Moral beliefs: Rational or Emotional?
Owl
One of the big issues between realism & anti-realism is this: Can a moral
statement be accepted on the basis of reason, or must it always rely on a
sentiment or feeling? It seems that the former is the case. Consider the
following, which seems like a reasonable argument:
1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only in
that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in B, while no
one is worse off, then A is better than B.
2. Other things being equal, if a person is happier, then he is thereby
better off than if he is less happy.
3. Therefore, other things being equal, increases in people's happiness and
decreases in suffering are good.
1 seems to be true. Moreover, it does not seem that one requires a special
feeling in order to find that 1 is apparently true, and in fact I can't
detect any special feeling I have about it. I have included "innocent" in
parentheses, because some people think it's good for guilty (or bad) people
to be worse off, and I don't mean to be talking about that case; I'm being
neutral for now on whether retributive punishment is good. Since it is also
stipulated in 1 that no one is worse off, it seems that there could be no
rational objection to preferring A over B. It would seem absurd for someone
to hold that being better off wasn't good, and in fact, I don't think a
person could be found who held such a view.
2 also seems like an obvious truth. Could one rationally claim that you're
better off when you're being tortured, say, than when you're happy and
healthy? Again, 2 doesn't give me any special feeling or sentiment when I
look at it. Both 1 and 2 are too abstract to inspire any passions, yet I am
quite certain they are correct. It seems, then, that my certainty has
nothing to do with feelings.
3 is an evaluative statement, and there has pretty clearly been given a
rational argument for it. Therefore, it is possible to accept an evaluative
statement on the basis of reason. In this argument, it is not clear whether
each of 1 and 2 is evaluative. The concept 'better off' (related to the
concepts of interests and of a benefit) is the bridge between the concept of
happiness and the generic concept of goodness (in Aristotelian terms: we use
'better off' as the middle term between 'happy' and 'good'). It's unclear "S
is better off in A than in B" is descriptive or evaluative; perhaps it is
something halfway between. The strength of the argument is that it seems
impossible to deny the connection between better-off-ness and goodness, nor
that between better-off-ness and happiness.
Would a moral skeptic want to deny:
1) That anything ever benefits anyone, or
2) That benefits are good?
Now another sample rational argument. Imagine that X is on trial for the
murder of Y, and assume premise 1 below is established by empirical
evidence:
1. X did not kill Y.
2. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime that he did not commit.
3. Other things being equal, one should not perform injustices.
4. Therefore, other things being equal, one should not punish X for the
murder of Y.
4 is obviously evaluative, and 1 might be empirically established. Each of 2
and 3 seems like a self-evident principle about the nature of 'injustice' as
such. Could there be a rational person who thinks that punishing people for
crimes they didn't commit represents justice? That would seem absurd, almost
contradictory, and accordingly there is in fact no one who holds such a
view. Likewise for the view that we should perform injustices. Again, I
don't feel any special emotions about the abstract statements 2 and 3.
In these cases, I'm not so much interested in the question of which of the
above statements are evaluative (except that the conclusions of both
arguments are); what I'm interested in is that in each case, the important
premises seem to be conceptual truths. Truths of that sort are familiar to
any good rationalist, of course. For instance, if one wanted to state some
conceptual (or self-evident) truths about 'lines' and 'points', they might
be these:
- Given any two points, there is a line between them.
- A straight line is the shortest path between any two points.
- Any line can be extended in either direction an arbitrary distance.
and so on. These aren't *analytic* truths in the usual sense (they can't be
derived from a set of definitions), but they are *self-evident* truths,
which anyone who grasps 'line' and 'point' (those concepts) will be able to
see.
Continuing, what if one wanted to formulate some conceptual truths about the
relation of 'insideness'. They might be these:
- If a is inside b, then it is not the case that b is inside a.
- If a is inside b, and b is inside c, then a is inside c.
- If a is inside b, then every part of a is inside b.
and so on. Once again, there's no obvious way of deriving any of these from
definitions (good luck trying to define "inside"), but they are conceptual
truths in the sense that if you grasp the concept of insideness, you will be
able to see that they are true.
What if I wanted to formulate some conceptual truths, similarly, about
colors? They might include these:
- If x is red, then x is not green.
- Red is closer to orange than blue is.
- Yellow is the chromatic color most similar to white.
Again, if you understand those color concepts (which means, of course, that
you must have had the experiences of seeing each of those colors), then you
will see that those statements are true; but none of them can be derived
from any definitions. (And please don't somebody say that there are
reddish-green objects.)
Every concept has its own set of conceptual truths. Continuing our series,
if we wanted to state some of the conceptual truths about 'goodness,' they
might include these:
- In general, it is good that one be better off.
- Other things being equal, one should bring about more good.
- If x is better than y, and y is better than z, then x is better than z
(where 'better' = more good).
- If x is good, and y leads to x, then other things being equal, y is good.
And if I wanted to formulate some conceptual truths about 'injustice', they
would include:
- Punishing people for crimes they didn't commit is unjust.
- Other things being equal, one shouldn't commit injustice.
- It is just for people to get what they deserve.
and so on.
For good measure, one might list some of the conceptual truths about
'should', such as:
- Other things being equal, one should do good things.
- If S can't do A, then it is not the case that S should do A.
- Other things being equal, one should avoid injustice
- One should do the things that one has the most reason to do.
etc.
None of these things is at all controversial among people who understand and
use the concepts involved. Notice how much that is saying, because
philosophers disagree about all sorts of obvious and, most of us would say,
quite certain things. There have been substantial disagreements among
philosophers about a) whether there are any physical objects, b) whether
there are any properties, c) whether consciousness exists, d) whether there
is more than one thing in the universe, d) whether time passes, e) whether
anything ever changes. But none has disagreed with the conceptual truths
above about 'good,' 'should', and 'injustice', any more than they have
challenged the other conceptual truths -- none, that is, except those who
put forward a blanket, theoretical rejection of all evaluative discourse.
I think the anti-moralist wants to say, that he *understands* this
moralistic talk, these moral concepts -- and so he understands that, 'within
moral systems', so to speak, all those things are axiomatic -- but he
doesn't endorse it. That is, the statements above, so to speak, follow from
the moral concepts, but the amoralist wants to *reject the concepts*, in
some sense.
The question is whether we should take this any more seriously than we take
the person who announces that since he 'rejects geometrical concepts,' he
need not accept that the shortest path between two points is a straight
line -- or, perhaps more to the point, whether we should take it any more
seriously than we take all of those other skeptical philosophers in history,
the ones who said that nothing ever moves, that we're not conscious, that
time doesn't pass, and so on. Practically everything that is obvious has
been doubted by some philosopher (if there is anything that no philosopher
has doubted, perhaps it is just the proposition that something exists).
In any case, there is no introspective evidence for the claim that the
'conceptual truths' listed above are expressions of emotion, or products of
emotions, rather than being judgements. And as judgements, there is no
evidence at all against any one of them.
User 1DE7
>From: Owl a@a.a
>Date: 11/11/00 11:47 PM Central Standard Time
>Message-id: <8ulapn$u13$1...@slb6.atl.mindspring.net>
>One of the big issues between realism & anti-realism is this: Can a moral
>statement be accepted on the basis of reason, or must it always rely on a
>sentiment or feeling? It seems that the former is the case.
"Sentiment or feeling" may imply slightly too much narrowness as to what might
cause our moral notions. You could throw in compellations due to biology or
conditioning.
>Consider the
>following, which seems like a reasonable argument:
>
>1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only in
>that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in B, while no
>one is worse off, then A is better than B.
This seems like a simple assertation of a realist proposition. I don't see why
anyone who wasn't already a moral realist would accept this.
"Better off" also needs to be explained.
>2. Other things being equal, if a person is happier, then he is thereby
>better off than if he is less happy.
See second comment above.
>3. Therefore, other things being equal, increases in people's happiness and
>decreases in suffering are good.
Follows in part from the flawed first premise.
>1 seems to be true.
It seems consistant with my notions of goodness, but not true.
That may be an easy mistake to make. If you have a notion of goodness,
instilled in you from childhood like most of your other concepts, then it will
seem very natural to identify things as 'good' if they correspond to this
notion. These things would "seem right" to you. You may not have feelings about
it at the time, but its naturalness can probably seem like some perception of
truth.
Anyway, I think it'd be better to go back to our discussion on 'direct
perception' on this. It seems to have trailed off somehow. I'll look back at
the thread for it later.
>Moreover, it does not seem that one requires a special
>feeling in order to find that 1 is apparently true
See above, about how just your notion is sufficient, and you don't need to be
having feelings at the time.
>Since it is also
>stipulated in 1 that no one is worse off, it seems that there could be no
>rational objection to preferring A over B.
Right. There is no rational objection or reason for preferring either.
>It would seem absurd for someone
>to hold that being better off wasn't good, and in fact, I don't think a
>person could be found who held such a view.
As you say later, "better off" is a slippery term that can be taken as either
descriptive or evaluative.
User 1DE7
>2 also seems like an obvious truth. Could one rationally claim that you're
>better off when you're being tortured, say, than when you're happy and
>healthy?
"Better off" still hasn't been clarified. If it is evaluative, then one
couldn't claim that you are objectively better off, but neither could you claim
that you were objectively worse off.
>Both 1 and 2 are too abstract to inspire any passions, yet I am
>quite certain they are correct. It seems, then, that my certainty has
>nothing to do with feelings.
>
Your 'certainty' could simply be those things seeming natural or in-line with
your notions. It may be that you have no feelings now when you say this, but it
could be that previous feelings had shaped your notions, so feelings indirectly
play a part. However, this is not nessesary.
>The concept 'better off' (related to the
>concepts of interests and of a benefit) is the bridge between the concept of
>happiness and the generic concept of goodness (in Aristotelian terms: we use
>'better off' as the middle term between 'happy' and 'good'). It's unclear "S
>is better off in A than in B" is descriptive or evaluative; perhaps it is
>something halfway between.
Perhaps it is just a fuzzy terms that you can think about in different ways in
different contexts.
>The strength of the argument is that it seems
>impossible to deny the connection between better-off-ness and goodness,
If you think of better-off in an evaluative way.
>nor
>that between better-off-ness and happiness.
If you think of better-off-ness in a descriptive way.
Seems to me just like you're equivocating on the word, or else relying on
people's fuzzy concepts of better-off to make your argument seem stronger than
it is.
I'm beginning to see what I think is a problem in your general method of
argument. It is that you rely far too much on these personal notions that
people have, and not enough on definition. It is probably true that we can't
define "table" to match people's personal preferences, and that in defining
things rigorously we don't capture all facets of people's notions. However, the
added benefit in clearness possible when doing so is worth it in most caeses I
think, and almost nessesary in cases like these.
What I think makes you not see this as a problem is the idea that there is an
objective property of tableness, and by looking at tables for awhile both
person A and person B will be able to percieve this objective property, rather
than just form their own differing personal notions of tableness.
>Would a moral skeptic want to deny:
>1) That anything ever benefits anyone, or
>2) That benefits are good?
Same problem with the ambiguity of 'benefit.'
>Now another sample rational argument. Imagine that X is on trial for the
>murder of Y, and assume premise 1 below is established by empirical
>evidence:
>
>1. X did not kill Y.
>2. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime that he did not commit.
I talked about this example awhile ago. It is part of people's notions of what
it means to punish a person *for* something that it is alleged that they are
responsible for it.
The only time that they've ever heard that phrased used is when the person
being punished was alleged to have been responsible for Y, hence their notions
are bound up in this usage.
For instance, it is like you said to them "it is unjust to punish a person
because they committed a crime that they did not commit."
This is an example of one of your aguments relying on attributes of peoples
notions without really being up front about it, it seems.
>2. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime that he did not commit.
>3. Other things being equal, one should not perform injustices.
>Each of 2
>and 3 seems like a self-evident principle about the nature of 'injustice' as
>such.
Self-evident? Well, it is evident to people that that is their notion of
justice. It is probably easy for people to confuse that with it really being
just somehow, since identifying them as injust seems natural and 'right' by
their notions. I actualy don't see many people doing this -- which I think is a
confusion -- except realist philosophers.
>Could there be a rational person who thinks that punishing people for
>crimes they didn't commit represents justice?
The moral anti-realist doesn't claim that it is just to do such things -- that
would be a positive moral assertation -- just that it isn't unjust in some
objective way.
>That would seem absurd, almost
>contradictory,
Contradictory to people's notions of justice.
>For instance, if one wanted to state some
>conceptual (or self-evident) truths about 'lines' and 'points', they might
>be these:
>
>- Given any two points, there is a line between them.
>- A straight line is the shortest path between any two points.
>- Any line can be extended in either direction an arbitrary distance.
>
>and so on. These aren't *analytic* truths in the usual sense (they can't be
>derived from a set of definitions), but they are *self-evident* truths,
>which anyone who grasps 'line' and 'point' (those concepts) will be able to
>see.
They are consistant with people's notions of lines and points. They could also
be truths, but the point is that they seem right to people because they are
consistant with their notions. Whether their notions reflect truth or not is
another matter, it seems. I don't believe the mathamatical objects lines and
points exist, but maybe you dont want to get into that in this thread.
>Continuing, what if one wanted to formulate some conceptual truths about the
>relation of 'insideness'. They might be these:
>
>- If a is inside b, then it is not the case that b is inside a.
>- If a is inside b, and b is inside c, then a is inside c.
>- If a is inside b, then every part of a is inside b.
>
>and so on. Once again, there's no obvious way of deriving any of these from
>definitions (good luck trying to define "inside"), but they are conceptual
>truths in the sense that if you grasp the concept of insideness, you will be
>able to see that they are true.
Or, if you grasp the concept of insideness, you'll be able to see that your
concept, or notion, supports these things and thus they'll seem right to you.
<snip list of similar examples>
>None of these things is at all controversial among people who understand and
>use the concepts involved. Notice how much that is saying, because
>philosophers disagree about all sorts of obvious and, most of us would say,
>quite certain things. There have been substantial disagreements among
>philosophers about a) whether there are any physical objects, b) whether
>there are any properties, c) whether consciousness exists, d) whether there
>is more than one thing in the universe, d) whether time passes, e) whether
>anything ever changes. But none has disagreed with the conceptual truths
>above about 'good,' 'should', and 'injustice', any more than they have
>challenged the other conceptual truths -- none, that is, except those who
>put forward a blanket, theoretical rejection of all evaluative discourse.
The problem is trying to equate a common understanding of the notions of
injustice and goodness and such with a belief in their objective truth. Most
everyone will say that such and such is unjust because it conforms to our
common notions of what constitutes injustice. However, I think most
non-religious people realize that this doesn't imply justice is objective in
any sense other than "it is an objective fact that our notions of injustice
imply that X, Y, and Z are unjust."
> In any case, there is no introspective evidence for the claim that the
>'conceptual truths' listed above are expressions of emotion, or products of
>emotions, rather than being judgements.
If you introspect and don't feel emotion, it doesn't nessesarily mean that your
notion that causes you naturaly identifying something as right is not an
indirect product of feelings, emotions, compullsions, etc. These things don't
need to be present every time you involk your notion in order that they helped
create your notions. However, it isn't nessesary that emotions were even
involved in this, I doubt.
-User
Owl
news:20001113184345...@ng-ch1.aol.com...
> >1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only in
> >that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in B, while
no
> >one is worse off, then A is better than B.
>
why
> anyone who wasn't already a moral realist would accept this.
Well, almost any person would accept (1). No one would ever think about
denying it, unless they had first convinced themselves that anti-realism was
true.
I think what you're doing is just saying, "Ok, fix in mind that anti-realism
is true. Now: given that as a known fact, what do we have to say about this
argument?" That's not the best way of approaching philosophical issues.
Yes, if you assume anti-realism, you can deduce that some premise of every
realist argument is false. The question is whether you would have had any
grounds for questioning it otherwise.
Owl
> >2 also seems like an obvious truth. Could one rationally claim that
you're
> >better off when you're being tortured, say, than when you're happy and
> >healthy?
>
> "Better off" still hasn't been clarified. If it is evaluative, then one
> couldn't claim that you are objectively better off, but neither could you
claim
> that you were objectively worse off.
What's your basis for saying that?
Again, what you're doing here sounds like what the Objectivists would
criticize (rightly, imo) as the 'rationalistic' approach: Assume
anti-realism is true, and then deduce which premise of my argument must be
false according to that assumption. It is a foregone conclusion with this
approach that you'll never find any argument convincing.
Forget about where these statements would contradict your theory. Instead,
just ask: Do you really think that you're no worse off while being tortured
than when you're happy and healthy?
> >Both 1 and 2 are too abstract to inspire any passions, yet I am
> >quite certain they are correct. It seems, then, that my certainty has
> >nothing to do with feelings.
> >
> Your 'certainty' could simply be those things seeming natural or in-line
with
> your notions. It may be that you have no feelings now when you say this,
but it
> could be that previous feelings had shaped your notions, so feelings
indirectly
> play a part. However, this is not nessesary.
Maybe, but this is the sort of untestable hypothesis that would usually be
ignored in scientific reasoning. For instance, it could be that your own
beliefs, when you're arguing with me, are merely the product of some
unconscious emotions of yours, or perhaps the result of childhood
experiences that you've repressed. You can't prove it's not so. But this is
the sort of hypothesis that we normally don't admit without positive
evidence.
The normal way of determining whether a belief is influenced by emotions is
to introspect. Additional relevant considerations would include whether
people in general are known to have strong feelings about beliefs of the
same general kind. In this case, it seems there is no normal evidence that
the beliefs I was talking about are influenced by emotions, unless of course
you assume at the start that all moral beliefs must be caused by emotions.
But then, that would fall into the category of assuming one's theoretical
conclusion and then interpreting all particular cases to accord with it.
> >The concept 'better off' (related to the
> >concepts of interests and of a benefit) is the bridge between the concept
of
> >happiness and the generic concept of goodness (in Aristotelian terms: we
use
> >'better off' as the middle term between 'happy' and 'good'). It's unclear
"S
> >is better off in A than in B" is descriptive or evaluative; perhaps it is
> >something halfway between.
>
> Perhaps it is just a fuzzy terms that you can think about in different
ways in
> different contexts.
Perhaps, but again I see no evidence of this.
So far, I see no evidence that "better off" is ambiguous--again, unless you
count a general commitment to anti-realism as among our 'evidence'.
> >The strength of the argument is that it seems
> >impossible to deny the connection between better-off-ness and goodness,
> If you think of better-off in an evaluative way.
> >nor
> >that between better-off-ness and happiness.
> If you think of better-off-ness in a descriptive way.
> Seems to me just like you're equivocating on the word, or else relying on
> people's fuzzy concepts of better-off to make your argument seem stronger
than
> it is.
Ditto. As far as I know, there is no evidence that "better off" is
equivocal, unless you count the following as such evidence:
"If 'better off' isn't equivocal, then Owl would have succeeded in giving a
rational argument for an evaluative conclusion. But we already know that you
can't give a rational argument for an evaluative conclusion. Therefore,
'better off' must be equivocal."
If you don't count that (the argument in quotes), then I don't see that
there's any evidence of anything wrong with the argument.
> I'm beginning to see what I think is a problem in your general method of
> argument. It is that you rely far too much on these personal notions that
> people have, and not enough on definition. It is probably true that we
can't
> define "table" to match people's personal preferences, and that in
defining
> things rigorously we don't capture all facets of people's notions.
However, the
> added benefit in clearness possible when doing so is worth it in most
caeses I
> think, and almost nessesary in cases like these.
Let's assume that we agree with my general thesis that very few (ordinary
language) concepts are definable. Then if you give a definition of "table",
you can at best be defining some *other* concept, not the concept of a
table, but a new concept that you just made up. You may then find that some
of the statements your dialectical opponent made involving 'tables' are not
true of the things you are now calling "tables"--but that would be a too
cheap sort of refutation. For instance, say one of Joe's arguments about
tables involves the premise, "A bed is not a table." You then insist on
Joe's providing a precise definition of "table," so he reluctantly agrees to
"piece of furniture w/ a flat surface and supports, intended for supporting
other, smaller objects." You then conclude: "So, your argument was unsound,
because beds are tables."
Similarly, if you come up with some stipulative definition of "better than"
that makes one of my statements involving "better than" false, it will not
refute the statement as I intended it.
On my view, insisting on defining every term precisely amounts, essentially,
to *removing* almost all of our concepts from the discussion. Doing that can
often be advantageous for certain philosophical positions (particularly for
reductionist or, I would say, oversimplified philosophies). This is why my
point about the indefinability of most concepts wasn't just a minor
technical point--a methodological rule that mandates removing almost all
concepts from discourse is a very big deal.
> What I think makes you not see this as a problem is the idea that there is
an
> objective property of tableness, and by looking at tables for awhile both
> person A and person B will be able to percieve this objective property,
rather
> than just form their own differing personal notions of tableness.
Hm. Well, basically yes. Of course, it's not just looking with your eyes,
but also thinking, that enables you to form the concept of a table, and most
of it is automatic (so, not conscious, explicit thinking).
> >1. X did not kill Y.
> >2. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime that he did not commit.
>
> I talked about this example awhile ago. It is part of people's notions of
what
> it means to punish a person *for* something that it is alleged that they
are
> responsible for it.
...
> For instance, it is like you said to them "it is unjust to punish a person
> because they committed a crime that they did not commit."
Right, I remember this. I might have said the following. "Punishing a person
for a crime he did not commit" is something that has, in fact, happened in
human history many times. I think I gave an example of someone who suffered
that very fate. And I think that everyone knows what sort of thing I'm
talking about. So no, I do not think that the sense that (2) is true is due
to a misunderstanding whereby it would be logically impossible to 'punish
someone for a crime he did not commit.' Rather, it is due to the universal
judgement that such events--events that everyone could identify--constitute
injustices.
Actually, I'm not sure what point you're making. It is probably true that
'punishing x for a crime he did not commit' entails making the false claim
that x did commit the crime (it might even entail believing that claim
yourself). But this observation hardly show either (a) that punishing x for
a crime he did not commit isn't really unjust, or (b) that the belief that
it is unjust is due to some sort of confusion. I guess I'm not seeing what
you want to infer here.
> >2. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime that he did not commit.
> >3. Other things being equal, one should not perform injustices.
>
> >Each of 2
> >and 3 seems like a self-evident principle about the nature of 'injustice'
as
> >such.
>
> Self-evident? Well, it is evident to people that that is their notion of
> justice. It is probably easy for people to confuse that with it really
being
> just somehow, since identifying them as injust seems natural and 'right'
by
> their notions. I actualy don't see many people doing this -- which I think
is a
> confusion -- except realist philosophers.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you think that most people would
disagree, or fail to agree, that it is unjust to punish a person for a crime
he did not commit? All I'm saying is (2) and (3).
As to the other: "That's just true according to your notions..." sounds a
lot like the universal relativist response to everything, doesn't it? Is
there a reason why I should take that more seriously than you would take my
'objection' to your position that "Oh, you just think that's true because
it's in accordance with your notions"?
As I indicated at the bottom, I wouldn't take very seriously the
anti-realist who says he doesn't have to accept the theorems of geometry
because he "rejects geometrical concepts." Along much the same lines would
be the anti-realist who says that the theorems of geometry need not be
accepted because they only reflect our "geometrical notions".
> >Could there be a rational person who thinks that punishing people for
> >crimes they didn't commit represents justice?
>
> The moral anti-realist doesn't claim that it is just to do such things --
that
> would be a positive moral assertation -- just that it isn't unjust in some
> objective way.
If it's really no more just than unjust, don't you find it interesting that
everyone thinks it's one and no one thinks it's the other?
> >- Given any two points, there is a line between them.
