You say that objective values are incoherent, but you offer no argument for it. Presenting philosophical claims without justification isn’t something different to philosophy, or
something better. It isn’t good rationality either. Rationality is as rationality does.
By incoherent I simply mean “I don’t know how to interpret the words.” So far no one seems to want to help me do that, so I can only await a coherent definition of objective ethics and related terms. Then possibly an argument could start. (But this is all like deja vu from the recent metaethics threads.)
“Morality is subjective”: Each person has their own moral sentiments.
“Morality is not subjective”: Each person does not have their own moral sentiments. Or there is something more than each person’s moral sentiments that is worth calling “moral.” <--- But I ask, what is that “something more”?
OK. That is not what “subjective” means. What it means is that if something is subjective, an opinion is guaranteed to be correct or the last word on the matter just because it is the person’s opinion. And “objective” therefore means that it is possible for someone to be wrong in their opinion.
I don’t claim moral sentiments are correct, but simply that a person’s moral sentiment is their moral sentiment. They feel some emotions, and that’s all I know. You are seeming to say there is some way those emotions can be correct or incorrect, but in what sense? Or probably a clearer way to ask the question is, “What disadvantage can I anticipate if my emotions are incorrect?”
An emotion, such as a feeling of elation or disgust, is not correct or incorrect per se; but an emotion per se is no basis for a moral sentiment, because moral sentiment has to
be about something. You could think gay marriage is wrong because homosexuality disgusts you, or you could feel serial-killing is good because it elates you, but that
doesn’t mean the conclusions you are coming to are right. It may be a cast iron fact that you have those particular sentiments, but that says nothing about the correctness of their
content, any more than any opinion you entertain is automatically correct.
ETA
The disadvantages you can expect if your emotions are incorrect include being
in the wrong whilst feeling you are in the right. Much as if you are entertaining
incorrect opinions.
Then you are, or are likely to be, morally in the wrong. That is of course possible. You can choose to do wrong. But it doesn’t constitute any kind of argument. Someone can elect to ignore the roundness
of the world for some perverse reason, but that doesn’t make ”!he world is round” false
or meaningless or subjective.
You can choose to do wrong. But it doesn’t constitute any kind of argument.
Indeed it is not an argument. Yet I can still say, “So what?” I am not going to worry about something that has no effect on my happiness. If there is some way it would have an effect, then I’d care about it.
Someone can elect to ignore the roundness of the world for some perverse reason, but that doesn’t make ”!he world is round” false or meaningless or subjective.
The difference is, believing “The world is round” affects whether I win or not, whereas believing “I’m morally in the wrong” does not.
The difference is, believing “The world is round” affects whether I win or not, whereas believing “I’m morally in the wrong” does not.
That is apparently true in your hypothetical, but it’s not true in the real world. Just as the roundness of the world has consequences, the wrongness of an action has consequences. For example, if you kill someone, then your fate is going to depend (probabilistically) on whether you were in the right (e.g. he attacked and you were defending your life) or in the wrong (e.g. you murdered him when he caught you burgling his house). The more in the right you were, then, ceteris paribus, the better your chances are.
For example, if you kill someone, then your fate is going to depend (probabilistically) on whether you were in the right (e.g. he attacked and you were defending your life) or in the wrong (e.g. you murdered him when he caught you burgling his house).
You’re interpreting “I’m morally in the wrong” to mean something like, “Other people will react badly to my actions,” in which case I fully agree with you that it would affect my winning. Peterdjones apparently does not mean it that way, though.
You’re interpreting “I’m morally in the wrong” to mean something like, “Other people will react badly to my actions,” in which case I fully agree with you that it would affect my winning.
Actually I am not. I am interpreting “I’m morally wrong” to mean something like, “I made an error of arithmetic in an area where other people depend on me.”
An error of arithmetic is an error of arithmetic regardless of whether any other people catch it, and regardless of whether any other people react badly to it. It is not, however, causally disconnected from their reaction, because, even though an error of arithmetic is what it is regardless of people’s reaction to it, nevertheless people will probably react badly to it if you’ve made it in an area where other people depend on you. For example, if you made an error of arithmetic in taking a test, it is probably the case that the test-grader did not make the same error of arithmetic and so it is probably the case that he will react badly to your error. Nevertheless, your error of arithmetic is an error and is not merely getting-a-different-answer-from-the-grader. Even in the improbable case where you luck out and the test grader makes exactly the same error as you and so you get full marks, nevertheless, you did still make that error.
