Whether someone is judged right and wrong by others has consequences, but the people doing the judging might be wrong. It is still an error to make morality justify itself in terms of instrumental utility, since there are plenty of examples of things that are
instrumentally right but ethically wrong, like improved gas chambers.
Whether someone is judged right and wrong by others has consequences, but the people doing the judging might be wrong.
Actually being in the right increases your probability of being judged to be in the right. Yes, the people doing the judging may be wrong, and that is why I made the statement probabilistic. This can be made blindingly obvious with an example. Go to a random country and start gunning down random people in the street. The people there will, with probability so close to 1 as makes no real difference, judge you to be in the wrong, because you of course will be in the wrong.
There is a reason why people’s judgment is not far off from right. It’s the same reason that people’s ability to do basic arithmetic when it comes to money is not far off from right. Someone who fails to understand that $10 is twice $5 (or rather the equivalent in the local currency) is going to be robbed blind and his chances of reproduction are slim to none. Similarly, someone whose judgment of right and wrong is seriously defective is in serious trouble. If someone witnesses a criminal lunatic gun down random people in the street and then walks up to him and says, “nice day”, he’s a serious candidate for a Darwin Award. Correct recognition of evil is a basic life skill, and any human who does not have it will be cut out of the gene pool. And so, if you go to a random country and start killing people randomly, you will be neutralized by the locals quickly. That’s a prediction. Moral thought has predictive power.
It is still an error to make morality justify itself in terms of instrumental utility, since there are plenty of examples of things that are instrumentally right but ethically wrong, like improved gas chambers.
The only reason anyone can get away with the mass murder that you allude to is that they have overwhelming power on their side. And even they did it in secret, as I recall learning, which suggests that powerful as they were, they were not so powerful that they felt safe murdering millions openly.
Morality is how a human society governs itself in which no single person or organized group has overwhelming power over the rest of society. It is the spontaneous self-regulation of humanity. Its scope is therefore delimited by the absence of a person or organization with overwhelming power. Even though just about every place on Earth has a state, since it is not a totalitarian state there are many areas of life in which the state does not interfere, and which are therefore effectively free of state influence. In these areas of life humanity spontaneously self-regulates, and the name of the system of spontaneous self-regulation is morality.
Similarly, someone whose judgment of right and wrong is seriously defective is in serious trouble. If someone witnesses a criminal lunatic gun down random people in the street and then walks up to him and says, “nice day”, he’s a serious candidate for a Darwin Award. Correct recognition of evil is a basic life skill, and any human who does not have it will be cut out of the gene pool.
It sounds to me like you’re describing the ability to recognize danger, not evil, there.
Say that your hypothetical criminal lunatic manages to avoid the police, and goes about his life. Later that week, he’s at a buffet restaurant, acting normally. Is he still evil? Assuming nobody recognizes him from the shooting, do you expect the other people using the buffet to react unusually to him in any way?
It sounds to me like you’re describing the ability to recognize danger, not evil, there.
It’s not either/or. There is no such thing as a bare sense of danger. For example, if you are about to drive your car off a cliff, hopefully you notice in time and stop. In that case, you’ve sensed danger—but you also sensed the edge of a cliff, probably with your eyes. Or if you are about to drink antifreeze, hopefully you notice in time and stop. In that case, you’ve sensed danger—but you’ve also sensed antifreeze, probably with your nose.
And so on. It’s not either/or. You don’t either sense danger or sense some specific thing which happens to be dangerous. Rather, you sense something that happens to be dangerous, and because you know it’s dangerous, you sense danger.
Say that your hypothetical criminal lunatic manages to avoid the police, and goes about his life. Later that week, he’s at a buffet restaurant, acting normally. Is he still evil?
Chances are higher than average that if he was a criminal lunatic a few days ago, he is still a criminal lunatic today.
Assuming nobody recognizes him from the shooting, do you expect the other people using the buffet to react unusually to him in any way?
Obviously not, because if you assume that people fail to perceive something, then it follows that they will behave in a way that is consistent with their failure to perceive it. Similarly, if you fail to notice that the antifreeze that you’re drinking is anything other than fruit punch, then you can be expected to drink it just as if it were fruit punch.