> >- A straight line is the shortest path between any two points.
> >- Any line can be extended in either direction an arbitrary distance.
...
> They are consistant with people's notions of lines and points. They could
also
> be truths, but the point is that they seem right to people because they
are
> consistant with their notions. Whether their notions reflect truth or not
is
> another matter, it seems. I don't believe the mathamatical objects lines
and
Is this your way of saying that we don't, in fact, have to accept the
principles of geometry, because those principles derive from our geometrical
concepts? It seems that, according to that logic, we don't have to accept
anything. At any rate, we don't have to accept the law of non-contradiction,
because that derives from our concepts of negation, conjunction, truth, and
so on--is that right?
> points exist, but maybe you dont want to get into that in this thread.
Well, I was looking for some common ground--I was hoping you'd at least
agree that we had some knowledge of the properties of lines, points, and the
like. But I guess not.
> The problem is trying to equate a common understanding of the notions of
> injustice and goodness and such with a belief in their objective truth.
Most
> everyone will say that such and such is unjust because it conforms to our
> common notions of what constitutes injustice. However, I think most
> non-religious people realize that this doesn't imply justice is objective
in
> any sense other than "it is an objective fact that our notions of
injustice
> imply that X, Y, and Z are unjust."
First, I am, of course, not saying that if everyone agrees that P, then it
follows logically that P is true. However, it would be very strange if
everyone agreed to something that was false. If almost everyone in the world
assents to P, then the person with the not-P theory should recognize that he
has a very radical theory with a heavy burden of proof.
Second, if everyone assents to P, then it is difficult to try to explain the
P-belief by appealing to either their emotions or their cultures, unless you
argue that for some reason there is a universal, overpowering emotion, or
some reason why every culture would believe P, other than P's being true. Of
course, the truth of P--and, moreover, its accessibility to intuition--would
be a good explanation for its being universally accepted. For instance,
people everywhere in the world realize that 2+2=4.
Third, "it's in accordance with our notions" hardly seems to constitute one
of those alternative explanations. Of course, the fact that 2+2=4 is in
accordance with our notions of numbers. You might say that it is "implied
by" our concepts of 2, addition, and 4. That hardly undermines the truth of
"2+2=4", though. Quite the contrary. If "2+2=4" is implied by my concepts of
2, addition, and 4 (though it's not exactly clear what this 'implied by my
concepts' really means), then presumably I accept that 2+2=4.
> > In any case, there is no introspective evidence for the claim that the
> >'conceptual truths' listed above are expressions of emotion, or products
of
> >emotions, rather than being judgements.
>
> If you introspect and don't feel emotion, it doesn't nessesarily mean that
your
> notion that causes you naturaly identifying something as right is not an
> indirect product of feelings, emotions, compullsions, etc. These things
don't
> need to be present every time you involk your notion in order that they
helped
> create your notions.
True, but this seems to be along the same lines as the fact that, if we look
around and don't see God anywhere, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's
no God. We can't *prove* there's no God by just looking and not finding him,
but the odds would tend to be against God.
> However, it isn't nessesary that emotions were even
> involved in this, I doubt.
The point of my posting was to address, basically, what causes people to
adopt & hold certain values. Is it intellectual, or emotional? Or something
else? If you think it's something else, what is it?
User 1DE7
>From: Owl a@a.a
>Date: 11/15/00 7:25 PM Central Standard Time
>Message-id: <8uvcvb$prl$1...@slb6.atl.mindspring.net>
>> >1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only in
>> >that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in B, while
>no
>> >one is worse off, then A is better than B.
>>
>> This seems like a simple assertation of a realist proposition. I don't see
>why
>> anyone who wasn't already a moral realist would accept this.
>
>Well, almost any person would accept (1). No one would ever think about
>denying it, unless they had first convinced themselves that anti-realism was
>true.
I disagree. Almost every person's notion of goodness/betterness supports (1),
and if you causualy asked them they probably wouldn't interpret it as some
question about objective proscription, and they'd agree with it. However it you
made it clear that you meant "better" in an objective sense, I don't think
you'd get the majority of the non-religious vote.
>
>I think what you're doing is just saying, "Ok, fix in mind that anti-realism
>is true. Now: given that as a known fact, what do we have to say about this
>argument?" That's not the best way of approaching philosophical issues.
Well, I do think anti-realism is true, but I don't think I pre-maturely dismiss
arguments because I somehow just assume it is an unquestionable fact. What I
saw in your first premise was simply a statement that asserted something being
objectively better than something else. It should be well known that an
anti-realist will disagree with this unless this is shown to them somehow, or
else they wouldn't be anti-realists.
What was your first premise should have been your intended conclusion.
>Yes, if you assume anti-realism, you can deduce that some premise of every
>realist argument is false. The question is whether you would have had any
>grounds for questioning it otherwise.
In my previous message about differences in degree and such between animals and
humans I was trying to highlight part of your theory that I think is misguided,
but that really didn't seem to uncover any disagreement, so I will come at it
from a different angle, first with a few questions.
Suppose that humans don't exist, and otherwise our planet consists of all other
species of organism. Is there any argument for something non-materialistic
existing in this scenario?
Now suppose that humans exist, yet we aren't including your experience in this
scenario. The world *appears* just like it is now, except you don't exist and
you don't have your introspection or personal expeience to appeal to, but you
may use your observations of others.
In either of these scenarios, can you tell me what arguments there are for
anti-materialism? In the second I suspect you'll say "lots of people aren't
materialists, so that is evidence against it." Not sure what you'll say about
the first.
-User
George Dance
Owl <a@a.a> wrote:
> As a contribution to the recent meta-ethics debates here:
>
> One of the big issues between realism & anti-realism is this: Can a
moral
> statement be accepted on the basis of reason, or must it always rely
on a
> sentiment or feeling?
This sounds like the fallacy of false alternatives. It is perfectly
coherent to say that human action relies on or is motivated by
sentiments or feelings (pleasure, happiness, the removal of uneasiness),
and that that specific actions are chosen as a result of a reasoning
process; which is to say both.
It seems that the former is the case. Consider
the
> following, which seems like a reasonable argument:
>
> 1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only
in
> that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in B,
while no
> one is worse off, then A is better than B.
This sounds purely analytic, depending only on the synonymy of "better"
= "better off" and "not worse" = "not worse off."
> 2. Other things being equal, if a person is happier, then he is
> thereby
> better off than if he is less happy.
This sounds like an assertion that "happier" = "better off", and
therefore that "happier" = "better" (by 1).
> 3. Therefore, other things being equal, increases in people's
> happiness and
> decreases in suffering are good.
3 of course follows, as it is essentially no more than a restatement of
2, which was already asserted as a premise. The argument is valid,
meaning only that, if 1 and 2 are true, then 3 is true.
<snip>
> 3 is an evaluative statement, and there has pretty clearly been given
> a
> rational argument for it. Therefore, it is possible to accept an
> evaluative
> statement on the basis of reason.
Which is not the same thing as an evaluative statement that does not
rely on sentiments or feelings. Sentiments and feelings after all, are
the same thing as sensations (eg, pleasure and pain) and emotions (eg,
happiness and suffering). 3 says that morality is dependent on
emotions, not independent of them.
> In this argument, it is not clear whether
> each of 1 and 2 is evaluative. The concept 'better off' (related to
the
> concepts of interests and of a benefit) is the bridge between the
concept of
> happiness and the generic concept of goodness (in Aristotelian terms:
we use
> 'better off' as the middle term between 'happy' and 'good'). It's
unclear "S
> is better off in A than in B" is descriptive or evaluative; perhaps it
is
> something halfway between. The strength of the argument is that it
seems
> impossible to deny the connection between better-off-ness and
goodness, nor
> that between better-off-ness and happiness.
All of which assumes that "I am happy" or "X is happy" are purely
descriptive propositions, rather than evaluative judgements. Since
there is no prima facie reason to accept that they are, there is no
reason to accept, on this argument alone, that Owl has succeeded in
bridging the is-ought gap.
> Would a moral skeptic want to deny:
> 1) That anything ever benefits anyone, or
> 2) That benefits are good?
There seems no reason for anyone to want to deny either, or any evidence
that anyone actually does. This sounds like a straw man argument.
> Now another sample rational argument. Imagine that X is on trial for
the
> murder of Y, and assume premise 1 below is established by empirical
> evidence:
>
> 1. X did not kill Y.
> 2. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime that he did not commit.
> 3. Other things being equal, one should not perform injustices.
> 4. Therefore, other things being equal, one should not punish X for
> the murder of Y.
>
> 4 is obviously evaluative, and 1 might be empirically established.
Each of 2
> and 3 seems like a self-evident principle about the nature of
> 'injustice' as such.
2 sounds purely analytical, following as it apparently does from a
definition of "justice" (giving each person what he deserves) that I
myself use. OTOH, 3 sounds like only the assertion that justice is not
equivalent to morality (if "moral" is defined as "what one should do");
not a principle at all, but a qualification the previous principle.
> Could there be a rational person who thinks that punishing people for
> crimes they didn't commit represents justice? That would seem absurd,
almost
> contradictory, and accordingly there is in fact no one who holds such
> a view. Likewise for the view that we should perform injustices.
> Again, I
> don't feel any special emotions about the abstract statements 2 and 3.
I find that last statement incredible. Is Owl saying that, whether he
were treated justly or unjustly (by his standards) in any particular
case, his emotions would not be affected? Say the police were to break
in on him as he is reading this, and arrest him for sexual assault, and
drag him before a magistrate, and have him imprisoned? Owl would
perceive that he was the victim of an injustice, but would feel nothing?
<digression on geometry snipped>
> For good measure, one might list some of the conceptual truths about
> 'should', such as:
>
> - Other things being equal, one should do good things.
> - If S can't do A, then it is not the case that S should do A.
> - Other things being equal, one should avoid injustice
> - One should do the things that one has the most reason to do.
>
> etc.
So the moral action ("the action that one should do") must be:
- good
- possible
- just (other things being equal); and
- most reasonable.
Possibility sounds more like a side constraint on morality than a
motivating principle; while justice has been qualified, and so is
clearly a subordinate principle. Which leaves only the principles of
goodness and reasonableness. Either these are identical (as in, "the
good action is always the most reasonable action"), or else they can
possibly contradict each other; in which case both cannot be accepted
prima facie as absolute principles, and a morality based on both as
absolute principles would not necessarily be coherent.
> None of these things is at all controversial among people who
understand and
> use the concepts involved. Notice how much that is saying, because
> philosophers disagree about all sorts of obvious and, most of us would
say,
> quite certain things. There have been substantial disagreements among
> philosophers about a) whether there are any physical objects, b)
whether
> there are any properties, c) whether consciousness exists, d) whether
there
> is more than one thing in the universe, d) whether time passes, e)
whether
> anything ever changes. But none has disagreed with the conceptual
truths
> above about 'good,' 'should', and 'injustice', any more than they have
> challenged the other conceptual truths -- none, that is, except those
who
> put forward a blanket, theoretical rejection of all evaluative
> discourse.
There have, of course, been as many rejections and refutations of the
moral theories that treat such maxims as absolute truths, as there have
been moral theories themselves. These criticisms are not based on a
rejection of the concepts themselves, but on the coherence of treating
them as foundational axioms. Suffice it to say that, except by
establishing synonmy (IWO, by definition), no moral theory has ever
shown the truth of any of these axioms.
> I think the anti-moralist wants to say, that he *understands* this
> moralistic talk, these moral concepts -- and so he understands that,
'within
> moral systems', so to speak, all those things are axiomatic -- but he
> doesn't endorse it. That is, the statements above, so to speak, follow
from
> the moral concepts, but the amoralist wants to *reject the concepts*,
> in some sense.
I hope that I have made the sense clearer. The absolutist moralist,
whose aim is to develop a normative theory of action (a theory of how
humans /should/ act) independent of human wants, ends up either
smuggling those wants in through the back door (as Owl does, in his
first argument) or in pure incoherence.
> The question is whether we should take this any more seriously than
we take
> the person who announces that since he 'rejects geometrical concepts,'
he
> need not accept that the shortest path between two points is a
straight
> line --
Yes. Traditional geometry has no such problems as traditional
absolutist moral theory.
> or, perhaps more to the point, whether we should take it any
more
> seriously than we take all of those other skeptical philosophers in
history,
> the ones who said that nothing ever moves, that we're not conscious,
that
> time doesn't pass, and so on. Practically everything that is obvious
has
> been doubted by some philosopher (if there is anything that no
philosopher
> has doubted, perhaps it is just the proposition that something
exists).
That depends. If one wishes to defend morality only by the argument:
X is obvious to me.
What is obvious to me is true.
.`. X is true.
then one need not take any such criticisms seriously. However, if one
wishes their moralizing to have more justification than that, then some
thought to the moral skeptic's criticisms appears to be in order.
> In any case, there is no introspective evidence for the claim that
the
> 'conceptual truths' listed above are expressions of emotion, or
products of
> emotions, rather than being judgements.
False dichotomy. "Judgements are not expressions of emotion" has not
been shown.
> And as judgements, there is no
> evidence at all against any one of them.
Nor has any sort of rational case been made for any of them.
--
- 30 -
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Gordon G. Sollars
> In article <8ulapn$u13$1...@slb6.atl.mindspring.net>,
> Owl <a@a.a> wrote:
> > As a contribution to the recent meta-ethics debates here:
> >
> > One of the big issues between realism & anti-realism is this: Can a
> moral
> > statement be accepted on the basis of reason, or must it always rely
> on a
> > sentiment or feeling?
>
> This sounds like the fallacy of false alternatives. It is perfectly
> coherent to say that human action relies on or is motivated by
> sentiments or feelings (pleasure, happiness, the removal of uneasiness),
> and that that specific actions are chosen as a result of a reasoning
> process; which is to say both.
I think the issue between moral realism and anti-realism is whether moral
statements can be true or false. Ideally, a person does find a true
moral statement (that relates to an action the person can take) to be
motivating, but this is a contingent fact about the psychology of the
person in question.
...
> All of which assumes that "I am happy" or "X is happy" are purely
> descriptive propositions, rather than evaluative judgements. Since
> there is no prima facie reason to accept that they are, there is no
> reason to accept, on this argument alone, that Owl has succeeded in
> bridging the is-ought gap.
If you stipulate that there is such a gap, then you must claim that any
statement falls on one side or the other. But there is no prima facie
reason to claim that "X is happy" fails to describe. It may also be an
evaluation, but that is a reason to deny that it is a description only
after you stipulate the gap.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
user...@my-deja.com
gsol...@pobox.com wrote:
> ...
> > All of which assumes that "I am happy" or "X is happy" are purely
> > descriptive propositions, rather than evaluative judgements. Since
> > there is no prima facie reason to accept that they are, there is no
> > reason to accept, on this argument alone, that Owl has succeeded in
> > bridging the is-ought gap.
>
> If you stipulate that there is such a gap, then you must claim that
any
> statement falls on one side or the other. But there is no prima
facie
> reason to claim that "X is happy" fails to describe. It may also be
an
> evaluation, but that is a reason to deny that it is a description
only
> after you stipulate the gap.
Are there any published philosophers who actualy don't accept that the
naturalistic fallacy is really a fallacy, as you seem not to? If, the
next time I was in my bookstore, I went into the philosophy section,
what sort of books could I look for in which it is described how this
isn't a fallacy?
-User
User 1DE7
>From: Owl a@a.a
>Message-id: <8uvh3b$gc5$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>
>> "Better off" still hasn't been clarified. If it is evaluative, then one
>> couldn't claim that you are objectively better off, but neither could you
>claim
>> that you were objectively worse off.
>
>What's your basis for saying that?
Are you asking me to establish anti-realism now? Its simply a normal
anti-realist position. I thought your post was trying to take on the burden of
proof, and my comment served to point out that an anti-realist would simply
disagree with your premises.
>Again, what you're doing here sounds like what the Objectivists would
>criticize (rightly, imo) as the 'rationalistic' approach: Assume
>anti-realism is true, and then deduce which premise of my argument must be
>false according to that assumption. It is a foregone conclusion with this
>approach that you'll never find any argument convincing.
I thought you were trying to show that there was something wrong with
anti-realism. If so, then it seems you can't just start from premises that
anti-realists don't accept, they need to be established somehow. Maybe you
weren't trying to show anything wrong with anti-realism though. It is possible
that by the "emotional" alternative you meant simply a scenario where moral
facts existed yet our moral beliefs were the result of emotion.
>
>Forget about where these statements would contradict your theory. Instead,
>just ask: Do you really think that you're no worse off while being tortured
>than when you're happy and healthy?
Depends on how you mean "worse off."
>> >Both 1 and 2 are too abstract to inspire any passions, yet I am
>> >quite certain they are correct. It seems, then, that my certainty has
>> >nothing to do with feelings.
>> >
>> Your 'certainty' could simply be those things seeming natural or in-line
>with
>> your notions. It may be that you have no feelings now when you say this,
>but it
>> could be that previous feelings had shaped your notions, so feelings
>indirectly
>> play a part. However, this is not nessesary.
>
>Maybe, but this is the sort of untestable hypothesis that would usually be
>ignored in scientific reasoning.
I don't see why you'd say this at all. How is this untestable? The obvious test
is to instill notions of things in childen and note how succeptible they are to
sliding between it being true that [things are supported by their notions] and
[their notions being true]. There are all sorts of other tests one could come
up with.
>For instance, it could be that your own
>beliefs, when you're arguing with me, are merely the product of some
>unconscious emotions of yours, or perhaps the result of childhood
>experiences that you've repressed. You can't prove it's not so.
You'd have to specify the sort of beliefs you are talking about what what
exactly you mean by "the result of", as simply being the result of factors
doesn't mean the beliefs are false.
>But this is
>the sort of hypothesis that we normally don't admit without positive
>evidence.
The hypothesis that we believe things because of our notions about them seems
trivialy true. Now, we just have to account for the part about it being common
for people to mistake support from a class of notions outside of those that
model reality as support from those that model reality. This was probably how
moral realism at one point didn't seem so bad to me, I think I was making this
exact error. Introspecting seems to reveal that it isn't such an implausible
error at all. Try it. Theres a little bit of evidence, though we should not
rely too heavily on introspection.
In fact, this hypothesis seems quite powerful in that it predicts beliefs in
many things that don't exist, yet that we have notions of, such as universals,
mathamatical objects, facts, some dualist notion of free will. In fact this one
simple idea seems to explain almost everything I think is wrong with your
philosophy. I think I'll try to develop my arguments for it more thoroughly
later, as it seems so promising.
>The normal way of determining whether a belief is influenced by emotions is
>to introspect.
We probably disagree about the reliability of introspection, and about exactly
how easy it is to fool yourself. I think your theories are based far too much
on introspection. Are there actualy scientific studies that you think, if
carried out, would support your position that moral beliefs are the result of
pure reason, and/or that morality is real?
>Additional relevant considerations would include whether
>people in general are known to have strong feelings about beliefs of the
>same general kind. In this case, it seems there is no normal evidence that
>the beliefs I was talking about are influenced by emotions, unless of course
>you assume at the start that all moral beliefs must be caused by emotions.
The 'emotions' stuff isn't really important to my theory at all. I just threw
it in to show a possiblity of how it could be that you don't feel emotion when
you make moral judgements yet the judgements are the result of emotion.
>> >'better off' as the middle term between 'happy' and 'good'). It's unclear
>"S
>> >is better off in A than in B" is descriptive or evaluative; perhaps it is
>> >something halfway between.
>>
>> Perhaps it is just a fuzzy terms that you can think about in different
>ways in
>> different contexts.
>
>Perhaps, but again I see no evidence of this.
Well, I understand it as either. There are situations in which I'd take it as
purely decsriptive, and other situations where I'd take it as evaluative, so at
least in my case it serves a dual role, and is ambiguous. So, if you want me to
understand what you are talking about I suggest specifying what you mean more
clearly.
>So far, I see no evidence that "better off" is ambiguous--again, unless you
>count a general commitment to anti-realism as among our 'evidence'.
Well, to me it is. Maybe that's just my weird notion. I don't know how I could
give "evidence" that it is ambiguous to me, other than simply telling you.
>> >The strength of the argument is that it seems
>> >impossible to deny the connection between better-off-ness and goodness,
>> If you think of better-off in an evaluative way.
>> >nor
>> >that between better-off-ness and happiness.
>> If you think of better-off-ness in a descriptive way.
>> Seems to me just like you're equivocating on the word, or else relying on
>> people's fuzzy concepts of better-off to make your argument seem stronger
>than
>> it is.
>
>Ditto. As far as I know, there is no evidence that "better off" is
>equivocal, unless you count the following as such evidence:
>
>"If 'better off' isn't equivocal, then Owl would have succeeded in giving a
>rational argument for an evaluative conclusion. But we already know that you
>can't give a rational argument for an evaluative conclusion. Therefore,
>'better off' must be equivocal."
>
>If you don't count that (the argument in quotes), then I don't see that
>there's any evidence of anything wrong with the argument.
The evidence is this, if you take "better off" descriptively, then you can't
link it to goodness, and if you take it evaluatively, then you need either
further argument to link it to happiness, or you need to rely on people people
moral realists and accepting this. This is probably OK if your intended
audience are moral realists. It does not make sense for "better" to mean both
things at once in a non-equivical way, as far as I can see. Its sort of like me
using "produce" in a sentance and trying to tell you "maybe it half means
vegetable, and half means the act of creating at the same time." It just
doesn't make sense to me.
If you think it does make sense, maybe you could try to write a little essay on
the concept of 'better' so I can understand it.
>> I'm beginning to see what I think is a problem in your general method of
>> argument. It is that you rely far too much on these personal notions that
>> people have, and not enough on definition.
I should have added something like "or precise/clear explaination, or
elaboration."
>Let's assume that we agree with my general thesis that very few (ordinary
>language) concepts are definable. Then if you give a definition of "table",
>you can at best be defining some *other* concept, not the concept of a
>table, but a new concept that you just made up. You may then find that some
>of the statements your dialectical opponent made involving 'tables' are not
>true of the things you are now calling "tables"--but that would be a too
>cheap sort of refutation. For instance, say one of Joe's arguments about
>tables involves the premise, "A bed is not a table." You then insist on
>Joe's providing a precise definition of "table," so he reluctantly agrees to
>"piece of furniture w/ a flat surface and supports, intended for supporting
>other, smaller objects." You then conclude: "So, your argument was unsound,
>because beds are tables."
>
>Similarly, if you come up with some stipulative definition of "better than"
>that makes one of my statements involving "better than" false, it will not
>refute the statement as I intended it.
>
>On my view, insisting on defining every term precisely amounts, essentially,
>to *removing* almost all of our concepts from the discussion.
Maybe so, as I say above I should not have said simply "definition", as I meant
a general elucidation of what you are talking about. For instance if you wrote
me an essay on one of your concepts, I'd likely gain some understanding of your
meaning that I wouldn't pick up if you hadn't elaborated on the concept.
So, the revised problem that I see with some of your arguments, is that they
don't seem to relfect an appreciation that it is often unclear how exactly
various concepts are meant, whether further information could be given by
definition, explaination, or any other means.
>> >1. X did not kill Y.
>> >2. It is unjust to punish a person for a crime that he did not commit.
>>
>> I talked about this example awhile ago. It is part of people's notions of
>what
>> it means to punish a person *for* something that it is alleged that they
>are
>> responsible for it.
>...
>> For instance, it is like you said to them "it is unjust to punish a person
>> because they committed a crime that they did not commit."
>
>Right, I remember this. I might have said the following. "Punishing a person
>for a crime he did not commit" is something that has, in fact, happened in
>human history many times. I think I gave an example of someone who suffered
>that very fate. And I think that everyone knows what sort of thing I'm
>talking about.
