Chocolate and Caring, Brussels Sprouts and Murder

I’ve been quite specific in my objections.

(1) Every moral argument gets settled at its foundations on the basis of an aversion or an intuition, e.g., “Theory X cannot be correct because of counterexample Y, and we all feel/believe Y is wrong.”

(2) Morality only predicts the feelings (or beliefs) of the person who holds the moral belief, or about a group of people’s moral beliefs. (BTW, I have a belief and conviction that apple pie is delicious, so feel free to add beliefs and convictions to what is predicted.)

(3) The same sorts of influences that give us gastronomic and musical tastes also impact our moral tastes – genetics, personal history, evolutionary history, psychological state, etc.

(4) Moral claims are in contrast to objective science and mathematics. Science and mathematics make verifiable predictions, and they function just as well when we control for our emotional desires, aversions, biases, history, etc.

I think these arguments are quite specific, and do not specifically assume theism or materialism as a starting point. The only assume that our intuitions are not infallible.

In response to this argument, the only evidence you offer is that most people think their moral opinions are statements about objective facts. Yet, it would be a fallacy to believe that majority opinion makes your case. The majority of people are biased.

As I’ve pointed out previously, if moral opinions were not statements about objective facts, the world would look exactly the same. You suggested that history would only look the same if people retained moral realist convictions as well as their feelings. I disagree, but, for argument’s sake, let’s stipulate that people possess not only feelings, but corresponding moral realist convictions. This stipulation does nothing to bolster your case. If the beliefs in moral realism existed, but were false, what would be different?

For example, you claimed slavery was ended because abolitionists had moral realist beliefs, not merely because they had a moral aversion to slavery. Suppose this were true. Does this prove their belief in moral realism was true? It doesn’t.

If I thought that marriage was necessary to reach the unverifiable afterlife, so I got married, the fact I was wed would not provide evidence that marriage is necessary to reach the afterlife.

Once again, you’re left in the position of believing in something that disappears when we control for personal bias.

DL:

Morality only predicts the feelings (or beliefs) of the person who holds the moral belief, or about a group of people’s moral beliefs. (BTW, I have a belief and conviction that apple pie is delicious, so feel free to add beliefs and convictions to what is predicted.)

Morality of course is correlated to beliefs. It does not have to correlate to feelings. There is an indicator that morality does not necessarily align with feelings or preferences. You may feel like doing what is immoral and yet refrain from doing so. The contention that morality is like a penchant for apple pie trivializes morality and I suspect the trivialization is by design.

William,

You may feel like doing what is immoral and yet refrain from doing so.

No, I don’t think you have any unbiased evidence for this claim.

What sources of bias are there?

Suppose I say “I want to punch his lights out, but I refrain from doing so because it is wrong.”

One source of bias is cultural.
(i) I can mean that I was conditioned by my culture not to punch his lights out (as opposed to, say, in cowboy culture).

(ii) I can mean that punching his lights out is against the law.

(iii) I can mean that while I would enjoy punching his lights out at this moment, tomorrow I will wish that I had not, because

(a) I generally don’t like to harm people, and
(b) the consequences of my actions will be worse than if I don’t hit him. It will encourage retaliation, vigilantism in the community, feuding, etc.).

IMO, (i)-(iii) constitute adequate reasons for me to refrain from acting on a strong immediate desire to act, and to give me the same phenomenology.

Now, you believe there is a (iv):

(iv) I intuit that it is absolutely wrong to punch his lights out, and I generally try to act in accord with absolute moral laws.

I think that (iv) is not only lacking in any unbiased evidence, but is also implausible. This was the point of the thought experiment that Tom was so keen to ignore. If we were averse to moral reality, the mere fact that an act was morally wrong would be no deterrent to the act at all. The only way around this is to assume that our moral aversions are reliable guides to moral reality, which is like assuming that your bias is a guide to reality.

The contention that morality is like a penchant for apple pie trivializes morality and I suspect the trivialization is by design.

It’s by design, but not by malice. I’m not trying to tease you, I’m trying to explain that there’s no more unbiased evidence for objectivity of gastronomic taste than there is for moral taste. The claim that “Apple pie is delicious” is no more predictive than the statement that “Murder is wrong.”

You may feel like doing what is immoral and yet refrain from doing so.

DL: No, I don’t think you have any unbiased evidence for this claim.

DL, feelings are intrinsically difficult is not impossible to quantify in any empirically meaningful way. I can truthfully tell you I feel like eating ice cream. I can truthfully tell you I refrain from doing so because I do not want to gain weight. You in turn can argue that my feeling of wanting to lose weight is stronger than my affinity for ice cream. But all this does is illustrate the pretense of unbiased claims about feelings. Don’t confuse unbiased with objective. They are not the same.

Tom:

You have just removed the word “should” from your vocabulary, in its normal meaning. Was that your intention?

Without more context I’m not certain of your meaning. In a prior thread I was using “should” as a naturalistic view of morality. In this thread, I didn’t use it because it’s misleading.

If you put your hand on a hot stove, you “should” take it away quickly and swear furiously. Well, maybe, but it doesn’t seem to be the best word here.

DL to Tom:

If you’re like me, you have a desire to have fewer violent crimes, and so you would work to reduce such crimes. I really don’t want to commit violent crimes. When my blood is boiling, I might be held back only by the threat of retaliation,but that would be true even of the moral realist.

I’ve never met Tom but suspect that like most of the rest of us an attractive woman sometimes catches his eye. Acting on those feelings and proceeding to an adulterous relationship is consistent with feeling based morality. You can always spin these things and justify adultery in your own mind and find others who will agree. If an attractive woman gives suggestive hints you do not act on because you believe adultery is immoral then you have evidence that the sexual version of chocolate is declined based on determination grounded in moral principles.

I wrote

Without more context I’m not certain of your meaning.

Okay, the following might be your objection. If empathy drives us to change behavior in other humans, don’t we feel that they “should” change their behavior?

This “should” is still ultimately desire abatement and it is awkward: “You should stop hurting that man so I won’t feel bad”. The problem with this phrasing is that an empathic desire is by definition unselfish, so we can’t phrase it that way without twisting/inverting the meaning entirely. So a better phrasing is “You should stop hurting that man so he won’t feel bad”. This use of “should” is consistent and a natural result of empathic desire, I believe.

woodchuck64,

I’ve been thinking about this. We know that the left brain rationalizes the conclusions of the right brain (of course, sometimes those rationalizations are correct). It’s well-known that compulsions get rationalized as rule-following. It is certainly an evolutionary compulsion that we act on our drives and desires (for food, sex, relationships, status, etc.). Consequently, we might all rationalize that there is an abstract, external rule that we must act in accordance with our idealized drives and desires. I can’t help but X, but the left brain rationalizes an abstract explanation for why I X.

Hey! Science confirms attractiveness is measureable and therefore objective…..right DL?

I’m kidding, actually — sort of. I say sort of because, on the one hand I know that attractiveness isn’t a measurement, but on the other hand I’m wondering why you wouldn’t accept this as evidence for attractiveness being objective, at least to some degree? If attractiveness is 100% subjective, what are they measuring and why do they think it has something to do with attractiveness?

Tom:

Seriously,

Stop these games. Stop this arguing in such obvious bad faith.

Now I don’t get you, Tom.

You have DL’s unequivocal assertions (over and over and over again) that he is a moral relativist–that there is no objective basis for any moral categories, imperatives, etc., that these are reducible to “taste.” Of course he’s arguing in bad faith–here and in many other instances. Of course he’s playing games–among others, the hypocrisy of leveling absolutist moral charges against others while decrying them. He permits himself this because of his moral relativism: he will impose moral absolutes upon you, but permit himself the “taste” of arguing in bad faith and to play games.

On top of this, he’s dehumanized himself, you and others with his “humans are material mechanisms”… and you’re surprised he treats you this way?

I don’t get that you don’t get that…

Tom,

I might need a good “Stop It!” now and again. I was falling into a bad pattern. I was getting frustrated, too.

In writing this, it’s hard to know where to start. It’s a big topic, and blog comments are sometimes a little too small to cover even parts of the topic. However, I think it’s best to start with the big picture, and then get into details. It may take multiple comments, but I will address your responses so far, even if it doesn’t look like I’m starting out that way.

I think there’s a dynamic in the debate that’s counterproductive because it leads to a consistent misinterpretation. I like to compare the epistemology of gastronomic and aesthetic realism to the epistemology of moral realism. I must be clumsy at doing this, because I think it comes off as me saying that I feel the same way about anchovies as I do about murder (which isn’t the case). In response, I see the suggestion from you and others that either (1) the moral experience of the relativist is lacking in some phenomenological quality, or else (2) moral relativists are being dishonest in denying that quality (and probably (2)).

So, first, let me clarify that moral anti-realism/relativism/subjectivism is not disputing the phenomenological data about morality. I think we can stipulate that we all feel the same about specific moral experiences. Whether we’re watching a documentary about the Holocaust, watching news from the Middle East, reading the local paper, or interacting with our coworkers, we all have the same feelings, and make the same sorts of moral appeals. In common language, we’ll say “Fred was wrong to do that,” or “It’s wrong to cheat on your taxes.” We think that if we say “That’s wrong!”, we will elicit a certain reaction from other people. We think that such moral statements will cause others to think carefully about what they’re doing, just as if we had said something objective, like “that rope bridge won’t support your weight!”

When someone suggests that what I am doing is wrong, I analyze my actions to see if the effects of those actions lead to adverse outcomes, to see whether others will be offended by my actions, to see if I would be offended if someone else performed a similar action, and to see if society would become unpleasant if everyone acted as I did.

And, phenomenologically, we all feel compelled to act as we think we should.

I assume that what I describe in the paragraphs above holds for both of us. You have stated that you have additional moral realist beliefs, and those beliefs affect your actions, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Moral realism and moral anti-realism are both consistent with the experiences above. The difference is that moral realism says that our experience is indicative of a corresponding moral reality that would exist even if we did not exist, and which would exist, even if our moral phenomenology was different. For example, if we engineered a race of beings with different moral instincts, that would not change moral reality.

The moral anti-realist argues that mechanisms within us are responsible for our moral phenomenology, and while those mechanisms have adaptive advantages, they are not measuring anything that would be here without us.

Philosophically speaking, even showing that we were designed isn’t enough to show that morality is absolute. There’s still the is-ought problem, and just because we “is” designed for a purpose, doesn’t mean we absolutely “ought” to fulfill that purpose.

The last question is about the relevance of moral realism to our actual behavior.

Like every other believer I know of, I have a certain pattern of persistent temptations in my life. In one part of my mind they seem completely innocent, enjoyable, harmless. In another part of my mind I know, by God’s word, that they are wrong.

I appreciate the candor, and understand why you might not want to be more specific. In comment #24, you alluded to various forms of vice in the Western world. I assume that, like everyone else on the planet, there are at least some areas in life where you would indulge if you could get away with it.

However, I put it to you that the reasons you endeavor not to cheat are that (1) you value something more than cheating (say, your relationship with God), and (2) you believe you are under continuous surveillance. Yet, neither (1) nor (2) require moral realism.

Going back again to the vice you mentioned in #24, I think the question I asked in response was relevant. Either the West’s problems aren’t related to their metaethics, or else people in the West aren’t realists, and you’re saying their relativism explains why they behave badly.

