For a duty towards an animal would have to be directed at someone, and if the lights are out and there’s no-one home, then any talk of duties or obligations is meaningless. To be sure, a magnanimous person, motivated by a disinterested ethic of reverence for all living things, might still wish to alleviate the feelings of pain occurring in animals, even while recognizing that these feelings belonged to no-one. But it would no longer be possible to maintain that animals are morally significant “others.” The most we could say is that insofar as they are organisms, animals have a biological “good of their own.” If we adopted this biocentric view, then we would deplore any wanton harm done to animals, just as we would the felling of a Californian redwood tree. But the notion that animals belong on a psychological or moral continuum with us would be forever shattered. For if animals have no “selves,” then they are not “they,” and their pain doesn’t warrant our pity.
VJ Torley has posted an interesting argument regarding animals’ ability to suffer and the ethical implications of various interpretations of animal consciousness. Although VJ has his own conclusions, his post seem to invite discussion rather than agreement or disagreement. He emphasizes the limits of science rather than simply attacking science. I would suggest he also demonstrates some limits to philosophy.
Mapou helpfully sets up the main line of discussion:
Why beat around the bush? Science cannot even prove that humans are conscious, let alone animals. There is no experiment that can directly detect consciousness. It is a subjective phenomenon. We may know that we are conscious but we can only assume that other humans are equally conscious.
Mapou goes on to say that he considers animals to be meat robots and outside of any consideration of their welfare. I would argue that we draw our lines of demarcation on some basis other than evidence or logic. I personally think this problem of demarcation cannot be solved by reason.
I think we as individuals draw the line between creatures that merit ethical consideration and those that don’t, and I think we do this for purely emotional reasons. Some of us see someone home behind the eyes of non-humans.
Seems to me that they’re playing the old creationist game of supposing that similar (outward, in this case) results are due to different causes.
Certain patterns of similarity indicate non-miraculous relatedness–until they don’t (due to preconceived ideas).
Consciousness is associated with certain behaviors–until it isn’t (due to preconceived ideas).
In this case they’ve basically melded two of their more fundamental, evidence-free denials of the evidence in order for each preconceived idea to “support” the other.
Glen Davidson
I start from the assumption that I exist. What exactly “I” am is still an open question.
I prefer to exist rather than not. Why that should be is hard to explain, although to me it is self-evident that my existence is preferable to non-existence.
My preference for continued existence means, by implication, that I would rather that other people – and other creatures – do nothing to end my existence. I assume that other people have the same preference so we have a shared interest in not killing each other.
Whether other animals have the same conscious preferences as humans is unclear so, to play safe, we should not kill other creatures, any more than ourselves, without good cause.
The various cats that have been my companions were and are little personalities of their own although they are not human. They are not baby substitutes or living toys or furry jewelry but other beings in their own rights and deserving of our consideration as such.
Can I justify any of the above with anything other than post-hoc rationalization? No, I don’t think so and I doubt anyone else can. Does that make it any the less important? Not to me.
I see that vjtorley thread as saying a lot about vjtorley, but very little about animal consciousness.
I don’t think animals are just meat robots.
They have the unique thing of being alive with some sense of spirit. nOt like plants and not just memory on top of a machine.
They think and so are conscience.
So, we’re ALL meat robots. How does that change anything? We still form relationships with our fellow meat robots, and there’s no objective evidence that they cannot have meat-based feelings, as do we.
On the other hand, I don’t see that putting a controlling backpack on a cockroach is such a big deal.
The linked post and discussion are yet another reason for the queasiness that I feel towards ethical theories. It is scary to watch people convincing themselves that they should have no moral constraints against what ought to be morally revolting. With a suitable choice of a doctrine and some deft footwork, one can justify anything whatsoever. The question then is, do you let theory override your moral sense? What if you don’t have much of a moral sense to begin with? Scary.
Why should I agree to a moral system based on reciprocity in the first place, and in the second place, who gets to decide what “good cause” is?
There is always time for this classic:
THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long. Do you have any idea what’s the life span of meat?”
“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“So … what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”
“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”
“Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they’ve been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”
“Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?”
“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual.”
“We’re supposed to talk to meat.”
“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.’ That sort of thing.”
“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”
“Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat.”
“I thought you just told me they used radio.”
“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”
“Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”
“Officially or unofficially?”
“Both.”
“Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”
“I was hoping you would say that.”
