Getting the Moral Argument Wrong — Again

Although I have no idea whether it was what he intended, if Grayling means “morality” in a very loose layman’s sense synonymous with “avoiding and preventing harm to others” (in so far as this is one of the few elements common to almost all moral codes) then the first point seems fair (if obvious). The “towards others” at the end might be telling, I’m not sure.

I would probably otherwise agree with you.

Perhaps he has clarified in the book – but if not then I think this in itself is sloppy, perhaps a sign that his treatment of the topic is less than rigorous – given how nuanced and complex a topic like morality is.

theists do so in view of a standard that is pure love, holiness, justice, and goodness.

Well, they claim to, certainly.

Without something in the fundamental nature of the universe to make actions and attitudes objectively right or wrong, there is nothing in the universe to make actions and attitudes objectively right or wrong.

TFBW and I are still debating (I do intend to reply, but today I’m taking care of a sick wife) other possible frameworks.

If you have a goal, and constraints, then strategies arise. Games offer a direct illustration – given (a) a goal to win the game, and (b) the rules of chess, then you shouldn’t sacrifice your queen in the opening moves of the game. That’s not a ‘law of nature’, but it’s hard to argue it’s not objectively true in some sense.

Now, humans have goals, and the universe has laws and constraints. If there’s a sufficient commonality of human goals (and note that goals fall into a hierarchy; for example, “I’m going to get a washcloth, so I can clean up my kid’s vomit, so I can get them back to bed, so they can start getting better, so they can be healthy.”), and the laws really don’t change, then strategies would arise naturally. I’d contend that those strategies look a whole lot like the basic morals that human societies have worked out over the past hundred thousand years or so.

BSquibs –

It is conceivable that you might just want to sacrifice your queen in order to pull off a strategic coup-de-grace a few moves down the line.

Can you account for why I included the words “in the opening moves of the game” in my description?

Expediency is not the same as objectivity.

But sometimes what’s expedient can be objectively determined.

For more than a combox worth – which addresses the objections you’ve noted so far – see here or here.

“Now, humans have goals,…”

Do they? Could you give us some?

Exactly, Tom. But I knew that you knew. The question is whether Ray or A.C. Grayling know.

Actually, Tom we know a lot more than that. We know the purpose for which we were created. That’s something A.C. or Ray don’t and can’t know. And, of course, since they don’t know the purpose for which we were created they really can’t tell us if any of the above is good or not.

Tom Gilson –

To advance my personal survival and well-being, and that of my family/group/tribe/nation. Whether that also includes advancing any other person’s/group’s/family’s/tribe’s survival or well-being depends on what I decide about it.

Or, just possibly, there can be some right and wrong answers about that. Remember what I said about the hierarchy of goals? Try, before going on to the next paragraph, to ask yourself why that might be relevant.

What if, over the long haul, advancing the well-being of others advances your own well-being? In those other links I’ve remarked on how stagnant slave societies not only are, but must be. For a modern example, see the Soviet Union. A large chunk of the reason that society fell apart was that it simply could not compete with more liberated societies.

BillT –

our real goals and our purpose here.

Why only one purpose?

Without God we have no true purpose

Actually, even with God there’s still choices to be made about purpose and meaning.

JAD – You can pick which physics you’re going to follow? I think you’re not quite clear on what are ‘rules’ and what are ‘strategies’ in the analogy.

BillT – Why should I type something out when it’s already done? Did all the teachers you ever had stick entirely to lecturing, or did they once in a while assign some reading? I mean, it’s not like I’m asking you to read a two-volume set or anything.

I read it Ray. Basic gist. We can’t talk about the “purpose of life” unless we subjectify it to the point of meaninglessness. Like I said, I’d be embarrassed to put my name on it either (as I noticed the author didn’t).

It boils down to this, Ray. If God doesn’t exist there is no objective foundation for morals and meaning. Prove to us that God does not exist then that’s game, set, match– so to speak.

Observation is neither asking a question nor sniping.

SteveK –

Specifically, the Bible teaches that there is real, objective, unchanging, meaning and purpose to life

Of course, you skipped right over this part of the essay:

First, we need to examine “meaning” itself, and expose a mistake, a very basic mistake, in how many people think about it.

To say that some event means something without at least some implicit understanding of who it means something to is to express an incomplete idea, no different than sentence fragments declaring that “Went to the bank” or “Exploded.” Without first specifying a particular subject and/or object, the very idea of meaning is incoherent.

Yet too often people still try to think of meaning in a disconnected and abstract sense, ending up at bizarre and nonsensical conclusions. They ask questions like: What is the meaning of my life? What does it matter if I love my children when I and they and everyone that remembers us will one day not exist? But these are not simply deep questions without answers: they are incomplete questions, incoherent riddles missing key lines and clues. Whose life? Meaningful to whom? Matters to whom? Who are you talking about?

Once those clarifying questions are asked and answered, the seeming impossibility of the original question evaporates, its flaws exposed. We are then left with many more manageable questions: What is the meaning of my/your/their life to myself/my parents/my children? These different questions may have different answers: your parents may see you as a disappointment for becoming a fireman instead of a doctor, and yet your children see you as a hero.

But the one fact that becomes abundantly clear is that no one can ultimately judge the meaning of your own life other than yourself. Your parents can have purposes in mind for you: find meaning in, say, a dream that you will become the professional baseball star that your father could not. But these purposes are their purposes: they are not fundamentally your own: not inherently meaningful to you unless you decide to take them up yourself, or even just find meaning in understanding their hopes even if you cannot agree with them.

I would contend that the concept of “objective meaning” is, as has been laid out above, incoherent. Things don’t just ‘signify’ something, meaning doesn’t just hang there unsupported. Things signify something to someone.

But the one fact that becomes abundantly clear is that no one can ultimately judge the meaning of your own life other than yourself. Your parents can have purposes in mind for you: find meaning in, say, a dream that you will become the professional baseball star that your father could not. But these purposes are their purposes: they are not fundamentally your own: not inherently meaningful to you unless you decide to take them up yourself, or even just find meaning in understanding their hopes even if you cannot agree with them.

The flawed analogy of parents giving purpose to their children is just that – flawed. God would be the ultimate judge if he existed so the author is wrong. Parents, nor you, would not be the ultimate judge. This again is by definition and what the Bible teaches. So you cannot just take these facts away from the argument and claim victory.

If God, then he is the ultimate judge.
If God, then your life has purpose and meaning.
If God, parents don’t get to take on the role of God by proxy.

The author speaks of a fundamental purpose. By definition a fundamental purpose endures and does not change. You either have one, or you do not. Call it a your natural purpose if you will – it’s what you were born with. You can build upon this natural purpose by creating purposes that are your own, but you cannot change the most fundamental purpose for your existence that preceded those you just built for yourself.

Take for example the human heart. Naturalism says the heart was not created for any particular purpose because natural process do not form anything with purpose or intent in mind. So the heart has no fundamental purpose. It does have an obvious FUNCTION, which is to pump blood through the body. But its function isn’t fundamental to it’s existence. It’s function could very well change one day, and someone could even co-opt the heart for their own purposes and use it for something other than pumping blood. But no matter what, it’s fundamental purpose remains the same and will never change.

