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.
Thanks, Keith.
Ordinary diffey Qs – that brings back memories of a time long long ago in a galaxy far away. Well >35 years ago in Waterloo is close enough, I guess.
But that is probably the type of math course I’d do with well-reviewed YouTube and Schaums.
Yes, questions about whether someone “deserves punishment” are relevant to questions of free will, but, as I’ve explained, whether one deserves punishment does not require retributivism: the punishment in question might not be thought to have to “fit the crime.”That’s why, as I’ve explained a couple of times for you now, the question you need to answer is does Johnny ever deserve punishment of any kind; does it ever make sense for him to be sorry for what he’s done? The red herring here is the introduction of retributivism. A pure rehab supporter may believe in moral responsibility. It just confuses the issue to assume that retribution is required if people are morally responsible.
Do you still not understand this?
Sorry, double post.
ETA: I might as well use this post to say I agree wholeheartedly with everything keiths has said about deterrence in response to petrushka’s posts. The proposition that something is not a sensible punishment in all cases or should be used less, etc. isn’t the same thing as the proposition that it’s not a punishment at all, or that it’s not a punishment in those cases in which it shouldn’t be used. A punishment isn’t the same thing as an effective punishment.
Anyhow, all of keiths’ posts on that subject seem right to me.
What bothers me about the charge of obscurantism is whether such text is really valid technical terms of art and modes of discussion that I don’t have the background to understand.
The problem is that (translated, at least) it looks like English so I as a English reader expect to make sense of it. But maybe that is just a wrong expectation on my part, like expecting to understand math supposing you only know the Greek alphabet and calculator symbols.
The advantage of math is that everyone can see it is needed for science and science works to build things we use. So there must be something to it.
Philosophy does not have that trait, so it is hard to see why one should make the effort to be able to become technically proficient enough to understand the terms of art and their usage in order to be able to evaluate if the field is saying something you find valuable.
Yes it is. If the field of medicine took your attitude, we would still be using mercury as a treatment for syphilis. It works, so why invent anything better.
Incarceration and death “work,” to some degree, but the question is whether they are the best we can do.
Here’s a simple thought” the severity of the punishment produces a proportional push back in the the form of avoidance. We have industries dedicated to preventing the death penalty from being imposed. We have armies of lawyers dedicated to preventing incarceration. With the result that only poor people spend any significant time locked up.
And this disparity produces its own kind of political reaction. One result that in cities like London,minor crimes like theft and burglary are seldom investigated or prosecuted.
Punishment — like mercury as a medicine — is itself a poison. It does not promote good behavior. It promotes an array of avoidance behaviors. It is costly and ineffective.
Which is why I argue that the interesting questions in morality are not what s good and what is bad, but how do you promote the good.
You’re not a philosopher like Neil is not a metaphysician.
It’s a bit difficult to grasp this point, but it’s actually fairly important: Heidegger and Derrida have sophisticated philosophical reasons for adopting the writing style that they have. It’s “obscurantism” if you haven’t been trained in reading it. (Then again, any specialized field will look like “jargon” to those outside of it.) Heidegger is a special case because he has philosophical reasons for turning language against itself — and the result is that Heidegger’s German is perplexing but still basically intelligible to anyone who is fluent in German, but also untranslatable. Derrida tries to do in French what Heidegger does in German. (One would think that analytic philosophers raised on Quine’s indeterminacy of translation would appreciate this point.)
Unfortunately, when Heideggerians and Derrideans try to do this in English, it ends up sounding like a crappy imitation of Heidegger or Derrida, because those people developed their philosophical styles by translating Heidegger and Derrida into English.
It’s also worth pointing out that almost all of the Continental philosophers are concerned with the literary style of their peers and influences — Holderlin, Proust, Beckett, Rilke, Kafka, Jean Genet, Brecht are all important influences on German and French phenomenologists and post-structuralists. To see how weird that is, that’s like an American analytic philosopher of the 1960s thinking it’s important that his or her literary style bear a family resemblance to Kerouac, Ginsberg, or Burroughs. The point of difference between analytic and Continental philosophy turns on very different attitudes towards language itself.
