In a variant of the hoary old ‘ungrounded morality’ question, Barry Arrington has a post up at Uncommon Descent which ponders how a ‘materialist’ could in all conscience take a position as clinical ethicist, if he does not believe that there is an ultimate ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of clinical ethics. In contrast to daily usage, ethics here is not a synonym for morality.
I can understand how a theist who believes in the objective reality of ethical norms could apply for such a position in good faith. By definition he believes certain actions are really wrong and other actions are really right, and therefore he often has something meaningful to say.
My question is how could a materialist apply for such a position in good faith? After all, for the materialist there is really no satisfactory answer to Arthur Leff’s “grand sez who” question that we have discussed on these pages before. See here for Philip Johnson’s informative take on the issue.
After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.
I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” is ultimately meaningless.
(The last question is an odd one. You would pay someone to give you the “right answer” so long as they believe that there is such a thing?)
Of course you don’t have to go far into medical ethics before you get to genuine ethical thickets. The interests of a mother versus those of the foetus she carries; the unfortunate fact that there aren’t the resources to give every treatment to everyone; the thorny issues of voluntary euthanasia or ‘do not resuscitate’ decisions; issues raised by fertility treatments; cases such as the recent removal from hospital of Aysha King; the role of a patient’s own beliefs. There aren’t many right answers, when you get beyond the obvious things that you don’t need to pay someone to set guidelines for.
It is a bizarre argument to regard moral relativism as a bar to this job. A moral absolutist may believe that blood transfusion is wrong, that faith in the lord is the way to get better, that embryos should never be formed outside a uterus, or some other such faith-based notion. And they have to persuade others of different, or no, faith that this decision is indeed what objective morality dictates, and whatever their own views on morality they must accept that. So I don’t agree that the ‘grounding’ of an atheist’s personal moral principles has any bearing on their candidacy.
walto,
In case you’re wondering why I’m not responding to your comments, it isn’t merely because of childish stunts like pretending you can’t see an argument that is right in front of you.
You also continually misstate my positions. I can’t say whether that’s intentional or just due to poor reading comprehension, though I have my suspicions.
Here’s one example of many:
You say this despite the fact that a) I’ve told you that I’m not a verificationist, b) I’ve demonstrated that I’m not a verificationist, even according to the definition you provided, and c) I have stated that I am asking for any good reasons, whether scientific or not, to accept the existence of objective values. You haven’t provided any, and I don’t believe that you can.
It isn’t worth interacting with someone who behaves this way, so I will resume ignoring you until I am persuaded that your attitude has changed and you are willing to argue in good faith.
A topical piece in the Opinionator section of today’s New York Times:
The Benefits of ‘Binocularity’
Mathematically, it is just a change of coordinate systems (change of variables).
keiths:
Neil:
No, because if you take the heliocentric system and express the paths of the sun and planets in an earth-centered coordinate system, you don’t get the same paths you get in the geocentric model.
This should be easy to visualize. In the heliocentric system, the planets revolve around the sun. This means the sun is near the center of the planetary orbits, and this remains true regardless of the coordinate system chosen. In the geocentric system, by contrast, the earth is near the center of the planetary orbits, and this also remains true regardless of the coordinate system.
Heliocentrism is a feature of reality itself, not an artifact of the coordinate system chosen. If it had been merely a change of coordinate systems, heliocentrism wouldn’t be heralded as a great scientific advance.
Perhaps you never understood relativity.
The sun and planets are hurtling through space along intertwining paths. Heliocentrism is simply a convention to establish a convenient coordinate system.
Neil,
Heliocentrism isn’t merely the choice of a convenient coordinate system. It’s an actual scientific hypothesis about the nature of physical reality.
People laugh at geocentrists not because they failed to update their coordinate system when everyone else did. They laugh at geocentrists because they’re wrong. The predictions of the geocentric model are disconfirmed by observation.
Choose any coordinate system you like. The geocentric model is still wrong, and the heliocentric model is right.
Surely you’ve heard the story of Galileo’s observations of the phases of Venus, and how that was decisive evidence against the geocentric model in favor of the heliocentric one. Haven’t you?
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov.
ETA Depends on your frame of reference!
keiths is right Heliocentrism is not just convenient coordinate system. Why would you even think like that ?
Aw, gee, and I SOOO enjoyed our conversations (as I’m sure everyone else did too)! FWIW, as I disagree with your assessment of our relative merits, but as I also think this “No, I’M the better one, YOU’RE the worse one discussions aren’t terribly valuable, I say we put it up to a vote of all who can stand reading our posts: Who is the bad guy here: Me (the anti-semite) or You (the guy who honestly doesn’t mind at all admitting when he’s wrong)?