Ray, let’s play chess

My first move: White Queen “d1” to Black King “e8”.
I WIN.

Ray @ #30

Note words like “shouldn’t” and “bad”. They are value judgements. They prescribe ‘oughts’. They are not part of the ‘rules’ of chess. From where do they come?

They arise from the combinations of two things – first, the rules and structure of chess, and second, from the player’s desire to win the game. They are strategic rules. A player is free to disregard them, but they do so at their peril – it’s unlikely to further their goal.

My point, again, is that the rules of chess are quite arbitrary. As matter of fact they have been changed since chess was first introduced. I think it’s a very poor analogy.

Overall, I find the game theory approach to morality to be quite disturbing. Morality is not about competing with your fellow man it’s about helping him.

Tom Gilson –

If there is a God, and if this God is as described above, then meaning and purpose are features of being itself.

Sorry, not following. How can something ‘mean something’ without meaning something to someone? Why would meaning something to God equal objective meaning?

The classical example (Aristotle’s, even) is a statue. Its ‘material cause’, what it’s made of, might be brass. Its ‘formal cause’ is the form it takes – say, the shape of a fallen soldier. Its ‘efficient cause’ is who or what made it, the process that produced it – in this case, the artisan melting and casting some brass. Its ‘final cause’, ‘telos’, is the purpose for which it’s being made – to be a decorative memorial to that fallen soldier, perchance.

But why should something have only one ‘telos’? Take a simple example. The White House is where the President of the United States lives when in office. Is that its ‘telos’? But wait – it’s also an office building; the center of the executive branch. Is that its telos? And, hey, wait a minute – I’ve taken a tour of the public areas. Is the telos of the White House to be a museum? And then there’s the fact that it was designed and architected specifically to impress visiting foreign dignitaries – is that its telos?

The White House fulfills all the above purposes at once, and pretty well, too. Indeed, practically everything humans have designed has been fitted to more than one purpose. Even the most severely functional weapon is simultaneously a threat and a status display, even if it’s never used to inflict harm on an enemy. In theory, our arsenal of nuclear weapons were built so that they would never have to be used. What kind of ‘telos’ is that?

Speaking of weapons, check out any random Jackie Chan movie. He makes anything – frying pans, bikes, ladders, ladles, garden hoses, anything – into a weapon. Exactly why is the ‘telos’ he gives those objects any less valid than the purposes they are marketed under? Hey, speaking of marketing – is the telos of, say, a frying pan ‘to cook food’? Not from the perspective of the people making it – they are making the frying pans for the ‘telos’ of selling them to other people!

Even the case of the statue isn’t quite so clear-cut. A statue in a city square fulfills a purpose – decoration, memorial, whatever – but not only that purpose. It can serve as a landmark for navigating about the city. It can serve as a jungle gym for kids to climb on. It can serve as a perch for birds. It can serve as a blind from behind which to spy on someone. It can serve a fleeing pickpocket as an obstacle to slow pursuit. It can serve as a source of metal to melt down into cannons to defend the city. The number of different ’causes’ served by anything in the real world is probably at least equal to the number of agents that interact with it.

But even the artisan who made the statue may have multiple purposes in constructing it. He may wish to commemorate a fallen soldier… while at the same time subtly castigating the generals who ordered the march the soldier died in. The artisan may also choose a particular artistic style in order to make a statement to some of his fellow artisans, and have chosen brass as the medium to help out his brother-in-law the metal merchant. Plus, the artisan no doubt intends to be be paid for the statue… to help keep his children fed.

Nothing in the real world ever serves only one purpose, ever has only one meaning, ever has just one ‘objective’ it can or does serve. Any ‘telos’, any ‘final cause’, any ‘purpose’ is always relative to the agent that’s doing the intending.

God’s purpose(s) for something might come chronologically first. They might be the purpose(s) of the most powerful agent. But I simply don’t follow how that makes those purposes objective.

JAD –

My point, again, is that the rules of chess are quite arbitrary.

And my point is that the laws of physics are not. You don’t get to change the ‘rules of the game’ in this universe. You’re stuck with a particular variation.

G. Rodrigues is happy to claim that the results of mathematics are objective. But even there, we see multiple variations – in Euclidean geometry, a triangle has exactly 180 degrees. In Elliptical geometry, it has more than 180 degrees, and in Hyperbolic geometry, it has less.

But those results are objective, it would seem. Given the axioms of, say, Hyperbolic geometry, then it’s objectively true that triangles have less than 180 degrees.

Similarly, given the rules of chess, the results of chess theory are just as objective as the results of geometry. It’s objectively true that certain strategies are better than others in those conditions. You can change the conditions – there are plenty of chess variations, different boards, new pieces, etc. – but that doesn’t change the strategies that apply to FIDE chess.

Now, it’s true that the results you get depends on the particular axioms that obtain. But the point is, we can’t change the axioms of our universe – the laws of physics are fixed for us. So, arguing that if things were different, then things would be different, misses the point completely.

Tom Gilson –

I would suggest that on naturalism, humans’ sense of purpose cannot represent anything more real than humans’ sense of identity, consciousness, or free will. I think Coyne, Dennett, and others are right: naturalism renders all of those sensations illusory: they are fictions built into us by evolutionary processes.

I dunno about Coyne, haven’t read much of him. But I think you badly misunderstand Dennett. He understands identity, consciousness, and free will rather differently from you, but that doesn’t mean he thinks them illusions. (It’s kind of like a geocentrist accusing a heliocentrist of not believing in sunrises.)

Ray,
Are mind and consciousness reducible to the laws of physics?

@41,

God’s purpose(s) for something might come chronologically first. They might be the purpose(s) of the most powerful agent. But I simply don’t follow how that makes those purposes objective.

This doesn’t need to be so painstakingly difficult. I’m confident that I will get some of the details below wrong, so G. Rodrigues can correct me where I am.

There is no conflict in having these additional purposes tacked onto the original purpose. In fact, many of these later purposes can compliment / highlight / fulfill the original purpose. Problems arise when any of these later purposes contradict the original purpose. Then we say that the later purpose must be false because it contradicts the original purpose – objectively, contradicts.

Take for example a book. If the author intends to write a book about the Civil War, that original purpose will forever remain with the book even if it gets re-purposed to do other things (door stop, paper weight, frisbee), or if someone uses the book for their own purpose (to educate, help get to sleep faster). The original purpose is an objective purpose.

I believe the later purposes such are also objective but in a different sense that is meaningful. Maybe G. Rodrigues can help clarify because this is a key point I think.

If someone comes along later and says that the book’s purpose is NOT about the Civil War, they would be objectively wrong. The only way you could void the original purpose would be to destroy the book and make something else from it (confetti, paper airplane, another book). So now let’s look at life.

In this argument, God exists so we won’t be arguing over that truth. God’s purpose for life is that it brings glory to him, the creator of all. There’s a lot of detail wrapped up in the term “glory”, but we don’t need to get into that here. That fact is that God’s original purpose is forever “attached” to life.