For my part, when I make a decision, realism and anti-realism aren’t factors at all. Theism would be a factor, since it would be impossible to cheat, but theism and realism are independent factors (Euthyphro).

As for aliens in arguments, they do indeed have a pedigree… 🙂

I’ll leave it there for now. If you want me to address any other of your responses, I’ll be happy to do so.

“When someone suggests that what I am doing is wrong, I analyze my actions to see if the effects of those actions lead to adverse outcomes, to see whether others will be offended by my actions, to see if I would be offended if someone else performed a similar action, and to see if society would become unpleasant if everyone acted as I did.

…

Moral realism and moral anti-realism are both consistent with the experiences above.”

What you’re doing here really, honestly comes across as a shell game. The words you use would take on different meanings if applied either to a moral realist or a moral anti-realist.

For the moral realist, when someone suggests that what you are doing is wrong, it is or can be processed as a moral offense. The analysis would be to see whether the action was indeed morally wrong, whether the effects would even need to be considered, and if they warranted further consideration it would further make sense to consider their compatibility with morality. “Offense”, unless it was considered to be connected to that morality, would not matter – if it offended a great many people yet was determined to be consistent with that external morality, that’s that (of course, someone could knowingly do something immoral too, in a moment of weakness). “Society becoming unpleasant” would hardly matter either as far as that moral law goes (Unpleasant? People would be upset?).

For the moral anti-realist, there is no possibility of the action having been a moral offense – not unless moral anti-realism is itself questioned. No questions about the action “really being wrong” would ever come up lacking that questioning. The only questions are “Do I personally care?” – and the only reasons that person could or would care would be based on personal bias. “Does this bring me pleasure?” Others being offended would not matter at all, unless that was a source of personal pleasure. Nor would you have any reason to care if “society would become unpleasant if everyone acted as” you did. Even if you wouldn’t like society if everyone stole, that doesn’t mean you have a reason not to steal. It does mean you have a reason not to get caught, and said reason would, again, come right back to your personal likes and nothing more.

“If evolutionary mechanisms are sensitive to moral reality, then morality is equivalent to evolutionary success of a social species.”

That does not follow. For one thing, ‘evolutionary success’ would have to be defined – and it’s a wide open question whether ‘evolution’ is at all appropriate (except in the most trivial sense) for use when talking about human intellectual and social endeavors. Nor is it clear if the “science” that would be able to “study morality” would be anything at all like what we consider science to be nowadays. Perhaps if you’re willing to expand the realm of science to include philosophy and even theology. In which case, sure, morality can be studied by science.

What’s more, you keep on saying what Tom ‘can’t do’. He can’t refer to the universality of morality on the grounds that, apparently, the moral anti-realists think the overwhelming attestation to moral realism is a possibility. In which case, I think you’re making a common mistake – Tom, by citing the near total universality of people believing in morality and a real moral dimension to life, is not committing argumentum ad populum. He’s not saying ‘Everyone believes it, so it must be true’. He’s using that universality as a data point. Put another way, ‘If it’s just accidental that some people have a moral sense, it must be one hell of an accident, because it’s downright universal’. And yes, that data is real, and serves as evidence in Tom’s favor – and it’s relevant to the debate.

To put it in optical illusion terms: If 5 billion people claimed to see Michael Jackson appear on Johnny Carson, and if a handful insisted that everyone could have hallucinated seeing Michael Jackson on Johnny Carson, said handful isn’t going to gain much ground by saying “Look, you can’t cite the five billion people who saw this as evidence that it took place, because our explanation presupposes that they think it took place too! What they claim to have seen cannot count as evidence that Michael Jackson appeared on Johnny Carson!” It simply doesn’t work.

Joseph,

I was not a moral anti-realist until a few years ago. This is simply because I had never thought about meta-ethics in any detail. I can assure you that the whether something was good or bad independent of humanity’s existence has never been a factor in my thinking. Not even as a child.

When most moral thinking occurs, meta-ethics is simply irrelevant.

I think this is the case, even for theists. There are plenty of non-meta-ethical reasons for theists to do what God commands. If God’s morality is God’s subjective whim, it won’t change anything for the theist. The theist respects God’s authority, believes the Bible is a guide to morality, and believes he is under constant surveillance. Most theists don’t even know what moral realism is.

For the moral anti-realist, there is no possibility of the action having been a moral offense…

This is just 100% wrong unless you insert the word “absolute” before the word “moral”. If I say “Yo Moma!” you will take moral offense at what I say before you have a chance to even think meta-ethics. In my comment, I meant offense as it is felt and experienced, not as meta-ethicists philosophically rationalize the process to be.

Others being offended would not matter at all, unless that was a source of personal pleasure. Nor would you have any reason to care if “society would become unpleasant if everyone acted as” you did. Even if you wouldn’t like society if everyone stole, that doesn’t mean you have a reason not to steal. It does mean you have a reason not to get caught, and said reason would, again, come right back to your personal likes and nothing more.

That’s a bizarre thing to say. Taking moral offense is a painful experience. Anyone with empathy wants to avoid causing other people pain, and so causing others to take moral offense is something an empathic person wants to avoid.

Nor would you have any reason to care if “society would become unpleasant if everyone acted as” you did.

Why would I not care if my society became unpleasant?!! Even kindergartners learn that much. They know that if they push people, the pushing comes back to them. It’s got nothing to do with meta-ethics (unless kindergartners are waaay smarter than I’ve been taking them for).

And, um, are you saying I shouldn’t vote?

Even if you wouldn’t like society if everyone stole, that doesn’t mean you have a reason not to steal. It does mean you have a reason not to get caught, and said reason would, again, come right back to your personal likes and nothing more.

I just find this statement baffling. Obviously, there are stronger emotional reasons not to steal than what would happen to society in the long run. There’s the painful taking of moral offense of the victim (which I would empathize with) for starters.

Meta-ethics just doesn’t come into play. Consider offenses subject to this sort of reasoning (stealing isn’t a good example). Say, double-parking, playing music loud into the night, littering, etc. Folks refrain from doing these things (1) because they empathize when others to take moral offense, (2) they don’t want to lower their social standing, and (3) because they don’t want to establish a precedent that will make their society worse in the long run. I don’t believe anybody refrains from doing these things because of their meta-ethical position.

Put another way, ‘If it’s just accidental that some people have a moral sense, it must be one hell of an accident, because it’s downright universal’. And yes, that data is real, and serves as evidence in Tom’s favor – and it’s relevant to the debate.

No, it’s not evidence. No one says that our moral sense is a per-person accident. Just as no one says that monkey moral sense is a per-monkey accident. Your competitor theory says that our moral sense is a universal, species-wide adaptation. If Tom’s realism was competing against a theory which said our morality is a per-individual accident, then the universality would be evidence in his favor. But that’s not the theory Tom is competing against, so universality is irrelevant.

DL,

You claimed that your evidence went beyond your personal opinion because billions of other people also share your opinion. As my discussion above describes, this is irrelevant to the debate. Both sides argue for some species-level hard-wiring.

This is wrong. The opinions of billions don’t prove anything in the scientific sense, nor do opinions make something true, but it is highly relevant. It is relevant because there are facts/data/perceptions supporting those opinions. Don’t pretend that people are spouting opinions in a vacuum here.

There are reasons for having these opinions just as there are reasons for having the opinion that certain objects are X and not Y. Sure, the reasons may vary as to why it’s X and not Y, but that doesn’t change the fact that people perceive something meaningful in that X.

The perception has meaning even though nobody can quite put their finger on it. It’s an X, and for some reason we can’t ignore it. We can’t make it a Y if we wanted to, and we can’t make it fade into the background of reality as meaningless static. We must pay attention to it.

All those opinions say this: “apparently moral oughts are real.” You’ve got a lot of convincing to do to get people to accept your statement, which goes something like this: “apparently morality is nothing more than an expression of personal preference.” As it stands now, you’ve got billions of people who say apparently you’re incorrect. Doesn’t make it true, but it’s relevant.

Tom,

It’s possible that the absolute morality coincides with biological flourishing of a social species, although, it’s certainly possible that absolute morality might not have been compatible with biological flourishing.

That’s not possible on a theistic account, considering God’s loving care for humans and his design for us to live well in accord with his moral character.

Just saying it’s not possible doesn’t make it impossible. It seems possible to me that absolute morality might not be compatible with biological flourishing of our species, and God intervenes to help us survive despite the evolutionary impediment of our moral senses. I don’t see an inherent contradiction.

Or, consider the possibility that God lies. There’s nothing impossible about this, and you can’t argue that he doesn’t lie because he says he wouldn’t in the Bible. Nor is it necessary that God’s morality matches our own.

I understand that you advocate for a God whose morality we would recognize as good, who wouldn’t lie to us, etc., but I don’t see any basis for your claim that the alternatives are impossible.

There’s still the is-ought problem, and just because we “is” designed for a purpose, doesn’t mean we absolutely “ought” to fulfill that purpose.

I think you need to fill out that argument a whole lot more than you have done here, especially taking into account that theism entails that morality is part of the very foundation of all reality from all eternity, and that there will be an accounting for our actions at the end of our lives.

I’ll try to expand on the argument, but first a couple of notes about your response:

As I said above, theism does not entail that “morality is part of the foundation of all reality”. I’m not even convinced that such a property has any semantic meaning. Theism is a belief in a being who is able to shape physical reality to his/her/its will. If a man believes in Zeus, he is a theist. Most gods happen to be omniscient, too. In the case of your God, he is omniscient and good in a subjective sense, too. But saying that God is necessarily subjectively good? Necessary for what?

Second, theism does not automatically imply there will be an accounting. Your kind of theism says there will be an accounting, but not all theism must do so. Neither universalism nor deism imply such accounting, and they are certainly forms of theism.

If Hume is correct about the is-ought problem, then every “ought” proposition relies on another more fundamental ought. Every claim that “X ought to Y” is really means “X ought to Y, if X ought to Z and an ought to Z implies an ought to Y” and so on. You can theorize that this chain of oughts descending from more fundamental oughts comes to rest on some absolute moral axiom, “X ought to K”. However, it is impossible to distinguish the between the non-trivial moral consequences of “X ought to K” versus “X ought NOT K”, because neither statement is required to make anything more than a trivial prediction. If one’s initial moral axiom is that one absolutely ought to cause more suffering, then it is trivial to conclude that one ought to commit rape. However, the non-trivial part of morality is trying to determine what the axioms are. And it is precisely because of the is-ought problem that the axioms cannot be determined. We would have to look at what “is” in order to settle what “ought” to be.

Here’s another way of saying this. Consider the algebra equation x + y = 9.

Suppose we postulate that x = 5. That trivially implies that y = 4.

Now, suppose we postulate that x = 400. This trivially implies that y = -391.

There’s no way to decide between either value for x unless there’s a correspondence between an “is” fact and the math. In morality, the is-ought problem prevents you from connecting moral axioms to experiences.

You can assume that your “is” experiences of what you feel are guides to the absolute axioms, but you would have to reject the is-ought problem.

Revelation won’t help either. You would need to assume some moral axioms in order to count revelation as a guide to moral axioms.

Indeed, having all the “is” facts in the universe won’t solve this problem. As far as I can see, even God wouldn’t know what he absolutely ought to do.

DL,

“I can assure you that the whether something was good or bad independent of humanity’s existence has never been a factor in my thinking. Not even as a child.

