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On July 30 2013 08:07 frogrubdown wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:On July 30 2013 07:34 frogrubdown wrote:On July 30 2013 07:22 WhiteDog wrote:On July 30 2013 07:05 frogrubdown wrote:On July 30 2013 07:01 WhiteDog wrote:On July 30 2013 06:49 frogrubdown wrote:On July 30 2013 06:43 WhiteDog wrote:On July 30 2013 06:31 frogrubdown wrote:On July 30 2013 06:09 WhiteDog wrote:
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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 :
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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. I never claimed that moral assertions are exactly like scientific ones. I just claimed that they share with science the three features that I labeled earlier that have been used in epistemic arguments against realism. This on its own refutes those specific arguments as long as we should be realists about science. On the question of "established techniques", we have to ask "Established by who?" Well, by scientists. They certainly aren't agreed on by everyone. And before several hundred years ago there wasn't any community that practiced them consistently.[1] Before that time, was it the case that there were no non-relative truths about the laws of nature? Did the creation of the scientific community bring them into existence? There already are communities of people discussing ethical questions with a fairly wide amount of methodological agreement. Not everyone is a part of them, but not everyone is a part of the scientific community either. Do any of these ethical communities have a method of assessing ethical truth as good as the scientists have for their domain? On the hard questions of ethics, I'm inclined to say obviously not. But for simpler ethical truths I'm happy to endorse how people currently go about assessing them, and I'm completely open to better methods being developed in ethics just as they were in science. None of this will make ethics a science, but it could get better. Finally, on inability to see an epistemologist agreeing with me, you're kind of out of date. Here's the survey linked in the OP but with results filtered for epistemologist respondents. As you can see, they are even more realist about morality than philosophers in general. Amazingly enough, dead Germans didn't have the last word in epistemology. [1] For the sake of argument here I'm speaking as though the epistemic principles governing science are a whole lot more precise than they actually are. Nobody has a science algorithm. 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). First, do you actually have data on that last claim? It would surprise me greatly (at least in an anglophone context), but I have no data of my own. Second, how on earth are you accusing me of making an argument from authority? You introduced the notion that the experts (i.e., epistemologists) disagreed with me. I was merely rebutting that point. If anyone appealed to authority you did. Third, as the OP indicates, realism entails that we can know ethical truths. Since I never claimed (and don't think) that ethical truths are exactly the same as scientific ones from an epistemic perspective, it would be impossible for them to agree with me that they are identical. But that answer does clearly indicate that they think the methodology for assessing ethical truths is good enough for knowledge. 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 ? I've already stated that you can't perform an experiment like you can in natural sciences to assess ethical truths. That was my only point, when I asked if they consider that moral statement behave like scientific laws. I also already gave you a simple example of how you refute a moral claim (the nazi counterexample to the claim that lying is always wrong). You felt you could disregard this argument as historical and sociological without supporting those claims. I don't know what either of us can gain from rehearsing those steps again. 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. Why would that make it the case that murder is always and everywhere morally acceptable? In my example, the counterexample (of the form: Some x is an act of lying which is not morally wrong) was logically inconsistent with the claim it was a counterexample to (of the form: all x's that are acts of lying are morally wrong). It literally contradicted the ethical claim. You're example attempts to conclude "all x that are y are good" from "some x that is y is good". Not sure why that should even sound plausible. On the rape example, I'm not entirely sure, but I'd lean towards that act being unacceptable. I've already stated that it's harder to know the answers to difficult ethical questions, which should be a truism. More generally, I find your attempted counterexamples odd in form. Relativists think human perceptions determine what is "right". So you'd expect them to show what is "right" varying in accordance with what people perceive to be "right". But your examples aren't of that form. You're varying the causal effects of a given action to derive counterexamples. Realists already accept that the effects of an act will affect whether or not it is moral, so why are your examples supposed to threaten realists in the first place? On that note, I don't see why you think I have to provide you with a universally quantified moral statement that I take to be true. Why can't I know about particular acts being wrong, like a specific genocide, without thinking that all genocides are wrong ? There's hardly a general logical principle that forbids me from knowing about particular cases prior to knowing about general rules, and in fact such a situation appears to be the norm. Its being wrong to torture babies for fun seems like a good stab at one though. 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. I don't know how to parse this sentence, but it sounds unrelated to the question of whether or not you made up the statistic about the number of theist philosophers in 1950. Ho yes I made that up. Didn't understood the question. Well, we'd need to go through a lot more questions to be sure, but it sounds like we disagree a hell of a lot less than justifies this many posts back and forth. Realism does not require general moral laws as simple to consume as 'killing is wrong'. Just that there are some knowable moral truths, which could be about particulars. (I don't see this reducing everything to "choice" but we should probably quit while we're ahead). This actually reminds me a lot of a something that happened to a professor in my department. She's a Foucault scholar, among other things, and she gave a talk in which she argued that Foucault is a moral realist to the shock of all the social scientists present. They thought that moral realism required adherence to simple rule systems like in utilitarianism, which Foucault did not endorse. But that's not what philosophers mean by moral realism, and you'll see it's not entailed by any of the conditions I specify. '
From the way I see it, there might be some kind of cultural misunderstanding, because my definition of relativism (the belief that there are no absolute and transcendantal reference to beliefs and morals) is basically the word by word definition of relativism from the french article of the wikipedia. It is also more or less the definition that I've came to cross by through my study.
In the same wikipedia article they define moral (or ethical) relativism as the position of thinking that consists of saying that it is not possible to order moral values through the use of classification criteria.
According to this, realism and relativism are not strictly opposed - they just talk about different level of argumentation.
Your exemple is really interesting too. It is true that most of the people I know would instantly be irritated at the idea that Foucault is a moral realist. The problem is that when I read "ethical discourse is cognitive (or, fact-stating; or, truth-evaluable)" and that "some ethical statements are true", I instantly think "true all things equals", or truth evaluable all things equals. I think a social scientist would make the distinction between moral practice (in the context) and moral discurve (all things equal).
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On July 30 2013 08:20 Spekulatius wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 08:01 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 07:53 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 07:42 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:52 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 06:38 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:24 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 05:47 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 04:15 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 03:59 frogrubdown wrote:
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Did you read the "long story" spoiler? If you think that moral predicates have a hidden indexical element in them tied to the moral code of a person's society, then you should continue to be happy calling yourself a relativist and select "other" in the poll. But you should keep in mind that this is a linguistic claim and the types of evidence standardly marshaled for such claims seems to count against this. That said, there are a number of complications here that would require more explanation of formal semantics than I feel would be productive right now.