Like the example of the book, you and I can use our life for our own purpose (to have fun, to BBQ, to work), but God’s purpose objectively remains. Your purpose will always be to bring glory to God – and the good news is you can do that at the same time you are living out your own life purpose. But what if you disagree?

Well, if you disagree and say that life’s purpose is NOT to bring glory to God then you would be objectively wrong. Unlike a book, you and I cannot void God’s purpose by destroying life and creating something new. The reason is it’s impossible for us to destroy life in it’s entirely and remake something new.

If God, then objective meaning and purpose for life exists.

SteveK –

The original purpose is an objective purpose. I believe the later purposes such are also objective but in a different sense that is meaningful.

Note that you don’t explicate what this “different sense” is.

If someone comes along later and says that the book’s purpose is NOT about the Civil War, they would be objectively wrong.

Sure… but that’s not analogous to anything I’ve said.

You see, I could acknowledge that the author’s purpose for the book was to document the history of the Civil War. But I could also say that my purpose for the book is to prop up a broken table leg until I can fix it. Would I be objectively wrong?

The issue, I think, is that you assume that there’s only one possible teleology. But I don’t see why that must be the case. As I laboriously described in #41, when you have multiple agents, you get multiple teleologies.

Consider the concept of ‘value’, closely related to the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’. The idea of ‘objective value’ runs into all kinds of problems. Consider – which is objectively better, the color blue or mozzarella cheese? And if God is greater than both, are we saying that the sky would be better if it were God-colored? That a pizza topped with pepperoni and God would taste better than a pizza which settled for pepperoni and cheese?

Consider a wooden chair. What value does it have? It depends on the purpose you have for it. It might be something to sit on; it might be an heirloom; you might be using it to ward off a lion; you might be using it for kindling during a blizzard. It might be of only middling worth in the first case and literally worth your life in the last. Which purpose is the “real purpose” – and why?

If I trade some gold away to keep a simple wooden chair, break the chair up and burn it to keep my child warm… have I erred in assessing the value of the gold, or the chair? (Or the child?) The guy who made the chair intended it for sitting on (well, actually, as I pointed out, he made it to sell to people, probably expecting them to sit on it) but was I wrong that it would make a warm fire?

Even worse for the concept of ‘objective value’, different people will assign different values to the same things. A woodworker might trade you a chair for some of the corn you grew. Who came out better on the deal? You both did – you both have more value (by your personal estimates) than before. (Or else why did you trade at all?) Differential valuing is what makes economics possible. But think – if there’s some kind of ‘objective value’, then at least one of you is wrong. Either the chair was worth ‘objectively’ more than the corn, in which case you cheated the carpenter – or else the corn was ‘objectively’ worth more than the chair, in which case the carpenter cheated you. (Or else they are ‘objectively’ equal, in which case you’re both wrong about having more value than you did before.)

Value and greatness are relative, personal measures. My wife is probably worth a lot more to me than she is to you, and me to her, and our kids are more important yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t find them quite so amazing as your own spouse and children, though.

Well, if you disagree and say that life’s purpose is NOT to bring glory to God then you would be objectively wrong.

Let’s rephrase that slightly: ‘If you disagree and say that God’s purpose for your life is NOT to bring glory to God then you would be objectively wrong.’ But I could say that my purpose for my life is something else, and be objectively correct, too.

As I said in #41, “Any ‘telos’, any ‘final cause’, any ‘purpose’ is always relative to the agent that’s doing the intending.”

Ray @ 53:

I think you’re a little bit confused here. For one thing, you seem to be thinking of final causes in terms of something we impose on an inherently purposeless and goal-less object — so, for example, a book about the civil war is only actually a book about the civil war if you use it for that purpose; otherwise it’s a prop for a table-leg, or a door-stop, or whatever. Needless to say, that’s not actually what final causality is. Basically you’re just begging the question by assuming a worldview in which final causality doesn’t exist, and then saying that, since there’s no such thing as final causality in your worldview, therefore final causality doesn’t exist.

Also, I think you misunderstand the concept of “objective value”. For one thing, the term itself is a bit misleading, because “value” is usually used for something subjective and personal, i.e., the complete opposite of what an objective value would actually be like. Hence lots of philosophers who write on the subject prefer to talk in terms of “the good”. For another, it doesn’t mean that everybody has to have exactly the same tastes and interests. It’s perfectly coherent to maintain that (e.g.) worshipping God is objectively good, but preferring beer to wine is a matter of subjective preference. Also, believing in objective goodness doesn’t mean that you always have to choose one thing over another. This is true for some things, of course, in particular moral goods – so, for example, if you believe that gluttony is morally wrong and moderation is morally right, it follows that you should always eat what you need and never gorge yourself until you feel sick – but non-moral things, such as food and chairs, can be chosen depending on your needs at the moment.

I’d also add that if all purposes are the same (regardless of whether you label them subjective or objective), then the conclusion is that no purpose can ever wrong / incorrect. We are free to co-opt anything for our own purposes and shape reality any way that we want.

But Ray won’t accept that as true, so he must believe there are some real differences such that some of our purposes agree with some transcendent truth, and some do not.

This cuts to the morality question. If anyone can determine the purpose of any object, why do you, Ray, exclude the one case where I determine the purpose for your life? What overarching naturalistic principle makes this exception a fact? I’m aware of the Theistic principle that makes this a fact, so here again we see that we are not in the same boat.

@Ray Ingles:

And my point is that the laws of physics are not. You don’t get to change the ‘rules of the game’ in this universe. You’re stuck with a particular variation.

No, we do not have such powers, but no ought follows from the *laws of physics*. Absolutely none whatsoever.

G. Rodrigues is happy to claim that the results of mathematics are objective. But even there, we see multiple variations – in Euclidean geometry, a triangle has exactly 180 degrees. In Elliptical geometry, it has more than 180 degrees, and in Hyperbolic geometry, it has less.

The way you write is as if I am making an outrageous claim. Do you think mathematical results are not objective?

Also, I am not sure exactly what you mean by variations; probably the same as I do, but just for the sake of clarification, there are different mathematical objects as there are different species (in the metaphysical sense), with each theory, theory in the formal sense, formalizing in mathematical terms what the Scholastics called a real definition.

Why is what I said wrong: “Any ‘telos’, any ‘final cause’, any ‘purpose’ is always relative to the agent that’s doing the intending.”

Value and greatness are relative, personal measures.

It is wrong as a metaphysical claim, or so I would argue. It is wrong if it is meant as a description of AT metaphysics; if it is meant as an objection it has absolutely no force, because you misunderstand what is meant by telos. More modestly, it undermines your position. If purposes are always relative to the agent, then they are by definition subjective and with no normative force, and appealing to the *laws of physics* helps you not one iota. Which is what everybody else is saying by the way.

The idea of ‘objective value’ runs into all kinds of problems. Consider – which is objectively better, the color blue or mozzarella cheese? And if God is greater than both, are we saying that the sky would be better if it were God-colored?

Frankly, this is completely silly.

@Alex:

How do you determine the final cause of something?

What do you mean by the “final cause of something”? It seems by it, you mean some kind of overarching purpose. There is a sense in which, if you mean this, that it exists, but the answer is not exactly interesting or relevant for the purposes of the present discussion.

