Barry Arrington (the current owner of the blog, Uncommon Descent – the former “playground” of William Dembski, advocate of “Intelligent Design”) is a lawyer who seems to regard his finest hour when he acted for some victims families in the wake of the Columbine massacre.
Regular readers of Uncommon Descent (come on, admit it – it’s not just me) may have noted Barry’s singular style of posting “gotcha” questions and using the answers and his ability to control what appears on his blog to bolster his claim of “crickets”. (No complaint from me – ID is a lost cause as a philosophical view so whatever Barry does cannot make any difference in the real world – whether he allows discussion or limits it, the hollowness of ID shines through). The latest post, Eric Harris Was Just Paying Attention, seems to blend Barry’s contribution to Columbine with his predilection for the gotcha.
Asks Barry:
Why should our Übermensch refrain from hurting other people to achieve his selfish desires.
Commenter Mark Frank deals very eloquently with Arrington (please take the time if you can to read Mark’s comments) and RDFish/aiguy also contributes eloquently.
But I have to reproduce in full this masterly comment from Reciprocating Bill:
I’m always amused (and amazed) by the cartoonish portrayal of human experience that invariably accompanies eristic “challenges” such as this. In that cartoon, stick figures with no relationships and no histories either act upon self-interested calculations or conform themselves to objective, moral guidelines, fearful of the riding crop of eternal consequences. Those who reject God and his objective values do so because they wish to take what they want from others. To fully embrace the logic of naturalism is to become indistinguishable from that of a psychopath. (Or, it should; never mind that none of this actually occurs.)
Fortunately, the reality of human experience is different. Human beings are born into and participate in social worlds that are both cognitively and emotionally deeply interpenetrating, entering into what Andrew Whiten called “deep social mind.” Infants as young as 42 minutes imitate the facial gestures of adults – remarkable because they’ve never before seen a face and have yet to see their own. Mirror neurons encode the actions of others and the infant’s own actions identically, laying a neurobiological foundation for understanding and empathizing with others. Infants and mothers jointly attune themselves to the topography of their pre-verbal interactions, tracking “vitality affects” (per Daniel Stern) and sharing a form of joyful, mutually sustained and modulated affective attunement that in adulthood may be seen in joint activities as diverse as joint musical improvisation and good sex. In the latter months of the first year infants follow the gaze of adults to external objects, an innate skill that is quickly folded into thousands of episodes of shared joint attention that are crucial to human enculturation and language learning. Toddlers as young as 18 months understand and sympathize with the preferences of others, even when they differ from their own. Children at play enact countless simulated dramas in which fair play is argued and negotiated (can you count the number of times you heard “That’s not fair!” as a kid?). Out of all this emerges theory of mind, sensitivity to the beliefs, desires, affects and sufferings of others, skillfulness in “social chess” (the ability to negotiate and navigate social alliances and contracts), and the capacity for experiencing guilt (and being shamed) within one’s own community. These skills and capacities sculpt the human brain from birth and are among the foundations for filial love, pair bonding and community identification, altruism, and moral reasoning.
We all, theist and philosophical naturalist alike, emerge from and live within like social networks, and we all derive our capacity for pro-social behaviors and moral reasoning from those experiences, not from a coat of philosophical or religious paint applied after the fact. And, like it or not, this human sociality has a long history, specifically an evolutionary history of at least several million years duration, atop of which have accrued briefer and more varied histories of cultural invention.
Psychopaths display grave deficiencies in the deployment of this deep sociality. A large number of studies indicate that psychopaths exhibit subtle cognitive and affective abnormalities seen in language processing, cortical maturational lags, hemispheric imbalances, frontal lobe dysfunction, abnormalities of the deployment of attention, and states of chronic under-arousal. They have an attenuated experience of anxiety and fear and are abnormally physiologically unresponsive to punishment and painful stimuli, differences observable in galvanic skin response and accelerations in heart rate in experimental settings. Lack of social controls, emotional lability, restlessness and inattentiveness, impulsiveness and irritability may be identified in a subpopulation of children as early as age three years. Robert Hare observed that children who eventually become psychopaths as adults come to the attention of teachers and counselors at a very early age and continue their antisocial careers through latency and adolescence in the face of every attempt to socialize them. Something is awry in those children and adults they become. Absence of empathy for and attunement with the experiences of others is a defining characteristic, as codified in the Psychopathy Checklist (WJMs dictionary-driven misapprehension not withstanding).