I would aspire to be a technician, In the sense that a doctor does not need to think deeply about whether disease is bad, so much as about how to cure it.
In _Principia Ethica_, Moore spends a lot of times distinguishing those. He says one can’t give any reasons for believing that this or that is a good or an evil, and to think one can is to commit the naturalist fallacy. But he thinks one CAN give reasons why a certain action is right, and they may involve causal, empirical stuff. (He was a utilitarian, but not a hedonist.)
Anyhow, what he thought was interesting about the what-is-good question was that (in his view) the recognition that reasons can’t be brought illustrates things about the nature of goodness (simple and non-natural). Of course one man’s interesting is another man’s annoying. The Bloomsbury bohemians loved Moore, but I think he’s painful to read, myself. So persnickity.
I would like to draw your attention to the most recent essay at Scientia Salon, “Virtue Ethics: an ancient solution to a modern problem.”
I still say that the core problem is not defining virtue and vice, but finding ways to promote good behavior. I don’t think the problem of defining what is good behavior is that deep or difficult. It becomes deep and difficult when you try to manage people by punishing offenders.
I seem to be an odd duck here, but I am not a voice crying in the wilderness. The trend in medicine is away from emphasis on curing disease and toward preventing illness and promoting health.
There is a comparable trend in law, although not exactly bright and shining with success stories. But the so-called war on poverty is an example of the trend in thinking, as are trends toward alternatives to incarceration.
My personal take on all this is that words and arguments are not very effective. People are pretty much on course toward adult attitudes by age six. You can explain non-obvious consequences of behavior to adults, but people’s desire to be helpful and “good” are pretty much established in early childhood.
I don’t think solutions are matters of choice. this is not a multiple choice test. We don’t go through life pushing the good button or the bad button. We invent our relationships on the fly, not unlike creating art or improvising music. Doing this well is hard, and some people are better at it than others.
I could go on, and probably will, but I’m aware of TLDR.
petrushka,
Actually, I completely agree with you, Petrushka. I’ll admit that I got carried away with the meta-ethical side of the conversation, but empirically effective moral education is what’s really important.
One of the things I like about virtue ethics is that it takes moral education seriously: that since moral conduct is a kind of skill, it is acquired by habitual emulation of those whose conduct manifests the relevant behavior — and not by memorizing any set of rules or principles. It’s less about instructing and more about mentoring.
I was thinking this morning about the word mentoring.
I wish I could think of a way to replace teaching with mentoring.
It’s what I tried to do with my kids. I can’t remember ever lecturing them on rules, and I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out.
One little thing: if you don’t have rules, you don’t have exceptions and you don’t have sidestepping and you don’t have much lying. The natural tendency of kids is to copy parents, at least for the first few years. After that, peers start dominating, so it’s rather important to find benign playmates. All of this is terribly complicated and full of snares.
But I think it’s important to discover how things work, even if solutions aren’t immediately apparent.
Bruce,
I agree. I don’t know how it is in Canada, but the inequities in US education are stunning, with per-student expenditures ranging from less than
15,000 in others.
Bruce,
If you really believe that punishment is deserved for violating local moral norms, then that would make you a moral relativist, but my impression is that you aren’t a relativist. For example, you don’t think Afghan adulterers deserve to be stoned, even when that is the local norm, right?
Keith:
I have not researched in detail, but I also think the variance in results as well as dollars is large when the results are measured by international standard tests.
Also, I am going by memory, but I think the education results are correlated with poverty of the students, so the results reflect more than just the education system. To address the problems, one would need to address both poverty and the education infrastructure and people.
Canada has all the same problems as the US, but possibly with smaller variance (but in saying that I am not including our native population, which has severe, outlier issues with education and poverty).
Keith:
I am just trying to provide a bit more detail on how I interpret “deserves”, not convince you to change the meaning and overtones the word has for you.