Alternatively, you may basically think along the lines of an error theorist that moral predicates behave as though there were a non-relative morality based on categorical imperatives even though there are in fact no categorical imperatives for them to answer to. This would make such claims systematically false. If you felt that the best response to this is a linguistic reform wherein we interpret our claims with hidden indexicals, then you could call yourself a different time of relativist. But for the purposes of the poll you would be an error theorist. I find the semantics hard to get as a non-native speaker. Same goes for the word "indexical". My view - that I always thought to be named "moral relativism" - simply says: There are no true moral absolutes.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. And I'm saying such a universally true statement doesn't exist. Let's take the statement "killing is wrong". This is morally true if and only if we presuppose the existence of another statement which leads up to the "killing is wrong" statement. This other statement would be "human life must not be infringed". The latter statement is not universal though. Violating someone's right to life is fine under some circumstances. For some people. In some cultures. Fundamentalists think it's ok to kill non-believers. Presidents starting a war on other countries think it's ok to kill (at least) soldiers of either side. Most people think it's ok to kill in self-defense. etc... And in the same way no statement can be logically deduced from a universal statement as the ultimate source of a moral statement - the first step to the chain of argumentation - is always someone saying "I feel that X is right". Thus relativism. Now, am I right and old-fashioned in calling this relativism? Or simply wrong and it's really error theory? 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. 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. 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. 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. "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") 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. 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? Ignore the tools of physics for once. It's not about accessing the outside world, it's about if there theoretically can be truth without someone who's thoughtfully approaching the issue. The distinction I'm making is as follows: a) Newton's law being true or false is a subject that is untouched by the circumstance that a human mind is thinking about it. The question can theoretically be answered without a human pondering about it. In other words, in the equation that proves or disproves Newton's law, there is no variable for a human actor. b) On the other hand, an action or omission being morally right or wrong can never be argued without the existence of a brain which is passing judgment. A moral judgment, in the shape of an equation, necessarily has M as a factor - M being the human mind. Without a mind, there's no judgment. And without judgment, no morality. It's all in our heads.
Okay, I see the distinction you're trying to make, but I don't know why you would want to make such a distinction. Barring the naivety of a), I don't see how you can properly make moral judgments distinct in such a way that they become totally subjective. You might say "well it's just forms of interpretations we impose on physical objects" but this is something physicists do, too. The notions of force, energy, quantum spin, etc. are all interpretations we put over the physical facts; we could describe them differently. So if you said that "we can't consider the truth of a moral judgment without thinking about the actual system of morals that some human holds," you haven't actually separated moral judgment from scientific judgment.
It seems to me that morality has a kind of mind-independence very similar to that of the laws of physics. If I judge that murder is wrong and then I die, I don't think that murder stops being wrong in any way more significant than the way that Newton's laws stop being (nearly) true after I die. And just so with the other distinctions you providing: nobody can ever argue about physical laws without a brain passing judgment, and there can be no judgment without a mind.
I'm not saying your distinction is wrong, but I don't know what leads you to believe it's true. Moreover, I don't even see what you gain from believing it's true. The statement "all morality is necessarily the judgment of a mind" doesn't seem to explain the nature of morality or give you any answers to moral questions or tell you whether all moral statements are false. Surely the distinction between morality and more rigorous kinds of facts doesn't rest on the fact that morality is always the judgment of a mind, since that applies to just about every kind of fact I can think of, too.
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On July 30 2013 08:49 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 08:20 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 08:01 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 07:53 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 07:42 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:52 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 06:38 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:24 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 05:47 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 04:15 Spekulatius wrote:
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I find the semantics hard to get as a non-native speaker. Same goes for the word "indexical".
My view - that I always thought to be named "moral relativism" - simply says:
There are no true moral absolutes.
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. And I'm saying such a universally true statement doesn't exist.
Let's take the statement "killing is wrong". This is morally true if and only if we presuppose the existence of another statement which leads up to the "killing is wrong" statement. This other statement would be "human life must not be infringed".
The latter statement is not universal though. Violating someone's right to life is fine under some circumstances. For some people. In some cultures.
Fundamentalists think it's ok to kill non-believers.
Presidents starting a war on other countries think it's ok to kill (at least) soldiers of either side.
Most people think it's ok to kill in self-defense.
etc...
And in the same way no statement can be logically deduced from a universal statement as the ultimate source of a moral statement - the first step to the chain of argumentation - is always someone saying "I feel that X is right".
Thus relativism.
Now, am I right and old-fashioned in calling this relativism? Or simply wrong and it's really error theory?
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. 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. 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. 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. "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") 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. 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? Ignore the tools of physics for once. It's not about accessing the outside world, it's about if there theoretically can be truth without someone who's thoughtfully approaching the issue. The distinction I'm making is as follows: a) Newton's law being true or false is a subject that is untouched by the circumstance that a human mind is thinking about it. The question can theoretically be answered without a human pondering about it. In other words, in the equation that proves or disproves Newton's law, there is no variable for a human actor. b) On the other hand, an action or omission being morally right or wrong can never be argued without the existence of a brain which is passing judgment. A moral judgment, in the shape of an equation, necessarily has M as a factor - M being the human mind. Without a mind, there's no judgment. And without judgment, no morality. It's all in our heads. Okay, I see the distinction you're trying to make, but I don't know why you would want to make such a distinction. Barring the naivety of a), I don't see how you can properly make moral judgments distinct in such a way that they become totally subjective. You might say "well it's just forms of interpretations we impose on physical objects" but this is something physicists do, too. The notions of force, energy, quantum spin, etc. are all interpretations we put over the physical facts; we could describe them differently. So if you said that "we can't consider the truth of a moral judgment without thinking about the actual system of morals that some human holds," you haven't actually separated moral judgment from scientific judgment. It seems to me that morality has a kind of mind-independence very similar to that of the laws of physics. If I judge that murder is wrong and then I die, I don't think that murder stops being wrong in any way more significant than the way that Newton's laws stop being (nearly) true after I die. And just so with the other distinctions you providing: nobody can ever argue about physical laws without a brain passing judgment, and there can be no judgment without a mind. I'm not saying your distinction is wrong, but I don't know what leads you to believe it's true. Moreover, I don't even see what you gain from believing it's true. The statement "all morality is necessarily the judgment of a mind" doesn't seem to explain the nature of morality or give you any answers to moral questions or tell you whether all moral statements are false. Surely the distinction between morality and more rigorous kinds of facts doesn't rest on the fact that morality is always the judgment of a mind, since that applies to just about every kind of fact I can think of, too.
