All we have is factual questions about how people’s “morality cores” vary in time and from person to person, how compelling their voices are, finding patterns in their outputs, etc. Can someone explain what problem metaethics is supposed to solve?
If there is a problem worth solving, it has to be related to “how compelling their voices are”. In the philosophy of logic, we classify “Modus Ponens” differently from “Appeal to Inappropriate Authority”—and not simply by asking statistically which is more convincing. An empirical discovery that arguments quoting Justin Bieber are highly likely to convince the listener do not move such arguments out of the “fallacy” category.
Similarly, if metaethics is worthy of study, it must be able to say that certain arguments are better than others independently of their likelihood to convince the listener, and why.
If you believe that categories like “fallacy” are useless, then logic is just a crude stab at the true science of persuasion. If you believe there is no analogous category in ethics, it’s unlikely that you’ll find anything worthy of study.
But logic works! For example, establishing a non-contradictory axiom system, then observing how no contradictions seem to occur as we make deductions within the system. Appeal to inappropriate authority does not work! (Except when authority correlates with truth, and when it’s not screened off). On the other hand, I don’t see how morality can be said to work or not.
There may be a branch of logic which is a science of persuasion, but what it endorses and prescribes relies much on logic as a science of correct inference.
But logic works! For example, establishing a non-contradictory axiom system, then observing how no contradictions seem to occur as we make deductions within the system.
You may establish a formal system of morality, make up some requirements (say, no theorem which starts with “you ought to prefer” is produced within the system), and if you were lucky with the inference rules and axioms, then you would see that your morality works (e.g. no matter how hard you try, you can’t derive “you ought to prefer killing kittens”). Clearly, that doesn’t mean that the selected system of morality has the same status as logic.
The important question is, why non-occurence of contradictions is believed to be important for logic to work? Why even have a negation sign in our symbolic alphabet of logic? Without that, a contradiction couldn’t be even defined. The only answer I can think of is that logic is extremely strongly and universally supported by intuitions, or, if you want, by the brain architecture. Moral intuitions are more complex and variable.
The point was that we have reason why we don’t want contradictions: we want our inferences to be correct. So logic is instrumental there. Morality on the other hand seems to be something we wish to be a certain way, for its own sake.
Modus ponens works better than appeal to inappropriate authority wrt. making correct inferences. In the case of morality, what works better than what wrt. doing what?
You could ask why we would want correct inferences. But I don’t see a point in reducing further.
The analogy to morality would make sense if say we already made up our minds to ‘maximize happiness for the greatest number’, for then we can check that utilitarianism would do this, and hence is correct. But morality seems to be more complex than that.
I’m agreeing with Marius in thinking that ethics is about achieving some sort of reflective equilibrium. I’m just rejecting the analogy with logic there.
To summarize, with logic, we already know what we want. With morality, we don’t.
Very well said. It should be noted that there are logic problems most people get wrong. Valid reasoning is not defined by majority verdict or observation of patterns.
Similarly, if metaethics is worthy of study, it must be able to say that certain arguments are better than others independently of their likelihood to convince the listener, and why.
Fairly good analogy, but the question you have asked wants an answer. What, in your opinion, makes modus ponens better than appeal to authority, independently of its persuasiveness? I am not sure whether I can formulate it explicitly, and without an explicit formulation it is difficult to apply the idea to ethics.
All my answers to this are flawed.
My best is: It’s like Euclidean geometry: humans (and other species) are constructed in a way that Euclidean geometry fits fairly well. The formalized rules of Euclidean geometry match spacial reality even better than what we’ve evolved, so we prefer them… but they’re similar enough to what we’ve evolved that we accept them rather than alternate geometries. Euclidean geometry isn’t right—reality is more complex than any system of geometry—but the combination of “works well enough”, “improves on our evolved heuristic”, and “matches our evolved heuristic well enough” combine to give it a privileged place. Just so, that system of formal logic works well enough, improves on our evolved reasoning heuristics, and yet matches those heuristics well enough… so we give formal logic a privileged place. The privilege is sufficient that many believe logic is the basis of Truth, that many theists believe that even angels or deities cannot be both A and not-A, and that people who use fallacies to convince others of truths are frequently considered to be liars.
This does not sufficiently satisfy me.
An alternate answer, that a believer in absolute morality or logic might like, is that logic actually deserves a higher place than Euclidean geometry. Where geometry can be tested and modified wherever the data support a modification, logic can’t. No matter how many times our modus ponens does worse than an Appeal to Tradition or Ad Populum in some area of inquiry, we still don’t say “ok, alter the rules of logic for this area of inquiry to make Ad Populum the correct method there and Modus Ponens the fallacious method there”, we just question our premises, our methods of detection of answers, etc. So logic is special and is above the empirical method.