“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”
“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello, meat. How’s it going?’ But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”
“Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can’t live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact.”
“So we just pretend there’s no one home in the Universe.”
“That’s it.”
“Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You’re sure they won’t remember?”
“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them.”
“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”
“And we marked the entire sector unoccupied.”
“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?”
“Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again.”
“They always come around.”
“And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone …”
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
Reciprocating Bill 2,
Also made into a brilliant short movie by some film students.
The winner of the holy war, of course! Why fight them otherwise?
It seems to me that it’s just part of the experience of another sentient creature that one apprehends it as sentient. Looking for scientific evidence of this sentience is just missing the point. If one asks, “sure, my cat seems sentient, but is it really?”, the response is that they are asking the wrong question. The right question is, “how can the cognitive sciences explain our experience of each other as sentient beings?” And that experience is surely necessary for feeling empathy, which is crucial to morality.
What goes missing in Torley’s way of setting up the discussion is the possibility that being an animal could be itself an ethical category. He assumes, apparently following the Kantian tradition, that if something doesn’t count as a person, then it must count as a thing. There’s no room for any additional categories besides things and persons. And that flies so much in the face of our experience of at least some animals as creatures deserving our care and concern, as creatures to whom care and concern are owed, that there’s got to be something deeply wrong with the conceptual framework at play here.
(In another context, I would develop more fully the modern Western cultural schizophrenia about animals that put cats and dogs on one side and cows and pigs on the other. And I am not a vegetarian.)
Finally: just because there is an emotional dimension to morality, doesn’t mean that morality is only emotional. For morality could (and, I think, does) involve a complex interplay of emotion and reason.
William J. Murray,
Who’s asking you to? Alternatively, why should anyone agree to a moral system based on your assumptions re: an external (and inconveniently inaccessible) arbiter, or one based on the gibberings of this or that holy text?
If you really want to engage with Murray once again, at least start off by getting his position right — Murray is a natural law theorist, not a divine command theorist.
Unless there’s some argument that natural law collapses back into divine command — I don’t know if there is such an argument or not — at least start off by respecting Murray’s interest in making this distinction. Otherwise the whole rest of this thread will be a repeat of the same conversations we’ve had hundreds of times before.
Also, Murray has made it completely clear that his version of natural law has nothing to do with Scripture. He’s a theist, but he’s not an evangelical Christian — in fact, I don’t even know if he’d consider himself a Christian at all.
Kantian Naturalist,
I’m not about to bend over backwards to accommodating Murray’s specific position, since he puts little or no effort into anyone else’s. But my response had two parts. The first was related to Murray – ie his oft-expressed external arbiter of moral truth. The second was not – it was a point regarding other means by which people (not necessarily Murray) attempt to justify an absolute moral system. He wondered (unasked) why he should accept a reciprocal basis for morality; I wondered (equally unasked) why I should accept one of the theistic alternatives – not just his, but any.
One does not have to restrict every word of a post to addressing the position of the person one is responding to.
Allan Miller,
That’s fair enough, and quite right.
In response to the oft-heard “why should I think that?” move, there are several responses.
But with regard to morality, I would say that my care and concern for other people, and my efforts to alleviate their suffering when feasible, is at the very heart of my understanding of myself as a basically decent human being, and that a callous disregard for the welfare of others, and for the impact that one’s actions have on them, is the hall-mark of immorality.
Because if you don’t I’ll kill you.
Reciprocity is practical.
Kantian Naturalist,
Yes, a common theme is why, with any moral system, anyone else should buy into it. It tends to be more a theme of the theist than the atheist. For me, morality is a personal thing. It is, after all, about how an individual ‘ought’ to behave. I’m not even convinced by the reciprocity argument. I think morality starts with the personal sense – doing or witnessing ‘good’ induces positive feelings, while the reverse is negative. Collective morality emerges from that set of individual moralities (we are, after all, cut from broadly the same cloth, being related and all). Traffic is not, of course, all one way. Family, cultural and religious norms mould the individual sense.
This seems to be the stock objection to so-called ‘subjective morality’: what if individual X feels good about doing something you abhor? What then? But ‘what then’ arises in any moral system. Personally, I find it to be no problem at all. One can act or not act, and have a rational basis for either course. One is not asking anyone else to go along with the things one finds heartwarming or heartrending, or one’s means of reaching conclusions on moral issues. There are instances when allowing injustice would not be an acceptable course (personally acceptable), but these instances do not lie at the heart of morality.
