where
you are. The material circumstance has been
abstracted away.
Filseth:
> Do you have an argument for why this has to be
> possible in order for morality to be objective?
I think you're confusing our roles in this discussion.
BlinkyLight who wants a morality M to be "objective,"
and tried to define what that meant in this context.
You argued (I thought) that unless there were an
objective M, there was nothing to discuss. I
dissented. But we may have been talking about two
different things.
> It's theists who think morality comes from gods
> flipping metaphysical switches, not me. ..
Exactly. But let me put it a little differently.
There are moral realists who believe that there is
a unique M' that is The One Correct Morality. The
principles in this morality are circumstance-
abstracted. No one believes that it mandates
driving on the left, but it should lead to that
conclusion depending on the circumstances in which
it is applied. I'm a little skeptical about The One
Correct Morality, because I've never read a good
account of what "correct" means in this context.
Not all moral realists are theists.
> Since people perceive with their physical brains,
> they can't possibly know about the settings of
> any metaphysical switches that have no effect on
> physics. ..
Different Moral Realists have differing accounts
of how people are supposed to know The One Correct
Morality. Some believe in Holy Revelation. Others
believe we have an innate Moral Intuition, which may
involve a faculty of the human psyche that is not
fully material. (Materialists tend not to be Moral
Realists, for the reasons you describe.) You're right
that this is an area where Moral Realists often fail
in their account. Pointing that out was precisely the
The One Correct Morality.
Paul Filseth
> Skeptic wrote:
> > I don't think that vices are crimes. Just because something is
> > immoral doesn't mean it needs to be outlawed.
>
> Ummmmmm. I would prefer to say that they are not immoral wherever
> possible. Addiction is not immoral, its an illness. Truly immoral
> things should be made crimes, IF that is an effective way of
> preventing them.
I can think of a variety of truly immoral activities that should
not be crimes, even though that might well stop them. Making fun of
people's handicaps. Voting for evil laws. Doing jury-deliberation
carelessly. Teaching your children that God wants them to use
faith-healing instead of medicine.
Paul Filseth
> I can't imagine that morality ... didn't evolve, when it obviously
> affects our behavior to a great degree. And since it evolved, it
> must have evolved because it helped us survive/reproduce in some
> way. Its purpose is survival, as you say. So why should so many
> people have an instinctive reaction against the statement "morality
> is about survival," and think morality should be based on something
> "nobler" like "doing good for its own sake"?
Well, even if the "It's caused by survival, therefore its purpose
is survival" formula is correct, keep in mind that what genes are
selected for is the ability to keep _themselves_ alive, not the bodies
they temporarily inhabit. "A chicken is just an egg's way to make
another egg." Your genes for moral behavior are selected if they can
increase the general prosperity of morality genes, even if that gets
_you_ killed in the process. They can't sense who has morality genes,
but they _can_ sense who acts morally, so they use that as a stand-in.
Anything that increases the amount of good in the world is probably
adaptive for them. So their reproductive strategy is literally "doing
good for its own sake".
BlinkyLight
> Do you? In this scenario it's not wrong to him. Do you mistakenly
> believe it is, and you've just given up getting him to know himself
> better? Or has he convinced you it's not wrong to him? By this point
> in the discussion he presumably believes it's wrong to you. So what
> matter is there for the two of you to have two different opinions on?
We have different opinions on the answer to "is hurting people right
or wrong?" A useful analogy is the question of whether Coke or Pepsi
tastes better. I think Coke tastes better; he thinks Pepsi tastes
better. What we each really mean of course is "tastes better to me,"
though we don't explicitly say that in common English. Since we have
different answers to the "Coke or Pepsi" question, we have different
opinions on the matter. Of course we agree on what each other's
opinion *is*.
So to answer your question, he would have convinced me that it's not
wrong to him. We agree on what each other's opinion is, for I would
have come to the conclusion that he doesn't have any feelings of guilt
over hurting people that he's trying to avoid; but our opinions
differ.
> Where'd you get that? It doesn't meet his criteria for wrong.