Even if everyone except you wakes up tomorrow and believes that 3+4=6, whereas you still remember that 3+4=7, nevertheless in many contexts you had better not switch to what the majority believe. For example, if you are designing something that will stand up, like a building or a bridge, you had better get your math right, you had better correctly add 3+4=7 in the course of designing the edifice if that sum is ever called on calculating whether the structure will stand up.
If humanity divides into two factions, one faction of which believes that 3+4=6 and the other of which believes that 3+4=7, then the latter faction, the one that adds correctly, will in all likelihood over time prevail on account of being right. This is true even if the latter group starts out in the minority. Just imagine what sort of tricks you could pull on people who believe that 3+4=6. Because of the truth of 3+4=7, eventually people who are aware of this truth will succeed and those who believe that 3+4=6 will fail, and over time the vast majority of society will once again come to accept that 3+4=7.
Just imagine what sort of tricks you could pull on people who believe that 3+4=6.
Nothing’s jumping out at me that would seriously impact a group’s effectiveness from day to day. I rarely find myself needing to add three and four in particular, and even more rarely in high-stakes situations. What did you have in mind?
I offer you the following deal: give me $3 today and $4 tomorrow, and I will give you a 50 cent profit the day after tomorrow, by returning to you $6.50. You can take as much advantage of this as you want. In fact, if you like, you can give me $3 this second, $4 in one second, and in the following second I will give you back all your money plus 50 cents profit—that is, I will give you $6.50 in two seconds.
Since you think that 3+4=6, you will jump at this amazing deal.
I find that most people who believe absurd things still have functioning filters for “something is fishy about this”. I talked to a person who believed that the world was going to end in 2012, and I offered to give them a dollar right then in exchange for a hundred after the world didn’t end, but of course they didn’t take it: something was fishy about that.
Also, dollars are divisible: someone who believes that 3+4=6 may not believe that 300+400=600.
If he isn’t willing to take your trade, then his alleged belief that the world will end in 2012 is weak at best. In contrast, if you offer to give me $6.50 in exchange for $3 plus $3, then I will take your offer, because I really do believe that 3+3=6.
On the matter of divisibility, you are essentially proposing that someone with faulty arithmetic can effectively repair the gap by translating arithmetic problems away from the gap (e.g. by realizing that 3 dollars is 300 pennies and doing arithmetic on the pennies). But in order for them to do this consistently they need to know where the gap is, and if they know that, then it’s not a genuine gap. If they realize that their belief that 3+4=6 is faulty, then they don’t really believe it. In contrast, if they don’t realize that their belief that 3+4=6 is faulty, then they won’t consistently translate arithmetic problems away from the gap, and so my task becomes a simple matter of finding areas where they don’t translate problems away from the gap, but instead fall in.
Are you saying that you would not be even a little suspicious and inclined to back off if someone said they’d give you $6.50 in exchange for $3+$3? Not because your belief in arithmetic is shaky, but because your trust that people will give you fifty cents for no obvious reason is nonexistent and there is probably something going on?
I’m not denying that in a thought experiment, agents that are wrong about arithmetic can be money-pumped. I’m skeptical that in reality, human beings that are wrong about arithmetic can be money-pumped on an interesting scale.
Are you saying that you would not be even a little suspicious and inclined to back off if someone said they’d give you $6.50 in exchange for $3+$3? Not because your belief in arithmetic is shaky, but because your trust that people will give you fifty cents for no obvious reason is nonexistent and there is probably something going on?
In my hypothetical, we can suppose that they are perfectly aware of the existence of the other group. That is, the people who think that 3+4=7 are aware of the people who think that 3+4=6, and vice versa. This will provide them with all the explanation they need for the offer. They will think, “this person is one of those people who think that 3+4=7”, and that will explain to them the deal. They will see that the others are trying to profit off them, but they will believe that the attempt will fail, because after all, 3+4=6.