I remember you saying something like this, and I don't think I objected to it
as I should have.
The problem is that while the person didn't actualy commit the crime, the
punishment is going on under the auspicies that he did. For instance people
have been falsely imprisoned and whatnot. But the reason they are being
punished, if you look at inprisonment as punishment, is that it is thought that
they commited the crime.
Take another scenario where a prosecutor knows the defendant didn't do anything
wrong, but he wants to punish him for it anyway. The "punishing him for it" is
really only a facade so that it makes sense to the people who think the
defendant may need punishing. In the eyes of the prosecutor he isn't really
punishing the defendant *for* anything the defendant didn't do. He is punishing
the defendant because he wants to, for some reason, and he is only putting
forth the impression that it is *for* something else.
>So no, I do not think that the sense that (2) is true is due
>to a misunderstanding whereby it would be logically impossible to 'punish
>someone for a crime he did not commit.'
That isn't logicaly impossible itsself. If you are mistaken about whether
someone committed the crime, and you punish him because you think he did, then
you punish him for a crime he didn't commit. That is certainly possible. Even
if you know he did it and you punish him and give the official reason as some
crime that he committed, it will work.
What seems impossible is to willingly and intentionaly punish someone for a
crime they didn't commit without this "for a crime they didn't commit" part
being used just as an excuse for the reason the person is punishing them, but
rather it being the sole reason the person is being punished by the punisher.
This is because of the connection between how "for a crime he didn't commit"
and "for the reason that he committed a crime he didn't commit."
>Actually, I'm not sure what point you're making. It is probably true that
>'punishing x for a crime he did not commit' entails making the false claim
>that x did commit the crime (it might even entail believing that claim
>yourself). But this observation hardly show either (a) that punishing x for
>a crime he did not commit isn't really unjust,
I wasn't trying to show that here, only that your argument relied in a sense of
absurdness that wasn't moral in nature, but it was being passed off as an
example of something that was supposed to highlight the absurdness of the
proposition in only a moral way. Hence you get absurdness from two sources,
possibly, and you want the reader to attribute it to one source that supports
your position when, at least for me, the vast majority of the absurdness comes
from something entirely different.
>(b) that the belief that
>it is unjust is due to some sort of confusion. I guess I'm not seeing what
>you want to infer here.
I didn't mean to imply (b) either. Surely, if moral realism is true, it could
be unjust for a person to be mistakenly or negligently punished for a crime
they didn't commit and this doesn't rely on any confusion. The problem is that
when you assert some *active intention* to punish someone for a crime they
didn't commit, complete with the knowledge that they did not commit the crime,
you run into the different kind of absurdity that I mention above.
>> >Each of 2
>> >and 3 seems like a self-evident principle about the nature of 'injustice'
>as
>> >such.
>>
>> Self-evident? Well, it is evident to people that that is their notion of
>> justice. It is probably easy for people to confuse that with it really
>being
>> just somehow, since identifying them as injust seems natural and 'right'
>by
>> their notions. I actualy don't see many people doing this -- which I think
>is a
>> confusion -- except realist philosophers.
>
>I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you think that most people would
>disagree, or fail to agree, that it is unjust to punish a person for a crime
>he did not commit? All I'm saying is (2) and (3).
>
Not if you casualy asked him, no. This is a bad example for reasons I give
above, but pretending it isnt: If you made it clear that you were talking about
some sort of objective facts of justice, I think most non-religious people
would say that it isn't unjust in that way.
>As to the other: "That's just true according to your notions..." sounds a
>lot like the universal relativist response to everything, doesn't it?
No, there's a difference. I am not denying that things are objectively true. I
am simply saying that the reason we think they are true is because of our
notions about them. This seems trivial, but I was just mentioning it for
emphasis incase people began thinking we had some sort of direct knowledge of
truth.
>Is
>there a reason why I should take that more seriously than you would take my
>'objection' to your position that "Oh, you just think that's true because
>it's in accordance with your notions"?
I don't think I've said that in itsself to mean that it implied what you were
saying was false. If I did then I was incorrect. I recall only saying that to
highlight that that is why anything seems true to anyone.
>> The moral anti-realist doesn't claim that it is just to do such things --
>that
>> would be a positive moral assertation -- just that it isn't unjust in some
>> objective way.
>
>If it's really no more just than unjust, don't you find it interesting that
>everyone thinks it's one and no one thinks it's the other?
Interesting? Not terribly. Odd? Not at all. This is to be expected under my
theory as well. People's notions of justice are all formed quite similarly.
You're a little kid watching TV and you see superman flying around doing
certain deeds and later when he is awarded a medal there is talk of "justice",
etc. "Justice" is mentioned repeatedly alongside of things that people consider
just, and one's concept of what justice means is developed around that. It not
much weirder than everyone in a certain country speaking the same language
instead of various people deciding that they are going to call cats "dogs" and
dogs "cats."
>> They are consistant with people's notions of lines and points. They could
>also
>> be truths, but the point is that they seem right to people because they
>are
>> consistant with their notions. Whether their notions reflect truth or not
>is
>> another matter, it seems. I don't believe the mathamatical objects lines
>and
>
>Is this your way of saying that we don't, in fact, have to accept the
>principles of geometry, because those principles derive from our geometrical
>concepts? It seems that, according to that logic, we don't have to accept
>anything.
No, I am not saying that. Just that we think they are true because of our
notions of them. Reality is such that our space is roughly geometrical, but
that doesn't imply that our abstracted concepts of things in space -- lines or
points or perfect circles -- "exist" somehow in themselves.
>At any rate, we don't have to accept the law of non-contradiction,
>because that derives from our concepts of negation, conjunction, truth, and
>so on--is that right?
I don't think I ever began saying "therefore we shouldn't accept.. " It was
more like "We should remember that this isn't a direct link with truth.."
>> points exist, but maybe you dont want to get into that in this thread.
>
>Well, I was looking for some common ground--I was hoping you'd at least
>agree that we had some knowledge of the properties of lines, points, and the
>like. But I guess not.
Well, lines and points and such have been defined and there is a lot of
knowledge about geometric properties following from those definitions and such.
I don't know if I should use the term "knowledge" with you though, as we
probably have different notions of it.
>> The problem is trying to equate a common understanding of the notions of
>> injustice and goodness and such with a belief in their objective truth.
>Most
>> everyone will say that such and such is unjust because it conforms to our
>> common notions of what constitutes injustice. However, I think most
>> non-religious people realize that this doesn't imply justice is objective
>in
>> any sense other than "it is an objective fact that our notions of
>injustice
>> imply that X, Y, and Z are unjust."
>
>First, I am, of course, not saying that if everyone agrees that P, then it
>follows logically that P is true. However, it would be very strange if
>everyone agreed to something that was false.
You keep talking about how everyone -- or most people -- agree to certain
things -- presumably that certain moral facts exist, and I keep disputing it,
saying that my position is actualy quite common. Are there any studies that you
can refer me to establishing that most people are moral realists? Howabout most
non-religious people? It seems like a big part of your argument, but I haven't
seen anything to support it. I don't really believe it. I don't know anyone who
is a moral realist yet who is not religious and thinking that morality comes
from some sort of god.
>If almost everyone in the world
>assents to P, then the person with the not-P theory should recognize that he
>has a very radical theory with a heavy burden of proof.
Perhaps. I could just as well assert that almost every possibly rational
(non-religous) person in the world assents anti-realism, and then deduce that
you had quite a heavy burden of proof. This seems more true than asserting that
almost everyone is a moral realist. Where is your evidence?
I could also note that virtualy all people who I am familiar with who seem
exceptionaly bright or talented in some practical mental area turn out to be
moral anti-realists. Richard Feynman is a good example. David Friedman is one
exception but he doesn't seem too sure of moral realism at all. Mostly people
in the hard sciences. Physicists and biologists in general seem to be
overwhelmingly anti-realist from the little I have read of them -- sort of
interesting since they likely have the most expertise on the nature of reality
and life and such.
>> However, it isn't nessesary that emotions were even
>> involved in this, I doubt.
>
>The point of my posting was to address, basically, what causes people to
>adopt & hold certain values. Is it intellectual, or emotional? Or something
>else? If you think it's something else, what is it?
I think "emotional" is too narrow. Biological compulsions and dispositions,
conditioning, etc. This gets into my argument for why it doesn't make sense
that we would evolve to percieve moral truths, regardless of whether they
exist. I said I'd try to formalize the argument a little when I got time. I was
going to tonight, but I've spent most of my time allotted for posting to HPO on
this post, though I may still get to it later.
-User
Gordon G. Sollars
...
> Are there any published philosophers who actualy don't accept that the
> naturalistic fallacy is really a fallacy, as you seem not to?
I would expect any Aristotelean philosopher to have doubts about the
naturalistic fallacy. And even the "hard-science" philosopher Daniel
Dennett expresses come mild reservations about the "is/ought" gap (in his
/Darwin's Dangerous Idea/).
As I said some time back, I have been trying to develop my own view of
moral realism (based upon my understanding of Popper's philosophy of
science), so I am not the best person to give you references to others.
Owl, who I take it /does/ accept the claim that it is a fallacy, could
nevertheless probably help you much more. However, some months ago I did
come across a book on moral realism by David O. Brink, and an excellent
collection of papers, both for and against moral realism, titled /Essays
on Moral Realism/.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
Owl
> Are there any published philosophers who actualy don't accept that the
> next time I was in my bookstore, I went into the philosophy section,
> what sort of books could I look for in which it is described how this
> isn't a fallacy?
You would be unlikely to find books on meta-ethics in your local book store.
A university library is a better bet. Here are a few references:
1. (Mentioned this before) Michael Moore, "Moral Reality Revisited" in the
Michigan Law Review (don't remember the year, but I can find it if you
care). He claims that moral properties are (are identical with) certain
natural properties.
2. Peter Railton takes the same view. There are, in fact, papers by several
naturalists (including Railton) in a book edited by Sayre-McCord, which I
think is _Essays on Moral Realism_ or something like that.
3. There was a well-known exchange between Sturgeon and Harman in the
_Southern Journal of Philosophy_ 1986 (supplement), on the subject of
whether moral facts ever provide explanations of non-moral facts. Not
exactly the same as what you asked about, but related.
4. There will be a paper by yours truly in (I believe) the December issue of
the same journal, explaining why I think Sturgeon and company were wrong.
5. In another thread on the is-ought gap, I mentioned Searle's article of
many years ago, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'", Philosophical Review
(1964).
6. Alan Gewirth has tried to establish that anybody arguing about anything
is committed to certain normative presuppositions (to recognizing people's
rights, in fact).
7. There were also papers by Frankena (1939) and Hampshire (1949) on the
subject in _Mind_, both claiming that the naturalistic fallacy wasn't a
fallacy, if I remember correctly.
Gordon's position is in the minority, but not unheard of.
Owl
> >> >1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only
in
> >> >that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in B,
while
> >no
> >> >one is worse off, then A is better than B.
> >Well, almost any person would accept (1). No one would ever think about
> >denying it, unless they had first convinced themselves that anti-realism
was
> >true.
>
> I disagree. Almost every person's notion of goodness/betterness supports
(1),
Right -- therefore, they would accept (1).
> and if you causualy asked them they probably wouldn't interpret it as some
> question about objective proscription, and they'd agree with it. However
it you
> made it clear that you meant "better" in an objective sense, I don't think
> you'd get the majority of the non-religious vote.
...
> Well, I do think anti-realism is true, but I don't think I pre-maturely
dismiss
> arguments because I somehow just assume it is an unquestionable fact. What
I
> saw in your first premise was simply a statement that asserted something
being
> objectively better than something else. It should be well known that an
I'd like to call to your attention the fact that the words "objective" or
"objectively" did not appear once in my entire message. All I said was that
(1) was true.
> anti-realist will disagree with this unless this is shown to them somehow,
or
> else they wouldn't be anti-realists.
My hope was that by citing a specific example of a non-emotional, moral
intuition, I would thereby be showing that there were such things. Giving an
example of an A that is B is often a useful means of showing that some A's
are B's; the "No A's are B"-believer need not automatically reply, "No, that
can't be an A that is B!"
> Suppose that humans don't exist, and otherwise our planet consists of all
other
> species of organism. Is there any argument for something non-materialistic
> existing in this scenario?
Consciousness is non-material. I assume the other animals are conscious.
> Now suppose that humans exist, yet we aren't including your experience in
this
> scenario. The world *appears* just like it is now, except you don't exist
and
> you don't have your introspection or personal expeience to appeal to, but
you
> may use your observations of others.
I'm finding this difficult to get. If I don't exist, how am I making
observations of others?
Or maybe I'm supposed to imagine that I'm sort of outside the world, looking
in at it. Would I have my normal faculty of reason? When I observed the
other people, would I also be aware of the character of their experiences?
Owl
> Are you asking me to establish anti-realism now? Its simply a normal
> anti-realist position. I thought your post was trying to take on the
burden of
> proof, and my comment served to point out that an anti-realist would
simply
> disagree with your premises.
If the anti-realist gets to use anti-realism as his basis for disagreeing
with one of my premises, then it would be impossible for me to ever give an
argument for realism.
> I thought you were trying to show that there was something wrong with
> anti-realism. If so, then it seems you can't just start from premises that
> anti-realists don't accept, they need to be established somehow. Maybe you
What I was trying to do was to give some examples of some 'rational
intuitions.' These were examples of statements, with evaluative content,
that do not appear to be based on emotion, and appear instead to be
intellectually motivated.
Now, you might say, "Nope, they don't appear to be intellectually
motivated," in which case I failed (at least, I failed to convince you, but
I might still have convinced others). But what you shouldn't do is say, "I
don't accept that they are intellectually motivated, because that would
conflict with my general view about where moral beliefs come from."
> weren't trying to show anything wrong with anti-realism though. It is
possible
> that by the "emotional" alternative you meant simply a scenario where
moral
> facts existed yet our moral beliefs were the result of emotion.
I meant the idea that all moral beliefs are produced by emotions, or some
other non-intellectual source (some sort of bias). It does not seem credible
to me that the statements I cited were all examples of bias.
> >just ask: Do you really think that you're no worse off while being
tortured
> >than when you're happy and healthy?
>
> Depends on how you mean "worse off."
If you think "worse off" is ambiguous or equivocal, could you elaborate on
what the two (or more?) uses of it are?
If you don't think it's ambiguous, then why the above remark? "Worse off" is
a perfectly ordinary expression; surely you're not going to say that you're
unfamiliar with it. And after our discussion of definitions, I don't think
you're going to insist that I define it.
If you're familiar with this expression, and it's univocal, then why don't
you answer the above question?
> >Maybe, but this is the sort of untestable hypothesis that would usually
be
> >ignored in scientific reasoning.
>
> I don't see why you'd say this at all. How is this untestable? The obvious
test
> is to instill notions of things in childen and note how succeptible they
are to
> sliding between it being true that [things are supported by their notions]
and
> [their notions being true]. There are all sorts of other tests one could
come
> up with.
Perhaps "untested" would be a better word.
I suspect that the test you want to propose would not establish anything,
unless the experimenters could first agree on which of our 'notions are
true'. Anyway, I was looking for a test of the claim that my moral beliefs,
in particular, were the product of some emotional causes, presently unknown
to me.
If we could show that lots of people's moral beliefs, in general, were
produced by emotional causes, then that would be evidence for my case as
well. But I don't know how you would establish that in the case of
universally held moral beliefs.
> >For instance, it could be that your own
> >beliefs, when you're arguing with me, are merely the product of some
> >unconscious emotions of yours, or perhaps the result of childhood
> >experiences that you've repressed. You can't prove it's not so.
>
> You'd have to specify the sort of beliefs you are talking about what what
> exactly you mean by "the result of", as simply being the result of factors
> doesn't mean the beliefs are false.
Well, it seems that your argument for the falsity of my moral beliefs rests
on their being the result of certain factors--as I understand it, the fact
that they're allegedly produced by evolution, or emotions, or social
conditioning, is supposed to be evidence that they don't correspond to an
independent reality. Why wouldn't the analogous hypothesis, if true, be
evidence that your anti-realist beliefs don't correspond to an independent
reality (i.e., if the anti-realist beliefs were caused by evolution, etc.)?
> The hypothesis that we believe things because of our notions about them
seems
> trivialy true. Now, we just have to account for the part about it being
common
I didn't press this last time, but it's obvious now that it's a problem. I
don't know what you mean about a belief being 'based on our notions.'
Is a 'notion' a belief? If so, then you'd be saying that we believe things
because of our beliefs, which seems to be false (due to circularity). If
not, what is a 'notion'? An emotional attitude, perhaps? Then it's certainly
not trivial that we believe things because of them, and I thought I gave
examples of some beliefs that were not caused in that way.
Or is it just a synonym for 'concept' (abstract idea)? In that case, what
does the following mean:
> for people to mistake support from a class of notions outside of those
that
> model reality as support from those that model reality. This was probably
how
? An individual concept can be neither true nor false. Only a complete
proposition or *judgement* can be true or false. Thus, if a 'notion' isn't a
complete judgement, I don't know what you would mean by its 'modeling
reality' or (above) being 'true'.
> moral realism at one point didn't seem so bad to me, I think I was making
this
> exact error. Introspecting seems to reveal that it isn't such an
implausible
> error at all. Try it. Theres a little bit of evidence, though we should
not
I'm afraid I don't know what the error is supposed to be. Would an example
of this error be thinking that because "bachelor" means "unmarried man,"
therefore all bachelors are unmarried? How about thinking (for similar
reasons) that all unicorns have horns?
> In fact, this hypothesis seems quite powerful in that it predicts beliefs
in
> many things that don't exist, yet that we have notions of, such as
universals,
> mathamatical objects, facts, some dualist notion of free will. In fact
this one
> simple idea seems to explain almost everything I think is wrong with your
> philosophy. I think I'll try to develop my arguments for it more
thoroughly
Seems like you hardly believe in anything. As it happens, there is one
simple
idea that explains almost everything that I think is wrong with *your*
philosophy. Do you remember once that I mentioned that knowledge is
object-oriented, not subject-oriented? I mentioned that this was connected
with one of the things the objectivists got right: the primacy of existence
(over consciousness).
> >So far, I see no evidence that "better off" is ambiguous--again, unless
you
> >count a general commitment to anti-realism as among our 'evidence'.
>
> Well, to me it is. Maybe that's just my weird notion. I don't know how I
could
> give "evidence" that it is ambiguous to me, other than simply telling you.
If a word is really ambiguous, it is generally not hard at all to show that
it is. For instance, "bank" is ambiguous in English. For consider the
ordinary English sentences,
1. Joe was fishing down by the river bank.
2. I went to the bank today to make a deposit.
In (1), "bank" means something like "side of the river". But not in (2), for
I didn't go down to the side of the river to make a deposit; I went to my
financial institution.
> The evidence is this, if you take "better off" descriptively, then you
can't
> link it to goodness, and if you take it evaluatively, then you need either
> further argument to link it to happiness, or you need to rely on people
people
> moral realists and accepting this.
I don't think this is evidence that it's ambiguous. Maybe if you could show
us two contexts in which it clearly has different meanings, or maybe if you
could tell us, at least approximately, what the two alleged meanings are,
then you'd have something. As it is, I just simply don't know what you're
talking about. I have no idea what the two meanings are supposed to be.
So far, all I know is there is this relation, 'better off,' and it's hard to
say if it should be classified as 'descriptive' or 'evaluative.' The only
thing that shows me so far is that some concepts are hard to classify in
that way. Maybe it is both, maybe it's neither, maybe it's halfway between,
maybe the distinction doesn't apply; I don't know. But, for the purpose
of my argument, I don't care. All I care about is that I'm certain it's
preferable to be better off, and I'm also certain that I'm better off when
I'm healthy and happy than when I'm suffering or dead. Both of these things
at least seem obvious on their face. If you want to deny them, I think you
have a burden of proof.
If you say, "Well, there's one sense in which the first statement is true,
and a different sense in which the second one is true," you'll have to tell
me more, because so far that sounds like saying there's one sense of "green"
in which "Grass is green" is true, and a different sense in which "Nothing
is both green and red" is true--if someone says that, I just don't know what
they're talking about.
> >On my view, insisting on defining every term precisely amounts,
essentially,
> >to *removing* almost all of our concepts from the discussion.
>
> Maybe so, as I say above I should not have said simply "definition", as I
meant
> a general elucidation of what you are talking about. For instance if you
wrote
> me an essay on one of your concepts, I'd likely gain some understanding of
your
> meaning that I wouldn't pick up if you hadn't elaborated on the concept.
Well, I am using "better off" in the ordinary English sense. As in, "If only
Bill Clinton had died during childhood, we'd all be better off now." And,
"Oh, you'd be much better off without Jon."
> So, the revised problem that I see with some of your arguments, is that
they
> don't seem to relfect an appreciation that it is often unclear how exactly
> various concepts are meant, whether further information could be given by
> definition, explaination, or any other means.
I think I need more of an idea of what the unclarity is supposed to be
before I can try to remove it.
> The problem is that while the person didn't actualy commit the crime, the
> punishment is going on under the auspicies that he did. For instance
people
> have been falsely imprisoned and whatnot. But the reason they are being
> punished, if you look at inprisonment as punishment, is that it is thought
that
> they commited the crime.
Let's say that's right. How does that undermine anything I've said? I just
said that it was unjust to punish the innocent; do these remarks call that
into question somehow?
> Take another scenario where a prosecutor knows the defendant didn't do
anything
> wrong, but he wants to punish him for it anyway. The "punishing him for
it" is
> really only a facade so that it makes sense to the people who think the
> defendant may need punishing. In the eyes of the prosecutor he isn't
really
Again, I don't see how this calls my claim into question. In fact, of
course, the whole *reason why* the prosecutor would have to put up the
facade is because it is widely known (or, at least, widely believed)
that it would be unjust to punish the defendant for a crime he didn't
commit.
> punishing the defendant *for* anything the defendant didn't do. He is
punishing
> the defendant because he wants to, for some reason, and he is only putting
> forth the impression that it is *for* something else.
Not sure what to make of this -- are you saying that the sort of scenario we
have in mind here is not *really* a case of 'punishing someone for a crime
he didn't commit,' and so this is some reason for thinking that (genuinely)
punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit wouldn't be wrong--perhaps
because it is something impossible to do?
> That isn't logicaly impossible itsself. If you are mistaken about whether
> someone committed the crime, and you punish him because you think he did,
then
> you punish him for a crime he didn't commit. That is certainly possible.
Even
Alright. And it is widely accepted that such events are injustices.
What's the problem, then?
> I wasn't trying to show that here, only that your argument relied in a
sense of
> absurdness that wasn't moral in nature, but it was being passed off as an
> example of something that was supposed to highlight the absurdness of the
> proposition in only a moral way. Hence you get absurdness from two
sources,
> possibly, and you want the reader to attribute it to one source that
supports
> your position when, at least for me, the vast majority of the absurdness
comes
> from something entirely different.
I'm not sure what the second source of absurdity is supposed to be. Above
you admit that it is possible to punish someone for a crime he didn't
commit, so that's not the problem. You also said that if you *knowingly*
punished someone for a crime he didn't commit, it wouldn't *really* be
punishing him "for" committing that crime. On the other hand, in your view,
there is no intrinsic reason why a person shouldn't be either (a)
hypocritical, (b) self-contradictory, or (c) otherwise irrational. That is,
even if (knowingly) punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit involves
you in a self-contradictory state of mind, even then, according to your
view, there still wouldn't be anything normatively wrong with that. So how
are you trying to explain away the sense of obviousness of "you shouldn't
punish someone for a crime he didn't commit"?