Let me just close by saying that I have not seen any demonstrations that you are not a verificationist by my lights. As I recall, you didn’t even understand what the word currently means to people. (But I admit I may have missed another powerful three “step” “argument” regarding “cognition” of yours.)
Anyhow, bye-bye. It’s been a real pleasure!
ETA: Oh, I forgot, accusations of bad faith are supposed to be rule-violating aren’t they? Where are the guano builders?
The phases of venus depend only on the relative positions of earth, venus and sun. They are predictable from the geocentric model. That they were not predicted, is presumably due to the greater complexity of that model.
Think like what?
Was Albert Einstein wrong about there being no absolute frame of reference?
It is just a question of the best model that fits observations and produces the best predictions.
Keith:
Thanks for all your detailed replies Keith.
I think a lot of this comes down to how we are using not just individual words, but how individual words like “deserves” relate to each of our uses of various moral terms.
I was interested in your replies on science and “objectively true”. As I noted in several replies to Neil, I was trying to avoid “true” in my posts and should have left it out when I asked you that question.
I think a pragmatic moral process can be as objective as the scientific process. Of course, if one does not buy that science is an objective process, then that comparison does not gain you much.
I wonder if Blackburn’s quasi-realism might be closest to your position. As I understand him, he does not believe that there are moral truths. He believes that each individual moral question should be addressed separately on its merits, using arguments somewhat like those you propose. And finally, he says that such arguments will be more efficient if one pretends that there is an actual truth to the matter under question (hence the “quasi-” prefix).
To answer your other question about arguments I might use that you that you did not mention (but still could use, I suppose):
I agree with a subjectivist descriptive approach to provide proximate causes for how people do behave, but I see moral in the metaethical sense as rules applying to how people living in a society should behave. I am proposing a pragmatic, naturalistic approach to establishing better rules. The rules are a technology for making societies work; changes make societies work better.
So my arguments would be more at the level of societies that work well, rather than addressing individual attitudes directly. And since I take a naturalistic approach, I would use sciences like anthropology and sociology and psychology to understand what has worked well for societies and their people and whether a change would make the society work better. There would also be various pragmatically justified metanorms like avoiding hurting innocent people, equality, “expanding the circle”. There is more on this in previous posts.
I know you have posted about metrics for “working well” being open to question. But I don’t see that as a moral question; it can be addressed using standard technology-type definitions for working well as well as standard scientific techniques for reducing the dimensionality of multi-dimensional evaluation spaces to isolate key factors and facilitate comparison.
ETA: Of course, applying such techniques takes judgement and different experts may have different proposals to make based on their judgement. That is as true in science as it would be in a moral framework. The objectivity comes from the process for making and evaluating such proposals.
I think I am going to stop with this thread now.
So according to you and Neil Heliocentrism is not the state of our solar system but just a convenient mathematical way of representing our solar system ?
Heliocentrism* is a better fit to the data (when observing planetary motion in our solar system) and, as Neil says, much easier to work with than a “geocentric” model. Don’t confuse maps and territory.
*Originally, the religious view that dominated in Medieval times was that the Earth is the centre of the Universe. Clearly the Sun is not fixed and the centre of the Universe, either.
I saw that lawyers approach in a google search for the word, but I figured that what a philosopher means cannot be that!
Thanks for the reply.
BruceS,
You make very good sense, Bruce. Establishing “how people living in a society should behave” is only necessary because people are evolutionarily and culturally social animals.
If only we truly knew what is good for us!
ETA
And what to do to achieve maximum “goodness”.
Yes, Galen Strawson. The source for Strawson is “Your Moves, the Maze of Free Will” which turns out to be a 2010 NYT “The Stone” article.
It is available online; here is the relevant section from the article, which Dennett also quotes in Intuition Pumps before replying:
I try to avoid “good” and stick with “what works”.
This is all Kitcher of course with his take on pragmatic, naturalistic ethics. Except he does not make a big deal of objectivity. His goal is to avoid metaethical relativism by justifying a concept of “better”. But that still allows for pluralism.
… but the author of the piece thinks the answer is not yes. At least as I read him.
Thanks for posting this link.
Again, to my mind the addition of “ultimately” in front of “responsible” is nothing but an expletive. Someone is responsible or not responsible. “Ultimately responsible” doesn’t mean anything at all–unless it just means “responsible.”
IMHO, Galen’s father was a much better philosopher than he is. (In the Sellars family, the son was much the greater thinker.)
Bruce,
But “what works” is defined in terms of “what is good”.
Here’s how I expressed it to KN:
“What works” at promoting penguin flourishing is different from “what works” at promoting human flourishing. Until you decide which is the greater good — penguin flourishing, human flourishing, or something else entirely — you cannot decide what works and what doesn’t.