As a matter of fact, in my hypothetical the people who believe that 3+4=6 would be just as likely to offer those who believe that 3+4=7 a deal in an attempt to money-pump them. Since they believe that 3+4=6, and are aware of the belief of the others, they might offer the others the following deal: “give us $6.50, and then the next day we will give you $3 and the day after $4.” Since they believe that 3+4=6, they will think they are ripping the others off.
I’m not denying that in a thought experiment, agents that are wrong about arithmetic can be money-pumped. I’m skeptical that in reality, human beings that are wrong about arithmetic can be money-pumped on an interesting scale.
The thought experiment wasn’t intended to be applied to humans as they really are. It was intended to explain humans as they really are by imagining a competition between two kinds of humans—a group that is like us, and a group that is not like us. In the hypothetical scenario, the group like us wins.
And I think you completely missed my point, by the way. My point was that arithmetic is not merely a matter of agreement. The truth of a sum is not merely a matter of the majority of humanity agreeing on it. If more than half of humans believed that 3+4=6, this would not make 3+4=6 be true. Arithmetic truth is independent of majority opinion (call the view that arithmetic truth is a matter of consensus within a human group “arithmetic relativism” or “the consensus theory of arithmetic truth”). I argued for this as follows: suppose that half of humanity—nay, more than half—believed that 3+4=6, and a minority believed that 3+4=7. I argued that the minority with the latter belief would have the advantage. But if consensus defined arithmetic truth, that should not be the case. Therefore consensus does not define arithmetic truth.
My point is this: that arithmetic relativism is false. In your response, you actually assumed this point, because you’ve been assuming all along that 3+4=6 is false, even though in my hypothetical scenario a majority of humanity believed it is true.
So you’ve actually assumed my conclusion but questioned the argument that I used to argue for the conclusion.
And this, in turn, was to illustrate a more general point about consensus theories and relativism. The context was a discussion of morality. I had been interpreted as advocating what amounts to a consensus theory of morality, and I was trying to explain why may specific claims do not entail a consensus theory of morality, but are also compatible with a theory of morality as independent of consensus.
In sum, you seem to be saying that morality involves arithmetic, and being wrong about arithmetic can hurt me, so being wrong about morality can hurt me.
There’s no particular connection between morality and arithmetic that I’m aware of. I brought up arithmetic to illustrate a point. My hope was that arithmetic is less problematic, less apt to lead us down philosophical blind allies, so that by using it to illustrate a point I wasn’t opening up yet another can of worms.
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.
Indeed it is not an argument. Yet I can still say, “So what?” I am not going to worry about something that has no effect on my happiness. If there is some way it would have an effect, then I’d care about it.
The fact that you are amoral does not mean there is anything wrong with morality, and
is not an argument against it. You might as well be saying “there is a perfectly good rational argument that the world is round, but I prefer to be irrational”.
The difference is, believing “The world is round” affects whether I win or not, whereas believing “I’m morally in the wrong” does not.
That doesn’t constitute an argument unless you can explain why your winning
is the only thing that should matter.
Yeah, I said it’s not an argument. Yet again I can only ask, “So what?” (And this doesn’t make me amoral in the sense of not having moral sentiments. If you tell me me it is wrong to kill a dog for no reason, I will agree because I will interpret that as, “We both would be disgusted at the prospect of killing a dog for no reason.” But you seem to be saying there is something more.)
That doesn’t constitute an argument unless you can explain why your winning is the only thing that should matter.
The wordings “affect my winning” and “matter” mean the same thing to me. I take “The world is round” seriously because it matters for my actions. I do not see how “I’m morally in the wrong”* matters for my actions. (Nor how “I’m pan-galactically in the wrong” matters. )
*EDIT: in the sense that you seem to be using it (quite possibly because I don’t know what that sense even is!).
Yeah, I said it’s not an argument. Yet again I can only ask, “So what?”
So being wrong and not caring you are in the wrong is not the same as being right.
(And this doesn’t make me amoral in the sense of not having moral sentiments. If you tell me me it is wrong to kill a dog for no reason, I will agree because I will interpret that as, “We both would be disgusted at the prospect of killing a dog for no reason.” But you seem to be saying there is something more.)
Yes. I am saying that moral sentiments can be wrong, and that that can be realised through reason, and that getting morality right matters more than anything.
The wordings “affect my winning” and “matter” mean the same thing to me.