I was trying to make the point that to me “deserves” and “moral norms” go together: once you have one, you have the other.
But you are right, your question is important and I need to provide more detail. I have not thought a lot about this, but perhaps “deserves” as I am using it would be interpreted as relativized to a norm is the current framework. However, I am not a relativist as evidenced by a lot of my previous posts in this thread. So there could be a better moral framework where such a norm might not exist. There would be no question about someone deserving punishment in that framework, since there was no norm.
It would be right to urge adoption of that better framework, which is equivalent in my view to saying that the society should adopt a framework where the issue of “deserves” does not come up. Since moral frameworks are fallible, the use of “deserves” must be too, I suppose.
(By the way, I had to backspace over “objectively” several times in typing the preceding!)
I see your point about stoning and adultery as two separate questions. “Is adultery wrong?”; if so, people deserve to be punished. “Is stoning an appropriate punishment in that case?” would be a separate question. (Note: I do try to use the weasel word “appropriate” in front of “punishment” to leave that question open as a separate point. )
I cannot think of cases where stoning would ever be an appropriate punishment for anything.
There are also a set of norms for punishment but I am not sure if they are moral norms, although they might be based on moral norms (eg it is wrong to kill so capital punishment is wrong).
walto,
I understand what you’ve written, but I don’t agree with it.
Could you link to your explanation? I reread your comments but I don’t see it.
Again, could you link to your explanations? I don’t see them.
Also, I already answered your first question by stating that rewards and punishments are not deserved:
walto:
Sure. Any of us should feel regret after doing something immoral. That doesn’t require that we regard ourselves as deserving of punishment, however.
I don’t assume that. I’ve clearly stated my belief that compatibilist moral responsibility exists, but that this kind of moral responsibility does not mean that people deserve punishment:
petrushka:
keiths:
petrushka:
I don’t see how you can say that. Do you really believe that the prospect of getting a parking ticket never deters anyone from parking illegally? That’s completely implausible. Parking tickets deter parking violations, and that isn’t controversial.
Where are you getting this stuff? I haven’t said anything even remotely like that.
petrushka,
In order to promote the good effectively, you need to know what is good and what isn’t.
Bechtel’s book on mental mechanisms references the work of Lawrence Barsalou who it turns out has a some things to say on concepts and their implementation.
Barsalou promotes a dynamic, situated (pdf) view of concepts in contrast to the stable, semantic view of Old-Fashioned AI and the related philosophical Language of Thought approach.
He defines concepts mainly by their capabilities (categorization, inference from the category, productivity by recursion and combination, propositions of the form “token is type”, and others). Both the recording of information (akin to episodic memory) and conceptual processing use representations in the form of neural networks similar to perception (including senses and body perception),. Concepts involve re-enactment and simulation of the original perceptual processes tailored to be appropriate to the agent’s current environment and goals.
For him, concepts and memory representations are not abstract, word-like symbols in some internal language (“mentalese”), but rather grounded in the original perceptions (both the senses and body perceptions).
Concept processes involve areas of the brain related to perceptional processing (roughly) so part of the operationalization for fMRI experiments is hypothesizing which areas of the brain would be activated and testing for that.
Bruce,
If the issue of “deserves” doesn’t come up, doesn’t that mean that no one deserves punishment according to that framework? Or are you saying that they do, but that it’s better if we pretend that they don’t?
Also, you said earlier that
…but that would mean that the only kind of moral framework in which the issue of “deserves” would never come up would be one with no norms at all!
Walto will be disappointed. 🙂
You’ve completely lost me. My understanding of your take on morality was that you take something to be immoral just in case you disapprove of it. That is what I understand you take “immoral” to mean.
If so, why should you regret doing that which of which you disapprove? I mean, you might do so; maybe you’re even likely to. But why SHOULD you? Are you saying it would be wrong for you not to regret doing something you disapprove of? Why? Wouldn’t it be wrong, only if you disapproved of such lack of regret?
keiths:
walto:
No. You keep trying to portray my morality that way, but your portrayal is inaccurate.