> That's why he thinks it isn't wrong for somebody else to. He just
> doesn't see it as promoting any of his goals; or maybe hurting people
> is, like, work. :-)
Sorry, guess I misread it. To answer your original question, if I
encountered someone who thought hurting people was neither right nor
wrong (but didn't hurt others himself) and didn't disapprove of others
hurting people, it would appear I wouldn't have much to say to him.
For my own safety and peace of mind, I'd rather he disapproved of
hurting people, but if he doesn't think it's wrong, that's his
opinion. I might ask him if avoiding hurt was a goal of his, etc. and
maybe get him to agree that preventing harm to others would be
something he'd want to do.
> But more to the point, suppose it did satisfy his criteria, but
> they're totally different from yours. Suppose you and someone else
> both call hurting people "wrong", but for unrelated reasons. Why
> do you think of that as _agreeing_? Just because you use the same
> sequence of sounds? Or do you both have in mind for "wrong" a common
> meaning distinct from the criteria you use to infer it?
If someone thinks an action is wrong, presumably he or she will avoid
committing that action. So in that sense, we agree that we will each
avoid hurting people.
> No problem -- I'm just trying to understand the significance of
> you including your dislike of the feeling in your explanation. So if
> you _liked_ feeling guilty, then you'd hurt people in order to get that
> feeling but you'd still think hurting people was wrong?
If I liked feeling guilty, there would probably be something wrong
with me psychologically. :) My dislike of guilt is a motivator for
me not to do the things I consider wrong, but even if I were
indifferent to feelings of guilt, those feelings would still indicate
to me that I was doing something my conscience considered wrong.
Likewise, if I liked physical pain, I might try to burn myself, but
the pain would still be indicating to me that I was injuring my body.
> Do you mean self-interest plays a part in determining what to do,
> or in deciding what's right or wrong, or both?
The former. As I said, my moral feelings take first priority, so if
an action would benefit me in some way but would make me feel guilty,
I probably wouldn't do it. If I had a choice between two actions
whose morality were equal to me, then I would consider which would
benefit me the most.
> Hey, I just work with what you give me. If you want to tune your
> statement of what things are wrong, I'll tune my counterargument. The
> point is, my fictional creation satisfies your _criterion_ for "wrong
> to him". He feels all the guilt you could possibly hope for, quite
> consciously. And yet it sounds like he's the one persuading you. That
> suggests there may be something wrong with the "feeling guilty = wrong"
> formula.
He "persuaded" me because I thought he'd feel more guilt by not
fighting. If I were in his situation and felt guilty about shooting
people but would feel more guilty if I quit, I'd stay in the Army.
Since you've clarified his position such that he doesn't think he'd
feel more guilty if he quit, then if I were him I'd quit. At any
rate, a) he's doing what seems right to him, b) he has a different
criteria for determining right and wrong than I do, and c) his
decision doesn't negatively impact me in any way, so I have no reason
to argue with him.
> But not always? In the case of hurting someone for your own
> benefit, it's a matter of how guilty you feel vs. how much you stand
> to gain, and if you gain enough it stops being wrong?
It doesn't stop being wrong to me, since I've defined "wrong to me" as
that which causes me guilt. In practice I may commit an action which
causes me a small amount of guilt because it benefits me in other
ways, but I'm technically breaking my own moral code when I do so.
If an action causes more than a little guilt, the guilt outweighs any
benefit, and the only reason for me to commit the action is if not
doing so would cause greater guilt. In the case of hurting someone, I
would only do so if not hurting him or her would result in greater
guilt or serious injury/death.
Blink
BlinkyLight
> That's a good analogy. Of course I wouldn't say God exists
> because of what these people instinctively assume. But I would
> certainly say the issue is objective. I'd say there's probably no
> God, and therefore what theists say about their relationship with
> Him is *wrong*. Not "right for them". But suppose, instead, I came
> along after Xians and atheists have spent two thousand years debating
> whether there's a God and debating what if anything He wants, and said
> both sides are confused, and actually "God" refers to a subjective
> feeling inside human brains, and this means God exists for theists and
> simultaneously doesn't exist for atheists. And then I say judgments
> of what's "holy to God" are subjective and mean whatever each person
> cares about, so when two Xians disagree about whether last rites are
> holy, each one is "right for him". How do you think rational atheists
> and/or Xians would respond to that? Slap themselves in the forehead
> and say "Oh yeah! What were we thinking?"? Or point out that all I
> was doing was violently abusing the English language, and go back to
> discussing the God hypothesis on its merits?