But they don’t mean the same thing. Morality matters more than anything else by definition. You don’t prove anything by adopting an idiosyncratic private language.
I take “The world is round” seriously because it matters for my actions. I do not see how “I’m morally in the wrong”* matters for my actions. (Nor how “I’m pan-galactically in the wrong” matters. )
The question is whether mattering for your actions is morally justifiable.
So being wrong and not caring you are in the wrong is not the same as being right.
Yet I still don’t care, and by your own admission I suffer not in the slightest from my lack of caring.
I am saying that moral sentiments can be wrong, and that that can be realised through reason, and that getting morality right matters more than anything.
Zorg says that getting pangalacticism right matters more than anything. He cannot tell us why it matters, but boy it really does matter.
Morality matters more than anything else by definition.
Which would be? If you refer me to the dictionary again, I think we’re done here.
The fact that you are not going to worry about morality, does not make morality a) false b) meaningless or c) subjective. Can I take it you are no longer arguing for any of claims a) b) or c) ?
The difference is, believing “The world is round” affects whether I win or not, whereas believing “I’m morally in the wrong” does not.
You have not succeeded in showing that winning is the most important thing.
The fact that you are not going to worry about morality, does not make morality a) false b) meaningless or c) subjective. Can I take it you are no longer arguing for any of claims a) b) or c) ?
I’ve never argued (a), I’m still arguing (actually just informing you) that the words “objective morality” are meaningless to me, and I’m still arguing (c) but only in the sense that it is equivalent to (b): in other words, I can only await some argument that morality is objective. (But first I’d need a definition!)
You have not succeeded in showing that winning is the most important thing.
I’m using the word winning as a synonym for “getting what I want,” and I understand the most important thing to mean “what I care about most.” And I mean “want” and “care about” in a way that makes it tautological. Keep in mind I want other people to be happy, not suffer, etc. Nothing either of us have argued so far indicates we would necessarily have different moral sentiments about anything.
The fact that you are not going to worry about morality, does not make morality a) false b) meaningless or c) subjective. Can I take it you are no longer arguing for any of claims a) b) or c) ?
I’ve never argued (a), I’m still arguing (actually just informing you) that the words “objective morality” are meaningless to me
You are not actually being all that informative, since there remains a distinct supsicion that when you say some X is meaningless-to-you, that is a
proxy for I-don’t-agree-with-it. I notice throughout these discussions that
you never reference accepted dictiionary definitions as a basis for meaningfullness,
but instead always offer some kind of idiosyncratic personal testimony.
and I’m still arguing (c) but only in the sense that it is equivalent to (b): in other words, I can only await some argument that morality is objective. (But first I’d need a definition!)
What is wrong with dictionary definitions?
You have not succeeded in showing that winning is the most important thing.
I’m using the word winning as a synonym for “getting what I want,” and I understand the most important thing to mean “what I care about most.”
That doesn’t affect anything. You still have no proof for the revised version.
And I mean “want” and “care about” in a way that makes it tautological. Keep in mind I want other people to be happy
Other people out there in the non-existent Objective World?
, not suffer, etc. Nothing either of us have argued so far indicates we would necessarily have different moral sentiments about anything.
I don’t think moral anti-realists are generally immoral people. I do think it is an intellectual mistake, whether or not you care about that.
You are not actually being all that informative, since there remains a distinct supsicion that when you say some X is meaningless-to-you, that is a proxy for I-don’t-agree-with-it.
Zorg said the same thing about his pan-galactic ethics.
I notice throughout these discussions that you never reference accepted dictiionary definitions as a basis for meaningfullness, but instead always offer some kind of idiosyncratic personal testimony.
Did you even read the post we’re commenting on?
That doesn’t affect anything. You still have no proof for the revised version.
Wait, you want proof that getting what I want is what I care about most?
Other people out there in the non-existent Objective World?
Read what I wrote again.
I don’t think moral anti-realists are generally immoral peopl
You say that objective values are incoherent, but you offer no argument for it. Presenting philosophical claims without justification isn’t something different to philosophy, or something better. It isn’t good rationality either. Rationality is as rationality does.
By incoherent I simply mean “I don’t know how to interpret the words.” So far no one seems to want to help me do that, so I can only await a coherent definition of objective ethics and related terms. Then possibly an argument could start. (But this is all like deja vu from the recent metaethics threads.)