I disapprove of immoral acts, of course, but that doesn’t mean that everything I disapprove of is an immoral act. Suppose I disapprove of wearing plaids with stripes. Does that mean I think it’s immoral to wear plaids with stripes? Of course not.
Let’s excise the problematic word ‘disapprove’ from your questions. The amended questions follow, with my answers.
Because I want to act morally. If I fail, I am disappointed. I regret it.
Wanting to act morally goes hand in hand with feeling regret when you don’t.
If I want to act morally, it means I prefer acting morally to acting immorally. If I didn’t feel regret when I failed to act morally, it would mean that I didn’t prefer acting morally, which would mean I no longer wanted to act morally.
Yes. I don’t just want to behave morally right now; I also want to continue behaving morally, which requires that I continue wanting to behave morally, which requires that I regret it when I don’t behave morally.
A lack of regret means I no longer want to act morally, as explained above. Not wanting to act morally is immoral.
Just a note that the “obscure writing” discussion that began above has now jumped to its own thread.
That doesn’t help much. I take your point about disapproval, which you say can involve non-moral feelings. We can take care of this by using “disapprobation” instead, where that term is intended to be restricted to what might be called your “moral sense.” So let me revise my above remark the following way:
My understanding of your take on morality was that you take something to be immoral just in case you feel disapprobation toward it. That is what I understand you take “immoral” to mean.
My point is that I take your position to be one of subjectivism. “X is wrong” in your lingo just means “I feel disapprobation toward X” (where “I” refers to keiths).
So, your claims that you should feel regret, want to be moral, etc. can all be cashed out in terms of your feelings and wanting to feel or not feel a certain way. So when you say you might no longer want to act morally, you’re simply saying that that you might no longer want to act in such a way that you will not feel certain feelings about yourself.
I agree with Moore that there are no actual “shoulds” in any of that stuff. We can ask sensibly about your desire not to feel this or that way, “Yeah, OK, but is such a desire actually good?”
Keith:
Example: If a framework as no moral stricture against adultery, then no one deserves any punishment for adultery.
Reading between the lines, I am guessing you think there are some actions which deserve blame always, such as hurting innocent people for no reason. I would agree with such a view and would word it as saying any moral framework which lacks strictures against such acts can and should be improved by adding them, which would bring in the deserves by the addition of the norm.
That idea also handles the empty moral framework, if such a thing can exist.
For naturalistic ethics, I am satisfied that Moore’s Open Question argument (which has a supporter in this thread, I believe), as well as his related naturalistic fallacy, are refuted by counter-arguments in the Flanagan papers that have been linked as well as the SEP article.
The Bechtel book on mental mechanisms I’ve mentioned previously also uses the mechanism idea for a naturalistic ethics. He takes a bottom-up approach to mechanism, starting with simple negative feedback mechanisms to help organisms survive by maintaining internal state despite entropy. He goes on to discuss how such mechanism evolved, at least in humanities general path, to include planning and then self-awareness.
So wanting to avoid harm, looking to the future, and projecting oneself into the future are natural aspects of the human condition. One can use these facts to bootstrap morality based on respect for life and for each person equally being able to choose their life project.
Keith:
Well, I was actually alluding to our previous exchange which I don’t want to re-open.
No idea whether Walt wants me to do so.
You don’t need to ruminate over it with the intention of putting everything in one bucket or another. Good and bad are placeholders for whether people like or dislike something. Some things, like physical pain, are fairly universal. Most things are more like art and music and food, the result of culture and upbringing.
But you can’t categorize actions without reference to how they are perceived. They are not good or bad in and of themselves, even if a particular tribal community tries to label them as such.
You have not actually responded to my argument against punishment. I have not said it never works. I argue that it is inefficient and generally counterproductive. At best, it is a deterrent when there is little or no possibility of avoidance. That’s a severely limited set of conditions.