My point was that in the shooting case, the perception of danger is sufficient to explain bystanders’ behavior. They may perceive other things, but that seems mostly irrelevant.
You said:
Correct recognition of evil is a basic life skill, and any human who does not have it will be cut out of the gene pool.
This claim appears to be incompatible with your expectation that people will not notice your hypothetical murderer when they encounter him acting according to social norms after committing a murder, given that he’s supposedly still evil.
My point was that in the shooting case, the perception of danger is sufficient to explain bystanders’ behavior.
People perceive danger because they perceive evil, and evil is dangerous.
They may perceive other things, but that seems mostly irrelevant.
It is not irrelevant that they perceive a specific thing (such as evil) which is dangerous. Take away the perception of the specific thing, and they have no basis upon which to perceive danger. Only Spiderman directly perceives danger, without perceiving some specific thing which is dangerous. And he’s fictional.
Correct recognition of evil is a basic life skill, and any human who does not have it will be cut out of the gene pool.
This claim appears to be incompatible with your expectation that people will not notice your hypothetical murderer when they encounter him acting according to social norms after committing a murder, given that he’s supposedly still evil.
I was referring to the standard, common ability to recognize evil. I was saying that someone who does not have that ability will be cut out of the gene pool (not definitely—probabilistically, his chances of surviving and reproducing are reduced, and over the generations the effect of this disadvantage compounds).
People who fail to recognize that the guy is that same guy from before are not thereby missing the standard human ability to recognize evil.
If someone witnesses a criminal lunatic gun down random people in the street and then walks up to him and says, “nice day”, he’s a serious candidate for a Darwin Award.
Except when the evil guys take over, Then you are in trouble if you oppose them.
The only reason anyone can get away with the mass murder that you allude to is that they have overwhelming power on their side.
That doesn’t affect my point. If there are actual or conceptual circumstances where instrumental good diverges from moral good, the two cannot be equated.
Morality is how a human society governs itself in which no single person or organized group has overwhelming power over the rest of society.
Why would it be wrong if they do? You theory of morality seems to be in
need of another theory of morality to justify it.
Except when the evil guys take over, Then you are in trouble if you oppose them.
Which is why the effective scope of morality is limited by concentrated power, as I said.
That doesn’t affect my point. If there are actual or conceptual circumstances where instrumental good diverges from moral good, the two cannot be equated.
I did not equate moral good with instrumental good in the first place.
Why would it be wrong if they do?
I didn’t say it would be wrong. I was talking about making predictions. The usefulness of morality in helping you to predict outcomes is limited by concentrated power.
You theory of morality seems to be in need of another theory of morality to justify it.
On the contrary, my theory of morality is confirmed by the evidence. You yourself supplied some of the evidence. You pointed out that a concentration of power creates an exception to the prediction that someone who guns down random people will be neutralized. But this exception fits with my theory of morality, since my theory of morality is that it is the spontaneous self-regulation of humanity. Concentrated power interferes with self-regulation.
I did not equate moral good with instrumental good in the first place.
...but you also say...
The usefulness of morality in helping you to predict outcomes
..which seems to imply that you are still thinking of morality as something that has
to pay its way instrumentally, by making useful predictions.
On the contrary, my theory of morality is confirmed by the evidence[..]But this exception fits with my theory of morality, since my theory of morality is that it is the spontaneous self-regulation of humanity. Concentrated power interferes with self-regulation.
It’s a conceptual truth that power interferes with spontaneous self-regulation: but that isn’t the point. The point is not that you have a theory that makes predictions, but
whether it is a theory of morality.
It is dubious to say of any society that the way it is organised is ipso facto moral. You have forestalled the relativistic problem by saying that socieites must self organise for equality and justice, not any old way, which
takes it as read that equality and justice are Good Things. But an ethical theory
must explain why they are good, not rest on them as a given.
..which seems to imply that you are still thinking of morality as something that has to pay its way instrumentally, by making useful predictions.
“Has to”? I don’t remember saying “has to”. I remember saying “does”, or words to that effect. I was disputing the following claim:
The difference is, believing “The world is round” affects whether I win or not, whereas believing “I’m morally in the wrong” does not.