I'm happy we finally stopped misunderstanding each other and started actually disagreeing.
Now what I'm imagining is a world without humans. Would objects with mass still attract each other? Sure, one would say. Laws of physics apply regardless of the existence of humans or animals or any other form or conscient beholder. Laws of physics can be discovered, but their existence is not contingent on human existence.
(Existence of object A with mass) + (Existence of object B with mass) = attraction
Now would morality still exist without humans? What I'm arguing is: no! How should anything that only conscient beings can produce exist without their creator? How does wheat get shaped to bread without a baker? Or, probably even more similar: How is something beautiful if there is nobody looking at it?
(Event A) * (The moral "attitude" of person X) = (Moral Judgment Z)
Lastly, I do not agree with you saying laws of physics being unable to be perceived without a brain passing judgment does prove me wrong. Interpreting your perception of nature does not alter the laws of nature. It just changes your understanding of it. Nature itself remains untouched.
Moral judgments are different. They are inside of you, results of an inner process. Changing yourself changes your judgment. Dying removes the judgment, it becomes null and void. Why shouldn't it?
---
btw, I'm heading to bed. It's 2AM here. I'll be responding tomorrow morning.
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On July 30 2013 09:13 Spekulatius wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 08:49 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 08:20 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 08:01 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 07:53 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 07:42 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:52 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 06:38 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:24 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 05:47 Lixler wrote:
[quote]
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. 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. 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. 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. "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") 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. 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? Ignore the tools of physics for once. It's not about accessing the outside world, it's about if there theoretically can be truth without someone who's thoughtfully approaching the issue. The distinction I'm making is as follows: a) Newton's law being true or false is a subject that is untouched by the circumstance that a human mind is thinking about it. The question can theoretically be answered without a human pondering about it. In other words, in the equation that proves or disproves Newton's law, there is no variable for a human actor. b) On the other hand, an action or omission being morally right or wrong can never be argued without the existence of a brain which is passing judgment. A moral judgment, in the shape of an equation, necessarily has M as a factor - M being the human mind. Without a mind, there's no judgment. And without judgment, no morality. It's all in our heads. Okay, I see the distinction you're trying to make, but I don't know why you would want to make such a distinction. Barring the naivety of a), I don't see how you can properly make moral judgments distinct in such a way that they become totally subjective. You might say "well it's just forms of interpretations we impose on physical objects" but this is something physicists do, too. The notions of force, energy, quantum spin, etc. are all interpretations we put over the physical facts; we could describe them differently. So if you said that "we can't consider the truth of a moral judgment without thinking about the actual system of morals that some human holds," you haven't actually separated moral judgment from scientific judgment. It seems to me that morality has a kind of mind-independence very similar to that of the laws of physics. If I judge that murder is wrong and then I die, I don't think that murder stops being wrong in any way more significant than the way that Newton's laws stop being (nearly) true after I die. And just so with the other distinctions you providing: nobody can ever argue about physical laws without a brain passing judgment, and there can be no judgment without a mind. I'm not saying your distinction is wrong, but I don't know what leads you to believe it's true. Moreover, I don't even see what you gain from believing it's true. The statement "all morality is necessarily the judgment of a mind" doesn't seem to explain the nature of morality or give you any answers to moral questions or tell you whether all moral statements are false. Surely the distinction between morality and more rigorous kinds of facts doesn't rest on the fact that morality is always the judgment of a mind, since that applies to just about every kind of fact I can think of, too. I'm happy we finally stopped misunderstanding each other and started actually disagreeing. Now what I'm imagining is a world without humans. Would objects with mass still attract each other? Sure, one would say. Laws of physics apply regardless of the existence of humans or animals or any other form or conscient beholder. Laws of physics can be discovered, but their existence is not contingent on human existence. (Existence of object A with mass) + (Existence of object B with mass) = attraction Now would morality still exist without humans? What I'm arguing is: no! How should anything that only conscient beings can produce exist without their creator? How does wheat get shaped to bread without a baker? Or, probably even more similar: How is something beautiful if there is nobody looking at it? (Event A) * (The moral "attitude" of person X) = (Moral Judgment Z) Lastly, I do not agree with you saying laws of physics being unable to be perceived without a brain passing judgment does prove me wrong. Interpreting your perception of nature does not alter the laws of nature. It just changes your understanding of it. Nature itself remains untouched. Moral judgments are different. They are inside of you, results of an inner process. Changing yourself changes your judgment. Dying removes the judgment, it becomes null and void. Why shouldn't it? --- btw, I'm heading to bed. It's 2AM here. I'll be responding tomorrow morning.
We both agree that the world would be physically the same if all humans vanished (that is, the same minus the humans). What I'm saying is that there is a trivial notion of conceptual schemes that would keep morality around after we died, in just the same way the laws of physics would stay around.
When you say that we need to include someone's moral attitude to make a moral judgment, does this mean that person needs to be alive? No, of course not. I can judge something using the moral criteria of, say, Immanuel Kant. His system for judging morals is totally separate from his brain. His brain did historically grasp it, but the system didn't die along with him. And if we use his system, we can make all kinds of moral judgments even about a world that has no humans. (Note that every single event would be a moral non-entity, but this is because of the specific way Kant's system works. A utilitarian system would yield more rich analyses).
Now you might say: well, this system is just a fiction that we created. But my point is that physics is just the same sort of thing! Surely they are very different sorts of systems, but if you are requiring "The moral "attitude" of person X" (in my terminology, the moral system of person X)" to be factored into a moral judgment, then you ought also require "The physical "attitude" of person X" (in my terminology, the physical system of person X)" to be factored into a physical judgment.
