Are you implying there’s an objectively (not written in the stars, but deductible from human brains) optimal way to dress? That strikes me as strange; I’m pretty sure the optimal world would contain a bunch of different cultures, and I can’t see why they’d share clothing styles more than any other characteristic; also, implementations of human minds that can wear clothes in the first place don’t strike me as particularly good.
What’s strange about being a fashion relativist, then? (Well, not a complete relativist—accepting there are objectively ugly ways to dress, but anything beyond that is culture-dependent or arbitrary.)
Note that the flavor of objective morals I’m referring to is not “There’s a magic stone tablet in the fabric of the universe, which humans can’t access (so if an AI finds it and it says ‘Kill all humans’ then I want the AI to do so).”, more like “Considerations (that move me to accept considerations (that move me to accept considerations (...))) that move me, in a chain of changing my values according my meta-values, not by external accident”.
I just thought that if you took some of the posts here, and did a find-replace on “moral” to “fashionable”, they might make just as much sense.
Example:
Note that the flavor of objective [fashion] I’m referring to is not “There’s a magic stone tablet in the fabric of the universe, which humans can’t access (so if an AI finds it and it says ‘[Wear] all humans’ then I want the AI to do so).”, more like “Considerations (that move me to accept considerations (that move me to accept considerations (...))) that move me, in a chain of changing my [wardrobe] according my meta-[aesthetics], not by external accident”.
That’s the “non-relativism” bit. So you claim that if cosmic rays suddenly struck everyone in the world, making them believe that wearing colanders on one’s head was the most beautiful thing ever (with since aesthetic appreciation and all that), colanders would still be ugly in some real sense, and it would be a sad thing that knowledge of their ugliness was lost?
Also, nitpick:
chain of changing my [wardrobe] according my meta-[aesthetics]
That one doesn’t work, you lose the recursion. Changing your wardrobe doesn’t change the aesthetics that will change your wardrobe later on. Does it?
I claim nothing. I just thought it was an interesting line of thought, one that helped me see the meta-morality debate in a new light. Discussing a vantage point, so to speak. Sorry for bringing it up; I doubt we’ll be making any progress on meta-aesthetics, if such a thing existed.
EDIT
Downvoted for disagreement it was.
The key point in my argument was that morality needs to be objective because it leads to objective sanctions: someone is either imprisoned or not.
There is no such parallel with fashion.
At first glance, morality looks as though it should work objectively. The mere fact that we praise and condemn people’s moral behaviour indicates that we think a common set of rules is applicable both to us and to them. We can say that something is good-to-Mary but evil-to-John, but we cannot act on that basis, because someone is either in jail or they are not. To put it another way, if ethics were strongly subjective anyone could get off the hook by devising a system of personal morality in which whatever they felt like doing was permissible. It would be hard to see the difference between such a state of affairs and having no morality at all. The subtler sort of subjectivist (or relativist) tries to ameliorate this problem by claiming that moral principles are defined at the societal level. Although this constrains individuals to societal norms (as do legal systems), similar problems the get-out-of-jail objection re-occurs at the societal level; a society (such as the Thuggees or Assassins) could declare that murder is OK with them.
The foregoing assumes a rational or explicable relationship between the doing of right and wrong, and the subsequent allocation of praise and blame, reward and punishment. It could be argued that we can do without this, and just punish arbitrarily, and not bother reasoning things out. Since are not all in agreement on a single objective morality, that is to some extent the case. In democracies, punishment and reward are decided by an averaging out of opinion, and in other societies by the whim of the powerful. However, this is no a desirable state of affairs even if it is an inevitable one. It is desirable that people behave well based on their own understanding. rather than threats, and it is desirable that justice should be explicable and not arbitrary. That neither standard can be completely fullfilled is not justfication for abandoning them; some reasoning-based ethics is better than none.
These considerations are of course an appeal to how morality seems to work as a ‘language game’ and as such do not by themselves put ethics on a firm foundation. They make a prima facie case for the objectivity of morality, but the “language game” could be groundless. The epistemology and metaphysics of the issue need to be considered as well.
I was afraid of this: getting into a morality debate when all I wanted to do was identify a quick and simple parallel. The reason I was afraid of it is that I don’t have the answers, I don’t like standard philosophical terminology (objectivism, relativism, etc.) since I can’t translate it, and I’m not very good at arguing in-depth through time-delayed text.