“Why shouldn’t a metaphysical naturalist do exactly what he pleases even if it hurts another person?” Because it hurts other persons, Barry, and those of us who grew up in an adequate social milieu devoid of the profound deficits of the psychopath find that a good enough reason.
I’d like to chime in at Uncommon Descent but at least I’m curious as to where Barry finds his objectivity, his superior grasp of morality, his justification for some objective source for social norms. Can anyone help?
ETA
Hat-tip to Kantian Naturalist for spotting this.
Just seen news of the Malaysia Airlines plane downed over Ukraine. Words fail me.
If there is an objective morality, How do we know it? If it comes from a God, isn’t it still arbitrary?
Yes, Barry, you should answer that.
With something less vapid and less evidence-free than “Because God decrees it,” or equivalent platitude.
Glen Davidson
He makes it up as he goes along.
He is using his adaptation of very standard fundie arguments. I often see similar arguments when debating creationists. It is probably a standard part of Christian apologetics.
What we need is tougher laws against the kind of thing Harris did. That would deter people like him.
That and a return to the kind of unambiguous morality that inspired Joshua.
Every time Bully Arrington drags out Columbine as an example of what happens when people lack good Christian values I’m reminded of a scene from one of my favorite movies Robin and Marian, Richard Lester’s take on the legend of Robin Hood with a great cast headed by Audrey Hepburn and Sean Connery. In this passage, Connery as Robin Hood describes the notorious massacre carried out by the Crusaders of the Third Crusade during the Siege of Acre in 1191:
So much for the moderating influence of Christian morality.
Ask me if I’m sick of the sanctimonious self-righteousness of the Christian right.
I finally read some of Barry’s drivel, noticing this in particular
Why should we believe that Harris was paying attention when someone taught him Nietzsche (or that anyone did teach Nietzsche to him)? Did he become an artist? Did he create? Did he choose to go under? You have to be appallingly ignorant of what Nietzsche wrote to suppose that his Übermensch had anything to do with killing a bunch of people, with being a psychopath. I’m not saying that I’m especially sure that Nietzsche’s Übermensch should be considered really safe or admirable, but such a figure had a whole lot more to do with the lone Romantic hero than with the adolescent dreams of power and violence that Harris had.
Then there’s the fact that Nietzsche certainly was no materialist or naturalist, quite explicitly disavowing both (along with atomism, for that matter). You might be able to argue that it doesn’t matter for this purpose, but Barry makes no such case. Nietzsche was no Darwinist either, at a time when the term might have been appropriate for those seeing a primary role for natural selection.
Anyone who reads Eric’s journal should be left wondering if Eric in fact was paying attention to anything, other than his own frustrations and desires. It’s a disjointed adolescent rant lacking intellectual depth and understanding. It does mention natural selection several times, seemingly indiscriminately with respect to essentially anyone he’d like to see killed. Natural selection to kill the “retarded” and “crippled,” but also natural selection to kill the “rich snotty toadies.” I realize that Barry’s not bringing up natural selection in Harris’s journals in this round, but I believe he has in the past, so I thought I’d mention it now.
Barry not getting things right. Hm, I guess that UD is humming along at its usual abysmal level of anti-intelligence.
Glen Davidson
This is a new low for BA.
‘Ubermensch’? Harris was extensively bullied and ostracised. He killed himself along with the rest, which does not sit well with BA’s thesis that he was indulging some ‘cleansing’ activity. A deeply troubled young man, hardly representative of the ‘materialist mindset’.
And let’s once again address the elephant: easy availability of weapons. Control is opposed by, not least, Conservative Christians. And on it goes …
BA:
If Harris had claimed to have been told by God to perform his actions, on what grounds can a theist say he was wrong?