Let's say the following two descriptions of the universe are true: utilitarianism and Newton's laws (an actually false assumption, but whatever). Now let's say all rational agents in the universe die; nobody can make any judgments, physical, moral, or otherwise. Nothing prevents us, anyway, from applying both descriptions to this new post-human universe. Two planets will still attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, and actions will still be wrong to the extent that they increase suffering. What is supposed to invalidate the moral judgment here? Surely it's just one kind of moral interpretation, but so is the physical one. Nobody would be around to judge things utilitarian-wise, but neither would anyone be around to judge things Newton-wise. I do not see any difference in the mind-independence of the facts here. There are, to be sure, a ton of other differences in these two descriptions, but none w/r/t their mind-independence.
It seems to me the kind of mind-independence you want to establish would make it impossible for us to judge the moral worth of possible worlds wherein no morally judging creatures existed. But this doesn't seem right. If I take a utilitarian view again, I will be able to rank all sorts of possible worlds without humans (e.g. a world where there are only rabbits and they only have bananas to eat will be a worse world than one where there are only monkeys and they only have bananas to eat).
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I think I am pragmatic about these things
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On July 30 2013 09:13 Spekulatius wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 08:49 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 08:20 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 08:01 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 07:53 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 07:42 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:52 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 06:38 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:24 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 05:47 Lixler wrote:
[quote]
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. 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. 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. 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. "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") 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. 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? Ignore the tools of physics for once. It's not about accessing the outside world, it's about if there theoretically can be truth without someone who's thoughtfully approaching the issue. The distinction I'm making is as follows: a) Newton's law being true or false is a subject that is untouched by the circumstance that a human mind is thinking about it. The question can theoretically be answered without a human pondering about it. In other words, in the equation that proves or disproves Newton's law, there is no variable for a human actor. b) On the other hand, an action or omission being morally right or wrong can never be argued without the existence of a brain which is passing judgment. A moral judgment, in the shape of an equation, necessarily has M as a factor - M being the human mind. Without a mind, there's no judgment. And without judgment, no morality. It's all in our heads. Okay, I see the distinction you're trying to make, but I don't know why you would want to make such a distinction. Barring the naivety of a), I don't see how you can properly make moral judgments distinct in such a way that they become totally subjective. You might say "well it's just forms of interpretations we impose on physical objects" but this is something physicists do, too. The notions of force, energy, quantum spin, etc. are all interpretations we put over the physical facts; we could describe them differently. So if you said that "we can't consider the truth of a moral judgment without thinking about the actual system of morals that some human holds," you haven't actually separated moral judgment from scientific judgment. It seems to me that morality has a kind of mind-independence very similar to that of the laws of physics. If I judge that murder is wrong and then I die, I don't think that murder stops being wrong in any way more significant than the way that Newton's laws stop being (nearly) true after I die. And just so with the other distinctions you providing: nobody can ever argue about physical laws without a brain passing judgment, and there can be no judgment without a mind. I'm not saying your distinction is wrong, but I don't know what leads you to believe it's true. Moreover, I don't even see what you gain from believing it's true. The statement "all morality is necessarily the judgment of a mind" doesn't seem to explain the nature of morality or give you any answers to moral questions or tell you whether all moral statements are false. Surely the distinction between morality and more rigorous kinds of facts doesn't rest on the fact that morality is always the judgment of a mind, since that applies to just about every kind of fact I can think of, too. I'm happy we finally stopped misunderstanding each other and started actually disagreeing. Now what I'm imagining is a world without humans. Would objects with mass still attract each other? Sure, one would say. Laws of physics apply regardless of the existence of humans or animals or any other form or conscient beholder. Laws of physics can be discovered, but their existence is not contingent on human existence. (Existence of object A with mass) + (Existence of object B with mass) = attraction Now would morality still exist without humans? What I'm arguing is: no! How should anything that only conscient beings can produce exist without their creator? How does wheat get shaped to bread without a baker? Or, probably even more similar: How is something beautiful if there is nobody looking at it? (Event A) * (The moral "attitude" of person X) = (Moral Judgment Z) Lastly, I do not agree with you saying laws of physics being unable to be perceived without a brain passing judgment does prove me wrong. Interpreting your perception of nature does not alter the laws of nature. It just changes your understanding of it. Nature itself remains untouched. Moral judgments are different. They are inside of you, results of an inner process. Changing yourself changes your judgment. Dying removes the judgment, it becomes null and void. Why shouldn't it? --- btw, I'm heading to bed. It's 2AM here. I'll be responding tomorrow morning.
If morals are contingent on consciousness, which I somewhat agree with, that doesn't mean they cannot be universal truths that can be discovered in the same way physical laws of matter can be. Even if we stop to exist, the universal truths of morality don't necessarily stop. They'll be there to be rediscovered by the snorblaxians. Even if morality is contingent upon humanity that doesn't mean there aren't some universal truths, even if they only hold for humans. Just as we can say things about very specific kinds of matter. For instance, if we take a very specific Helium isotope and cool it to under 2.17 degrees Kelvin, it becomes a Bose-Einstein condensate, which has all kinds of properties we can study. Most of these properties aren't shared by any other type of matter that we know about. Yet, plenty of scientific papers have been written describing the laws that govern Bose-Einstein condensates. This, while very specific, is still a scientific truth: it is "universally true" for Bose-Einstein condensates. Similarly moral truths could be "universally true" for humans.
Of course, I think this is an utterly pointless way of looking at morals, as it is irrelevant except for one important consequence: it allows us to say some code of ethics is objectively better than another, just as we can for scientific theories. Even if we cannot know that the scientific theory we are using is actually true, we know it's better than the alternatives. Thus when I condemn slavery as being wrong, I can do so without worrying that this is only a recent realization and other societies throughout history seemed to work well with slavery. Just as I can "condemn" creationism and its ilk as being wrong without worrying that the theory of evolution is only a recent realization.
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How would ethics be any less real than physics. Hasn't any of you ever been in a situation where you had a moral choice to make?
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On July 30 2013 01:41 Sbrubbles wrote:
I'm not sure you can jump from "torturing babies for fun is morally wrong" to "Given some contingent facts about human beings and some necessary truths about rational agent interaction allowing torturing babies for fun as a general rule will not lead to a flourishing society.". The first sentence makes an ethical assertion while the second one makes a point about how society ought to be, so it sounds odd to say the first meaning to say the second.