Can you interpret the word “morality is subjective”? How about the the words “morality is not subjective”?
“Morality is subjective”: Each person has their own moral sentiments.
“Morality is not subjective”: Each person does not have their own moral sentiments. Or there is something more than each person’s moral sentiments that is worth calling “moral.” <--- But I ask, what is that “something more”?
OK. That is not what “subjective” means. What it means is that if something is subjective, an opinion is guaranteed to be correct or the last word on the matter just because it is the person’s opinion. And “objective” therefore means that it is possible for someone to be wrong in their opinion.
I don’t claim moral sentiments are correct, but simply that a person’s moral sentiment is their moral sentiment. They feel some emotions, and that’s all I know. You are seeming to say there is some way those emotions can be correct or incorrect, but in what sense? Or probably a clearer way to ask the question is, “What disadvantage can I anticipate if my emotions are incorrect?”
An emotion, such as a feeling of elation or disgust, is not correct or incorrect per se; but an emotion per se is no basis for a moral sentiment, because moral sentiment has to be about something. You could think gay marriage is wrong because homosexuality disgusts you, or you could feel serial-killing is good because it elates you, but that doesn’t mean the conclusions you are coming to are right. It may be a cast iron fact that you have those particular sentiments, but that says nothing about the correctness of their content, any more than any opinion you entertain is automatically correct.
ETA The disadvantages you can expect if your emotions are incorrect include being in the wrong whilst feeling you are in the right. Much as if you are entertaining incorrect opinions.
What if I don’t care about being wrong (if that’s really the only consequence I experience)? What if I just want to win?
Then you are, or are likely to be, morally in the wrong. That is of course possible. You can choose to do wrong. But it doesn’t constitute any kind of argument. Someone can elect to ignore the roundness of the world for some perverse reason, but that doesn’t make ”!he world is round” false or meaningless or subjective.
Indeed it is not an argument. Yet I can still say, “So what?” I am not going to worry about something that has no effect on my happiness. If there is some way it would have an effect, then I’d care about it.
The difference is, believing “The world is round” affects whether I win or not, whereas believing “I’m morally in the wrong” does not.
That is apparently true in your hypothetical, but it’s not true in the real world. Just as the roundness of the world has consequences, the wrongness of an action has consequences. For example, if you kill someone, then your fate is going to depend (probabilistically) on whether you were in the right (e.g. he attacked and you were defending your life) or in the wrong (e.g. you murdered him when he caught you burgling his house). The more in the right you were, then, ceteris paribus, the better your chances are.
You’re interpreting “I’m morally in the wrong” to mean something like, “Other people will react badly to my actions,” in which case I fully agree with you that it would affect my winning. Peterdjones apparently does not mean it that way, though.
Actually I am not. I am interpreting “I’m morally wrong” to mean something like, “I made an error of arithmetic in an area where other people depend on me.”
An error of arithmetic is an error of arithmetic regardless of whether any other people catch it, and regardless of whether any other people react badly to it. It is not, however, causally disconnected from their reaction, because, even though an error of arithmetic is what it is regardless of people’s reaction to it, nevertheless people will probably react badly to it if you’ve made it in an area where other people depend on you. For example, if you made an error of arithmetic in taking a test, it is probably the case that the test-grader did not make the same error of arithmetic and so it is probably the case that he will react badly to your error. Nevertheless, your error of arithmetic is an error and is not merely getting-a-different-answer-from-the-grader. Even in the improbable case where you luck out and the test grader makes exactly the same error as you and so you get full marks, nevertheless, you did still make that error.
Even if everyone except you wakes up tomorrow and believes that 3+4=6, whereas you still remember that 3+4=7, nevertheless in many contexts you had better not switch to what the majority believe. For example, if you are designing something that will stand up, like a building or a bridge, you had better get your math right, you had better correctly add 3+4=7 in the course of designing the edifice if that sum is ever called on calculating whether the structure will stand up.
If humanity divides into two factions, one faction of which believes that 3+4=6 and the other of which believes that 3+4=7, then the latter faction, the one that adds correctly, will in all likelihood over time prevail on account of being right. This is true even if the latter group starts out in the minority. Just imagine what sort of tricks you could pull on people who believe that 3+4=6. Because of the truth of 3+4=7, eventually people who are aware of this truth will succeed and those who believe that 3+4=6 will fail, and over time the vast majority of society will once again come to accept that 3+4=7.
