Metaethics - Page 10

On July 30 2013 05:47 Lixler wrote:

You seem to be conflating a sort of particularism with relativism. That there are no moral absolutes can be interpreted in two ways. For one (particularism), we might say that there are no invariant moral properties: there is no feature of a state of affairs that always makes the same moral contribution to every situation. So, for instance, "killing" does not count as an invariant property, because sometimes killing is bad (e.g. when it is done to babies for no reason), but other times it is good (e.g. when it is done to stop someone who is doing murders).

The other sort (relativism), which is what I think you're trying to go for, would say the moral significance of any state of affairs depends on certain facts about the moral beliefs of the participants (both those participating in and those judging, I would guess you think). But you have not done any work to support this view. Just because "fundamentalists think it's ok to kill non-believers" means neither 1) it is not an absolute (as in having invariant moral significance) truth that it isn't okay to kill non-believers nor 2) that it's okay for fundamentalists to kill non-believers. These latter claims (which, again, are different) need a lot more to build up to them, which your basic argument, viz. that morality is always founded upon subjective intuitions, falls quite short of.

And it's strange that you conflate particularism about morality with relativism. You suggest that both of the following statements contradict the notion that "human life must not be infringed" is a universally true statement: 1) "Fundamentalists think it's ok to kill non-believers." 2) "Most people think it's ok to kill in self-defense." But, if the distinction here is at all clear, these are two very different problems. The former looks like a mistake, or at least a disagreement with the moral code typical of modern-day Westerners, whereas the latter is a loophole in our universal. Whether the latter can be properly patched up is uncertain, but certainly the epistemic work you are requiring these universal statements to do ("This - to me - means that a statement can only be thought to be absolutely morally true when we presuppose that the assumption that it's founded on is universal.") is something that can be done with more modest kinds of grounding. For this, you might be interested in reading Jonathan Dancy's Ethics Without Principles.

The former contradiction to absolute statements is no contradiction at all. A vast number of obstacles stand in the way of this consideration disproving the notion that "human life must not be infringed." For one, people's beliefs about morality are not necessarily the ultimate ground of the moral truth (maybe you could demonstrate this?). But beyond this, the insertion of terms like "...according to modern-day Westerners" or whatever is no case against the absoluteness of any moral claim. That is to say, it doesn't require us, as modern-day Westerners, to rethink whether any given moral claim is true. It brings no evidence to bear to the contrary, it doesn't undermine our assumptions, etc.

You have a very confused stance that seems to intermingle particularism with error theory, particularism with relativism, and relativism with error theory. Even a casual acquaintance with these topics should be enough to untangle the weird mess of opinions you have now, and then you could come to more clarity about what exactly you (wrongly) believe.

On July 30 2013 05:55 frogrubdown wrote:

edit:


Digressed? You asked what an indexical was and I explained it with the simplest example I could think of.

On July 30 2013 06:09 WhiteDog wrote:

Yes and we go back to the question : how do you evaluate the truthness of a moral statement every being equal ?

I'll quote a previous post :

You only respond to that that moral statement behave like scientific assertions, but I can't see an epistemologist agreeing on that. The history of philosophy as I know it has actually made a clear cut between what is refutable - through experience - and what is not (this is one of the main subject in the critic of pure reason, or the book "What is thinking ?" by Heiddegger).

This is how scientific evaluate the truthness of a statement, and not by some abstract discussion on the logic of the said statement : they test the assertion over and over through experimentation, and if the result is the same over and over, then the statement is judged as true.

On July 30 2013 06:24 Spekulatius wrote:

Firstly: well yes I am confused. I've never studied philosophy so I naturally mix up those theories that I've never heard of before.
That's why I asked for clarification in the first place.

Secondly, I'm not sure why you think the burden of proof is not on you to prove any of your assumptions of which you deduce the existence of absolute moral truths. That seems like the epitomy of arrogance to me. "We're modern westerners so fuck people who think differently, may they have to prove us wrong."

Thirdly, you ask me how I come to conclude that there is no objective, absolute moral truth. I tried to explain in some of my posts that every experience and every thought is being processed by your brain. There is not a single thought or feeling or judgement that is not touched by the particularity of your own brain. Thus, a thought/judgment/feeling cannot be thought of without being influenced by your own personality. So naturally, there will never be a consensus on any moral statement.
Now you will retort that the lack of consensus does not necessarily mean there is no such thing as absolute moral truths. Asking me to disprove this beyond any doubt is like asking me to disprove god. Which is, and I'm restating my second point, not my duty, but yours.

On July 30 2013 06:29 Spekulatius wrote:

Oh, sorry. I wasn't expecting an unannounced example of "indexical" considering that you've responded before to me. My bad.