This is factually false, considered as a claim about the real world.
It is dubious to say of any society that the way it is organised is ipso facto moral. You have forestalled the relativistic problem by saying that socieites must self organise for equality and justice, not any old way, which takes it as read that equality and justice are Good Things. But an ethical theory must explain why they are good, not rest on them as a given.
I am presenting the hypothesis that, under certain constraints, there is no way for humanity to organize itself but morally or close to morally and that it does organize itself morally or close to morally. The most important constraint is that the organization is spontaneous, that is to say, that it does not rely on a central power forcing everyone to follow the same rules invented by that same central power. Another constraint is absence of war, though I think this constraint is already implicit in the idea of “spontaneous order” that I am making use of, since war destroys order and prevents order.
Because humans organize themselves morally, it is possible to make predictions. However, because of the “no central power” constraint, the scope of those predictions is limited to areas outside the control of the central power.
Fortunately for those of us who seek to make predictions on the basis of morality, and also fortunately for people in general, even though the planet is covered with centralized states, much of life still remains largely outside of their control.
I am presenting the hypothesis that, under certain constraints, there is no way for humanity to organize itself but morally or close to morally and that it does organize itself morally or close to morally.
is that a stipulative definition(“morality” =def “spontaneous organisation”) or
is there some independent standard of morality on which it based?
The most important constraint is that the organization is spontaneous, that is to say, that it does not rely on a central power forcing everyone to follow the same rules invented by that same central power.
What about non-centralised power? What if one fairly large group—the gentry, men, citizens, some racial group, have power over another in a decentralised way?
And what counts as a society? Can an Athenian slave-owner state that all citizens in their society are equal, and, as for slaves, they are not members of their society.
ETA:
Actually, it’s worse than that. Not only are there examples of non-centralised power,there are cases where centralised power is on the side of angels
and spontaneous self-organisation on the the other side; for instance
the Civil Rights struggle, where the federal government backed equality,
and the opposition was from the grassroots.
ETA: Actually, it’s worse than that. Not only are there examples of non-centralised power,there are cases where centralised power is on the side of angels and spontaneous self-organisation on the the other side; for instance the Civil Rights struggle, where the federal government backed equality, and the opposition was from the grassroots.
The Civil Rights struggle was national government versus state government, not government versus people. The Jim Crow laws were laws created by state legislatures, not spontaneous laws created by the people.
There is, by the way, such a thing as spontaneous law created by the people even under the state. The book Order Without Law is about this. The “order” it refers to is the spontaneous law—that is, the spontaneous self-government of the people acting privately, without help from the state. This spontaneous self-government ignores and in some cases contradicts the state’s official, legislated law.
Jim Crow was an example of official state law, and not an example of spontaneous order.
The Civil Rights struggle was national government versus state government, not government versus people. The Jim Crow laws were laws created by state legislatures, not spontaneous laws created by the people.
Plenty of things that happened weren’t sanctioned by state legislatures, such as discrimination by private lawyers, hassling of voters during registration drives,
and the assassination of MLK
There is, by the way, such a thing as spontaneous law created by the people even under the state.
But law isn’t morality. There is such a thing as a laws that apply only to certain
people, and which support privilege and the status quo rather than equality and
justice.
Plenty of things that happened weren’t sanctioned by state legislatures, such as discrimination by private lawyers, hassling of voters during registration drives, and the assassination of MLK
Legislation distorts society and the distortion ripples outward. As for the assassination, that was a single act. Order is a statistical regularity.
But law isn’t morality.
I didn’t say it was. I pointed out an example of spontaneous order. It is my thesis that spontaneous order tends to be moral. Much order is spontaneous, so much order is moral, so you can make predictions on the basis of what is moral. That should not be confused with a claim that all order is morality, that all law is morality, which is the claim that you are disputing and a claim I did not make.
From it’s primordial state of equality...? I can see how a society that starts equal might self organise to stay that way. But I don’t think they start equal that often.
Whether someone is judged right and wrong by others has consequences, but the people doing the judging might be wrong. It is still an error to make morality justify itself in terms of instrumental utility, since there are plenty of examples of things that are instrumentally right but ethically wrong, like improved gas chambers.