And similarly with morality.
Nothing’s jumping out at me that would seriously impact a group’s effectiveness from day to day. I rarely find myself needing to add three and four in particular, and even more rarely in high-stakes situations. What did you have in mind?
Suppose you think that 3+4=6.
I offer you the following deal: give me $3 today and $4 tomorrow, and I will give you a 50 cent profit the day after tomorrow, by returning to you $6.50. You can take as much advantage of this as you want. In fact, if you like, you can give me $3 this second, $4 in one second, and in the following second I will give you back all your money plus 50 cents profit—that is, I will give you $6.50 in two seconds.
Since you think that 3+4=6, you will jump at this amazing deal.
I find that most people who believe absurd things still have functioning filters for “something is fishy about this”. I talked to a person who believed that the world was going to end in 2012, and I offered to give them a dollar right then in exchange for a hundred after the world didn’t end, but of course they didn’t take it: something was fishy about that.
Also, dollars are divisible: someone who believes that 3+4=6 may not believe that 300+400=600.
If he isn’t willing to take your trade, then his alleged belief that the world will end in 2012 is weak at best. In contrast, if you offer to give me $6.50 in exchange for $3 plus $3, then I will take your offer, because I really do believe that 3+3=6.
On the matter of divisibility, you are essentially proposing that someone with faulty arithmetic can effectively repair the gap by translating arithmetic problems away from the gap (e.g. by realizing that 3 dollars is 300 pennies and doing arithmetic on the pennies). But in order for them to do this consistently they need to know where the gap is, and if they know that, then it’s not a genuine gap. If they realize that their belief that 3+4=6 is faulty, then they don’t really believe it. In contrast, if they don’t realize that their belief that 3+4=6 is faulty, then they won’t consistently translate arithmetic problems away from the gap, and so my task becomes a simple matter of finding areas where they don’t translate problems away from the gap, but instead fall in.
Are you saying that you would not be even a little suspicious and inclined to back off if someone said they’d give you $6.50 in exchange for $3+$3? Not because your belief in arithmetic is shaky, but because your trust that people will give you fifty cents for no obvious reason is nonexistent and there is probably something going on?
I’m not denying that in a thought experiment, agents that are wrong about arithmetic can be money-pumped. I’m skeptical that in reality, human beings that are wrong about arithmetic can be money-pumped on an interesting scale.
In my hypothetical, we can suppose that they are perfectly aware of the existence of the other group. That is, the people who think that 3+4=7 are aware of the people who think that 3+4=6, and vice versa. This will provide them with all the explanation they need for the offer. They will think, “this person is one of those people who think that 3+4=7”, and that will explain to them the deal. They will see that the others are trying to profit off them, but they will believe that the attempt will fail, because after all, 3+4=6.
As a matter of fact, in my hypothetical the people who believe that 3+4=6 would be just as likely to offer those who believe that 3+4=7 a deal in an attempt to money-pump them. Since they believe that 3+4=6, and are aware of the belief of the others, they might offer the others the following deal: “give us $6.50, and then the next day we will give you $3 and the day after $4.” Since they believe that 3+4=6, they will think they are ripping the others off.
The thought experiment wasn’t intended to be applied to humans as they really are. It was intended to explain humans as they really are by imagining a competition between two kinds of humans—a group that is like us, and a group that is not like us. In the hypothetical scenario, the group like us wins.
And I think you completely missed my point, by the way. My point was that arithmetic is not merely a matter of agreement. The truth of a sum is not merely a matter of the majority of humanity agreeing on it. If more than half of humans believed that 3+4=6, this would not make 3+4=6 be true. Arithmetic truth is independent of majority opinion (call the view that arithmetic truth is a matter of consensus within a human group “arithmetic relativism” or “the consensus theory of arithmetic truth”). I argued for this as follows: suppose that half of humanity—nay, more than half—believed that 3+4=6, and a minority believed that 3+4=7. I argued that the minority with the latter belief would have the advantage. But if consensus defined arithmetic truth, that should not be the case. Therefore consensus does not define arithmetic truth.
