Results of t.o. informal survey
Ananda Gupta
"Talk.Origins Informal Survey" in subject line to see the original
question, as it was quite long). All nine replies were from evolutionists,
and they split down the middle (5-4 in favor of moral realism).
E = evolutionist
C = creationist
T = moral relativist
L = moral realist
E & L: 5
E & T: 4
I was surprised at how many people affirmed moral realism; I was expecting
a pretty skewed result in favor of relativism.
ASG
Average Joe
Gupta) wrote:
>moral relativist
only brattish children of fortune think this way, and they remain
children sometimes until the money runs out, let us enable the dogs of
the earth to prey upon them
Cyde Weys
Oh STFU you pig.
--
-/ Cyde Weys -/
Attacking your views sideways since before I was sensitive.
No, I'm not 90! To send me an email remove every 90.
John Wilkins
At one time I thought that evolution required a utilitarian view of
moral rules (rule-utilitarianism, not surprisingly), until I read James
Paradiso's excellent introduction to Huxley's _Evolution and Ethics_ and
finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy actually meant.
--
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
Hiero5ant
"Ananda Gupta" <a...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:Xns92FE172...@199.45.49.11...
I forget, how did the entailment responses pan out?
AC
More peace and love from Average Joe. Guys like you are only scary when you
get into a position of power.
--
A. Clausen
Ananda Gupta
<1CdT9.11295$gb....@nwrddc03.gnilink.net>:
>> I was surprised at how many people affirmed moral realism; I was
>> expecting a pretty skewed result in favor of relativism.
>
> I forget, how did the entailment responses pan out?
Oh yes, I forgot those. Only one response suggested that the reason for
belief in one affected belief in the other (and another seemed to hint at
that but wasn't conclusive). Both the definite and the borderline were E &
T.
rich hammett
> Average Joe wrote:
>> On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 07:12:14 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
>> Gupta) wrote:
>>
>>
>> >moral relativist
>>
>>
>> only brattish children of fortune think this way, and they remain
>> children sometimes until the money runs out, let us enable the dogs of
>> the earth to prey upon them
> Oh STFU you pig.
You sure proved him wrong!
rich
--
-to reply, it's hot not warm
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
\ Rich Hammett http://home.hiwaay.net/~rhammett
\ ..basketball [is] the paramount
/ synthesis in sport of intelligence, precision, courage,
\ audacity, anticipation, artifice, teamwork, elegance,
/ and grace. --Carl Sagan
rich hammett
> Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
Ananda Gupta
<v1rhvhc...@corp.supernews.com>:
>> At one time I thought that evolution required a utilitarian view of
>> moral rules (rule-utilitarianism, not surprisingly), until I read
>> James Paradiso's excellent introduction to Huxley's _Evolution and
>> Ethics_ and finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy
>> actually meant.
>
>Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
Moore believed that the word "good" is foundational and unanalyzable, which
means it is not definable except by ostension (an example of definition by
ostension would be if you ask me to define "red" and I do so by pointing at
a kid's balloon that happens to be red and say "That balloon is red.")
So, for Moore, the naturalistic fallacy is committed by philosophers when
they try to define or analyze "goodness", or identify it with some other
property or thing. Moore thought that all such attempts to identify
goodness with any other kind of natural property fell victim to this
confusion -- the confusion between something having the property of
goodness and that thing being *identical with* goodness.
ASG
Average Joe
wrote:
>Guys like you are only scary when you
>get into a position of power.
you're choice is a moral absolutist or a moral relevatist, a
nationalist or a globalist, and eventually all nationalism comes to an
end, in the mean time you could pick a good nationalist, like Pat
Buchanan, chances are he's not going any where further than the
representative of the other side, Al Sharpton, I like Kerry, he talks
of "fairness", I like Edwards, he talks of "Average Man"
but we might have to go for plan b and infiltrate the repugs and bote
them out in their own primary
rich hammett
Ah. Then regardless of what the Professional Thinker John Wilkins
sed, I think Moore was a fuzzy-thinking moron.
John, any rebuttal for Moore?
rich
> ASG
Eric Gill
news:95jr1vo1861m8poh8...@4ax.com:
Right. Insane people are scary when they get into power.
darth_versive
Perhaps you were surprised because you were working from a false
assumption about the relationship between scientific thinking and
moral philosophy. Scientific thinking, based on methodological
naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
subscribe to. That is, the methods that allow us to know what *is*
are not the same ones that tell us what *ought to be*. Science, which
is metaphysically neutral, is compatible with a large number of
theological and ethical conceptual frameworks. That is, you can
believe in science and still believe in a wide variety of religious
and moral ways of thinking. It's just those few specific religious
and philosophical frameworks which explicitly or implicitly deny the
methods and findings of science which are incompatible with science.
(And one of the articles of their faith is typically that all morality
must necessarily be grounded in the tenets of their own faith.)
Even apart from this, metaphysical naturalists, who don't believe in
the supernatural, are *also* free to be moral realists, if they so
choose.
DV
Ananda Gupta
>Ah. Then regardless of what the Professional Thinker John Wilkins
>sed, I think Moore was a fuzzy-thinking moron.
I think he was dead on target. In any case, the Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy entry for "naturalistic fallacy" lists the two most standard
criticisms of Moore's view.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<8e0e3045.03010...@posting.google.com>:
>Perhaps you were surprised because you were working from a false
>assumption about the relationship between scientific thinking and
>moral philosophy.
No, I was surprised because of my previous experience with atheists. In my
(previous) experience atheists are often moral relativists. I wanted to
see if there was a similar correlation between relativism and evolutionism,
and expected there to be one because of the overlap between evolutionism
and atheism.
>Scientific thinking, based on methodological
>naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
>subscribe to.
Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are meta-
ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know what ought to
be, not what ought to be.
> That is, the methods that allow us to know what *is*
>are not the same ones that tell us what *ought to be*. Science, which
>is metaphysically neutral, is compatible with a large number of
>theological and ethical conceptual frameworks.
Yes... but, as above, it may not be compatible with a large number of
*meta*-ethical frameworks. Some people, in particular, tend to use
naturalistic arguments against, e.g., the existence of conscience or a
moral sense. To put it in the terms you use, some naturalists argue that
only scientific methods can bring us knowledge, and since they don't tell
us what ought to be, there is no moral knowledge. That is moral skepticism
(not quite the same as moral relativism, but they're all anti-realist in
any case).
>That is, you can
>believe in science and still believe in a wide variety of religious
>and moral ways of thinking. It's just those few specific religious
>and philosophical frameworks which explicitly or implicitly deny the
>methods and findings of science which are incompatible with science.
>(And one of the articles of their faith is typically that all morality
>must necessarily be grounded in the tenets of their own faith.)
>
>Even apart from this, metaphysical naturalists, who don't believe in
>the supernatural, are *also* free to be moral realists, if they so
>choose.
I agree, but, as many critics of moral realism point out, moral realism
seems to require us to accept the existence of a moral sense or some other
cognitive (or perhaps noncognitive -- there are people on both sides of
that one) faculty that allows us to become aware of moral facts. There is
no scientific basis, they allege, for supposing such a faculty exists, and
hence no scientific basis for supposing that moral facts exist. Hence,
again allegedly, moral realism cannot be true.
ASG
Richard Clayton
Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are a wealthy man who lacks
nothing?
Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are poor, your family is
starving, and you've no other immediate way to feed them?
If you gave different answers to these two questions, you are a moral
relativist. Congradulations.
--
The e-mail address above is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.
"If it does turn out to be real and I just didn't believe it, well,
that's because I've reached this, like, hyperspace, higher plane of
cynicism where all reality and the people in it are a ridiculous pageant
for my amusement." -- Tycho Brahe, Penny Arcade
rich hammett
Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
rich hammett
So, in his formulation, "good" is only meaningful in an immediate,
intuitive, yet indefinable context.
Yech. Has anyone posited a rational basis for this "intuition," or
is it magic?
John Wilkins
> John Wilkins sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
> > Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> >> I received nine replies to my original query (search on me as author and
> >> "Talk.Origins Informal Survey" in subject line to see the original
> >> question, as it was quite long). All nine replies were from evolutionists,
> >> and they split down the middle (5-4 in favor of moral realism).
> >>
> >> E = evolutionist
> >> C = creationist
> >> T = moral relativist
> >> L = moral realist
> >>
> >> E & L: 5
> >> E & T: 4
> >>
> >> I was surprised at how many people affirmed moral realism; I was expecting
> >> a pretty skewed result in favor of relativism.
> >>
> > At one time I thought that evolution required a utilitarian view of
> > moral rules (rule-utilitarianism, not surprisingly), until I read James
> > Paradiso's excellent introduction to Huxley's _Evolution and Ethics_ and
> > finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy actually meant.
>
> Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
>
That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
statements. How's that for succinct?
John Wilkins
> Ananda Gupta sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
> > rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote in
> > <v1rhvhc...@corp.supernews.com>:
> >
> >>> At one time I thought that evolution required a utilitarian view of
> >>> moral rules (rule-utilitarianism, not surprisingly), until I read
> >>> James Paradiso's excellent introduction to Huxley's _Evolution and
> >>> Ethics_ and finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy
> >>> actually meant.
> >>
> >>Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
>
> > Moore believed that the word "good" is foundational and unanalyzable, which
> > means it is not definable except by ostension (an example of definition by
> > ostension would be if you ask me to define "red" and I do so by pointing at
> > a kid's balloon that happens to be red and say "That balloon is red.")
>
> > So, for Moore, the naturalistic fallacy is committed by philosophers when
> > they try to define or analyze "goodness", or identify it with some other
> > property or thing. Moore thought that all such attempts to identify
> > goodness with any other kind of natural property fell victim to this
> > confusion -- the confusion between something having the property of
> > goodness and that thing being *identical with* goodness.
>
> Ah. Then regardless of what the Professional Thinker John Wilkins
> sed, I think Moore was a fuzzy-thinking moron.
>
> John, any rebuttal for Moore?
>
I would not call Moore a moron - he was one of the smartest and best of
his generation (even more do than Russell IMO; like Mayr, Russell's
secret was to outlive his opponents).
Goodness is what some might call a supervenient property - it can be had
by a number of non-identical things, but identical things or situations
will have it equally. But since I realised that the drive to identify
the Good with the Natural is the Enlightenment Dream, and not a
necessary feature of morality, Moore's point in general is worth making.
The Enlightenment wanted to derive the laws of morality from the laws of
nature, no doubt to escape the necessity of finding it solely in the
pronouncements of the Church. It is this that makes evolutionary ethics
so dangerous. What is, is not right. Moral language is justificatory,
and moral justification happens independently of factual language.
The Naturalistic Fallacy is not really a fallacy in the strict sense,
but it is just one possible position out of several, and the fallacy
lies in asserting that *only* the Naturalistic view is feasible. But if
we decouple moral justification from epistemic or pragmatic
justification, then there is no need to identify Good with anything
whatsoever. The Good is what is used as a comparative in moral language,
that's all. You can *explain* why that Good is used in a given society
in terms of cultural (not moral) relativism, but to say this is what the
Good is *in the moral language game* is to commit a *real* fallacy - the
Genetic Fallacy.
When one is acting as a moral agent, one must be a moral realist. One
has to assume that the values by which, at base, one evaluates moral
behaviours, are real. In a metamoral sense, they may be real in the same
way that scientific entities that are unobservable are real, as formal
consequences of the global theory, but *while you are acting morally*
they have to be real.
Mitchell Coffey
> Ananda Gupta sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
> > rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote in
> > <v1rhvhc...@corp.supernews.com>:
> >
> >>> At one time I thought that evolution required a utilitarian view of
> >>> moral rules (rule-utilitarianism, not surprisingly), until I read
> >>> James Paradiso's excellent introduction to Huxley's _Evolution and
> >>> Ethics_ and finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy
> >>> actually meant.
> >>
> >>Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
>
> > Moore believed that the word "good" is foundational and unanalyzable, which
> > means it is not definable except by ostension (an example of definition by
> > ostension would be if you ask me to define "red" and I do so by pointing at
> > a kid's balloon that happens to be red and say "That balloon is red.")
>
> > So, for Moore, the naturalistic fallacy is committed by philosophers when
> > they try to define or analyze "goodness", or identify it with some other
> > property or thing. Moore thought that all such attempts to identify
> > goodness with any other kind of natural property fell victim to this
> > confusion -- the confusion between something having the property of
> > goodness and that thing being *identical with* goodness.
>
> Ah. Then regardless of what the Professional Thinker John Wilkins
> sed, I think Moore was a fuzzy-thinking moron.
>
> John, any rebuttal for Moore?
Moore was a great man. Moore was thunping dudes like Plato and...
whatzhizname... Aristotle, who deduced the properties of goodness and
assumed, idiots like they were, that they'd determined what good is.
Recall Socrates padding around Athens challenging sophists to define
"good" and stuff like that, with general hilarity following in his
wake.
The Naturalistic Fallacy has come to mean, in common thought,
confusing a discription of the thing with the thing itself; as in, to
bring it home, "Evolution is false because Hitler, Stalin and Mel
Blanc were evolutionists." That may not be the real naturalistic
fallacy, but it sure darntootin *is* a fallacy, which I suppose needs
a name of it's own.
Now our man John informs us that he now knows what the Naturalistic
Fallacy actually meant, but ostentatiously neglects to tell *us* that
meaning. But if that bastard thinks I'm going to lose any sleep over
some cheap, one-upping philosophical trick...
OH, FOR GOD'S SAKE, JOHN, LET US IN ON IT!
Mitchell Coffey
Michael G.
Give him a way to work a pun into it or he'll never spill...
John Wilkins
> Ananda Gupta sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
> > darth_...@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
> > <8e0e3045.03010...@posting.google.com>:
>
> >>Perhaps you were surprised because you were working from a false
> >>assumption about the relationship between scientific thinking and
> >>moral philosophy.
>
> > No, I was surprised because of my previous experience with atheists. In my
> > (previous) experience atheists are often moral relativists. I wanted to
> > see if there was a similar correlation between relativism and evolutionism,
> > and expected there to be one because of the overlap between evolutionism
> > and atheism.
It would be very interesting to do a largescale and statistically valid
survey on this, and publish it. Also be interesting to see the
correlation between atheism and relativism, and some other
"freethinking" viewpoints (like agnosticism).
>
> >>Scientific thinking, based on methodological
> >>naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
> >>subscribe to.
>
> > Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are meta-
> > ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know what ought to
> > be, not what ought to be.
Nicely put.
In what language game or discourse? Nothing is universal over space and
time except in the context of a model and description of the universe of
the discussion. The Universe of, say, metaphysical debate is always
(sometimes explicitly, particularly in David Lewis's works) limited to
the language in which the issues are framed. this can be a logical
language, or just some formal language of a model.
When making metaethical points, one is using a metaethical language; in
which statements like S: '"A moral rule R is true" iff R is T' can be
made. The quoted sentence is mentioned, not used. This means that the
sentence S is in a metalanguage to the one in which R is used. This is
pretty standard analysis of linguistic philosophy.
One can be a moral relativist in one language - call it E for empirical
- and a moral realist in another - call it M for moral. In M one tests
moral claims and actions using the Rs of M (i.e., on the basis that they
are, or are not, consonant with the moral rules of that language). In E,
however, one can describe the evolution of the language M as a simple
process - say using game theory - and know that the entities that M
quantifies over are real within M, but not real within E. In describing
this situation, one uses a philosophical language P which is a
metalanguage to both M and E. And so on. It gets very Cantorian very
quickly, and at that point I just shut down the frontal lobes...