I am not sure that I follow you completely. On the face of it, both sentences could be said to be descriptive of a certain state of affairs (note that the second sentence does not contain any ought) or a counterfactual (given that in no society anybody is actually torturing babies). Whether you agree that the semantic content of the two statements is the same/similar/comparable is a different thing altogether and I wholeheartedly admit that it provides only a crude summary of my view. I further think that -given some further philosophical reasoning - from both statements follows an ought, if they are true - that is a moral obligation not to torture babies for fun. I agree with error theorists that this is not any cosmic or categorical imperative, but more in the form of prudence, in the sense that rational agents can and should agree on the fact that not torturing babies for fun should be followed.
On July 30 2013 01:41 Sbrubbles wrote:
On game theory, I know you can use it to show how in certain situations rational actors cooperate despite their (short-term) best interests, but it doesn't seem logical to derive morals from this. Game theory can attempt to show the presence of an unwritten normative code that punishes people through future non-cooperation, but to me this is much more akin to customary law than morals. How do you actually work rational agents and game theory into this whole discussion?
I simply mentioned game theory because it provides a tool to figure out how rational agents will/should behave. It can thus be a device to predict agent behavior (granted in limited scenarios) to ascertain action-reaction chains and this provide insights to propagating effects in a society with many (approximately) rational agents.
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On July 30 2013 02:21 WhiteDog wrote:
The problem is that you are all searching for a definition of "man" that is not supposed to be up to controversy - so you need something to define this man. See your sentence "Given some contingent facts about human beings and some necessary truths about rational agent interaction allowing torturing babies for fun as a general rule will not lead to a flourishing society" : you considers that there are contingent "facts" about human beings (the use of contingent is obviously really problematic because you admit that you can't define man always and everywhere),
I am not really sure what to make of this paragraph. I can only hope you wrote this because you are confused about the meaning of contingent, because none of your conclusions seem to follow. It is a contingent physiological fact that human beings usually have two hands and ten fingers, in the sense that it does not seem logically necessary that we have two hands and ten fingers. The natural sciences are full of contingent facts, but that does not compromise any of the conclusions physicists derive. It is further not at all necessary to be able to describe "one unchanging human nature" for moral realism. What makes you think that? Human beings are complex physical systems, so obviously there will be lots of variety in their reactions. But just as it is not necessary to derive one true nature of the "storm" or of the "cloud" for meteorology to generate true statements about the weather, it is not necessary to have "an unchanging human nature" to derive universally true statements about humans or sentient beings for that matter.
On July 30 2013 02:21 WhiteDog wrote:
you are making the assumption that men are evolving in a "rational" society and you use the idea of "flourishing society" without defining it. Why ? Because this is something that you cannot and will never be able to prove irrefutably.
You are further placing an unfair burden on moral knowledge methinks. I am perfectly fine with the notion that no statement about the real world can be irrefutably proven to be true. So what? Where does this need for irrefutability come from?
Science is full of questions that can't be proven in any rigorous sense. I realize that in the ongoing discussion with frog you already covered this in parts, but also this notion that knowledge generation has to involve full scale experiments needs to be dispelled. Do you hold the statement "if the sun were to burn out right now life on earth would die as well" to be true? Mind you a full scale experiment on that cannot really be carried out, but it seems obvious given what we know about the sustainability of life without sufficient energy. Likewise I might hold that the adverse effects of torturing babies are obvious given what we know about the human nervous system and the psychological development of infants (and adult torturers) alike. If I do not define "flourishing" sufficiently for you or make simplifying assumptions about the rationality of agents, then all this might purport to show are the inherent limitations of an internet discussion about a complex topic or my particular limitations to express myself clearly.
On July 30 2013 02:21 WhiteDog wrote:
Since all those things are not and will never be considered as valid axiom for some of us on this topic, because they obviously create controversy, your logic cannot be considered as true always and everywhere, unless you are able to falsify the existence of one of those things in our world - you are actually trying to prove that god exist.
That some people cannot be swayed by argument does not show anything in any other field of discourse, so it seems like special pleading to me. The god statement is just silly.
On July 30 2013 02:21 WhiteDog wrote:
For exemple : "Considering what the old testament said about men, it is not right to consider men and women equally" try to prove this wrong without criticising the idea of men and women presented by the old testament.
Finally, I am completely at a loss why you think doing anything like this were necessary to defend my view. After all it is me who thinks that it is possible -within limits- to "get behind" different value systems and critique them on rational grounds from the outside to show that they make incorrect moral statements. To me, your view seems completely impotent in this regard.
