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.
Yes, that’s a coherentist proposal, I believe.
Seems like a practical solution
I don’t think anyone has ever only provisionally granted the reliability of our senses, except perhaps in a kind of academic exercise (quite artificial). Our senses really are our basis for knowing, albeit within a very human sort of interpretation. We live or die according to our responses to those senses.
Of course that’s one of the many things wrong with presuppositionalism, it happens to be based upon abstractions taken from our interpretation of our senses, and the application of those abstractions are very much in question and not above doubt. FMM never based his understanding of the world on his presuppostions, rather his presuppositions are based on certain interpretations of the world that invite a skepticism that can hardly be satisfied by the answers that he gives.
To be sure, it is legitimate to ask why sensing puppies is different from sensing God via visions or revelations. It was certainly a problem in earlier human history, when it was unclear as to why one should believe other humans and not dream figures (who often spoke “truth” to you, more reliably than most other humans–as you saw it anyhow), or oracles, or whatever. Generally, though, they compared what the mystical figures said if it turned out to be so according to our waking senses, and if not, either they were lying spirits or some kind of delusion. In the end, and with increasing knowledge of how people can be fooled by hallucinations and delusions, it seemed best to just cut out what became known as mental fictions (etc.) and just rely on the senses as verified by multiple fairly competent subjects.
Obviously, those who receive “revelations” often find them to be convincing. But other than the power of the senses (and apparent sensations) to convince people, it’s not clear to others that they really did “see God” or whatever. FMM never gets anywhere in explaining “the difference,” of course, but is as sure that his “revelations” are correct as the “wrong ones” are that theirs are.
Glen Davidson
Glen,
KN was talking about cognitive processes, not senses:
Glen,
He has finally acknowledged that it’s insufficient to repeat “revelation…revelation…revelation” like a deranged robot. Now he’s on the hook to actually describe how one can distinguish genuine revelations from imaginary ones.
As indicated above, I’m predicting a backslide.
Oh, my error. But I don’t see that it makes much difference, other than that our cognitive capacities are even less capable of being “wrong” overall. The senses aren’t really anything without the cognitive processes, the difference being that I can at least imagine that my senses could be completely wrong. I can’t really think that of the cognitive processes without realizing that even the doubts thereby become meaningless if my cognition is somehow “wrong.”
Of course there are better and worse ways of approaching a problem, but I can hardly grant “provisional assent” to the reliability of our cognitive processes overall. They’re simply how we know anything beyond raw perceptual data. I don’t even know what it means to grant provisional assent to cognition’s reliability, since we just die (or end up institutionalized or something similar) if they’re wrong. We’ll use them regardless.
It’s reasonable to grant provisional assent to the senses, at least in an artificial (but quite possibly meaningful) exercise, while we’re stuck with our cognitive capacities. They’re honed and improved in many ways (development of good cognition requires interaction with the environment/society), but they’re also the set of what’s possible for us.
Glen Davidson
walto:
Sadly, the odds appear to be in your favor.
Glen.
That’s why I treat the senses differently from cognition in my Cartesian skepticism.
And it only took months to achieve this relatively simple realization.
With no backsliding (but does he have a choice?), he could begin to learn how messy, uncertain processes can provide meaningful knowledge just as much as unquestioned “certainties” do not. He’s not likely to go there.
Glen Davidson
Sensus Divinitatis.
Checkmate so-called atheists.
And all rival theists!
Glen Davidson
And Quakers.
Actually I hold to a triune theory of truth, You know us Christians dig triune things. 😉
It’s called Triperspectivalism
check it out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiperspectivalism
and especially
http://frame-poythress.org/a-primer-on-perspectivalism/
Each of the perspectives are held in a unified balance with the others to form one consistent epistemology
peace
Unless you are a Christian and have presuppositions that cohere with each other and correspond to reality at the same time.
peace
Actually it’s simply a sign that you have been tilting at a straw-man and did not realize it because your own prejudice and bias made you think you were dealing with a fiedist instead of a presuppositionalist.
All you had to do was ask. 😉
Exactly what Ive been saying all along. Nothing what soever has changed on my side.
What has changed perhaps is you now are reading what I actually said instead of what your biased attitude led you to expect I would say.
Actually there is no squirming or dishonesty.
But I do like to think that God gets some glory when rebels are made to look foolish because they extend enormous effort to defeat positions that their opponents never actually held simply because they were to too caught up in their prejudice to even ask for clarification.
😉
peace
quote:
There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.
(Pro 14:12)
end quote:
peace
How do you even know that your senses are reliable in the first place?
Using your senses to verify that your senses are reliable is the worse kind of circularity.
I also think you are mistaken to assume that the only way that God can reveal stuff to us is through our senses.
He often uses out faculties of reason for example.