When most moral thinking occurs, meta-ethics is simply irrelevant.”

And your personal psychology is evidence, as far as it goes. But it simply doesn’t go very far at all. What you’re saying here is that A) You personally say that something actually being “good” or “bad” has never been a factor in your thinking, even as a child, and B) Therefore, when most moral thinking occurs, meta-ethics is irrelevant. Not only does it not follow, but the latter is being actively contested here.

You say “most theists don’t even know what moral realism is”. But they don’t have to in order to be moral realists, just as someone doesn’t need to know what “compatiblist free will” means to hold what amounts to the same position. They simply have to be aware of a moral standard that exists externally to them and is not subjective. They have to believe that some things are moral or immoral irrespective of people’s views. And the number of people who believe as much is shockingly large.

What’s more, one doesn’t need to be a Christian to be a moral realist. Not even a theist, necessarily, though most non-theist moral realists will, I think, inevitably end up in a position that’s either theism or shockingly close to it if they’re consistent. Have you seen the recent Philpapers survey? If not, I really suggest you take a look at the number of theists represented there percentage-wise, and the number of moral realists versus anti-realists. You may be surprised.

“This is just 100% wrong unless you insert the word “absolute” before the word “moral”.”

And I can say it’s 100% right unless you melt the word “moral” down to something trivial, like “what I personally like or dislike”. Regardless, no: The moral realist and the moral anti-realist do not have the same experiences with judgment. In fact, they’re different in dramatic and important ways, and must be.

“That’s a bizarre thing to say. Taking moral offense is a painful experience. Anyone with empathy wants to avoid causing other people pain, and so causing others to take moral offense is something an empathic person wants to avoid.”

But that’s practically a tautology. You may as well say “Anyone who is concerned about and doesn’t want to cause other people moral offense will be concerned about and not cause other people moral offense”. As I said, it comes back to personal likes and nothing more. You can’t be appealing to morality as a moral realist when you talk about the importance of empathy here. The only work empathy can do here is “Well, I draw pleasure from that view/tact.” That’s just a fact.

“Why would I not care if my society became unpleasant?!! Even kindergartners learn that much. They know that if they push people, the pushing comes back to them.”

First, that’s not what I said. I said that they would have no reason to care that “society would become unpleasant if everyone acted as they did”. So what if they would? Unless the action is going to lead to that happening and they’d personally suffer from it, it means nothing. I can assure you that thieves don’t like to be stolen from, most thugs don’t like to be beaten up, etc.

Again, it all comes back to personal likes and what can affect those likes. What’s more, even your kindergarten line on its own doesn’t hold up. Kindergarteners are *taught* these lessons. They don’t end up accepting the conclusions. Clearly. There are plenty of bullies and misfits who get out of kindergarten. In fact, some learn to become teacher’s pets, in which case they learn an interesting fact about pushing people: Sometimes you can push people, and it won’t come back to you.

“And, um, are you saying I shouldn’t vote?”

What are you even talking about here?

“Obviously, there are stronger emotional reasons not to steal than what would happen to society in the long run. There’s the painful taking of moral offense of the victim (which I would empathize with) for starters.”

You can get over that, DL. Many do. And you have no reason not to get over it either. Are you honestly making the mistake of thinking that people, either as individuals or as a society, are not capable of being entirely at home with some “emotionally horrible” things? By the way you write, you have faith in the world and humanity that would naturally lead to some kind of theism if it were consistent.

“I don’t believe anybody refrains from doing these things because of their meta-ethical position.”

And I believe your belief is mistaken. Particularly with regards to Christianity, which frankly has such simple but universal rules that it will, if you are serious, affect you in every moment of your life – even when it comes to littering or playing loud music at night. You seem to be arguing that, if the person isn’t aware of words like “moral realism” or “meta-ethical position”, they can’t possibly be aware of or pursuing accordance with an external moral reality, or think they are. You’d be wrong.

“No, it’s not evidence. No one says that our moral sense is a per-person accident.”

Yes, it is evidence. It’s data about humanity, it’s a widespread attestation that there is a real moral dimension to reality. Again, back to the TV example: 5 billion people seeing Michael Jackson on Johnny Carson counts as evidence that Michael Jackson was on Johnny Carson. The near universality of attestation to some things being “really right” and “really wrong” counts as evidence that some things are “really right” and “really wrong”. The former does not suddenly become irrelevant just by virtue of someone saying that the experience of seeing Michael Jackson on Johnny Carson “could have been a species-wide hallucinatory adaptation”. It doesn’t mean it’s proven true by that level of attestation, but it does serve as evidence. The mere existence of a counter-explanation does not remove this evidence.

Now, I suppose you can argue something like “Okay, sure, the vast majority of people believe that some things are “really right” and “really wrong”. But that was just evolution playing a trick on them!” First, you’d need to establish that evolution wasn’t guided. Second, even if you did establish that, you’d be getting dangerously close to one hell of a skeptical argument. ‘There’s something in nature that is fooling people left and right, reliably corrupting their judgment, and has no relation to an actual truth’ is one hell of a road to walk down.

Either way, the data is relevant. The mere existence of a counter-explanation doesn’t make the data irrelevant as evidence for the reality of something, any more than “Well, it’s logically possible that aliens mind-warped everyone into thinking MJ was on MC, but he really wasn’t” does not somehow mean that now 5 billion people attesting to seeing what they did “doesn’t count as evidence” that what they saw happening, happened.

Joseph A:

Actually, given your description, it seems more like the monkeys are acting consistently with there being a rule “do this and other monkeys are going to beat your ass.” There seems to be a whole lot of anthropomorphism in play in these descriptions, as if often the case.

Yes. But likewise, it can be argued that humans follow moral rules at least partly out of fear of punishment.

But empathy does not do that. I can imagine how someone may feel when I do something cruel to them, and find it downright funny. I can imagine it being done to me, and reason that it’s all the more reason to do it to someone else, etc.

That’s not empathy. Empathy is when you include another as self. If it would be cruel when done to you, you would judge it cruel. If it would be funny when done to you, you would judge it funny. Anything else is not properly called empathy.

If I couldn’t care less about “fairness”, or if I thought “fairness” was a joke or something actively to be discouraged, then merely being able to imagine someone else’s perspective would mean nothing.

True. Empathy only works with the values you happen to have, which explains the tendency of people to apply even clearly subjective moral values — say, “short skirts are evil” — to everyone. But I’m not following how this refutes rather than supports my point roughly stated here.

BTW, your posts will be more readable if you enclose quoted sections in <blockquote> </blockquote>

It’s data about humanity, it’s a widespread attestation that there is a real moral dimension to reality. Again, back to the TV example: 5 billion people seeing Michael Jackson on Johnny Carson counts as evidence that Michael Jackson was on Johnny Carson. The near universality of attestation to some things being “really right” and “really wrong” counts as evidence that some things are “really right” and “really wrong”.

The questions is, Joseph, would people see MJ on JC even if MJ weren’t on JC? That is, is there a bias?

Obviously, in the case of MJ on JC, the theory that he was on the show makes predictions. We ought to be able to find evidence that MJ was at the studio that day, correspondence and memos to that effect, videotape, and news stories referring to the upcoming appearance, etc. As we know, our basic faculty for seeing is excellent when it comes to constructing predictive models.

However, moral realism is completely different. Moral realism doesn’t predict anything except attestation. In that regard, it looks exactly like a subjective belief.

You’ll get very wide-scale attestation to the deliciousness of chicken soup. That doesn’t mean chicken soup would be delicious if no humans were around to eat it. And alien species might find chicken soup both disgusting and toxic.

Why is moral realism so special?

DL,

Under both moral realism and moral anti-realism, people care about fairness, and care about it as a basic emotional drive.

[…]

Wouldn’t you agree that our moral sense of fairness is pretty basic?

Not the way you put it, no. I would agree that awareness of a real morality is pretty basic, and that justice is part of said morality. What is “unfair” means something very different when a moral realist says it (Something unfair would be a violation of a real moral law) versus what an anti-realist would mean (something unfair is something they personally disapprove of, but isn’t “actually” wrong.) If a moral anti-realist had a feeling that something was truly “unfair”, as in it was actually wrong regardless of their feelings, they would either have to regard that feeling as a delusion or question/give up their moral anti-realism.

My point is that I don’t just have a moral feeling about the results of a specific transaction in which I am engaged, but I also can have comparable moral feelings about transactions that are distant from me (or even fictional).

Agree?

No agreement. Your “moral feelings” as a moral anti-realist would be very different from the “moral feelings” of a moral realist, as I keep pointing out. At the very least, they would be reflected upon in a vastly different way.

Please parse this for me. Yes, people can get over their revulsion for, say, assault. Indeed, if a conditioning program were instituted by a society, the majority of the population of that society could get over it. But this is true whether the population are realists or anti-realists. So, what is your point?

Leaving aside whether such a conditioning program were really possible in the deepest senses, I’m saying this. Your personal feelings of revulsion at “unfairness” or anything else are, as a moral anti-realist, not an actual truth or reality for you to better accord yourself to. Really, you have no reason to encourage yourself to desire or promote “fairness” or “truth” or anything else aside from your personal whim. You can never pursue actual “goodness”, you can never avoid actual “evil”. Such things simply don’t exist given your worldview.

The moral realist, even the moral agnostic, is in a different situation. The moral realist has every reason to regard his whims and feelings as held to an external standard, and to therefore condition himself in a particular direction – namely, in accord with that actual “good”, despite urges and such in another direction, despite failings. Indeed, he CAN really “fail” in a moral capacity, and recognizes it.

But why would you think that the anti-realist would not nudge people in the directions of his subjective goods?

Sure, the anti-realist can nudge people. But there is no actual “good” for the anti-realist to “nudge people towards” in his view. Just his own personal likes, his subjective goods. Sure, it’s possible for his likes to coincide with the sort of things the moral realists near universally regard as “good”. But there’s no reason for him to do so. In fact, given that he will consciously think that the only thing which is “good” is what he personally likes or dislikes – and that there’s not even the possibility that he’s wrong about this – then by default he’s only out to please himself. Really, that’s the only “good” he can ever pursue.

We all agree that simply being a realist is not enough to guarantee nice behavior. The realist also has to care about the specific behavior in question. That means that caring is the only significant variable on either side of the meta-ethical debate.

As I’ve been trying to explain (with my thought experiments), there’s no reason to care about absolute morality for the sake of absolute morality.

Being a moral realist means believing that there are actual, real moral goods to pursue, ones that will not change based on personal whim, etc. For the moral anti-realist, there are no morals to care about, or seek. Even the moral agnostic is in a better position, because he at least has a reason to seek the good – he just may have not found it yet.

So yes, absolute morality is a good of its own. It has dramatic repercussions for discussions of actions, for human behavior, for justice, etc. What’s more, if a person knows even a shred of true “real” moral law, or has reason to believe they do, then the repercussions are immediate.

Obviously, in the case of MJ on JC, the theory that he was on the show makes predictions. We ought to be able to find evidence that MJ was at the studio that day, correspondence and memos to that effect, videotape, and news stories referring to the upcoming appearance, etc. As we know, our basic faculty for seeing is excellent when it comes to constructing predictive models.