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On July 30 2013 09:29 Lixler wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 09:13 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 08:49 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 08:20 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 08:01 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 07:53 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 07:42 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:52 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 06:38 Lixler wrote:On July 30 2013 06:24 Spekulatius wrote:
[quote]
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. 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. 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. "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") 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. 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? Ignore the tools of physics for once. It's not about accessing the outside world, it's about if there theoretically can be truth without someone who's thoughtfully approaching the issue. The distinction I'm making is as follows: a) Newton's law being true or false is a subject that is untouched by the circumstance that a human mind is thinking about it. The question can theoretically be answered without a human pondering about it. In other words, in the equation that proves or disproves Newton's law, there is no variable for a human actor. b) On the other hand, an action or omission being morally right or wrong can never be argued without the existence of a brain which is passing judgment. A moral judgment, in the shape of an equation, necessarily has M as a factor - M being the human mind. Without a mind, there's no judgment. And without judgment, no morality. It's all in our heads. Okay, I see the distinction you're trying to make, but I don't know why you would want to make such a distinction. Barring the naivety of a), I don't see how you can properly make moral judgments distinct in such a way that they become totally subjective. You might say "well it's just forms of interpretations we impose on physical objects" but this is something physicists do, too. The notions of force, energy, quantum spin, etc. are all interpretations we put over the physical facts; we could describe them differently. So if you said that "we can't consider the truth of a moral judgment without thinking about the actual system of morals that some human holds," you haven't actually separated moral judgment from scientific judgment. It seems to me that morality has a kind of mind-independence very similar to that of the laws of physics. If I judge that murder is wrong and then I die, I don't think that murder stops being wrong in any way more significant than the way that Newton's laws stop being (nearly) true after I die. And just so with the other distinctions you providing: nobody can ever argue about physical laws without a brain passing judgment, and there can be no judgment without a mind. I'm not saying your distinction is wrong, but I don't know what leads you to believe it's true. Moreover, I don't even see what you gain from believing it's true. The statement "all morality is necessarily the judgment of a mind" doesn't seem to explain the nature of morality or give you any answers to moral questions or tell you whether all moral statements are false. Surely the distinction between morality and more rigorous kinds of facts doesn't rest on the fact that morality is always the judgment of a mind, since that applies to just about every kind of fact I can think of, too. I'm happy we finally stopped misunderstanding each other and started actually disagreeing. Now what I'm imagining is a world without humans. Would objects with mass still attract each other? Sure, one would say. Laws of physics apply regardless of the existence of humans or animals or any other form or conscient beholder. Laws of physics can be discovered, but their existence is not contingent on human existence. (Existence of object A with mass) + (Existence of object B with mass) = attraction Now would morality still exist without humans? What I'm arguing is: no! How should anything that only conscient beings can produce exist without their creator? How does wheat get shaped to bread without a baker? Or, probably even more similar: How is something beautiful if there is nobody looking at it? (Event A) * (The moral "attitude" of person X) = (Moral Judgment Z) Lastly, I do not agree with you saying laws of physics being unable to be perceived without a brain passing judgment does prove me wrong. Interpreting your perception of nature does not alter the laws of nature. It just changes your understanding of it. Nature itself remains untouched. Moral judgments are different. They are inside of you, results of an inner process. Changing yourself changes your judgment. Dying removes the judgment, it becomes null and void. Why shouldn't it? --- btw, I'm heading to bed. It's 2AM here. I'll be responding tomorrow morning. We both agree that the world would be physically the same if all humans vanished (that is, the same minus the humans). What I'm saying is that there is a trivial notion of conceptual schemes that would keep morality around after we died, in just the same way the laws of physics would stay around. When you say that we need to include someone's moral attitude to make a moral judgment, does this mean that person needs to be alive? No, of course not. I can judge something using the moral criteria of, say, Immanuel Kant. His system for judging morals is totally separate from his brain. His brain did historically grasp it, but the system didn't die along with him. And if we use his system, we can make all kinds of moral judgments even about a world that has no humans. (Note that every single event would be a moral non-entity, but this is because of the specific way Kant's system works. A utilitarian system would yield more rich analyses). Now you might say: well, this system is just a fiction that we created. But my point is that physics is just the same sort of thing! Surely they are very different sorts of systems, but if you are requiring "The moral "attitude" of person X" (in my terminology, the moral system of person X)" to be factored into a moral judgment, then you ought also require "The physical "attitude" of person X" (in my terminology, the physical system of person X)" to be factored into a physical judgment. Let's say the following two descriptions of the universe are true: utilitarianism and Newton's laws (an actually false assumption, but whatever). Now let's say all rational agents in the universe die; nobody can make any judgments, physical, moral, or otherwise. Nothing prevents us, anyway, from applying both descriptions to this new post-human universe. Two planets will still attract each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, and actions will still be wrong to the extent that they increase suffering. What is supposed to invalidate the moral judgment here? Surely it's just one kind of moral interpretation, but so is the physical one. Nobody would be around to judge things utilitarian-wise, but neither would anyone be around to judge things Newton-wise. I do not see any difference in the mind-independence of the facts here. There are, to be sure, a ton of other differences in these two descriptions, but none w/r/t their mind-independence. It seems to me the kind of mind-independence you want to establish would make it impossible for us to judge the moral worth of possible worlds wherein no morally judging creatures existed. But this doesn't seem right. If I take a utilitarian view again, I will be able to rank all sorts of possible worlds without humans (e.g. a world where there are only rabbits and they only have bananas to eat will be a worse world than one where there are only monkeys and they only have bananas to eat).
i think you are mixing stuff here, mainly the cause and effect of physicalism and moralism. physicalism has both cause and effect while moralism has only effect (at least you are only talking about its effect; unless you go with emergence as a cause).
(i'll wait Spekulatius reply tho)
edit: an alien will be able to understand the cause and effect of newtonian laws/mechanics but it might never understand human morals because their cause is not (will not be) quantifiable so in that sense, physicalism is more objective.
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@ Lixler:
I think I expressed myself badly in my last post. Of course I do agree with you that dying does not remove a moral system. But this does not in any way mean a moral system is like a law of physics.
You say, moral systems survive their "thinker" just as laws of physics do - I disagree.
You say, a physical system of person X needs to be included in the equation the same way the moral system of person X needs to be included in its respective equation - I disagree.
I tried to compare morals to beauty as I believe they are comparable. And I very strongly believe that if you remove a critical beholder from the equation, the notion of beauty stops to make sense. What is beauty if there is nobody who is appreciating it, rating it or feeling it? Nothing. A notion without content.
I very strongly believe the exact same statement holds true for moral systems. Morals are a human invention. Without humans, nobody would ever think about calling something right or wrong. It is completely implausible to me how there should be any universal statement that is not contingent on a beholder.
ObviousOne phrased it much more bluntly: The universe does not care if something is right or wrong. This means a) that only caring about morality produces moral systems which means it's contingent on the human mind. And b) laws of physics are not relative to the beholder, they do not change depending on who's watching/rating/analyzing.
@ Acrofales:
No. You're not getting the fundamental point I'm trying to make.
Universal truths cannot be discovered (as you claim) because
1. there are no universal truths (see above)
2. if there were universal moral truths, they would not be discoverable because they would not be part of the world outside of your mind. Morals have no anchor in the real world. You would not be able to discover moral truths just as you would not be able to "discover" that you are feeling tired, hungry or alone. The word "discover" does not make any sense in this context.
Again, moral "truths" are fundamentally different from laws of nature. Moral systems are like feelings which are - you agree, I suppose - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions of beauty - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions on taste - check our KMD thread: not universal.
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself though.
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How is it that man apparently understands natures laws themselves, yet has no clue about the laws that govern its own actions.
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On July 30 2013 19:01 gneGne wrote:
How is it that man apparently understands natures laws themselves, yet has no clue about the laws that govern its own actions.
Huh?
We are far from understanding nature completely. Questions of quantum mechanics, dark matter and all that stuff remain to be answered universally and in a satisfying way. Not to mention the questions physicians haven't even discovered yet.