I am unsatisfied by the above paragraph as well.
A third possibility is that it’s not—it’s just a code of conduct/signalling. We agree to only use logic to convince one another because it works well, because the use of other methods of persuasion can often be detected and punished, and because the people who can rely on logic rather than on other methods of persuasion are smarter and more trustworthy. In specific instances, logic might not be the best way to learn something or to convince others, but getting caught supporting or using contraband methods will be punished so we all use/support logic unless we’re sure we can get away with the contraband.
This is an unsatisfying explanation to me as well.
Another answer (which I’m not sure is the answer) is that in logic or mathematics, a person is more likely to be convinced by a random correct proof than a random flawed proof; and if a person is convinced by a flawed proof it is easy to change their mind by pointing out the flaw in the proof; but if a person is convinced by a correct proof, then it is difficult to change their mind by incorrectly claiming there is a flaw. Of course I am being sloppy and nontechnical here; I bet there is a subtle, technical sense in which, under reflection, Modus Ponens is more appealing than Appeal To Justin Bieber.
Your second answer is the nearest to being right, but I wouldn’t put it quite like that.
An alternate answer, that a believer in absolute morality or logic might like, is that logic actually deserves a higher place than Euclidean geometry. Where geometry can be tested and modified wherever the data support a modification, logic can’t.
Just to clarify: Here you’re talking about Euclidean geometry as an empirical theory of space (or perhaps space-time), as opposed to Euclidean geometry as a branch of mathematics. Here is how ‘empirical’ and ‘mathematical’ Euclidean geometry come apart: The latter requires that we make methodological decisions (i) to hold the axioms true come what may and (ii) to refrain from making empirical predictions solely on the basis of our theorems.
I don’t think there is any important sense in which logic is ‘higher’ than Euclidean-geometry-as-mathematics.
No matter how many times our modus ponens does worse than an Appeal to Tradition or Ad Populum in some area of inquiry, we still don’t say “ok, alter the rules of logic for this area of inquiry to make Ad Populum the correct method there and Modus Ponens the fallacious method there”
I don’t think this makes sense.
What does it mean for modus ponens to “do worse” than something? It might “do badly” in virtue of there not being any relevant statements of the form “A” and “if A then B” lying around. That would hardly make MP “fallacious” though. It might be that by deducing “B” from “A” and “if A then B” we thereby deduce something false. But then either “A” or “if A then B” must have been false (or at least non-true), and it hardly counts against MP that it loses reliability when applied to non-true premises.
(You might want to object to the (“loaded”) terminology of “truth” and “falsity”, but then it would be up to you to say what it means for MP to be “fallacious”.)
Going back to prase’s question:
What, in your opinion, makes modus ponens better than appeal to authority, independently of its persuasiveness?
Users of a language have to agree on the meanings of primitive words like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘then’, or else they’re just ‘playing a different game’. (If your knights are moving like queens then whatever else you’re doing, you’re not playing chess.) What makes MP ‘reliable’ is that its validity is ‘built into’ the meanings of the words used to express it.
There’s nothing ‘mystical’ about this. It’s just that if you want to make complex statements with many subclauses, then you need conventions which dictate how the meaning of the whole statement decomposes into the meanings of the subclauses.
It might be that by deducing “B” from “A” and “if A then B” we thereby deduce something false. But then either “A” or “if A then B” must have been false
This is key. I like to say that we play logic with a stacked deck. We’ve dealt all the aces to a few logical rules. This doesn’t mean that logic isn’t in some sense absolute, but it removes any whiff of theology that might be suspected to be attached.
Users of a language have to agree on the meanings of primitive words like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘then’, or else they’re just ‘playing a different game’.
True, but there is more to being logical than just following linguistic convention. The philosophers’ classic “tonk” operator works like this: From A, one is licensed to infer “A tonk B”. From “A tonk B” one is licensed to infer B. Luckily for language users everywhere, there is no actual language with these conventions.
What does it mean for modus ponens to “do worse” than something? It might “do badly” in virtue of there not being any relevant statements of the form “A” and “if A then B” lying around. That would hardly make MP “fallacious” though. It might be that by deducing “B” from “A” and “if A then B” we thereby deduce something false. But then either “A” or “if A then B” must have been false (or at least non-true), and it hardly counts against MP that it loses reliability when applied to non-true premises.