From a societal standpoint, punishment creates a fertile ground for bribery and corruption.
I take a different position. I don’t think Moore has proven either that goodness is non-natural or a property at all. But I think he’s right that it’s not reducible to any natural property, and I think the Open Question argument is useful in showing that. FWIW, I don’t care too much for Flanagan, generally, and I think the guy who wrote the SEP article is a bit too sure of himself. These issues hang around for generations for good reason.
What is meant by”reducible” is probably a place I don’t want to revisit in too much detail after hashing it out in that thread on scientific reducibility.
But if “reducible” is about specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be “morally good” then I agree that likely one cannot find such conditions to make good a natural property.
I’m satisfied to start with a definition that morality is about rules for people living together. Building these rules should take into account what science tells us about people and society (hence naturalistic) but that process of rule-building also requires that we provide non-scientific metanorms for deriving rules (like equality). Finally, we can use pragmatic means to judge the success of the norms and metanorms and of the overall process that uses them.
One can start to ask “why” questions about any part of that, but I don’t think they lead to infinite regresses, although they may lead to a point where we don’t have a principled basis for further discussion.
As for Flanagan, if you mean that he does not argue as closely as one would like, then I would tend to agree. I cannot locate it offhand, but there was a sentence in one of the papers I or KN linked that I would paraphrase as “of course, despite leading to moral pluralism, a naturalistic ethics still gives one grounds for reject obvious evil”. But I could not find arguments for that conclusion.
Issues “hanging around” for generations, presumably because there are no knock-down deductive arguments, is a good reason to adopt pragmatism, I think.
walto,
Let’s use “moral disapproval”. It’s more explicit.
Your amended questions and my responses, using “moral disapproval” instead of “disapprobation”.
No, the causation runs the other way. I disapprove of it because I feel that it’s immoral.
Of course! I don’t believe that objective morality exists, but morality clearly does, and so it must be subjective.
If I think X is wrong, I will disapprove of it, but my reason for thinking it’s wrong won’t be that I disapprove of it.
No, I would put it this way instead:
1. I feel that certain things are moral and others are immoral.
2. I acknowledge that these feelings are subjective.
3. I disapprove of immoral acts.
4. If I find X to be an immoral act, I therefore disapprove of it. If I do X, I regret it.
I’m pointing out the inconsistency of saying “I want to behave morally” and then in the same breath “but it’s fine if I don’t regret it when I act immorally”.
Here’s how I put it earlier:
walto:
The “shoulds” are in the moral axioms, which are subjective, of course. “I should not kill people just for fun” is definitely a “should”.
Bruce,
I was just pointing out that two of your statements, taken together, lead to a conclusion that is undesirable (to me, and presumably to you also).
You wrote:
And:
If “society should adopt a framework where the issue of ‘deserves” does not come up”, and the issue of ‘deserves’ always comes up where there are norms, then you are saying that normless frameworks are better — but I doubt that you really mean that.
If you don’t mean it, then something must be wrong with at least one of your original statements.
petrushka:
keiths:
petrushka:
keiths:
petrushka:
I’m not ruminating over it. I see that your statement is false, so I say so and provide counterexamples.
Sure I have. The claim that deterrence doesn’t work is part of your argument, and I’m criticizing that claim.
Yes, you have. You disagreed when I wrote this:
I can’t see why you would double down on something that’s obviously false.
Me: My understanding of your take on morality was that you take something to be immoral just in case you disapprove of it morally. That is what I understand you take “immoral” to mean.
Keith: No, the causation runs the other way. I disapprove of it because I feel that it’s immoral.
**************************************************
I didn’t make a causal claim. I said that that’s what I understand you take “immoral” to mean. Before the rest of your response can be assessed, one would need to know if you believe “X is wrong” means the same thing as “I morally disapprove of X.”