GlenDavidson,
[De-lurking for a moment here while I drink coffee and wake up for the day . . . ]
You’re 100% right that Barry is appallingly ignorant of what Nietzsche actually said — he also clearly doesn’t care about being ignorant and almost revels in it. If he did cared at all about understanding Nietzsche, he would at least know something about Nietzsche’s esteem for ruthless self-discipline, sublimation, creativity (“one must have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star”) — something that Harris obviously lacked.
But, nope, Barry’s grasp of Nietzsche almost certainly comes from Christian apologetics — I’d be surprised if Barry has even once read a word that Nietzsche actually wrote. Bottom line: Barry doesn’t have the right to use the word “Ubermensch”.
The only point at which I’d disagree with Glen is on the question of NIetzsche’s “naturalism”. Glen’s right that Nietzsche opposed “atomism” — in the 19th century version. But Nietzsche had an odd affinity for the physics of Roger Boscovich. Boscovich replaced “atoms” in the old, Epicurean sense with “force-center points”. In Epicurean physics, the atoms are completely inert and passive — they are completely acted upon by external forces. In Boscovich’s physics, the force-center points are active — each one exerts its activity on all the others. This, plus some of von Baer’s work in embryology and some budding psychology, inspired Nietzsche’s metaphysics of “power”. In my reading, Nietzsche was a naturalist. (This is denied by those who read Nietzsche as not having a metaphysics at all, etc.)
Barry’s sneering dismissal of Reciprocating Bill’s excellent description of what we know about the biological basis of morality is another example of UD anti-intellectualism cunningly disguised as anti-elitism. (Actually, the disguise is pretty transparent to everyone not inside that tiny little circle.)
As for this:
Well, Barry is not even the most philosophically sophisticated person at UD — that honor clearly goes to Vincent Torley, followed by StephenB — but I’d be surprised if Barry endorsed divine command theory. My guess is that he’d appeal to some version of natural law theory. That doesn’t work either, but at least it’s not as obviously question-begging as divine command theory.
[back to lurking . . . ]
As one goes back earlier and earlier in the 1800s, the theories put forward under the rubric of naturalism look (to us) more and more unnatural. The example I have noticed is Lamarck. He was not a theist, most likely a deist, as was common among intellectuals in the era of the French Revolution. He would, I think, have endorsed naturalism.
Yet the forces he invoked in his theory of evolution included a universal complexifying force, in addition to his better-known mechanism of use-and-disuse. To us, this complexifying force seems mysterious, at best. It almost sounds supernatural. But Lamarck seemed sure that it would be discovered to be a real force in nature.
It sounds as if we find in Nietzsche a similar situation, But by about 1900, the forces get much more recognizable and mundane. At least, if you count quantum mechanics as mundane.
It seems to me that our current view of the nature of morality is very different from the ancients who wrote the Bible. Most people today view morals as transcendent and objective. Atheists attribute this to a perception due to our shared humanity, theists think its been programmed into our brains by God but in both cases morals exist independently of any persons ( including God) opinion on the matter. I don’t think ancients viewed things this way. They had a right-makes-right view of things. It might better to say that had a might-makes-right-meaningless view of things: there were rules laid down that you followed. Different people followed different rules, and you got away with what you could. So when the Emperor Tiberias raped children the Roman nobility found it horrible but no one questioned his right to do it and no one suggested there should be any punishment for him in the afterlife. Although there were exceptions to this view, such as Plato, things didn’t really change to the modern view of morality until the time the Koran was written.
So…not only can we have morality without belief in God, we cant really have morality in the modern sense if there is a God. Belief in God as moral arbiter reduces morals to arbitrary rules set down by God. This is how people used to view morality but its certainly not the way the majority of people, including religious people, see things today
Yet in the one book I know that Nietzsche mentions Boscovich and discusses his ideas briefly, Beyond Good and Evil, is also where Nietzsche writes:
Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. trans. RJ Hollingdale. England: Penguin Books, 1973 & 1990. p. 51
Judith Norman’s translation of the same bit, but a longer excerpt:
p. 148 of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche on the Role of Philosophy: Description, Creativity, Naturalism, and Possibility
I include the longer version in part because it agrees with Nietzsche’s later remarks about “false cause” in the later Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great errors, since some might argue that Beyond Good and Evil isn’t part of his “mature work.” As the link notes, though, it’s very close to the time of his mature works, and there’s no reason I know of to think that he changed his mind on naturalism by the time he was writing Twilight of the Idols. While it’s also true that he could be a naturalist while criticizing “naturalizers,” I just don’t see it.