But controlling others seems at the root of theistic versions of morality. It perplexes them when an individual-moralist sees it as a non-issue. “Why should I buy your version of morality?” “No reason. It’s a free country. Why should I buy yours?”.
Indeed.
The issue is that a morally responsible person can allow and defend the right of freedom of thought and expression to those with whom they (fundamentally 🙂 ) disagree. When I see equivocation on this (and it is usually religious fundamentalists) then my alarm bells ring.
Yes, arguing against someone’s actual position is much more difficult than regurgitating set responses whether they apply or not.
I think the problem in this debate has always been that materialists / atheists are largely incapable of understanding the argument that’s actually being made. The actual argument is that of assumed premises from which one makes a moral argument, and whether or not those assumed premises can justify their beliefs and the way one actually behaves in the world. Materialists think that the argument is about whether or not a premise can be proven, and if not, then the necessary de facto position is that morality is subjective in nature.
When I ask, “why should I agree to it”, that question is asking “if true, what reasons can be extrapolated from your premise of “what morality is” for me to accept what you say is moral or immoral and behave accordingly? It’s not asking for you to prove or provide evidence that your view of morality is correct, or to prove your premise, but to make a case for why I, or anyone, should agree to it – or even care about it, even if we agree arguendo that your premises are true.
If we agree arguendo that my premise of morality is correct, there are necessary consequences for one’s moral behavior. This provides a rational reason (given the premise) why it is important for an individual to figure out, as best they can, what is moral and what is immoral. That is why, given my premise, one should accept it and care.
That’s not an argument that objective morality is true in the first place; it’s an argument why, if true, one should adopt it and behave morally. But there is no such corresponding argument if the materialist/atheist premise is true, because if the materialist/atheist premise is true, there’s no inherent, inescapable reason why I should behave morally, nor any assumed standard of morality by which I should try to live my life.
IOW, given the materialist/atheist premise, there’s no intrinsic reason for me to care about morality whatsoever. There’s no intrinsic reason for me to adopt anyone else’s morality. There’s lots of social and interpersonal reasons to behave in various ways to maximize one’s potential for achieving various goals and preferences, but there’s no reason to call any of it “morality” other than for the purpose of rhetorical manipulation. I’m certainly not obligated, in any meaningful sense of the word, to behave morally or to intervene when others are behaving in any particular way.
That’s the point; given materialist/atheist premises, there’s no reason for me to care about morality, in and of itself. It’s just a big fat “so what?” Who says? Who cares? I can do whatever I want as long as I can get away with it; there is no cosmic or divine justice ore consequences wrt morality. There is no cosmic principle of reciprocity; so what if I would prefer not to be harmed by others? My not harming others doesn’t, in any significant way, indemnify me from being harmed by others. In fact, in some situations, my not harming others might make it more likely that I will be harmed by others.
So, if your premise of morality is true, there’s no intrinsic reason for me to care about morality at all; there’s no reason for me to feel morally obligated to act any particular way or intervene; I have no moral authority or obligation whatsoever.
If my premise is true, there is an intrinsic reason to care about morality, and there would be a reason why I would have moral obligations and authority to intervene in certain cases.
The fact is, unless one is a sociopath, everyone behaves as if my premises are true, and nobody acts as if the materialist/atheist premises are true. We all act as if there is an intrinsic value and necessity to moral behavior, and as if we have both moral obligations and authority to intervene in certain cases.
It is the atheist/materialist, however, that cannot reconcile how they act and think (wrt morality) with their worldview premise about what morality is.
One can hardly reconcile a god that gives humans free will with a god that is attempting to control their behavior. I suggest that it is often not the root of theistic versions of morality that attempt to control others, but rather the institutions that spring up around various forms of theism that attempt to control others. Humans attempt to control others through all kinds of institutions such as politics or media – not just religion.
Then why bother calling anything we do or think “morality” if we don’t consider it binding on anyone, including ourselves? That’s what perplexes me; it’s like calling a diet “healthy” for no reason other than “I like this food.” Why bother calling what you like to eat “healthy” when there is simply no standard for such a term, and it doesn’t have any intrinsic value?
Any sociopath can sing “Personally, I find it to be no problem at all. ” while chopping up girl scouts and eating them. If your morality offers no substantive distinction between what you do, and what Dahmer or Gacy or Hitler did, why bother calling it morality?