As far as the question, or what I take you to be asking, final causality cannot be understood divorced from the other types of causality (even though there is a reason why Aquinas called it the cause of causes, but leave that aside for now), and is determined in pretty much the same way as we determine those other types, and is subject to the same difficulties — meaning, no more no less.

Mr. X. –

For one thing, you seem to be thinking of final causes in terms of something we impose on an inherently purposeless and goal-less object

Objects don’t have goals. They have tendencies, sure, but that’s not the same thing as goals. So far as I can see, only a subject could have goals or purposes.

I mean, a baseball has certain properties and tendencies (size, hardness, etc.) that make it useful to subjects – baseball players – who want to play baseball. That doesn’t mean it wants to be used to play baseball. And it’s not that a baseball doesn’t want to be used as a soccer ball, it’s that its properties are such that it makes for a poor soccer ball.

In “The Last Superstition”, when Edward Feser talks about how a match is ‘directed towards’ producing flame, he assumes too much with his terminology. ‘Having a tendency to produce flame’ is just not the same thing as ‘being directed (by a Director, say) to produce flame’, and it’s radically unlike ‘wanting to produce flame’.

Hence lots of philosophers who write on the subject prefer to talk in terms of “the good”.

And I understand ‘the good’ in terms of goals and strategies. And I think they tend to converge in practice and general outline to look like the basic morals common to most religions through history.

Ray @ 62:

The problem with your morals-chess analogy is that it turns morality into a mere set of prudential advice rather than a binding code. Sure, it might generally benefit me to act justly, selflessly, etc., but what about the times when it won’t? Imagine I were to come across a woman who’s passed out from drinking too much and whom I could easily rape without her ever knowing about it. According to your theory, what reason would there be for me to refrain?

@ 63:

“In “The Last Superstition”, when Edward Feser talks about how a match is ‘directed towards’ producing flame, he assumes too much with his terminology. ‘Having a tendency to produce flame’ is just not the same thing as ‘being directed (by a Director, say) to produce flame’, and it’s radically unlike ‘wanting to produce flame’.”

“Goals” in Aristotelian terms is often understood analogically rather than univocally. Aristotelian philosophers don’t imagine that a match actually wants to produce a flame, any more than scientists talking about the “laws of nature” imagine that there’s some kind of Parliament of Atoms somewhere which passes decrees about what different types of atoms can and cannot do.

What they do mean is that things have certain natural ends and inherent tendencies to produce particular effects. In some cases, this might be because a thing was specifically designed to produce a certain effect – a match being designed to produce a flame, for example – whilst in others, it might just be that it naturally does a certain thing if it’s not interfered with – so fire produces heat, smoke and light.

The mechanistic philosophy which arose in the 17th century, on the other hand, understood nature in terms of inherently property-less and goal-less (viz. tendency-less) particles, with any sense of things having properties being imposed on them by subjective observation. This is why the prominent early mechanists all believed in God (because, if you believe that things have no inherent tendencies, then some kind of external controlling force is pretty much essential to explain the regularity of nature). It’s also why later atheistic philosophers and scientists all either unconsciously assumed the existence of final causes or ended up with various Hume-esque difficulties about causality and induction.

“And I understand ‘the good’ in terms of goals and strategies.”

Then your understanding of “the good” is radically different to what most philosophers mean by the term.

“And I think they tend to converge in practice and general outline to look like the basic morals common to most religions through history.”

“Tend to”, maybe. But there are quite a few situations where self-interested pursuit of your particular goals would seem to clash with what “basic morals” tell us to do, and your theory gives no reason to choose to act morally in such circumstances.

Mr. X @66
I believe I understand Tom. See my #60. I’m challenging the idea that we can obtain the sort of standard he is referring to. Even in the OP we have this:

That standard exists in God’s character, and it is in his nature to follow his standard. When he created humans in his image he imparted knowledge of his standard. Though we are impaired in that knowledge through rebellion from God, we have not lost it altogether.

Note the loop hole, that “we are impaired in that knowledge”. Now what? This serves my point. When can we ever say for sure that our or another’s point of view is actually getting it right or is actually a product of our “impairment”. It’s an impossibility, he is in an infinite regress.

Mr X @68

doesn’t mean that some conclusions aren’t vastly more likely than others.

Did you read my post? I’m claiming that we have vastly more likely conclusions than God instilled us with some a priori truth detector.

It would still remain the case that to judge we would need to know what is objectively moral.

And yet humans have thus far been carrying on without knowing what is objectively moral. You are just assuming that there must be ultimate foundations to our judgments, but there never have been. You can just decide that you don’t need to impose that “must”.

@Tom

Stephen, how certain are you that your statement, “humans have thus far been carrying on without knowing what is objectively moral,”

I asked you to show me how it is so, how does it work. I posed the problem, I’m waiting for your response (this isn’t it). I’ll show you how it is not so: If humans had latched on to the this sort of objective standard, there would be total agreement, isn’t that the idea? Why has this never happened? The problem I posed in #60 is why. Clearly, we have never seen such a thing. We only see small groups of people fighting over their version of it. Explain the disconnect by thinking the other group is missing the objective standard. But then there is another group, the group that never found the answer and admit there is none, they see a futility in it, the futility I tried to expose above.

it is false to say that self-sacrifical love is really better than torturing people for fun?

It’s just the “really is” part I disagree with, of course I think it’s better.

“If humans had latched on to the this sort of objective standard, there would be total agreement, isn’t that the idea?”

Erm, no. There are lots of questions which have an objective answer, but which we don’t seem likely to gain total agreement on. Whether or not we can get more economic growth by cutting government spending or by stimulus projects, for example, is a question which has an objective answer, but there is nevertheless a lot of disagreement over the issue.

“Why does our strong intuition about what is better in easy case morality lead to the necessary conclusionthat an objective standard is in the works?”

It doesn’t, and nobody as far as I can see has said otherwise. What people have been saying, however, is that saying “behaviour x is better than behaviour y” requires an objective third standard against which to measure both behaviours. Otherwise you’re just stating your own subjective preferences, and why should anybody else care about those?

@Mr X #73

There are lots of questions which have an objective answer, but which we don’t seem likely to gain total agreement on

Of course I meant where we have proposed objective standard to address a given question. Not all questions.

see #61

While I think skepticism is possible, on the other hand I think it is unnecessary. I think we all really know certain moral facts are true, like the difference between self-sacrificial love and torturous murder for fun. There’s never been any reason to doubt it.

This is used as part of an argument for there being objective standards.

What people have been saying, however, is that saying “behaviour x is better than behaviour y” requires an objective third standard against which to measure both behaviours.

And #60 argues that this is impossible, because then we need an objective standard to settle difference over who is right about the objective standard.

Otherwise you’re just stating your own subjective preferences, and why should anybody else care about those?

Not everybody is stuck in the futile effort to agree on objective standards or to find a bottom to our reasoning. For those that have not only given up theology, but also metaphysics, we don’t expect an metaphysical objective standard, a metaphysical or theological Truth, no a priori, ahistorical, non-human anything that we humans are responsible to. We only feel the need to be responsible to each other, to other living things, to the planet, to future human life, and more as we see fit.