From a recent nonfiction book review in the Boston Globe:
"In the end the answer [the author] was looking for could not be found
in a Hopi sweat lodge or St. Patrick's Cathedral confessional booth or
Scientology workshop. It was already there, in her heart, waiting to
be tapped. And that, as we all know, is the true fountainhead of God."
Just thought it was interesting that the Globe is apparently
"violently abusing the English language." :)
But what's wrong with what you say above? By "God" the Xians (and
many atheists) mean (roughly) some sort of invisible, powerful being
that controls the universe. What you're essentially doing is agreeing
with the atheists that God as defined by theists doesn't exist, and
then offering an alternate notion of God which explains theists'
experiences.
Likewise, the subjectivist is siding with the nihilist in saying an
objective moral standard doesn't exist, but then differing from them
in saying there is something for "morality" to refer to, namely
something which exists inside ourselves.
In both cases, the subjectivist is offering a new definition, a new
way of looking at things. I don't see why atheists should have a huge
problem with saying there's no God but there is a "religion" part of
the brain and/or psyche which causes or enables people to have what
are commonly termed "religious experiences." Likewise, I don't see
why nihilists should have a huge problem with saying there's no
objective moral principles which enable people to say there's right
and wrong, but there is a "conscience" which causes people to
experience guilt and pride. It's only the theists and objective
moralists who have issues with it, because it's still denying the
existence of the thing they believe in.
Blink
Paul Filseth
> But is morality a kind of thing that can be objective? To me all
> moral statements seem to involve _goals_, desires, wishes. To say
> that something objectively _should_ be this way or that way seems to
> mean that some objectively authoritative will wants it this way or
> that way.
That's not what it means. Moral claims aren't the sort of thing
that can be determined by authority. If the so-called "authoritative
will" doesn't have a good reason for willing it this way instead of
that way, then what makes it any more authoritative than any other
will? And if it does have a good reason, it's the good reason that's
objective, not the will.
> Morality is about _what to do_; _what to do_ is about goals,
> ultimately -- about what we _want_, not directly dependant on what
> actually is. At least that is the way it seems to me. I suppose
> it seems different to you, but I don't see exactly how...
Morality isn't about what what we want; it's about what we
_would_ want _if we were good people_.
> What kind of objective situation could demand that we _want_ and
> _work towards_ the realization of this or that?
Well, what are the semantics of a moral claim? When somebody
makes a moral claim on your efforts, he's not just telling you what
his goal is. "She's been shot! You, the guy with the cell-phone!
Call 911. I need to hold her wound closed!" is a different kind of
demand from "My hair's way too long. Take off about two inches."
It's understood that you'll be paid to work toward his goal in one
situation but not the other. Why? Because saving a life *should
be your goal too*, while getting his hair out of his eyes is *his*
problem. A moral claim always implies that if you don't accept it
there's something wrong with you.
If cell-phone-guy tells the man pressing on her wound "No problem;
but I'm a lawyer and my time is worth $200 an hour. Will you pay me
$20 to call 911?" he's going to say "What's wrong with you, do you
want her to die? Call NOW! Yes! Fine! I'll pay you, asshole!".
The objective situation is that the lawyer in this story really is an
asshole. There really is something wrong with him, and the guy making
the demand on him perceived this. People have brain circuitry to make
them help out without stopping to negotiate in a situation like this;
and they also have brain circuitry to recognize when the circuitry in
other people's brains isn't working right.
> Really I don't even understand the _concept_ of objective morality,
> distinct from the subjective wishes of individual wills, ...
> What I want to know is: WTF might you mean by objective morality?
> And _how_ might it be objective?