Hmm. It just occurred to me; this is a version of the Third Man Regress.
Whaddyaknow.
Philip Deitiker
> Moore believed that the word "good" is foundational and unanalyzable,
> which means it is not definable except by ostension (an example of
> definition by ostension would be if you ask me to define "red" and I
> do so by pointing at a kid's balloon that happens to be red and say
> "That balloon is red.")
>
> So, for Moore, the naturalistic fallacy is committed by philosophers
> when they try to define or analyze "goodness", or identify it with
> some other property or thing. Moore thought that all such attempts to
> identify goodness with any other kind of natural property fell victim
> to this confusion -- the confusion between something having the
> property of goodness and that thing being *identical with* goodness.
That's good.
however
good=pleasure to moral sensibilities.
Moore, your fired, your no good.
Average Joe
<richzigard...@verizon.net> wrote:
>Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are a wealthy man who lacks
>nothing?
>
> Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are poor, your family is
>starving, and you've no other immediate way to feed them?
>
> If you gave different answers to these two questions, you are a moral
>relativist.
no the morality is just a function of two things, still absolute
morality=f(acceptable behavior, true desperation)
I never said desperation was immoral
but it is completely objective, so it is absolute
David Jensen
john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
<1fok9ym.10a9wfy1moydwfN%john.w...@bigpond.com>:
Yes, quite. I agree with it as stated. Was he really that clear, though?
John Wilkins
Not far off it, if I recall my Principia Ethica...
It may be true that all things which are good are _also_ something else,
just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain
kind of vibration in the light . . . . But far too many philosophers
have thought that when they named those other properties they were
actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not
'other,' but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I
propose to call the 'naturalistic fallacy' and of it I shall now
endeavour to dispose. (Moore, 10)
from
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/streiffer/PapersFolder/Frankena.pdf
http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/moore.html
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6k.htm#eth
Here's a very nice discussion of the topic (with which I do not fully
agree)
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~brendan_long/Meta-ethics_Part_2.html
and AN Prior's classic refutation of Moore
http://www.utilitarian.org/texts/prior.html
with which I also do not agree (Prior is a utilitarian). More (forgive
that pun) can be found in the Bernard Williams book _Ethics and the
Limits of Philosophy_, and in the wonderful debate between Jack Smart
and Williams in _Utilitarianism for and against_.
--
John Wilkins
B'dies, Brutius
Ananda Gupta
>Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
All I mean by a moral fact is a normative proposition whose truth is
independent of anyone's perspective. If that entails that moral facts are
universal over space and time (off the top of my head it seems that it
would entail that) then yes.
ASG
Mitchell Coffey
That's right. OK, but what do you call the fallacy that everybody
thinks is the naturalistic fallacy but isn't, but is a hell of a fallacy
anyway? (By this I mean the "'Sharks eat people' = 'I want people to be
eaten by sharks'" fallacy.)
Mitchell Coffey
Mitchell Coffey
[snip]
> The Naturalistic Fallacy has come to mean, in common thought,
> confusing a discription of the thing with the thing itself; as in, to
> bring it home, "Evolution is false because Hitler, Stalin and Mel
> Blanc were evolutionists."
> Mitchell Coffey
I haven't written anything this filthy ignorant in at least a day or
two. What I've descibed above is an ad hominem fallacy. The fallacy
commonly, but inaccurately called the naturalistic fallacy is the
"seismographers want earthquakes" fallacy. Since it needs a name it can
call it's own, I suggest "The shoot the messenger fallacy."
Mitchell Coffey
Ananda Gupta
<1fokkos.17tm1511n80pg9N%wil...@wehi.edu.au>:
>It would be very interesting to do a largescale and statistically valid
>survey on this, and publish it. Also be interesting to see the
>correlation between atheism and relativism, and some other
>"freethinking" viewpoints (like agnosticism).
I agree, although I'm not sure off the top of my head who would publish it.
>>>> Scientific thinking, based on methodological
>>>> naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
>>>> subscribe to.
>>
>>> Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are
>>> meta- ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know
>>> what ought to be, not what ought to be.
>
>Nicely put.
Thanks. After I posted it I thought of some nits to pick, but it seemed a
fair initial summing up.
>> Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
>
>In what language game or discourse? Nothing is universal over space and
>time except in the context of a model and description of the universe of
>the discussion. The Universe of, say, metaphysical debate is always
>(sometimes explicitly, particularly in David Lewis's works) limited to
>the language in which the issues are framed. this can be a logical
>language, or just some formal language of a model.
I am not especially familiar with philosophy of language (although I am
familiar, and unimpressed, with David Lewis' work -- it's interesting, but
I question its resilience).
Regardless, let's consider a statement like "The Earth is 6,000 years old."
Are you saying that the truth of this statement -- that the relationship
between the referents of the words -- depends on the language being used?
>When making metaethical points, one is using a metaethical language; in
>which statements like S: '"A moral rule R is true" iff R is T' can be
>made.
Is T meant to mean "true", or another atom?
But leaving that aside, suppose I assert that the last bit, "iff R is T",
is unnecessary, and claim that "R is true" where R is a moral proposition.
That is, suppose I assert that moral knowledge (and certain other kinds of
claims, e.g. certain claims of epistemology) is prior to the linguistic
considerations you describe. Alternatively, suppose I grant that moral
knowledge is limited by the language game we are using, but that the
language game we are using employs a *complete* description of the
universe, so the fact that it is limited to this language game is
unimportant.
>The quoted sentence is mentioned, not used. This means that the
>sentence S is in a metalanguage to the one in which R is used. This is
>pretty standard analysis of linguistic philosophy.
>
>One can be a moral relativist in one language - call it E for empirical
>- and a moral realist in another - call it M for moral. In M one tests
>moral claims and actions using the Rs of M (i.e., on the basis that they
>are, or are not, consonant with the moral rules of that language).
>In E,
>however, one can describe the evolution of the language M as a simple
>process - say using game theory - and know that the entities that M
>quantifies over are real within M, but not real within E.
Can you give a concrete example of a thing (doesn't have to be a physical
object) that is real within one language and not real in another, other
than moral values? I am familiar with the idea that certain ideas cannot
be expressed in one language but can in another (e.g. Orwell's famous claim
that once Newspeak had completely evolved, treason would be literally
unthinkable, for there would be no words with which to meaningfully express
it). But that doesn't seem to be what you are talking about.
>In describing
>this situation, one uses a philosophical language P which is a
>metalanguage to both M and E. And so on. It gets very Cantorian very
>quickly, and at that point I just shut down the frontal lobes...
>
>Hmm. It just occurred to me; this is a version of the Third Man Regress.
>Whaddyaknow.
To tell you the truth this is seeming a lot more like a clever reductio ad
absurdum of "standard linguistic philosophy" than anything else :) But I
fully admit to not following the argument very well, if at all.
ASG
John Wilkins
> john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
> news:1fok9ym.10a9wfy1moydwfN%john.w...@bigpond.com:
>
> >> > Ethics_ and finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy
> >> > actually meant.
> >>
> >> Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
> >>
> > That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> > statements. How's that for succinct?
>
> That's right. OK, but what do you call the fallacy that everybody
> thinks is the naturalistic fallacy but isn't, but is a hell of a fallacy
> anyway? (By this I mean the "'Sharks eat people' = 'I want people to be
> eaten by sharks'" fallacy.)
They are formally equivalent:
"Sharks eat people" is a fact.
therefore
"Sharks should eat people" is true.
This is fallacious. No amount of shark dietary information will justify
the moral claim that something should occur WRT shark behaviours. This
is the same as saying that the *natural* properties of shark diets are
not in any way identical to the *moral* rule that sharks should be
people eaters.
Moore puts it better - he is arguing against the idea that pleasure (a
utilitarian utility function) justifies any moral statement whatsoever.
The giving of pleasure is a statement about the factual properties of
some process. It is not enough or even needed to justify the moral
claim. Hence, he says that moral claims about what is good are not
identical with factual claims about what is.
Ananda Gupta
<JdlT9.35439$xb.2...@nwrddc02.gnilink.net>:
> Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are a wealthy man who
> lacks
>nothing?
>
> Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are poor, your family is
>starving, and you've no other immediate way to feed them?
>
> If you gave different answers to these two questions, you are a
> moral
>relativist. Congradulations.
I don't see why different answers would commit someone to moral relativism.
Ananda Gupta
<jajs1vgvthnk7p1ok...@4ax.com>:
>> That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
>> statements. How's that for succinct?
Very, although be careful, because many laymen will assume you mean
"empirical" when you say "factual".
ASG
Ananda Gupta
>Ananda Gupta sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
>> rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote in
>So, in his formulation, "good" is only meaningful in an immediate,
>intuitive, yet indefinable context.
I don't know what you mean by "immediate". Certainly Moore would argue
that we have an intuitive understanding of goodness (since we can point it
out when we see things that are good). That doesn't mean we can define it.
>Yech. Has anyone posited a rational basis for this "intuition," or
>is it magic?
Depends on what you mean by "rational basis". Intuitionists (which would
include Moore) would argue that intuition *is* a rational faculty -- it is
part of human reason, and inseparable from it. Intuitionists, though, are
generally committed to epistemological foundationalism, which is the view
that some propositions are "foundational" i.e. self-justifying. I think
many atheists are hostile to this idea because it sounds like religious
faith, but there are important differences.
ASG
SortingItOut
> I received nine replies to my original query (search on me as author and
> "Talk.Origins Informal Survey" in subject line to see the original
> question, as it was quite long). All nine replies were from evolutionists,
> and they split down the middle (5-4 in favor of moral realism).
>
> E = evolutionist
> C = creationist
> T = moral relativist
> L = moral realist
>
> E & L: 5
> E & T: 4
>
> I was surprised at how many people affirmed moral realism; I was expecting
> a pretty skewed result in favor of relativism.
It surprises me too. The reason for my surprise is that I've yet to
see a definition of what the absolute morals are (or do I
misunderstand moral realism?). Further, it seems like I've seen a lot
of anecdotal evidence that moral realists have widely varying views on
specific moral issues, perhaps precisely because there exists no
clear, precise, unambiguous guidelines or definitions of specific
morals.
What am I missing?
>
> ASG
stew dean
> On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 17:11:56 +0000 (UTC), AC <sp...@nospam.com.invalid>
> wrote:
>
> >Guys like you are only scary when you
> >get into a position of power.
>
> you're choice is a moral absolutist or a moral relevatist, a
> nationalist or a globalist,
It's your choice. "You're" is short for you are. Your point, as usual,
paints a false dichotomy. The choice is not between globalism - the
rule of the corporation or nationalism - the rule of a right wing
government but about global cooperation. The concept of country
becomes less important when cooperation is in place.
Stew Dean
John Wilkins
Mostly, I do. For me a fact is either an empirical claim or some
derivation of empirical claims. But that is a horse of a different
stalk..
John Wilkins
> wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote in
> <1fokkos.17tm1511n80pg9N%wil...@wehi.edu.au>:
>
> >It would be very interesting to do a largescale and statistically valid
> >survey on this, and publish it. Also be interesting to see the
> >correlation between atheism and relativism, and some other
> >"freethinking" viewpoints (like agnosticism).
>
> I agree, although I'm not sure off the top of my head who would publish it.
Zygon, perhaps.
>
> >>>> Scientific thinking, based on methodological
> >>>> naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
> >>>> subscribe to.
> >>
> >>> Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are
> >>> meta- ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know
> >>> what ought to be, not what ought to be.
> >
> >Nicely put.
>
> Thanks. After I posted it I thought of some nits to pick, but it seemed a
> fair initial summing up.
>
> >> Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
> >
> >In what language game or discourse? Nothing is universal over space and
> >time except in the context of a model and description of the universe of
> >the discussion. The Universe of, say, metaphysical debate is always
> >(sometimes explicitly, particularly in David Lewis's works) limited to
> >the language in which the issues are framed. this can be a logical
> >language, or just some formal language of a model.
>
> I am not especially familiar with philosophy of language (although I am
> familiar, and unimpressed, with David Lewis' work -- it's interesting, but
> I question its resilience).
Gasp! Shock! You would be eviscerated at my department :-)
>
> Regardless, let's consider a statement like "The Earth is 6,000 years old."
> Are you saying that the truth of this statement -- that the relationship
> between the referents of the words -- depends on the language being used?
Essentially, yes. But there is no sharp distinction to be made between
the levels of language - at some point we are using a kind fo
pre-semantic language (or perhaps a presymbolic langauge) that is just a
biological Lebensform (did I mention my Wittgestein fixation?), and
statements become actions in the world, so some empirical truth value is
preserved in complex ways.
>
> >When making metaethical points, one is using a metaethical language; in
> >which statements like S: '"A moral rule R is true" iff R is T' can be
> >made.
>
> Is T meant to mean "true", or another atom?
"True", but as an atom in that metalanguage. What else could truth be?
<slinks slyly into the corner and cowers in the dark>
>
> But leaving that aside, suppose I assert that the last bit, "iff R is T",
> is unnecessary, and claim that "R is true" where R is a moral proposition.
> That is, suppose I assert that moral knowledge (and certain other kinds of
> claims, e.g. certain claims of epistemology) is prior to the linguistic
> considerations you describe. Alternatively, suppose I grant that moral
> knowledge is limited by the language game we are using, but that the
> language game we are using employs a *complete* description of the
> universe, so the fact that it is limited to this language game is
> unimportant.
Good luck. Universally applicable language games are not yet, I think,
plausible (on Rosenberg's account, they never will be). But if you
reject the Tarskian T-principle in this case, then you reject in in all
cases, I think. Insofar as we can *talk* about the truth conditions of
some proposition, we have to be able to make the metalinguistic shift. I
believe someone called this the "linguistic prison", from which there is
no escape.
>
> >The quoted sentence is mentioned, not used. This means that the
> >sentence S is in a metalanguage to the one in which R is used. This is
> >pretty standard analysis of linguistic philosophy.
> >
> >One can be a moral relativist in one language - call it E for empirical
> >- and a moral realist in another - call it M for moral. In M one tests
> >moral claims and actions using the Rs of M (i.e., on the basis that they
> >are, or are not, consonant with the moral rules of that language).
>
> >In E,
> >however, one can describe the evolution of the language M as a simple
> >process - say using game theory - and know that the entities that M
> >quantifies over are real within M, but not real within E.
>
> Can you give a concrete example of a thing (doesn't have to be a physical
> object) that is real within one language and not real in another, other
> than moral values? I am familiar with the idea that certain ideas cannot
> be expressed in one language but can in another (e.g. Orwell's famous claim
> that once Newspeak had completely evolved, treason would be literally
> unthinkable, for there would be no words with which to meaningfully express
> it). But that doesn't seem to be what you are talking about.
"Electron" is real in post-Bohrian physics and unreal in pre-Bohrian
physics (which existed for some time after Bohr, IIRC). I'm not, though,
going for a Whorffian linguistic relativism. Language does not define
the world, it merely defines what we can say about it. Treason in
Orwell's nightmare would still be possible - you just couldn't properly
describe it. You might, if language were to evolve rather than be
designed, have to invent a new word for it, which is what happens in
language.