My question in #76 was in the course of answering your question in #72. If there’s another question I’ve missed answering, please let me know.

And there is #60.

But I don’t see how you #76 post addresses my question in #72 either.

I take it that your answer in #78 could be paraphrased, “Self-sacrificial love isn’t really morally better than committing torture and murder for fun.”…The way I asked the question is designed not to beg the question concerning transcendent truth. If you don’t believe in transcendent truth, then you will probably (I think) choose to say no, it isn’t really better, because there is no such thing as really better.

This is just what it’s like to not be out from under metaphysical assumptions on the question. Or to be able to imagine what it is like. The word “really” assumes that there is no saying its better without it being hooked to some nonhuman, timeless grounding. As you said somewhere above, you believe we get some a priori truth detector from God at creation. I just don’t feel I need to explain my sense of “better” that way.

@tom#83 How does #61 address the question ” How do you know when you have the “standard” “right”?” and How do you resolve differences over just what the standard IS without the need for ANOTHER standard about the standard. As an analogy, this is a question that can be turned toward some notion of the Bible as truth, or as having a CERTAIN meaning from God. By what objective standard do you resolve differences in interpretation? How do you know when someone has it right? If there were someone walking around who really got it in their head, just what original meaning God intended, how would know? How do you know it’s not the Christian that you know that you disagree with the most? Not having a good answer to those questions renders the whole idea of the Bible having a certain meaning from God, useless.

And the example I used has an objective standard, namely, a nation’s GDP.

I try to clarify “metaphysical objective standards” of the sort on topic in the OP as what I’m talking about.

At Mr X #86

No, some people are content to just act and think in a completely incoherent, self-contradictory and indefensible manner

I think this is just that you can’t see any way clear of your metaphysical assumptions. My position, I think is more coherent, of course, because it avoids the infinite regress, the circular, question begging arguments that have pointed out and that have yet to be properly handled. (don’t feel bad if you can’t, there hasn’t been a philosopher yet that has settled the problem).

@tom#91

I only asked (in #79), how is it possible for you to believe and disbelieve the same thing at the same time?

To construe my position as “to believe and disbelieve the same thing at the same time” is simply the disconnect that occurs across the “clash”. You simply don’t accept a notion of “better” that isn’t tethered to a nonhuman anchor. And it isn’t that I haven’t answered the question, it’s just that my answers don’t make an appeal to some timeless truth, so it’s a bad answer.

You say in #84, you don’t feel bound to answer the demand for a finally grounded answer. But I haven’t made that demand…

Not explicitly, but you just reject any answer that isn’t so grounded or say I’m “believing and disbelieving at the same time” when I give an answer, or as Mr X has commented on my answers.

What is the benefit or the aim of wanting to establish objective metaphysical standards (like we have a God given a priori truth detector) if it isn’t to satisfy that “demand”?

At tom#94

Now I think it’s interesting that you yourself said you believe this is true (#78). And yet you contradicted yourself, as I pointed out in #79.

#96

You said you believe that one moral action is better than another. You used the word “really” in that statement.

I said

I believe it to be so myself, but and I don’t believe anyone does so because of metaphysical objective standards.

We simply aren’t communicating if you see contradiction here. I can understand you saying you to don’t accept my non-absolute, non-groundable notion of “better”. But you talk like you actually don’t know what I mean.

Stephen, if you can’t separate the ontology from the epistemology, then this argument and this discussion are beyond your understanding. This is not because of your stance toward transcendence. Many, many people who deny transcendence can still make that conceptual distinction.

Well, either that or you don’t get my criticism of the distinction. Why can’t you respond to the problem of the objective standard not settling the question of “better” if two people can conceivable disagree about the nature of the objective standard? How does it settle anything?

I give up. I’ve tried. You don’t get it. You think I don’t get it because I don’t “like” your position. But I can at least understand the words you use, and I can ask you for clarification when I do not.

I understand the words you use. You are just looking for a cheap way out of the killer question I posed.

I asked “what incommensurability you’re referring to.” You didn’t answer that

I’ll try again. Is it not the point of a objective standard to settle questions of moral choice? Isn’t that your answer to the question of which choice is better? And if I’m pointing out that we disagree as much over these standards as we do over the topical point they are intended to settle, isn’t that “connected” to your OP?

Stephen:

I appreciate you do have quite a clear idea of what rejecting metaphysics means to you – I would suggest that you probably don’t reject metaphysics in the typical modern usage of the term (apologies if this is a complete misjudgment!), and if so then describing your beliefs as such as unconducive to discussion – peruse the SEP article on metaphysics and see what you think.

Perhaps you would still want to deny metaphysics (although I wouldn’t guess so from what you’ve said) – but I would then suggest considering section 5 in the above article very seriously – in short that such a position is incoherent.

If you’re interested in further discussion let me know what you think of the above and I’ll see if I can rework how I think your ideas relate to the original discussion.

I’m not 100% up to scratch and I’m definitely an amateur, but I think most of the people you mention would describe some of their work as being on or about metaphysics. Pragmatism claims an emptiness to a priori ontological metaphysics in particular but I don’t think to metaphysics per se. Again if you could clarify your position (or correct my mistakes if you think that the case) then this would be appreciated!

Tom, My apology for those two remarks. You are right that they were inappropriate. I understand you dropping out, I have done the same with some.

@Ray Ingles:

First a correction to your post to Mr. X.

In “The Last Superstition”, when Edward Feser talks about how a match is ‘directed towards’ producing flame, he assumes too much with his terminology. ‘Having a tendency to produce flame’ is just not the same thing as ‘being directed (by a Director, say) to produce flame’, and it’s radically unlike ‘wanting to produce flame’.

You are conflating different arguments: the real, objective status of final causes (each agent, or its causal powers, are directed at producing an effect or specific range of effects, for otherwise it is unintelligible why a match produces flame instead of say, a billion dollars in unmarked notes) with the claim that from the passive orderliness of objects to their telos we can reason to a Director, which everyone calls God. The latter is also an argument, the Fifth Way; to defuse it, it does not suffice to conflate two different claims and then go on to say that “he assumes too much with his terminology”. Also, Feser is quite explicit in that the immanent teleology exhibited by natural substances is in no way “conscious”, a “desire” or a “wanting”, so it is hard to fathom how you managed to misrepresent him. Not surprising, since you misunderstand AT metaphysics as a matter of routine, just unfathomable; to me, at least. I mean, how hard can it be to understand it?

On to your post.

The idea is that ‘rules of the game’ plus ‘a goal to win the game’ lead to strategies (which can be objectively ranked, see below). And in the exact same way ‘rules of the universe’ plus ‘human goals’ lead to the kinds of strategies we call ‘morals’.

You are very confused if you think morals can be conflated with a winning strategy in the Game of Life where the rules are dictated by the physical laws. Very confused. For one, because “physical laws” are not real existents, so nothing follows, or can follow, from them. To claim that they are real existents is a very substantial metaphysical thesis that very few are prepared to defend. I will deal with the other, more substantive reasons below.