Actually being in the right increases your probability of being judged to be in the right. Yes, the people doing the judging may be wrong, and that is why I made the statement probabilistic. This can be made blindingly obvious with an example. Go to a random country and start gunning down random people in the street. The people there will, with probability so close to 1 as makes no real difference, judge you to be in the wrong, because you of course will be in the wrong.
There is a reason why people’s judgment is not far off from right. It’s the same reason that people’s ability to do basic arithmetic when it comes to money is not far off from right. Someone who fails to understand that $10 is twice $5 (or rather the equivalent in the local currency) is going to be robbed blind and his chances of reproduction are slim to none. Similarly, someone whose judgment of right and wrong is seriously defective is in serious trouble. If someone witnesses a criminal lunatic gun down random people in the street and then walks up to him and says, “nice day”, he’s a serious candidate for a Darwin Award. Correct recognition of evil is a basic life skill, and any human who does not have it will be cut out of the gene pool. And so, if you go to a random country and start killing people randomly, you will be neutralized by the locals quickly. That’s a prediction. Moral thought has predictive power.
The only reason anyone can get away with the mass murder that you allude to is that they have overwhelming power on their side. And even they did it in secret, as I recall learning, which suggests that powerful as they were, they were not so powerful that they felt safe murdering millions openly.
Morality is how a human society governs itself in which no single person or organized group has overwhelming power over the rest of society. It is the spontaneous self-regulation of humanity. Its scope is therefore delimited by the absence of a person or organization with overwhelming power. Even though just about every place on Earth has a state, since it is not a totalitarian state there are many areas of life in which the state does not interfere, and which are therefore effectively free of state influence. In these areas of life humanity spontaneously self-regulates, and the name of the system of spontaneous self-regulation is morality.
It sounds to me like you’re describing the ability to recognize danger, not evil, there.
Say that your hypothetical criminal lunatic manages to avoid the police, and goes about his life. Later that week, he’s at a buffet restaurant, acting normally. Is he still evil? Assuming nobody recognizes him from the shooting, do you expect the other people using the buffet to react unusually to him in any way?
It’s not either/or. There is no such thing as a bare sense of danger. For example, if you are about to drive your car off a cliff, hopefully you notice in time and stop. In that case, you’ve sensed danger—but you also sensed the edge of a cliff, probably with your eyes. Or if you are about to drink antifreeze, hopefully you notice in time and stop. In that case, you’ve sensed danger—but you’ve also sensed antifreeze, probably with your nose.
And so on. It’s not either/or. You don’t either sense danger or sense some specific thing which happens to be dangerous. Rather, you sense something that happens to be dangerous, and because you know it’s dangerous, you sense danger.
Chances are higher than average that if he was a criminal lunatic a few days ago, he is still a criminal lunatic today.
Obviously not, because if you assume that people fail to perceive something, then it follows that they will behave in a way that is consistent with their failure to perceive it. Similarly, if you fail to notice that the antifreeze that you’re drinking is anything other than fruit punch, then you can be expected to drink it just as if it were fruit punch.
My point was that in the shooting case, the perception of danger is sufficient to explain bystanders’ behavior. They may perceive other things, but that seems mostly irrelevant.
You said:
This claim appears to be incompatible with your expectation that people will not notice your hypothetical murderer when they encounter him acting according to social norms after committing a murder, given that he’s supposedly still evil.
People perceive danger because they perceive evil, and evil is dangerous.
It is not irrelevant that they perceive a specific thing (such as evil) which is dangerous. Take away the perception of the specific thing, and they have no basis upon which to perceive danger. Only Spiderman directly perceives danger, without perceiving some specific thing which is dangerous. And he’s fictional.
I was referring to the standard, common ability to recognize evil. I was saying that someone who does not have that ability will be cut out of the gene pool (not definitely—probabilistically, his chances of surviving and reproducing are reduced, and over the generations the effect of this disadvantage compounds).
People who fail to recognize that the guy is that same guy from before are not thereby missing the standard human ability to recognize evil.
Except when the evil guys take over, Then you are in trouble if you oppose them.