It occurs to me that there are likely many more fashion relativists than moral relativists in this community.
Are you implying there’s an objectively (not written in the stars, but deductible from human brains) optimal way to dress? That strikes me as strange; I’m pretty sure the optimal world would contain a bunch of different cultures, and I can’t see why they’d share clothing styles more than any other characteristic; also, implementations of human minds that can wear clothes in the first place don’t strike me as particularly good.
I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it before. Objective morals strike me as strange, too.
What’s strange about being a fashion relativist, then? (Well, not a complete relativist—accepting there are objectively ugly ways to dress, but anything beyond that is culture-dependent or arbitrary.)
Note that the flavor of objective morals I’m referring to is not “There’s a magic stone tablet in the fabric of the universe, which humans can’t access (so if an AI finds it and it says ‘Kill all humans’ then I want the AI to do so).”, more like “Considerations (that move me to accept considerations (that move me to accept considerations (...))) that move me, in a chain of changing my values according my meta-values, not by external accident”.
I just thought that if you took some of the posts here, and did a find-replace on “moral” to “fashionable”, they might make just as much sense.
Example:
That’s the “non-relativism” bit. So you claim that if cosmic rays suddenly struck everyone in the world, making them believe that wearing colanders on one’s head was the most beautiful thing ever (with since aesthetic appreciation and all that), colanders would still be ugly in some real sense, and it would be a sad thing that knowledge of their ugliness was lost?
Also, nitpick:
That one doesn’t work, you lose the recursion. Changing your wardrobe doesn’t change the aesthetics that will change your wardrobe later on. Does it?
I claim nothing. I just thought it was an interesting line of thought, one that helped me see the meta-morality debate in a new light. Discussing a vantage point, so to speak. Sorry for bringing it up; I doubt we’ll be making any progress on meta-aesthetics, if such a thing existed.
EDIT Downvoted for disagreement it was. The key point in my argument was that morality needs to be objective because it leads to objective sanctions: someone is either imprisoned or not. There is no such parallel with fashion.
I didn’t downvote you.
What?
Why Objectivism?
At first glance, morality looks as though it should work objectively. The mere fact that we praise and condemn people’s moral behaviour indicates that we think a common set of rules is applicable both to us and to them. We can say that something is good-to-Mary but evil-to-John, but we cannot act on that basis, because someone is either in jail or they are not. To put it another way, if ethics were strongly subjective anyone could get off the hook by devising a system of personal morality in which whatever they felt like doing was permissible. It would be hard to see the difference between such a state of affairs and having no morality at all. The subtler sort of subjectivist (or relativist) tries to ameliorate this problem by claiming that moral principles are defined at the societal level. Although this constrains individuals to societal norms (as do legal systems), similar problems the get-out-of-jail objection re-occurs at the societal level; a society (such as the Thuggees or Assassins) could declare that murder is OK with them.
The foregoing assumes a rational or explicable relationship between the doing of right and wrong, and the subsequent allocation of praise and blame, reward and punishment. It could be argued that we can do without this, and just punish arbitrarily, and not bother reasoning things out. Since are not all in agreement on a single objective morality, that is to some extent the case. In democracies, punishment and reward are decided by an averaging out of opinion, and in other societies by the whim of the powerful. However, this is no a desirable state of affairs even if it is an inevitable one. It is desirable that people behave well based on their own understanding. rather than threats, and it is desirable that justice should be explicable and not arbitrary. That neither standard can be completely fullfilled is not justfication for abandoning them; some reasoning-based ethics is better than none.
These considerations are of course an appeal to how morality seems to work as a ‘language game’ and as such do not by themselves put ethics on a firm foundation. They make a prima facie case for the objectivity of morality, but the “language game” could be groundless. The epistemology and metaphysics of the issue need to be considered as well.
I was afraid of this: getting into a morality debate when all I wanted to do was identify a quick and simple parallel. The reason I was afraid of it is that I don’t have the answers, I don’t like standard philosophical terminology (objectivism, relativism, etc.) since I can’t translate it, and I’m not very good at arguing in-depth through time-delayed text.
I’m sorry; I don’t have any answers for you.
Downvoted for disagreement, I presume