To put it in syllogistic terms: (a) game theory is a branch of mathematics, (b) mathematical results are objective, therefore (c) the results of game theory are objective too.

I am not disputing that game-theoretic mathematical results are objective. But there is no logical path from the latter claim, to any claims relating to morality. What I am disputing, nay, I am flat out denying, is that game theory will help you in any way to make the sort of moral reasoning you want to do, objective and normative in any interesting sense, or even practically relevant, this or that artificially cooked “example” notwithstanding. It has not been done; it cannot be done, simply because moral reasoning, irrespectively of how you set it up, is not the sort of reasoning that deals with quantifiable realities.

I understand the allurement to coat our more philosophick opinions with the sheen of mathematical and scientifick respectability, but really, it is just a case of misplaced envy.

Goals themselves don’t have to be normative. They can be arbitrary. What’s normative are the strategies that arise when goals and constraints interact.

First, a large part of moral reasoning just *is* the figuring out of what the Good is, that is, it is as much about ends as it is about means. To pick up your chess example, a Chess Master may want to win the game, but he may also delay the winning to achieve a more aesthetically satisfying victory. The rules may enable him to do so, but this is a rather trite and trivial observation. No amount of staring at the rules will explain in what exactly consists a more aesthetically satisfying victory, nor even make us see that there is such a thing as a more aesthetically satisfying victory, nor even that the Chess Master should or ought to purse such a type of victory. Computer brute force search has uncovered Chess endgame winning strategies (e.g. in queen and pawn against queen positions) that are so convoluted and contorted, that the probability that a human being ever stumbled on them unaided is vanishingly low because, at least in the present state of knowledge, the logic behind such strategies is unknown. They are winning strategies, but they are not the sort of strategies that human beings find intelligible, aesthetic or interesting, an important aspect to a game like Chess; they are more like some random mathematical fact which has no place in a more comprehensive and intelligible framework — think of some arithmetical truth like 46717234 * 725165426 = 33877722895151684, which is true for no deep reason other than the bare syntactical facts (assuming Ramanujan or his ghost cannot scold us and say that such a fact is significant because such and such), and furthermore, is not true in any significant interesting way, e.g. as in generating other significant, interesting truths.

note: this is just meant to illustrate the flaws in the analogy, not in picking it for myself.

Second, you are equivocating, because the objective, normative sense you are attaching to the strategies that allegedly drop out from a consideration of means and ends (granting the cogency of this particular claim for the sake of argument, which I do not), is not normative in the same sense that the OP talks about such and such behavior being morally normative. How best to achieve a certain goal, fixing it arbitrarily (your words) and taking into account the proper, human limitations, is not necessarily what is moral. Third, what I stated still stands: “If purposes are always relative to the agent, then they are by definition subjective and with no normative force, and appealing to the *laws of physics* helps you not one iota. Which is what everybody else is saying by the way.” Saying that the goals are arbitrary but the strategies to achieve them are not, even granting the cogency of the latter, leaves you exactly with nothing.

Alex#113 re the link you provide.
Section five discusses the incoherence of attempts to show metaphysical claims meaningless. The pragmatist avoids this charge by abandoning the traditional questions of metaphysical philosophy not because they have proved them false or meaningless. As Rorty says:
“Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace[traditional metaphysics]. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
And
“try to ignore the apparently futile traditional questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions”. C.I.S.

And only the metaphysician can claim foul play by not providing an adequate (to the metaphysician) response to these questions, but so what, there is nothing (except the metaphysican) saying these questions were ever necessary intellectual pursuits. The sense of foul play is just more of our highly ingrained metaphysical intuitions in our thinking – just what Rorty suggests abandoning. There is nothing “incoherent” in simply ceasing to ask traditional questions or to stop abiding by highly ingrained metaphysical intuitions and urges. And this probably explains why you don’t find the pragmatist position addressed in the article, because the pragmatists have just refuses to play that game, it doesn’t deny it in the terms of the metaphysician, that would be self-contradictory, rather it presents a paradigm shift.
The author of this article makes a good argument in favor of the metaphysical tradition, but it is just an argument, not a proof, he hasn’t settled anything, as is the case with Rorty.

@Stephen:

There is nothing “incoherent” in simply ceasing to ask traditional questions or to stop abiding by highly ingrained metaphysical intuitions and urges.

As there is nothing incoherent in asserting that your claims are ipso facto uninteresting and therefore not worthy of discussion, would you kindly take your claptrap elsewhere? By your own admission you are not interested in the OP, so you have nothing of interest to contribute except to say that in your own historically and culturally contingent opinion, maybe we should be asking different questions. How will you pretend to rationally answer those other questions if you eschew metaphysics, is beyond me, but hey, whatever rocks your boat. I cannot speak for anybody else, but I refuse to play *your* game, so there you have it, end of discussion. And if you even dare to utter “foul play” that is just you abiding by your ingrained intuitions and urges.

JAD –

The object of a zero sum game like chess is to win.

To quote the links you still haven’t read: I think we can agree that, overall, our lives are ‘non zero-sum’.

The claim is this: humans need an objective standard in order to know right from wrong, they can’t rely on subjective faculties.

If humans didn’t disagree, in the first place, just got it right, we wouldn’t need to talk about it. But we do disagree. So it is the disagreement that brings us to the need for a solution.

The solution is said to be an objective standard. But as we can see throughout this blog and given the fragmentation of belief systems, that the objective standard is just as contentious as the original moral questions. Subjective faculties still get involved. Can we really avoid that? The objective standard just isn’t doing the said work of solving the problem, it just changes the debate from the moral question to the “nature” of the standard.

@Stephen:

The claim is this: humans need an objective standard in order to know right from wrong, they can’t rely on subjective faculties.

No, that is not the claim.

The solution is said to be an objective standard. But as we can see throughout this blog and given the fragmentation of belief systems, that the objective standard is just as contentious as the original moral questions. Subjective faculties still get involved. Can we really avoid that? The objective standard just isn’t doing the said work of solving the problem, it just changes the debate from the moral question to the “nature” of the standard.

Let us leave aside the utter confused mess you are making, and try to give a charitable rendering of your “argument”.

(1) The solution to answer moral questions is X.

(2) But people disagree on the answers to moral questions.

(3) So the solution to answer moral questions cannot be X.

There are still some flaws in this formulation (it is no mean feat to make sense of what you say), but I will cut to chase and go after what I presume you are getting at. First, the argument is invalid as (3) does not follow from (1) and (2). The fact that people disagree on the moral answers says nothing of whether there is in fact a way to answer them (e.g. an objective moral standard). But it is not only invalid, it is self-refuting. For suppose that you were correct; in addition, suppose also you are correct in that we should be asking other questions. But those other questions *also* have conflicting answers, so by your ilogic they cannot be answered as there is no solution, or standard we can appeal to, to answer them. So again, by your ilogic, we should be asking different questions from the ones *you* make. And so on, ad infinitum.

The question is not what is exactly the objective standard, but that there is an objective standard or principle in the first place, that allows us to actually answer the moral questions. For if there is no such standard, there is no way to answer moral questions, and in fact, following Rorty and the philosophers you mentioned, there is no way to answer any question at all and all *your* “arguments” are no more meaningful and interesting than the muuu a cow makes.