And anyone can say “God wants me to do it,” or “I find this to be self-evidently moral,” while stoning an adulteress to death.
Pretending that you have access to an Absolute Morality via your “self-evident” moral intuitions doesn’t make it so.
That you are attempting a turnabout phrasing one of my statements as if it would invalidate my point demonstrates that you don’t understand the point – as usual. Anyone can say anything. What matters in an argument is if what they say is reconcilable with how they actually behave and coherent with the other beliefs they hold.
Once again, your statement only demonstrates that you don’t understand the point. I don’t pretend I have such access, nor do I know I have such access; it’s just a statement of behavioral fact that we all must act as if absolute morality exists (unless one is a sociopath) and as if we all not only have access to it, but are obligated and have authority to act upon it.
It’s a necessary set of assumptions, even if one denies it, for morality to have any meaning of value and for morality to be in line with how people actually act and think.
William,
Suppose a sociopath says that his every momentary whim is morally binding on the rest of us, and behaves accordingly. What he says is “reconcilable with how they actually behave and coherent with the other beliefs they hold.”
Rather than negating the sociopath’s morality, your argument reinforces it!
You keep making this claim, but you never provide any evidence for it. Any question of the form “Is it right to do X?” can be answered without pretending that absolute morality exists or that we have access to it. Can you provide a counterexample?
Your morality is based on a demonstrably false premise: that we must assume the truth of something that we cannot possibly know.
For someone who claims to be rational, you have adopted a strikingly irrational moral system.
Divide and conquer?
I wonder at several of Torley’s assumptions here. For example, Torley assumes that adopting an ethical attitude towards an animal — having an I-Thou relation with it, in Buber’s terms — is contingent upon having some implicit theory of animal consciousness. And this just seems wrong-headed to me. A theory of animal consciousness is part of our third-person, explanatory stance on the world; an ethical relation is part of our second-person, practical stance in the world.
There may be all sorts of good reasons for treating at least animals as Thous rather than as Its — though even here I still worry that the I-Thou/I-It distinction inherits all the flaws of the Kantian distinction. And I submit that most of us do, in fact, treat some animals as Thous, e.g. as pets and other kinds of animal companions.
That we also think of animals as robots made of meat — and indeed, also ourselves as robots made of meat — for certain explanatory, scientific purposes has nothing at all to do with our ethical being-in-the-world, and can only seem to threaten if one misunderstands the place of science in human life.
Here’s a really lovely set of lectures on the philosophy of neuroscience: The Semantic Apocalypse. It’s dense at points but — I thought — deeply rewarding as well.
Far too pessimistic.
Thus far I’ve only read the main presentation. I’ll need to read the responses. Perhaps we need a new topic, since this thread is the wrong place for a discussion.
Ok, I’ll start one.
i would say that whether or not you agree to any moral system would depend on whether or not you judged it to be in your best interests. That’s assuming you are deciding the matter rationally.
In the case of a moral system based on reciprocity, suppose that, like Sartre, you decided hat hell was other people. You might conclude that there was no compelling reason to suffer the unwanted attentions of others and withdraw to the splendid isolation of a desert island or, perhaps, that Platonic cave which kairosfocus finds so instructive. In that case, a moral system based on reciprocity would simply be irrelevant.
If, on the other hand, you crave the society of others and want them to enter into association with you of their own free will, then showing consideration for their interests would seem be a sensible strategy. Reason aside, your need for others might also be founded on a genuine empathy for them. In either case, reciprocity would be a good idea.
That would matter if I was attempting to make a case against a sociopath’s argument, and it would matter had I not already conceded several times in this thread alone that “unless one is a sociopath”, their moral views are irreconcilable with their actual behavior.
SeverskyP35,
In other words, there is no compelling rational reason, there is only rhetorical appeal to my personal proclivity.
By “must assume”, I mean that the premises are required to logically justify the behavior, not that you, in your mind, must assume those premises true. Whether you accept those premises or not doesn’t change the fact that you and everyone else who isn’t a sociopath acts as if those premises are true.
William,
Those premises are neither implicitly nor explicitly required. If they were, then you would be able to respond to my challenge instead of evading it. I repeat:
Can you?
Should you and yours come to power, will you use this “fact” as a convenient way of sorting those you want to keep and those you wish to dispose of?
Those who disagree with this “self-evident” fact, what would you do with them?