>
> >In describing
> >this situation, one uses a philosophical language P which is a
> >metalanguage to both M and E. And so on. It gets very Cantorian very
> >quickly, and at that point I just shut down the frontal lobes...
> >
> >Hmm. It just occurred to me; this is a version of the Third Man Regress.
> >Whaddyaknow.
>
> To tell you the truth this is seeming a lot more like a clever reductio ad
> absurdum of "standard linguistic philosophy" than anything else :) But I
> fully admit to not following the argument very well, if at all.
Yeah, well, I'm not making it very well. At present, I don't have the
available mental resources to work through it clearly. I may never have
them again. At one time in my life, this was all crystalline.
Bill Rogers
Not sure, but I do not understand why the observation that different
moral realists come to different conclusions about morals undermines
moral realism. I am a moral relativist. However, it seems to me that
it would be perfectly possible for someone to be a moral realist
without claiming to know what exactly the moral reality was. Just as I
can be a scientific realist without claiming to have a complete
description of the reality which I think science describes. A moral
realist could assert that there are absolute normative moral "facts"
without claiming certainty as to what those facts are. Moral reasoning
would then be a process of trying to discover and apply those facts.
Such a moral realist would be different from a moral relativist. But I
doubt you could tell them apart by watching how they behaved.
A religious fundamentalist who was a moral realist might claim to know
for sure what all the moral facts are. But that is not a necessary
claim of all moral realists.
Bill
>
>
> >
> > ASG
Sverker Johansson
>
> Mitchell Coffey <m.remov...@removestarpower.net> wrote:
>
> > john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
> > news:1fok9ym.10a9wfy1moydwfN%john.w...@bigpond.com:
> >
> > >> > Ethics_ and finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy
> > >> > actually meant.
> > >>
> > >> Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
> > >>
> > > That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> > > statements. How's that for succinct?
> >
> > That's right. OK, but what do you call the fallacy that everybody
> > thinks is the naturalistic fallacy but isn't, but is a hell of a fallacy
> > anyway? (By this I mean the "'Sharks eat people' = 'I want people to be
> > eaten by sharks'" fallacy.)
>
> They are formally equivalent:
>
> "Sharks eat people" is a fact.
> therefore
> "Sharks should eat people" is true.
>
> This is fallacious. No amount of shark dietary information will justify
> the moral claim that something should occur WRT shark behaviours. This
> is the same as saying that the *natural* properties of shark diets are
> not in any way identical to the *moral* rule that sharks should be
> people eaters.
I wonder if Mitchell wasn't referring to the meta-fallacy that is seen
so often on t.o. It sure bothers _me_ when some cretinist states
that because I accept evolution then I must think that it is _good_
that the strong survive at the expense of the weak.
The cretinist is committing the meta-fallacy of assuming that I must commit
the naturalistic fallacy. Does this type of meta-fallacy have a name?
[snip]
--
Best regards, HLK, Physics
Sverker Johansson U of Jonkoping
----------------------------------------------
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH - adapted from
CREATIONISM IS SCIENCE George Orwell
Sverker Johansson
>
> darth_...@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
> <8e0e3045.03010...@posting.google.com>:
>
> >Perhaps you were surprised because you were working from a false
> >assumption about the relationship between scientific thinking and
> >moral philosophy.
>
> No, I was surprised because of my previous experience with atheists. In my
> (previous) experience atheists are often moral relativists. I wanted to
> see if there was a similar correlation between relativism and evolutionism,
> and expected there to be one because of the overlap between evolutionism
> and atheism.
Is that overlap really so large? Obviously there are no atheist YECs
-- but YECs are a minority also among Christians, not to mention
other religions. If you took a large random sample of people who
understand and accept evolution, I suspect you'd find that a majority
of them also believed in a god. (I object to the term "evolutionism"
since it implicitly grants the fallacoius creationist premiss that
evolution is just another faith.)
> >Scientific thinking, based on methodological
> >naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
> >subscribe to.
>
> Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are meta-
> ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know what ought to
> be, not what ought to be.
I agree that these are meta-ethical. However, I do not agree that they
say anything about how we know what ought to be. Realism vs
relativism IMHO is about whether there _are_ truths about what ought to be.
This is a different issue from whether and how we can _find_out_ what
those truths are.
> > That is, the methods that allow us to know what *is*
> >are not the same ones that tell us what *ought to be*. Science, which
> >is metaphysically neutral, is compatible with a large number of
> >theological and ethical conceptual frameworks.
>
> Yes... but, as above, it may not be compatible with a large number of
> *meta*-ethical frameworks. Some people, in particular, tend to use
> naturalistic arguments against, e.g., the existence of conscience or a
> moral sense.
The existence of a conscience or moral sense makes eminent
evolutionary sense -- an adaptation to group living.
However, there is no reason to assume that such a moral
sense delivers _true_ moral verdicts in any absolute sense -- it
delivers the moral verdicts that happen to maximize our
inclusive fitness.
> To put it in the terms you use, some naturalists argue that
> only scientific methods can bring us knowledge, and since they don't tell
> us what ought to be, there is no moral knowledge. That is moral skepticism
> (not quite the same as moral relativism, but they're all anti-realist in
> any case).
I would call myself both a moral absolutist (I believe that moral
truths exist) and a moral skepticist, or agnostic rather (I believe
that we have no way of being absolutely sure what these
moral truths are).
This is similar to my view of the empirical world: I believe that
there is a real world out there, with real true natural laws ---
but at the same time I believe that we have no way to know for
sure what they are. Science, the survival of the fittest theories,
is the best we can do in an imperfect world. It behooves us
to do our best to approach physical truth, even though we may never reach it,
and have no way of knowing when we have reached it. Similarly, it behooves us
to do our best to approach moral truth, even though we may never reach it,
and have no way of knowing when we have reached it (and we don't even have
the kind of powerful tool -- science -- for morals that we do for the
factual world.)
> >That is, you can
> >believe in science and still believe in a wide variety of religious
> >and moral ways of thinking. It's just those few specific religious
> >and philosophical frameworks which explicitly or implicitly deny the
> >methods and findings of science which are incompatible with science.
> >(And one of the articles of their faith is typically that all morality
> >must necessarily be grounded in the tenets of their own faith.)
> >
> >Even apart from this, metaphysical naturalists, who don't believe in
> >the supernatural, are *also* free to be moral realists, if they so
> >choose.
>
> I agree, but, as many critics of moral realism point out, moral realism
> seems to require us to accept the existence of a moral sense or some other
> cognitive (or perhaps noncognitive -- there are people on both sides of
> that one) faculty that allows us to become aware of moral facts. There is
> no scientific basis, they allege, for supposing such a faculty exists, and
> hence no scientific basis for supposing that moral facts exist. Hence,
> again allegedly, moral realism cannot be true.
The last does not follow. Something can be true even though we cannot
know that it is true. The lack of scientific basis only means that
we cannot legitimately claim knowledge about absolute morals, it does not
mean morals do not exist.
We have no way of knowing what it inside a black hole. Does it follow
that the interior of a black hole does not exist?
Sverker Johansson
The difference between believing that there _are_ absolute morals,
and knowing what the absolute moral rules are. I believe that there
are absolute moral rules (thus I am a moral realist), but I do not
claim to know for sure what they are.
Then of course there are all those people who claim to be
moral realists but are really moral relativists, because they believe
in a moral ordained by their god, and thus relative to their god.
And since they have different gods, they have different moral rules.
A Pagano
Pagano replies:
It's not really a matter of whether Johansson thinks the destruction
of the weak is "good" in the moral sense or not. The question is
whether Johansson can render a moral sense of "bad" given the
acceptance of a mechanism of evolutionary history that he believes
requires exactly that-----the destruction of the weak or less fit.
Under that theory we are merely an evolutionary branch from some
common animal ancestor. We are a biological animal. Our "human"
differences are merely the characteristics of the taxonomist. If
such a mechanism of destroying the weak to enhance differential
survival is, in large part, responsible for the creation of all
biological novelty and diversity and was a necessity of nature
wouldn't we be forced to describe this as good?
If "red in tooth and claw" is the natural way of evolution and as such
is, in large part, crucial to our very existence why shouldn't
Johansson consider this good? If this is the necessary mechanism of
the material world how can we have a morality which characterizes it
as bad?
When the stronger Naziis destroyed whole populations in order to
exploit an ecological niche and expand into others how could this be
bad? This is exactly what evolutionary theory says has happened over
the course of 600 million years. According to Richard Dawkins the
flesh and blood is merely a vehicle that the genes employ for their
own propagation, the fittest of which continue on. It is the genes
which matter not the flesh and blood people.
Under such a materialistic theory Johansson will have difficulty
justifying any concept of good or evil. Such characterizations will
be merely arbitrary.
Regards,
T Pagano
Geoff Offermann
"Cyde Weys" <vze2...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:GYcT9.35765$1c.1...@nwrddc01.gnilink.net...
> Average Joe wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 07:12:14 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
> > Gupta) wrote:
> >
> >
> > >moral relativist
> >
> >
> > only brattish children of fortune think this way, and they remain
> > children sometimes until the money runs out, let us enable the dogs of
> > the earth to prey upon them
>
> Oh STFU you pig.
Yuk yuk yuk
Sverker Johansson
Thank you for providing a splendid example of the meta-fallacy
I was discussing, expressed in your inimitable verbose pomposity.
You _really_ don't get it, do you?
Gravitation is a fact. Things do fall down. Does this mean
that anybody who accepts gravity must believe that airplane
crashes are _good_ ?
Evolution is a fact. Critters do evolve. Does this mean that
anybody who accepts evolution must believe that the death of
the less fit is _good_ ?
Concepts of good and evil can never be justified by appeal to
matters of fact. That is the essence of the naturalistic fallacy,
and it is as true for the theist as for the atheist.
Ananda Gupta
>> I am not especially familiar with philosophy of language (although I
>> am familiar, and unimpressed, with David Lewis' work -- it's
>> interesting, but I question its resilience).
>
>Gasp! Shock! You would be eviscerated at my department :-)
In what sense of "eviscerated"? heh heh. :)
Incidentally which department is that?
>> Regardless, let's consider a statement like "The Earth is 6,000 years
>> old." Are you saying that the truth of this statement -- that the
>> relationship between the referents of the words -- depends on the
>> language being used?
>
>Essentially, yes. But there is no sharp distinction to be made between
>the levels of language - at some point we are using a kind fo
>pre-semantic language (or perhaps a presymbolic langauge) that is just a
>biological Lebensform (did I mention my Wittgestein fixation?), and
>statements become actions in the world, so some empirical truth value is
>preserved in complex ways.
OK. That paragraph made my brain hurt but I kindasortamaybe see what
you're getting at.
>>> When making metaethical points, one is using a metaethical language;
>>> in which statements like S: '"A moral rule R is true" iff R is T' can
>>> be made.
>>
>> Is T meant to mean "true", or another atom?
>
>"True", but as an atom in that metalanguage. What else could truth be?
><slinks slyly into the corner and cowers in the dark>
But you just said above that empirical truth value is "preserved" (across
what? Different languages?), so clearly it has to be something other than
just an atom in a metalanguage.
>> But leaving that aside, suppose I assert that the last bit, "iff R is
>> T", is unnecessary, and claim that "R is true" where R is a moral
>> proposition. That is, suppose I assert that moral knowledge (and
>> certain other kinds of claims, e.g. certain claims of epistemology) is
>> prior to the linguistic considerations you describe. Alternatively,
>> suppose I grant that moral knowledge is limited by the language game
>> we are using, but that the language game we are using employs a
>> *complete* description of the universe, so the fact that it is limited
>> to this language game is unimportant.
>
>Good luck. Universally applicable language games are not yet, I think,
>plausible (on Rosenberg's account, they never will be).
But they might be universally applicable with respect to certain concepts,
e.g. moral facts (I am certainly not saying this is the case, but it could
be in principle, yes?).
> But if you
>reject the Tarskian T-principle in this case, then you reject in in all
>cases, I think. Insofar as we can *talk* about the truth conditions of
>some proposition, we have to be able to make the metalinguistic shift. I
>believe someone called this the "linguistic prison", from which there is
>no escape.
I'll have to look up that last term ("linguistic prison"); it seems to be
more or less what you are talking about in this thread, correct?
>> Can you give a concrete example of a thing (doesn't have to be a
>> physical object) that is real within one language and not real in
>> another, other than moral values? I am familiar with the idea that
>> certain ideas cannot be expressed in one language but can in another
>> (e.g. Orwell's famous claim that once Newspeak had completely evolved,
>> treason would be literally unthinkable, for there would be no words
>> with which to meaningfully express it). But that doesn't seem to be
>> what you are talking about.
>
>"Electron" is real in post-Bohrian physics and unreal in pre-Bohrian
>physics (which existed for some time after Bohr, IIRC).
> I'm not, though,
>going for a Whorffian linguistic relativism. Language does not define
>the world, it merely defines what we can say about it.
OK, now we're getting somewhere. I guess my biggest sticking point here is
that I don't think the constraint of "what we can say about X" is
especially meaningful. Obviously if we lack the terminology to accurately
discuss a topic then we have some limits (or we can just make words up on
the spot). Regardless, if what you say immediately above is the case, then
the moral realist (and the relativist) no longer has a problem: he can just
say that the underlying moral reality (or lack thereof) is not defined by
moral language (as I thought you were claiming before).
>Treason in
>Orwell's nightmare would still be possible - you just couldn't properly
>describe it. You might, if language were to evolve rather than be
>designed, have to invent a new word for it, which is what happens in
>language.
Right -- which is why Orwell also points out that Newspeak, alone among
languages, *shrinks* over time (in terms of vocabulary) rather than
expanding, precisely to prevent the possibility of people just making up
new words to express incorrect ideas. Orwell was a clever guy. :)
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<avlmpm$sf8$4...@bob.news.rcn.net>:
>MitC...@aol.com (Mitchell Coffey) wrote in
>[snip]
>I haven't written anything this filthy ignorant in at least a day or
>two. What I've descibed above is an ad hominem fallacy. The fallacy
>commonly, but inaccurately called the naturalistic fallacy is the
>"seismographers want earthquakes" fallacy. Since it needs a name it can
>call it's own, I suggest "The shoot the messenger fallacy."
Good name. Seconded. heh
Ananda Gupta
>Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> David Jensen <da...@dajensen-family.com> wrote in
>> <jajs1vgvthnk7p1ok...@4ax.com>:
>>
>>>> That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
>>>> statements. How's that for succinct?
>>
>> Very, although be careful, because many laymen will assume you mean
>> "empirical" when you say "factual".
>>
>Mostly, I do. For me a fact is either an empirical claim or some
>derivation of empirical claims. But that is a horse of a different
>stalk..
Well, Moore thought that moral claims *were* factual statements. Anyway
the above sounds more like Hume's is-ought problem. Taking another stab,
building on your foundation:
One cannot equate the good with any instance of an empirically observed
property. How's that?
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<4404b96e.03010...@posting.google.com>:
>a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote in message
>news:<Xns92FE172...@199.45.49.11>...
>> I received nine replies to my original query (search on me as author
>> and "Talk.Origins Informal Survey" in subject line to see the original
>> question, as it was quite long). All nine replies were from
>> evolutionists, and they split down the middle (5-4 in favor of moral
>> realism).
>>
>> E = evolutionist
>> C = creationist
>> T = moral relativist
>> L = moral realist
>>
>> E & L: 5
>> E & T: 4
>>
>> I was surprised at how many people affirmed moral realism; I was
>> expecting a pretty skewed result in favor of relativism.