I do not mean to be insulting, but really, do you even listen to yourself? How virtually every single statement you make is riddled with logical fallacies and incoherences? The thread is already clocking at an impressive 130 comments (impressive, but not that uncommon for this blog) and you still misunderstand the nature of the argument directed against you. Maybe you should read a book on elementary logic? Maybe take the modus operandi of Rorty more to heart? He styled himself a liberal ironist, with emphasis on the ironist. Rorty, for all his incoherence (and that is exactly into what devolves say, his critique of metaphysics and the correspondence theory of truth), at least had enough self-awareness to know that his own opinions was just that, contingent and tied to the historical and cultural moment, that no argument formulated in his own vocabulary can be final or dissolve his *own* doubts and rebuttals, let alone meet those of the opponent, and finally empty himself into an “intellectual gadfly”. Emphasis on the gadfly. If you want to leave logic and coherence at the front door, that is your choice, but please do not presume to enter into the Great House of Public Debate.

@Tom#135 So is it fair or even accurate to say that this means that atheists are “getting the argument wrong” when this is denied by atheists from the get go, in the same way that you (I believe) deny that morality is entirely subjective? There simply isn’t enough commonality to begin a “debate” from this standpoint. Atheists want to talk about the practical aspects of deciding or otherwise bringing into our psychology – taboos, etc, how we should live together, what works and doesn’t work, without reference to such a nonhuman standard. So, isn’t it better to describe this disconnect as a demonstration of the “worldview clash”?

Where is that given? What makes it a relevant question? Why do we have to limit morality to what humans can form?

But anyone that would hold such a view wouldn’t get invited to many parties.”

Is this really true? There are places in the world today where you can kill your wife and daughters in an “honor” killing as we saw this week in Egypt. Where you can leave your newborn daughter outside to die because she isn’t a son. Where women are chattel and must walk three steps behind their husbands. And we in this country say it’s ok to murder your unborn child to preserve the rights of the mother. (And yes, this is the argument made by the pro-choice side) When you leave morality up to the individual or the collective, most anything is permissible.

Anyone care to take on my actual point?

I was obviously having some fun, but the idea behind it is still my point, that societies forge morality in part by ostracizing.

@Bill

When individuals or societies are left to determine their own morality you end up with: legalized murder in varying forms, second class citizenship and and a number of other unfortunate results, if those weren’t enough.

Is it your thought that there is a way to get beyond having disagreements about what our moral code should look like?

Stephen @ 150:

“This is talk from the other side of the clash.”

You keep saying that, Stephen, but as far as I can see it’s trivial and largely irrelevant. Yes, moral objectivists and subjectivists have different world-views. So what? Given that it’s entirely possible for people — even large numbers of people — to hold world-views that are arbitrary and inconsistent, just pointing out that you’ve got a different worldview to Tom doesn’t go any way to rebutting any of his points.

“Societies develop morals and build mechanisms to enforce them, codifying them in taboos and laws which act to constrain individual behavior beyond an individuals personal sense of right and wrong. This is something that falls outside of your subjective-objective split.”

No it doesn’t. Just because the majority of people in a society hold to a subjective opinion, doesn’t make it any less subjective. Nor does being able to enforce those opinions on others.

Stephen,
How do you measure societies morals? Where do you look, who are the relevant people to poll, how often do you need to update the results, what questions do you ask, how do you resolve conflicting answers where one society says X is immoral but another says it is moral, and how do you assemble the responses into a hierarchy of human morality when you don’t even ask about hierarchy?

For example: is taking candy from a baby ever considered to be morally good? Where do I go to find the answer for the particular situation that I am in?

For no rational reason whatever.

That’s ethical imperialism, and I find it despicable. You’re so convinced you have everybody’s right answer you’re going to push it on them, even while admitting there is no right answer. It’s your preference. It’s your ethnocentrusm. It’s your egocentrism.

And people complain about religious proselytizing. At least Christians have something other than our own self-satisfied belief in our personal moral superiority to offer.

Tom

You’re so convinced you have everybody’s right answer you’re going to push it on them

Settle down now. Who is pushing the “right” answer here? I’m pushing the way I prefer, you’ve been reading my posts. “push it on them”? really? by having a conversation? By doing what I can to influence the outcome of that public working through a way to live together? I’m not the absolutist here who thinks of the world in terms like “right” and “wrong” and I don’t believe that by now that is not clear to you.

If you’re trying to convince someone, Stephen, you’re trying to do what? There’s no convincing me of anything when all you are doing is “pushing the way you prefer”. You say it, and it’s obvious to anyone within earshot that you prefer it. There’s obviously more to it than that.

Tom

And people complain about religious proselytizing. At least Christians have something other than our own self-satisfied belief in our personal moral superiority to offer.

I’m not the one pushing an ideology. I’m saying we’d live together better if we softened our ideologies – and that begins with dropping our absolutism, our belief that we are in touch with some eternal anchor for our beliefs and reasoning, the divine or divine truth.

SteveK
Are you saying that you know of a reliable way to settle disagreements? How does it work? I just need something “true”? I’d like to hear about the history of this at work in the world. Please be specific.

@Stephen:

I’m not the absolutist here who thinks of the world in terms like “right” and “wrong” and I don’t believe that by now that is not clear to you.

Well, if you are not absolutist then why are you inveighing against absolutists? If there is no “right” nor “wrong”, it is neither “right” nor “wrong” to be an absolutist, but here you are chiding absolutists and “pushing” them to drop their absolutism.

I’m saying we’d live together better if we softened our ideologies – and that begins with dropping our absolutism, our belief that we are in touch with some eternal anchor for our beliefs and reasoning, the divine or divine truth.

Live “better”? What is that? You just said there was neither “right” nor “wrong”, now you invoke the word “better”? Better for whom? What are you appealing to to decide what is “better”? And how do you know that by dropping absolutism we would live “better”, whatever the latter means? Some infallible oracle informed you? Where is the proof that that is true?

And for the record, I say we would live better if were all absolutists, which just means being rational people. Or as SteveK put it so aptly (and yet, you managed to miss his point), first *you* drop your intolerant-absolutism-masquerading-as-tolerant-relativism.

Stephen,

Are you saying that you know of a reliable way to settle disagreements?

You posed a question AS IF there is a true answer to it. How should I begin to answer if there isn’t a true answer? Please be specific.

Stephen,
Your question “Are you saying that you know of a reliable way to settle disagreements?” implied that there was indeed a true answer to it. If so, then your question in #169 is answered as “yes” without me providing any response. If not, then you are wasting my time with this question – so stop asking. Pick one of these options and run with it.

Uncle Screwtape, is that you?

SteveK

You can avoid the one you are holding on to in favor of one that is more consistent with your experiences and one that isn’t self-refuting. That would be progress.

But that is the point of these discussions is to try to SHOW that to be the case. You can start to show how your belief system is coherent by answering the question you’ve been avoiding.