Also, btw, note that the actual statement involved "unjust". I don't see how
you would explain the intuition about injustice, even if the
self-contradiction otherwise explained why we thought there was something
wrong with 'punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit.'
> >If it's really no more just than unjust, don't you find it interesting
that
> >everyone thinks it's one and no one thinks it's the other?
>
> Interesting? Not terribly. Odd? Not at all. This is to be expected under
my
> theory as well. People's notions of justice are all formed quite
similarly.
> You're a little kid watching TV and you see superman flying around doing
> certain deeds and later when he is awarded a medal there is talk of
"justice",
Most people in the world don't watch the same TV programs. More generally,
there are people from a wide variety of different cultures. Isn't it
interesting that they all seem to agree on certain moral principles?
Cultural indoctrination might explain convergence among people within a
culture. What explains cross-cultural convergence?
> saying that my position is actualy quite common. Are there any studies
that you
> can refer me to establishing that most people are moral realists? Howabout
most
> non-religious people? It seems like a big part of your argument, but I
haven't
I don't think I've ever made either of those claims.
> I could also note that virtualy all people who I am familiar with who seem
> exceptionaly bright or talented in some practical mental area turn out to
be
> moral anti-realists. Richard Feynman is a good example. David Friedman is
one
> exception but he doesn't seem too sure of moral realism at all. Mostly
people
What about me?
> in the hard sciences. Physicists and biologists in general seem to be
> overwhelmingly anti-realist from the little I have read of them -- sort of
> interesting since they likely have the most expertise on the nature of
reality
> and life and such.
Experts on morality? I should note that David Friedman and I have probably
spent much more time thinking and reading about moral philosophy than
Richard Feynman, so if you wanted to look for experts...
Physicists tend to think that everything is physical. Literary theorists
tend to think that everything is words. (I'm not joking about that one.)
Some social scientists like to think that everything is 'socially
constructed.'
In general, I wouldn't take a physicist's word on anything philosophical. I
would scarcely take a philosopher's word either, I'm afraid, but certainly
not a non-philosopher. Suffice it to say that I think physicists, literary
theorists, social scientists, and other non-philosophers make horrible
amateur philosophers.
I didn't want to get into an argument over authorities. I just wanted to
point out the comparison between denying my sample 'conceptual truths', and
denying, for example, that the shortest path between 2 points is a straight
line, or denying that the sky is blue.
Enough for tonight; this is too long.
User 1DE7
>From: Owl a@a.a
>Message-id: <8v2gr2$sfc$1...@slb7.atl.mindspring.net>
>> and if you causualy asked them they probably wouldn't interpret it as some
>> question about objective proscription, and they'd agree with it. However
>it you
>> made it clear that you meant "better" in an objective sense, I don't think
>> you'd get the majority of the non-religious vote.
>...
>> Well, I do think anti-realism is true, but I don't think I pre-maturely
>dismiss
>> arguments because I somehow just assume it is an unquestionable fact. What
>I
>> saw in your first premise was simply a statement that asserted something
>being
>> objectively better than something else. It should be well known that an
>
>I'd like to call to your attention the fact that the words "objective" or
>"objectively" did not appear once in my entire message. All I said was that
>(1) was true.
>
Right. This goes back to the objection I had in my other post about how you
seem to ignore critical differences in people's concepts. When you said "better
off" in (1), unless I misunderstood you, you meant it in an objective way. I
was just making that explicit when I paraphrased you because when most people
hear the term they won't be aware that you mean it like that.
So, you're trying to show me evidence of the truth of someone being "better
off" as you mean it, which is in an objective way. If you really went around
asking people simply "is person P better off in this situation than that one?"
then they would take "better off" to mean something different than what it is
that you are trying to get evidence for. This is a problem. Hence, it would be
nessesary to make it explicit in your questioning that you meant objectively
better off.
>> Suppose that humans don't exist, and otherwise our planet consists of all
>other
>> species of organism. Is there any argument for something non-materialistic
>> existing in this scenario?
>
>Consciousness is non-material. I assume the other animals are conscious.
What do you mean by consciousness? From looking just at animals, why would you
say that their consciousness is non-material? That claim seems to need a good
deal of establishing.
Are computational processes material?
(I suspect the above is a very important point in our disagreement. Probably
the most important thing in this particular thread.)
>> Now suppose that humans exist, yet we aren't including your experience in
>this
>> scenario. The world *appears* just like it is now, except you don't exist
>and
>> you don't have your introspection or personal expeience to appeal to, but
>you
>> may use your observations of others.
>
>I'm finding this difficult to get. If I don't exist, how am I making
>observations of others?
You're not nessesarily making observations. You're not really "in" the
scenario. You're just supposed to evaluate the scenario, given the same
knowledge that you have now except without your introspection. Pretend you're
simply a logic machine, and you have no moral intuitions or feelings or
anything. Only logic and sensory data.
>Or maybe I'm supposed to imagine that I'm sort of outside the world, looking
>in at it.
Sort of.
>Would I have my normal faculty of reason?
You wouldn't have what you now call your faculty of reason, because you think
that your moral intuitions are part of that. You have a logical faculty, but
nothing directly telling you about morality.
>When I observed the
>other people, would I also be aware of the character of their experiences?
Now directly aware or anything. You are free to infer stuff about their
experience from their behavior though, or from their descriptions of their
experience.
-User
Mark Young
> One of the big issues between realism & anti-realism is this: Can a
> moral statement be accepted on the basis of reason, or must it always
> rely on a sentiment or feeling?
That seems to be a false dichotomy. A moral statement may be accepted
on the basis of reasoning from pre-held moral statements, and yet still
rely (fundamentally) on moral sentiments or feelings.
Compare a gustatory statement: "That's going to taste awful." I may
make that statement based on observing that "that" contains coconut and
my pre-existing belief that I hate coconut. There is no tasting
involved in my acceptance of that statement -- I just reasoned it out --
and yet ultimately it relies on tasting -- I know that I hate coconut
because I have tasted it in enough variations to be sure -- I don't need
to taste this thing to know I will hate it.
Likewise the moral statements you hold are ultimately based on your
knowledge of your (and, to a lesser extent, other people's) moral
sentiments. If no one had any sentiments or feelings, then no one would
make moral claims -- there would be no interest in doing so, and
arguably no better or worse for anyone.
> It seems that the former is the case. Consider the following, which
> seems like a reasonable argument:
>
> 1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only
> in that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in
> B, while no one is worse off, then A is better than B.
It seems likely that all would evaluate A as being better than B -- but
if someone didn't, on what basis would you say they had made a
*mistake*, rather than simply having a strange set of preferences?
And you *had* to put the word "innocent" in there -- for if you had not
people would have disagreed with you. But "innocent" is itself a
morally loaded term: it applies to people who are not "guilty", that
is, people who have not done anything they "shouldn't" have. Without
the morally loaded term, your moral claim becomes untenable.
> 2. Other things being equal, if a person is happier, then he is
> thereby better off than if he is less happy.
This is not true. Let A and B be two situations that differ only in
that some people in A are happier than some people in B -- we may even
stipulate that these people are innocent, if you like. By 2 these
people (the happier ones) are better off in A than in B.
But let me describe A (and B) a bit more. This situation is one where
there is a world-wide gov't that tolerates no dissent. People are not
free to act as they like -- and criticism of the gov't or anyone in the
gov't is met with instant punishment (when found out). Most people
there are miserable -- only people actually in the gov't *and those
people in A who are magically happy* are not miserable.
Now it is not clear to me (nor, I would wager, to libertarians and
Objectivists) that these non-gov't people are better off happy than
unhappy. Unhappiness is a motivator -- it motivates us to do something
to end our unhappiness. And even if these people are not motivated
enough to overcome their fear of the gov't, they are -- many realists
would argue -- better off "knowing" that they are oppressed, so that if
(when?) a revolution does begin, they will be less motivated to let it
be crushed by the gov't.
You might object that other things are not equal if their motivation to
rebel has been quenched -- but then you must admit that 2 describes an
impossible situation -- happy people are not motivated to rebel, and so
we cannot change one without changing the other. If X -> ~Y, then it is
of no interest that Y -> (X -> Z) is true, since it's true for any Z.
> 3. Therefore, other things being equal, increases in people's
> happiness and decreases in suffering are good.
And if we used happy-rays on the the population of world A, the ones who
are already secretly plotting rebellion will cease to do so -- making
everyone in the world (except possibly the gov't folk) worse off.
[...]
> 3 is an evaluative statement, and there has pretty clearly been given
> a rational argument for it. Therefore, it is possible to accept an
> evaluative statement on the basis of reason.
Yes. 3 was reasoned out from other evaluative statements.
> [...] The strength of the argument is that it seems impossible to
> deny the connection between better-off-ness and goodness, nor that
> between better-off-ness and happiness.
These statements are true, as far as I can see. The problem is that
they do not provide a non-evaluative basis for evaluative statements.
To get from a non-evaluative statement to an evaluative one requires an
evaluation -- which in turn requires an evaluator. For certain terms we
can use generic or variable agents, but moral terms are not among them.
> Would a moral skeptic want to deny:
> 1) That anything ever benefits anyone, or
> 2) That benefits are good?
Note the switch from "anti-realists" above to "skeptic" here. It's
switches like this that had me thinking "skeptic" was another term for
"anti-realist".
A skeptic might want to deny one or both of those statements. I don't
want to deny them -- I only want to say that they are empty statements.
That is, they simply state relationships between terms, and do not do
anything to *ground* moral claims in reality.
As a moral anti-realist, my concern is not with the relationships
between moral terms and concepts -- it is with the extensions of those
terms and concepts. To say that morality is real is to say that these
concepts have extensions, and that there is a fact of the matter as to
whether a given thing is in one of those extensions(*). The skeptic
says that there is nothing in the extensions, and other anti-realists
say that the extensions (and thus, I suppose, the concepts) differ from
case to case, and are bound together only by the use of the same terms.
(*) I allow for "fuzzy" extensions, as with colours -- fuzziness may be
modeled with real numbers or with partial orders or whatever the realist
feels is most appropriate; that is no bar to realism. The bar would be
a fuzziness that leaves no core group of objects as definitely in the
extension and others definitely out.
As an example, consider the term "murder", which we have discussed
before. Most people treat this term as morally loaded -- you do not
call a killing murder unless you disapprove of it. Thus it is no skin
off the anti-realist's nose to say that murder is definitely wrong -- it
is a simple consequence of the way the term is used in common language.
What the anti-realist will care about is: is there any killing that is
objectively a murder. But what does that mean?
It can't mean "is there any killing that is objectively disapproved of"
because that doesn't make sense -- disapproval requires a disapprover,
and none was given.
It can't (for the realist) mean "is there a killing that *you*
disapprove of", because that's subjectivism.
It can't (for the realist) mean "is there a killing that *people
generally* disapprove of", because that's relativism.
It can't (for the realist) mean "is there any killing that *everyone*
disapproves of", for there is no such killing, and so it would render
the term empty.
Most realist take it, I believe, to mean "is there any killing that
everyone *should* disapprove of?" But that gets us no closer to an
answer, because it's merely replaces one evaluative term with another.
We must now ask what *that* statement means, and we run into the same
options.
And suppose we take it to mean "is there any killing that any rational
person would disapprove of?" Well this, too, gets us nowhere. To be
rational is to be governed by reason. If reason is objective (as we
believe it to be), then the outputs of reason are the same *so long as
we start from the same premises*. And what premises do we start from
with morality? Why, with our feelings (possibly including pre-existing
moral sentiments). Why is happy better than unhappy? Because it feels
better. Subjectivism is at the very heart of your moral claims.
Moral terms can also usefully be compared to other terms in common use.
Suppose you and I have a dispute about whether some object is a table.
If we can't settle it between us, we could consult others for their
opinions. If everyone else stood against me, I would conform with the
common usage. If almost everyone (in a language community) says that
something is a table, then it *is* a table. If there is another
community somewhere nearby that would not call this thing a table, then
the word "table" has slightly different meanings in the two communities.
Now compare the use of the word "good". If you and I have a dispute
about whether something is good, I doubt either of us would abide by
popular opinion -- even if it were as strong as the consensus on the
table. And if there were two communities that disagreed about whether
something was good, that would not be considered as an instance where
"good" had slightly different meanings there. Moral terms are not
assigned by popular will.
Since the extension of "good" is not fixed by community usage, perhaps
its intension is? Only in the most basic sense -- only in terms of
other evaluative statements. As soon as an attempt to reduce the term
to non-evaluative concretes appears, it is shot down by one or another
brand of realist. These realists claim to be capturing "our intuitions"
about goodness -- but they cannot agree on a definition. That suggests
that "our intuitions" are not as much "ours" as "each others'".
[...]
> In these cases, I'm not so much interested in the question of which
> of the above statements are evaluative (except that the conclusions
> of both arguments are); what I'm interested in is that in each case,
> the important premises seem to be conceptual truths. Truths of that
> sort are familiar to any good rationalist, of course. For instance,
> if one wanted to state some conceptual (or self-evident) truths about
> 'lines' and 'points', they might be these:
>
> - Given any two points, there is a line between them.
> - A straight line is the shortest path between any two points.
> - Any line can be extended in either direction an arbitrary distance.
>
> and so on. These aren't *analytic* truths in the usual sense (they
> can't be derived from a set of definitions), but they are
> *self-evident* truths, which anyone who grasps 'line' and 'point'
> (those concepts) will be able to see.
They are definitional truths, in spite of the lack of a definition. The
terms are primitives, and the above are constraints on the use of the
primitives. That moral terms might also be amenable to such a treatment
is of no concern to the anti-realist.
> Continuing, what if one wanted to formulate some conceptual truths
> about the relation of 'insideness'. They might be these:
>
> - If a is inside b, then it is not the case that b is inside a.
> - If a is inside b, and b is inside c, then a is inside c.
> - If a is inside b, then every part of a is inside b.
>
> and so on. Once again, there's no obvious way of deriving any of
> these from definitions (good luck trying to define "inside"),
There is a whole field of mathematics (topology) concerned with defining
things like this. I do know that "hole" has been characterized, so I
would expect that the same has been done for "inside" (for A is inside B
if and only if A is a hole in (B-A)).
[...]
> Every concept has its own set of conceptual truths. Continuing our
> series, if we wanted to state some of the conceptual truths about
> 'goodness,' they might include these:
>
> - In general, it is good that one be better off.
> - Other things being equal, one should bring about more good.
> - If x is better than y, and y is better than z, then x is better
> than z (where 'better' = more good).
> - If x is good, and y leads to x, then other things being equal, y is
> good.
>
> And if I wanted to formulate some conceptual truths about
> 'injustice', they would include:
>
> - Punishing people for crimes they didn't commit is unjust.
> - Other things being equal, one shouldn't commit injustice.
> - It is just for people to get what they deserve.
>
> and so on.
>
> For good measure, one might list some of the conceptual truths about
> 'should', such as:
>
> - Other things being equal, one should do good things.
> - If S can't do A, then it is not the case that S should do A.
> - Other things being equal, one should avoid injustice
> - One should do the things that one has the most reason to do.
>
> etc.
>
> None of these things is at all controversial among people who
> understand and use the concepts involved.[...]
> I think the anti-moralist wants to say, that he *understands* this
> moralistic talk, these moral concepts -- and so he understands that,
> 'within moral systems', so to speak, all those things are axiomatic
> -- but he doesn't endorse it. That is, the statements above, so to
> speak, follow from the moral concepts, but the amoralist wants to
> *reject the concepts*, in some sense.
No. The anti-moralist wants to deny that moral concepts have fixed
extensions (unless they are fixed at empty).
[...]
> In any case, there is no introspective evidence for the claim that
> the 'conceptual truths' listed above are expressions of emotion, or
> products of emotions, rather than being judgements. And as
> judgements, there is no evidence at all against any one of them.
They are useless as judgements. They tell us nothing about the kinds of
moral claims that people dispute. They tell us nothing about abortion,
nothing about capital punishment, nothing about pre-marital sex, nothing
about adultery or bribery or buggery or homosexuality. These "truths"
are merely consequences of the inferential relationships between the
terms, and so are not "moral claims" in any interesting sense.
...mark young
Owl
> Right. This goes back to the objection I had in my other post about how
you
> seem to ignore critical differences in people's concepts. When you said
"better
> off" in (1), unless I misunderstood you, you meant it in an objective way.
I
> was just making that explicit when I paraphrased you because when most
people
> hear the term they won't be aware that you mean it like that.
I suspect that you're misusing "mean." The fact that I believe that A is B,
does not imply that by "A" I 'mean' "something that is B."
The people who heard my statement would think that I was using "better off"
in the ordinary English sense of the expression--which, as a matter of fact,
I was.
> So, you're trying to show me evidence of the truth of someone being
"better
> off" as you mean it, which is in an objective way. If you really went
around
> asking people simply "is person P better off in this situation than that
one?"
> then they would take "better off" to mean something different than what it
is
> that you are trying to get evidence for. This is a problem. Hence, it
would be
I don't see any reason to think that anyone else uses "better off" with a
different meaning. This, of course, goes back to the question of whether
"better off" is ambiguous. So far, I have no idea what the alternative
meanings would be.
> nessesary to make it explicit in your questioning that you meant
objectively
> better off.
No--it is necessary *not* to make it explicit in my questioning that I
*believe that* 'better off' is an objective relation. What you're actually
saying is that, when the nature of X is in dispute, it is necessary to beg
the question with every statement one makes about X, by building into it
one's own view about the nature of X. Just the opposite is the case. When
the nature of X is in dispute, in order to attempt to resolve the dispute,
it is necessary to make statements about X *without* building into them the
explicit assertion that one or the other particular theory about X is the
case.
> What do you mean by consciousness? From looking just at animals, why would
you
> say that their consciousness is non-material? That claim seems to need a
good
> deal of establishing.
Other animals have thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories. Do you want to
start a thread about mind/body dualism? There are arguments enough against
physicalism, but I'd rather not try to detail all of them now. (There's lots
of literature on it, though.)
> Are computational processes material?
I'm not sure, but I don't think that has anything interesting to do with
consciousness.
> (I suspect the above is a very important point in our disagreement.
Probably
> the most important thing in this particular thread.)
The mind/body problem is indeed important. Here is something I wrote about
it a long time ago, a pretty short exposition of the problem:
http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/mind.htm
> You're not nessesarily making observations. You're not really "in" the
> scenario. You're just supposed to evaluate the scenario, given the same
> knowledge that you have now except without your introspection. Pretend
you're
> simply a logic machine, and you have no moral intuitions or feelings or
> anything. Only logic and sensory data.
I see. So your question was along these lines: "Apart from your moral
intuitions or feelings, is there any *other* evidence you have for the truth
of moral propositions?"?
The only other evidence I know of is the beliefs of other people who have
moral intuitions and such.
> You wouldn't have what you now call your faculty of reason, because you
think
> that your moral intuitions are part of that. You have a logical faculty,
but
> nothing directly telling you about morality.
So the question here is really whether you could infer moral prop's from
non-moral prop's. The answer is no, except for the case mentioned
immediately above.
> >When I observed the
> >other people, would I also be aware of the character of their
experiences?
>
> Now directly aware or anything. You are free to infer stuff about their
> experience from their behavior though, or from their descriptions of their
> experience.
Right, so I would infer that other people had lots of moral intuitions,
judgements, and so on. This would be evidence, but not proof, that there
were moral truths, particularly in the cases where the judgements were
universal or very nearly universal.
User 1DE7
>From: Owl a@a.a
>Message-id: <8v3uaf$584$1...@slb0.atl.mindspring.net>
>> Are you asking me to establish anti-realism now? Its simply a normal
>> anti-realist position. I thought your post was trying to take on the
>burden of
>> proof, and my comment served to point out that an anti-realist would
>simply
>> disagree with your premises.
>
>If the anti-realist gets to use anti-realism as his basis for disagreeing
>with one of my premises, then it would be impossible for me to ever give an
>argument for realism.
Well, the anti-realist doesn't take it as axiomatic that moral facts aren't
real. So, what you could do would be to come up with premises that the
anti-realist accepts (meaning they can't simply be assertations about some
moral fact existing), and then show that these premises imply something
favorable to moral realism (that a certain moral fact exists, for instance).
The moral anti-realist is fully aware that he holds that moral facts don't
exist. It seems that since it is basicaly the conclusion of his theory that it
is well known to him. It doesn't seem likely that you'll achieve much by
asserting the opposite of a high-level conclusion of the theory. However,
suppose that the fact that ducks have webbed feet somehow implies that moral
realism is true, by an intricate chain of reasoning. Since the fact that ducks
have webbed feet is not obviously against any tennet of moral anti-realism, yet
it is obvious that ducks have webbed feet, this would be a far more effective
method.
>> I thought you were trying to show that there was something wrong with
>> anti-realism. If so, then it seems you can't just start from premises that
>> anti-realists don't accept, they need to be established somehow. Maybe you
>
>What I was trying to do was to give some examples of some 'rational
>intuitions.' These were examples of statements, with evaluative content,
>that do not appear to be based on emotion, and appear instead to be
>intellectually motivated.
>
>Now, you might say, "Nope, they don't appear to be intellectually
>motivated," in which case I failed (at least, I failed to convince you, but
>I might still have convinced others).
Ok.
>But what you shouldn't do is say, "I
>don't accept that they are intellectually motivated, because that would
>conflict with my general view about where moral beliefs come from."
Nope, it definitely doesn't seem like I accept those things because they are
"true."
>> >just ask: Do you really think that you're no worse off while being
>tortured
>> >than when you're happy and healthy?
>>
>> Depends on how you mean "worse off."
>
>If you think "worse off" is ambiguous or equivocal, could you elaborate on
>what the two (or more?) uses of it are?
Sure. The way I would commonly take "John is worse off" is something like "John
is less happy/satisfied" or "John has a lower standard of living from a
meterial or mental-health standpoint" or "John will suffer more now/[ in the
long run]."
However, when you say it, I take your meaning of worse as containing some
proscription, like if something is worse it means that it *should* not be
preferred over what is better.
>> You'd have to specify the sort of beliefs you are talking about what what
>> exactly you mean by "the result of", as simply being the result of factors
>> doesn't mean the beliefs are false.
>
>Well, it seems that your argument for the falsity of my moral beliefs rests
>on their being the result of certain factors--as I understand it, the fact
>that they're allegedly produced by evolution, or emotions, or social
>conditioning, is supposed to be evidence that they don't correspond to an
>independent reality.
That itsself isn't supposed to show they aren't real. My logical beliefs are
the result of evolution too, but that doesn't imply that they're false.
I was simply pointing out that moral beliefs can be explained in this way. This
should really wait until after my revised argument. I'll try to write it right
after this post.
>> The hypothesis that we believe things because of our notions about them
>seems
>> trivialy true. Now, we just have to account for the part about it being
>common
>
>I didn't press this last time, but it's obvious now that it's a problem. I
>don't know what you mean about a belief being 'based on our notions.'
>
>Is a 'notion' a belief? If so, then you'd be saying that we believe things
>because of our beliefs, which seems to be false (due to circularity).
Not really, see below.
>If
>not, what is a 'notion'? An emotional attitude, perhaps? Then it's certainly
>not trivial that we believe things because of them, and I thought I gave
>examples of some beliefs that were not caused in that way.
>
>Or is it just a synonym for 'concept' (abstract idea)? In that case, what
>does the following mean:
Yes, more like a concept. Or simply your mental model of something.
>> for people to mistake support from a class of notions outside of those
>that
>> model reality as support from those that model reality. This was probably
>how
>
>? An individual concept can be neither true nor false.