Then, that Nietzsche writes so commonly of mere “appearances,” but goes further in Twilight of the Idols to write of the disappearance not only of the “real world” but also of the disappearance of the apparent world, makes it difficult for me to accept the case that Nietzsche was a naturalist (as some, like Leiter, do), unless a very peculiar one (yes, also odd in the 19th cent.). He does seem to have used “naturalism” as one of his perspectives, but how is that not just putting into practice perspectivism? How, indeed, could naturalism be anything but interpretation, if Nietzsche’s statements about all being interpretation were to have any real meaning?
It’s true, yes, that Nietzsche at least did something like “natural science” in order to write about psychology, something that I think grounds him in fact, while most of those who cite him extensively (postmodernists, notably) fail to be much acquainted with fact at all (at least IMO). Yet, as far as I can tell, that’s just fitting the right tool to the job at hand.
Anyway, that’s how it seems to me, admittedly no expert on Nietzsche or philosophy at large. The link above makes the case rather better, IMO, but mileage, variance, etc.
Thanks for the comment, KN, as it certainly made me think and look around at sources, even if not to wholeheartedly agree. However, that naturalism as understood then played a role in Nietzsche’s thought is not something with which I would disagree. He certainly appealed to nature often enough.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
I’ll admit, I hadn’t realized you were so well-acquainted with Nietzsche — that’s fantastic! My Ph.D. (early 2000s) was on Nietzsche’s “free spirit series” and I have two publications on Nietzsche — one that contrast his account of autonomy with Kant’s, and one that examines Carnap’s professed admiration for Nietzsche. I haven’t written on Nietzsche in a few years but I have a future project on Nietzsche in mind that shows the relation between ‘the death of God’ and ‘the myth of the Given’. So I’m always happy to discuss ol’ Fritz.
I agree that Nietzsche rejects a certain kind of “naturalism”: the view that science tells us the truth about the natural world. (“Scientific realism” or “scientific naturalism” would work as a label here, for now.) Nietzsche is a Kantian — which is to say, a constructivist — about knowledge (but a pluralist and fallibilist about the conceptual schemes through which knowledge is constructed). But I don’t think Nietzsche would say that “life, history, and becoming” are themselves constructed.
Apologies to commenters and thanks for not pointing out the garbled prose. When writing the post, I was checking the web and happened to come across news of the shot-down airliner. It made the post seem somewhat trivial in comparison to the lives of nearly 300 people minding their own business sitting quietly in their seats suddenly being blown to oblivion and I pondered over trashing the post. I did, as you see, post but did not spend any time error-checking. I also temporarily lost the inclination to follow up on comments.
I will add a few corrections to the OP and I especially should add a hat-tip to Kantian Naturalist for drawing my attention to Reciprocating Bill’s epic comment.
Coincidentally, my daughter sent me as a birthday present (it was in March but the transport system had many legs – thanks, Karen 😉 ) Edward O. Wilson’s The Future of Life. Published in 2002, it still struck a nerve, and I thought remarks on page 150 were quite pertinent to Barry and his “objective morality”.
Fairness is ingrained in us.
The UD thread is a train wreck.
StephenB is claiming that morality, beauty and humor are all objective.
Yeah, it’s kind of amusing. But it’s actually quite sad and frustrating to me, because almost all of the disagreements that people are having there arise because of a systematic series of conflations. Here are a few:
– between objective and absolute. (Think about physics for a minute. Is it objectively true? Yes Is it absolutely true? No. Why not? What does this show us about the conceptual relation between ‘objective’ and ‘absolute’?)
