I side with Caledonian and Richard in these things—CEV is actually just begging the question. You start with human values and end up with human values.
Well, human values have given us war, poverty, cruelty, oppression, what have you...and yes, it was “values” that gave us these things. Very few humans want to do evil things, most actually think they are doing good when they do bad onto others. (See for instance: Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty).
Apart from that, I have to plug Nietzsche again: he has criticized morality as no other before him. Having read Nietzsche, I must say that CEV gives me the shivers—it smacks of the herd, and the herd tramples both weed and flower indiscriminately.
Incidentally, via Brian Leiter’s Blog I happened upon the dissertation (submitted in Harvard) by Paul Katsafanas: Practical Reason and the Structure of Reflective Agency who draws largely on Nietzsche. I have not read it (but plan to), but it sounds quite interesting and relevant.
From the abstract:
Confronted with normative claims as diverse as “murder is wrong” and “agents have reason to take the means to their ends,” we can ask how these claims might be justified. Constitutivism is the view that we can justify certain normative claims by showing that agents become committed to these claims simply in virtue of acting. I argue that the attractions of constitutivism are considerable. However, I show that the contemporary versions of constitutivism encounter insurmountable problems, because they operate with inadequate conceptions of action. I argue that we can generate a successful version of constitutivism by employing a more promising theory of action, which I develop by mining Nietzsche’s work on agency.
A “right” morality should not concentrate on humans or extrapolated humans, but on agency (this would then encompass all kinds of agents, not only primate descendants). Where there are no agents, there is no (necessity of) morality. Morality arises where agents interact, so focusing on “agents” seems the right thing to do, as this is where morality becomes relevant.
I side with Caledonian and Richard in these things—CEV is actually just begging the question. You start with human values and end up with human values.
Well, human values have given us war, poverty, cruelty, oppression, what have you...and yes, it was “values” that gave us these things. Very few humans want to do evil things, most actually think they are doing good when they do bad onto others. (See for instance: Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty).
Apart from that, I have to plug Nietzsche again: he has criticized morality as no other before him. Having read Nietzsche, I must say that CEV gives me the shivers—it smacks of the herd, and the herd tramples both weed and flower indiscriminately.
Incidentally, via Brian Leiter’s Blog I happened upon the dissertation (submitted in Harvard) by Paul Katsafanas: Practical Reason and the Structure of Reflective Agency who draws largely on Nietzsche. I have not read it (but plan to), but it sounds quite interesting and relevant.
From the abstract:
A “right” morality should not concentrate on humans or extrapolated humans, but on agency (this would then encompass all kinds of agents, not only primate descendants). Where there are no agents, there is no (necessity of) morality. Morality arises where agents interact, so focusing on “agents” seems the right thing to do, as this is where morality becomes relevant.