DL, you have to realize you’re changing the subject here. Again, it was made clear that 5 billion people claiming to have seen MJ on JC does count as evidence that MJ was on JC. Note that this stays as the case *even if no other evidence of MJ being on JC can be found*. In fact, it stays as the case *even if contradictory evidence can be found*. What you’re doing at this point is not questioning that it’s evidence, you’re questioning the strength of the evidence.

Moral realism doesn’t predict anything except attestation. In that regard, it looks exactly like a subjective belief.

For one, that really depends on the particular articulations of moral realism, its interplay with other stances (teleology, God, etc). Further, attestation is a prediction, and one that’s met in spades. Conceivably moral anti-realism could have taken place and be every bit as universal as moral realism actually is. It’s not. That’s a strike against moral anti-realism.

Just as well, re: chicken soup, aliens could conceivably show up – and be moral realists, with moral beliefs in considerable accord with human moral beliefs. Would you say, in that case, that this was further evidence for moral realism? Or would nature’s habit of deluding agents suddenly be that much stronger?

If the former, then until aliens show up with a different point of view, it sure seems like the evidence on that front lines up best with the moral realists.

DL,

These words “truly” and “real” amount to nothing more than a tautology with your meta-ethical views. As I said, I don’t believe people have these meta-ethical views in moral situations. I certainly don’t.

I certainly do have these views in moral situations, and I believe others do as well. And it certainly seems that there’s plenty of people (even atheists) who would agree with me. I said before that your personal experience – whatever that may be – is some evidence for you. It’s just meager. Certainly not persuasive to me.

And no, they are not tautological – in this context they are highlighting a very real, very deep difference between how morality is viewed for the moral realist, and “morality” for the moral anti-realist. I really get the feeling you’re doing your best to blur some very important distinctions between how both realists and anti-realists approach morality, so I’m doing my best to keep those distinctions in proper relief.

More of the same. “Actual truth”, “reality”, “actual evil”, etc. The only differences you are are speaking to are abstract, philosophical, meta-ethical differences that the vast majority of people have never even heard of.

And as I’ve said before, the fact that they have not heard these specific, academic terms does not mean that they don’t believe in what amounts to the same thing. Further, I’d reject that the vast majority of people have never dealt and do not deal with terms like “truth” and “reality” and “evil”. People don’t need to go to Stanford or Tufts to grasp some, even many truths. Hell, it may be actually make such more difficult for them.

Personal desire and compulsion are not whimsy. What a person likes or feels compelled to do is not whimsy. Whimsy is when the person has no special desire for A rather than B, and chooses between them at random.

What “special desire” could a moral anti-realist have for action A rather than B? Again, it can’t be owing to pursuing an actual moral good in their view. If your argument here is, “A moral anti-realist may have more considered reasons for choosing morals, such as what pleases them!”, it’s not going to be much of an improvement over what I’ve said. I think you get my jist here.

(1) Your view of objective morality is informed by your subjective morality. It’s just an idealization of your subjective morality. Even your interpretation of revelation is shaped by your subjective morality.

That’s your claim, for you to argue for and prove. Not simply assume. So far, it seems all you really do is assert it. Now, if I go ahead and claim a certain moral truth is both real and self-evident, I may not be able to get you to admit it is so. But so what? There are some people who refuse to admit they have beliefs, or that they have a self, or that they experience pain, etc. Those people may pose problems, but my having to take their views very seriously in an intellectual sense is not one of them.

(2) Moral realists change their morality, just like the anti-realists do.

Due to learning, etc. But moral realists recognize there is a morality for them to find. Moral anti-realists reject this. Moral realists have a strange knack for finding broadly similar morality. Moral anti-realists, even if they did, would be doing so for reasons (of course) unrelated to any real morality, at least in their explanation.

(3) Given that the realist’s compliance with absolute moral laws is a function of his subjective cares, it sure looks like subjective cares determine the whole ball game.

Assertion on your part, not argued for. Maybe you’ll insist that it’s self-evidently nothing but subjectivity. At which point we’d be at a stand-still.

(4) If your subjective morality doesn’t match absolute morality, why be good? Seriously? No one wants to be absolutely good for its own sake. There’s no point, no advantage, no sense. It would be irrational. Why not be absolutely evil, but subjectively good?

You never heard the term “virtue is its own reward”? You never read what Aristotle had to say about the final cause of man? Has it occurred to you that certain desires may themselves be actual real goods, and culminating such desires also real goods?

(5) If I can have a subjective preference for a morality, I can have a subjective preference for a direct of progress.

Sure. That “progress” just can be absolutely anything at all, and if there’s a real morality, purpose, and good in the universe, it can entirely be at odds with it. In fact, if you really do have access to real moral knowledge, yet you’re prone to writing off such knowledge as a delusion, it’s all the worse for you.

Apples and oranges. Sight is a reliable predictor of external stuff, from apples on tables, to people in places. If vision had never predicted anything external, and if neither MJ nor JC ever showed any evidence of being external, then 5 billion people seeing MJ on JC would count for nothing.

You yourself said that moral realism predicted widespread attestation of moral realism, and said prediction was fulfilled. That puts it head and shoulders above anti-realism already. I already showed how the alien example could conceivably turn out to be even more evidence for moral realism – which you’d have to accept, given that you’ve spent so much time insisting the opposite event (aliens show up, have radically different views from us) would be suggestive of moral anti-realism. If you’re backing off from that claim such that aliens showing up and attesting to moral realism, and having similar morality, would not be evidence for moral realism… well, you have some explaining to do.

So again, 5 billion people attesting to having seen MJ on JC would, indeed, be evidence. That much is clear, and I’m surprised you’re keeping on this point. I think even people who are anti-realists about pain would certainly admit that there’s at least evidence for pain (then again, these tend to be some crazy people.) Are you going to tell me you’re skeptical about, say.. other minds? Or flip in the other direction and endorse panpsychism?

The claim of moral realism is like a claim of dream realism, i.e., that the worlds we occupy in dreams are real. “Dream realists” could claim that everyone has dreams that feel real to them. Lots of weird stuff happens in dreams, of course, but that doesn’t necessarily prove dreamscapes aren’t real. Does the fact that 5 billion people have dreams that feel real provide strong evidence that dreams worlds are real?

You put in that qualifier strong. If you’re taking the position that widespread attestation of moral realism is evidence, but not very strong evidence, that’s utterly different from saying it’s no evidence whatsoever.

Either way, your example isn’t clear enough for me to follow. What does it mean to claim a world is real?

Clearly you can’t be suggesting that people are lying, or that no one has dreams, or that dreams don’t “really” take place. Then again, maybe you are. I’m pretty curious about the other minds / panpsychism question.

DL,

Moral realism doesn’t predict anything except attestation. In that regard, it looks exactly like a subjective belief.

No. No. No. Around and around in circles we go.

We’ve already agreed that (quoting Tom) “moral realism does not entail consistent moral success .”

Second, moral reality is not a deterministic mechanism. Its ‘mechanism’ involves FREE agents (God being one of them), and since you don’t believe in FREE agents I can see why this whole prediction things sticks in your craw. To you, all outcomes are either determined (forced) by past history or they are random.

Stop trying to shoehorn Christian moral reality into your unrealistic view of reality.

Third, Christian moral reality says grace, faith, hope and suffering can be morally good (absolutely so!). How will you factor these into your prediction model? What does grace look like in YOUR reality where outcomes are either determined or random? I’d like to see you attempt to cobble a simple prediction model together using grace.

Joseph A.

But what was your point? I already pointed out the problems with saying the monkeys were acting in accordance with an “objective moral rule”. That’s an anthropomorphism, and I gave another (and given your own description, I think far more credible) description of what they’re doing. Namely, acting in accordance with the “I don’t want to have three other guys beat the crap out of me” rule.

I’m not attempting to refute moral realism, but rather addressing some criticisms of moral relativism or anti-realism.

My point was that the monkeys are acting consistently with there being an objective moral rule “don’t be greedy” (or “don’t take more than your share”). “Acting consistently with” does not mean that they believe there is an objective rule or even that one exists. It also doesn’t mean that they’re acting morally (in the same sense as humans) or even acting out of fear of punishment necessarily. What I do take away from it is that social rules emerge given rather simple abilities of social organisms: empathy and sense of fairness. Therefore, it may well be that empathy and a sense of fairness are necessary predecessors to moral rules and abstractions. It seems fairly uncontroversial that monkeys are not moral realists, yet their societies do not devolve into chaos or “every ape for himself”.

You also suggested that empathy may create a feeling of externality by “expanding” our identity. But you also realize that empathy only works with values we already have. At most, empathy can be a useful tool for the moral realist. It may be something that comes hand in hand with those aware of moral law (indeed, maybe the awareness of moral law inevitably leads to empathy, or is somehow connected elsewise) But they clearly aren’t ‘the same thing’, nor does empathy serve as an explanation for the belief of moral realism.

A common criticism of moral relativism is that it can’t explain the feeling we have that our morals are objective, that they “should” be followed by others. But that’s exactly what empathy does. It blurs the line between self and other, making it completely natural to apply our own moral values to others. This seems true whether absolute morals exist or not.

If you are making a more specific objection that I’m not catching, please clarify.

Tom,

Just to note – all I meant when I said that the moral anti-realist has “no reason” to care about certain things is that ultimately, those reasons are not what they can attribute to morality, or “right”, or “wrong”. Not if they want to be consistent. They could always be deluded, I suppose.

But the idea that the moral anti-realist has to be concerned if “society will suffer”, for example, is ludicrous. Or that they have to take an idea like “if everyone did what I’m doing, I wouldn’t like it” seriously. They don’t. They can’t even say “Well, I don’t know if this is really and truly moral or immoral to do, so I’ll act accordingly” because they’d be giving up moral anti-realism.

DL,

I simply like A more than B. B disturbs me in a non-cognitive way. You said you were fine with non-cognitive judgments about moral conditions, such as fairness or cruelty.

Actually, I’ve been repeatedly saying that what a moral realist and a moral anti-realist means when they talk about their motivations are drastically different, and must be. What can “fairness” mean to a moral anti-realist? What can “cruelty” mean? Again, they must be something drastically different from what the moral realist means. Indeed, I question whether “fairness” can reasonably exist for the moral anti-realist. It collapses to “I don’t like that” or “I do like that”. The similar terminology is illusory.

If it’s so real and deep, why are you unable to explain what it is?

I’ve explained it repeatedly. Why are you unable to grasp it? Beats me. Maybe you’re deluded. Maybe you’re just denying the obvious for the sake of a debate. I’m not too concerned with the gap.

The moral anti-realist believes there is no actual, existent moral order. The moral realist believes there is. You’re insisting that all moral judgments are totally subjective. I’m saying that, no, moral judgments can be and are knowledge that humanity can access to whatever degree. You deny this, but that doesn’t concern me too much. Again, there are people who deny that things like belief exist, that other minds exist, etc. The ways that may be worrying are ways not appropriate to this discussion.

If you eliminated all of the cognitive moral judgments, but kept the non-cognitive moral judgments and kept the cognitive “is” judgments (i.e., awareness of consequences), you would account for most moral behavior.

Ridiculous. But if you want to argue for it, go right ahead. But don’t just assert it and expect me to agree. You may as well be telling me that if I program a robot to give nickels to anyone who says “I need a nickel” that, wham. The robot is practicing generosity, because being generous is nothing but an action, and has nothing to do with thoughts. That strikes me as absurd as what you’re saying here.