– the correlated conflation between each contrary, subjective and relative;
– the conflation between subjective and individual (as if there aren’t any universal truths about the nature of subjectivity as such).
– the conflation between the content of an ethical framework and the criteria for evaluating them.
When all is said and done, the debate is about this: given that the content of ethical frameworks is historically and culturally relative, are there any criteria for evaluating those competing frameworks which are absolute? How might we find out what those criteria are, and what is our mode of cognitive access to those criteria? How do we know when a putative mode of cognitive access to those criteria is functioning correctly and reliably? Does “atheism” (which is far too vague a term to be useful here) entail that these questions must be answered in the negative?
I’m sure that the participants in the debate would continue to disagree, but at least they’d be clearer on what it is that they are disagreeing about. I also think that if the non-theists were to push StephenB and Kairosfocus on the second and third questions, the circularity of their view would become apparent. The theists have a ready-made answer to the first question — the moral law. (Another thing that frustrate me about that debate is that the non-theists assume that Arrington, StephenB, and Kairosfocus are divine command theorists. They aren’t; they are obviously natural law theorists. It’s a different view that requires a different critique.)
I think the debate only becomes really interesting when we notice that naturalism, unlike theism, can answer the question as to our mode of cognitive access to the absolute criteria for evaluating competing ethical frameworks: we have a lot of good empirical data about the kinds of capacities that human beings (and non-human living things) have that must be cultivated in order for that being to flourish as the kind of being that it is.
It’s Aristotle’s answer, he came up with it completely independently of any specific religious doctrine (and the relation between Aristotle’s ethics and his own theology is pretty murky), and it’s a perfectly good empirical answer.
Reciprocating Bill’s excellent point, about the biological basis of morality, is an answer to a different question: there, the question is, “what are the causal mechanisms that underpin and explain ordinary moral experience?”
In your last point, I think “experience” in first-person sense could be replaced by “observed behavior” to get another confusion that I saw there in my limited review (I only look at StephenB, Mark F, Recip Bill, torley, the OP).
The other possible source of confusion that I noticed (eg, I think, in one of Mark Frank’s posts), is the separate question of what are the standards for ascertaining the meaning/truthfulness,/appropriateness of (eg) the sentence “That joke was funny”.
I’ve restarted Kitchers book “Ethical Project” which attempts to address some of these issues using a pragmatic approach. If I finish the book while this thread is still live, I’ll try to summarize how I understand his answers.
Yes, that’s a question of semantics and pragmatics of language — and that can by settled independently of the higher-order questions about whether or not there are criteria for adjudicating conflicts between competing conceptual (ethical, epistemic, aesthetic, etc.) frameworks.
I’m beginning to think about theories of reality as being ether endoskeletons or exoskeletons.
An exoskeleton theory describes the shape of reality and constrains expectations about what can happen. The laws of nature would be an example. They are descriptive and very useful, but avoid any hint of “why.”
And endoskeleton theory would be a kind of generative grammar, a description of how to make things, including entirely new things. I see evolution as an example of a generative grammar of reality.
petrushka,
I like the metaphor! I’m not entirely sure how to use it, but I do like it!
BruceS,
BruceS, I finally finished reading Mark Okrent’s Rational Animals (also reviewed here). I recommend it extremely highly (though I also thought the review was fair).
There are very interesting and I think quite compelling criticisms of Millikan and Dennett. He argues against Millikan that teleological explanations are better conceived of in terms of goals rather than functions, and he argues against Dennett that “the teleological stance” can do the kind of predictive work that Dennett’s “design stance” cannot, because the design stance doesn’t disambiguate between organisms and artifacts. There’s a lot of Aristotle here, which for me is a selling-point.
Yet Okrent also argues — in ways I find mostly (but not entirely) plausible — that we can and should distinguish teleological explanations from typological explanations. With that shift, we can endorse teleological explanations about the behavior of an organism even with the shift from typological to populationist conceptions of a species. With this in place, he introduces a distinction between teleological explanations, instrumentally rational explanations, and practically rational explanations.
In some of his other work Okrent refers to himself as a “naturalistic pragmatist,” in contrast with the non-naturalistic (actually, anti-naturalistic) pragmatism Okrent attributes to Heidegger.