>
>
>It surprises me too. The reason for my surprise is that I've yet to
>see a definition of what the absolute morals are (or do I
>misunderstand moral realism?).
Moral realism is the view that there are moral facts. Moreover, most
people would also take moral realism as committing one to the view that we
can know at least some of these facts (that moral knowledge is possible).
>Further, it seems like I've seen a lot
>of anecdotal evidence that moral realists have widely varying views on
>specific moral issues, perhaps precisely because there exists no
>clear, precise, unambiguous guidelines or definitions of specific
>morals.
A moral realist would argue that the presence of disagreement on a
particular question tells you nothing about the answer to that question,
except perhaps that it is not obvious. (Just as an evolutionary biologist,
to keep this on topic, would argue that disagreement on a particular
question about evolutionary theory only means that the answer is not
obvious, not that there isn't an answer at all.)
Some moral realists would also argue that it is far from trivial to hold a
view on a moral issue, since meaningfully doing so requires reflection
without the distorting effects of self-interest, bias, prejudice,
intellectual laziness, etc., and that much moral disagreement arises
because people are not always successful at setting these things aside.
(Again, as an analogy, an evolutionary biologist might argue that at least
some disagreement over evolutionary biology comes because people don't want
to believe it, or are biased towards their own idiosyncratic views, etc.,
and it's difficult to put these aside.)
ASG
Raymond P. Freeman-Lynde
And of course even the best fit eventually die. They just have better reproductive
success before they die.
The "nature red in tooth and claw" is a poor representation of evolution in any
event. Most organisms have neither tooth nor claws (prokaryotes, protistans,
metaphytes, fungi). The key element is not killing, but reproducing.
Ray Freeman-Lynde
Ananda Gupta
<3E1ECE95...@hlk.no.hj.spam.se>:
>Ananda Gupta wrote:
>> No, I was surprised because of my previous experience with atheists.
>> In my (previous) experience atheists are often moral relativists. I
>> wanted to see if there was a similar correlation between relativism
>> and evolutionism, and expected there to be one because of the overlap
>> between evolutionism and atheism.
>
>Is that overlap really so large? Obviously there are no atheist YECs
>-- but YECs are a minority also among Christians, not to mention
>other religions. If you took a large random sample of people who
>understand and accept evolution, I suspect you'd find that a majority
>of them also believed in a god.
Oh, there's no doubt lots of people believe in both a god and evolution.
Perhaps I should have said that I expected there to be one because of my
observation that all atheists accept evolution, but not vice versa.
>(I object to the term "evolutionism"
>since it implicitly grants the fallacoius creationist premiss that
>evolution is just another faith.)
I share this discomfort but I don't know what other word to use.
>>> Scientific thinking, based on methodological
>>> naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
>>> subscribe to.
>>
>> Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are
>> meta- ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know
>> what ought to be, not what ought to be.
>
>I agree that these are meta-ethical. However, I do not agree that they
>say anything about how we know what ought to be. Realism vs
>relativism IMHO is about whether there _are_ truths about what ought to
>be. This is a different issue from whether and how we can _find_out_
>what those truths are.
Yes, that was one of the "nits" I mentioned to John W. in the other post :)
In the narrow sense you are right, yet there are lots of other anti-realist
positions, all of which fall into the broad category of meta-ethical views,
which are neither relativist nor realist (moral skepticism is the best
example, the view that there might be moral facts but there might not, and
we have no way of finding out). Moreover, moral relativists often include
in their view a determination of how relative ethics can be known -- hence
the various subsidiary views of moral relativism e.g. cultural relativism,
individual relativism, and so forth.
>>> That is, the methods that allow us to know what *is*
>>> are not the same ones that tell us what *ought to be*. Science,
>>> which is metaphysically neutral, is compatible with a large number of
>>> theological and ethical conceptual frameworks.
>>
>> Yes... but, as above, it may not be compatible with a large number of
>> *meta*-ethical frameworks. Some people, in particular, tend to use
>> naturalistic arguments against, e.g., the existence of conscience or a
>> moral sense.
>
>The existence of a conscience or moral sense makes eminent
>evolutionary sense -- an adaptation to group living.
>However, there is no reason to assume that such a moral
>sense delivers _true_ moral verdicts in any absolute sense -- it
>delivers the moral verdicts that happen to maximize our
>inclusive fitness.
Precisely my point -- that some people use naturalistic arguments to
conclude against certain meta-ethical views. That was DV's original
confusion, I think.
>> To put it in the terms you use, some naturalists argue that
>> only scientific methods can bring us knowledge, and since they don't
>> tell us what ought to be, there is no moral knowledge. That is moral
>> skepticism (not quite the same as moral relativism, but they're all
>> anti-realist in any case).
>I would call myself both a moral absolutist (I believe that moral
>truths exist) and a moral skepticist, or agnostic rather (I believe
>that we have no way of being absolutely sure what these
>moral truths are).
>
>This is similar to my view of the empirical world: I believe that
>there is a real world out there, with real true natural laws ---
>but at the same time I believe that we have no way to know for
>sure what they are.
*No* way? Really? If that's the case then why believe there is in fact a
real world out there (or at least one that even marginally resembles the
one we think we perceive)? If indeed we have no way to know for sure the
nature of the physical world and the laws that govern it, isn't even the
barest claim about that world a statement of faith?
> Science, the survival of the fittest theories,
>is the best we can do in an imperfect world. It behooves us
>to do our best to approach physical truth, even though we may never
>reach it, and have no way of knowing when we have reached it. Similarly,
>it behooves us to do our best to approach moral truth, even though we
>may never reach it, and have no way of knowing when we have reached it
>(and we don't even have the kind of powerful tool -- science -- for
>morals that we do for the factual world.)
Except that science depends on observation, and observation is fallible.
Hence the skeptic (and by this I mean the skeptic in the philosophical
sense, one who believes that *no* knowledge is possible about anything, not
just morals) will argue that no beliefs about the physical world are
justified. Those beliefs may be true, but they aren't justified.
Incidentally, I'd argue that moral discussion, argument, etc., is a
powerful tool as well.
>> I agree, but, as many critics of moral realism point out, moral
>> realism seems to require us to accept the existence of a moral sense
>> or some other cognitive (or perhaps noncognitive -- there are people
>> on both sides of that one) faculty that allows us to become aware of
>> moral facts. There is no scientific basis, they allege, for supposing
>> such a faculty exists, and hence no scientific basis for supposing
>> that moral facts exist. Hence, again allegedly, moral realism cannot
>> be true.
>
>The last does not follow.
Point taken. Revise that last bit to read "moral realism is at most
trivially true, and moral beliefs are all unjustified."
>We have no way of knowing what it inside a black hole. Does it follow
>that the interior of a black hole does not exist?
No; it does follow, though, that no claims about what's inside a black hole
are justified.
ASG
Brian M. Scott
john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote:
>Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
[...]
>> Regardless, let's consider a statement like "The Earth is 6,000 years old."
>> Are you saying that the truth of this statement -- that the relationship
>> between the referents of the words -- depends on the language being used?
>Essentially, yes. But there is no sharp distinction to be made between
>the levels of language - at some point we are using a kind fo
>pre-semantic language (or perhaps a presymbolic langauge) that is just a
>biological Lebensform (did I mention my Wittgestein fixation?), and
>statements become actions in the world, so some empirical truth value is
>preserved in complex ways.
Can you explain briefly what you mean by 'pre-semantic language'
and 'presymbolic language'? From my point of view they are
necessarily oxymoronic.
[...]
Brian
rich hammett
> rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote:
>> John Wilkins sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
>> > Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>> >> I received nine replies to my original query (search on me as author and
>> >> "Talk.Origins Informal Survey" in subject line to see the original
>> >> question, as it was quite long). All nine replies were from evolutionists,
>> >> and they split down the middle (5-4 in favor of moral realism).
>> >>
>> >> E = evolutionist
>> >> C = creationist
>> >> T = moral relativist
>> >> L = moral realist
>> >>
>> >> E & L: 5
>> >> E & T: 4
>> >>
>> >> I was surprised at how many people affirmed moral realism; I was expecting
>> >> a pretty skewed result in favor of relativism.
>> >>
>> > At one time I thought that evolution required a utilitarian view of
>> > moral rules (rule-utilitarianism, not surprisingly), until I read James
>> > Paradiso's excellent introduction to Huxley's _Evolution and Ethics_ and
>> > finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy actually meant.
>>
>> Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
>>
> That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> statements. How's that for succinct?
Excellent! Now I'm trying to pin down the concept by formulating
a response to it...probably in one of the other subthreads.
rich
--
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Dana Tweedy
"A Pagano" <anthony...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:vs2u1v0pq6e3eq35p...@4ax.com...
snipping
> >I wonder if Mitchell wasn't referring to the meta-fallacy that is seen
> >so often on t.o. It sure bothers _me_ when some cretinist states
> >that because I accept evolution then I must think that it is _good_
> >that the strong survive at the expense of the weak.
> >The cretinist is committing the meta-fallacy of assuming that I must
commit
> >the naturalistic fallacy. Does this type of meta-fallacy have a name?
>
> Pagano replies:
> It's not really a matter of whether Johansson thinks the destruction
> of the weak is "good" in the moral sense or not. The question is
> whether Johansson can render a moral sense of "bad" given the
> acceptance of a mechanism of evolutionary history that he believes
> requires exactly that-----the destruction of the weak or less fit.
Evolution doesn't require the destruction of the weak, or less fit. It's
simply a fact of nature that the less fit die, and the more fit survive to
leave more offspring. Nature makes no value judgement over whether or not
such a fact is good or bad, it just IS.
>
> Under that theory we are merely an evolutionary branch from some
> common animal ancestor. We are a biological animal.
Yes we are a biological animal. What is wrong with that? Would you rather
be a vegetable?
> Our "human"
> differences are merely the characteristics of the taxonomist. If
> such a mechanism of destroying the weak to enhance differential
> survival is, in large part, responsible for the creation of all
> biological novelty and diversity and was a necessity of nature
> wouldn't we be forced to describe this as good?
Again, Evolution doesn't require that the strong individuals kill the weak.
Evolution describes the fact that those better fitted to their enviroment
survive to leave more offspring. It's not a moral choice, it's a
description of what DOES happen, not what SHOULD happen. You are simply
wrong, and you have based your entire world view on this basic mistake.
>
> If "red in tooth and claw" is the natural way of evolution and as such
> is, in large part, crucial to our very existence why shouldn't
> Johansson consider this good? If this is the necessary mechanism of
> the material world how can we have a morality which characterizes it
> as bad?
"Red of tooth and claw" is not an accurate description of how individuals in
a population interact, and does not describe how evolution works. Moreover,
humans are social animals, and our existance depends on our social bonds
with other individuals. Being violent towards other members of one's
social group will reduce one's chance of survial and reproduction, not
enhance it.
>
> When the stronger Naziis destroyed whole populations in order to
> exploit an ecological niche and expand into others how could this be
> bad?
Because 1. the Nazis were not, on average "stronger" than the people they
oppressed, merely more inclined to use violence. 2. Nazism was a political
movement, not a genetic trait. 3. They were not "exploiting and ecological
niche", they were pursuing a political end. 5. The Nazis were engaging in
a form of tribal warfare, not an evolutionary struggle for existance. The
Nazis were not a distinct population competeing for resources, they were a
political movement interested in acquiring political power.
>This is exactly what evolutionary theory says has happened over
> the course of 600 million years.
No, Tony, you are simply wrong. In the natural world, members of the same
species rarely engage in genocidal warfare. That would more likely result
in extinction of the species than in reproductive success.
> According to Richard Dawkins the
> flesh and blood is merely a vehicle that the genes employ for their
> own propagation, the fittest of which continue on. It is the genes
> which matter not the flesh and blood people.
Again, Dawkins is describing how things work, not prescribing how people
should behave. To the individual that posseses those genes, the flesh and
blood IS important. Human beings can, and do care about the individual,
nature however does not.
>
> Under such a materialistic theory Johansson will have difficulty
> justifying any concept of good or evil. Such characterizations will
> be merely arbitrary.
Only to those who have no respect for their fellow individuals. Human
survival depends on respect for the welfare of each individual. Tony
mistakenly assumes that a human being's behavior is constrained by the non
sentient action of a natural process. As Johansson points out, we don't
decry Gravity for the fact that falls from a great height are often fatal.
The fact of natural selection doesn't prevent humans from caring for others.
DJT
rich hammett
>> john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
>> news:1fok9ym.10a9wfy1moydwfN%john.w...@bigpond.com:
>>
>> >> > Ethics_ and finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy
>> >> > actually meant.
>> >>
>> >> Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
>> >>
>> > That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
>> > statements. How's that for succinct?
>>
>> That's right. OK, but what do you call the fallacy that everybody
>> thinks is the naturalistic fallacy but isn't, but is a hell of a fallacy
>> anyway? (By this I mean the "'Sharks eat people' = 'I want people to be
>> eaten by sharks'" fallacy.)
> They are formally equivalent:
> "Sharks eat people" is a fact.
> therefore
> "Sharks should eat people" is true.
> This is fallacious. No amount of shark dietary information will justify
> the moral claim that something should occur WRT shark behaviours. This
> is the same as saying that the *natural* properties of shark diets are
> not in any way identical to the *moral* rule that sharks should be
> people eaters.
Of course, I agree strongly with the distinction between those two.
> Moore puts it better - he is arguing against the idea that pleasure (a
> utilitarian utility function) justifies any moral statement whatsoever.
> The giving of pleasure is a statement about the factual properties of
> some process. It is not enough or even needed to justify the moral
> claim. Hence, he says that moral claims about what is good are not
> identical with factual claims about what is.
I find that this is compelling at first glance, but the more I try
to reduce it to something meaningful (besides the distinction
you and Mitchell make above) I end up with...nothing.
Since "good" varies so much across time, culture, and myriad other
circumstances, how can we give just one name to such a varied item,
unless we define it in terms of something else?
An example of sharp relief: To a 19th centure slave owner, it
was quite definitely "good" for slaves to follow orders. To
the slave, and in the perspective of many outsiders, that situation
is less good than many other possible situations.
Which of these is "good"? Each player and observer has their
own moral intuition. How does Moore address such a situation?
My own response here would be to say that the "moral intuition"
is a sum of utilitarian impulses, each of which can be defined
by another absolute context. And all boiling down to "I want
to survive. I want to meet my basic biological drives."
And so, a prescriptive moral system would involve maximizing this
utility, possibly including group utilities.
Not very pleasant, but it seems more realistic than my superficial
reading of Moore.
rich hammett
>> Ananda Gupta sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
>> > darth_...@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
>> > <8e0e3045.03010...@posting.google.com>:
>>
>> >>Perhaps you were surprised because you were working from a false
>> >>assumption about the relationship between scientific thinking and
>> >>moral philosophy.
>>
>> > No, I was surprised because of my previous experience with atheists. In my
>> > (previous) experience atheists are often moral relativists. I wanted to
>> > see if there was a similar correlation between relativism and evolutionism,
>> > and expected there to be one because of the overlap between evolutionism
>> > and atheism.
> It would be very interesting to do a largescale and statistically valid
> survey on this, and publish it. Also be interesting to see the
> correlation between atheism and relativism, and some other
> "freethinking" viewpoints (like agnosticism).