(1) Which social rules would I prefer to live under? This involves imagining certain moral scenarios, and seeing which is non-cognitively more preferable.

Only if the social rules always apply to you, or if you value them always applying to you. And you automatically exclude “the one most in accord with moral law” out of the gates of course.

(2) Self-discipline. If, in hindsight, I can identify some of my moral decisions as bad (in the non-cognitive sense), then I can try to create abstract rules for myself so that I will feel better about my actions in the future. For example, if I observe that I have greedy tendencies, I can institute a personal moral policy of being more generous. That will cancel out my greediness bias, and result in fairer transactions. Consequently, I will non-cognitively prefer my overall dealings with others.

Or you can get over your feeling bad about greediness, and institute a policy of getting over it and self-desensitization. Indeed, feeling bad about it wouldn’t be indicative of a moral law, not even an ultimate purpose in your case. A guy may feel horrified at working in a slaughterhouse despite having moral knowledge that (barring actual immoral acts in the slaughterhouse) what’s going on there is not immoral. Do you think all such workers become vegetarians? Or do many of them just get used to the slaughter? Yet what happens if said guy convinces himself that there is no actual morality?

All of the above make sense under both meta-ethical views. It’s just higher-order satisfaction of desires, some of which are moral desires (e.g., for more fairness).

What I want to know is what you think is missing from the anti-realist’s picture.

Awareness or public acceptance of real moral knowledge, for one. Now, I don’t deny that a moral anti-realist can have access to real moral knowledge and, befuddled or confused or even hobbled as they are, tend towards such. But still there’s a problem to be addressed. Seeing the light and all that.

And please, don’t tell me it’s missing the belief that fairness is “really” or “truly” right. That’s an inert belief, and a tautology. Give me something that impacts your moral behavior and which cannot be motivated by non-cognitive moral judgments (like “I like fair transactions, even where I may not materially benefit as much as unfair transactions.”).

You say it’s an inert belief, but what proof do you have for such other than just stating it? Are you saying that even if moral knowledge does exist, and even if agents have access in whatever degree to such knowledge, that mere information will have no impact? Again, hard to believe.

And also, please recall that there’s a number of views on moral realism. I even said that morality can, in fact, be studied to whatever degree as a “science” – depending on how you’re going to change “science” in response to such.

Sure, I have. But I’ve never heard of the phrase “absolute objective virtue is its own reward.” Don’t see the relevance of this statement to being absolutely good versus subjectively good.

“Subjectively good” is, if we’re talking about morally good, hard to take seriously at all. “Doing whatever pleases you most is its own reward.”? Really?

The reward has to be subjective, or the deal is off. And if objective virtue is its own subjective reward, then that maxim says follow your subjective good.

Are you denying that there can both be moral realism, and that people can still desire things that are not morally optimal? Are you denying that virtue can be its own reward – that the “reward” for behaving according to the good is that one is behaving according to the good?

Again, this is going to inevitably lead to more specific accounts of moral realism. But so far you’re taking a number of really odd stances – and one of which seems to be that morality is unreal, but the moral realist shouldn’t be concerned anyway, because people – even moral anti-realists – are going to act just like moral realists (and the morality the realists see will remain largely the same) anyway. Which at once seems very naive, yet also like an evidential argument for a variety of moral realism.

It’s easy to spout fortune cookie wisdom when you don’t actually have to define any of the terms you’re using. Who cares if something is a “real good” if it’s not also a subjective good?

You think Aristotle is “fortune cookie wisdom”? If you say so. Regardless, I’ve been explaining myself here in detail. You, though, seem to make a lot of assertions but fail to back them up. Like insisting “morality is nothing but subjectivity!” and then, when being asked to prove or defend that, suggesting that it’s my job to convince -you-. Make a claim, defend the claim. Or just admit you’re just going off subjective instincts which apparently don’t apply to others.

You and Tom try to evade this question by ignoring the possibility that the absolute good is your subjective evil.

I have ignored and evaded no such thing. It’s possible for me to be mistaken about some absolute good, just as it’s possible for me to both know a lot of mathematics yet solve a problem incorrectly. I suppose it’s technically possible that I think 2+2=4, but it really doesn’t. It’s not a possibility that worries me.

Meanwhile, you seem to utterly ignore the possibility that people have access to real moral knowledge. The fact that you can imagine possible skeptical scenarios doesn’t bother me, and certainly doesn’t persuade me. In a way, it’s kind of funny to have you try to persuade me like this. It’s almost like you’re appealing to a real moral good here.

Suppose that torturing cats is a real good, and the majority of people think it is. It’s a subjective evil for the two of us (I hope). Why should we be “really” good? Merely saying that having and fulfilling certain desires could be a real good doesn’t explain why we should condition ourselves to desire to torture cats.

And I’m saying that simply desiring the good, full stop, is enough. Are you saying it’s immoral to desire the good? Wait, no, you can’t be. Maybe you’d say it’s irrational to desire the good because it’s good – I deny that. But even if I didn’t – what’s so great about being rational? Is it to be valued purely because it has an objective value? Oops. Again, no.. it can’t be that, can it?

Now, we can get into deeper discussions of moral realism where subjectivity and objectivity sync up, or ideally sync up, in greater ways. But oddly enough, it seems like you’re making a moral argument for moral skepticism (not moral anti-realism, here. Though -that- would be downright amusing!)

Yet, you expect the man in the reverse situation, the man who desires to torture cats (who sees that torture as a subjective good) to change his desires to conform to your alleged objective good and our societal norm. What possible reason could the cat torturer possibly have to willingly go along with your suggestion? You ask him to be subjectively evil in order to reap some sort of reward?

“Subjectively evil” and nothing more seems pretty flimsy. As for what possible reasons – well, I could always hope he either acquires that knowledge of morality, or pays proper attention to it. Maybe he gets some pleasure from torturing cats despite knowing it’s wrong. You seem to be asking me “what if he doesn’t care about objective morality”? Well, he can value what he wishes, I suppose. I’ll still have a duty to those cats.

Tom,

Thank you so much for the summary! I know it took time, care and effort, and I appreciate that.

You got most of the positions correct. I’ll try to fill in the blanks and correct a couple of minor issues.

I thought that (4) was slightly off when you said there was no moral knowledge, but you recover in (6) when you say:

6. But the categories into which these behaviors seem to fit are not categories of knowledge, because of (4); or if they are categories of knowledge, what is known is their practical effect upon persons and groups.

There is moral knowledge, just as there is gastronomic knowledge. But it is a matter of self-knowledge (in the individual’s case) or statistical group knowledge (in a culture or species’ case). That is, it’s not knowledge about acts in themselves.

Maybe I can use this to fill in a gap for you:

7. Morality is what works for the increase of some desired good (utility, happiness … ? … I’m not sure how you would fill the blank) for persons and groups.

We can try to devise models about what is most delicious, and there will be a lot of common ground, but there’s no “objective delicious”. The guy who prefers burgers to sushi isn’t failing to align himself with what is actually delicious in some human-independent sense. Although the healthfulness of a meal contributes to how much we like it, it’s not the only goal in cuisine. We could not say that a balanced diet is the ultimate in deliciousness. Nor would we say that it was sweetness or saltiness or presentation. There is no well-defined “gastronomic good” by which we could say that so-and-so restaurant chain was the best.

In my view, morality is similar to deliciousness. To me, it doesn’t make sense to define “the good” any more than it makes sense to define “the delicious” or “the beautiful.” I might make considerable headway defining my own good, my own beauty, my own taste in food. I might also be successful in devising some statistical metrics for “cultural good” in the same way I could define statistical metrics for “culturally delicious”.

The major difference between morality and taste in food is that while only I can taste my own food, I can directly taste morality in the actions of others. If Bob eats sushi, I can’t taste it. If Bob assaults someone, I can taste it, quite strongly and directly.

Just because everyone’s moral tastes are different doesn’t mean we can’t lay down laws and create mutually beneficial social contracts. Laws serve a useful purpose for me, even when I don’t agree with every law on the books. (That’s where politics comes in.)

I’m skeptical of overarching moral theories. It can be convenient to generalize and simplify, but we shouldn’t mistake the map for the territory.

Anyway, if you’re asking me personally what “the desired good” is, I’ll probably answer that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask the question in those terms. I can tell you about my own morality, but it will be rather boring. For example, in political decision-making, I’m not very ideological. I’ll look at the likely effect of a policy, and try to judge whether the policy will reduce suffering and make us safer in the long run without causing too much pain in the short run, and I’ll often look to see whether the effect of the legislation will make it easier for people to make more rational decisions.

9. Most of us would agree that the latter pair in (8) is morally much better than the former pair, but I do not know on what basis you would support that opinion, other than that the former pair disgusts or bothers you. So in my summary of your position, I have an unknown for you to fill in.

Yes, it’s basically that it bothers me, but it bothers me on several levels. There’s the direct pain of seeing others come to immediate harm, but there’s also an indirect suffering I experience when I consider the opportunity cost, and the future suffering that will plague us for generations afterward.

As woodchuck64 says, saying something “bothers me” shouldn’t diminish the impact of bother. Burning my hand bothers me, too.

Tom,

17. But the above implies that if one “desensitizes” himself, as Joseph just suggested, and does what is not normally considered at all moral (think Hannibal Lecter or Pol Pot), that person is not doing something evil. That person is violating preferences instead.

I think that this is going to be the most productive line of inquiry.

If taste in food is subjective, then eating locusts is not objectively disgusting. I currently think that locusts are a pretty disgusting food. I also believe that, if I desensitize myself, I could learn to eat locusts, and maybe even enjoy them. In which case, presumably, I would no longer think they were disgusting.

If I translate your concern in (17), it is that gastronomic anti-realists could start eating locusts.

But, I ask you, do you think it is likely that you or I are will start eating locusts?

In the case of morality, there are even greater hurdles. First, most people would rather eat locusts than participate in genocide. So whatever is holding you back from eating locusts, something stronger is holding you back from committing genocide.

Second, as I said earlier, the difference between morality and taste in food is that while only I can taste my own food, I can directly taste morality in the actions of others. You might worry that if every supermarket sold hot, honey-laced locusts, the practice of eating locusts might become acceptable. However, if the rule was that one had to eat every item sold by the supermarket, there would be a lot fewer items on the shelves, not more items. If having locusts at the supermarket meant you would have to eat them, then you would not permit the supermarket to carry them. Likewise, I don’t think it’s easy for us to slip into genocide.

The other problem with your concern is that most of the bad guys throughout history were probably realists. If realism is an abstract rationalization of subjective taste, then one can still become desensitized and conditioned, but as one does so, one rationalizes and interprets the new attitude as a better understanding of moral reality. Indeed, realism might even make it easier to pull people towards genocide, racism, etc because the moral “teacher” can argue that moral reality is what it is no matter what your moral intuitions say.

Hi Guys

I think you are labouring under a false analogy, preference in morals is not the same as preference between hamburger or locusts, both of which are nourishing and healthy. Both agree that we should eat nourishing healthy food but differ over the nature of what constitutes food. In the same sense both agree that helping your neighbor is a ‘good’ but differ over how best to provide that help. Should we help by giving him money, or teaching him to how to earn his own money? Both, no doubt, would consider the man who said “Let him help himself!” as deficient in some way.