Thanks for the recommendation; I think I need to understand some of the mainstream positions better before tackling this, but I will add the book to my list.
That’s a really interesting point. Thanks.
Are you suggesting there that we can’t know anything unless we know how we know it? Wouldn’t it follow from that that in order to know who won a particular baseball game yesterday, one would have to be very adept at epistemology?
Anyhow, those who have thought there is an objective morality have generally claimed there is some kind of “moral sense”–that by which Robin Hood in the excerpt above knew that the slaughter of Muslim children was wrong, even though his culture, including the clerics, had no problem with that practice. A concern about “how Robin knew this” isn’t much different from concerns about how he knew he wasn’t dreaming or in the power of an evil demon: he is simply able to know that kind of thing, even though he could be wrong.
It’s a sad fact of human fallibility. I mean, how do I know I’ve not imagined all the posts on this site? I have some evidence from my experience, which–if it’s actually true that there are posts on this site–is sufficient for me to know that there are. If it’s not actually true, I don’t know it, but so what? The moral is that skepticism is not susceptible to disproof–either with respect to ethical claims–or any other claims.
Some other possibilities, I think:
Divinely revealed to certain visionaries and religious leaders.
Revelaed thought pure reason, such as suggested by Kant and possibly by Rawls (if you include contractual-constructivist accounts as objective in some sense).
Also, if you believe morals are part of the natural world and hence objective, then an empirical approach should be available.
As I understand it, a benefit of taking morals to be objective entities justifies one of the above approaches to trying to know what they are: there is a target we can try to make our approach to knowledge converge to (S/O to Neil!).
I agree it is an interesting point, but I am not sure about RodW’s account of the history.
Even if we restrict ourselves to just the western tradition and western “ancient peoples”, I am not sure if Plato can be relegated to an exception. It seems to me instead that his thinking would be an important part of the source of later Christian and Muslim ideas.
I’m also not sure about the claim that O.T. ancients viewed rules simply as things you had to follow because might (presumably God’s) makes right. For example, I understand the Old Testament presentation of laws mirrors the type of language used in ancient treaties, and that hence the reason ancient Jews thought it correct to obey them was because they were a treaty-based contract between themselves and God. In return for the lands conquered with the help of God, they would commit to obeying His laws.
Further, I understand the later Jewish tradition to be focused on living a life according to laws for the sake of leading a righteous life (a kind of virtue ethics), not due to fear of punishment. The additional of a motivation of fear of might (eg as in hell) is a later Christian (and possibly Muslim?) addition.
And finally, when recounting history, we need to account for the natural law version of ethics which starts with Aristotle before being revived by middle age Christian (and Muslim?) theologians.
In the book I am reading, Kitcher sees morals as social technology and “unseen enforcers” as being added to solve the technical issue of very ancient people not following the agreed rules when they thought no one was looking. So that would be another way of viewing God and morals: a very ancient technical fix that had unforeseen consequences, like many technical fixes, both bad (arbitrary constraints on future change) and good (a positive feeling of oneness with a higher purpose).
LOL
When we talk of knowledge converging, we are often just talking of people coming to agreement. This does not seem at all the same as the question of whether a sequence of scientific theories can be said to converge.
Agreed, I just wondered if you were awake and paying attention.
In the Kitcher book I am reading, he talks about a type of consequentialist approach to ethics where the nature of the good to be calculated in the consequences varies with the type of ethical function one is trying to implement.
To describe this relationship of good metric to function, he says at one point that “Conceptions of the good are duals of the functions assembled in the growth of the ethical project”.
Another (mis?)-appropriation of a mathematical concept into philosophy.
FWIW, many of those who take the “moral sense” position these days DO consider it an empirical approach. E.g., there’s a lot of recent literature on “empathy.” It’s even said to have evolutionary value. From my point of view, what’s important is that emotions of approval and disapproval are intentional–i.e., have objects in much the way that beliefs and ostensible perceptual experiences do.
I think that’s exactly right. (At least I hope it is, because I’m planning to suggest that view to my students this fall.)