It seems to me that in your society you are intent on building, those with an impoverished moral sense or conscience, a history of crime, legal problems, impulsive and aggressive behavior would not be welcome.
And you already have a label to apply to any that disagree with this “fact” of yours – “sociopath”.
So, William, what’s the cure for these “sociopaths” you perceive in society? Lock them up? Or is something more final required?
William J. Murray,
You really don’t see the irony, do you? That is a pretty good summary of your entire schtick. Hence the restoration of the full sentence above.
William J. Murray,
Whether or not God gives humans free will, religious people nonetheless spend an awful lot of time and energy attempting to point the free will of others in a particular direction. My comment was not about control-by-God, but control-by-other-people.
William J. Murray,
Wrong. It may please you to believe I am a sociopath, but in fact I act as if MY premises are true. I don’t think there is a Morality Central external to humans, nor do I act as if there is. I think that some behaviours are rewarding and others are not. So I do the rewarding ones (which does not boil down to killing babies, or screwing every woman I fancy).
It’s not my problem if you can’t distinguish ‘behaviour one might call moral’ from ‘behaviour’. Talk about cheap rhetoric! Argumentum ad hitlerum, yet? I call behaviour ‘moral’ if it gives me a sense that I am helping, not hurting, my fellow man. So that does not include my preference for raspberry jam or Prefab Sprout. One of your famously callous individuals may have thought he was helping his fellow man also, in which case what can I say? My morality fails because someone has a different conception? Boo hoo.
I don’t act as if anything else in the universe gives a damn about what I do, except that I might wish for good standing in the eyes of others, because that makes me feel good. But it is not essential that anyone know if I do something ‘worthy’. Self esteem is a sufficient driver. If you can cast the behaviour of your ID parade of Bad People in that same light, yippee for you. Neither of us really knows how their internal rationalisation went, but in any case I don’t care; it has no impact on my own ‘moral’ choices (yes, I once again dare use the word, and yet not mean Objective Morality by it). You are proving my point, by repeating the same tedious litany over and over – “you can’t have subjective morality because – well, look at Exception X. That’s where it takes you”. Except that it doesn’t, logically or practically.
Allan Miller,
Too late to edit, I realise this is not quite what is being said – more that “subjective morality means that Person X has just as much ‘right’ to define a behaviour as moral as you do”. But it does not alter the point: why should variant viewpoints matter to the position one takes? I am arguing that morality is not fundamentally about what others should do, but oneself. So repeating some relativistic issue involving others, and their imagined internal state, demonstrates that, once again, you miss the point.
If Hitler gained the same warm glow from torching Jews as I do from being kind, then I’d have to accept that that’s just how we are respectively wired (I very much doubt that this was the nature of his experience, but it is a possibility). So let us insert Objective Morality into the picture, to avoid this bugbear of ‘moral equivalence’. Now, there is something external that actually cares, and can rank our behaviours according to those desires. And the one of us that External Morality adjudicates in favour of is … ?
I realise (and apologise) that this is a derail from the OP, but the relevance is this: there simply is no experience other than subjective experience. We must use our (variably-developed) capacity for empathy to evaluate the nature of other subjective experiences – our conspecifics and others. I’m not fully convinced that WJM even experiences the sensations of which I talk. Which makes it difficult to convey their impact on my behaviour.
You say that as if there is a standard by which “behavior” can be discerned from “moral behavior”, which others should recognize. As if it doesn’t all just depend on subjective, internal rationalizations. Which you apparently contradict with:
I don’t have an argument with atheists/materialists who admit their morality is the might-makes-right equivalent of mass murderers and child molesters. I agree that such a position is rationally justifiable under materialism/atheism.
I would say that such a sentiment is fine if one is a sociopath, but since you consider your morality, in principle, the equivalent of any sociopath, mass murderer or child molester, why bother?
For most of us, an essential aspect of morality is about how we treat others and our obligations to intervene and/or advocate on their behalf or to stop their activity.
But then, your position is that you get to do whatever happens to be your proclivity regardless of what any other perspective is, and you don’t have to justify it because that’s all such things are – subjective justifications/rationalizations for doing whatever you want to do anyway. I can see why you think morality is all about you and what you want to do. That’s basically the sociopath’s morality, which I have no quarrel with as far as logical arguments are concerned.