The difference between subjective and objective morality is more like the difference between the man who say “Let’s help!” and the man who says, “Let him help himself!” Or, to continue the “taste” analogy, whether a better seasoning for your hamburgers and locusts is salt or arsenic. Salt is nourishing and healthy whereas arsenic is a slow poison. Should we nourish our neighbor or poison him?

Moral decay is like arsenic poisoning. It’s effects are not immediately discernable. Little things start to go wrong, then bigger things, then everything collapses… like the proverbial frog in boiling water. We begin taking the keys out of the car, locking our doors, gating our communities, carrying firearms, shooting anyone who walks onto our property… Incremental degeneration from civil society to anarchy. Because who can really say what is right and what is wrong, it’s all a matter of taste.

“Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptability to truth and nobleness; a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence, all beauty.” – Carlyle

Which is not to say that morals don’t exist apart from human experience; just that if “spicy” doesn’t need to exist independently of human experience, why does morality?

That which we discern and name “spicy” does exist independent of human experience, the sensation (sense experience) of “spicy” is dependent upon human experience. That sensation is subjective, I cannot experience the effect of “spicy” on your taste receptors, nor can you experience its effect on mine, but that does not mean it isn’t objectively real.

You may caution me, “Be careful, that’s pretty spicy.” and we may discuss our relative sensitivity to various spices as (objectively real) causes of the effects we (subjectively) experience. I may be more or less sensitive to the effect of a particular spice than you or may find the effect of setting my mouth on fire more or less pleasant than you, but the fact that the effect and/or our reaction to the effect differs from person to person doesn’t make the cause subjective.

Hi woodchuck64

…do we understand morals to exist independently of human experience in the same way we understand “spicy” to exist independently of human experience, by discerning the experience and naming it?

There are a great many things which exist independently of human experience, and there are many things which we experience but the causes of which we cannot explain. I find some concepts easier to visualize when I think of them in terms of ‘laws’ of nature rather than as pure abstractions (although the ‘laws’ of nature are themselves abstract).

Consider the ‘law’ of gravity; no one really ‘knows’ how discrete bodies are attracted to each other. Gravity cannot be directly observed, appears to be non-material, and apparently is not constrained by distance. It would qualify as “spooky action at a distance” had Eintein not incorporated a mathematical aether into his Theory of Relativity to mathematically connect otherwise discrete material bodies. I find this example helps me to visualize, in a concrete way, that there are forces which act in the universe, forces whose effects we can observe, but whose causes are obscure.

Similar analogies may be drawn with “dark matter” and “dark energy” as effects whose causes remain, for the present, hypothetical. They are, in fact, ‘fudge factors’ designed to reconcile the discrepencies between the predictions of current cosmological theories and the phenomena we observe. We experience (observe) it and “name” it and, mistakenly, think we have explained it. In the case of “dark energy” I – personally – first learned of it from a television documentary which covered its discovery. One of the lead astronomers was explaining how they had discovered ‘it’ and referred to ‘it’ as “some kind of pushy stuff between the stars.” I remember thinking, “Next time I hear about this they’ll have a name for it and think they know what it is.” 8^>

So what’s all this got to do with ‘morals’ and ‘spicy’? Well, we have effects which are observable and the causes of which are visible and are reasonably well understood – “spicy”; and effects which are observable and the causes of which are obscure and possibly indetectable – gravity, dark matter, dark energy; and an effect we observe the cause of which we deny existence – moral sensibility in humans. This moral sensibility is not simply a ‘western’ phenomenon, nor simply a ‘Christian’, nor a simply ‘modern’ phenomenon – it is found wherever we find people. Granted, there are different eefcts and/or reactions to this perception and different practices associated with this perception, but as C. S. Lewis pointed out long ago, the similarities outweigh the differences by an order of magnitude.

St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’ In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta—that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. As Plato said that the Good was ‘beyond existence’ and Wordsworth that through virtue the stars were strong, so the Indian masters say that the gods themselves are born of the Rta and obey it.

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao‘. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm#1

The truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can the Innovator find the basis for a system of values. None of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they are all to be found somewhere else. ‘All within the four seas are his brothers’ (xii. 5) says Confucius of the Chün-tzu, the cuor gentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto says the Stoic. ‘Do as you would be done by,’ says Jesus. ‘Humanity is to be preserved,’ says Locke. All the practical principles behind the Innovator’s case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premisses. You may, since they can give no ‘reason’ for themselves of a kind to silence Gaius and Titius, regard them as sentiments: but then you must give up contrasting ‘real’ or ‘rational’ value with sentimental value. All value will be sentimental; and you must confess (on pain of abandoning every value) that all sentiment is not ‘merely’ subjective. You may, on the other hand, regard them as rational—nay as rationality itself—as things so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition2.htm

Hi woodchuck64

However, does that objectivity then necessarily mean that taste exists independently of human experience?

I think I get where you are coming from… correct me if I am wrong…

If there is no sensing human there is no one there to taste the food – similarly, if there is no sensing human there is no one there to sense moral percepts. At the risk of sounding frivolous – If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make any sound? It sounds all very Zen and, while it may be a valid question, I hope we might agree that the tree would make a sound. Just as rotten food would remain rotten even if no one was there to taste it. Our perception of the taste is our perception of the external reality which exists independent of our selves.

A porcelain teacup, if used to hammer nails, would soon shatter. It is in the ‘nature’ of porcelain teacup to shatter when sharply struck. That potential exists even if no porcelain teacup exists. Would such a thing as a porcelain teacup come into existence it would necessarily be fragile.

A human being is also a creature constructed within certain physical constraints. In our own way we are as fragile as the porcelain teacup. There are some things we ought not do if we wish to lead an relatively trouble free life. Moral precepts are the guide to what we ought or ought not do to conform ourselves to the exigencies of the world in which we live. As such, these moral precepts exist potentially even if there are no human beings.

Human beings are volitional beings, perhaps the only such being in the universe, we simply do not know. The animals and plants and other living creatures with whom we share this planet appear not to share our capacity for volitional action. Alone among the creatures we discuss such abstract concepts as philosophy and moral agency. Alone among the creatures we have language and communicate abstract knowledge. Alone among the creatures we categorize action as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We make moral judgements, assert moral claims, invent moral precepts, and establish governments, laws, and courts to enforce our moral code.

That is the a-theist defense of objective morality.

The theistic (Christian) defense says that moral standards conform to the nature of God. God has certain attributes which are evident in the natural law (or Tao). Through the exercise of our volition in a self-centered fashion we lost the capacity to recognize the natural law directly, we are now a law unto ourselves, each doing what is right in his own eyes. Our self-absorbed, self-esteeming, action has disrupted what was a good and wholesome world, propagating dissonance and decay throughout all creation. Even so, we perceive the natural law indirectly, through effects, but obliquely enough that, should we desire, we may close our eyes and deny its reality and excuse our continued self-centeredness.

Dave,

I forgot to mention this:

There are some things we ought not do if we wish to lead an relatively trouble free life.

Why ought we lead a relatively trouble-free life?

We certainly might desire to lead a trouble-free life. I think desires lie at the heart of moral thinking, even if those desires are for less suffering, more happiness, and even base desires for altruism and fairness. However, this is not what most moral realists are arguing for.

Why ought we not cook the data in our lab books to make scientific research turn out the way we want it? Per DL’s personal subjective opinion (“desire” echoing “will to power”)–which is anything but scientific–scientific inquiry would be the first thing to fall: there is no objective reason whatsoever to be honest in scientific work. Even if caught (what could that mean to a relativist?), the short-term gains could easily outweigh future sanction (dang! there I go again using a non-subjective moral term). But, then again, if we are nothing more than dehumanized “mechanical systems,” why does DL continue the question-begging in the first place?

(By the way, woodchuck’s reliance on “society” as the grounding for morality is laughable: what if a society believed it’s okay to cheat? Consider Islam: it’s not truth that’s the summit of our striving but submission. I’ve spent enough time in the Middle East to understand quite well that Islam parses “truth” according to whether one is a Muslim or whether one is an “infidel”.)

Here’s why DL is pulling a fast one with his dehumanizing “mechanical systems” nonsense (the same intellectually repugnant thing Ray Kurzweil and the transhumanists are trying to pull). It has to do with a fallacy worse that that of the fallacy of composition–the false belief that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. DL has stated on previous occassions that because a computer (a certain ontological substance that is an accidental unity and human artifact) can calculate, then a human being (a quite different ontological substance that is a substantive unity) is not only reducible to complex calculating “mechanical system” but whose material software can eventually (huge raincheck!) be transferred to a complex robot.

I’ll go further than just pointing out it’s a fallacy–it’s also foolishly anti-intellectual. It will NOT do to assert that since computers can do arithemtic, and by their very nature have no conscious experience, it must be the case that what humans do (say, have a free will–the sine qua non aspect of human morality… hence partly why DL’s holds the nonsensical and often hypocritical opinion of moral relativism) is at best an illusion. Why? Because DL assumes that what we do and what computers do when they calculate (for example) that two plus two equal four is the same! DL never challenges his own assumption–that’s part of the foolishness of holding such a position. Worse, for him, no one–neither eliminativists like the Churchlands nor “real” neuroscientists have the slightest clue what goes on in the brain when even the simplest of calculations is carried out. (Asserting that patterns on a screen generated by PET scanners ARE representative of calculuations in the mind is the height of wishful-thinking absurdity.) So, the other foolish aspect of DL’s reductionism is to assume–quite illicity and quite unscientifically–that what humans and computers do is fundamentally the same. Rather, this is a proposition that has to be demonstrated… and DL has not taken a single step in the direction of a rigorous demonstration. DL demands “proofs” from people of faith, but does not expect demonstrations of his own assertions–nay, in fact he rejects “just is” or “how dare you question me”–demonstrations of the silliness of moral relativism, atheism, dehumanizing persons as “mechanical systems,” etc., etc., etc.

Hi doctor(logic)

It may seem simple, but it’s complicated by two issues.

Really?

First, everything we sense about an object, even the objective properties, comes to us filtered through our subjectivity.

Does it now?

Every objective property we see appears to us as a pattern of subjective appearances, and we’re asking “what is it about such patterns of appearances that leads us to infer that the property isn’t just in our interaction with the object, but in the object itself?”

How do you even know there is an object there with which you are interacting? Perhaps you are living in the Matrix and all this subjective interaction with external objects is generated within your mind. Since all experience is subjective how would you know?

Dave,

How do you even know there is an object there with which you are interacting?

If I’m interacting with something, then there is plainly an object which is the subject of my attention. That’s a different question from whether the object is external to myself and my subconscious. If I dream about a talking rabbit, I’m interacting with an object, the talking rabbit. It’s just that this object is not external to me and my subconscious.

Perhaps you are living in the Matrix and all this subjective interaction with external objects is generated within your mind. Since all experience is subjective how would you know?

External objects are as external objects do. External objects aren’t labeled as external by magic. They’re labeled as external because of apparent properties and behaviors. Even if I’ve spent all my life in the Matrix, the phrase “external objects” would still refer to apparently external stuff that’s in the matrix. (If you’re in the Matrix, the machines are supplying you with inputs that appear like objects in a normal sensory world. They’re still external, because they’re not part of your self or your subconscious. They’re just not physical in the way you are led to think they are.)