I note that if they mean precisely the same thing, there can be no “causation” in either direction. If they don’t mean the same thing, what does “X is wrong” mean?
walto,
They don’t mean the same thing, there is causation, and the causation runs one way: from “keiths thinks X is immoral” to “keiths morally disapproves of X.” In other words, while it’s true that I morally disapprove of X because it is immoral, it isn’t true that I consider it immoral because I morally disapprove of it.
It’s the same for you. You morally disapprove of things because you think they are immoral, but it isn’t true that you consider them immoral because you morally disapprove of them.
The difference between us is that you think there’s some mysterious process by which your conscience taps into objective morality. I see absolutely no evidence for this, nor do I see any nonevidential grounds for believing it.
Regarding your idea that “X is wrong” means the same thing as “I morally disapprove of X”, perhaps you’re confused by the fact that “things keiths considers immoral” picks out the same set as “things keiths morally disapproves of”. That’s true, but it doesn’t imply that the two phrases have the same meaning.
The phrase “the smallest integer greater than 1” picks out the same number as “the number of ears possessed by a normal human”, but the phrases don’t mean the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
Keith:
I think the paragraph you quote from me has to be read in the context of my overall reply. The context was your question about stoning for adultery and whether that was deserved. You then wondered if I was a relativist for thinking that if “deserves” applied in a given moral framework, then maybe that was all I could say on the subject, and so I was a relativist when it came to deserving (and norms).
My point about dropping the norm was not meant to say this is something that could done in general to make a framework better. Rather, I meant that if there was a better framework where the particular norm did not exist, then the deserves would not exist in that better framework as well (that is, deserves with respect to acts related to the dropped norm).
Some of our previous discussion in this thread was about comparing moral frameworks; that is how I intend “better framework”.
I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I am getting any more out of this topic in the thread, so I am going to stop now.
Keith:
Do you see your views as fitting into any of the standard metaethical categories?.
One reasonable list and hierarchy of the standard categories is from the semantic theories section on metaethics in Wikipedia.
Are there any terms from that section that seem close to your views?
Yes, I think that I believe things are wrong because of my emotional response. But I think the two expressions mean different things. The thing is, that stance is easier for objectivists–we can, to take one example, follow the intuitionists in saying that that goodness refers to a non-natural property being ascribed to X. (I don’t think that’s the right way to go, myself, but that’s neither here nor there.)
That route is not available to personal relativists like yourself, however. Thus, they have generally said either that the expression means the same thing as “I disapprove of X” (which you have denied) or they have said that it doesn’t express a proposition at all, because it’s more like a grunt or a purr. That position is also inconsistent with a number of your posts. So I ask again, what do you think “X is wrong” DOES mean?
That’s basically what I’m asking. He has insisted on personal relativism but has now denied both subjectivism and emotivism, so I really don’t know what his position is, other than that it doesn’t countenance objective values and seems to prefer personal to cultural relativism.
Bruce,
Okay. In that case it sounds like you are saying that stoning is deserved in the Afghan framework, but that there are better frameworks available in which stoning is not deserved.
That still sounds like relativism to me.
Keith:
It makes me a descriptive relativist but not (on its own) a metaethical relativist, at least not as I understand the standard use of the terms in philosophy.
Specifically, I believe there can be a way to determine a (fallible but justifiably called) truth of moral statements through a pragmatic, naturalistic process. That process gives a truth which is goes beyond what is held to be moral by a particular culture and so it is different from the meta-ethical relativists notion of truth of moral statements.
A metaethical relativist would say that there is no such process, that moral statements truth values exist but are relative to a culture, and nothing more can be said.
I don’t know what you mean by “relativist”. It would be very helpful to my understanding of your posts if you could relate your metaethical position to one of the standard philosophical ones. That provides a great way to avoid miscommunication because of different meanings being assumed for certain terms.
Bruce,
I dislike some of the definitions in that Wikipedia article, so let me just tell you how I label myself and why.
I consider myself a subjectivist, but not a relativist.