The laws that govern our own actions can reasonably be explained by evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. It's tough in the details, but not in the fundamentals.
Our level of understand in both subjects is not as far different as you might think. If anything, it's the other way around.
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On July 30 2013 18:42 Spekulatius wrote:
@ Lixler:
I think I expressed myself badly in my last post. Of course I do agree with you that dying does not remove a moral system. But this does not in any way mean a moral system is like a law of physics.
You say, moral systems survive their "thinker" just as laws of physics do - I disagree.
You say, a physical system of person X needs to be included in the equation the same way the moral system of person X needs to be included in its respective equation - I disagree.
I tried to compare morals to beauty as I believe they are comparable. And I very strongly believe that if you remove a critical beholder from the equation, the notion of beauty stops to make sense. What is beauty if there is nobody who is appreciating it, rating it or feeling it? Nothing. A notion without content.
I very strongly believe the exact same statement holds true for moral systems. Morals are a human invention. Without humans, nobody would ever think about calling something right or wrong. It is completely implausible to me how there should be any universal statement that is not contingent on a beholder.
ObviousOne phrased it much more bluntly: The universe does not care if something is right or wrong. This means a) that only caring about morality produces moral systems which means it's contingent on the human mind. And b) laws of physics are not relative to the beholder, they do not change depending on who's watching/rating/analyzing.
@ Acrofales:
No. You're not getting the fundamental point I'm trying to make.
Universal truths cannot be discovered (as you claim) because
1. there are no universal truths (see above)
2. if there were universal moral truths, they would not be discoverable because they would not be part of the world outside of your mind. Morals have no anchor in the real world. You would not be able to discover moral truths just as you would not be able to "discover" that you are feeling tired, hungry or alone. The word "discover" does not make any sense in this context.
Again, moral "truths" are fundamentally different from laws of nature. Moral systems are like feelings which are - you agree, I suppose - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions of beauty - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions on taste - check our KMD thread: not universal.
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself though.
.. and if i were to say: universal laws are an invention of the universe?, your arguments would turn into a subordinate functionary of some sorts.
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On July 30 2013 19:14 Spekulatius wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 19:01 gneGne wrote:
How is it that man apparently understands natures laws themselves, yet has no clue about the laws that govern its own actions. Huh? We are far from understanding nature completely. Questions of quantum mechanics, dark matter and all that stuff remain to be answered universally and in a satisfying way. Not to mention the questions physicians haven't even discovered yet. The laws that govern our own actions can reasonably be explained by evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. It's tough in the details, but not in the fundamentals. Our level of understand in both subjects is not as far different as you might think. If anything, it's the other way around.
Well, if you admit that science leaves many questions unanswered, then it means we should also not be so bold to 'explain away' our own actions with said science that leaves us only with estimations on the causes and effects of certain phenomena that go with our actions.Thus we can only explain phenomena in retrospect through hypotheses, but we don't do so or think that way like 'What made me act such and so a few seconds ago?', no we make practical judgments in the moment here 'What should I do?' instead of theoretical judgments.
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On July 30 2013 19:24 xM(Z wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 18:42 Spekulatius wrote:
@ Lixler:
I think I expressed myself badly in my last post. Of course I do agree with you that dying does not remove a moral system. But this does not in any way mean a moral system is like a law of physics.
You say, moral systems survive their "thinker" just as laws of physics do - I disagree.
You say, a physical system of person X needs to be included in the equation the same way the moral system of person X needs to be included in its respective equation - I disagree.
I tried to compare morals to beauty as I believe they are comparable. And I very strongly believe that if you remove a critical beholder from the equation, the notion of beauty stops to make sense. What is beauty if there is nobody who is appreciating it, rating it or feeling it? Nothing. A notion without content.
I very strongly believe the exact same statement holds true for moral systems. Morals are a human invention. Without humans, nobody would ever think about calling something right or wrong. It is completely implausible to me how there should be any universal statement that is not contingent on a beholder.
ObviousOne phrased it much more bluntly: The universe does not care if something is right or wrong. This means a) that only caring about morality produces moral systems which means it's contingent on the human mind. And b) laws of physics are not relative to the beholder, they do not change depending on who's watching/rating/analyzing.
@ Acrofales:
No. You're not getting the fundamental point I'm trying to make.
Universal truths cannot be discovered (as you claim) because
1. there are no universal truths (see above)
2. if there were universal moral truths, they would not be discoverable because they would not be part of the world outside of your mind. Morals have no anchor in the real world. You would not be able to discover moral truths just as you would not be able to "discover" that you are feeling tired, hungry or alone. The word "discover" does not make any sense in this context.
Again, moral "truths" are fundamentally different from laws of nature. Moral systems are like feelings which are - you agree, I suppose - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions of beauty - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions on taste - check our KMD thread: not universal.
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself though. .. and if i were to say: universal laws are an invention of the universe?, your arguments would turn into a subordinate functionary of some sorts.
"The universe" is not an entity capable of inventing stuff.
On July 30 2013 19:36 gneGne wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 19:14 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 19:01 gneGne wrote:
How is it that man apparently understands natures laws themselves, yet has no clue about the laws that govern its own actions. Huh? We are far from understanding nature completely. Questions of quantum mechanics, dark matter and all that stuff remain to be answered universally and in a satisfying way. Not to mention the questions physicians haven't even discovered yet. The laws that govern our own actions can reasonably be explained by evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. It's tough in the details, but not in the fundamentals. Our level of understand in both subjects is not as far different as you might think. If anything, it's the other way around. Well, if you admit that science leaves many questions unanswered, then it means we should also not be so bold to 'explain away' our own actions with said science that leaves us only with estimations on the causes and effects of certain phenomena that go with our actions.Thus we can only explain phenomena in retrospect through hypotheses, but we don't do so or think that way like 'What made me act such and so a few seconds ago?', no we make practical judgments in the moment here instead of theoretical judgments.
I don't know what you're saying exactly or how this relates to the metaethics discussion.
And if I understand you right, then I disagree. We can explain our process of judgment to a certain extent. We can look at it in retrospect and say "well ok this is why I acted this way". Where do you get that we don't exactly do that?
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"The universe" is not an entity capable of inventing stuff.
what a narrow minded thing to say 
hey man!, i remember the times when you were an amoeba and couldn't figure out what shape is ...