>>
>> >>Scientific thinking, based on methodological
>> >>naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
>> >>subscribe to.
>>
>> > Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are meta-
>> > ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know what ought to
>> > be, not what ought to be.
> Nicely put.
>>
>> >> That is, the methods that allow us to know what *is*
>> >>are not the same ones that tell us what *ought to be*. Science, which
>> >>is metaphysically neutral, is compatible with a large number of
>> >>theological and ethical conceptual frameworks.
>>
>> > Yes... but, as above, it may not be compatible with a large number of
>> > *meta*-ethical frameworks. Some people, in particular, tend to use
>> > naturalistic arguments against, e.g., the existence of conscience or a
>> > moral sense. To put it in the terms you use, some naturalists argue that
>> > only scientific methods can bring us knowledge, and since they don't tell
>> > us what ought to be, there is no moral knowledge. That is moral skepticism
>> > (not quite the same as moral relativism, but they're all anti-realist in
>> > any case).
>>
>> >>That is, you can
>> >>believe in science and still believe in a wide variety of religious
>> >>and moral ways of thinking. It's just those few specific religious
>> >>and philosophical frameworks which explicitly or implicitly deny the
>> >>methods and findings of science which are incompatible with science.
>> >>(And one of the articles of their faith is typically that all morality
>> >>must necessarily be grounded in the tenets of their own faith.)
>> >>
>> >>Even apart from this, metaphysical naturalists, who don't believe in
>> >>the supernatural, are *also* free to be moral realists, if they so
>> >>choose.
>>
>> > I agree, but, as many critics of moral realism point out, moral realism
>> > seems to require us to accept the existence of a moral sense or some other
>> > cognitive (or perhaps noncognitive -- there are people on both sides of
>> > that one) faculty that allows us to become aware of moral facts. There is
>> > no scientific basis, they allege, for supposing such a faculty exists, and
>> > hence no scientific basis for supposing that moral facts exist. Hence,
>> > again allegedly, moral realism cannot be true.
>>
>> Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
> In what language game or discourse? Nothing is universal over space and
> time except in the context of a model and description of the universe of
> the discussion. The Universe of, say, metaphysical debate is always
> (sometimes explicitly, particularly in David Lewis's works) limited to
> the language in which the issues are framed. this can be a logical
> language, or just some formal language of a model.
Yes, I understand this. But, as in mathematics, it's only a
pretty game until it can be related back to the real world. I
would say that goes doubly for ethics.
So, what is this concept "good" in Moore, in the real world?
rich
> When making metaethical points, one is using a metaethical language; in
> which statements like S: '"A moral rule R is true" iff R is T' can be
> made. The quoted sentence is mentioned, not used. This means that the
> sentence S is in a metalanguage to the one in which R is used. This is
> pretty standard analysis of linguistic philosophy.
> One can be a moral relativist in one language - call it E for empirical
> - and a moral realist in another - call it M for moral. In M one tests
> moral claims and actions using the Rs of M (i.e., on the basis that they
> are, or are not, consonant with the moral rules of that language). In E,
> however, one can describe the evolution of the language M as a simple
> process - say using game theory - and know that the entities that M
> quantifies over are real within M, but not real within E. In describing
> this situation, one uses a philosophical language P which is a
> metalanguage to both M and E. And so on. It gets very Cantorian very
> quickly, and at that point I just shut down the frontal lobes...
> Hmm. It just occurred to me; this is a version of the Third Man Regress.
> Whaddyaknow.
rich hammett
>>Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
> All I mean by a moral fact is a normative proposition whose truth is
> independent of anyone's perspective.
In that case, I truly do not understand how this might relate to
any meaningful _human_ definition of the word "good."
rich
> If that entails that moral facts are
> universal over space and time (off the top of my head it seems that it
> would entail that) then yes.
> ASG
dandelion
<massive snip>
> Right -- which is why Orwell also points out that Newspeak, alone among
> languages, *shrinks* over time (in terms of vocabulary) rather than
> expanding, precisely to prevent the possibility of people just making up
> new words to express incorrect ideas. Orwell was a clever guy. :)
'Lingua Tertii Imperii' by Victor Klemperer may interest you. Unfortunately,
though Orwell described it to it's final consequences, he did not invent
it.
http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/highlights/books/newacq15.htm
--
Warp 7 -- It's a law we can live with.
John Harshman
"Dana Tweedy" <twe...@cvn.net> wrote:
> "A Pagano" <anthony...@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:vs2u1v0pq6e3eq35p...@4ax.com...
> snipping
[piggybacking to cover a point not previously considered, as far as I
know]
So, what's the basis for judgements of good and evil in a religious
framework? Is something good because God says so or does he say it's
good because, objectively, it is good? (Plato's question)
If the first, then good and evil are indeed arbitrary, because God could
pick anything he liked to put into those categories. Child-murder could
be "good" as well as anything. You can say that God wouldn't do that,
but why, unless he's recognizing some objective standard? And that
brings us to the second alternative, that there is an objective
standard. Since the standard doesn't come from God, it must exist
regardless of God. So even assuming the strawman theory that evolution
and atheism necessarily go together, morality in the religious and
evolutionary frameworks have the same objective standard (if there is
any such standard). They are either equally objective or equally
arbitrary, at least.
--
*Note the obvious spam-defeating modification
to my address if you reply by email.
SortingItOut
> "Talk.Origins Informal Survey" in subject line to see the original
> question, as it was quite long). All nine replies were from evolutionists,
> and they split down the middle (5-4 in favor of moral realism).
>
> E = evolutionist
> C = creationist
> T = moral relativist
> L = moral realist
>
> E & L: 5
> E & T: 4
>
> I was surprised at how many people affirmed moral realism; I was expecting
> a pretty skewed result in favor of relativism.
>
It would be interesting to see if the 5 "E & L" people from your
survey agree on the sprcifics of proper moral behavior. If they all
have different views then aren't all but one of them (at least)
actually relativists?
Or perhaps they can plead ignorance on specific moral issues. That
seems fair enough. After all, these things are complicated. But
should they not at least be able to define some kind of basis or
standard for realism and all agree on what that basis is?
It is my gut feel (but I have no hard data) that most absolutists are
actually relativists, they just don't realize it.
Ananda Gupta
>Ananda Gupta sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
>> rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote in
>> <v1rpef2...@corp.supernews.com>:
>
>>> Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
>
>> All I mean by a moral fact is a normative proposition whose truth is
>> independent of anyone's perspective.
>
>In that case, I truly do not understand how this might relate to
>any meaningful _human_ definition of the word "good."
As before, according to Moore "good" is undefinable. What Moore would say
is that, e.g., the propositions "Genocide is evil" or "Keeping promises is
good" are true independent of anyone's perspective.% That's what Moore
would say with respect to the other example you gave in another post, where
the 19th century slave owner thinks it's good for slaves to follow his
commands. Whether or not it *actually* is good has nothing to do with the
owner's opinion. It is or it isn't. Analogously, the fact that Ptolemaic
astronomers believed the sun revolved around the earth may be interesting
in terms of our understanding their world view, in the history of science,
etc., but it has nothing to do with whether the sun *actually* revolves
around the earth.
%: Note that these are not context-independent. One should always think of
such propositions as including a sort of addendum saying something along
the lines of "in everyday circumstances" or "the circumstances surrounding
us as we have this discussion", etc., which are unspoken for the sake of
convenience -- just as, when I assert a scientific fact ("If I drop this
pencil it will fall") I am implicitly assuming a context including details
such as my being on Earth (or some other very large mass), the pencil is of
the normal sort we use today and not some futuristic version that has anti-
gravity built in, etc. Of course if either of those contexts doesn't
really obtain then the original statement is false, not true, but in that
case its *falsity* is still independent of anyone's perspective.
ASG
Mark Isaak
Wilkins) wrote:
>Mitchell Coffey <m.remov...@removestarpower.net> wrote:
>>
>> thinks is the naturalistic fallacy but isn't, but is a hell of a fallacy
>> anyway? (By this I mean the "'Sharks eat people' = 'I want people to be
>> eaten by sharks'" fallacy.)
>
>They are formally equivalent:
>
>"Sharks eat people" is a fact.
> therefore
>"Sharks should eat people" is true.
>
>This is fallacious. No amount of shark dietary information will justify
>the moral claim that something should occur WRT shark behaviours.
Does Pangloss have a fallacy named after him?
--
Mark Isaak at...@earthlink.net
Don't read everything you belive.
Ananda Gupta
>Since "good" varies so much across time, culture, and myriad other
>circumstances, how can we give just one name to such a varied item,
>unless we define it in terms of something else?
<lots of snippage>
See my other reply, but Moore (along with other moral realists) would say
that your premise -- that what is good varies across time, culture, etc.,
is false.
>An example of sharp relief: To a 19th centure slave owner, it
>was quite definitely "good" for slaves to follow orders. To
>the slave, and in the perspective of many outsiders, that situation
>is less good than many other possible situations.
>
>Which of these is "good"? Each player and observer has their
>own moral intuition. How does Moore address such a situation?
Through sincere discussion and argument, where all parties involved try to
set aside their biases and prejudices, and try to argue in good faith --
that is, face up to tensions and contradictions in one's own beliefs, etc.
It's similar, indeed, to the process by which science is done, when
scientists disagree about something. In particular, a chief purpose of
such discussion is to draw out the consequences of our moral intuitions and
test them against one another.
>My own response here would be to say that the "moral intuition"
>is a sum of utilitarian impulses, each of which can be defined
>by another absolute context. And all boiling down to "I want
>to survive. I want to meet my basic biological drives."
>
>And so, a prescriptive moral system would involve maximizing this
>utility, possibly including group utilities.
>Not very pleasant, but it seems more realistic than my superficial
>reading of Moore.
Realistic in what sense?
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<qd8u1v48ike3kpnsg...@4ax.com>:
>Does Pangloss have a fallacy named after him?
I don't know if it's common usage but I have seen references to "the best
of all possible worlds fallacy".
Ananda Gupta
<4404b96e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>It would be interesting to see if the 5 "E & L" people from your
>survey agree on the sprcifics of proper moral behavior. If they all
>have different views then aren't all but one of them (at least)
>actually relativists?
No, it just means they disagree. Your argument is akin to saying that if 5
scientists disagree about a particular scientific proposition, then only
one actually believes in scientific truths; the others don't actually
believe in scientific truth. But that's not (necessarily) the case: it
might be that all 5 believe in scientific truths but each believes that the
others, because of errors in reasoning or observation, or perhaps
intellectual laziness, bias, etc., have come to the wrong conclusions.
>Or perhaps they can plead ignorance on specific moral issues. That
>seems fair enough. After all, these things are complicated. But
>should they not at least be able to define some kind of basis or
>standard for realism and all agree on what that basis is?
Not sure what you mean by "standard" for realism. Do you mean a way by
which they might come to agree in principle? If that's what you mean, no
problem -- see one of my other posts (I think in reply to one of rich
hammett's) for a description thereof.
>It is my gut feel (but I have no hard data) that most absolutists are
>actually relativists, they just don't realize it.
My feeling is the opposite; most relativists believe in an absolute moral
imperative not to impose one's views on other people, so (inconsistently)
in their efforts to obey this imperative they purport to reject *all* moral
imperatives (because that way there's no basis for imposing one's beliefs
on someone else, since those beliefs are always unjustified).
ASG
dandelion
>>This is fallacious. No amount of shark dietary information will justify
>>the moral claim that something should occur WRT shark behaviours.
>
> Does Pangloss have a fallacy named after him?
No, and that's all for the best, so you can have the honour of naming it
after him! Perfectly befitting, too.
--
Don't abandon hope: your Tom Mix decoder ring arrives tomorrow.
Average Joe
Gupta) wrote:
>I don't see why different answers would commit someone to moral relativism.
bravo
Brian M. Scott
Gupta) wrote:
>rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote in
><v1u53hl...@corp.supernews.com>:
[...]
>>An example of sharp relief: To a 19th centure slave owner, it
>>was quite definitely "good" for slaves to follow orders. To
>>the slave, and in the perspective of many outsiders, that situation
>>is less good than many other possible situations.
>>Which of these is "good"? Each player and observer has their
>>own moral intuition. How does Moore address such a situation?
>Through sincere discussion and argument, where all parties involved try to
>set aside their biases and prejudices, and try to argue in good faith --
>that is, face up to tensions and contradictions in one's own beliefs, etc.
>It's similar, indeed, to the process by which science is done, when
>scientists disagree about something. In particular, a chief purpose of
>such discussion is to draw out the consequences of our moral intuitions and
>test them against one another.
The similarity strikes me as rather superficial, since there
seems to be no counterpart to observation. What you describe
here appears to have more in common with mathematical
investigation.
[...]
Brian
Ananda Gupta
<3e1f34d0...@enews.newsguy.com>:
>The similarity strikes me as rather superficial, since there
>seems to be no counterpart to observation. What you describe
>here appears to have more in common with mathematical
>investigation.
Mathematical investigation probably would be a better comparison, so I
agree with you there. Moore would argue that there isn't really a
difference between observation and moral intuition, in terms of how they
justify our beliefs. Either can be questioned.
ASG
Mitchell Coffey
> Mitchell Coffey <m.remov...@removestarpower.net> wrote:
>
> > john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
> > news:1fok9ym.10a9wfy1moydwfN%john.w...@bigpond.com:
> >
> > >> > Ethics_ and finally realised what Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy
> > >> > actually meant.
> > >>
> > >> Which is, summarized in a paragraph of less than 100 words?
> > >>
> > > That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> > > statements. How's that for succinct?
> >
> > thinks is the naturalistic fallacy but isn't, but is a hell of a fallacy
> > anyway? (By this I mean the "'Sharks eat people' = 'I want people to be
> > eaten by sharks'" fallacy.)
>
> They are formally equivalent:
>
> "Sharks eat people" is a fact.
> therefore
> "Sharks should eat people" is true.
>
> is the same as saying that the *natural* properties of shark diets are
> not in any way identical to the *moral* rule that sharks should be
> people eaters.
>
> utilitarian utility function) justifies any moral statement whatsoever.
> The giving of pleasure is a statement about the factual properties of
> some process. It is not enough or even needed to justify the moral
> claim. Hence, he says that moral claims about what is good are not
> identical with factual claims about what is.
Sure: I know that; everybody knows that. What I long to know is,
first, did Moore generalize from that; did he extend the concept
beyond a critique of utilitarianism? Second, is it accurate to use
the term "naturalistic fallacy" in reference to fallacies of the type
common in these parts, wherein good, stable, family guys like you and
me are accused of being Hannibal Lecter's evil twin for reporting
unpleasant things afoot?
Finally, if the generalized fallacy is indeed abroad without a name,
can we call it the "Shoot the messenger fallacy", because it's my
idea, and mine alone, and I thirst for glory.
Mitchell Coffey
Mitchell Coffey
>
> > Moore believed that the word "good" is foundational and unanalyzable,
> > which means it is not definable except by ostension (an example of
> > definition by ostension would be if you ask me to define "red" and I
> > do so by pointing at a kid's balloon that happens to be red and say
> > "That balloon is red.")
> >
> > So, for Moore, the naturalistic fallacy is committed by philosophers
> > when they try to define or analyze "goodness", or identify it with
> > some other property or thing. Moore thought that all such attempts to
> > identify goodness with any other kind of natural property fell victim
> > to this confusion -- the confusion between something having the
> > property of goodness and that thing being *identical with* goodness.