“Tom, continuing, that is just to say that what I am after isn’t to change your mind about specific topics (moral beliefs), but about your notion of “true” (Truth).”

So wait, you’re denying the possibility of us accessing, not just objective moral truth, but objective truth full stop? That’s… even more incoherent than what I thought you were saying.

SteveK

We’ve done that multiple times.

Please, for me, do it one more time using #164

@Stephen,

Are you saying, “there IS no truth” or “that we can never KNOW what is true”? i.e. we can only observe what (at this point in time, space etc) appears to comport with present reality…..

@Robert

Are you saying, “there IS no truth” or “that we can never KNOW what is true”? i.e. we can only observe what (at this point in time, space etc) appears to comport with present reality…..

If you mean “Truth”, some metaphysical entity that serves as a standard that will settle disagreements, I’m saying we don’t benefit from continuing to ask those questions. They are questions for the theologian and the metaphysician and we don’t have to be either. We can stop thinking that the urge to find a final grounding for our beliefs is one we need to respect: it itself is man made and culturally given and not beyond controversy.

@ Stephen

in other words ANY belief is only REAL in that it is accepted by the individual who believes it; there are no OBJECTIVE standards, just various choices and we can all pick what we want for ourselves, so we should stop sweating if someone has picked something different from ourselves?

Forget the where or how of grounding; is there ONE or MANY realities?

@ Robert 201. I don’t really see it has so individualistic. I am more convinced that we can’t really separate the individual from culture. Learning and belief formation do not occur in a isolated self, they involve an interaction with the public. Culture exerts its pressures to constrain and guide belief and knowledge.This is a Deweyian way of understanding belief and knowledge. Take science, the peer review, as an example. So individuals are responsible to community for what and why they believe, but not to a timeless, nonhuman entity. Some here have been dismissive of this third component that sits outside the subjective/objective split as it is discussed here. This, to me is at least what we can mean by the word “objective”.

@Tom says I’m saying

It’s my total intention here to try to get you to drop your morality and accept mine.

Yet I said in #186

Tom, that is just to say that what I am after isn’t to change your mind about specific topics (moral beliefs), but about your notion of “true” (Truth). So from that point of view, your comment, to me, is circular.

I don’t see how either side of these debates can claim they are not interested in trying to change minds. Isn’t that the point of your website? As for the tone of that remark, I can only point to Freudian transference to explain that.

Tom

Will you grant that this is not an impossible resolution to the question you’ve been asking?

Of course its “possible”. But, is it probable?

There is quite a difference between positing pens on desks, that we can see, and positing objective standards that ground our beliefs.

This is a proposition. Explain how this belief is objectively true. If it’s not objectively true, then I’m free to believe it to be false without being wrong (or right).

Stephen

What makes your first statement circular is that you are using the thing in question to determine the truth of the thing.

Maybe my wording wasn’t entirely clear. Here’s what I said:

The objective standard does not make disagreement impossible, it makes propositional statements about the standard objectively true or false.

To further explain…I’m saying that a proposition about the objective standard either describes that standard in a way that is either accurate (true) or inaccurate (false). If there is no objective standard to describe, then my description isn’t describing anything in particular and cannot be said to be either accurate or inaccurate. Make sense?

The objective standard for “red pen” is the extra-mental object itself. The proposition involves the metaphysical universal concepts of ‘red’ and ‘pen’ and the relationship between the two. Those universal concepts, put into a propositional statement, refer to the object.

So what about moral propositions like “Kindness is a virtue”? The same criteria applies. If the universal concepts of ‘kindness’ and ‘virtue’ don’t refer to any extra-mental reality (doesn’t have to be physical) then my proposition isn’t referring to (or describing) anything extra-mental.

Deny that universal moral concepts refer to any extra-mental reality and you will be unable to say that propositions using those concepts are objectively accurate or inaccurate (true or false). There’s no object. Everything about that proposition can only point back to the mind.

But, is it probable?

I find the more relevant question to be, “am I justified in concluding it is actual?” Statistical answers aren’t good at answering non-statistical questions.

@Robert So you’re basically saying “reality by collective opinion”.Reality? Are you referring now specifically to my example of science and peer review?

so individuals are responsible to community for what and why they believe. Never!

Certainly, if you believe in a God and that you are responsible to that God, then you would disagree. The idea of being responsible to society seems inadequate. The question keeps returning to the fundamental question of whether their actually IS something like that to be responsible to.

@Tom I think we need to begin with this

“Given what we know about nature, is it probable that there is a God behind it all?”

And we may want to put it this way. Given the way things go in the world, not just with humans, does it suggest that an all powerful, loving father is behind it all? Only if we hold to a double standard about our meaning for “loving father”.

@Steve #216

Morality is about what ought to be, not what’s suggested to be. So far, so good?

Are you saying that I think of morality as suggestions, not oughts? Can you point to the entry that misled you in this way? In lieu of that, let me just say that I don’t think that, I do believe that we can, as a society, say something is wrong. I just don’t think we need to ground that statement in some nonhuman, ahistorical, timeless entity (how many times do I have to explain that!). This idea just seems to fall outside of conceptual schemes and so I become the target of projection.

What is the point of the term “is” in that statement? There would be no point to it.

This is good question. If you read “general semantics”, you will find discussion about how the “is” of “identity” has been most troublesome to human conceptions. It is the language that conditions us to reify inordinately.

There’s no such thing as an extra-mental “ought” in Stephen’s worldview.

I’m not sure with extra-mental means. Do you mean something outside of nature that is there before humans arrived in the universe and would continue to be there after they vanish? If so, then yes, I deny that our moral frameworks rely on such entities.

Steve K,

Actually we can make is statements about things that don’t exist extra-mentally. These statements rely on shared concepts in the community, and I think this is what Stephen has in mind for his sense of morality.

For example if I drew a drawing of a unicorn with two horns and five legs, someone could say that is not a unicorn. It would be a true statement based on a shared definition of what a unicorn is, and yet the unicorn has no extra-mental reality. The problem is that if we disagree on what a unicorn is we have no extra-mental data to fall back on to work out which definition is correct, whereas if I drew a cat with ten legs, you could, by reference to real cats, correctly state that my cat is defective because cats should have four legs.

In the same way, given theism we can correctly state that humans should behave in certain ways, the extent to which they don’t tells us whether they are a good specimen of human being or not, of course it is much more difficult to determine correct behaviour as opposed to answering the question as to whether a cat should have ten legs but it is the same principle.

Stephen on the other hand maintains that morality is more like the definition of a unicorn. In that case if we disagree, contrary to his contention throughout this thread, we have absolutely no basis on which to resolve the disagreement, ie. shared definitions without any extra-mental reality to them only help to resolve disagreements if all parties agree to the definitions. My question to Stephen would be to what are you appealing when you argue that your position is more accurate or better or however else you want to describe it.

Stephen,

I’m not sure with extra-mental means

It refers to something that is outside, or beyond, the mind.

@223

Are you saying that I think of morality as suggestions, not oughts?

I’m not saying that about you so I wasn’t misreading you. I was just making a point about morality.

@Stephen:

All scientific knowledge is inferential and therefore probabilistic in nature.

Wrong.