Neil,
Right, and the relative positions do not change merely because you express them in a different coordinate system.
Yes, and the geocentric model predicts them incorrectly, just as it predicts thousands of other things incorrectly. That’s why geocentrists go into the “crackpot” category with the flat earthers.
We wouldn’t call them crackpots if their only offense were to choose a different coordinate system!
Heliocentrism vs. geocentrism is not just a matter of convenience. The Apollo missions would have killed a lot of astronauts if they had been flown under the assumptions of the geocentric model, even if the calculations had been done perfectly. Heliocentrism works for planning space missions, while the geocentric model — even when correctly applied — is a total bust.
Are we actually having this conversation in the year 2014, or am I dreaming?
Me too! At first glance, Kitcher seems to have a sensible outlook.
Bruce,
But that is not what most people, including moral philosophers, mean when they use the phrase “objective morality”.
Let me repost part of my comment:
You are using ‘objective’ in sense 2, but sense 1 is the standard meaning of ‘objective’ in the context of morality. (Google ‘objective morality’ and you’ll see what I mean.)
Bruce,
Suppose you are trying to decide whether it’s moral to shoot wolves from helicopters. There’s no question that this technique “works well” if your goal is to kill wolves, but that doesn’t tell you that the goal itself is moral.
Suppose Robert the Rancher thinks that killing wolves is morally acceptable. If we ask him why, he might say “because they kill cattle.” If we ask him why it’s morally acceptable to kill things that kill cattle, he might say “because people depend on cattle for food.” If we ask him why feeding people is more important than preserving the lives of wolves, he might start to get annoyed, but let’s assume he’s a phlegmatic type who answers “because the well-being of people takes priority over the well-being of wolves.” When we ask why, he says that people are more important than wolves, and when we ask again, he says “they just are.”
We’ve reached the end of the line and arrived at one of Robert’s moral axioms: people are more important than wolves. He isn’t offering justification; he’s just asserting it. And it’s clearly subjective; someone else could assert that people aren’t always more important than wolves.
We have no objective way of adjudicating the dispute. People may always be more important than wolves to Robert the Rancher, but not to Ellie the Environmentalist. Neither position is objectively correct.
“Technology-type definitions” don’t help us. Morality remains subjective.
Keith: You are correct that my long serious of posts trying to explain how I use “objective” and how it compares to a reasonable use of “objective” for science does not yield the same definition of “objective morality” as a Google survey.
I also agree that there is no way I can deductively and conclusively prove that human societies might work better if they concentrated on maximizing metrics of penguin colony lifetimes and also by looking at where penguins preferred to live, if penguins had the choice.
So you win that one too.
Bruce,
“Winning” isn’t the point, and I’m not asking for deductive proofs. Science uses induction, yet it’s still able to yield (not prove!) objective truths.
To see why objectivity in sense 2 is a bad choice as a criterion for ‘objective morality’, consider the following argument:
1. People with blood type AB are evil and deserve punishment. (That’s a subjective moral axiom if there ever was one!)
2. We have objective ways of testing for blood type AB.
3. There are various ways of rounding up people, testing their blood types, and punishing them if they are type AB. Some of those ways are objectively better than others.
4. Therefore, this is an example of objective morality.
The problem is clear. If the axiom is subjective, then the morality is subjective, even if it is applied objectively after the axiom is chosen.
The axiom “stable societies are morally preferable” is just as subjective as the axiom “people with blood type AB are evil and deserve to be punished.”
The good news is that even though both are subjective, most people would reject the latter.
Lots more than one problem there. Not only is one of the premises false, it’s also invalid. Looks like a lot of the stuff you post, actually.
When I was a kid, there ws a slogan, “you can’t legislate morality.”
Things have moved so far that i can’t even remember which tribal faction deployed that slogan. But I thought then and still believe that there isn’t any better way to arbitrate morality than through elected representatives.
I often deplore the results, but I simply haven’t seen a better way. It beats divine command, philosopher king, warlord and gang leader, tradition, and lots of other methods of determining what is and is not acceptable.
It has the advantage that it is arbitrary and reversible.
petrushka,
Barry Goldwater used it to argue against civil rights legislation, though I don’t know if he coined the phrase.
Keith: You are a very intellectually-intelligent person and, most of the time, my exchanges with you help me to clarify my thinking and the alternatives.
Based on some of your previous posts and this one, you seem to see deduction from axioms as a useful way to think about morality. I do not.
Bruce,
Yes, and that’s an important point. Objective truths can be discovered by induction, by deduction from objectively true premises, or by a combination of the two. Objective morality can’t be determined by induction, because you can’t make even a single observation that tells you whether something is objectively moral or immoral, much less a whole series of them. And it can’t be determined deductively, because there is no way to know that the premises express objective moral truths, either.