I personally feel that I do not have any sort of “moral knowledge”. That is to say, I find the term “know” to be inappropriate when talking about how I relate to moral situations. I do not “know”, for instance, that torturing children for personal pleasure is wrong; I feel internally ill and discomforted by the idea of torturing children. It’s like asking me if I “know” that a Pichon Longeville Comtesse de Lalande is delicious; I would say that I personally find it to be a quite pleasing experience, but do I “know” that it is such? Only in the sense of experiencing it in the moment.
Probably. But that’s not necessarily bad.
Mathematical duality is far more interesting than the various kinds of philosophical dualism. And I think it can be seen as possibly related to ideas of emergence.
Interesting.
I have seen (in Rationally Speaking) attempts to relate emergence to that mathematics of phase changes, but I am not sure how duality and functional analysis fit in. I am guessing this relates to how your ideas about perception somehow.
Technically, I think you are expressing something like the philosophical positions cognitivism versus non-cognitivism.
Cognitivists would say that the moral beliefs refer to propositions (eg propositions such as “torturing babies are wrong”), that such propositions are either true are false, and so there is a fact of the matter to be known.
Non-cognitivists say that beliefs refer to expressions of emotional attitude combined with an exhortation to share that attitude. (I abhor torturing babies and you should too). So you sound like a non-cognitivist.
Yes.
Somehow, most people are looking for a reductionist account of perception. But I don’t see that as useful.
A reductionist account would give the exact mechanisms whereby we perceive a cat or a parrot.
It is at least imaginable, that all current species except homo sapiens might go extinct, and be replaced by other species. And our reductionist account of perception would then be worthless. We would have to toss it, and start all over for the new biosphere.
We need a different kind of explanation for perception. We need an account that is not tied to the current way that the world is. We need an account that, at least in principle, could handle any kind of world that the perceiver might be in. This is why I think philosophy needs to be done without metaphysics.
Many philosophers have responded to claims of subjectivism that it is inconsistent with all the constant arguing about right and wrong. To stick with Robin Hood, if people disagree about whether it’s OK to kill children because they’re Muslim, they’re not disagreeing about their feelings–anymore than whether you think this or that is delicious. Of course, it’s possible that everyone who engages in such disagreements are wrong/confused, because the judgments in question really ARE subjective–just about one’s own feelings. But again, insisting on such translations of ordinary language (in order to make true statements) seems to me (as it has to others) analogous to translating talk of ordinary objects like tables and chairs into talk of what that is claimed to be “really about”–either percepts or sub-atomic particles (depending on who’s ordering the translation.)
I think it might help think about the problem of convergence.
An outside skeleton can converge on what we observe of reality by changing its shape to conform to observation. A good outside theory can be pretty or elegant by having simple descriptive equations that “predict” points not yet observed.
Occasionally it gets stretched , and it is necessary to shed the old skin and build a new one. An inside theory works differently. One can only talk about how to fit pieces together — a grammar of construction — but one cannot say what is possible. How many different sentences can be constructed, or how many different objects made from Legos, or atoms?
I thin this is a useful metaphor, because it helps think about why theories like evolution are different from laws of nature, and why constructive theories cannot, even in principle, predict what can be made or what is possible.
I think it also describes why a generative grammar can’t accomplish anything except as part of an evolutionary process.
Trying desperately to return to the thread topic, I think morals and ethics are best thought of as evolving statements about how we wish people to behave. Such statements can never be complete or fully rational, because they are about dynamic systems.
Barry and his ilk would like to build an exoskeleton to contain all possible statements about morality, but it isn’t going to happen.
If it is not tied to the way the world is, then to me that means you are excluding science as well as philosophy.
I guess that just leaves mathematics.
So what about the mathematics of learning theory? I am referring just to the possible mathematical models, not limited to ones which have been found to be useful in psychology or big data analysis.
Or if perception is not just learning but also, even predominantly, about incorporating information from the environment, then maybe you would need to involve some of the math ideas which came up in the quantum interpretations thread on decoherence and quantum information transfer to the environment (at least, that was my understanding of them).