My point is this: that arithmetic relativism is false. In your response, you actually assumed this point, because you’ve been assuming all along that 3+4=6 is false, even though in my hypothetical scenario a majority of humanity believed it is true.
So you’ve actually assumed my conclusion but questioned the argument that I used to argue for the conclusion.
And this, in turn, was to illustrate a more general point about consensus theories and relativism. The context was a discussion of morality. I had been interpreted as advocating what amounts to a consensus theory of morality, and I was trying to explain why may specific claims do not entail a consensus theory of morality, but are also compatible with a theory of morality as independent of consensus.
I agree with this, if that makes any difference.
In sum, you seem to be saying that morality involves arithmetic, and being wrong about arithmetic can hurt me, so being wrong about morality can hurt me.
There’s no particular connection between morality and arithmetic that I’m aware of. I brought up arithmetic to illustrate a point. My hope was that arithmetic is less problematic, less apt to lead us down philosophical blind allies, so that by using it to illustrate a point I wasn’t opening up yet another can of worms.
Then you basically seem to be saying I should signal a certain morality if I want to get on well in society. Well I do agree.
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.
The fact that you are amoral does not mean there is anything wrong with morality, and is not an argument against it. You might as well be saying “there is a perfectly good rational argument that the world is round, but I prefer to be irrational”.
That doesn’t constitute an argument unless you can explain why your winning is the only thing that should matter.
Yeah, I said it’s not an argument. Yet again I can only ask, “So what?” (And this doesn’t make me amoral in the sense of not having moral sentiments. If you tell me me it is wrong to kill a dog for no reason, I will agree because I will interpret that as, “We both would be disgusted at the prospect of killing a dog for no reason.” But you seem to be saying there is something more.)
The wordings “affect my winning” and “matter” mean the same thing to me. I take “The world is round” seriously because it matters for my actions. I do not see how “I’m morally in the wrong”* matters for my actions. (Nor how “I’m pan-galactically in the wrong” matters. )
*EDIT: in the sense that you seem to be using it (quite possibly because I don’t know what that sense even is!).
So being wrong and not caring you are in the wrong is not the same as being right.
Yes. I am saying that moral sentiments can be wrong, and that that can be realised through reason, and that getting morality right matters more than anything.
But they don’t mean the same thing. Morality matters more than anything else by definition. You don’t prove anything by adopting an idiosyncratic private language.
The question is whether mattering for your actions is morally justifiable.
Yet I still don’t care, and by your own admission I suffer not in the slightest from my lack of caring.
Zorg says that getting pangalacticism right matters more than anything. He cannot tell us why it matters, but boy it really does matter.
Which would be? If you refer me to the dictionary again, I think we’re done here.
The fact that you are not going to worry about morality, does not make morality a) false b) meaningless or c) subjective. Can I take it you are no longer arguing for any of claims a) b) or c) ?
You have not succeeded in showing that winning is the most important thing.
I’ve never argued (a), I’m still arguing (actually just informing you) that the words “objective morality” are meaningless to me, and I’m still arguing (c) but only in the sense that it is equivalent to (b): in other words, I can only await some argument that morality is objective. (But first I’d need a definition!)
I’m using the word winning as a synonym for “getting what I want,” and I understand the most important thing to mean “what I care about most.” And I mean “want” and “care about” in a way that makes it tautological. Keep in mind I want other people to be happy, not suffer, etc. Nothing either of us have argued so far indicates we would necessarily have different moral sentiments about anything.
You are not actually being all that informative, since there remains a distinct supsicion that when you say some X is meaningless-to-you, that is a proxy for I-don’t-agree-with-it. I notice throughout these discussions that you never reference accepted dictiionary definitions as a basis for meaningfullness, but instead always offer some kind of idiosyncratic personal testimony.
What is wrong with dictionary definitions?
That doesn’t affect anything. You still have no proof for the revised version.
Other people out there in the non-existent Objective World?
I don’t think moral anti-realists are generally immoral people. I do think it is an intellectual mistake, whether or not you care about that.
Zorg said the same thing about his pan-galactic ethics.
Did you even read the post we’re commenting on?
Wait, you want proof that getting what I want is what I care about most?
Read what I wrote again.
Read.