Unless you want to punt on morality altogether, it seems to me that you have to accept that your axioms are subjective and go forward from there. Then at least you can employ deduction.
Subjective morality makes a huge difference in the world, but I see no way that it can be linked to objective morality, if such a thing even exists. Moral axioms are ultimately subjective.
I’ve mentioned ampliative reasoning as a common term for reasoning is science; here is what SEP says in article on arguments and inferences
ETA: If I observe a path of bubbles in a cloud chamber, have I “objectively observed” an electron?
This is old fashioned and possibly inaccurate description of the science experiment, but hopefully my point is clear: objective “observations” of unobservables in science requires theory and it is the objectivity of the process for generating and evaluating theories that is the point of the science process I have discussed
Bruce,
Let me think about it some more, but my initial take is that all of those [ETA: examples of ampliative reasoning] reduce to induction and/or deduction.
I ETA to that post; but you are too quick to me.
abduction is another term you hear to differentiate the reasoning from induction (mostly IBE in that case, I think)
Bruce,
Having pondered it some more, it still seems to me that the examples you cited reduce to induction and/or deduction.
Take abduction, for instance. The observational constraints are built up inductively; for instance, by observing that a certain experimental setup consistently produces curved tracks in a cloud chamber. The hypotheses are tested deductively, by deriving predictions from them and seeing if those predictions match the observations.
Though it’s an interesting question, I don’t think it matters for our present purposes, because my statement…
…is also true for abduction and the other types of ampliative inference you mentioned.
Sure, but the result of that process is objective only if a) the process itself is objective and b) the observations being fed into that process are objective. If you replace the objective observations with subjective criteria, intuitions, or axioms, the results are no longer objective even if the process is carried out objectively. It’s a milder version of GIGO. Instead of garbage in, garbage out, it’s SISO — subjective in, subjective out.
We don’t know whether anything, including your suggested criterion of “what works in producing stable societies”, is objectively moral or not. The best you can do is to take your subjective criterion, feed it into the objective process, and accept that the results coming out the other end are necessarily subjective. It’s SISO.
Here’s another way of making the point. Suppose you select “stable societies” as the goal of morality, and someone else selects “unstable societies” as the goal. Both of you apply the process objectively. You conclude that slavery is immoral because it destabilizes societies, and she concludes that it is moral for exactly the same reason — it destabilizes societies, which to her is a good thing.
By your standard, both you and she have followed an objective process, yet you’ve reached opposite conclusions. That’s not surprising — each of you started with a subjective assumption that was the opposite of the other person’s, and you therefore were able to reach opposite conclusions even though you were both stringently objective in the way you carried out the process. The conclusions are subjective because the starting assumptions were subjective. It’s SISO again.
The question we’d like to answer is whether X is objectively moral or immoral, but following an objective process is not by itself sufficient to answer it.
Keith:
You’re free to use words as you like, as long as you define them first. But SEP and every philosopher of science I’ve read uses the words to mean something that includes enumerative induction but other things as well. (And take a look at IEP on metaethics for all the ways “objective” has been used).
I’ve repeated denied that the metrics for successful societies are moral norms and I’ve provided examples of what I think they are instead in previous posts.
I agree that a pragmatic approach implies evaluating how well something works.
There is judgement in selecting evaluation criteria, although deciding it means one should look for “unstable societies” would be perverse.
I addressed the issue of what to look for in more detail in a previous posts.
OK, I am now officially done with this thread. I’m painting a red X on the SZ shortcut in my Firefox shortcut bar.
Bruce,
Perverse, but no more or less objective than looking for stable societies.
By your usage of ‘objective’, slavery is both objectively moral and objectively immoral, because in each case the conclusion can be reached by an objective process starting from a (subjectively) chosen criterion.
To me, that’s a misuse of the word ‘objective’. Slavery cannot be both objectively moral and objectively immoral.
Given that the choice of criterion is subjective, the results are subjective — even if the rest of the process proceeds objectively. SISO.
If you raise an infant you will discover that all observations involve theory formation, and nothing is direct. Everything we see and know is the result of iterative theory building and testing.
Science is no different, merely more formalized.
keiths:
Bruce:
Yes, that’s what he seems to think. He writes:
That’s an intellectual capitulation. He’s basically punting (in the American sense of the word).
Oscillating between “one eye closed” and “the other eye closed” isn’t true binocularity. Our job is to figure out how to fuse the disparate images into a coherent whole — with both eyes open.
Yesterday’s speculation becomes today’s fMRI experiment:
The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates.