Since objective morality is The Topic That Won’t Die here at TSZ, I think we need Yet Another Thread to Discuss It.
A Sam Harris quote to get things rolling (h/t walto):
There are two mistakes I see moral subjectivists making. The first mistake is believing in the fact-value dichotomy. The second mistake is conflating moral philosophy and psychology, suggesting that our psychology ought to be the sole determinant of our beliefs.
I’ll only address the fact-value dichotomy mistake here. Subjectivists typically exaggerate the gap between facts and values. While there is a useful distinction to be made between facts and values, it’s usually taken too far.
Let me explain. Facts in science are held in high epistemic regard by non-religious people, including me. But scientific facts are theory-laden. And theory choice in science is value-laden. What values inform choices of scientific theory? Verifiability, falsifiability, explanatory value, predictive value, consistency (logical, observational, mathematical), parsimony, and elegance. Do these values, each taken alone, necessarily make or prove a scientific theory choice correct? No. But collectively, they increase the probability that a theory is the most correct or useful. So, as the philosopher Hilary Putnam has put it, facts and values are “entangled.” Scientific facts obtain their veracity through the epistemic values listed above. If I reject those epistemic values (as many religious people do), and claim instead that a holy book holds more epistemic value for me, does that mean science is subjective?
I maintain the same is true of morality. Moral facts, such as “X is right or good,” are at least value-laden, and sometimes also theory-laden, just like scientific facts. What values inform choices of moral belief and action? Justice, fairness, empathy, flourishing of conscious creatures, and integrity (i.e. consistency of attitudes, beliefs, and behavior between each other and over time). Do these values, each taken alone, necessarily make or prove a moral choice correct? No. But collectively, they increase the probability that a moral choice is the most correct or useful. So again, as the philosopher Hilary Putnam has put it, facts and values are “entangled.” Moral facts obtain their veracity through the values listed above (and maybe through other values as well; the list above is not necessarily complete).
Now, the subjectivist can claim that the moral values are subjective themselves, but that is no different than the religious person claiming scientific values are subjective. The truth is that we have no foundation for any knowledge whatsoever, scientific or moral. All we have to support scientific or moral knowledge is a web of entangled facts and values, with values in science and morality being at the core of our web. Our values are also the least changeable, for if we modify them, we cause the most disruption to our entire web. It’s much easier to modify the factual periphery of our web.
If we reject objectivity in morality, we must give up objectivity in science as well, and claim that all knowledge is subjective, since all knowledge is ultimately based in values. I reject this view, and claim that the scientific and moral values listed above provide veracity to the scientific and moral claims I make. Religious people disagree with me on the scientific values providing veracity, and moral subjectivists disagree with me on the moral values providing veracity. But disagreement doesn’t mean there is no truth to the matter.
Seems to me Sam Harris just showed convincingly that, just like there is no provable objective foundation for knowledge (it all rests on unprovable assumptions), so is there no provable objective foundation for morality.
It pretty much took place here:
I agree completely. There is no objective morality and there is no objective foundation for knowledge. I haven’t come across any religion or philosophy that has been able to convince me otherwise. All I see from all the parties is assertions nobody seems able to justify. They will invariably devolve into either blatant question begging, circular reasoning or an infinite regression of assertions.
I think you should have written “There is no objective foundation for morality and there is no objective foundation for knowledge”, if you really wanted to agree.
I believe what Harris is saying is that, just like with science, we can pick foundations for morality so that it becomes objective, by definition. The choice of foundations may still be subjective, but that doesn’t mean that objective morality does not exist.
If human well being is a foundation of morality, I can easily conceive why shooting people for fun is objectively wrong
Rum, if you put moral claims on the same footing as empirical claims, I think you may be saying something Harris could agree with. But objectivism v. subjectivism isn’t about “provable foundations.”
Harris doesn’t just want to put moral claims on the same epistemic footing as empirical claims, but wants to treat moral claims as a species of empirical claims. That’s where I get off the bus.
Though you’re quite right that “objective” vs. “subjective” isn’t about foundations!
Besides which, “provable foundations” is a contradiction. If the foundations could be proven, from other premises or axioms, then they wouldn’t be foundations. The idea of “foundations” is that they are “self-evident” or “presuppositionless” — they don’t rest on anything, but they are that on which everything else relies. They are Given.
To quote from Sellars (“Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?” in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind“):
Kantian Naturalist,
Good points all, KN!
“Morality can be judged by the societal collapse… The achievements will not overshadow them”.
J-Mac,
The Roman Empire was one of the most successful empires ever…Why did it collapse?
We are all Presuppositionalists now.
😉
All that is left is to recognize that unprovable does not in any way equal untrue.
quote:
“I don’t believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.”
end quote:
Kurt Gödel
peace
it most certainly does.
All we can ever hope to do is examine our assumptions to see if they are consistent with each other and sufficient to do what we ask of them
peace
Morality is like toilet-paper for most …There are many alternatives…
I’ve been in contact with, with the many different “morality interpreters”…
I find that most of them would like the morality to be fluid just as is their sexuality…or whatever they would like to do without any restrictions of their morality…
Let’s say I have an urge to f..k some chickens but in my society it is not acceptable to do it. So, if I would like to continue to f..k the chicken and not feel odd about it I’m going to seek other chicken f…..s and then together we can try to normalized our own view of morality which accepts the f….g of chickens…
One could equally say that there is no objective foundation for engineering, therefore engineering is value-driven.
Is there anything left for the word “objective” to be used for?
Rome was sacked, true, but the empire moved to new headquarters. Byzantium was pretty posh for a long time, and Rome moved on and became Italy.
There is no provable objective foundation for engineering. That does not mean that there is no objective foundation.
Not provable does not mean not true and it certainly does not mean not objective.
It simply means not provable, that is all.
peace
Not unless you are a theist.
Only if God exists does the term “objective” have any real meaning.
peace
Yeah that’s what I meant.
I understood that. We all subjectively define some objective fact, to be the foundation for morality.
This is where it unhinges for me. That’s exactly what it means. If the foundations are subjectively defined, then calling morality “objective” simply because the subjective definition appeals to some objective fact, like some aspect of human nature, seems to be.. well it feels like one would only do that so that one can say morality is objective. It’s deceptive in some sense.
I can’t. It’s subjectively wrong. We’ve defined it subjectively to be wrong because we subjectively defined morality to be human wellbeing.
Strangely enough I can agree with Harris there. I agree to the subjective definition, I would prefer that we definite morality to be about human wellbeing. And in light of that definition, there might be objective empirical facts about how best to achieve those goals of happiness and wellbeing.
Then you could say stuff like “it is objectively wrong (due to some empirical fact), according to the definition we chose, to do X, because doing X causes a reduction in human wellbeing”.
Heh, I now realize that my issue with subjective vs objective morality is mostly about semantics. If to say that there is an objective morality, is merely to say that that it is possible to say that something is objectively wrong according to some definition, then of course there is an objective morality. But then the whole subjective-objective dichotomy becomes a complete red herring. Even trivial, because it seems to me then all moralities are then “objective” moralities, since with some definition in hand, there’s always going to be some objective facts of the matter to point to.
Somehow I always felt this debate was about more, and deeper, than that.
Rumraket,
That’s my objection as well.
When you speak of “objective truths”, almost everyone will take you to be referring refer to actual states of affairs that hold true independent of observers. To them, “Mercury is closer to the sun than Venus” is an objective truth because Mercury is in fact closer to the sun than Venus — in reality, regardless of what any particular observer believes.
Moral “truths” can’t be established as objective in that sense.
More on this tomorrow.
The moral version of the “how do you know?” bot looks something like this
Why should X be a foundation for morality?
in this particular case it would be rendered
Why should human well being be a foundation for morality?
Once you have answered that question simply substitute your answer for the X and repeat.
peace
“can’t be established” is not the same as not true.
The problem is not with Moral truths it’s with the Materialist’s jacked up method for determining what is true.
peace
That (or any) epistemic principle has nothing at all to do with materialism.
As opposed to the mindless and endless declaration “God did it and I know because he reveals it” which you can’t substantiate with anything, you can merely repeat the claim endlessly.
Wow, well done, really that’s so brilliant. That dumb game can be played by anyone. My favorite entity ensures it’s true and reveals it to me in such a way that I can know it. You can apply that ludicrous crap to anything.
A method that can be used to defend anything, defends nothing.
Yes yes I know, this is where you start brainlessly repeating what you can’t demonstrate to be true (after all, all you really do is just say the words over and over again, that’s it), as if the repetition of it was in fact capable of settling the matter.
Please explain
When keith’s says “can’t be established as objective”
I think he means “can’t be established as objective by empirical means”
am I wrong?
peace
If you can’t show them to be true, whether they really are true is completely irrelevant.
Oh wait, he “reveals” it to you. How do you know that? He reveals it. Put it on repeat. The fact that you find this persuasive probably says more about your psychological state than the merits of your beliefs.
No. There are extremely few truths we can demonstrate. None empirical.
Yes. Keiths has said he takes mathematical asserions (e.g.) to be objective. I suppose, too, that ’empirical’ needs to be defined. I mean is ‘I seem to be seeing red’ empirical?
I’d don’t agree (well, depends on what you mean by “extremely few”). I’d say there are millions of demonstrable truths. But they’re truths demonstrable dependent on certain sets of axioms. Like logic and mathematical truths. Or empirical truths.
All truthes which we know to be truths, are known to be truthes because they are demonstrable. Otherwise we wouldn’t know them to be truths.
And I’d say there are two classes of truths. Empirical and logical (and mathematical is, I think, a kind of logical truth).
Both kinds stand on certain assumptions or axioms if you will, so they’re not (at least in my view) ultimate truths. They could be, we just don’t know that they are. They’re conditional on those assumptions/axioms being true. But e can’t show the assumptions to be true (if we could, they wouldn’t be assumptions/axioms).
I think the kind of truth you speak about, an ultimate truth, is unobtainable. We can never know that we have discovered such a truth.
Rumraket,
Yes, we seem to disagree about a lot on this subject, Rum. I’m a fallabilist. I don’t think we can have CERTAINTY of empirical conclusions even if we grant the axioms–because we can’t have certainty of the axioms. But as I don’t believe that knowledge requires certainty, I think we know lots of stuff–both empirical and non-empirical. I wouldn’t call any of the empirical knowledge “demonstrated.” Operationalists (like Bridgeman) believed that physical object claims were deducible from phenomenal statements and so-called bridge laws–but nobody’s ever been able to actually produce any of the latter.
Also, I haven’t talked about “ultimate truths” at all. (Maybe that was directed at keiths?–he’s troubled because he feels he can’t know that he’s not being deceived by an evil demon.)
Finally, I’m a kind of presuppositionalist (though not of the same kind as FMM) in that I think the axioms you mention are required in all of (what Aristotle called) categories. Thus, although moral claims are quite different from empirical claims (and unlike Harris–but like keiths–I don’t think they’re reducible, etc.), both types are dependent on axioms or categorical choices that cannot be proved.
Anyhow, the moral is that I don’t think we’re communicating very well here.
I’ve often wondered, to what extent to you think of categories as genuinely transcendental in a Kantian or quasi-Kantian sense? By that I mean, do you think categories are invariant? Fixed? Immune to change through experience? How is awareness of categories generated?
I think that one of the big issues on which I am definitely on Team Hegel/Lewis/Sellars is that I think of categories as relatively and pragmatically a priori, not fixed for all time. Categorical revision happens relatively rarely but it does happen.
The confusion of “objective truth” and “ultimate truth” (and likewise between “subjective truth” and “conventional truth”) is but one of the many confusions here.
I don’t think we need axioms. Rather, we need conventions.
Axioms are abstract. Conventions, in my view, are behavioral. We need conventions to connect language to reality. If we then pretend that there is no reality, the conventions might look like axioms. But their basis is in the connection that they provide to reality, rather than in abstract relations.
I won’t want to put epistemology and metaphysics so far apart, though. Whatever epistemic principles we adopt in the course of reflecting on the conditions of knowledge will need to also be explained in terms of whatever metaphysics we vindicate on the basis of those principles. I wouldn’t want epistemology and metaphysics to swing so far apart from each other that there’s no way of connecting them back up, and we do need them to connect back up if we’re to construct a comprehensive system.
Or would you disagree?
Is there a difference that makes a difference, in your view, between “conventions” and “norms”? Or between conventions and practices?
I ask because I do think there’s a difference there, though it’s a subtle one that turns on technical considerations raised by David Lewis and developed by Robert Brandom. But those considerations might not mean much to non-technical philosophers.
If one were to say, “we need norm-governed social practices to connect language (including discursively articulated and discursively articulable thought) to reality,” I’d only disagree slightly.
My disagreement there would be about the picture in which language and reality are seen as two distinct things that need to be related. Such a picture is, on my view, still too Platonic/Cartesian.
Hence my view is that norm-governed social practices are both the institution of discursively articulated thought and also the structures through which affordances are disclosed to us as graspable in thought and action.
I think that my view is similar to yours, since Gibson and Wittgenstein are both significant influences for both of us, but I delve a bit deeper into how post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language is developed, via Sellars, Brandom, and others, into a systematic theory of the interaction of “wording” and “worlding”.
Yes, but it is complicated.
With science, it mostly needs to be conventions.
In ordinary life, here’s the distinction that I see. I think we should use “convention” for something that is explicit. But I would allow a “private convention”, which can be said to be explicitly implemented by neural structure. And yes, I realize that “private convention” seems like an oxymoron.
We all need these private conventions to connect to reality. And, roughly speaking, we get them by making them up as we go along and using pragmatic testing to decide which ones to keep.
Once we are connected to reality, we can begin to get hints at the private conventions others are using. And because we are social organisms, we try to adjust our own conventions to be more closely aligned with those of others. But because we only have hints, and never see the explicit private conventions of others, we finish up with only approximate agreements. And it seems to me that’s how we get norms.
Science, by contrast, does not rely on this mutual alignment. Instead, someone sets an explicit convention. This establishes a closer agreement than we get in ordinary life, and is part of the reason why science does better and why scientific concepts seem more precise.
Neil Rickert,
What you call “private conventions,” I would prefer to call “habits.” It’s less of an oxymoron, and it connects up with a rich tradition of psychologically informed philosophy about the central role of habits in human cognition as well as action.
I’m carefully avoiding that.
A habit is what it will look like to an observer watching someone’s behavior. But, in order for cognition to be possible, it really needs to be explicitly wired at the neural level.
And in a way, “private convention” is not that bad a term. Keep in mind that this has to do with connecting to reality. The brain needs to make sure that the left eye sees the world the same way that the right eye does. So it needs some kind of system wide convention to coordinate all of the different sensory paths to the same information about the real world.
In science we achieve this kind of coordination with conventions (specifically, measuring conventions). And the brain has the same kind of coordination problems to deal with.
Kantian Naturalist,
Let me add some more here. I’m really talking about perception, and how I see it as working. (We are way off-topic for a Sam Harris thread).
Keiths says that perception should be veridical, and I have argued against that.
To me, to say that perception is veridical is to say that it conforms to external standards. And I don’t see that there could be such external standards. However, what I have described as “private conventions” amount to internal standards. And I do see a need for perception to conform to those internal standards. That answers some of the issues that keiths raises, such as how do we detect a misperception. A misperception would show up as a problem with internal standards. And, as for where internal standards come from — I see no alternative other than that we make them up as we go along, with strong pragmatic testing as we decide what standards to use.
This is also where I disagree with a lot of “machine learning” theory. I see a huge part of human learning, particularly for a child, as involved in devising a suitable system of private conventions (internal standards) such as would allow the kind of access to the world that we have.
I agree with that. I don’t think absolute certainty is necessary for knowledge, nor for truth. I think we just have to be careful and remember that our truth-claims are only as good as our axioms. Within the system, we can be certain of our conclusions (at least, if we stick to logic and mathematics).
I agree.
I would, I would call it demonstrated empirically. For example I would claim that I can demonstrate empirically lots of things. That mass attracts things, that like charges repel each other and so on. I would say these are all empirical truths we can demonstrate. Demonstrate empirically.
They’re not absolutely certain, nor are they absolutely “true”, both because in so far as they are empirical they rely on our fallible senses and our senses could both be one giant deception (we could be in a matrix, for example), and because our senses are known to be inaccurate. Measurements come with error bars, they always do.
I don’t know what an operationalist is, nor a phenomenal statement or a bridge-law. Never heard about it before so I won’t comment on it.
I know, I’m not sure I was using the right word there. What I was referring to with an “ultimate truth” (for lack of me knowing about a better term), is what is really, truly the case, irrespective of our logical axioms and what our senses tell us. For example, if the true state of affairs is that we are all in a matrix, or “inside the mind of God”, or “it’s all math all the way down” (or whatever), or if I myself (as in my mind) is really all that exists, then that would be the “ultimate truth”.
Whatever the ultimate truth is (and I do believe there IS an ultimate truth), I don’t believe we can ever truly know about it, in the sense that we can be absolutely certain that we have found it. For the same reasons you brought up. Our senses are fallible, we can’t prove our assumptions (for obvious reasons) and so on.
Oddly enough I now think we don’t really disagree about much. I think you’re right, much of this owes to bad communication between us. I will take some responsibility for that, I’m often use incorrect words to refer to these concepts.
Again, agreed.
I agree with all of that.
How odd 😀
Rumraket,
You and walto are using “demonstrate” differently. You’re using “demonstrate” to mean something like “verify with an extremely high probability” or (perhaps) “deduce from laws of physics as presently known.” Walto is using “demonstrate” to mean something like “logically prove within a formal system” or “derive from self-evident first principles”. It’s an specific sense of “demonstrate” than it’s common in 17th-century philosophy, and folks like Walto and I had to learn that all stuff as part of our professional training.
As you were — just pointing out that there’s a difference in background that’s resulting in different uses of a specific word.
Kantian Naturalist,
Can you give a couple of examples of this?
True, but it is helpful to see how we’re willing to use words like “objective” in different contexts.
To be fair, keiths has argued that we cannot know if perception is veridical or not. Which is to say, in your terms, that we cannot know whether or not perception is conforming to external (‘transcendent’) standards.
If this means that there’s no ‘view from nowhere’ that is epistemically accessible to us, then I would agree. But I’d a bit uneasy about using the terms “external” and “internal” to mark this distinction.
I’d quibble with the phrasing here, but otherwise I agree. That’s the point I was trying to make to keiths.
Now that surprised me — I would have thought that evolutionary histories and developmental pathways would play some role here as well! Maybe less of a role as neural architectures become more plastic, but plasticity itself is an adaptation, no?
I think that’s largely right. Infants have a lot of stuff they need to figure out for themselves before they can start expressing themselves to us in ways that we can understand.
Here’s how Hume uses the term:
The theorems of Euclidean geometry are “demonstrated” because they are logically deduced from self-evident principles (which are “intuited”).
Descartes uses the term in the same sense when he says that in the Meditations he will demonstrate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. That is to say, he attempts to show from intuitive or self-evident principles that God must exist and also that the soul is immortal.
fifth:
walto:
fifth:
Yes, that’s wrong. If a moral truth were logically necessary, for instance, then it would qualify as objective but not empirical. And as walto noted, whether you’re a materialist or not is irrelevant. Empirical and non-empirical truths are recognized by both materialists and non-materialists.
walto:
Relative to their axioms, anyway. The assertion that “the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees” is objectively true in flat geometry, but not in spherical or hyperbolic geometry.
If space is actually flat, then you could reasonably make that assertion with no qualifier. But in that case it would be an empirical truth, since we can only determine the flatness of space through observation.
walto, to Rumraket:
I’m no more “troubled” by Cartesian skepticism than I am by the fact that humans can’t flap their arms and fly. It’s just the way things are, and I accept it.
If you’re looking for someone who is troubled by Cartesian skepticism, then KN is your man: 🙂
I’m fine with all that, I think. I don’t see why categories can’t change.
I wouldn’t. That’s probably right. I just think it’s important not to confuse the subject matters. It’s hard to keep them straight consistently (for me, anyhow).
my question was about his use of the word
“establish”. When he said objective morality can’t be established.
I assumed that he thought that the only way to “establish” something was empirically. I guess I was wrong
I guess that makes sense. In that case the moral truth would be “established” by what exactly?
This is more to the point I was getting at. How In your opinion can an axiom be “established”?
Can axioms be “established” at all according to your worldview?
peace
Roy Wood Sellars once criticized C. I. Lewis for always doing epistemology and neglecting metaphysics. Lewis’s response was, “I want to do metaphysics, but it always comes out as epistemology!”
Well sure. But I don’t see how the genes can possibly code all of what I am calling “internal standards”. Most of it has to arise during development.
Standards cannot be purely abstract things. We anchor our measurements to real world things (a platinum rod in Paris, the freezing point of water, etc). An organism cannot rely on a platinum rod in Paris. It pretty much has to rely on its own body structure. But that human body changes size considerably. So the internal anchors change. And any possible external anchors change if you move from one town to another. So the whole structure of internal standards has to be able to adapt to those changes. That cannot work if the standards come directly from the genes.
‘All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.’ 🙂
Do you agree that you don’t substantiate axioms?
peace