Those are just thoughts to try to understand better what you might have in mind.
Interestingly enough, Kitcher agrees there are no external constraints to adjudicate moral statements. He uses that “external constraints”phrase a lot. I would see as similar to what you call an exoskeleton.
He also sees an evolutionary type of experimentation and competition (eg between cultures) as part of the nature of the development of ethics.
But the analogy to evolution has one big limitation for him: there is no valid concept of progress in biological evolution. And Kitcher wants progress to avoid philosophical relativism (that is, all we see is mere change with one society’s approach being as good as any others as long as the society survives).
That is where technology comes in: he takes ideas of better functioning technology as a way of judging progress and explores how to apply them to ethics as a social technology. The problems by new or improved functions in technology involve limitations in altruism.
I don’t know about valid, but social evolution is somewhat Lamarkian. And humans do apply concepts of progress to moral and ethical evolution.
The concepts themselves appear to evolve, but I see a consistent direction. The greatest happiness for the greatest number does not suggest specific answers to difficult questions, but over time it acts as a selector.
When you write or talk there is no perfect sentence, but a language community judges speech and writing. Some utterances, like Shakespeare, survive for centuries, and some fade away almost instantly. Most just exist as part of the flow of human activity.
The lack of perfectly rational and consistent standards does not mean there is a lack of direction. You just can’t predict the details.
ETA:
When I say Lamarkian, I mean that human social evolution involves foresight, something missing from the mechanisms of biological evolution. Human foresight is error-prone and imperfect, but it is an “improvement” over blind trial and error.
No, not at all.
Rather, it means that we are considering method, rather than detail. And isn’t that what philosophy should be about?
That works. I wondered whether there was a term for such a position. Thanks!
One problem with that sort of non-cognitivism is that it makes the following statement self-contradictory. “I like killing babies, but I know it’s wrong.” I believe that Fritz Lang’s “M” is a great refutation of that position.
I not familiar with “M”, and I see nothing self-contradictory with liking something that is wrong.
Wrongness can either refer to something that harms others, or it can refer to something that causes delayed or intermittent harm to oneself. Either way, wrongness is orthogonal to liking. For example, one could like gambling, though it leads in the long run to financial harm. Or overeating.
petrushka,
i agree with you that they’re not contradictory. So does Lang. If we’re right, that version of subjectivism is false.
I agree with you that human social evolution shows progress and I agree that change with foresight is a key difference from random mutation.
Kitcher accepts something like that, but he is also trying to us pragmatic, naturalistic approach to provide a principled argument for progress happening at least sometimes (but regression happens too, he admits).
You suggested greatest happiness for greatest number; there are elements of consequentialism in the process he sees as part of recognizing potentially progressive changes, but he wants a more dynamic version to allow variation different ways of measuring the goodness of consequences.
I think a lot of language change is simple change without progress. But if language is a technology for communication and some changes improve its ability to do that, then that might be seen as a standard for the progressiveness of some changes.
By saying progress was undefined in biological evolution I was referring to wrongheaded statements like humanity versus bacteria represents progress .
FWIW, non-cognitivism seems to be Mark Franks position at the UD conversation linked in the OP, as far as I can tell.
OK.
But under that, my confusion would be that I see a lot of philosophy addressing method.
Further, philosophy looks at method both descriptively and normatively.
For example, some parts of philosophy of science describe how methods in science work: here I am thinking about Kuhn’s work as one example,
Other parts of philosophy of science are normative and look at what methods science should use: the nature of good explanations for example.
And to return to your original point about going beyond what is, in both cases, philosophy may use arguments from possible worlds, not just the world as it is, as part of the analysis (an example would be the grue/bleen argument in analysis of induction).
I have to admit I’m often puzzled in that way by some of your comments: I read you as saying philosophy is lacking because it does not do X, whereas I can think of examples where it seems to be doing exactly that X.
I tried to indicate that th concepts by which we measure progress also evolve. I wouldn’t know how to begin talking about whether such change can be called progress. I think moral ideas progress ( improve) but I have no justification for that opinion.