The rest of my post still stands. Morals are human inventions. Humans are individuals. Why should there ever be a universality of opinion on what is right and wrong?

In 1950, 90% of the philosophers believed in god. That doesn't mean they were right (or wrong).

On July 30 2013 06:43 WhiteDog wrote:

Interesting, when I say that epistemologists would not agree with you on the fact that scientific knowledge has the same properties as philosophical assertions, you show me a survey with no clue on that. Am I supposed to see that 62% of the epistemologist are moral realists ?

In 1950, 90% of the philosophers believed in god. That doesn't mean they were right (or wrong).

On July 30 2013 06:38 Lixler wrote:

I didn't purport that there were any absolute moral truths. Being myself a particularist, I don't think there are any. In any case, I was only trying to show that you hadn't successfully argued for your own views, not that your conclusions were wrong. I could do that if you wanted.

Also, I wasn't trying to say that our (modern-day Western) views are right and universal and everyone else has to disprove us. I was saying that, given that we have a certain kind of moral framework, the fact that our moral statements would be wrong in another framework is no argument at all against the absolute nature of our moral statements. I could just have easily have used Australian aboriginals or whatever as my example. It is no problem to the absoluteness of an aboriginal's moral claim that other cultures make different moral claims that are true for them, unless we interpret "absoluteness" in a strange way. In some logics, you have the law of the excluded middle, and in others you don't. This doesn't mean that statements in a logic that has the LEM are non-absolute within that logic; it just means there are other systems where it would be false. But given that we always speak from within a system, we would be committing a kind of conceptual confusion if we thought that disagreement from other systems was a stain on the value of our own statements.

Consider a scientist's deduction that evolution is true. Within a different framework that has wildly different assumptions about reality, say 14th-century Catholicism, evolution isn't true (given the kind of extreme relativism you want to invoke, that is). But this doesn't mean that the scientist needs to take that into account. The scientist's rules for deduction do not involve "What do 14th-century Catholics think?" just as our rules for morality do not involve "What do Australian aboriginals think?" (Or, well, they might include such a premise, but it isn't a necessary fact about any moral system whatsoever)

Your argument for why there can't be consensus on moral statements is weird. Every part of it before the conclusion applies perfectly well to all facts, and I don't think that the fact that my brain has to process the fact that the sun is hot means that there can't be consensus about it. Did you mean to say that there can be no consensus about any fact ever (surely a queer view), or did you forget to put in your premise that restricts the scope of the argument to just moral statements?

I don't much like burden of proof arguments, but yours has a hole in it so I'll try to point it out in a clear way. You said this: "you ask me how I come to conclude that there is no objective, absolute moral truth" and gave me an argument that led up to "there will never be a consensus on any moral statement," and then you concluded that it was up to me to disprove the link between that latter statement and "there is no such thing as absolute moral truths." I don't see why I need to disprove that at all, especially if I was just doing a bit of psychological investigation about you: I asked what you think the link is, more or less, between the impossibility of consensus and the impossibility of absolute truth w/r/t morality. I can't provide a disproof of the link you have in mind before you state what kind of a link you have in mind. If you want me to give you a generally applicable one, I can try to do that, but I don't think I've obligated myself to do so.

Also, I don't think I ever did actually ask you how you came to conclude that. I just tried to demonstrate that your arguments for your view betrayed a high amount of conceptual confusion. If you would like me to argue against your conclusion, then sure, please do tell me how you reached it.

On July 30 2013 07:01 WhiteDog wrote:

They believe that we can know ethical truth (66% of them) but I'm still waiting for the answer on how are you supposed to judge which judgement is more true than the other outside of its context. You answer me by always disgressing to another subject.

Clearly yes or no, do you think that epistemologist think you can experiment moral statement like you can experiment the law of physics ? If not, how do you refute or falsify a moral statement ? If you refute a moral statement by the intermediary of something that is not proven, not falsifiable, historic or sociologic, then mathematically, how can your moral statements be true universally ?

On July 30 2013 07:22 WhiteDog wrote:

That was my only point, when I asked if they consider that moral statement behave like scientific laws.


I said that what you did can be done with every moral statements: Let's say I have the opportunity to kill Hitler before he becomes what he is. It would be moral right ? Would that make murder morally acceptable always and everywhere ?
If a man and a woman are both locked in a cage with no water and food, and the only way to live for the man is to rape the woman, would that make it morally acceptable ?
On the other side, I asked you to give me a moral statement that will always be true and I'm still waiting for it.

See up.

I considered as self evident that epistemologist don't consider that scientific truth doesn't exactly behave like moral statement in the way that you cannot experiment moral statements.