>
> That's good.
> however
>
> good=pleasure to moral sensibilities.
>
> Moore, your fired, your no good.
So what's good about pleasuring moral sensibilities?
Mitchell Coffey
Mitchell Coffey
> David Jensen <da...@dajensen-family.com> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 22:11:03 +0000 (UTC), in talk.origins
[snip]
> > >That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> > >statements. How's that for succinct?
> >
>
> Not far off it, if I recall my Principia Ethica...
>
> It may be true that all things which are good are _also_ something else,
> just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain
> kind of vibration in the light . . . . But far too many philosophers
> have thought that when they named those other properties they were
> actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not
> 'other,' but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I
> propose to call the 'naturalistic fallacy' and of it I shall now
> endeavour to dispose. (Moore, 10)
>
> from
>
> http://philosophy.wisc.edu/streiffer/PapersFolder/Frankena.pdf
>
> http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/moore.html
>
> http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/6k.htm#eth
>
> Here's a very nice discussion of the topic (with which I do not fully
> agree)
>
> http://members.optusnet.com.au/~brendan_long/Meta-ethics_Part_2.html
>
> and AN Prior's classic refutation of Moore
>
> http://www.utilitarian.org/texts/prior.html
>
> with which I also do not agree (Prior is a utilitarian). More (forgive
> that pun) can be found in the Bernard Williams book _Ethics and the
> Limits of Philosophy_, and in the wonderful debate between Jack Smart
> and Williams in _Utilitarianism for and against_.
Strangely, I read that latter book once. I thought it was a slam
dunk. The odd thing is that there are any utilitarians left.
Also, does Rawls' "A Theory of Justice" fall to the naturalistic
fallacy?
Mitchell Coffey
Philip Deitiker
news:a766a589.03011...@posting.google.com:
Do I look like a Zen master.
What's goog about pleasuring your immoral sensibilities?
The ancient chinese beleive that there should be a balance within life
between various forces that draw us. If left unchecked the primal nature
draws one toward the abyss of what is physically pleasing, this is bad.
John Wilkins
> John Wilkins sanoi, niin käheällä äänellä etten alussa tajunnut sitä:
> > rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote:
>
....
> >> Are these "moral facts" universal over space and time?
>
> > In what language game or discourse? Nothing is universal over space and
> > time except in the context of a model and description of the universe of
> > the discussion. The Universe of, say, metaphysical debate is always
> > (sometimes explicitly, particularly in David Lewis's works) limited to
> > the language in which the issues are framed. this can be a logical
> > language, or just some formal language of a model.
>
> Yes, I understand this. But, as in mathematics, it's only a
> pretty game until it can be related back to the real world. I
> would say that goes doubly for ethics.
I agree (hence my speculations on protolanguages elsewhere in this
thread). Although it goes equally for maths, ethics and any formal
system, not soubly...
>
> So, what is this concept "good" in Moore, in the real world?
To him (but not essential to the Naturalistic Fallacy IMO) it is an
intuitively obvious fact we can point to and identify.
....
--
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
John Wilkins
> john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
> <1fol9bp.166ls4n13wncaaN%john.w...@bigpond.com>:
>
> >Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> >> David Jensen <da...@dajensen-family.com> wrote in
> >> <jajs1vgvthnk7p1ok...@4ax.com>:
> >>
> >>>> That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> >>>> statements. How's that for succinct?
> >>
> >> Very, although be careful, because many laymen will assume you mean
> >> "empirical" when you say "factual".
> >>
> >Mostly, I do. For me a fact is either an empirical claim or some
> >derivation of empirical claims. But that is a horse of a different
> >stalk..
>
> Well, Moore thought that moral claims *were* factual statements. Anyway
> the above sounds more like Hume's is-ought problem. Taking another stab,
> building on your foundation:
>
> One cannot equate the good with any instance of an empirically observed
> property. How's that?
>
Better as an exegensis of Moore. I've been refreshing my knowledge by
reading the PE over last evening. I think that moral claims are factual,
but only within a moral domain of discourse. IOW, unlike Moore, I do not
think that empirical facts and moral facts are in the same ballpark.
John Wilkins
If language emerges from the complex cognitive and communicative
processes of a certain kind of ape, then there are pre-semantic
linguistic skills and abilities. For example, some birds show these
sorts of capacities. As you ramp up the complexity of information
processing in these apes, you find language-like behaviours:
protosymbolic representation, generalisation of signals to cover a range
of less obligate stimuli, transmission of these to others in the troop,
and so forth. But language is grounded in our experience of the natural
world, and we can communicate because we share these abilities (and
these cultural experiences - feral children never learn language quite
as well as socialised children do).
When the idea of an unconscious behaviour was first mooted (well before
Freud) it was refuted thus: a behaviour is necessarily consciously
chosen, hence a behaviour cannot be unconscious. Given the history of
ideas in the west, this made a kind of sense, even though we can now see
it was merely argument by definition and the definition was false.
The idea that a language must be symbolic and semantic (not to say
syntactic) is of this kind - we are defining language by the currently
observed complex behaviour and then saying that what *it* has, all
previous language must have (A Chomskyeque argument against language
being evolved). But language - both temporally and developmentally - is
based on prior shared biological traits which are *pre*-symbolic and,
IMO, pre-semantic, and we ground our use of language in that.
John Wilkins
> john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
> <1fol9eh.isvqup1dbq4alN%john.w...@bigpond.com>:
>
> >> I am not especially familiar with philosophy of language (although I
> >> am familiar, and unimpressed, with David Lewis' work -- it's
> >> interesting, but I question its resilience).
> >
> >Gasp! Shock! You would be eviscerated at my department :-)
>
> In what sense of "eviscerated"? heh heh. :)
>
> Incidentally which department is that?
History and Philosophy of Science at the Uni of Melbourne (I am a PhD
student in my spare time). Lewis was a frequent visitor and friend to
many of the locals...
>
> >> Regardless, let's consider a statement like "The Earth is 6,000 years
> >> old." Are you saying that the truth of this statement -- that the
> >> relationship between the referents of the words -- depends on the
> >> language being used?
> >
> >Essentially, yes. But there is no sharp distinction to be made between
> >the levels of language - at some point we are using a kind fo
> >pre-semantic language (or perhaps a presymbolic langauge) that is just a
> >biological Lebensform (did I mention my Wittgestein fixation?), and
> >statements become actions in the world, so some empirical truth value is
> >preserved in complex ways.
>
> OK. That paragraph made my brain hurt but I kindasortamaybe see what
> you're getting at.
You see why I remain satisfied by the superficialities, then :-)
All this comes from... wait for it... a comparison of Kuhn's
Incommensurability Thesis and Wittgenstein's Forms of Life. I think that
what defeats K's IT is the latter - we understand the referents because
we share FoLs (and if a lion *could* talk, we'd understand whatever was
biologically common between him and us).
>
> >>> When making metaethical points, one is using a metaethical language;
> >>> in which statements like S: '"A moral rule R is true" iff R is T' can
> >>> be made.
> >>
> >> Is T meant to mean "true", or another atom?
> >
> >"True", but as an atom in that metalanguage. What else could truth be?
> ><slinks slyly into the corner and cowers in the dark>
>
> But you just said above that empirical truth value is "preserved" (across
> what? Different languages?), so clearly it has to be something other than
> just an atom in a metalanguage.
It is preserved across the protolanguage of experience through to the
object level languages that are increasingly nested within that
protolanguage. Languages emerge out of dispositions to behave in ways
that are common to groups of social agents (this is both a philosophical
definition and an empirical hypothesis - I am proposing that language
evolved *in order* to share experiences between social agents).
But any statement of the truth of some lower level proposition is
justified in terms of a more abstract formal language. The error is in
thinking that we can justify propositions indefinitely or that there is
some terminus in the abstract direction, as it were.
Moral language is self-contained in a formal sense (at lower levels such
things are of course intertwined) and moral justifications end with
moral facts (and, as a side issue, they are not fully transitive IMO -
you can justify something according to a rule without needing to be
fully coherent with all other moral facts in the system).
I'm not an intuitionist in the classical sense - AFAIAC, we know moral
facts because we are taught them or encounter them. This means that, in
a metadiscourse I might be a metamoral relativist (that is, when I'm not
being a moral agent but an analytic philosopher), but when I make a
moral judgement, I am a moral realist: my moral facts are true (in that
domain) no matter what previous generations or foreign cultures might
think about the matter.
>
> >> But leaving that aside, suppose I assert that the last bit, "iff R is
> >> T", is unnecessary, and claim that "R is true" where R is a moral
> >> proposition. That is, suppose I assert that moral knowledge (and
> >> certain other kinds of claims, e.g. certain claims of epistemology) is
> >> prior to the linguistic considerations you describe. Alternatively,
> >> suppose I grant that moral knowledge is limited by the language game
> >> we are using, but that the language game we are using employs a
> >> *complete* description of the universe, so the fact that it is limited
> >> to this language game is unimportant.
> >
> >Good luck. Universally applicable language games are not yet, I think,
> >plausible (on Rosenberg's account, they never will be).
>
> But they might be universally applicable with respect to certain concepts,
> e.g. moral facts (I am certainly not saying this is the case, but it could
> be in principle, yes?).
Sure; and in-principle there is a complete theory and physical language
for everything. Rosenberg argues that whatever might be in-principle
possible, *we* will never have a single language that unifies all
science, because we have computational and communicational limitations.
I was just transferring his argument (which although I don't like it, I
haven't seen it refuted yet).
>
> > But if you
> >reject the Tarskian T-principle in this case, then you reject in in all
> >cases, I think. Insofar as we can *talk* about the truth conditions of
> >some proposition, we have to be able to make the metalinguistic shift. I
> >believe someone called this the "linguistic prison", from which there is
> >no escape.
>
> I'll have to look up that last term ("linguistic prison"); it seems to be
> more or less what you are talking about in this thread, correct?
Pretty much. The term in Quine is, IIRC, "semantic ascent".
>
> >> Can you give a concrete example of a thing (doesn't have to be a
> >> physical object) that is real within one language and not real in
> >> another, other than moral values? I am familiar with the idea that
> >> certain ideas cannot be expressed in one language but can in another
> >> (e.g. Orwell's famous claim that once Newspeak had completely evolved,
> >> treason would be literally unthinkable, for there would be no words
> >> with which to meaningfully express it). But that doesn't seem to be
> >> what you are talking about.
> >
> >"Electron" is real in post-Bohrian physics and unreal in pre-Bohrian
> >physics (which existed for some time after Bohr, IIRC).
> > I'm not, though,
> >going for a Whorffian linguistic relativism. Language does not define
> >the world, it merely defines what we can say about it.
>
> OK, now we're getting somewhere. I guess my biggest sticking point here is
> that I don't think the constraint of "what we can say about X" is
> especially meaningful. Obviously if we lack the terminology to accurately
> discuss a topic then we have some limits (or we can just make words up on
> the spot). Regardless, if what you say immediately above is the case, then
> the moral realist (and the relativist) no longer has a problem: he can just
> say that the underlying moral reality (or lack thereof) is not defined by
> moral language (as I thought you were claiming before).
>
> >Treason in
> >Orwell's nightmare would still be possible - you just couldn't properly
> >describe it. You might, if language were to evolve rather than be
> >designed, have to invent a new word for it, which is what happens in
> >language.
>
> Right -- which is why Orwell also points out that Newspeak, alone among
> languages, *shrinks* over time (in terms of vocabulary) rather than
> expanding, precisely to prevent the possibility of people just making up
> new words to express incorrect ideas. Orwell was a clever guy. :)
>
Oh yes. doubleplusgood, he was. Or in geekspeak, that would be good++.
Lenny Flank
<harshman....@sjm.infi.net> wrote:
<snip>
>So, what's the basis for judgements of good and evil in a religious
>framework? Is something good because God says so or does he say it's
>good because, objectively, it is good? (Plato's question)
>
>If the first, then good and evil are indeed arbitrary, because God could
>pick anything he liked to put into those categories. Child-murder could
>be "good" as well as anything. You can say that God wouldn't do that
Ummmm, he did. Just ask the Amelekites what happened to their kids.
And their women.
Apparently genocide is OK if god says it's OK. . . . . <sigh>
=================================================
Lenny Flank
"There are no loose threads in the web of life"
Creation "Science" Debunked
http://www.geocities.com/lflank
Lenny Flank's Reptile Page
http://www.geocities.com/lflank/herp.html
Lenny Flank
<anthony...@verizon.net> wrote:
snip--
>When the stronger Naziis destroyed whole populations in order to
>exploit an ecological niche and expand into others how could this be
>bad? This is exactly what evolutionary theory says has happened over
>the course of 600 million years.
It's also exactly what the Bible says happened when the Israelites
moved into the "Promised Land" . . . . . . . . .
Or are you under the impression that the Israelis were *invited*
there by the people who were already living there . . . . . . . .
John Wilkins
....
> Finally, if the generalized fallacy is indeed abroad without a name,
> can we call it the "Shoot the messenger fallacy", because it's my
> idea, and mine alone, and I thirst for glory.
>
I think it's yours, but there is no canonical list of fallacies of
either logic or rhetoric. It's probably a special case of ad hominem or
the genetic fallacy...
John Wilkins
> wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote...
Utilitarianism is rather like a religious view. Because it is an ethical
naturalism, a certain kind of thinker prefers it and counterarguments
are ignored - Peter Singer being a case in point. All his ethical
deliberations rely on utilitarianism, and so far as I know he never
justifies this but makes public polity claims for all of us
deontologists.
>
> Also, does Rawls' "A Theory of Justice" fall to the naturalistic
> fallacy?
I do not think so. As I recall Rawls (and it's over a decade since I
read anything on this), he does not deal with the metaethical issues,
but on how to specify just laws however justice is defined or grounded.
But I don't have a copy to hand to check.
>
> Mitchell Coffey
John Wilkins
> john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote in
> <1fol9bp.166ls4n13wncaaN%john.w...@bigpond.com>:
>
> >Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> >> David Jensen <da...@dajensen-family.com> wrote in
> >> <jajs1vgvthnk7p1ok...@4ax.com>:
> >>
> >>>> That one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> >>>> statements. How's that for succinct?
> >>
> >> Very, although be careful, because many laymen will assume you mean
> >> "empirical" when you say "factual".
> >>
> >Mostly, I do. For me a fact is either an empirical claim or some
> >derivation of empirical claims. But that is a horse of a different
> >stalk..
>
> Well, Moore thought that moral claims *were* factual statements. Anyway
> the above sounds more like Hume's is-ought problem. Taking another stab,
> building on your foundation:
>
> One cannot equate the good with any instance of an empirically observed
> property. How's that?
>
Pretty good. Note that Moore thinks the good is an elemental and not
further defineable. I do not. I just think that there is no single
definiens for all goods.