I hope that helped. What I want to know is: WTH might you mean
by _subjective_ morality? For example, suppose you think that people
who hack off children's arms are evil and deserve to be punished, but
you also think this is just a matter of opinion and if two people
disagree each is no more right than the other. Unless this is either
just straightforwardly not minding having contradictory beliefs, or
else just a narcissistic tendency to get upset at people for not
reading your mind and doing whatever makes *you* happy, I don't even
understand the _concept_ of simultaneously believing both of those
things.
Paul Filseth
> > Figure out what the function is. Arteries are there to move blood.
> > Hardening interferes with an artery's ability to move blood.
> > Therefore atherosclerosis is a disease, whether we happen to prefer
> > Bach or Mozart or moving blood or unmoving blood.
>
> No, it is a disease because it causes pain to humans. Find an organ
> whose function you can determine, and whose dysfunction doesn't hurt
> anybody: that dysfunction is not a disease, whether such an organ
> really exists or not.
What about the pain center in the brain? There are people who
have inactive ones, so they're incapable of feeling pain. They tend
to be covered with scars. You think this isn't a disease?
> Some definitions of disease involve the "objective" functions of
> organs, etc, but our ideas of organs' objective functions depend,
> really, on what _we_ want them to do for _us_.
Who's "we"? It isn't the organs' owner -- body piercing isn't
therapeutic even if your kid thinks fitting into his clique is really
important. It isn't the doctor -- anesthetizing his patient so he
can have sex with her while she's under is malpractice. It isn't the
culture -- using insane asylums to brainwash political prisoners isn't
medicine.
> You might get all Darwinian, and say that organs' functions are the
> things they do that increase the chances of our reproducing, but
> that is not how medical evaluation works.
Of course not -- Harvey didn't need to know about evolution to
figure out that hearts are blood-pumps. You can find out a machine's
function by studying it directly. But if you know what you're doing,
you'll get the same answer that way as you would if you could watch
the organ evolve for millions of years.
> If some process in our testicles or ovaries endangers our quality of
> life enough, we will want to get rid of those organs, despite the
> subsequent certainty that we will never reproduce...
So? That just means your brain's function isn't reproduction.
That doesn't change what your gonads' function is.
> > Morality is complicated. It's adaptive.
>
> If morality is adaptive it can't be strictly objective. Or at least
> not in all phases of its development.
How does that follow? Do you think "It's okay to violate the
U.S. Constitution if you're Tony Blair but not if you're George Bush."
is automatically non-objective simply because it's situational and
varies from person to person? Contrariwise, if that can be objective,
what's non-objective about "It's okay to punish a suspected wrongdoer
without a trial if you're a baboon but not if you're a human."?
> Do you just want to say that people have sufficient common feelings
> to justify moral reasoning, education, punishment, etc? In that
> case I agree.
I don't. No amount of common feeling is sufficient to justify
moral reasoning, etc.
> I'm sure that there was a time when all people
> thought the world was flat. That did not make it objectively true.
> Maybe you think there is something about morality that makes
> nearly-universal agreement about it somehow _objective_, whereas the
> same kind of agreement did not make the flat-earth assumption
> objective. If so, I would ask you to explain it.
I don't think that. I've said nothing to suggest otherwise.
> But I don't see how a Darwinian or any other kind of explanation of
> why we are here makes morality objective.
It doesn't -- morality would be objective even if we were here
for no reason at all, by the arbitrary initial conditions of a random
universe. Evolution only enters the picture because it helps us
understand what's going on. Morality is objective because that's
part of the semantics of moral claims. If there's no objective good
and bad, that makes all statements that something is good or bad
false. And if they're all false, well, that's one of the ways
morality can be objective.
> At _most_ (and this is asking a lot) it makes our morality
> nearly universal. But, again, I don't see how even perfectly
> universal moral feelings would necessarily be _objective_. To
> say that they would be objective would, to my mind, be a concession
> to subjectivism: if the whole human race feels this or that way
> about morals, then that common subjective view becomes objective...
Quite right -- that would be a concession to subjectivism. Just
not a concession _I_ ever made. If the head Ayatollah of Iran kills
everyone in the world who doesn't think atheism is evil, that wouldn't
mean atheism is evil. It would mean the Ayatollah is evil.