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On July 30 2013 19:54 xM(Z wrote:what a narrow minded thing to say hey man!, i remember the times when you were an amoeba and couldn't figure out what shape is ...
You must be talking about my ancestors as I have always been human.
But that put aside: so what?
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On July 30 2013 18:42 Spekulatius wrote:
@ Lixler:
I think I expressed myself badly in my last post. Of course I do agree with you that dying does not remove a moral system. But this does not in any way mean a moral system is like a law of physics.
You say, moral systems survive their "thinker" just as laws of physics do - I disagree.
You say, a physical system of person X needs to be included in the equation the same way the moral system of person X needs to be included in its respective equation - I disagree.
I tried to compare morals to beauty as I believe they are comparable. And I very strongly believe that if you remove a critical beholder from the equation, the notion of beauty stops to make sense. What is beauty if there is nobody who is appreciating it, rating it or feeling it? Nothing. A notion without content.
I very strongly believe the exact same statement holds true for moral systems. Morals are a human invention. Without humans, nobody would ever think about calling something right or wrong. It is completely implausible to me how there should be any universal statement that is not contingent on a beholder.
ObviousOne phrased it much more bluntly: The universe does not care if something is right or wrong. This means a) that only caring about morality produces moral systems which means it's contingent on the human mind. And b) laws of physics are not relative to the beholder, they do not change depending on who's watching/rating/analyzing.
@ Acrofales:
No. You're not getting the fundamental point I'm trying to make.
Universal truths cannot be discovered (as you claim) because
1. there are no universal truths (see above)
2. if there were universal moral truths, they would not be discoverable because they would not be part of the world outside of your mind. Morals have no anchor in the real world. You would not be able to discover moral truths just as you would not be able to "discover" that you are feeling tired, hungry or alone. The word "discover" does not make any sense in this context.
Again, moral "truths" are fundamentally different from laws of nature. Moral systems are like feelings which are - you agree, I suppose - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions of beauty - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions on taste - check our KMD thread: not universal.
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself though.
I am sorry to interfere, but I find this line of reasoning utterly unconvincing. That moral systems require moral agents and that moral theory is only applicable if moral agents exist is a trivial truism, just like the laws of nature would not be applicable if nature would not exist or like geology would not make sense to anyone if planets had not formed. It might be an interesting exercise to investigate in what respect statements could nonetheless be said to be true if none of the objects in the statement had ever obtained existence, but I fail to see how this is in any way special for morality.
I am a realist about psychology for instance, in that I think that psychology as a science can generate true statements about the human psyche and human behavior. Would you agree? If yes, why are you not moved by the argument that without any human, no one could make any sense of psychology. If you disagree, what do you think it is that psychologists are doing?
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On July 30 2013 19:40 Spekulatius wrote:Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 19:24 xM(Z wrote:On July 30 2013 18:42 Spekulatius wrote:
@ Lixler:
I think I expressed myself badly in my last post. Of course I do agree with you that dying does not remove a moral system. But this does not in any way mean a moral system is like a law of physics.
You say, moral systems survive their "thinker" just as laws of physics do - I disagree.
You say, a physical system of person X needs to be included in the equation the same way the moral system of person X needs to be included in its respective equation - I disagree.
I tried to compare morals to beauty as I believe they are comparable. And I very strongly believe that if you remove a critical beholder from the equation, the notion of beauty stops to make sense. What is beauty if there is nobody who is appreciating it, rating it or feeling it? Nothing. A notion without content.
I very strongly believe the exact same statement holds true for moral systems. Morals are a human invention. Without humans, nobody would ever think about calling something right or wrong. It is completely implausible to me how there should be any universal statement that is not contingent on a beholder.
ObviousOne phrased it much more bluntly: The universe does not care if something is right or wrong. This means a) that only caring about morality produces moral systems which means it's contingent on the human mind. And b) laws of physics are not relative to the beholder, they do not change depending on who's watching/rating/analyzing.
@ Acrofales:
No. You're not getting the fundamental point I'm trying to make.
Universal truths cannot be discovered (as you claim) because
1. there are no universal truths (see above)
2. if there were universal moral truths, they would not be discoverable because they would not be part of the world outside of your mind. Morals have no anchor in the real world. You would not be able to discover moral truths just as you would not be able to "discover" that you are feeling tired, hungry or alone. The word "discover" does not make any sense in this context.
Again, moral "truths" are fundamentally different from laws of nature. Moral systems are like feelings which are - you agree, I suppose - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions of beauty - not universal. Moral systems are like opinions on taste - check our KMD thread: not universal.
I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself though. .. and if i were to say: universal laws are an invention of the universe?, your arguments would turn into a subordinate functionary of some sorts. "The universe" is not an entity capable of inventing stuff. Show nested quote +On July 30 2013 19:36 gneGne wrote:On July 30 2013 19:14 Spekulatius wrote:On July 30 2013 19:01 gneGne wrote:
How is it that man apparently understands natures laws themselves, yet has no clue about the laws that govern its own actions. Huh? We are far from understanding nature completely. Questions of quantum mechanics, dark matter and all that stuff remain to be answered universally and in a satisfying way. Not to mention the questions physicians haven't even discovered yet. The laws that govern our own actions can reasonably be explained by evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. It's tough in the details, but not in the fundamentals. Our level of understand in both subjects is not as far different as you might think. If anything, it's the other way around. Well, if you admit that science leaves many questions unanswered, then it means we should also not be so bold to 'explain away' our own actions with said science that leaves us only with estimations on the causes and effects of certain phenomena that go with our actions.Thus we can only explain phenomena in retrospect through hypotheses, but we don't do so or think that way like 'What made me act such and so a few seconds ago?', no we make practical judgments in the moment here instead of theoretical judgments. I don't know what you're saying exactly or how this relates to the metaethics discussion. And if I understand you right, then I disagree. We can explain our process of judgment to a certain extent. We can look at it in retrospect and say "well ok this is why I acted this way". Where do you get that we don't exactly do that?
Ok you are right that we do indeed explain away alot of our actions, like 'I was hungry and tired and thus..' but the peculiar thing is that we don't accept these explanations or 'excuses' in certain moral situations and thus we can regret the choices/actions we've made and take responsibility for.
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EPT