By the way, this should be of interest in the context:
30. The modern vogue of 'Evolution' is chiefly owing to Darwin's
investigations as to the origin of species. Darwin formed a strictly
biological hypothesis as to the manner in which certain forms of animal
life became established, while others died out and disappeared. His
theory was that this might be accounted for, partly at least, in the
following way. When certain varieties occurred (the cause of their
occurrence is still, in the main, unknown), it might be that some of the
points, in which they varied from their parent species or from other
species then existing, made them better able to persist in the
environment in which they found themselves--less liable to be killed
off. They might, for instance, be better able to endure the cold or heat
or changes of the climate; better able to find nourishment from what
surrounded them; better able to escape from or resist other species
which fed upon them; better fitted to attract or to master the other
sex. Being thus less liable to die, their numbers relatively to other
species would increase; and that very increase in their numbers might
tend towards the extinction of those other species. This theory, to
which Darwin gave the name 'Natural Selection,' was also called the
theory of survival of the fittest. The natural process which it thus
described was called evolution. It was very natural to suppose that
evolution meant evolution from what was lower into what was higher; in
fact was observed that at least one species, commonly called higher--the
species man--had so survived, and among men again it was supposed that
the higher races, ourselves for example, had shewn a tendency to survive
the lower, such as the North American Indians. We can kill them more
easily than they can kill us. The doctrine of evolution was then
represented as an explanation of how the higher species survives the
lower. Spencer, for example, constantly uses 'more evolved' as
equivalent to 'higher, But it is to be noted that this forms no part of
Darwin's scientific theory. That theory will explain, equally well, how
by an alteration in the environment (the gradual cooling of the earth,
for example) quite a different species from man, a species which we
think infinitely lower, might survive us. The survival of the fittest
does _not_ mean, as one might suppose, the survival of what is fittest
to fulfil a good purpose--best adapted to a good end: at the last, it
merely means the survival of the fittest to survive; and the value of
the scientific theory, and it is a theory of great value, just consists
in shewing what are the causes which produce certain biological effects.
Whether these effects are good or bad, it cannot pretend to judge.
Section 30 of Principia Ethica, by G E Moore :-) The sections before and
after it are well worth reading in this context.
Brian M. Scott
john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote:
>> >Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> [...]
>> [...]
As an aside, I'm not sure that this has actually been
demonstrated; in the cases of which I'm aware, there may have
been other problems besides lack of socialization.
[...]
>The idea that a language must be symbolic and semantic (not to say
>syntactic) is of this kind - we are defining language by the currently
>observed complex behaviour and then saying that what *it* has, all
>previous language must have (A Chomskyeque argument against language
>being evolved).
No, we are simply defining what we mean by 'language'. This
obviously says nothing about the temporal or developmental
precursors of language. Plainly they must have something in
common with language, but this is no reason to stretch the term
beyond recognition. (Sort of an etymological fallacy in
reverse.)
>But language - both temporally and developmentally - is
>based on prior shared biological traits which are *pre*-symbolic and,
>IMO, pre-semantic, and we ground our use of language in that.
Brian
gen2rev
>
> On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 20:43:00 +0000 (UTC), Richard Clayton
> <richzigard...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> >Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are a wealthy man who lacks
> >nothing?
> >
> > Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are poor, your family is
> >starving, and you've no other immediate way to feed them?
> >
> > If you gave different answers to these two questions, you are a moral
> >relativist.
>
> no the morality is just a function of two things, still absolute
>
> morality=f(acceptable behavior, true desperation)
Wow, morality reduced to mathematics. I haven't laughed that hard in a
while...
> I never said desperation was immoral
>
> but it is completely objective, so it is absolute
Steven J.
>
-- [snip]
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> It's not really a matter of whether Johansson thinks the destruction
> of the weak is "good" in the moral sense or not. The question is
> whether Johansson can render a moral sense of "bad" given the
> acceptance of a mechanism of evolutionary history that he believes
> requires exactly that-----the destruction of the weak or less fit.
>
Ah, I see. You aren't committing the naturalistic fallacy. You are
simply wondering why natural selection could ever favor behavior that
wasn't predatory or exploitive. How could a system that favored the
strong against the weak ever favor not using whatever strength you
had, as aggressively as possible? How could a desire for justice ever
evolve, under natural selection.
Actually, I addressed this briefly in my last response to you on that
issue (I just got back to the group, and I'm not caught up on the
threads yet, but am responding to posts by you and Goodrich rather at
random).
>
> Under that theory we are merely an evolutionary branch from some
> common animal ancestor. We are a biological animal. Our "human"
> differences are merely the characteristics of the taxonomist. If
> such a mechanism of destroying the weak to enhance differential
> survival is, in large part, responsible for the creation of all
> biological novelty and diversity and was a necessity of nature
> wouldn't we be forced to describe this as good?
>
First, no, this doesn't follow. We aren't obliged to make any moral
judgements of it at all. As I noted in another post, we weren't
created in natural selection's image. It has no goals that we can
seek and help further -- and none we can oppose. Natural selection is
not a *thing*; it's the end result of various sets of processes.
Second, natural selection eliminates the "unfit," not the "weak."
Remember all those painstaking lectures to you on vestigiality through
disuse; natural selection will favor the loss of "strength" one
doesn't need, and agression that profits one nothing.
>
> If "red in tooth and claw" is the natural way of evolution and as such
> is, in large part, crucial to our very existence why shouldn't
> Johansson consider this good? If this is the necessary mechanism of
> the material world how can we have a morality which characterizes it
> as bad?
>
I've run across this argument before: "if natural selection is true,
why do gentle sheep survive while fierce velociraptors went extinct?"
"Red in tooth and claw" is Tennyson, not Darwin, Wallace, or even
Spencer. You need to move beyond metaphorical cliches either to a
higher level of absraction, or a much lower one.
It is obvious that cooperation can enhance the odds of survival under
some circumstances. "A rope of three strands is not easily broken"
made it into the Proverbs, as a practical rather than strictly moral
reason for cooperation. But nature is full of examples of mutualistic
symbiosis, as well as parasitism. Providing a benefit to others can
be of benefit to you (this is why business enterprises exist; it is
also why cleaner fish exist).
A group can often benefit from sharing with one another -- if I help
you when I am able and you need the help, perhaps you will help me.
Even if you don't, perhaps someone else will, because then, when our
circumstances are reversed, I will be able to return the favor, and
both of us will have benefitted. Note that a species need not be able
to articulate this strategy in order to follow it; a mutation can make
you more likely to help others as easily as make you more likely to
cheat or exploit them -- but the former mutation would tend to be met
with more favor from others, who would have been descended from
ancestors selected as most likely to benefit potential friends and
harm likely enemies.
Over time, one can evolve built-in instincts to help others in your
group, to not cheat on them (and, of course, to detect and punish
cheaters against yourself and others).
>
> When the stronger Naziis destroyed whole populations in order to
> exploit an ecological niche and expand into others how could this be
> bad? This is exactly what evolutionary theory says has happened over
> the course of 600 million years.
>
It was bad for everyone who didn't meet the Nazis' criteria for
"Aryan." That gave everyone in that category a reason to stop them.
Nazi types are always bad for everyone else -- and tolerating such
ideas, much less encouraging them, is the sort of behavior that tends
to get selected out of a population. Thinking that people, who [a]
don't think you are like them and [b] want to kill everyone they think
is like them, are "good" is the epitome of an unfit trait. Note that
the Nazis tried treating members of their own population like members
of a different population, and even a different species. Treating
members of your own species as though they belonged to a different
species might, on occasion, be a "fit" trait, but it seems a most
unlikely one.
>
> According to Richard Dawkins the
> flesh and blood is merely a vehicle that the genes employ for their
> own propagation, the fittest of which continue on. It is the genes
> which matter not the flesh and blood people.
No, it is merely the genes which change over time in ways relevant to
evolution, not the individuals who bear those genes. It is genes,
ultimately, not the bodies they are in, that are selected. But the
bodies they are in, and the minds they build, *are* relevant. They
are the phenotypes upon which natural selection operates.
The individuals surely "count" -- the genes wouldn't get very far
without the bodies they build. The individuals are the only ones who
value *anything* at all; genes have no values, no desires, no hopes or
fears. They do not, except in a metaphorical sense, have interests
which they can "selfishly" pursue. Dawkins is quite clear on this,
but he made the mistake of expecting his critics to read past his
title.
>
> Under such a materialistic theory Johansson will have difficulty
> justifying any concept of good or evil. Such characterizations will
> be merely arbitrary.
>
In terms of what concepts, exactly, would you propose to justify
concepts of good or evil? Any criteria you could use to judge them
would, themselves, be concepts of good and evil, and equally in need
of their own justification. "We should obey God because He's the
Creator" is either an appeal to brute force -- the merest sort of
"might makes right" mentality -- or an appeal to a moral code that
apparently exists independently of any ideas we have about God. That
evolution provides no basis for morality is no problem for evolution,
since [a] neither atomic theory nor geocentrism imply such a basis,
and [b] morality isn't the sort of thing that can have a basis anyway.
>
> Regards,
> T Pagano
-- Steven J.
darth_versive
> Ananda Gupta wrote:
> >
> > darth_...@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
> > <8e0e3045.03010...@posting.google.com>:
<snip>
> > >Scientific thinking, based on methodological
> > >naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
> > >subscribe to.
> >
> > Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are meta-
> > ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know what ought to
> > be, not what ought to be.
>
> I agree that these are meta-ethical. However, I do not agree that they
> say anything about how we know what ought to be. Realism vs
> relativism IMHO is about whether there _are_ truths about what ought to be.
> This is a different issue from whether and how we can _find_out_ what
> those truths are.
My statement wasn't intended to imply that moral realism and
relativism weren't meta-ethical. I was just making a general
statement about what science can and can't tell us. Along the same
lines, science can't tell us what meta-ethical framework one should
subscribe to either. Science can merely describe, not prescribe, in
this area.
> > > That is, the methods that allow us to know what *is*
> > >are not the same ones that tell us what *ought to be*. Science, which
> > >is metaphysically neutral, is compatible with a large number of
> > >theological and ethical conceptual frameworks.
> >
> > Yes... but, as above, it may not be compatible with a large number of
> > *meta*-ethical frameworks. Some people, in particular, tend to use
> > naturalistic arguments against, e.g., the existence of conscience or a
> > moral sense.
>
> The existence of a conscience or moral sense makes eminent
> evolutionary sense -- an adaptation to group living.
> However, there is no reason to assume that such a moral
> sense delivers _true_ moral verdicts in any absolute sense -- it
> delivers the moral verdicts that happen to maximize our
> inclusive fitness.
Yes. Science can describe behavior, and infer mental states from
this, including moral sense, and test those inferences by various
means. And correlate mental states and behaviors with inferred
evolutionary adaptive factors. But as to the existence of any
transcendent moral "truths," "absolutes," or "universals," science
must remain silent on this issue.
And I disagree with the statement above that science "may not be
compatible with a large number of *meta*-ethical frameworks."
Individual scientists may use naturalistic arguments against the
existence of a conscience or a moral sense, for sure. But others may,
as you have done, use naturalistic arguments that a conscience or
moral sense *does* exist, and has evolutionary consequences relating
to adaptive behaviors. So I wouldn't say that science per se really
is incompatible with all that many meta-ethical frameworks, regardless
of what individual scientists may argue.
DV
Ananda Gupta
<8e0e3045.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>Sverker Johansson <l...@hlk.no.hj.spam.se> wrote in message
>news:<3E1ECE95...@hlk.no.hj.spam.se>...
>> Ananda Gupta wrote:
>>>
>>> darth_...@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
>>> <8e0e3045.03010...@posting.google.com>:
>
><snip>
>
>>>> Scientific thinking, based on methodological
>>>> naturalism, has nothing to say about what moral framework one should
>>>> subscribe to.
>>>
>>> Moral realism and relativism are not ethical frameworks. They are
>>> meta- ethical frameworks. That is, they tell us about how we know
>>> what ought to be, not what ought to be.
>>
>> I agree that these are meta-ethical. However, I do not agree that
>> they say anything about how we know what ought to be. Realism vs
>> relativism IMHO is about whether there _are_ truths about what ought
>> to be. This is a different issue from whether and how we can
>> _find_out_ what those truths are.
>
>My statement wasn't intended to imply that moral realism and
>relativism weren't meta-ethical. I was just making a general
>statement about what science can and can't tell us. Along the same
>lines, science can't tell us what meta-ethical framework one should
>subscribe to either. Science can merely describe, not prescribe, in
>this area.
OK, so you think science cannot, by itself, tell us what kinds of arguments
ought to persuade us to accept various propositions. Fair enough.
>Yes. Science can describe behavior, and infer mental states from
>this, including moral sense, and test those inferences by various
>means. And correlate mental states and behaviors with inferred
>evolutionary adaptive factors. But as to the existence of any
>transcendent moral "truths," "absolutes," or "universals," science
>must remain silent on this issue.
>
>And I disagree with the statement above that science "may not be
>compatible with a large number of *meta*-ethical frameworks."
>Individual scientists may use naturalistic arguments against the
>existence of a conscience or a moral sense, for sure. But others may,
>as you have done, use naturalistic arguments that a conscience or
>moral sense *does* exist
Actually, I haven't done that (Sverker Johanssen did, though). The
paragraph beginning "The existence of a conscience or a moral sense makes
eminent evolutionary sense..." was not written by me. And for good reason;
I don't think you *can* make a (persuasive, non-trivial) naturalistic
argument in favor of a moral sense. And since some people believe that
naturalistic (or mathematical) arguments are the only rationally persuasive
arguments, they take that fact as reason not to believe that there is a
moral sense.
>, and has evolutionary consequences relating
>to adaptive behaviors. So I wouldn't say that science per se really
>is incompatible with all that many meta-ethical frameworks, regardless
>of what individual scientists may argue.
Also, fair enough.
ASG
SortingItOut
> eri...@home.com (SortingItOut) wrote in
> <4404b96e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>
> >It would be interesting to see if the 5 "E & L" people from your
> >survey agree on the sprcifics of proper moral behavior. If they all
> >have different views then aren't all but one of them (at least)
> >actually relativists?
>
> No, it just means they disagree. Your argument is akin to saying that if 5
> scientists disagree about a particular scientific proposition, then only
> one actually believes in scientific truths; the others don't actually
> believe in scientific truth. But that's not (necessarily) the case: it
> might be that all 5 believe in scientific truths but each believes that the
> others, because of errors in reasoning or observation, or perhaps
> intellectual laziness, bias, etc., have come to the wrong conclusions.
You're right. Poor argument on my part.
>
> >Or perhaps they can plead ignorance on specific moral issues. That
> >seems fair enough. After all, these things are complicated. But
> >should they not at least be able to define some kind of basis or
> >standard for realism and all agree on what that basis is?
>
> Not sure what you mean by "standard" for realism. Do you mean a way by
> which they might come to agree in principle? If that's what you mean, no
> problem -- see one of my other posts (I think in reply to one of rich
> hammett's) for a description thereof.
This isn't really what I'm looking for. Agreeing in principle seems
fairly useless. By the way, I read your other posts and still didn't
see what I was looking for. Maybe I mis-read.
The fact that there are moral issues for which there is wide agreement
also seems irrelevant. What I'm looking for is wide agreement across
ALL moral issues. All those things in the gray need to be resolved,
or at least shown to be resolvable. There should be no gray areas.
More importantly, what is the basis for which these gray areas can be
resolved?
For example, how can we determine all the circumstances (if any) for
which it is acceptable to kill another human being? Some common
accepted circumstances are killing in self defense, capital
punishment, and war. Some less commonly accepted are killing in
defense of others, killing in defense of rape or other bodily injury
(yet no threat of death), and killing in defense of property. But
what exactly constitutes a threat for which killing is justified (e.g.
verbal vs. physical). There are an infinite number of scenarios to
consider.