Well, look at the Problem of Identity. I start with an apple or a boat, and I brush molecules off the apple or replace the boards on the boat, and end up with something other than an apple or a boat. This shouldn’t be a problem, except that I’ve got a big Modus Ponens chain (this is an apple; an apple with a molecule removed is still an apple) that fails when the chain gets long enough. To fix my problem, I’ve got to:
a. Say actually, there are almost no apples in the world. Modus Ponens rarely applies to the real world because almost no premises are perfectly true. When someone asks “is this delicious-looking fruit an apple”, I have to say “Dunno, probably not.”
b. Say actually, there are apples, and an apple missing a molecule remains an apple, and Modus Ponens works except in rare corner cases. And experience/tradition/etc can help us know where those corner cases are, so we can avoid mistakenly applying Modus Ponens when it will lead from correct premises to incorrect conclusions.
Here you’re talking about Euclidean geometry as an empirical theory of space (or perhaps space-time), as opposed to Euclidean geometry as a branch of mathematics
Well, Euclidean geometry is extremely interesting because it works relatively well as a theory of space, without actually relying on empirical data.
Users of a language have to agree on the meanings of primitive words like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘then’, or else they’re just ‘playing a different game’.
I hope that logic (like Euclidean geometry) is actually telling us something about the world, not just about the words/rules we started with. If modus ponens is purely a linguistic trick rather than a method of increasing our knowledge, then it’s as useful as chess. I think it’s far more useful, and lets us obtain better approximations of the actual world.
I like the first answer. The second one uses rather mystical “higher place”. It decouples logic from the real world, making it “true” without regard to observations. But logic is represented in human brains which are part of the world. The third answer seems too much instrumental. I don’t think punishment plays important role in establishing the status of logic. After all, “contraband” methods of persuasion are rarely punished.
Expanding on your first answer, it seems that logic is based on the most firm intuitions which almost all people have—maybe encoded in the low level hardware structure of human brains. People often have conflicting intuitions, but there seems to be some hierarchy which tells which intuitions are more basic and thus to be prefered. But this is still strongly related to persuasion, even if not in the open way of your third answer.
If this view of logic is correct, the generalisation to ethics is somewhat problematic. The ethical intuitions are more complicated and conflict in less obvious ways, and there doesn’t seem to be a universal set of prefered axioms. Any ethical theory thus may be perceived as arbitrary and controversial.
After all, “contraband” methods of persuasion are rarely punished
Contraband methods of persuasion are weakly punished, here and elsewhere, by means of public humiliation along with repudiation of the point trying to be made. Some people go so far as to give fallacious defenses of positions they hate (on anonymous forums) in order to weaken support for those positions. Interestingly, the contexts where we think logic is most important (like this site) are much less tolerant of fallacies than the contexts where we think logic is less important (politics or family dinner). So while I’d love to dismiss that cynical explanation, I can’t quite so easily.
People often have conflicting intuitions, but there seems to be some hierarchy which tells which intuitions are more basic and thus to be preferred.
Actually, there is indeed such a hierarchy in moral reasoning, and it has been better studied/elucidated (by Kohlberg, Rest, et al) than logical reasoning has.
If there is a problem worth solving, it has to be related to “how compelling their voices are”. In the philosophy of logic, we classify “Modus Ponens” differently from “Appeal to Inappropriate Authority”—and not simply by asking statistically which is more convincing. An empirical discovery that arguments quoting Justin Bieber are highly likely to convince the listener do not move such arguments out of the “fallacy” category. Similarly, if metaethics is worthy of study, it must be able to say that certain arguments are better than others independently of their likelihood to convince the listener, and why.
If you believe that categories like “fallacy” are useless, then logic is just a crude stab at the true science of persuasion. If you believe there is no analogous category in ethics, it’s unlikely that you’ll find anything worthy of study.
But logic works! For example, establishing a non-contradictory axiom system, then observing how no contradictions seem to occur as we make deductions within the system. Appeal to inappropriate authority does not work! (Except when authority correlates with truth, and when it’s not screened off). On the other hand, I don’t see how morality can be said to work or not.
There may be a branch of logic which is a science of persuasion, but what it endorses and prescribes relies much on logic as a science of correct inference.
You may establish a formal system of morality, make up some requirements (say, no theorem which starts with “you ought to prefer” is produced within the system), and if you were lucky with the inference rules and axioms, then you would see that your morality works (e.g. no matter how hard you try, you can’t derive “you ought to prefer killing kittens”). Clearly, that doesn’t mean that the selected system of morality has the same status as logic.