First, why “must” we use our empathy for that purpose? You are again speaking as if there is a standard for morality, and that this “variable” standard lies in our empathetic feelings. Why should I hold that empathy has anything whatsoever to do with morality? Why shouldn’t I desensitize myself to my empathetic feelings if I want if I think it will serve me better in my life, and construct a morality devoid of empathy?
Second, why should I care what impact your empathetic feelings have on your behavior? You’ve already admitted that non-empathetic sociopaths are as entitled to their subjective morality (under your premise) as anyone else. Just because you personally employ empathy in what you refer to as your moral system doesn’t mean anyone else has to. Your use of the term “must” up there is hanging out as yet another self-contradiction.
WJM ,
By “must assume”, I mean that the premises are required to logically justify the behavior, not that you, in your mind, must assume those premises true. Whether you accept those premises or not doesn’t change the fact that you and everyone else who isn’t a sociopath acts as if those premises are true.
That seems a practical approach, though I don’t see the exception for sociopaths as logically justified.
I am late to the game, but it seems like you have to know what is objectively moral before you assume a specific moral authority which lends that code authority.
Or is part of the premise that only one specific moral authority is possible?
Welcome, Sir!
Some distinctions:
– the language of should and the language of must (in ‘technical’ terms, the language of normativity and the language of modality);
– the distinction between the individual and the social (“I” and “We”);
– the distinction between the subjective and the objective;
– the distinction between the relative and the absolute;
– the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori;
With these distinctions in place, I see no difficulty in saying that, for example, justice is about how we ought to live together, as distinct from the personal plan-of-life about how I ought to live.
And the social norms that hold a society together can confront each member of that society as objectively valid, even though there is nothing in the basic framework of the cosmos which prescribes those norms to that society.
However, it seems plausible to me that there does need to be something in place, at a deep emotional level, at work in the individual in order for the objectively valid norms of the society to get a grip on his or her individual moral psychology. We can call that “empathy”. A sociopath, lacking empathy, knows full well what is morally permissible and forbidden — she just doesn’t care. And since she doesn’t care, what she requires is not persuasion but therapy.
Rational persuasion can indicate to someone what they ought to care about, but it cannot, by itself, bring about that care if the innate psychological dispositions are absent.
That’s just silly. You can’t therapize empathy into someone. A person who has no internal desire to be helpful to others need law, not therapy.
I don’t mean retribution. I mean effective law. At the moment, game theory suggests restitution is the most effective form of legal discipline.
As I have argued on other threads, our actual laws are often counterproductive. They produce results that are worse than no law at all.
petrushka,
Whether the genuine sociopath needs therapy or detention is an empirical question, though I suspect you’re right.
Kantian Naturalist,
True, though it is a two-way street. Society is a collection of individuals. Where do its norms come from? We codify both nature and nurture into our individual general sense that, when confronted with one behaviour (in ourselves or others) we experience warmth, with another revulsion. That collectivises into the norms of a society. Our personal sense is malleable, but not to the same degree for every factor and every individual. But fundamentally, society can mould us because we want to belong to it. Most of us.
William J. Murray,
Whoa, there, Neddy. Your entire flight depends upon misreading my statement. Therefore there is no contradiction. When I say ‘one’, I mean the individual. The person considering the behaviour. Not someone else. They (that one individual) know what behaviours make them feel warm and fuzzy, and which make them feel somewhat icky. If they are native speakers of English, they also recognise that the word tends not to be used for just ANY behaviour. It tends to be used for certain kinds of behaviour. This distinction seems lost on you, so you saddle up your tired old “what-if-someone-thought-killin-babies-was-moral? Huh? Huh? HUH?”. Yes, if someone really thought it was moral, and wasn’t lying, we (me and him, not me and you) would potentially have a disagreement on what ‘moral’ meant, and not just what was and what wasn’t ‘moral’ by our lights.
In bringing Hitler into the conversation (Hi, Adolf!), and regarding one of his behaviours (presumably something about genocide) as morally equivalent to one of mine, you are asserting that HE (not you or I) thought it moral in the same sense that I (or, separately, you) think something moral. You have no evidence for this. Hitler could, for example, have been a sociopath. Therefore he would be devoid of any conception of the warmth or revulsion attendant upon his various actions. But I do possess that sense. Therefore I would say that his behaviour is not what I would call moral. Nor is it what you would call moral. If it was what Hitler would call moral – well, bully for Hitler.