I’m a subjectivist because I regard morality as subjective. “X is morally wrong” cannot be true or false in an objective sense. There is no fact of the matter, independent of the observer’s mind. There’s always a qualifier, whether explicit or implicit: “X is morally wrong according to this person” or “according to this group”.
I don’t call myself a relativist, however, because I often see that term applied to people who hold that since moral systems are subjective, we should tolerate all of them equally. I completely disagree with that stance.
I think that stoning is wrong, and that we should work to prevent it. I understand that others disagree, but I think that my (subjective) view is (subjectively) better than their (subjective) view. If I thought theirs was better, I would adopt it instead of my own!
.
Bruce,
Then we probably need to distinguish “the Taliban think that adulterers deserve to be stoned” from “adulterers actually deserve to be stoned if they are living among the Taliban”.
I gather that we agree that adulterers do not deserve to be stoned, but then that means that your earlier statement needs to be amended.
This statement…
…needs be amended to something like this:
I disagree with even the amended statement, however. For example, it is possible to consistently hold both that punishment is immoral and that other acts are immoral, too. If punishment is immoral then no one deserves to be punished, yet that doesn’t imply that murder becomes moral.
That just means you’re not a CULTURAL relativist. As I said, you are a personal relativist. But that generally means either that you take “X is good” to mean “I feel moral approval towards X” or to express no proposition at all but be akin to a grunt of approval. You have denied both of those in various posts. You also deny that “good” names an objective property that could be ascribed to X. So, what do you think “X is good” does mean?
walto,
The causal chain is the same. Both of us disapprove of certain actions because we feel they are immoral. It’s just that you take the additional step of claiming that your feelings are a (mostly) accurate reflection of objective morality, while I think that notion is completely unjustified.
To be absolutely explicit, the ‘algorithm’ is:
0. Assume that your feelings are a mostly accurate indicator of objective morality.
1. Ask yourself, “do I feel that X is immoral?”
2. If the answer is “yes”, then disapprove of X.
I reject step 0 while you don’t, but otherwise the process is the same.
Again, I think morality is subjective, so when I say that X is morally wrong, I mean that it violates my (subjective) moral axioms, or that it violates an implication of those axioms. I choose my axioms because they feel right. There’s no other justification. That’s why they’re subjective!
To decide whether X is immoral, I first need to figure out whether it violates my moral axioms or their implications. Once I have determined that it is (subjectively) immoral, then I morally disapprove of it.
Immorality is prior to disapproval. I can’t answer the “do I disapprove?” question without first answering the “is it (subjectively) immoral?” question.
walto,
My statements remain true if you substitute ‘George’ for ‘the Taliban’, so no, I am not a personal relativist either.
But be careful — I am using ‘relativism’ as specified in the first paragraph that you quoted:
{Deleted, because I’d only notices your second response before I posted that you wouldn’t answer my question}
Keith:
What does “actually” mean to you in the above? I’ve tried to explain why I think some moral systems can be better that others, so I know how I might interpret it.
But as best I can tell, a moral wrong “actually deserves” means “Keith thinks (or feels?) the wrong deserves”.
Another way to ask the question: what sort of arguments would you use to convince someone that “stoning was wrong”. It seems to me that all you could do is appeal a series of arguments of the form “Stoning is wrong because it involves x and Keith thinks/feels x is wrong”.
( I seem to have picked up the infinite regress bug…).
What am a missing?
On the rest of your reply: I am not sure where I said deserve has anything to do with belief. If I did, I expressed myself poorly in that case. I would accept “X has violated moral norm B (within a moral framework) as meaning “X deserves appropriate punishment for violating moral norm B (with that framework).
No actually though in the above anywhere. To add an actually takes more, as I have explained. That is why I am not a meta-ethical relativist, only a descriptive relativist.
OK, enough about me. I am still interested in the nuances of your form of subjectivism, if you care to elaborate. I have to admit, I don’t see how it different from personal relativism, as I understand philosophers use the term.
I see Walt making a similar point.
ETA: You can replace “Keith” by “George” in my questions and their essence does not change.