The important question is, why non-occurence of contradictions is believed to be important for logic to work? Why even have a negation sign in our symbolic alphabet of logic? Without that, a contradiction couldn’t be even defined. The only answer I can think of is that logic is extremely strongly and universally supported by intuitions, or, if you want, by the brain architecture. Moral intuitions are more complex and variable.
The point was that we have reason why we don’t want contradictions: we want our inferences to be correct. So logic is instrumental there. Morality on the other hand seems to be something we wish to be a certain way, for its own sake.
Modus ponens works better than appeal to inappropriate authority wrt. making correct inferences. In the case of morality, what works better than what wrt. doing what?
You could ask why we would want correct inferences. But I don’t see a point in reducing further.
The analogy to morality would make sense if say we already made up our minds to ‘maximize happiness for the greatest number’, for then we can check that utilitarianism would do this, and hence is correct. But morality seems to be more complex than that.
I’m agreeing with Marius in thinking that ethics is about achieving some sort of reflective equilibrium. I’m just rejecting the analogy with logic there.
To summarize, with logic, we already know what we want. With morality, we don’t.
I like your answer a lot. Thanks!
Very well said. It should be noted that there are logic problems most people get wrong. Valid reasoning is not defined by majority verdict or observation of patterns.
Fairly good analogy, but the question you have asked wants an answer. What, in your opinion, makes modus ponens better than appeal to authority, independently of its persuasiveness? I am not sure whether I can formulate it explicitly, and without an explicit formulation it is difficult to apply the idea to ethics.
All my answers to this are flawed. My best is: It’s like Euclidean geometry: humans (and other species) are constructed in a way that Euclidean geometry fits fairly well. The formalized rules of Euclidean geometry match spacial reality even better than what we’ve evolved, so we prefer them… but they’re similar enough to what we’ve evolved that we accept them rather than alternate geometries. Euclidean geometry isn’t right—reality is more complex than any system of geometry—but the combination of “works well enough”, “improves on our evolved heuristic”, and “matches our evolved heuristic well enough” combine to give it a privileged place. Just so, that system of formal logic works well enough, improves on our evolved reasoning heuristics, and yet matches those heuristics well enough… so we give formal logic a privileged place. The privilege is sufficient that many believe logic is the basis of Truth, that many theists believe that even angels or deities cannot be both A and not-A, and that people who use fallacies to convince others of truths are frequently considered to be liars. This does not sufficiently satisfy me.
An alternate answer, that a believer in absolute morality or logic might like, is that logic actually deserves a higher place than Euclidean geometry. Where geometry can be tested and modified wherever the data support a modification, logic can’t. No matter how many times our modus ponens does worse than an Appeal to Tradition or Ad Populum in some area of inquiry, we still don’t say “ok, alter the rules of logic for this area of inquiry to make Ad Populum the correct method there and Modus Ponens the fallacious method there”, we just question our premises, our methods of detection of answers, etc. So logic is special and is above the empirical method. I am unsatisfied by the above paragraph as well.
A third possibility is that it’s not—it’s just a code of conduct/signalling. We agree to only use logic to convince one another because it works well, because the use of other methods of persuasion can often be detected and punished, and because the people who can rely on logic rather than on other methods of persuasion are smarter and more trustworthy. In specific instances, logic might not be the best way to learn something or to convince others, but getting caught supporting or using contraband methods will be punished so we all use/support logic unless we’re sure we can get away with the contraband. This is an unsatisfying explanation to me as well.
Another answer (which I’m not sure is the answer) is that in logic or mathematics, a person is more likely to be convinced by a random correct proof than a random flawed proof; and if a person is convinced by a flawed proof it is easy to change their mind by pointing out the flaw in the proof; but if a person is convinced by a correct proof, then it is difficult to change their mind by incorrectly claiming there is a flaw. Of course I am being sloppy and nontechnical here; I bet there is a subtle, technical sense in which, under reflection, Modus Ponens is more appealing than Appeal To Justin Bieber.
Your second answer is the nearest to being right, but I wouldn’t put it quite like that.
Just to clarify: Here you’re talking about Euclidean geometry as an empirical theory of space (or perhaps space-time), as opposed to Euclidean geometry as a branch of mathematics. Here is how ‘empirical’ and ‘mathematical’ Euclidean geometry come apart: The latter requires that we make methodological decisions (i) to hold the axioms true come what may and (ii) to refrain from making empirical predictions solely on the basis of our theorems.