Well, a concept can correspond to reality more or less closely than another
one. For instance suppose I have a concept of your haircut from reading your
HPO posts. Suppose from your posts that I think you'd let your hair grow long
and bushy, and therefore my mental concept of who I am responding to is someone
who has long bushy hair. This concept has a certain degree of accuracy or
inaccurary.
>Only a complete
>proposition or *judgement* can be true or false. Thus, if a 'notion' isn't a
>complete judgement, I don't know what you would mean by its 'modeling
>reality' or (above) being 'true'.
See above.
>> moral realism at one point didn't seem so bad to me, I think I was making
>this
>> exact error. Introspecting seems to reveal that it isn't such an
>implausible
>> error at all. Try it. Theres a little bit of evidence, though we should
>not
>
>I'm afraid I don't know what the error is supposed to be. Would an example
>of this error be thinking that because "bachelor" means "unmarried man,"
>therefore all bachelors are unmarried?
No, not like that..
>How about thinking (for similar
>reasons) that all unicorns have horns?
I don't think so. In fact, all the examples of things that I don't think exist
that I might have you try this experiment with and things that you think exist.
I was going to start giving you examples like universals and math concepts and
such.
>> In fact, this hypothesis seems quite powerful in that it predicts beliefs
>in
>> many things that don't exist, yet that we have notions of, such as
>universals,
>> mathamatical objects, facts, some dualist notion of free will. In fact
>this one
>> simple idea seems to explain almost everything I think is wrong with your
>> philosophy. I think I'll try to develop my arguments for it more
>thoroughly
>
>Seems like you hardly believe in anything. As it happens, there is one
>simple
>idea that explains almost everything that I think is wrong with *your*
>philosophy. Do you remember once that I mentioned that knowledge is
>object-oriented, not subject-oriented?
I don't remember too well what you said about it, but it sounds familiar.
>I mentioned that this was connected
>with one of the things the objectivists got right: the primacy of existence
>(over consciousness).
Hm, sounds interesting. Maybe you could let me in on it if you think it
explains everything wrong with my philosophy.
>> The evidence is this, if you take "better off" descriptively, then you
>can't
>> link it to goodness, and if you take it evaluatively, then you need either
>> further argument to link it to happiness, or you need to rely on people
>people
>> moral realists and accepting this.
>
>I don't think this is evidence that it's ambiguous. Maybe if you could show
>us two contexts in which it clearly has different meanings, or maybe if you
>could tell us, at least approximately, what the two alleged meanings are,
>then you'd have something. As it is, I just simply don't know what you're
>talking about. I have no idea what the two meanings are supposed to be.
>
One meaning would be of the same type that I said "worse off" had above --
referring to simply descriptive criteria. For instance if my heater goes off
durring the winter I might say "Gee, now I am worse off." When I say this I
don't mean anything like "It is an objective fact that I ought to prefer my
heater not going off rather than it going off." Which is what I take to be
embedded in your use of the term. I'm not sure I can explain it much better
than that. I wouldn't normaly say it is ambiguous because I'd normaly take it
in the first sense automaticaly, as the second one doesn't make sense to me. It
is only your odd usage that makes me point out that the word is being used in
two ways.
Maybe the problem is just that I am trying to cater too much to your notions of
betterness. I could just say that there is zero connection between "better off"
and "good in an objective sense" as far as I can see.
>So far, all I know is there is this relation, 'better off,' and it's hard to
>say if it should be classified as 'descriptive' or 'evaluative.' The only
>thing that shows me so far is that some concepts are hard to classify in
>that way. Maybe it is both, maybe it's neither, maybe it's halfway between,
>maybe the distinction doesn't apply; I don't know.
Maybe you shouldn't base your arguments on concepts that you don't seem to
understand.
>But, for the purpose
>of my argument, I don't care. All I care about is that I'm certain it's
>preferable to be better off,
But from above you don't seem too sure on what exactly better off means, so I
don't know how you can be so certain.
>and I'm also certain that I'm better off when
>I'm healthy and happy than when I'm suffering or dead.
Same comment. It seems to me like you are certain that you'd refer to the state
of being healthy and happy rather than dead as "better off", but not that there
is some property of better-offness that this situation would have.
>> The problem is that while the person didn't actualy commit the crime, the
>> punishment is going on under the auspicies that he did. For instance
>people
>> have been falsely imprisoned and whatnot. But the reason they are being
>> punished, if you look at inprisonment as punishment, is that it is thought
>that
>> they commited the crime.
>
>Let's say that's right. How does that undermine anything I've said? I just
>said that it was unjust to punish the innocent
No, what you say now is slightly different. It doesn't have the "for.." in it.
For the reason it makes your argument suspect, see below.
>> I wasn't trying to show that here, only that your argument relied in a
>sense of
>> absurdness that wasn't moral in nature, but it was being passed off as an
>> example of something that was supposed to highlight the absurdness of the
>> proposition in only a moral way. Hence you get absurdness from two
>sources,
>> possibly, and you want the reader to attribute it to one source that
>supports
>> your position when, at least for me, the vast majority of the absurdness
>comes
>> from something entirely different.
>
>I'm not sure what the second source of absurdity is supposed to be. Above
>you admit that it is possible to punish someone for a crime he didn't
>commit, so that's not the problem.
But, it is not possible for that to be your personal reason for punishing him
if you know that he did not commit the crime. In your scenario you ask the
reader to judge the accpetability of [accepting "they committed the crime" as
your personal reason for punishing someone when you have knowledge that they
didn't commit it.
>You also said that if you *knowingly*
>punished someone for a crime he didn't commit, it wouldn't *really* be
>punishing him "for" committing that crime. On the other hand, in your view,
>there is no intrinsic reason why a person shouldn't be either (a)
>hypocritical, (b) self-contradictory, or (c) otherwise irrational.
This is beside the point entirely. We aren't talking about whether the person
reading your argument *should* not have a problem accepting it on those
grounds. We know that people tend to think self-contradictory or irrational
things are -- well irrational for some reason. This isn't about what they
*should* do at all. I am simply pointing out that there is
self-contradictoryness coming from more than the moral aspect of the statement
and that people may be influenced by it in a sort of sneaky way, whether they
should be or not.
Then there is the issue of the "murder is wrong" example that mark young
pointed out, with it possibly being analyticly true. So there is sort of a
pattern of hidden reasons for people to think your examples are more convincing
than they really are.
>That is,
>even if (knowingly) punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit involves
>you in a self-contradictory state of mind, even then, according to your
>view, there still wouldn't be anything normatively wrong with that. So how
>are you trying to explain away the sense of obviousness of "you shouldn't
>punish someone for a crime he didn't commit"?
Again, if we're talking about the general acceptibility of your example, then
my theory doesn't come into play. The fact is that people will be mislead by it
simply due to how people think.
If you want to know how I justify denying the obviousness of the statement,
well my reason won't be new to you. That part of the obviousness that comes
from the problem I speak about above just strikes human minds as contrary.
Therefore, it struck my mind as contrary when I read it and that is part of why
I don't think the moral part of your view is obvious at all. If we remove the
trickyness, and just say "it is unjust to punishing people for no reason" or
something, then that doesn't seem obvious in a factual way to me at all. Same
as my objection to all other normative propositions that I have heard. They
simply don't seem like facts.
>Also, btw, note that the actual statement involved "unjust". I don't see how
>you would explain the intuition about injustice, even if the
>self-contradiction otherwise explained why we thought there was something
>wrong with 'punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit.'
People have notions of injustice that are very similar to unfairness. Now, the
key point is that people don't have to think unfairness has some objective
property of injustice for this to be the case. They simply need to associate
the two concepts somehow, so when they think of injustice they think of
unfairness and such. It is relatively easy to see that it isn't fair to punish
people for no reason, especialy if everyone isn't being punished like that.
>> Interesting? Not terribly. Odd? Not at all. This is to be expected under
>my
>> theory as well. People's notions of justice are all formed quite
>similarly.
>> You're a little kid watching TV and you see superman flying around doing
>> certain deeds and later when he is awarded a medal there is talk of
>"justice",
>
>Most people in the world don't watch the same TV programs. More generally,
>there are people from a wide variety of different cultures. Isn't it
>interesting that they all seem to agree on certain moral principles?
They seem to agree generaly and nowhere near as precisely as you'd expect if
these principles were fact. In fact the similarity in agreement seems to be
much more like the similarity in emotions people have, for instance. Most
everyone is sad if you murder their spouse, or they're upset if you decieve
them, etc. It simply highlights that we're all of the same species and behave
in similar manners.
Theres lots of cultures that seem fairly different from our current american
one in terms of morals. I think I mentioned the Japanese culture before,
especialy in non-modern times (if the book "Sho-gun" is representative at all
-- I believe the author was quite a student of Japanese culture) there are
middleeastern ones that seem different. To me our moral systems seems as
similar as would be expected from slightly differing creatures of the same
species and different enough to support that they aren't percieving some sort
of moral facts that they base their systems on -- or if they are, that its a
sloppy process.
>Cultural indoctrination might explain convergence among people within a
>culture. What explains cross-cultural convergence?
Biology.
>> saying that my position is actualy quite common. Are there any studies
>that you
>> can refer me to establishing that most people are moral realists? Howabout
>most
>> non-religious people? It seems like a big part of your argument, but I
>haven't
>
>I don't think I've ever made either of those claims.
Well you often say things like "if all people think P, then it is pretty strong
evidence for P, and a person saying not-P should have the burden of proof" and
such. When you say these things I assume you mean P to be that morality is
real. I don't see any evidence that most people think P, though.
>> I could also note that virtualy all people who I am familiar with who seem
>> exceptionaly bright or talented in some practical mental area turn out to
>be
>> moral anti-realists. Richard Feynman is a good example. David Friedman is
>one
>> exception but he doesn't seem too sure of moral realism at all. Mostly
>people
>
>What about me?
What I was really talking about with these other people is that I had some
reference to establish their mental skill in other than in philosophy, and then
looking at their philosophy I found that it was anti-realist. With you I really
have no other reference where I can certify general mental exceptionality. The
only thing I know of you are your philosophical arguments, which I disagree
with.
>> in the hard sciences. Physicists and biologists in general seem to be
>> overwhelmingly anti-realist from the little I have read of them -- sort of
>> interesting since they likely have the most expertise on the nature of
>reality
>> and life and such.
>
>Experts on morality? I should note that David Friedman and I have probably
>spent much more time thinking and reading about moral philosophy than
>Richard Feynman, so if you wanted to look for experts...
Maybe. I think I'd be more reliant on his not fooling himself, though.
>Physicists tend to think that everything is physical. Literary theorists
>tend to think that everything is words. (I'm not joking about that one.)
>Some social scientists like to think that everything is 'socially
>constructed.'
I'd agree that people in certain fields generaly tend to overstate the
importance of their field relative to other fields. But I am not sure about
that literary theorist thing, or even the social science stuff. I really don't
think literary theorists have opinions *on physics* that contradict those of
physisicts, or *on biology* that contradict those of biologists(social
scientists might overstate the role of conditioning in the nature vs nurture
debate, though). I don't really have much respect for people involved in
humanties' ability to discover truth about reality. When we look at who has
discovered truth in reality -- who has the proper methods in place of dong so,
and such, instead of just talking about books or speculating on morality, it
seems that those in the hard sciences are generaly the only ones who
consistantly establish the truth of anything and are able to demonstrate it.
From what I know, there isn't a lot of conflict between those in the
hard-sciences trying to impose their theories on everyone. Physicists and
biologists and chemists, computer scientists, engineers, don't seem to
contradict eachother or say "everything is an organism" "everything is a
chemical compound." (Actualy I don't know about chemists, haven't read much
from them)
>Enough for tonight; this is too long.
>
Yep, this thread is expanding a bit too much for my taste as well. I think
there are three points worth focusing on:
(1) Why you think consciousness must be non-physical, which I talk about in
another post.
(2) My "notion" theory, about how things seem 'right' to people if they simply
correspond to their notions, so that they can have notions of things without
objective existance that they think are true simply because they seem right and
natural.
(3) My coming post elaborating on why moral intuitions can't have evolved to be
true.
My (2) still needs to be fleshed out more. (1) is the only thing I am really
curious about from you at the moment. So, if you feel like cutting things that
you feel to be nonessential from your next reply that don't appear above, feel
free.
-User
George Dance
>
> I think the issue between moral realism and anti-realism is whether
> moral statements can be true or false.
Agreed. Owl's attempt to characterize the debate (moral realists accept
moral statements on the basis of reason, whereas anti-realists rely
solely on their feelings) can be rejected as a red herring.
> Ideally, a person does find a true
> moral statement (that relates to an action the person can take) to be
> motivating, but this is a contingent fact about the psychology of the
> person in question.
That is an odd way of looking at it. Surely what makes a statement like
"God says killing is wrong" morally relevant is not whether that
statement is true or not, but whether anyone is motivated to act in a
certain way by it.
> ...
> > All of which assumes that "I am happy" or "X is happy" are purely
> > descriptive propositions, rather than evaluative judgements. Since
> > there is no prima facie reason to accept that they are, there is no
> > reason to accept, on this argument alone, that Owl has succeeded in
> > bridging the is-ought gap.
>
> If you stipulate that there is such a gap, then you must claim that
> any
> statement falls on one side or the other. But there is no prima facie
> reason to claim that "X is happy" fails to describe. It may also be
> an evaluation, but that is a reason to deny that it is a description
> only after you stipulate the gap.
I don't see that the gap has to be stipulated as anything more than a
theorym by which statements can be analyzed to see if and where it
occurs; the assumption for each statement should be that it either
occurs or does not. Nor does it seem necessary, for the gap to be
shown in any case, that a statement be classed as unequivocally on
either side. For example, a syllogism like:
1. You should do what is good.
2. What is good is what makes people happy.
3. You should make people happy.
clearly shows the gap (as 1 is evaluative, and 2 is descriptive).
However, it is just as clear that the syllogism attempts to bridge the
is-ought gap simply by employing two different definitions of "good",
IOW by equivocation. The gap is shown not by the fact that good is
being used purely descriptively or evaluatively, but by the fact that it
is not.
Owl
> Well, the anti-realist doesn't take it as axiomatic that moral facts
aren't
> real. So, what you could do would be to come up with premises that the
> anti-realist accepts (meaning they can't simply be assertations about some
> moral fact existing), and then show that these premises imply something
> favorable to moral realism (that a certain moral fact exists, for
instance).
I mentioned this in another message, but it won't hurt to say it again.
Suppose someone thinks "No A's are B." One way of criticizing this view
might be to try to find an inconsistency in his position -- which is what
you're talking about above. But this would only work if the person's set of
philosophical beliefs contains a contradiction to begin with, and I don't
think you want to say that only self-contradictory beliefs can be refuted.
Another way of criticizing the view might be to give *an example* of an A
that is B. The person, when thinking about the example, might then realize
that he was wrong, because here is an A that is B. It is true that it
follows, directly and obviously (it's a 1-step proof!) from his general
view, that this particular thing isn't an A that is B. But that doesn't mean
that he will immediately say (or would be reasonable to say), "Oh, that's
not an A that is B."
For example, Gettier refuted the traditional definition of "knowledge" (in
terms of justified, true belief) by giving an example of a justified, true
belief that, he said, wasn't knowledge. When they heard his example, the
JTB-people didn't say, "Oh, that IS knowledge." What they said was, "You're
right. That isn't knowledge, so the JTB definition is wrong."
Was my example like Gettier's? Perhaps not so compelling. But it's not as if
I just came out and asserted, "Anti-realism is false" for no reason. (In
fact, I don't think I asserted that at all, in that message; the truth of
moral skepticism is logically compatible with the statement in the following
sentence.) I wanted to show that it was possible to accept a normative
proposition on intellectual grounds (non-emotionally, etc.). I tried to do
that by giving some examples. The right way to approach them is to try, so
far as possible, to clear your mind of theoretical presuppositions, and then
consider the claims, and see whether they seem correct to you; and *then*,
the important step, to introspect on whether that was caused by an emotion
of yours. Or, alternately: To observe some other people's beliefs in the
claims I cited, and look for evidence that the beliefs were caused by
various sources.
The right way to approach my examples isn't to say, "Those claims are all
false, because there are no moral values."
We're looking at a psychological question here, and so introspection (for
oneself), together with behavioral evidence (for other people) is the best
way to address it.
> Nope, it definitely doesn't seem like I accept those things because they
are
> "true."
The question was whether certain evaluative beliefs had an intellectual
source (not whether they are true). Of course, having an intellectual source
makes a belief more likely to be true than otherwise, but isn't the same
thing.
Hopefully, then, you can also see the point of the examples which followed,
where I gave examples of some other, non-evaluative statements, our
acceptance of which, I take it, has intellectual sources. When you
introspect, you will probably find no apparent difference between the ways
in which you hold these various beliefs; at least, I can find none. (If you
don't actually hold the beliefs at all, then that won't work on you; but it
works for lots of people.)
> >If you think "worse off" is ambiguous or equivocal, could you elaborate
on
> >what the two (or more?) uses of it are?
>
> Sure. The way I would commonly take "John is worse off" is something like
"John
> is less happy/satisfied" or "John has a lower standard of living from a
> meterial or mental-health standpoint" or "John will suffer more now/[ in
the
> long run]."
Well, I think there is an easy explanation for why you think "worse off" has
that meaning -- that the things you cite are in fact *examples* of John's
*interests*, i.e. things that partly constitute his welfare. It is in John's
interests (part of his welfare) to be happy; it is also in his interests to
have money; and to have health. This explains why you think that "John is
worse off" might mean that John has less of these things--and it explains
what all those things have in common.
To further clarify my thesis about the meaning of "better off", compare a
case in which someone had different beliefs from yours and mine about what
serves someone's interests. Suppose someone thinks that having lots of
offspring is in your interests. Then he would probably say things like, "Joe
is better off than Ben, because Joe has 12 kids, and Ben doesn't have any!"
In the Bible, Abraham was promised, as part of his reward for piety, that
his offspring would be numerous. Apparently, he was supposed to feel this as
a great benefit to him.
Now, would you want to say, "Oh, those people were just using yet another
sense of 'better off'"? But positing dozens of different senses of "better
off" (because there are probably going to be dozens of examples I can give),
or perhaps, positing a massively disjunctive concept of "better off"(*),
with nothing in common, is less plausible than the simple explanation, that
"better off" just refers to advancing a person's interest.
(* Disjunctive means having "or"'s in it. So "x is A = x is B or C or D
or..." would be a disjunctive definition of "is A.")
> Well, a concept can correspond to reality more or less closely than
another
> one. For instance suppose I have a concept of your haircut from reading
your
> HPO posts. Suppose from your posts that I think you'd let your hair grow
long
> and bushy, and therefore my mental concept of who I am responding to is
someone
> who has long bushy hair. This concept has a certain degree of accuracy or
> inaccurary.
I would have described this as a belief, rather than a concept: You believe
(or, perhaps, merely suspect) that I have long, bushy hair. I don't see how
your use of "concept" differs from "belief."
> I don't think so. In fact, all the examples of things that I don't think
exist
> that I might have you try this experiment with and things that you think
exist.
> I was going to start giving you examples like universals and math concepts
and
> such.
That often happens with philosophers. (It's a product of our consistency. ;)
> >I mentioned that this was connected
> >with one of the things the objectivists got right: the primacy of
existence
> >(over consciousness).
>
> Hm, sounds interesting. Maybe you could let me in on it if you think it
> explains everything wrong with my philosophy.
Not to sound like I'm dodging, but this is discussed, in part, in my
forthcoming book (probably in the summer of next year), which I recommend to
everyone. Very briefly, my claim (I illustrate this with examples from
Locke, Berkeley, and Kant) is that philosophers have very commonly confused
a vehicle of awareness with an object of awareness. A vehicle of awareness
is 'that by which' one is aware, whereas an object of awareness is 'that OF
which' one is aware. Roughly, the confusion is between cognitive processes
and their objects. And my claim is that one knows about the world by
*having* cognitive processes, which are directed at the world, not by *being
aware of* those processes. The confusion I was talking about would lead one
to argue that you have to inspect the properties of the cognitive process,
itself, in order to determine the objective facts (i.e., in order to
'really' determine the properties of the world *I* say is the object of
awareness). This in turn, I claim, can lead to things like
representationalism (actually, representationalism is just an *instance* of
the confusion in question), external world skepticism, idealism, global
skepticism, memory-skepticism; and even moral skepticism (though the last
won't be discussed in the book). Essentially, you get multifarious forms of
skepticism because the intrinsic properties of the cognitive process are
*never* sufficient to entail (or even confirm) any proposition about the
world (or: the object of cognition), because they're distinct things.
> Maybe the problem is just that I am trying to cater too much to your
notions of
> betterness. I could just say that there is zero connection between "better
off"
> and "good in an objective sense" as far as I can see.
Do you believe there is such a thing as a person's interests? Can there be a
fact that so-and-so is serving his own interests? (This is independent of
whether you think there's a fact about whether x should serve his own
interests, or someone else's interests, etc.)
> >So far, all I know is there is this relation, 'better off,' and it's hard
to
> >say if it should be classified as 'descriptive' or 'evaluative.' The only
> >thing that shows me so far is that some concepts are hard to classify in
> >that way. Maybe it is both, maybe it's neither, maybe it's halfway
between,
> >maybe the distinction doesn't apply; I don't know.
>
> Maybe you shouldn't base your arguments on concepts that you don't seem to
> understand.
I never do, you'll be relieved to hear.
> But from above you don't seem too sure on what exactly better off means,
so I
> don't know how you can be so certain.
I know what it means as well as I know what "table" and other ordinary words
mean. (Socrates used to say he didn't know what virtue was, because he
couldn't define it; well, in *that* sense, you might say that I hardly know
what anything is, including "better-off-ness"; but only in that sense.)
I have a friend named "Stuart." He doesn't have much hair on his head. I'm
not sure if he's bald or not, though. That doesn't mean I don't know what
"Stuart" (or "Stuart's head", or any related term) means! I'm not sure why
you assume one should automatically know whether every concept is
'evaluative' or 'descriptive'.
What about Gordon--he doesn't believe in the distinction in the first place.
Does that mean he doesn't understand any concepts at all, because he doesn't
know they're evaluative or descriptive?
> >punishing him "for" committing that crime. On the other hand, in your
view,
> >there is no intrinsic reason why a person shouldn't be either (a)
> >hypocritical, (b) self-contradictory, or (c) otherwise irrational.
>
> This is beside the point entirely. We aren't talking about whether the
person
> reading your argument *should* not have a problem accepting it on those
> grounds. We know that people tend to think self-contradictory or
irrational
> things are -- well irrational for some reason. This isn't about what they
> *should* do at all.
Something in here is beside the point ... If everyone agrees with my
example because everyone agrees that you shouldn't have contradictory
beliefs, then that's just as good an example of a universally-held normative
judgement as my original example.
Anyway, I still don't think you're explaining why people think certain
events to be *unjust*. It's a fact that almost everyone thinks the events
I'm talking about to be unjust. Furthermore, I think it's pretty clear that
their thinking that has to do with their intuitions specifically about
*justice*. Punishing the innocent is a paradigm case of 'injustice' --
that's what the example is about.
I actually doubt that ordinary people reading my sentence would have read it
the way you did; at least I didn't. I don't think it would ever occur to
most people that "punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit" might mean
"knowing that he didn't commit the crime but having the belief that he did
be your reason for action." If they did, again, that might explain their
thinking that punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit was
*illogical*, or hypocritical, or something like that; but that's not what
they think. They think it is *unjust*.
> I don't think the moral part of your view is obvious at all. If we remove
the
> trickyness, and just say "it is unjust to punishing people for no reason"
or
> something, then that doesn't seem obvious in a factual way to me at all.
Same
Okay, it seems obvious to me. Let me ask you this: *before* you adopted an
anti-realist stance, would it have seemed obvious to you?
> >Cultural indoctrination might explain convergence among people within a
> >culture. What explains cross-cultural convergence?
>
> Biology.
Another explanation is "truth." So, then we have to ask which explanation is
better, simpler, and so on. I humbly suggest that your genes don't implant a
whole bunch of specific beliefs into you. They only give you capacities,
physiological structures, and such.
> Well you often say things like "if all people think P, then it is pretty
strong
> evidence for P, and a person saying not-P should have the burden of proof"
and
> such. When you say these things I assume you mean P to be that morality is
> real. I don't see any evidence that most people think P, though.
I have in mind "It is unjust to punish the innocent" and such like.
> >Experts on morality? I should note that David Friedman and I have
probably
> >spent much more time thinking and reading about moral philosophy than
> >Richard Feynman, so if you wanted to look for experts...
>
> Maybe. I think I'd be more reliant on his not fooling himself, though.
I sure wouldn't.
> debate, though). I don't really have much respect for people involved in
> humanties' ability to discover truth about reality. When we look at who
has
> discovered truth in reality -- who has the proper methods in place of dong
so,
I don't think broad categories like "the humanities"--which lumps together
English, cultural studies, philosophy, art history, world history, etc.--are
very useful. My opinions of a) cultural studies, b) philosophy, and c)
history are completely different.
> and such, instead of just talking about books or speculating on morality,
it
> seems that those in the hard sciences are generaly the only ones who
> consistantly establish the truth of anything and are able to demonstrate
it.
I have some of these logic books here, y'know, and under "appeal to
authority," they list some of the conditions under which an appeal to
authority is a fallacy. They list "when an expert is speaking outside his
area of expertise" as one such condition. One of the examples was citing
Einstein as an authority to show that we should have nuclear disarmament, or
something like that.
From the examples that I have seen (and I know you don't know what I'm
referring to specifically here, so this won't be too persuasive to you, but
it's the truth), scientists tend to be incompetent outside their narrow area
of expertise. They tend to be *particularly* naive and unreasonable when
they talk about anything philosophical (that is, even more so than when
talking about other things outside their areas of expertise), because, I
speculate, they think that there isn't anything to learn in the field of
philosophy, that all you have to do is just speculate on a Sunday afternoon,
and you're a philosopher. They don't think that about, say, chemistry, which
is why a physicist, while being ignorant of chemistry, won't go on making
naive statements about chemistry that any chemist could easily refute; the
physicist would probably at least know that he was ignorant. Similarly, he
would know that he was ignorant of history, or economics, or other sciences,
so he wouldn't pontificate about it. But he probably wouldn't realize the
same thing about philosophy.
Really, it's a lot like the Randians. Kind of like Peikoff writing his essay
on the analytic-synthetic distinction but not apparently having read Frege's
paper on sense and reference; or Peikoff and Rand writing all about how Kant
was a tremendously evil man, without seeming to have read much of Kant or
the enormous literature on the interpretation of same. (Cathcart has been
making a big deal about this lately.)
This is off the subject, but let me add this. Ayn Rand was a brilliant
woman; possibly a genius. Nevertheless, she wrote some very naive and easily
refuted stuff about philosophy. Why? Because she didn't think it required
any *study*. She made the kind of errors that *anyone* with that attitude
would be bound to make.
Here's another analogy. Almost anyone, after learning the rules of chess,
would still not be able to play well. (No, I'm not saying philosophy is a
game -- that's for the ARIans out there.) Say he was a genius, the smartest
man in the world. But he decides that he doesn't need to study chess theory
because he can figure everything out by himself, right? He would get wiped
out by an average intelligence player who *had* studied theory. </end
tirade>
> From what I know, there isn't a lot of conflict between those in the
> hard-sciences trying to impose their theories on everyone. Physicists and
> biologists and chemists, computer scientists, engineers, don't seem to
> contradict eachother or say "everything is an organism" "everything is a
> chemical compound." (Actualy I don't know about chemists, haven't read
I bet they'd disagree greatly about philosophical questions, just like
everyone else. This would be an interesting experiment, though I don't think
I'll muster the resources to carry it out: See if there are definite
philosophical trends among scientists (other than the trends among the
population as a whole). Another interesting thing would be to see if there
was a significant correlation between scientists' beliefs about things
outside their areas of expertise and the truth (that is, a stronger
correlation than that in the general population). Of course, you have to
pick things that people typically have beliefs about without having studied
them -- political subjects would be good.
> (1) Why you think consciousness must be non-physical, which I talk about
in
> another post.
...
> My (2) still needs to be fleshed out more. (1) is the only thing I am
really
> curious about from you at the moment. So, if you feel like cutting things
that
> you feel to be nonessential from your next reply that don't appear above,
feel
> free.
Oops, only got to this at the end. That should be another thread anyway.
Gordon G. Sollars
> > Ideally, a person does find a true
> > moral statement (that relates to an action the person can take) to be
> > motivating, but this is a contingent fact about the psychology of the
> > person in question.
>
> That is an odd way of looking at it. Surely what makes a statement like
> "God says killing is wrong" morally relevant is not whether that
> statement is true or not, but whether anyone is motivated to act in a
> certain way by it.
Surely not - at least as long as the possibility of moral realism is at
issue. If it were not true that "God says that killing is wrong", then
the issue of killing would not have any moral relevance at all - so long
as it is God that determines what is moral. Of course, as I said to Mark
with regard to Christianity, any serious theologian sees the point in
asking whether something is wrong because God wills it or whether God
forbids something /because/ it is wrong.
On a realist view, we certainly want people to be motivated to act on
true moral statements, but motivation is not the sole test of moral
relevance. What is in fact morally correct is obviously of great
relevance.
...
> > If you stipulate that there is such a gap, then you must claim that
> > any
> > statement falls on one side or the other. But there is no prima facie
> > reason to claim that "X is happy" fails to describe. It may also be
> > an evaluation, but that is a reason to deny that it is a description
> > only after you stipulate the gap.
>
> I don't see that the gap has to be stipulated as anything more than a
> theorym by which statements can be analyzed to see if and where it
> occurs; the assumption for each statement should be that it either
> occurs or does not.
I don't see what you are trying to show by this. What is this
"theorym"? What does it mean that for each statement the gap "occurs" or
not? Does this occurrence sort the statements to one side of the gap or
the other? If so, how is this different from what I said? If not, what
exactly are you saying?
> Nor does it seem necessary, for the gap to be
> shown in any case, that a statement be classed as unequivocally on
> either side. For example, a syllogism like:
>
> 1. You should do what is good.
> 2. What is good is what makes people happy.
> 3. You should make people happy.
>
> clearly shows the gap (as 1 is evaluative, and 2 is descriptive).
So (1) and (2) /are/ on different sides on your view. The gap is already
there, prior to the argument.
> However, it is just as clear that the syllogism attempts to bridge the
> is-ought gap simply by employing two different definitions of "good",
> IOW by equivocation.
You have switched to looking at an argument, not a statement. My claim
was that /if/ you stipulate a gap, you must go on to put statements on
one side or the other. Note that this is exactly at you have done.
> not by the fact that good is
> being used purely descriptively or evaluatively, but by the fact that it
> is not.
If a person accepts this argument, it seems clear that he is denying an
is/ought gap. You reject the argument, apparently because it uses "good"
equivocally. And why is it "equivocal"? Because it seeks to bridge the
gap you have assumed. Which is what I said.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
Owl
news:8v4jf6$h9f$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> > One of the big issues between realism & anti-realism is this: Can a
> > moral statement be accepted on the basis of reason, or must it always
> > rely on a sentiment or feeling?
>
> That seems to be a false dichotomy. A moral statement may be accepted
> on the basis of reasoning from pre-held moral statements, and yet still
> rely (fundamentally) on moral sentiments or feelings.
I meant that sort of case to be included in the "rely on sentiment or
feeling" category.
> Likewise the moral statements you hold are ultimately based on your
> knowledge of your (and, to a lesser extent, other people's) moral
> sentiments.
There's where we disagree.
> If no one had any sentiments or feelings, then no one would
> make moral claims -- there would be no interest in doing so, and
> arguably no better or worse for anyone.
The above claim, while related, is not the one at issue here. The question
isn't what claims people would make in a world in which they had no
emotions. It is, rather, about whether the acceptance of moral claims always
depends (causally) on emotions. The counter-factual test of causality is
well-known to be false.
> > 1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only
> > in that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in
> > B, while no one is worse off, then A is better than B.
>
> It seems likely that all would evaluate A as being better than B -- but
> if someone didn't, on what basis would you say they had made a
> *mistake*, rather than simply having a strange set of preferences?
I would say they made a mistake, on the basis that A is better than B, of
course. (On what basis would I say that someone who claimed the sky is red
had made a mistake? That the sky isn't red.)
> And you *had* to put the word "innocent" in there -- for if you had not
> people would have disagreed with you. But "innocent" is itself a
> morally loaded term: it applies to people who are not "guilty", that
> is, people who have not done anything they "shouldn't" have. Without
I'm not sure I see the point.
My question is whether the acceptance of (1) is intellectually or
emotionally based. It seems to me that it is intellectually based. This has
partly to do with introspection, and partly to do with the universality of
the judgement. I don't see the relevance, to this question, of the fact that
"innocent" is also an evaluative term.
> > 2. Other things being equal, if a person is happier, then he is
> > thereby better off than if he is less happy.
>
> This is not true. Let A and B be two situations that differ only in
> that some people in A are happier than some people in B -- we may even
> stipulate that these people are innocent, if you like. By 2 these
> people (the happier ones) are better off in A than in B.
Right.
> But let me describe A (and B) a bit more. This situation is one where
> there is a world-wide gov't that tolerates no dissent. People are not
> free to act as they like -- and criticism of the gov't or anyone in the
> gov't is met with instant punishment (when found out). Most people
> there are miserable -- only people actually in the gov't *and those
> people in A who are magically happy* are not miserable.
Ok. So far, it seems to me that the magically happy people are better off.
> Now it is not clear to me (nor, I would wager, to libertarians and
> Objectivists) that these non-gov't people are better off happy than
> unhappy. Unhappiness is a motivator -- it motivates us to do something
> to end our unhappiness.
If you would like to further elaborate the story, so that in B the people
throw off their oppressive government, while in A they do not, then you're
simply introducing another value -- freedom -- which is present in B but not
in A. This would explain why someone might think A to be worse than B (even
if you assume that after throwing off the oppressive government, they're
still unhappy). But that doesn't show that happiness wasn't a value. That
doesn't mean that the greater degree of happiness in A wasn't itself an
advantage that A had over B. It just means that there was also a
disadvantage, having to do with a different value. I don't claim that
happiness is the only value.
> You might object that other things are not equal if their motivation to
> rebel has been quenched -- but then you must admit that 2 describes an
> impossible situation -- happy people are not motivated to rebel, and so
> we cannot change one without changing the other.
I don't see why I must admit that. First, it would be easy to imagine a
situation in which there was no oppressive government, and so the issue you
raise here doesn't arise.
Second, I don't see that it's a necessary truth that happy people don't
rebel against their oppressive government. I can imagine a world in which
the happy people overthrow their government, because they see that freedom
is intrinsically valuable (after all, your argument seems to presuppose that
that's true; if you're right, how could it be impossible for the people in A
to see that and therefore to see that rebelling would be good?)
I think you're trying too hard to find something to disagree with. I doubt
that you think happiness isn't good.
> > [...] The strength of the argument is that it seems impossible to
> > deny the connection between better-off-ness and goodness, nor that
> > between better-off-ness and happiness.
>
> These statements are true, as far as I can see. The problem is that
> they do not provide a non-evaluative basis for evaluative statements.
I think I mentioned at some point in there that I don't care. The question
of the message wasn't, "Can you deduce an evaluative proposition from
non-evaluative ones?" It was, "Do some evaluative beliefs have an
intellectual motivation?"
> What the anti-realist will care about is: is there any killing that is
> objectively a murder. But what does that mean?
...
I think it means something along the lines of: "Is being a murder an
objective property?" Or, if you prefer it in the formal mode: "Does 'is a
murder' ascribe an objective property?" (The latter should be acceptable
even if you don't believe the property of being a murder exists.) An
objective property (roughly) is a property of an object as it is in itself,
i.e., (roughly) a property that is independent of how the bearer of the
property is regarded.
> And suppose we take it to mean "is there any killing that any rational
> person would disapprove of?" Well this, too, gets us nowhere. To be
> rational is to be governed by reason. If reason is objective (as we
> believe it to be), then the outputs of reason are the same *so long as
> we start from the same premises*.
I'm not sure what "reason is objective" means--maybe it just means the same
as the last half of that sentence.
> And what premises do we start from
> with morality? Why, with our feelings (possibly including pre-existing
> moral sentiments). Why is happy better than unhappy? Because it feels
> better. Subjectivism is at the very heart of your moral claims.
It sounds to me like you are simply answering the question in the negative,
rather than showing that there is something wrong with that way of
formulating the question.
Some people claim that values (or evaluative beliefs or attitudes) are
produced by the faculty of reason; others that they are produced by feelings
or desires, or something else mushy like that. I don't see the difficulty
with understanding this dispute.
> Moral terms can also usefully be compared to other terms in common use.
> Suppose you and I have a dispute about whether some object is a table.
> If we can't settle it between us, we could consult others for their
> opinions. If everyone else stood against me, I would conform with the
> common usage. If almost everyone (in a language community) says that
> something is a table, then it *is* a table. If there is another
> community somewhere nearby that would not call this thing a table, then
> the word "table" has slightly different meanings in the two communities.
I'm not sure what generalization you're implying from this. Suppose that
almost everyone in a certain language community asserts that the earth is
stationary at the center of the cosmos. That doesn't make the Earth
stationary at the center of the cosmos. And in general, if almost everyone
says that a is F *because almost everyone has mistaken beliefs*, then a
isn't thereby F.
> Now compare the use of the word "good". If you and I have a dispute
> about whether something is good, I doubt either of us would abide by
> popular opinion -- even if it were as strong as the consensus on the
> table. And if there were two communities that disagreed about whether
> something was good, that would not be considered as an instance where
> "good" had slightly different meanings there. Moral terms are not
> assigned by popular will.
Suppose there were another community, in which there was a complete reversal
in the uses of "good" and "bad." These people, let's say, apply "bad" to all
the things we normally call "good", and "good" to all the things we normally
call "bad". Then it would be reasonable to hypothesize that their use of
"good" actually means bad, and their "bad" actually means good.
I don't see any difference between the workings of "table" and "good" so
far: it is possible to have a community with mistaken beliefs about tables,
and it is possible to have a community with different meanings for moral
words.
> Since the extension of "good" is not fixed by community usage, perhaps
> its intension is? Only in the most basic sense -- only in terms of
> other evaluative statements. As soon as an attempt to reduce the term
> to non-evaluative concretes appears, it is shot down by one or another
> brand of realist.
Well, the concept is irreducible.
> > - Given any two points, there is a line between them.
> > - A straight line is the shortest path between any two points.
> > - Any line can be extended in either direction an arbitrary distance.
...
> They are definitional truths, in spite of the lack of a definition. The
> terms are primitives, and the above are constraints on the use of the
> primitives.
At this point, we could now have a big debate about mathematical knowledge,
or I could just give up. I think I'll just inform you that I think that's
wrong, and I don't see why one would think such a thing. Well, I see
why--in order to try to avoid admitting a priori knowledge. I'm not moved by
that motivation.
> > In any case, there is no introspective evidence for the claim that
> > the 'conceptual truths' listed above are expressions of emotion, or
> > products of emotions, rather than being judgements. And as
> > judgements, there is no evidence at all against any one of them.
>
> They are useless as judgements. They tell us nothing about the kinds of
> moral claims that people dispute. They tell us nothing about abortion,
> nothing about capital punishment, nothing about pre-marital sex, nothing
> about adultery or bribery or buggery or homosexuality. These "truths"
I wasn't trying to resolve any controversial moral issues. I was just trying
to give some examples of some moral claims that have an intellectual source.
> are merely consequences of the inferential relationships between the
> terms, and so are not "moral claims" in any interesting sense.
Above, I think you agreed that they were indeed evaluative, so perhaps what
you mean is just that they aren't very interesting evaluative claims. No
argument there--I don't find them particularly exciting either. But they are
examples illustrating my thesis.
George Dance
> In article <8v4qe3$mfc$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, George Dance writes...
> > That is an odd way of looking at it. Surely what makes a statement
like
> > "God says killing is wrong" morally relevant is not whether that
> > statement is true or not, but whether anyone is motivated to act in
> > a certain way by it.
>
gsol...@pobox.com wrote:
> Surely not - at least as long as the possibility of moral realism is
> at issue. If it were not true that "God says that killing is wrong",
> then the issue of killing would not have any moral relevance at all -
> so long as it is God that determines what is moral.
But the whole point of moral realism, and indeed of morality per se, is
to motivate action. Moral principles and rules are principles and rules
/for/ behavior: the claim that X is a moral rule is the claim that: (1)
if I am faced with the choice of doing X or not, then I should do X; (2)
I should encourage, pressure, or if necessary force, others faced with
the same choice to do X. Whether X is "true" is a morally relevant
question, only because whether something is true affects what
people believe, and consequently how they act. Consider: if it were
true that "God says that killing is wrong," but no one were motivated
by that statement to act as per (1) or (2) - say, if absolutely no one
cared what God said - then in what way could it possibly be said to be
"morally relevant"?
> Of course, as I said to Mark
> with regard to Christianity, any serious theologian sees the point in
> asking whether something is wrong because God wills it or whether God
> forbids something /because/ it is wrong.
Yes.
> On a realist view, we certainly want people to be motivated to act on
> true moral statements, but motivation is not the sole test of moral
> relevance. What is in fact morally correct is obviously of great
> relevance.
Only, I think, because people in general want their beliefs to be
correct, as they want their actions to be efficacious. So I agree
denying that "correctness" can be morally relevant, but see that
relevance as being totally contingent.
>
...
gsol...@pobox.com wrote:
> > > If you stipulate that there is such a gap, then you must claim
> > > that any statement
> > > falls on one side or the other. But there is no prima facie
> > > reason to claim that "X is happy" fails to describe. It may also
> > > be an evaluation, but that is a reason to deny that it is a
> > > description only after you stipulate the gap.
> >
> > I don't see that the gap has to be stipulated as anything more than
a
> > theorym by which statements can be analyzed to see if and where it
> > occurs; the assumption for each statement should be that it either
> > occurs or does not.
>
> I don't see what you are trying to show by this. What is this
> "theorym"?
A misspelled theory. 8) Meaning only that the idea of the is-ought gap
is falsifiable, or fallible.
> What does it mean that for each statement the gap "occurs" or not?
That it should not be assumed, or stipulated, in advance that any
statement (actually, I meant any argument) does (or does not) contain a
gap; rather, whether it does can be shown only by analyzing the argument
itself.
> Does this occurrence sort the statements to one side of the gap or
> the other? If so, how is this different from what I said? If not,
> what exactly are you saying?
First (above) that I was not simply stipulating that every argument with
a normative conclusion contains an is-ought gap. Second (below), that
it may not always be possible to sort each statement in the way you
suggest.
> > Nor does it seem necessary, for the gap to be
> > shown in any case, that a statement be classed as unequivocally on
> > either side. For example, a syllogism like:
> >
> > 1. You should do what is good.
> > 2. What is good is what makes people happy.
> > 3. You should make people happy.
> >
> > clearly shows the gap (as 1 is evaluative, and 2 is descriptive).
>
> So (1) and (2) /are/ on different sides on your view. The gap is
> already there, prior to the argument.
Only because I wrote it into the argument, for purposes of illustration.
It is possible to separate clearly descriptive and evaluative
statements. However, it is not always possible to do so:
>
> > However, it is just as clear that the syllogism attempts to bridge
the
> > is-ought gap simply by employing two different definitions of
> > "good", IOW by equivocation.
>
> You have switched to looking at an argument, not a statement. My
> claim was that /if/ you stipulate a gap, you must go on to put
> statements on one side or the other. Note that this is exactly at you
> have done.
It was easy in this case, because I know what the argument means: I
wrote it. If I did not, though, there would or could be ambiguity,
precisely because of the equivocation. For instance, I know that "good"
in 2 means "good" in a descriptive sense - "good" is being defined as
"what makes one happy." However, that would not be clear to me if it
were someone else's statement; it could be the case that "good" in 2
meant "what you should do," as it does in 1. In that case 2 is an
evaluation, not a description. So (if this were someone else's
argument) I could have no idea on which side of the gap to put 2, or (in
that case, since all the steps would be evaluative) whether the gap
occurs in this argument or not. However, if that were the case, I could
still dismiss the argument, as it would be viciously circular (3 would
have been asserted, by this reading of 2, as a premise).
> > not by the fact that good is
> > being used purely descriptively or evaluatively, but by the fact
> > that it is not.
>
> If a person accepts this argument, it seems clear that he is denying
> an is/ought gap. You reject the argument, apparently because it uses
> "good" equivocally. And why is it "equivocal"? Because it seeks to
> bridge the gap you have assumed. Which is what I said.
My reply to what you said (which admittedly could have been made more
clearly) is that, first, I am not assuming that the gap exists in any
argument, but only that it might exist; second, the presence of
equivocal terms may make it impossible, in any particular argument, to
show exactly where the gap appears; third, that step does not appear to
be necessary - if the argument starts with purely descriptive premises,
and reaches a purely normative conclusion, that is evidence enough that
there is a gap, even though equivocation may make it impossible to say
precisely where it is.
For example, Owl's original argument in this thread:
-------------- PASTE --------------
1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B only in
that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they are in B,
while no one is worse off, then A is better than B.
2. Other things being equal, if a person is happier, then he is thereby
better off than if he is less happy.
3. Therefore, other things being equal, increases in people's happiness
and decreases in suffering are good.
-------------- PASTE --------------
relies on the equivocal term "better off". Is that a descriptive term,
an evaluative one, or one being used in two different ways? I simply
cannot say for sure. It appears that "better off" is being used in two
different senses, exactly the same as "good" in my argument above. In
that case the gap falls between 1 and 2. But it may be the case that
"better off" means only "better", meaning that 1 is analytically true,
and that 2 is not a description at all but a normative judgement about
happiness. In that case, the gap does not appear in the argument at
all (as all the premises are evaluative); but also in that case, the
argument does not reach an evaluative conclusion from descriptive
premises, as it contains no descriptive premises. So it is not an
example that falsifies the is-ought theory.
Mark Young
>>> One of the big issues between realism & anti-realism is this: Can a
>>> moral statement be accepted on the basis of reason, or must it
>>> always rely on a sentiment or feeling?
Mark Young:
>> That seems to be a false dichotomy. A moral statement may be
>> accepted on the basis of reasoning from pre-held moral statements,
>> and yet still rely (fundamentally) on moral sentiments or feelings.
Owl:
> I meant that sort of case to be included in the "rely on sentiment or
> feeling" category.
But that makes your first argument in your original post pointless. It
would not be enough to show that 3 follows from 1 and 2; you would also
have had to show that 1 and 2 do not rely on sentiment or feeling *at
any level* -- for if 1 or 2 does, then 3 does as well.
>> Likewise the moral statements you hold are ultimately based on your
>> knowledge of your (and, to a lesser extent, other people's) moral
>> sentiments.
> There's where we disagree.
So we do.
>> If no one had any sentiments or feelings, then no one would
>> make moral claims -- there would be no interest in doing so, and
>> arguably no better or worse for anyone.
> The above claim, while related, is not the one at issue here. The
> question isn't what claims people would make in a world in which they
> had no emotions. It is, rather, about whether the acceptance of moral
> claims always depends (causally) on emotions.
You see, this sounds different than what you said above. I said
"fundamentally" above, not "causally". That is, I did not say that
you accept this moral statement because of an emotional reaction to it,
but that your reasoning is ultimately based on your emotional reactions
(to concrete situations). It is not that such-and-such an emotion
caused you to accept this moral claim, it is that your moral reasoning
is grounded in emotions.
> The counter-factual test of causality is well-known to be false.
What is the counter-factual test of causality, and (if it will not be
obvious when I read it) how is it relevent?
>>> 1. If A and B are two states of affairs, and if A differs from B
>>> only in that some (innocent) people in A are better off than they
>>> are in B, while no one is worse off, then A is better than B.
>> It seems likely that all would evaluate A as being better than B --
>> but if someone didn't, on what basis would you say they had made a
>> *mistake*, rather than simply having a strange set of preferences?
> I would say they made a mistake, on the basis that A is better than
> B, of course.
Of course -- on the basis of your belief in moral realism and that
particular evaluative judgement.
[...]
>> And you *had* to put the word "innocent" in there -- for if you had
>> not people would have disagreed with you. But "innocent" is itself
>> a morally loaded term: it applies to people who are not "guilty",
>> that is, people who have not done anything they "shouldn't" have.
> I'm not sure I see the point.
>
> My question is whether the acceptance of (1) is intellectually or
> emotionally based. It seems to me that it is intellectually based.
> This has partly to do with introspection, and partly to do with the
> universality of the judgement. I don't see the relevance, to this
> question, of the fact that "innocent" is also an evaluative term.
My point was that reasoning is a common way to come to accept moral
claims, but that the reasoning must be from pre-accepted moral claims
or from subjective reactions.
Your claim, in order to make it "universal" had to be tainted by the
addition of a moral term -- making it useless as a premise to show that
moral claims can be based on reason *alone*.
>>> 2. Other things being equal, if a person is happier, then he is
>>> thereby better off than if he is less happy.
>> This is not true. Let A and B be two situations that differ only in
>> that some people in A are happier than some people in B -- we may
>> even stipulate that these people are innocent, if you like. By 2
>> these people (the happier ones) are better off in A than in B.
> Right.
>> But let me describe A (and B) a bit more. This situation is one
>> where there is a world-wide gov't that tolerates no dissent. People
>> are not free to act as they like -- and criticism of the gov't or
>> anyone in the gov't is met with instant punishment (when found out).
>> Most people there are miserable -- only people actually in the gov't
>> *and those people in A who are magically happy* are not miserable.
> Ok. So far, it seems to me that the magically happy people are better
> off.
And that's fine by me. But I doubt that many here would share your
opinion.
>> Now it is not clear to me (nor, I would wager, to libertarians and
>> Objectivists) that these non-gov't people are better off happy than
>> unhappy. Unhappiness is a motivator -- it motivates us to do
>> something to end our unhappiness.
> If you would like to further elaborate the story, so that in B the
> people throw off their oppressive government, while in A they do not,
> then you're simply introducing another value -- freedom -- which is
> present in B but not in A.
To elaborate the story that way would be to deny the ceteris paribus
assumption. Many believe that the people in A are worse off *because*
they are happy in spite of their oppression. They are less human than
their counterparts in B.
> This would explain why someone might think A to be worse than B (even
> if you assume that after throwing off the oppressive government,
> they're still unhappy). But that doesn't show that happiness wasn't a
> value. That doesn't mean that the greater degree of happiness in A
> wasn't itself an advantage that A had over B. It just means that
> there was also a disadvantage, having to do with a different value.
There is no freedom in either situation -- the *only* difference is in
the happiness. *You* say that A is better than B. Someone else says
that B is better than A. Convince me that the difference is not simply
because the two of you have fundamentally different emotional reactions
to the two situations.
[...]
> I doubt that you think happiness isn't good.
I don't think happiness is good per se -- I think people label "good"
those things that make them happy. Happiness that comes out of a
bottle or needle is worthless unless it leads to "good" consequences.
>>> [...] The strength of the argument is that it seems impossible to
>>> deny the connection between better-off-ness and goodness, nor that
>>> between better-off-ness and happiness.
>> These statements are true, as far as I can see. The problem is that
>> they do not provide a non-evaluative basis for evaluative statements.
> I think I mentioned at some point in there that I don't care. The
> question of the message wasn't, "Can you deduce an evaluative
> proposition from non-evaluative ones?" It was, "Do some evaluative
> beliefs have an intellectual motivation?"
Have no emotional motivation, you mean -- you said above that when any
of the premises had any non-intellectual motivation that it fell under
the classification of emotionally motivated. And thus you should care,
for you cannot prove your thesis until you give an evaluation that
depends only on non-evaluative facts.
>> What the anti-realist will care about is: is there any killing that
>> is objectively a murder. But what does that mean?
> [...] An objective property (roughly) is a property of an object as
> it is in itself, i.e., (roughly) a property that is independent of
> how the bearer of the property is regarded.
>> And suppose we take it to mean "is there any killing that any
>> rational person would disapprove of?" Well this, too, gets us
>> nowhere. To be rational is to be governed by reason. If reason is
>> objective (as we believe it to be), then the outputs of reason are
>> the same *so long as we start from the same premises*.
> I'm not sure what "reason is objective" means--maybe it just means
> the same as the last half of that sentence.
An objective process would be one that does not vary based on how the
objects in the process are regarded.
>> And what premises do we start from with morality? Why, with our
>> feelings (possibly including pre-existing moral sentiments). Why is
>> happy better than unhappy? Because it feels better. Subjectivism
>> is at the very heart of your moral claims.
> It sounds to me like you are simply answering the question in the
> negative, rather than showing that there is something wrong with that
> way of formulating the question.
>
> Some people claim that values (or evaluative beliefs or attitudes)
> are produced by the faculty of reason; others that they are produced
> by feelings or desires, or something else mushy like that. I don't
> see the difficulty with understanding this dispute.
I shall assume that, as above, you intend that "[evaluations] are
produced by feelings or desires" includes "evaluations are produced by
reason from a foundation that includes facts, feelings and desires".
Now the question becomes "Is 'is a murder' an evaluation that can be
produced by reason from a base that consists only of facts not
themselves produced from feelings and desires?"
Is that a misunderstanding of your point?
>> Moral terms can also usefully be compared to other terms in common
>> use. Suppose you and I have a dispute about whether some object is
>> a table.[...] If almost everyone (in a language community) says
>> that something is a table, then it *is* a table.[...]
> I'm not sure what generalization you're implying from this.[...] if
> almost everyone says that a is F *because almost everyone has
> mistaken beliefs*, then a isn't thereby F.
The point is that some terms have their extensions set by community
usage. I went on to explain that "good" is not one of them.
>> Now compare the use of the word "good".[...] Moral terms are not
>> assigned by popular will.
> Suppose there were another community, in which there was a complete
> reversal in the uses of "good" and "bad."
Small, community-wide variations in the extension of "table" are dealt
with as dialectical differences, but similar differences in the
extension of "good" are not.
[...]
> I don't see any difference between the workings of "table" and "good"
> so far[....]
So is it the British or the Americans who are mistaken when they speak
of "tabling" a bill?
>> [...] As soon as an attempt to reduce the term to non-evaluative
>> concretes appears, it is shot down by one or another brand of
>> realist.
> Well, the concept is irreducible.
If that were true then it would mean different things in different
communities, and the Northerner should have had no objection to the
southerner saying that slavery was good -- it's simply a linguistic
difference between the communities.
>>> - Given any two points, there is a line between them.
>>> - A straight line is the shortest path between any two points.
>>> - Any line can be extended in either direction an arbitrary
>>> distance.
>> They are definitional truths, in spite of the lack of a definition.
>> The terms are primitives, and the above are constraints on the use
>> of the primitives.
> At this point, we could now have a big debate about mathematical
> knowledge, or I could just give up. I think I'll just inform you that
> I think that's wrong, and I don't see why one would think such a
> thing. Well, I see why--in order to try to avoid admitting a priori
> knowledge.
Well I suppose someone might say it to avoid admitting a priori
knowledge. It's not why *I* say it -- I have no opinion on a priori
knowledge (I never quite understood what that debate was about).
The reason I say is because it is the way I learned it -- perhaps from
people who were trying to avoid admitting a priori knowledge, I suppose.
I was taught that the geometric terms are primitives (undefined) and
that they are related in these ways (insert several items -- including
all three of the above -- here).
[...]
>>> In any case, there is no introspective evidence for the claim that
>>> the 'conceptual truths' listed above are expressions of emotion,
>>> or products of emotions, rather than being judgements. And as
>>> judgements, there is no evidence at all against any one of them.
>> They are useless as judgements. They tell us nothing about the
>> kinds of moral claims that people dispute. They tell us nothing
>> about abortion, nothing about capital punishment, nothing about
>> pre-marital sex, nothing about adultery or bribery or buggery or
>> homosexuality.
> I wasn't trying to resolve any controversial moral issues. I was just
> trying to give some examples of some moral claims that have an
> intellectual source.
They are none of them judgements -- they are inferential relationships
between judgement terms.
>> are merely consequences of the inferential relationships between the
>> terms, and so are not "moral claims" in any interesting sense.
> Above, I think you agreed that they were indeed evaluative, so
> perhaps what you mean is just that they aren't very interesting
> evaluative claims. No argument there--I don't find them particularly
> exciting either. But they are examples illustrating my thesis.
If your thesis is only that those statements are true, then I was wrong
to object (except to the ones that weren't true). I took your thesis to
be of more relevence to the debate between realists and anti-realists --
a claim about substantive moral judgements.
Owl
> But that makes your first argument in your original post pointless. It
> would not be enough to show that 3 follows from 1 and 2; you would also
> have had to show that 1 and 2 do not rely on sentiment or feeling *at
> any level* -- for if 1 or 2 does, then 3 does as well.
That's why I spent all that time talking about how 1 and 2 were conceptual
truths.
> What is the counter-factual test of causality, and (if it will not be
> obvious when I read it) how is it relevent?
The counter-factual test is this: A causes B if and only if: if A did not
happen, B would not have happened. This bi-conditional, while tempting, is
subject to various counter-examples. The relevance is that one should not
subsitute "if you didn't have an emotion, you wouldn't judge that p" for
"your emotion caused you to judge that p."
> My point was that reasoning is a common way to come to accept moral
> claims, but that the reasoning must be from pre-accepted moral claims
> or from subjective reactions.
>
> Your claim, in order to make it "universal" had to be tainted by the
> addition of a moral term -- making it useless as a premise to show that
> moral claims can be based on reason *alone*.
I really don't see how the occurrence of an evaluative term "taints" the
sentence. I don't see why you think I've taken on, or should have taken on,
a project that commits me to not using evaluative terms in those premises.
My premises also contained the evaluative term "better" and the
possibly-evaluative term "better off"--why didn't you claim that those terms
'taint' the premises?
Maybe you're saying that because "innocent" occurs in the premise, it shows
that the premise depends on another moral judgement. But what other
judgement? And again, why do you object to "innocent" on this ground but not
"better"?
> > If you would like to further elaborate the story, so that in B the
> > people throw off their oppressive government, while in A they do not,
> > then you're simply introducing another value -- freedom -- which is
> > present in B but not in A.
>
> To elaborate the story that way would be to deny the ceteris paribus
> assumption. Many believe that the people in A are worse off *because*
> they are happy in spite of their oppression. They are less human than
> their counterparts in B.
Oh, I see. Last time, it sounded like the whole point was about how
unhappiness would make you more likely to throw off your oppressive
government.
I guess I'm not seeing how the people in A are supposed to be less human,
merely because they are happier. Maybe you can argue that they are worse
off insofar as they fail to understand the correct political principles and
so fail to understand that their government is oppressive ("better to be
Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, and all that). But then you're
just saying that knowledge and understanding is a value (in addition to
happiness), which I don't deny. Alternately, one could argue that people are
worse off if they are happy *about something which is bad*, because this is
a moral defect. But this is the same thing again. All you can do is show
examples of some other value, besides happiness, in respect of which the
people in A are worse off. This doesn't make the happiness, itself, not a
value. In fact, you're just describing a situation in which 'other things
aren't equal,' and then arguing that therefore either (a) happiness isn't a
value other things being equal, or (b) other things are never equal. But
either (a) or (b) would be a non sequitur.
> the classification of emotionally motivated. And thus you should care,
> for you cannot prove your thesis until you give an evaluation that
> depends only on non-evaluative facts.
I don't see why you say that, unless you're assuming that I couldn't find an
evaluative proposition that we believed non-emotionally, which would beg the
question.
I never took on the task of deducing an evaluative proposition from
non-evaluative ones, and I don't see why I should--even though you and User
apparently want me to.
> The point is that some terms have their extensions set by community
> usage. I went on to explain that "good" is not one of them.
There are at least two things that you might mean by that (first sentence).
Take the term "table", which allegedly is among the terms whose 'extensions
are set by community usage'.
1. You could be claiming that a thing is a table as long as a lot of people
say so, irrespective of the way the world actually is. This is false. If I
produce an incredibly realistic hologram of a table, and everyone calls it a
table, that does not make it into a table. Given the current meaning of
"table", that is, the thing isn't a table but a hologram of a table, even if
almost everyone thinks it's a table. Thus, the extension of the term is not,
in this sense, determined by community usage.
2. You could mean that if a lot of people call something a 'table', this is
*evidence that* it is the sort of thing included in the extension of
"table". True, but this is true for any term. If a lot of people call
something 'good,' this is also evidence that it is in the extension of
"good".
> Small, community-wide variations in the extension of "table" are dealt
> with as dialectical differences, but similar differences in the
> extension of "good" are not.
All this points to is the fact that we are less willing to attribute to
people errors about the property of tablehood than we are to attribute
errors about goodness. So it requires less evidence to convince us that the
other community doesn't really mean table than to convince us that they
don't really mean good. That is, it requires a wider divergence of usage to
show (have adequate evidence that) a nonstandard meaning of "good" is
being employed.
> > Well, the concept is irreducible.
>
> If that were true then it would mean different things in different
> communities,
I don't see why.
> and the Northerner should have had no objection to the
> southerner saying that slavery was good -- it's simply a linguistic
> difference between the communities.
Well, the main thing the northerner would object to is the southerner's
holding slaves, not his saying that slavery was good. He would also object
to the latter intellectually, of course, provided he believed (as he would
have in the actual situation) that the southerner really meant good by
"good." I don't see how this creates a problem for my view that "good" is
indefinable.
> > I wasn't trying to resolve any controversial moral issues. I was just
> > trying to give some examples of some moral claims that have an
> > intellectual source.
>
> They are none of them judgements -- they are inferential relationships
> between judgement terms.
I'm not sure I follow you there. Maybe by "judgement" you mean "evaluative
judgement." If so, you're saying that my sample propositions weren't
evaluative. But why would you say that? Certainly they're the sort of thing
that User would refuse to accept as a premise in an argument (that's a
pretty good test of evaluativeness, don't you think?)
It seems that your idea is that a proposition that relates 2 evaluative
terms is not itself evaluative. For instance:
(a) "Injustice is bad."
Evaluative or descriptive? It's not clear, though (a) is probably analytic,
so you might want to declare it non-evaluative (maybe also non-descriptive).
However, what about:
(b) "Those who violate property rights deserve to be killed."
(b) relates two evaluative terms: "violate property rights" and "deserve to
be killed." These must be evaluative expressions, since if I said, "Joe
violated property rights" or "Joe deserves to be killed," you would surely
consider those to be evaluative propositions. But obviously (b) an
evaluative judgement (people with different values would disagree about it,
etc.; it is not analytic, nor descriptive.) Therefore, a proposition
relating different evaluative terms can be evaluative.
Likewise for my propositions:
"Ceteris paribus, you should not punish the innocent."
"Ceteris paribus, it is better for innocent people to be happier."
Those are evaluative, despite that each contains more than one evaluative
term. They happen to be truistic evaluative propositions, and so less
interesting than (b), but evaluative nonetheless.
User 1DE7
>From: Owl a@a.a
>Message-id: <8v9t85$5v0$1...@slb6.atl.mindspring.net>
>I never took on the task of deducing an evaluative proposition from
>non-evaluative ones, and I don't see why I should--even though you and User
>apparently want me to.
>
I don't think I've ever wanted you to do this. People seem to keep trying to
mesh my and mark's positions into one hybrid position.
By the way, I may not be posting very often for awhile, due to various
real-life priorities, so expect long delays for my responses to the exchanges
we're involved in.
-User
Gordon G. Sollars
...
> gsol...@pobox.com wrote:
> > Surely not - at least as long as the possibility of moral realism is
> > at issue. If it were not true that "God says that killing is wrong",
> > then the issue of killing would not have any moral relevance at all -
> > so long as it is God that determines what is moral.
>
> But the whole point of moral realism, and indeed of morality per se, is
> to motivate action.
No, the "whole point" of moral realism (I claim) is that moral statements
are, like most "ordinary" (leaving out, say, self-referential) sentences,
either true or false. Mark (and perhaps you) seems to think that being a
moral realist in and of itself colors what moral statements one will
assent to. But a sufficiently deluded moral realist could believe any
moral statement - his constraint is only that the statement must be true
or false (so there are /meta-moral/ statements that he must reject).
For all I know, Mark's day-to-day morality is what the moral realist
should hold, and Mark is simply wrong in thinking that his "moral
sentiments" are not statements with truth values.
> Consider: if it were
> true that "God says that killing is wrong," but no one were motivated
> by that statement to act as per (1) or (2) - say, if absolutely no one
> cared what God said - then in what way could it possibly be said to be
> "morally relevant"?
You agreed that the sophisticated theologian is concerned with what is
good independently of whether God wills it (which the believer thinks He
does). So the moral relevance of "God says that, 'Killing is wrong.'",
is that killing is wrong (if it is). If you will, the believer takes
that fact (if it is a fact) that God says something as the best evidence
there is that it is so.
Forget God for a moment. Suppose moral realism is correct, and that
"Killing is wrong" is true, but that no one is motivated not to kill.
What would be the moral relevance of "Killing is wrong"? It would be
that people ought to change their motivational psychology so that they
/were/ motivated not to kill. (I am assuming that is it also a true
statement that we ought to do what morality requires.)
...
> > On a realist view, we certainly want people to be motivated to act on
> > true moral statements, but motivation is not the sole test of moral
> > relevance. What is in fact morally correct is obviously of great
> > relevance.
>
> Only, I think, because people in general want their beliefs to be
> correct, as they want their actions to be efficacious. So I agree
> denying that "correctness" can be morally relevant, but see that
> relevance as being totally contingent.
Do you deny that "We ought to do what morality requires"? I would think
that even a relativist or subjectivist agrees with that; only the skeptic
would reject it, claiming either that we can not know what morality
requires or that even if we know it, there is no good reason to act on
what we know of it. Is that your view?
...
> My reply to what you said (which admittedly could have been made more
> clearly) is that, first, I am not assuming that the gap exists in any
> argument, but only that it might exist;
OK, perhaps I misunderstood you. I have already said that I can not
"bridge the gap" with any original argument of my own. But my failure,
even the wide-spread failure by many, is not the same as having a proof
that there is an is/ought gap. However, User seems to hold this
position. Or perhaps, in view of how completely obvious the gap is to
him, he finds it preposterous to claim the gap could be bridged. But
what User finds preposterous is not enough to settle matters of meta
ethics.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
Owl
> By the way, I may not be posting very often for awhile, due to various
> real-life priorities, so expect long delays for my responses to the
exchanges
> we're involved in.
Of course, you have no choice but to follow your subjective preferences.
Myself, I will be balancing my various duties to pursue the truth, to grade
papers, to increase the amount of happiness in the world, and so on. Thus, I
may often have to delay responses as well.
abcd...@my-deja.com
---------------------------------------------------------------
Has moral value? Subjective or objective? Should one keep moral? What
is moral? ..... Most of the so-called scholar ........
> > What is economics? Why should man learn economics? .....
> > >
> > > Could any economist, economics-professor, or Nobel Prize receiver
> > answer
> > > the simple following questions logically in open?
> > >
> > > 1) Is value the basis of economics? Why?
> > >
> > > 2) Could anybody produce your subjective value? How?
> > >
> > > 3) Is knowledge subjective or objective value? Why?
> > >
> > > 4) Where does knowledge come from? How?
> > >
> > > If you need to know the answer, please, look at the home page:
> > > http://www.angelfire.com/ga/chaok , you could find more.
> > >
> > > Reading without thinking is nonsense; reading without
understanding
> is
> > > in vain!
> > >
> > > ---------------------------------------------------------------
User 1DE7
>From: Owl a@a.a
>Message-id: <8vd848$8vp$1...@slb0.atl.mindspring.net>
>> By the way, I may not be posting very often for awhile, due to various
>> real-life priorities, so expect long delays for my responses to the
>exchanges
>> we're involved in.
>
>Of course, you have no choice but to follow your subjective preferences
One thing I notice in anti-determinists is they try to seperate "you" from
"your preferences" so that you are somehow controlled by "your preferences."
How one should really think about it is that "your preferences" are part of
what constitutes "you."
It is sort of like saying "Your arm is simply under the control of the muscles
within the arm, it cannot do anything to control itsself, its all the muscles
and tendons!"
-User
George Dance
Owl <a@a.a> wrote:
> I never took on the task of deducing an evaluative proposition from
> non-evaluative ones, and I don't see why I should--even though you and
User
> apparently want me to.
Oh, I see. So the thread you began on "Deriving an 'ought' from an
'is'" was about ... what?
--
- 30 -
Owl
> One thing I notice in anti-determinists is they try to seperate "you" from
> "your preferences" so that you are somehow controlled by "your
preferences."
> How one should really think about it is that "your preferences" are part
of
> what constitutes "you."
>
> It is sort of like saying "Your arm is simply under the control of the
muscles
> within the arm, it cannot do anything to control itsself, its all the
muscles
> and tendons!"
Actually, that's what the hard determinists say.
Mark Young
>> But that makes your first argument in your original post pointless.
>> It would not be enough to show that 3 follows from 1 and 2; you
>> would also have had to show that 1 and 2 do not rely on sentiment or
>> feeling *at any level* -- for if 1 or 2 does, then 3 does as well.
Owl:
> That's why I spent all that time talking about how 1 and 2 were
> conceptual truths.
I don't recall you arguing that those statements were conceptual truths.
>> My point was that reasoning is a common way to come to accept moral
>> claims, but that the reasoning must be from pre-accepted moral claims
>> or from subjective reactions.
>>
>> Your claim, in order to make it "universal" had to be tainted by the
>> addition of a moral term -- making it useless as a premise to show
>> that moral claims can be based on reason *alone*.
> I really don't see how the occurrence of an evaluative term "taints"
> the sentence. I don't see why you think I've taken on, or should have
> taken on, a project that commits me to not using evaluative terms in
> those premises.
Well perhaps I have misunderstood your purpose from the start.
You said that it seemed that there were moral claims that did not rely
at all on feelings or sentiments at all -- and undertook to argue for
that position. It would make no sense to base your argument on premises
your opponent does not accept. Since the position you were arguing
against is that evaluative statements are all tainted by sentiment,
starting from evaluative premises is pointless.
> My premises also contained the evaluative term "better" and the
> possibly-evaluative term "better off"--why didn't you claim that
> those terms 'taint' the premises?
I did -- just not in so many words.
[...]
Owl:
>>> If you would like to further elaborate the story, so that in B the
>>> people throw off their oppressive government, while in A they do
>>> not, then you're simply introducing another value -- freedom --
>>> which is present in B but not in A.
>> To elaborate the story that way would be to deny the ceteris paribus
>> assumption. Many believe that the people in A are worse off
>> *because* they are happy in spite of their oppression. They are
>> less human than their counterparts in B.
> Oh, I see. Last time, it sounded like the whole point was about how
> unhappiness would make you more likely to throw off your oppressive
> government.
The point was that (2) was not true -- certainly not conceptual, as you
now say. The method attempted was to invoke a plausible counter-example
to it. In the proposed example, there is simply a magical difference
instituted -- a certain number of people have their (quite
understandable) misery replaced by happiness. Your position is that it
is inconceivable that they would not be better off there-by (you claimed
that (2) was a conceptual truth -- thus them not being better off is in
the same category as them being married bachelors). I say that it *is*
conceivable that they are not better off, and I provided an example of
one way in which they could be considered to be worse off.
In this latest, I merely used some language I've heard used about people
who are happily oppressed -- that they are less than fully human in that
their oppression does not make them unhappy, and does not motivate them
to rise against it.
> I guess I'm not seeing how the people in A are supposed to be less
> human, merely because they are happier. Maybe you can argue that they
> are worse off insofar as they fail to understand the correct
> political principles and so fail to understand that their government
> is oppressive ("better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig
> satisfied, and all that).
That's not it. If they realized before that they were being oppressed,
then they will realize still that they are being oppressed (that's part
of ceteris paribus). But -- and it is a big but -- they are happy,
anyway. They have no reason to be happy -- they are in a situation
where everyone else is miserable. They have every reason to be
miserable, but they are not. They have every reason to revolt, but they
will not -- they are happy *as they are*, in the full knowledge of their
condition (as it was before the change was made).
> But then you're just saying that knowledge and understanding is a
> value (in addition to happiness), which I don't deny. Alternately,
> one could argue that people are worse off if they are happy *about
> something which is bad*, because this is a moral defect.
They are not happy "about" anything -- they have just been emotionally
altered to be happy. They are simply no longer dissatisfied with their
lot in life. So taxes take 90% of their income. So the courts sell
verdicts to the highest bidder. So their child was just killed.
They're happy anyway. Why are they happy? They have no idea. You, for
some reason, seem to think that they are better off like that.
[...]
>> the classification of emotionally motivated. And thus you should
>> care, for you cannot prove your thesis until you give an evaluation
>> that depends only on non-evaluative facts.
> I don't see why you say that, unless you're assuming that I couldn't
> find an evaluative proposition that we believed non-emotionally,
> which would beg the question.
You claimed to be showing that there were evaluative claims we believed
non-emotionally -- it doesn't strike me as question begging on my part
to point out that your arguments depend on evaluative claims. Do you
intend to argue that "it's turtles all the way down"?
[...]
>> The point is that some terms have their extensions set by community
>> usage. I went on to explain that "good" is not one of them.
> There are at least two things that you might mean by that (first
> sentence). Take the term "table", which allegedly is among the terms
> whose 'extensions are set by community usage'.
> 1. You could be claiming that a thing is a table as long as a lot of
> people say so, irrespective of the way the world actually is. This is
> false. If I produce an incredibly realistic hologram of a table, and
> everyone calls it a table, that does not make it into a table. Given
> the current meaning of "table", that is, the thing isn't a table but
> a hologram of a table, even if almost everyone thinks it's a table.
> Thus, the extension of the term is not, in this sense, determined by
> community usage.
> 2. You could mean that if a lot of people call something a 'table',
> this is *evidence that* it is the sort of thing included in the
> extension of "table". True, but this is true for any term. If a lot
> of people call something 'good,' this is also evidence that it is in
> the extension of "good".
3. What counts as a table is what community usage says counts as a
table. If you show your table and everyone in the community says "Yes,
that is a table" and then you laugh demonically and rush thru it,
showing it to be a mere hologram, and then everyone in the community
says "So what -- it's still a table" then it would *be* a table. As you
pointed out, the term is a primitive -- and primitive terms are defined
(if at all) by extension. If the community agrees that the hologram is
in that extension, then you are the one with the defective
conceptualization. If, on the other hand, they all gasped at your
exploit, and granted that they had been mistaken, then the hologram
would *not* be a table.
Now there is (or may be, anyway) a fact of the matter as to how people
in our community would react. I believe that they would react the
second way -- admission that they were mistaken. If I am correct in
this belief, then I am correct (as you are) in believing that this
hologram of yours would not be a table. The extension of the term
"table" is set by the community.
The cultural relativist takes "good" to be the same kind of term (this
is my understanding of what a cultural relativist is -- I may have a
defective conceptualization, however). Since cultural relativists are
anti-realists, I take it that a realist could not hold this position.
>> Small, community-wide variations in the extension of "table" are
>> dealt with as dialectical differences, but similar differences in
>> the extension of "good" are not.
> All this points to is the fact that we are less willing to attribute
> to people errors about the property of tablehood than we are to
> attribute errors about goodness.
I disagree with that -- the "all this points to" bit. I think it points
to "good" getting its extension in a different way than "table".
[...]
> It seems that your idea is that a proposition that relates 2
> evaluative terms is not itself evaluative. For instance:
> (a) "Injustice is bad."
> Evaluative or descriptive? It's not clear, though (a) is probably
> analytic, so you might want to declare it non-evaluative (maybe also
> non-descriptive). However, what about:
> (b) "Those who violate property rights deserve to be killed."
> (b) relates two evaluative terms: "violate property rights" and
> "deserve to be killed." [...] Therefore, a proposition relating
> different evaluative terms can be evaluative.
It's not an evaluation if it states a conceptual truth. Likewise
"Bachelors are not married" is not an observation -- it just states a
conceptual truth.
George Dance
> [T]the "whole point" of moral realism (I claim) is that moral
> statements
> are, like most "ordinary" (leaving out, say, self-referential)
> sentences,
> either true or false. Mark (and perhaps you) seems to think that
> being a
> moral realist in and of itself colors what moral statements one will
> assent to. But a sufficiently deluded moral realist could believe any
> moral statement - his constraint is only that the statement must be
> true or false (so there are /meta-moral/ statements that he must
> reject).
I don't know if you are using "deluded" ironically, to refer to how Mark
or I might be imagining moral realists, or if you mean it seriously. If
the latter, then you apparently share the belief that "moral realism
in and of itself" does colour "what moral statements one will assent to.
Just as a commitment to the idea of physical truth entails a commitment
to believing and not believing certain propositions ("I am typing on a
computer keyboard," "There is a purple elephant flying directly above
me"), a commitment to moral realism entails belief in only certain moral
statements or maxims: those that are true. Belief in any other set of
maxims is, at best delusion, at worst dishonesty.
> For all I know, Mark's day-to-day morality is what the moral realist
> should hold, and Mark is simply wrong in thinking that his "moral
> sentiments" are not statements with truth values.
However, if Mark's morality differs from yours in any way, then one of
you is wrong. Both of you are obligated not only to follow the true
morality, but to do what you can (by harassment, or possibly even force)
to have the other one do likewise. It is contradictory to believe this
and to believe that the true morality can be undetermined; you cannot
assert a true morality without at least asserting a method for
determining the true morality, if not every last detail of the moral
code.
<snip>
> Forget God for a moment. Suppose moral realism is correct, and that
> "Killing is wrong" is true, but that no one is motivated not to kill.
> What would be the moral relevance of "Killing is wrong"? It would be
> that people ought to change their motivational psychology so that they
> /were/ motivated not to kill. (I am assuming that is it also a true
> statement that we ought to do what morality requires.)
> ...
> Do you deny that "We ought to do what morality requires"? I would
think
> that even a relativist or subjectivist agrees with that; only the
skeptic
> would reject it, claiming either that we can not know what morality
> requires or that even if we know it, there is no good reason to act on
> what we know of it. Is that your view?
I don't quite know how to answer that. My first impression is to
interpret the question purely logically, and say: "Yes, if there is a
set of rules that I am morally /required/ to do, then I /ought/ to do
them." But I think you are asking a bit more: do I think there are any
rules in that set - do I think that there is in fact any specific action
or actions that I ought to do simply because morality requires them? I
am maintaining an open mind on the latter question.
> ...
> I have already said that I can not "bridge the [is-ought] gap" with
> any original argument of my own. But my failure,
> even the wide-spread failure by many, is not the same as having a
> proof that there is an is/ought gap.
Indeed. But this acknowledged failure to show successful
counterexamples has to have been demonstrated by some evidence that
normative conclusions were not being validly derived from purely
descriptive premises; which is to assert a fact to which the theory of
the gap corresponds. If even one such counterexample were successful,
then naturally the theory would be false and not a matter for debate.
Since it can be proven false, and (despite attempts to do so) has not
been proven false (there are no successful counterexamples) I believe I
am justified in thinking that it is true - although it continues to be
fallible, of course.
> However, User seems to hold this
> position. Or perhaps, in view of how completely obvious the gap is to
> him, he finds it preposterous to claim the gap could be bridged. But
> what User finds preposterous is not enough to settle matters of meta
> ethics.
Nor do I think that the matter can be settled at the "meta" level alone.
Rather, the important question to me about ethics is, how am I affected
by it? So my concern with ethics is one of what morality it leads to,
and my concern with meta-ethics, mainly one of what moral theories are
implied by meta-ethical theories.
Gordon G. Sollars
...
> Just as a commitment to the idea of physical truth entails a commitment
> to believing and not believing certain propositions ("I am typing on a
> computer keyboard," "There is a purple elephant flying directly above
> me"),
This is false, so far as I can see. A commitment to physical realism is
a commitment to believe these things if are true, and not if they are
not. But a commitment to realism does not tell you, by itself, what /is/
true. If you saw a purple elephant flying over your head (and if you
checked with others to determine that you were not being tricked or
having an hallucination), then a commitment to realism would presumably
entail that you believe there was such an elephant there. What you are
really saying is that you do not see any way, consistent with other
things that you know, that there could be such an elephant. But a
physical realist without your knowledge might believe that there were
flying purple elephants.
> a commitment to moral realism entails belief in only certain moral
> statements or maxims: those that are true. Belief in any other set of
> maxims is, at best delusion, at worst dishonesty.
And you are certain that all of your beliefs about the physical world are
true? I suspect not. I started by saying that a "sufficiently deluded"
moral realist could belive any moral statement - and you ended by
mentioning "delusion". That's what I meant: a deluded moral realist
could believe all manner of false things, just as a deluded physical
realist could.
> > For all I know, Mark's day-to-day morality is what the moral realist
> > should hold, and Mark is simply wrong in thinking that his "moral
> > sentiments" are not statements with truth values.
>
> However, if Mark's morality differs from yours in any way, then one of
> you is wrong. Both of you are obligated not only to follow the true
> morality, but to do what you can (by harassment, or possibly even force)
> to have the other one do likewise.
I have just gone over this with Mark. Merely because I am a moral
realist and I believe that you are acting immorally does not show that I
ought to harass or force you. First, it could be a moral truth that
proper behavior may not be coerced, so it serves no purpose to do so.
Second, it could be that harassing or forcing you was also wrong (as it,
in fact, is), so I would have to take this into account. Third, in any
reasonably complex situation, there could be uncertainty about how
immoral your action was, and therefore uncertainty about what actions I
could legitimately take in response (so sometimes harassment or forcing
is legitimate and other times not).
Additionally, a moral constructivist or a subjectivist or relativist
could hold that you were obligated to harass or force Mark because of
what he had done, as far as I can see. So I really find this whole line
of argument puzzling. If you have in mind that a moral realist must hold
that moral reality is captured by a handful of simple, absolute
statements, then I could see the point. But, given the complexity of
physical reality (four forces, a hundred or so "sub-atomic" (!)
particles, etc.), why would anyone imagine that moral reality was simple?
...
> My first impression is to
> interpret the question purely logically, and say: "Yes, if there is a
> set of rules that I am morally /required/ to do, then I /ought/ to do
> them."
I think "logically" is good way to proceed.
> But I think you are asking a bit more: do I think there are any
> rules in that set - do I think that there is in fact any specific action
> or actions that I ought to do simply because morality requires them?
But we could disagree about whether there are rules in the set. If there
were not any, then the hypothetical above would be a counterfactual, but
we could still ask if it was true.
> I
> am maintaining an open mind on the latter question.
Does this mean that there is no morality that you try to follow, that is,
nothing that you think you ought to do?
...
> > I have already said that I can not "bridge the [is-ought] gap" with
> > any original argument of my own. But my failure,
> > even the wide-spread failure by many, is not the same as having a
> > proof that there is an is/ought gap.
>
> Indeed. But this acknowledged failure to show successful
> counterexamples
(BTW, I said "original" counterexamples. There is, for example, Searle's
argument for deriving an ought from as is, which Owl posted some time
back.)
> has to have been demonstrated by some evidence that
> normative conclusions were not being validly derived from purely
> descriptive premises; which is to assert a fact to which the theory of
> the gap corresponds.
Not necessarily. It could be the failure to detect the normative content
of a given descriptive statement or the descriptive content in a given
normative statement.
> Since it can be proven false, and (despite attempts to do so) has not
> been proven false (there are no successful counterexamples) I believe I
> am justified in thinking that it is true - although it continues to be
> fallible, of course.
You might indeed be so justified. OTOH, I think that at least some moral
realists believe that naturalism is justified because there is no hard
and fast line of demarcation between physical theories and moral
theories. Now, perhaps believing this is equivalent to rejecting the
"is/ought" gap, but I'm not sure that that is true. So there could be
several independent ways of looking for justification here.
--
Gordon Sollars
gsol...@pobox.com
user...@my-deja.com
Owl <a@a.a> wrote:
> "User 1DE7" <user...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:20001117210713...@ng-cs1.aol.com...
>
> > Well, a concept can correspond to reality more or less closely than
> another
> > one. For instance suppose I have a concept of your haircut from
reading
> your
> > HPO posts. Suppose from your posts that I think you'd let your hair
grow
> long
> > and bushy, and therefore my mental concept of who I am responding
to is
> someone
> > who has long bushy hair. This concept has a certain degree of
accuracy or
> > inaccurary.
>
> I would have described this as a belief, rather than a concept: You
believe
> (or, perhaps, merely suspect) that I have long, bushy hair. I don't
see how
> your use of "concept" differs from "belief."
Beliefs are probably based on our concepts. To illustrate, suppose you
remembe some scenery. Now, you have a concept of the scenery you saw,
but your concept is not simply a list of propositions in your brain
that you believe, like "The trees to the east were taller than the
others." You have to sort of deduce them from something else -- your
mental model of the scene -- which I'd call more of a concept than a
belief.
Not sure how a "process" could be "directed" at the world.
> not by *being
> aware of* those processes.
Sounds like a valid point, though I don't see why it would be a problem
for skepticism.
>The confusion I was talking about would lead one
> to argue that you have to inspect the properties of the cognitive
process,
> itself, in order to determine the objective facts (i.e., in order to
> 'really' determine the properties of the world *I* say is the object
of
> awareness).
I don't see how saying that we simply "have" processes directed at the
world avoids this. For us not to inspect the nature of these processes
you seem to be saying that the processes that the world cause must
nessesarily be processes that accurately simulate the world that caused
it, or something. Why is it not possible that people *have* processes
about pink bunnies no matter what external stimuli they get?
> This in turn, I claim, can lead to things like
> representationalism (actually, representationalism is just an
*instance* of
> the confusion in question), external world skepticism, idealism,
global
> skepticism, memory-skepticism; and even moral skepticism (though the
last
> won't be discussed in the book). Essentially, you get multifarious
forms of
> skepticism because the intrinsic properties of the cognitive process
are
> *never* sufficient to entail (or even confirm) any proposition about
the
> world (or: the object of cognition), because they're distinct things.
I still see them as distinct. You only seem to be cutting down the
number of "levels" from three to two. Those who say that we are aware
of our processes need to stipulate some means of awareness of
processes, lets call this M. They also need to have processes, lets
call these P. And, suppose there is an external reality, R, causing
these processes. Then their model of perception would be like:
R =====> P =====> M
And M is their experience. The arrows mean:
[this is stimuli] ===> [causing effects here]
Your model seems to just be
R =====> P
However this doesn't imply that your experience, P, is some accurate
representation of R. It simply means that your experience is the result
of R. We should still study the process by which R effects P, because
that is the only way to give us understanding of what P means in terms
of R. Maybe I am misinterpreting you though.
>
> > >punishing him "for" committing that crime. On the other hand, in
your
> view,
> > >there is no intrinsic reason why a person shouldn't be either (a)
> > >hypocritical, (b) self-contradictory, or (c) otherwise irrational.
> >
> > This is beside the point entirely. We aren't talking about whether
the
> person
> > reading your argument *should* not have a problem accepting it on
those
> > grounds. We know that people tend to think self-contradictory or
> irrational
> > things are -- well irrational for some reason. This isn't about
what they
> > *should* do at all.
>
> Something in here is beside the point ... If everyone agrees with my
> example because everyone agrees that you shouldn't have contradictory
> beliefs, then that's just as good an example of a universally-held
normative
> judgement as my original example.
But I don't think they'd think that at all. They'd just think something
seems illogical about it.
> Anyway, I still don't think you're explaining why people think certain
> events to be *unjust*. It's a fact that almost everyone thinks the
events
> I'm talking about to be unjust. Furthermore, I think it's pretty
clear that
> their thinking that has to do with their intuitions specifically about
> *justice*.
I think more of it is simply appealing to their notions about what
injustice means. Suppose you had someone do a random word association
with "injustice" and they said "unfairness" among other things. Now, I
think that this word would simply pop into their head because it is
closely connected with the common meaning of injustice, not because the
person considered injustice and then percieved some objective quality
of unfairness and noticed that this quality was injustice.
>
> I actually doubt that ordinary people reading my sentence would have
read it
> the way you did; at least I didn't. I don't think it would ever occur
to
> most people that "punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit"
might mean
> "knowing that he didn't commit the crime but having the belief that
he did
> be your reason for action." If they did, again, that might explain
their
> thinking that punishing someone for a crime he didn't commit was
> *illogical*, or hypocritical, or something like that; but that's not
what
> they think. They think it is *unjust*.
I'm not sure how you can so boldly make that statement. Do you have
survey results from people who had just read your example confirming
your assertation about what they think? I think a lot of people would
interpret it how I did.
>
> > I don't think the moral part of your view is obvious at all. If we
remove
> the
> > trickyness, and just say "it is unjust to punishing people for no
reason"
> or
> > something, then that doesn't seem obvious in a factual way to me at
all.
> Same
>
> Okay, it seems obvious to me. Let me ask you this: *before* you
adopted an
> anti-realist stance, would it have seemed obvious to you?
Well, it would have obviously corresponded to my notion of injustice
(as it still does), and I probably would have said "yes, that is
obviously unjust", though I would not have meant that it had some
objective property of injustice. I would have meant it sort of like how
I'd mean "this icecream is obviously yummy" or "that is obviously an
awesome skateboard."
-User
user...@my-deja.com
Owl <a@a.a> wrote:
> "User 1DE7" <user...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:20001117173919...@ng-cs1.aol.com...
> > Right. This goes back to the objection I had in my other post about
how
> you
> > seem to ignore critical differences in people's concepts. When you
said
> "better
> > off" in (1), unless I misunderstood you, you meant it in an
objective way.
> I
> > was just making that explicit when I paraphrased you because when
most
> people
> > hear the term they won't be aware that you mean it like that.
>
> I suspect that you're misusing "mean." The fact that I believe that A
is B,
> does not imply that by "A" I 'mean' "something that is B."
Well, not simply "anything that is B", but, maybe you have a point that
I was miusing "mean." See below for objections.
>
> The people who heard my statement would think that I was using
"better off"
> in the ordinary English sense of the expression--which, as a matter
of fact,
> I was.
Ok, I will concede that I miused "mean" and that there is only one
common meaning of "better off" in english.
>
> > So, you're trying to show me evidence of the truth of someone being
> "better
> > off" as you mean it, which is in an objective way. If you really
went
> around
> > asking people simply "is person P better off in this situation than
that
> one?"
> > then they would take "better off" to mean something different than
what it
> is
> > that you are trying to get evidence for. This is a problem. Hence,
it
> would be
>
> I don't see any reason to think that anyone else uses "better off"
with a
> different meaning. This, of course, goes back to the question of
whether
> "better off" is ambiguous. So far, I have no idea what the alternative
> meanings would be.
As above, it *means* the same thing for everyone. But, I think the
problem comes in when you try to take people agreeing that someone is
better off as supporting your theory of what better-off-ness is, rather
than just your meaning.
For instance, group A thinks a person can be objectively better off
than another person. Group B thinks there's really no such objective
thing as "better", and that saying that person P is better off is
either expressing a positive attitude toward his current situation or
that there is a common concept of better-offness that corresponds to
this person's situation, but that this concept does not model anything
real. So, A and B both mean the same thing by "better-off", but they
have different theories about it. It seems to me like your argument
takes it as evidence for A's theory that people with B's theory will
respond the same way to questions about better-off-ness as people with
A's theory, since A and B both mean the same thing by it.
>
> > nessesary to make it explicit in your questioning that you meant
> objectively
> > better off.
>
> No--it is necessary *not* to make it explicit in my questioning that I
> *believe that* 'better off' is an objective relation.
Not nessesarily that you believe it, but that that is the theory of
better-off-ness that you are asking about.
> What you're actually
> saying is that, when the nature of X is in dispute, it is necessary
to beg
> the question with every statement one makes about X, by building into
it
> one's own view about the nature of X.
Ok, lets look at what you were doing. You want to find out if better-
offness is objective, or something, so you give a bunch of people a
situation and ask them if a character in the situation is better off
than some other character.
You seem to think that this will reveal something about your theory of
better-offness being true, and mine not being true, or something. You
seem to take everyone saying the same person is better off as evidence
of your theory. This isn't evidence at all. The people with my theory
would be expected to say the exact same thing. I could just as well say
that the fact that everyone said the same person was better off was
evidence that better-offness is non-objective, because people who hold
that theory all said that the same person was better-off, and my
argument would be just as bad as yours, it seems.
Now, maybe it is nessesary not to mention any theories of better-
offness when asking people things that are supposed to in some way
provide evidence for one theory or another. If you think presenting an
argument like you did in your post, where people of the different
theories are expected to answer in the exact same way, then I don't see
the purpose of the experiment.
What I thought you were trying to do was to present your *theory* of
better-offness in a formal manner and then say "look at how convincing
this argument is, anyone who accepts it must accept my theory."
That is what I was objecting to. If you were trying to do that, then I
was pointing out that those of the opposite theory would accept the
argument as well, so it showed nothing (I got into some talk about
"meaning" in my first objections that were sort of sloppy, though).
If you were not trying to do the above, then again I don't know what
your argument was supposed to accomplish, or how it was supposed to be
an investigation into the nature of better-offness.
> > What do you mean by consciousness? From looking just at animals,
why would
> you
> > say that their consciousness is non-material? That claim seems to
need a
> good
> > deal of establishing.
>
> Other animals have thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories. Do you
want to
> start a thread about mind/body dualism? There are arguments enough
against
> physicalism, but I'd rather not try to detail all of them now.
(There's lots
> of literature on it, though.)
We've since done so, and I think its "your turn" in most of the
subthreads there, but after this post I will look at the thread to make
sure.
>
> > Are computational processes material?
>
> I'm not sure, but I don't think that has anything interesting to do
with
> consciousness.
>
I think I asked you this before but I am not sure it got through. Are
you familiar with a book by Pinker titled "how the mind works", that
advocates what is called the "computational theory of mind"?