That doesn’t affect my point. If there are actual or conceptual circumstances where instrumental good diverges from moral good, the two cannot be equated.
Why would it be wrong if they do? You theory of morality seems to be in need of another theory of morality to justify it.
Which is why the effective scope of morality is limited by concentrated power, as I said.
I did not equate moral good with instrumental good in the first place.
I didn’t say it would be wrong. I was talking about making predictions. The usefulness of morality in helping you to predict outcomes is limited by concentrated power.
On the contrary, my theory of morality is confirmed by the evidence. You yourself supplied some of the evidence. You pointed out that a concentration of power creates an exception to the prediction that someone who guns down random people will be neutralized. But this exception fits with my theory of morality, since my theory of morality is that it is the spontaneous self-regulation of humanity. Concentrated power interferes with self-regulation.
You say:
...but you also say...
..which seems to imply that you are still thinking of morality as something that has to pay its way instrumentally, by making useful predictions.
It’s a conceptual truth that power interferes with spontaneous self-regulation: but that isn’t the point. The point is not that you have a theory that makes predictions, but whether it is a theory of morality.
It is dubious to say of any society that the way it is organised is ipso facto moral. You have forestalled the relativistic problem by saying that socieites must self organise for equality and justice, not any old way, which takes it as read that equality and justice are Good Things. But an ethical theory must explain why they are good, not rest on them as a given.
“Has to”? I don’t remember saying “has to”. I remember saying “does”, or words to that effect. I was disputing the following claim:
This is factually false, considered as a claim about the real world.
I am presenting the hypothesis that, under certain constraints, there is no way for humanity to organize itself but morally or close to morally and that it does organize itself morally or close to morally. The most important constraint is that the organization is spontaneous, that is to say, that it does not rely on a central power forcing everyone to follow the same rules invented by that same central power. Another constraint is absence of war, though I think this constraint is already implicit in the idea of “spontaneous order” that I am making use of, since war destroys order and prevents order.
Because humans organize themselves morally, it is possible to make predictions. However, because of the “no central power” constraint, the scope of those predictions is limited to areas outside the control of the central power.
Fortunately for those of us who seek to make predictions on the basis of morality, and also fortunately for people in general, even though the planet is covered with centralized states, much of life still remains largely outside of their control.
is that a stipulative definition(“morality” =def “spontaneous organisation”) or is there some independent standard of morality on which it based?
What about non-centralised power? What if one fairly large group—the gentry, men, citizens, some racial group, have power over another in a decentralised way?
And what counts as a society? Can an Athenian slave-owner state that all citizens in their society are equal, and, as for slaves, they are not members of their society.
ETA: Actually, it’s worse than that. Not only are there examples of non-centralised power,there are cases where centralised power is on the side of angels and spontaneous self-organisation on the the other side; for instance the Civil Rights struggle, where the federal government backed equality, and the opposition was from the grassroots.
The Civil Rights struggle was national government versus state government, not government versus people. The Jim Crow laws were laws created by state legislatures, not spontaneous laws created by the people.
There is, by the way, such a thing as spontaneous law created by the people even under the state. The book Order Without Law is about this. The “order” it refers to is the spontaneous law—that is, the spontaneous self-government of the people acting privately, without help from the state. This spontaneous self-government ignores and in some cases contradicts the state’s official, legislated law.
Jim Crow was an example of official state law, and not an example of spontaneous order.
Plenty of things that happened weren’t sanctioned by state legislatures, such as discrimination by private lawyers, hassling of voters during registration drives, and the assassination of MLK
But law isn’t morality. There is such a thing as a laws that apply only to certain people, and which support privilege and the status quo rather than equality and justice.
Legislation distorts society and the distortion ripples outward. As for the assassination, that was a single act. Order is a statistical regularity.
I didn’t say it was. I pointed out an example of spontaneous order. It is my thesis that spontaneous order tends to be moral. Much order is spontaneous, so much order is moral, so you can make predictions on the basis of what is moral. That should not be confused with a claim that all order is morality, that all law is morality, which is the claim that you are disputing and a claim I did not make.
From it’s primordial state of equality...? I can see how a society that starts equal might self organise to stay that way. But I don’t think they start equal that often.