I don’t think there is any important sense in which logic is ‘higher’ than Euclidean-geometry-as-mathematics.
I don’t think this makes sense.
What does it mean for modus ponens to “do worse” than something? It might “do badly” in virtue of there not being any relevant statements of the form “A” and “if A then B” lying around. That would hardly make MP “fallacious” though. It might be that by deducing “B” from “A” and “if A then B” we thereby deduce something false. But then either “A” or “if A then B” must have been false (or at least non-true), and it hardly counts against MP that it loses reliability when applied to non-true premises.
(You might want to object to the (“loaded”) terminology of “truth” and “falsity”, but then it would be up to you to say what it means for MP to be “fallacious”.)
Going back to prase’s question:
Users of a language have to agree on the meanings of primitive words like ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘then’, or else they’re just ‘playing a different game’. (If your knights are moving like queens then whatever else you’re doing, you’re not playing chess.) What makes MP ‘reliable’ is that its validity is ‘built into’ the meanings of the words used to express it.
There’s nothing ‘mystical’ about this. It’s just that if you want to make complex statements with many subclauses, then you need conventions which dictate how the meaning of the whole statement decomposes into the meanings of the subclauses.
I agree but with some spin control.
This is key. I like to say that we play logic with a stacked deck. We’ve dealt all the aces to a few logical rules. This doesn’t mean that logic isn’t in some sense absolute, but it removes any whiff of theology that might be suspected to be attached.
True, but there is more to being logical than just following linguistic convention. The philosophers’ classic “tonk” operator works like this: From A, one is licensed to infer “A tonk B”. From “A tonk B” one is licensed to infer B. Luckily for language users everywhere, there is no actual language with these conventions.
Well, look at the Problem of Identity. I start with an apple or a boat, and I brush molecules off the apple or replace the boards on the boat, and end up with something other than an apple or a boat. This shouldn’t be a problem, except that I’ve got a big Modus Ponens chain (this is an apple; an apple with a molecule removed is still an apple) that fails when the chain gets long enough. To fix my problem, I’ve got to:
a. Say actually, there are almost no apples in the world. Modus Ponens rarely applies to the real world because almost no premises are perfectly true. When someone asks “is this delicious-looking fruit an apple”, I have to say “Dunno, probably not.”
b. Say actually, there are apples, and an apple missing a molecule remains an apple, and Modus Ponens works except in rare corner cases. And experience/tradition/etc can help us know where those corner cases are, so we can avoid mistakenly applying Modus Ponens when it will lead from correct premises to incorrect conclusions.
Well, Euclidean geometry is extremely interesting because it works relatively well as a theory of space, without actually relying on empirical data.
I hope that logic (like Euclidean geometry) is actually telling us something about the world, not just about the words/rules we started with. If modus ponens is purely a linguistic trick rather than a method of increasing our knowledge, then it’s as useful as chess. I think it’s far more useful, and lets us obtain better approximations of the actual world.
I like the first answer. The second one uses rather mystical “higher place”. It decouples logic from the real world, making it “true” without regard to observations. But logic is represented in human brains which are part of the world. The third answer seems too much instrumental. I don’t think punishment plays important role in establishing the status of logic. After all, “contraband” methods of persuasion are rarely punished.
Expanding on your first answer, it seems that logic is based on the most firm intuitions which almost all people have—maybe encoded in the low level hardware structure of human brains. People often have conflicting intuitions, but there seems to be some hierarchy which tells which intuitions are more basic and thus to be prefered. But this is still strongly related to persuasion, even if not in the open way of your third answer.
If this view of logic is correct, the generalisation to ethics is somewhat problematic. The ethical intuitions are more complicated and conflict in less obvious ways, and there doesn’t seem to be a universal set of prefered axioms. Any ethical theory thus may be perceived as arbitrary and controversial.
You are certainly at least partly right. But:
Contraband methods of persuasion are weakly punished, here and elsewhere, by means of public humiliation along with repudiation of the point trying to be made. Some people go so far as to give fallacious defenses of positions they hate (on anonymous forums) in order to weaken support for those positions. Interestingly, the contexts where we think logic is most important (like this site) are much less tolerant of fallacies than the contexts where we think logic is less important (politics or family dinner). So while I’d love to dismiss that cynical explanation, I can’t quite so easily.
Actually, there is indeed such a hierarchy in moral reasoning, and it has been better studied/elucidated (by Kohlberg, Rest, et al) than logical reasoning has.
So do you think aliens would develop a non-isomorphic system of logic?
I think it is possible.
That would seem to assume moral realism.