There are several criteria for determining whether an object is external. Typical properties of external objects are:

(1) The object impacts surrounding objects, even when we don’t have our attention on it.
(2) We cannot alter the properties of the object at will.
(3) We lack positive objective evidence that the object is a projection of the subconscious.

Since all experience is subjective how would you know?

Wait! You have purely objective experiences sans qualia? That must be really cool.

DL:

Indeed! Realistically and ordered to truth…

…not idealistically, atheistically, philosophical-naturalistically, anti-intellectually and certainly not through scientism and positivism and the hypocrisy of moral relativism that breeds morally-repugnant nonsense… like dehumanizing persons to “mechanical systems.”

Perhaps you’re seeing the multitudinous errors of your ways? Come on in, DL… the water is fine!

Woodchuck:

It remains laughable despite your qualifications: there was no need to deal with the equally-laughable qualifications (like “desirism,” which is a kind utilitarian spin on the strong over the weak). Consider your “cheating” example: what if the “desire” of the “most” changes? The answer, of course, is your position is incoherent… or at the very least chaotic, and in an atmosphere of chaos the strong usually prevail to impose their “desires.” Abortion is a real-life example: at the beginning of the last century, the overwhelming “most” opposed it, then that changed, now it appears to moving back to opposition. Do we go with “electoral morality” (which is at the base of what you’re proposing)? Give me a break. How about when homosexual activists violently stormed the APA’s 1970 annual meeting in San Francisco to FORCE characterization from pathological to non… talk about “objective” science… talk about moral anti-realistic superstition!

Holopupenko:

It remains laughable despite your qualifications.

I didn’t offer qualifications, I pointed out that you were incorrect to claim I was relying on society to ground morality. You were ridiculing a straw man. You seem to ridiculing a second straw man, here. And why the need to ridicule at all, especially before you understand what I’m saying?

Consider your “cheating” example: what if the “desire” of the “most” changes? The answer, of course, is your position is incoherent… or at the very least chaotic, and in an atmosphere of chaos the strong usually prevail to impose their “desires.”

“Desires” can change all they want, what doesn’t change is desirism’s central tenet that desires that are to be called “good” tend on balance to fulfill other desires and desires that are to be called “bad” tend on balance to thwart other desires. Nothing chaotic about that.

Abortion is a real-life example: at the beginning of the last century, the overwhelming “most” opposed it, then that changed, now it appears to moving back to opposition. Do we go with “electoral morality” (which is at the base of what you’re proposing)? Give me a break. How about when homosexual activists violently stormed the APA’s 1970 annual meeting in San Francisco to FORCE characterization from pathological to non… talk about “objective” science… talk about moral anti-realistic superstition!

Changing views of abortion and homosexual rights are of course consistent with desirism, which makes no assumptions about how society will evolve. As a point of application, the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality would be determined by how it fulfills and thwarts other desires of individuals in society and based on that we would find nothing wrong with it. For abortion, the moral contention would probably not result from desirism itself, but over the personhood of a fetus, which is a separate argument (that is, only a person can have desires).

If you have a valid criticism of desirism (and I’m sure they exist), please give it. But I don’t really have time to be a tutor on the subject (see here for more details), especially in this thread where I am not defending desirism but trying to find common ground on basic moral sense/perception.

Hello doctor(logic)

We should try to remember the metaphysic from which you are arguing, the Humean metaphysic, that we perceive the world subjectively, through our ideas, not objectively, through perception of externals.

(1) The object impacts surrounding objects, even when we don’t have our attention on it.

The ‘object’ which you perceive is really only your ‘idea’ of the ‘object’. If the ‘object’, that is, your ‘idea’ of the ‘object’, appears to affect ‘surrounding objects’ – that is, your ‘idea’ of surrounding objects – you haven’t solved the problem. It may well be your ‘idea’ which has altered perspective and nothing external to yourself.

This is the basis, and the flaw, in Hume’s skepticism. Hume argued that all we can really know is the ‘ideas’ through which we perceive the world, we can never actually know the ‘thing in itself’ because we cannot directly perceive the ‘thing in itself’. His mistake was in confusing ‘ideas’ – that through which we understand the world – and percepts – our real perceptions of external ‘objects’. We classify those objects with our mind – ideation – but we perceive them with our senses.

(2) We cannot alter the properties of the object at will.

If all we possess is the ‘idea’ through which we perceive externals, if we cannot perceive external ‘objects’ directly, we cannot have objective knowledge of the properties of external ‘objects’, nor even if externals ‘objects’ really exist. If we cannot perceive external ‘objects’ directly then we cannot know if the properties of the ‘object’ have changed or if our ‘idea’ of the properties of the ‘object’ have changed.

(3) We lack positive objective evidence that the object is a projection of the subconscious.

Do we? How so? Besides, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Hi woodchuck64

Okay, well I’m mostly in agreement on that section.

Thank you, I often wonder at my capacity to adequately communicate the concepts in my mind. I think I sometimes use words in a manner which is obscure to others, due to either my inadequate vocabulary or poor grammar. I’m working on that but it takes time.

I think “potential existence” is the best we can get for objective morals, although I got the impression Tom sees it a little more strongly than that.

I suspect “potential” is one of my misused words. I use it in the above context as a ‘power’ that is not yet instantiated.

“It may be present; but, without the action of receptive organs, it will remain unrecognized. Just as lilac blossoms possess the power of producing the sensation of purple, but can never do it without an eye to look at them;…”

“Practical Rhetoric” John D. Quackenbos p. 36

In addition to the receptive organs, a sensitive and discerning mind is pre-requisite to the perception. How often do we perceive some insight from nature or man only to discover our fellows are apparently blind to the insight and its implications. Yet, through demonstration and persuasion, they too can perceive. The problem is not a lack of the organs of perception, but their inadequate exercise.

Hi woodchuck64

I don’t see disagreement on first principles as a practical difference. However, this is a view that I’m continually testing so we’ll see if I stick with it…

First principles are the only ‘practical’ difference because first principles cannot be demonstrated by reason. If they could be logically demonstrated we might, in a spirit of open-minded inquiry, examine the premises and arguments by which we arrive at first principles and reach agreement on first principles through the ‘practice’ of sound reasoning. As the matter stands all we can do is examine the conclusions to which our particular first principles lead us and see if they are consistent with our observations of the world as it is. As I wrote above, (#95) “If a particular “first” principle, coupled with valid reasoning, leads you to an absurd conclusion, then that “first” principle is probably false.”

I submit that naturalism necessarily leads to absurd conclusions. Apparently you have no objection to my definition of naturalism; specifically “… ‘naturalism’ professes that all phenomena may be explained as the effects of purely ‘natural’ (unguided, stochastic, a-teleological) causes.”: but have you considered the implications of naturalism as it pertains to human beings?

Your assertion above (#97) that “Under naturalism, morality is entirely about how human beings treat human beings, the rest of the universe doesn’t need to enter into it. misstates the essence of the problem. If everything can be explained by purely ‘natural’ causes then ‘nature’ is essential to understanding human behavior. Human behavior, human existence, the existence of our planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe are all effects of prior ‘natural’ causes, up to and including the ’cause’ of the universe itself. In fact, under naturalism every event, past, present, or future, can be explained as the outcome of a prior cause. This includes what you will have for breakfast tomorrow.

You see, the ‘laws’ of cause and effect, and even the arch-skeptic David Hume recanted his rejection of cause and effect, lock us into an inflexible determinism. Every event which has occurred since the beginning of time is part of a great chain of prior causes and subsequent events from beginning to end. In principle, if we could compute the precise conditions throughout the universe at a given instant of time we could predict every past and future event. If we could reproduce the precise conditions at the instant the universe began the entire process would unwind in precisely the same manner as the original.

If this is the case, then the apparent perception that we aquire knowledge and make decisions is nothing more than, as it’s critics refer to it, “Folk Psychology”. We are, in fact, deterministically programmed biological machines whose every act is the result of a prior cause – anything else would viloate the ‘laws” of nature and would, by definition, be a classified as a miracle.

Of course, this hasn’t prevented the invention of a multitude of hypotheses to reconcile the inconsistency of theory and experience. These are generally some variation of “Compatabilism” which posits some ’emergent’ property of life (insert miracle here) which permit living organisms to ‘violate’ the laws of nature. It’s either that or accept the absurd propostion that every thought we think and every act we perform is nothing more or less than the effect of a prior cause, in the same sense that billiard balls roll around a billiard table. Of course, that hasn’t stopped otherwise intelligent and educated people from advocating the absurd.

Hi doctor(logic)

Instead, I’m considering the number of possible worlds in which morality is objective versus the number of possible worlds in which morality is subjective.

I might ask how you determined which worlds are “possible” and which are not? Certainly it couldn’t be by observation, nor could it be by some other objective standard, so it must be something you pulled out of a hat… poof!

Consider the following from 2003 speech by Michael Crichton, “Aliens Caused Global Warming” in which he bemoans the lack of rigour in much of what passes for ‘science’ today. MC was most certainly not a theist, nor was he anti-science, as his speech elucidates, he was very disturbed by the anti-intellectual (read superstitious) trends of modern scientific practice.

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we’re clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

and then there is http://www.tbiomed.com/content/6/1/27some recent research on the matter of “possible” vs. “plausible” hypotheses. Almost anything is “possible” but is it worthy of investigation (“plausible”)?

But at some point our reluctance to exclude any possibility becomes stultifying to operational science [10]. Falsification is critical to narrowing down the list of serious possibilities [11]. Almost all hypotheses are possible. Few of them wind up being helpful and scientifically productive. Just because a hypothesis is possible should not grant that hypothesis scientific respectability. More attention to the concept of “infeasibility” has been suggested [12]. Millions of dollars in astrobiology grant money have been wasted on scenarios that are possible, but plausibly bankrupt. The question for scientific methodology should not be, “Is this scenario possible?” The question should be, “Is this possibility a plausible scientific hypothesis?” One chance in 10/200 is theoretically possible, but given maximum cosmic probabilistic resources, such a possibility is hardly plausible. With funding resources rapidly drying up, science needs a foundational principle by which to falsify a myriad of theoretical possibilities that are not worthy of serious scientific consideration and modeling.

http://www.tbiomed.com/content/6/1/27

While your determination to demonstrate that subjective morality more “probable” than objective is touching and even somewhat quaint, it certainly isn’t anything approaching rational. Ultimately, it is a superstition based upon prejudice.

Dave:

To add some more…

The kind of idealistic-inspired nonsense DL propound most recently (which you nicely dispatched from the perspective of science properly practiced) goes on all the time. In many of his arguments, DL permits his imagination to get the better of him: “We can imagine this being the case, so it must at least be possible…right?”

Wrong! Here’s the broader philosophical unmasking of such shamanism: Our imagination—taken narrowly or broadly can never be the measure nor the cause of any real possibility. There is no relation between imagination and real possibility: some imagined things are possible, others impossible, others necessary; and the same is true for those things that cannot be imagined (i.e., those things that we try to conceive).

If one foolish permits their imagination to indicate and alleged real possibility, that persons then permits a parallel universe of possibilities that are evident to imagination alone, and whose real existence does not follow from actual external sensation. I can imagine a purple people eater or a flying spaghetti monster or a unicorn, but they’re not real unless they are demonstrated to exit either through the senses or through correct reasoning. Moreover, I cannot conceive of them because they have no natures: a nature is essential to the SUB-STANCE which is what we UNDER-STAND.