Getting widespread agreement that it's wrong to kill little old ladies
while they're crossing the street doesn't impress me. Eliminating all
the gray areas and getting widespread agreement for all moral dilemmas
would impress me. Or at least establishing a method or basis for
doing so (but then agreement should quickly follow, anyway). How can
anyone claim that there is an absolute moral standard when such huge
gray areas abound? It seems like they should at least be able to
point to some kind of standard if they're going to make this claim.
My default position is that the absolute standard doesn't exist until
the evidence for it appears, just as my default position is that there
are not invisible pink elephants dancing on my head until evidence for
them appears. I can't (and don't) claim that an absolute moral
standard does not exist. I can only say that I haven't seen evidence
for it. Not even close.
>
> >It is my gut feel (but I have no hard data) that most absolutists are
> >actually relativists, they just don't realize it.
>
> My feeling is the opposite; most relativists believe in an absolute moral
> imperative not to impose one's views on other people,
Hmmm...I don't know why they would feel that way. An absolute moral
imperative? Sounds contradictory for a relativist to have this
position. But I guess that's your point. But my point is that
there's nothing odd about finding widespread agreement on some spcific
issues, by relativists or otherwise. If you find wide agreement among
relativists across all moral issues, then you have a point. But I
doubt you'll find that among any large group of people, even moral
realists.
> so (inconsistently)
> in their efforts to obey this imperative they purport to reject *all* moral
> imperatives (because that way there's no basis for imposing one's beliefs
> on someone else, since those beliefs are always unjustified).
I must be missing something here too. I don't think relativists claim
that there are *no* moral issues or no issues we can't agree on.
Their claim (I think) is that there is not an overall standard that
covers everything...that there is instead only widespread differing
opinions.
>
> ASG
John Wilkins
The sample size is small, but IIRC all instances of children not
learning languages until after 5 for whatever reason lead to a very poor
grasp of language overall, nicht wahr?
>
> [...]
>
> >The idea that a language must be symbolic and semantic (not to say
> >syntactic) is of this kind - we are defining language by the currently
> >observed complex behaviour and then saying that what *it* has, all
> >previous language must have (A Chomskyeque argument against language
> >being evolved).
>
> No, we are simply defining what we mean by 'language'. This
> obviously says nothing about the temporal or developmental
> precursors of language. Plainly they must have something in
> common with language, but this is no reason to stretch the term
> beyond recognition. (Sort of an etymological fallacy in
> reverse.)
I think we discussed this once before. I think this is correct, but
differ where to draw the line. Here's another example: species. In the
pre-transmutationist account, a species was a universal kind that was
defined in terms of being distinct within a broader universal kind. It
could no more change from one to another than the number 4 could
transmute to the number 5. hence, when evolutionary views were proposed,
creationists like Agassiz quite correctly said that species could not
evolve, because the definition of species precluded that. He wrote,
"[I]f species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the
transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? And if individuals
alone exist, how can differences which may be observed among them prove
the variability of species?" (Lurie 1960 (1988), 297).
Darwin responded by redefining the term; he used another lexicon, one
designed to cope with the problem. His reply, to Asa Gray, was "I am
surprised that Agassiz did not succeed in writing something better. How
absurd that logical quibble "if species do not exist how can they vary"?
As if anyone doubted their temporary existence?" (quoted in Gayon 1996,
229).
Gayon, J. (1996). "The individuality of the species: A Darwinian theory?
- from Buffon to Ghiselin, and back to Darwin." Biology and Philosophy
11: 215-244.
Lurie, E. (1960 (1988)). Louis Agassiz: A life in science. Baltimore and
London, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Now, was Darwin wrong to redefine this term? I think he is not
stretching the term but changing the way we look at things. Merely
because "species" was taken out of an initial context in which it could
not change (i.e., in which it had essential characters), should it
remain liek that? Ditto for language. We define Language in one context,
where we know already the "mature" form of it, and can discuss it with
some familiarity. So if we now think that language evolved out of prior
traits that do not have all the requisite features, or have it only in a
"nascent" :-) form, we are overstretching the term to apply it to those
states, especially if we add "proto" as a prefix?
I think the etymological fallacy is to assume that the meanings of terms
must remain solid.
>
> >But language - both temporally and developmentally - is
> >based on prior shared biological traits which are *pre*-symbolic and,
> >IMO, pre-semantic, and we ground our use of language in that.
>
> Brian
Ananda Gupta
>You're right. Poor argument on my part.
I must be hallucinating. Did a Usenet poster graciously claim to have made
a bad argument? Next you'll be telling me you're Santa Claus. ;)
>>> Or perhaps they can plead ignorance on specific moral issues. That
>>> seems fair enough. After all, these things are complicated. But
>>> should they not at least be able to define some kind of basis or
>>> standard for realism and all agree on what that basis is?
>>
>> Not sure what you mean by "standard" for realism. Do you mean a way
>> by which they might come to agree in principle? If that's what you
>> mean, no problem -- see one of my other posts (I think in reply to one
>> of rich hammett's) for a description thereof.
>
>This isn't really what I'm looking for. Agreeing in principle seems
>fairly useless. By the way, I read your other posts and still didn't
>see what I was looking for. Maybe I mis-read.
>
>The fact that there are moral issues for which there is wide agreement
>also seems irrelevant. What I'm looking for is wide agreement across
>ALL moral issues. All those things in the gray need to be resolved,
>or at least shown to be resolvable.
Showing borderline or un-obvious cases to be resolvable seems exactly like
showing that agreement on those cases is possible in principle, yet above
you say the latter "seems fairly useless".
Regardless, again I am not sure what agreement across all moral issues is
supposed to show. We do not expect scientists to agree across all
scientific questions, even in principle (since the theories for answering
some such questions may not yet exist).
> There should be no gray areas.
>More importantly, what is the basis for which these gray areas can be
>resolved?
>
>For example, how can we determine all the circumstances (if any) for
>which it is acceptable to kill another human being? Some common
>accepted circumstances are killing in self defense, capital
>punishment, and war. Some less commonly accepted are killing in
>defense of others, killing in defense of rape or other bodily injury
>(yet no threat of death), and killing in defense of property. But
>what exactly constitutes a threat for which killing is justified (e.g.
>verbal vs. physical). There are an infinite number of scenarios to
>consider.
Sure, although some are only trivially different from others (just as some
scientific scenarios are only trivially different from others -- if I
conclude that the gravitational force on Earth is G, and then see a planet
exactly like Earth except that it's bright yellow, I have at least a prima
facie reason to suppose its gravitational force is the same). But in any
case the way to do the determination you are suggesting needs to be done is
through argument and (sincere) reflection.
>Getting widespread agreement that it's wrong to kill little old ladies
>while they're crossing the street doesn't impress me. Eliminating all
>the gray areas and getting widespread agreement for all moral dilemmas
>would impress me. Or at least establishing a method or basis for
>doing so (but then agreement should quickly follow, anyway).
Just like the establishment of the scientific method has yielded universal
agreement on the answers to all scientific questions?
>How can
>anyone claim that there is an absolute moral standard when such huge
>gray areas abound?
Egypt, circa 2000 BC:
Ancient Egyptian #1: You know, it would be great if there was this thing
called "science". What we'd do is make hypotheses and test them against
our observations, in the hope that some hypotheses survive this testing and
allow us to make predictions about the world.
A.E. #2: It'd be of no use. People would disagree about what exactly was
being observed, or whether the observations really did support the
hypothesis. There'd be huge gray areas. How could anyone claim that there
is such thing as scientific knowledge in the presence of these gray areas?
What might you say if you happened along and overheard this discussion
(other than, perhaps, "Watch out for that camel!")?
>My default position is that the absolute standard doesn't exist until
>the evidence for it appears, just as my default position is that there
>are not invisible pink elephants dancing on my head until evidence for
>them appears. I can't (and don't) claim that an absolute moral
>standard does not exist. I can only say that I haven't seen evidence
>for it. Not even close.
I refer you to the brief essay I posted here earlier, with the title
"Epistemology for Beginners". Should you choose to read it, keep in mind
your demand for evidence here.
>>> It is my gut feel (but I have no hard data) that most absolutists are
>>> actually relativists, they just don't realize it.
>>
>> My feeling is the opposite; most relativists believe in an absolute
>> moral imperative not to impose one's views on other people,
>
>Hmmm...I don't know why they would feel that way. An absolute moral
>imperative? Sounds contradictory for a relativist to have this
>position. But I guess that's your point.
Indeed.
>> so (inconsistently)
>> in their efforts to obey this imperative they purport to reject *all*
>> moral imperatives (because that way there's no basis for imposing
>> one's beliefs on someone else, since those beliefs are always
>> unjustified).
>
>I must be missing something here too. I don't think relativists claim
>that there are *no* moral issues or no issues we can't agree on.
The standard definition of moral relativism is: the view that the truth of
moral statements is determined by (is relative to) someone's perspective
(there are different veins of moral relativism that disagree about whose
perspective this is).
>Their claim (I think) is that there is not an overall standard that
>covers everything...that there is instead only widespread differing
>opinions.
And that those opinions do not describe an attitude towards *fact* --
rather they describe something akin to a matter of taste. To a real moral
relativist, the statements "rape is bad" and "vanilla ice cream is not very
tasty" express morally equivalent sentiments (albeit not necessarily with
the same enthusiasm -- obviously a moral relativist might feel very
strongly about the former and not very strongly about the latter, but they
still express matters of taste, not fact).
ASG
Richard Clayton
> Richard Clayton <richzigard...@verizon.net> wrote in
> <JdlT9.35439$xb.2...@nwrddc02.gnilink.net>:
>
>> Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are a wealthy man who
>> lacks
>>nothing?
>>
>> Is it okay to steal a loaf of bread if you are poor, your family is
>>starving, and you've no other immediate way to feed them?
>>
>> If you gave different answers to these two questions, you are a
>> moral
>
>
> I don't see why different answers would commit someone to moral relativism.
I think the implication is that an action which is unacceptable under
one set of circumstances may be acceptable under a different set of
circumstances.
--
The e-mail address above is a spam trap. To reply, take off every zig.
"If it does turn out to be real and I just didn't believe it, well,
that's because I've reached this, like, hyperspace, higher plane of
cynicism where all reality and the people in it are a ridiculous pageant
for my amusement." -- Tycho Brahe, Penny Arcade
Ananda Gupta
> I think the implication is that an action which is unacceptable
> under
>one set of circumstances may be acceptable under a different set of
>circumstances.
Certainly, but that has no bearing on whether or not moral relativism is
true. After all, certain scientific propositions are true under one set of
circumstances and not under others, but that doesn't mean we should adopt
"scientific relativism".
Mitchell Coffey
news:qd8u1v48ike3kpnsg...@4ax.com:
> On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 05:43:00 +0000 (UTC), wil...@wehi.edu.au (John
> Wilkins) wrote:
>>Mitchell Coffey <m.remov...@removestarpower.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> OK, but what do you call the fallacy that everybody
>>> thinks is the naturalistic fallacy but isn't, but is a hell of a
>>> fallacy anyway? (By this I mean the "'Sharks eat people' = 'I want
>>> people to be eaten by sharks'" fallacy.)
>>
>>They are formally equivalent:
>>
>>"Sharks eat people" is a fact.
>> therefore
>>"Sharks should eat people" is true.
>>
>>This is fallacious. No amount of shark dietary information will
>>justify the moral claim that something should occur WRT shark
>>behaviours.
>
> Does Pangloss have a fallacy named after him?
No, but they did name a genus of fungi in honor of Voltaire: "Candida."
Mitchell Coffey
Mitchell Coffey
> rich hammett <bubba...@warmmail.com> wrote in
> <v1u53hl...@corp.supernews.com>:
>
>>Since "good" varies so much across time, culture, and myriad other
>>circumstances, how can we give just one name to such a varied item,
>>unless we define it in terms of something else?
>
> <lots of snippage>
>
> See my other reply, but Moore (along with other moral realists) would
> say that your premise -- that what is good varies across time,
> culture, etc., is false.
>
>>An example of sharp relief: To a 19th centure slave owner, it
>>was quite definitely "good" for slaves to follow orders. To
>>the slave, and in the perspective of many outsiders, that situation
>>is less good than many other possible situations.
>>
>>Which of these is "good"? Each player and observer has their
>>own moral intuition. How does Moore address such a situation?
>
> Through sincere discussion and argument, where all parties involved
> try to set aside their biases and prejudices, and try to argue in good
> faith -- that is, face up to tensions and contradictions in one's own
> beliefs, etc. It's similar, indeed, to the process by which science
> is done, when scientists disagree about something. In particular, a
> chief purpose of such discussion is to draw out the consequences of
> our moral intuitions and test them against one another.
>
>>My own response here would be to say that the "moral intuition"
>>is a sum of utilitarian impulses, each of which can be defined
>>by another absolute context. And all boiling down to "I want
>>to survive. I want to meet my basic biological drives."
>>
>>And so, a prescriptive moral system would involve maximizing this
>>utility, possibly including group utilities.
>
>>Not very pleasant, but it seems more realistic than my superficial
>>reading of Moore.
>
> Realistic in what sense?
Determining what is "good" via discussion seems to assume that there
really is one, cross-cultural, extra-historical "good" at the core
somewhere.
Mitchell Coffey
Mitchell Coffey
> Mitchell Coffey <MitC...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> ....
>> Finally, if the generalized fallacy is indeed abroad without a name,
>> can we call it the "Shoot the messenger fallacy", because it's my
>> idea, and mine alone, and I thirst for glory.
>>
> I think it's yours, but there is no canonical list of fallacies of
> either logic or rhetoric. It's probably a special case of ad hominem
> or the genetic fallacy...
To maintain and enforce a canonical list of fallacies, could we anoint a
Fallacious Pope?
Mitchell
Mitchell Coffey
I also read Singer in college. He seemed mostly not to have ideas so
much as to believe in grand reducto-ad-absurdae. Rather like Ayn Rand.
Maybe it was the way utilitarianism was presented to me, but I got the
feeling that it was one of those schools that had been basically refuted
years ago, but remained in the general atmosphere because it seemed to
make sense until you thought about it.
By the way, I've been noting the books I've read because I feel unworthy
in your presence and want people to see that I do know something about
philosophy. By the way, since you mentioned you're a deontologists, I
wanted your opinion. There's these new ceramic crowns; people say
they're as durable as gold, and cheaper. What do you think? And in
your practice, do you use nitrous oxide?
>> Also, does Rawls' "A Theory of Justice" fall to the naturalistic
>> fallacy?
>
> I do not think so. As I recall Rawls (and it's over a decade since I
> read anything on this), he does not deal with the metaethical issues,
> but on how to specify just laws however justice is defined or
> grounded. But I don't have a copy to hand to check.
That, really truly, is how I had seen it.
Mitchell
David Wilson
in talk.origins john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote:
[paraphrasing or quoting G.E. Moore]
> ... one cannot justify any moral claim by any amount of factual
> statements. ...
Is that a factual statement or a moral claim?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Wilson
SPAMMERS_fingers@WILL_BE_funnelweb_PROSECUTED_internet.com.au
(Remove underlines and upper case letters to obtain my email address)
John Wilkins
....
> ....By the way, since you mentioned you're a deontologists, I
> wanted your opinion. There's these new ceramic crowns; people say
> they're as durable as gold, and cheaper. What do you think? And in
> your practice, do you use nitrous oxide?
Nine out of ten deontologists recommend the theory of evolution.