On July 30 2013 06:52 Spekulatius wrote:

Damn you type fast.

1. Ok so we agree on the fact that simply because someone else has a diverging opinion on a subject from you this does not mean you are necessarily less right about assuming it. Good.

2. And yes, I do not mean we cannot all agree on the sun being hot. It is at least theoretically possible given we exclude blind people who doubt the existence of the sun and think it's a giant lightbulb and those people who suffer from an illness that makes them incapable of perceiving temperature.
Still - and there you certainly agree with me - people agreeing on something doesn't make a statement true just as much as disagreeing on it doesn't make it untrue (see 1.). I must have expressed myself unprecisely before.

3. What I'm trying to argue is this: morality is a judgment. Judgments are passed by humans. It is thus impossible to conceive a judgment that is abstract from a human mind. Which leads me to conclude there is no non-subjective morality.

This is what it boils down to. Nobody's ever challenged me to phrase my view though. Please tell me what you think about it.

On July 30 2013 07:42 Lixler wrote:


"Subjective" does not mean "created by a human mind." The distinction between subjective and objective (albeit a poor and vague one) essentially runs: subjective things are just expressions of the opinions of a subject, but objective things are facts about some object. Anyway, I won't work with this terminology and I'll try to talk about what you actually have in mind.

It seems like you'd want to say that somehow human grasping of the objects of perception taints them, or otherwise distorts them. Would you say that's a fair characterization? So even if objects were really X, Y, and Z, we can only see them as X*, Y*, and Z*, which is what these properties turn out to be after they've gone through the distortion of the human mind. And you want to say that (I guess?) these distortions are always different for each different human, so we can't have complete agreement (in the case of morality). If this is what you mean there's a lot packed into it, so please tell me whether that's a good description of your view.

(By the way, you should remember that just because all of your arguments came from the same source (you) doesn't mean they contribute to the same conclusions. Moral particularism doesn't mean morality is subjective, moral relativism doesn't mean consensus is impossible, and so forth. I'm only going to focus on "there is no non-subjective morality")

On July 30 2013 06:13 Shiori wrote:

Exactly. Without philosophical reasoning, you cannot move from medical knowledge to "we shouldn't kill everyone at birth so that there aren't anymore health problems." I mean, can you give a medical argument as to why killing everyone at birth would be wrong?

The problem here is that Sam Harris is relying on a semantic trick: "medicine" in one sense refers to the science of medicine (i.e. the biology/chemistry/physics/psychology research that informs it) and in another sense refers to the practice of medicine. Medicine itself is nothing more than a collection of facts about living things, from bacteria to human beings. The practice of medicine is the application of that knowledge to trying to make people die less frequently. It is impossible to conclude that one should do this without philosophy.

Why is it absurd?

Well, it does need to be well-defined, because literally everything is going to depend on it. How are we supposed to know if it's the foundation of all moral decision making when we can't even tell what it actually is without referencing fields that are subordinate to this hypothetical utility itself. I mean, medicine wouldn't even exist if people didn't have some moral reason for wanting to cure other people.

On July 30 2013 07:53 Spekulatius wrote:

Almost.

My view goes even further. I say there is no X, Y and Z in the first place. I claim they're not just distorted, but they rather don't even exist in the "outside" world. Unlike scientific truths, X, Y and Z as moral absolutes are statements that are not to be found and perceived, they rather only come into existence by the functioning of the human mind. And as such, I argue it is impossible to have a judgment without someone passing it. Which in my eyes makes it ultimately subjective.

On July 30 2013 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:

Here I don't understand at all. Relativism to me is not the belief that human perceptions determine what is "right", it is the belief that there are no absolute and transcendantal reference to beliefs and morals.
I don't think that it is impossible to define, if you go deep down in the context of every actions, what is right or wrong. I consider that it is impossible to define a right or wrong everything equal. Because that absolute reference does not exist, I have no moral ground to compare the value of a moral statement to another moral statement outside of its context. I cannot "evaluate" the "truthness" of my statement "everything equal".

As I said in my previous posts : "Murder is wrong today"; "Murder is not wrong in war", etc. I can't get out of the historical and sociological context in which I make those statements.

This is why, I consider absolute moral statement to be a choice and nothing else.


Ho yes I made that up. Didn't understood the question.

On July 30 2013 08:01 Lixler wrote:

How are you teasing apart scientific and moral judgments here? Why is it that with, say, the tools of physics I can get some access to things in the world (maybe distorted or not), but morality has absolutely no link with the world at all? Would you like to say that we "project" our moral feelings onto the physical world, and we have (distorted) access to the physical world, but all our projected moral judgments have no basis in the reality of the world?