DL is doing nothing more that imagining purple people eaters.

DL’s “arguments” are neither science nor philosophy—they are, in fact, the very thing critical thinkers eschew: Shamanism. The false power DL thinks he feels in his various disordered takes on reality is quite similar to the “power” witch-doctors try (vainly) to cast hexes: because DL believes some imagined thing is a real possibility to be entertained seriously simply because he imagines it to be so. This is truly the mark of an unsophisticated “thinker”: “How can we rule out moral relativism or anti-realism? Maybe you faithers aren’t wholly convinced by my spell-casting, but isn’t it better to assume it is true just to be safe? After all, the most reputable and relevant atheists think so.”

Moral realists realize the game being played—we realize it because we know we’re not the one’s setting up imaginary scenarios indicating “real” possibilities.

Dave:

I submit that naturalism necessarily leads to absurd conclusions.
…
If this is the case, then the apparent perception that we aquire knowledge and make decisions is nothing more than, as it’s critics refer to it, “Folk Psychology”. We are, in fact, deterministically programmed biological machines whose every act is the result of a prior cause – anything else would viloate the ‘laws” of nature and would, by definition, be a classified as a miracle.

Yes, I’m a determinist and agree with what you write here.

It’s either that or accept the absurd propostion that every thought we think and every act we perform is nothing more or less than the effect of a prior cause, in the same sense that billiard balls roll around a billiard table.

But what’s wrong with that? What more does determinism entail except that I’m a part of the universe and the universe is part of me? I don’t know what thoughts I’m determined to think or what cause I will become to my environment, so I see no other practical way to live my life. Besides, I want to live and act based on causes I see and feel around me, I don’t want to behave randomly. So a deterministic view of reality looks like common sense to me.

Dave:

That is the point of the reference to billiard balls, each event is the ‘inevitable consequence of antecendent states of affairs’ means that your agreement has nothing to do with a ‘conclusion ascertained after reasoning, observation etc.’ but is the consequent of some prior state of affairs, i.e. a cosmic ray impinged upon a synapse in your brain causing you to have a feeling of agreement. Your agreement with my statement is a brain state which has nothing whatsoever to do with reason or observation.

A conclusion ascertained after observation and reasoning seems quite consistent with determinism, to me. Observation is a recording of events in some form to memory, reasoning is (in its simplest form at least) applying prior memorized patterns and rules to newly recorded memory. As an example, rule-based computer software is used with reasonable success for automatic medical diagnosis. Observations are typed in, the computer consults its memory for matching patterns and returns a list of diseases that may fit the symptoms. At any given moment in this simple process, the state of all transistors in the CPU are a direct consequence of a prior state of transistors and so the overall process is consistent with determinism without requiring cosmic rays to force a premature output. In saying “I agree with what you write”, I would be doing much the same thing as a computer: consulting memory, matching learned rules of logic and arriving at an output based on the input. If transistors are analogous to neurons and the computer program analogous to learned patterns and rules of reason (and this seems uncontroversial for naturalism), there is no problem with a reasoned conclusion under deterministic assumptions.

Let me also address your reference to C.S Lewis’ argument from reason which I believe can be summarized as “how can one trust reason at all if it is the product of blind chance?”. If naturalism is true, organisms that are successful have become so by adaption to their environment. We human beings, as one of the most successful organisms, have so adapted to our environment that we have evolved the ability to recognize the patterns and rules that intrinsically characterize it. For example, the ability to use induction could only have evolved in a universe in which the past provides some continuity with the present and the future. “Reason” is the key to surviving and thriving in our world probably because our world is already capable of being understood, utilized and manipulated to our advantage by such abstractions.

Therefore, why should we trust reason, under naturalism? Because it is a useful way of understanding our reality, first. If reason ever failed to be useful, that would be a good reason to abandon it; it hasn’t. Secondly, evolution is already known to endow organisms with strategies for utilizing and manipulating the environment to their advantage. With human beings and the evolution of language giving rise to a mastery of abstract concepts, it is possible that the best strategy of all, “reason”, has evolved. That’s another reason to trust it.

When you say you “want to live and…” you assume that you are capable of making choices independent of the forces acting upon you within your environment
…

Again, when you say “…I don’t want to behave randomly.” you assume that you have free will and that your ‘wants’ are something which you may ‘choose’ to fulfill; that, somehow, your ‘wants’ are something other than a brain state which is itself the effect of a prior cause.

When I say “I want” or “I don’t want”, I’m referring to desires that are themselves “forces” acting on me. Some of these I can change but only if I have a prior existing desire to change, which means that, ultimately, I can not act freely of the sum total of my desires.

The sum total of my desires — good/bad/wants/needs/hopes/dreams — are the real forces acting upon me over which I have no control. It is consistent for me to refer to those desires as what I want and what I don’t want, but also consistent to realize that changing those desires (outside the bounds of a desire to change a desire) are ultimately beyond my reach.

So I don’t mean that my choices are independent of my desires. Rather, my choices follow my desires, which is exactly what I mean when I say “I want”. I can make choices independently of many forces in my environment but not independently of my desires, which, under determinism, are the eventual result of my environment and my genetics. So I don’t see any category mistakes here.

It is also said that choice is an illusion if determinism is true. A choice to me is a process of analyzing a course of action based on one or more possibly conflicting desires. I fully expect that my choice will always reflect what happens to be the strongest desire at the moment of my choice and that feels like a free choice to me. If someone were to peer inside my mind prior to my decision and more quickly discern my desires (and their predictable ebb and flow with respect to my environment and genetics), they could flawless predict my decision. I only want to be free to make choices without coercion from others, I really can’t make sense of making choices that are “free” from what I want or don’t want to do.

Note that my description above is introspective, I don’t think I’m adopting naturalistic or deterministic assumptions (except where noted). I’m just reporting what it feels like, and what it feels like looks consistent with determinism.

Every event in the physical (time space continuum) universe is determined by prior causes… except, apparently, that part of the universe which is intellectual… rational… knowing… and that is not ‘random’ in any sense of the word. It is rational, (i.e. the product of observation, intellection, and reason) action (behavior).

I explained above that reason seems quite deterministic. But further, what would it mean to say that repeated observation with the same prior experiences and same rules for interpretation would not give the same result every time? If reason is not deterministic, it seems to me that science would break down very quickly.

Dave:

Is a computer analogous to a human mind? I would suggest that it is not.

Perhaps not, but if human thought is essentially brain states resulting from antecedent brain states eventually resulting from observation and memory, than it seems easy to say that the process looks pretty deterministic, the same way a computer’s operation looks deterministic. Whatever is truly non-deterministic is not easy to pin down (or at least I’m not getting it yet). If determinism is truly absurd, I would think it more obvious. For example, imagination seems deterministic in that we are essentially building virtual simulations of reality in our mind based on memorized experiences and letting them run with arbitrary parameters to see the result. Virtual modeling is familiar ground in computer science.

Evaluating and weighing states of mind, making decisions, and acting on those decisions presupposes a freedom from the blind forces of deterministic physics.

If I decide to go to the store to get food, where is the freedom from deterministic physics in that decision? Specifically, I observe that the pantry is bare, I feel hungry, I remember that eating food removes the pain of hunger, I remember that the store has food, I remember where the store is, and I then run a virtual model of myself going to the store to buy food, overlaying it with the actual physical steps of going to the store to buy food. I would feel like I’m making a decision to go the store even though my going to the store is inevitable given my hunger and my memories of how to assuage it. A choice of which store? I’m going to be driven by preferences such as distance and cost which will determine my choice. I’m determined in my actions by my desires and the memories I have, yet it is a choice to me.

This also seems to be something that a computer model could do if it was programmed to recognize an input as the need for a certain action and could rely on various learned or taught virtual models of reality as a way of interacting with reality.

If naturalism is true, organisms that are successful have become so by adaption to their environment.

Actually, that doesn’t follow logically from the premise. Nor does it really make an coherent propostion. What do you mean by “successful” and what is “adaption to their environment”; what should happen if the environment were to change dramatically and suddenly? What if the organism(s) suffered catastrophic (random) mutation. What if an existing characteristic of that organism was sufficient to confuse its perception/cognition but not sufficient to kill it?

I don’t really follow your objections here. “Successful” would generally mean that a population of organisms is growing rather than shrinking, which would only be possible if it was well-adapted to the challenges its environment offers (food availability, predators, parasites), under evolutionary theory. A changing environment could certainly render a successful population unsuccessful by decimating it. I suppose a spontaneous genetic disease could wipe out a population, but that doesn’t seem to be common driver of evolution. Confusing perception/cognition, if that perception/cognition was critical for an environment, would prevent success of the population in the first place, I would think, more so than allowing it to thrive.

We human beings, as one of the most successful organisms, have so adapted to our environment that we have evolved the ability to recognize the patterns and rules that intrinsically characterize it.

Back to Hume and the skeptics… what about our allegedly reptillian brain stem which causes us to act incoherently and self destructively. What of our “primate brain evolved for survival on the savannahs of Africa” which is allegedly ill suited to the rigours of modern life?

These failings just don’t hurt our success as a species that much. But I don’t think I’m getting your point. I don’t mean to say that humans are successful in an absolute sense but relative to other species. Likewise, reason would not be guaranteed to be the absolute best strategy for species success under naturalism.

For example, the ability to use induction could only have evolved in a universe in which the past provides some continuity with the present and the future. “Reason” is the key to surviving and thriving in our world probably because our world is already capable of being understood, utilized and manipulated to our advantage by such abstractions.

A fortunate coincidence, don’t you think?

That’s my point. It is not a coincidence under naturalism because we observe that evolution acts like a search engine that finds strategies for successful populations (via mutation and natural selection). A very successful strategy would be to find a way for an organism to exploit a critical property of the universe. Induction is a way of exploiting one such property, a degree of continuity to past, present, future.

Actually, many organisms “act” like they value induction, using experience to guide behavior. With humans, though, I think language was the big evolutionary win that made it possible to build, share and enhance mental constructs, using those to conceptualize and generalize patterns in our environment.

Which, of course, takes us full circle to the beginning of this post, “reason” cannot be a property of matter because matter is governed by the determinsitic laws of physics. A billiard ball, for all its motion and direction, has no concept (an abstraction) of the cue ball, the table, nor the pocket towards which it inerringly proceeds. An abstraction is not a physical event, nor is it governed by the laws of physics. It has no length, breadth, or weight, is not bounded by time or space.

We are so accustomed to thinking that we think it is ‘natural’; that it is a product of natural processes, like gravity and chemistry and physics, but it is qualitatively different. You cannot measure a concept with anything physical, but, with concepts, you can measure the entire physical universe.

Abstractions occur naturally with language. As soon as you and I agree on a particular sound for an object, we’ve created an abstraction (a word) that simply doesn’t fit in the physical universe as you note above. Yet I don’t see anything complicated about agreeing on an auditory symbol to represent some physical object. I think a computer could do the same. Further, as soon as you and I agree on a word for “cat”, we’ve “discovered” the logical law of identity. A cat can only be a cat. When we agree on the word for “dog”, we’ve just created the logical law of non-contradiction that a “cat” can not be a “dog”. So I’m not seeing why abstractions per say are necessarily “unnatural” or incompatible with a deterministic view of naturalism.