Logically necessary truths are still only received through revelation.
peace
how do you know that? Did you sense it or is it raw perceptual data?
peace
Who said I did? Stop your ignorant strawmanning, the only essential point about my senses is that clearly I can do better (with less pain, etc.) responding one way to one set of senses and another way to another set.
I’m not concerned with your mindless bleating about having to “know” that something is “true” according to your baseless, ignorant, simple-minded tripe. If you knew anything you’d realize that not everyone cares about your mindless “certainties.”
That’s why I didn’t write anything so godawfully stupid. Pay attention, and quit projecting your simple-minded literalness onto everyone else.
You may as well write that baseless nonsense in machine code.
Glen Davidson
Gee, I can actually think complex thoughts based on reason and sensory data.
You should get that far.
Glen Davidson
Actually I’m not concerned with certainty either.
Ive repeatedly made that clear, perhaps you should have payed attention so that you don’t get caught misrepresenting folks like keiths did.
Knowledge does not require certainty but it does require belief, truth and justification.
I’m simply asking for your justification for the facts you just now claimed to know
Is that how you claim to know stuff?
What if your reason or sensory data are faulty?
peace
Yes, that’s one of the reasons why Charles Sanders Peirce called it “pragmatism”.
If my reason and senses are wrong, I don’t want to be right.
More seriously, they get me around my experience in a satisfactory manner. While I think it quite likely that there are atoms, birds, and planets causing my sensory data (evidence pointing to them is persistent and results sometimes surprising in ways that don’t appear like our simulations, etc.), if they aren’t and I’m in a holographic simulation the experience is what it is nonetheless.
No useful and/or explanatory data have been shown to come from anything but the senses as processed via our cognitive abilities (even if machine extensions are used for observation and data processing). That is the case no matter how presuppositionalists spin it, and regardless of whether or not we’re sensing “reality.”
Glen Davidson
Woodbine,
Does that mean that you do a spit take when your your reason or sensory data are faulty?
Now that would be a handy trick
😉
peace
I would be fine with you acknowledging that you don’t actually know anything but seem to get along fine as far as you can tell.
God looks after animals and simpletons after all.
The problem is with the constant claims to have knowledge when you have no reason to think that actually is the case.
Worse yet is the attitude that blind faith reliance on the veridicity of your senses and reasoning ability is some how superior to approaches that can lead to actual knowledge.
There you go again claiming to know something with out explaining your justification
how do you know what you claim is true? How can you possibly know anything at all?
To be able to say anything “is the case” is to claim actual knowledge of reality
What is your justification for doing so
IOW how do you know stuff?
peace
I would be fine if you weren’t constantly restating things according to your idiotic assumptions, and actually understand what I’m saying rather than judging it in your ignorance.
He leaves you blithering, so color me skeptical.
I have a great deal of knowledge, as does anyone who gets around a complex simulation or “reality” must have. Your trouble is that you only “know” one kind of “knowledge,” and you’re too simple-minded to even ask what that “knowledge” is.
It is superior to the bullshit of ignoramuses such as yourself. Too bad you’re too dull to understand even that.
If you weren’t a simple-minded buffoon, you’d understand that justifying conclusions from complex understanding requires far too much time and trouble to spell out for doofuses who only know religious bullshit (not including all religious stuff in that, of course, but this presuppositionalist junk is nothing else).
By learning what you haven’t a clue about.
Complete bullshit. I’m making claims on knowledge of phenomena. Your empty rhetoric is all you get from your worthless religion.
I’m not stupid enough to believe your unjustified tripe.
That you even have to ask indicates that you’re too damned ignorant to understand. Not that I could cover it all here anyhow, but even if I could you’d just chant your ignorant tripe at it without comprehension.
Glen Davidson
How do you know this?
You never say how you know anything you only assume that you know stuff and expect everyone to agree with you.
Actually I know of at least 6 kinds of knowledge. But in these discussions the kind we are interested is Propositional Knowledge or Declarative Knowledge.
It’s the kind of knowledge you claim to have here when you say “I know X” and X is a proposition.
OK, We might be getting somewhere.
How do you know that you actually have knowledge of phenomena?
So you claim to have justification but are unable to articulate it.
That’s OK why not just give a summary
peace
fifth:
That doesn’t seem to be true in your case. He watched you make an inane argument for months — one that the smarter folks here recognized as fallacious the moment you made it — and he did nothing to correct you or save you from embarrassment. For months.
You finally recognized your logic as “idiotic”, but only when it was put into someone else’s mouth: the imaginary character ‘fourthdemocracyguy’.
Now God is watching you trying to word-lawyer your way out of your predicament, a move that would fail even if the Mungish word-lawyering itself were actually legitimate:
Any neutral theist observing this train wreck would conclude, ironically, that God is with the atheists here, not with you. Why does God want you to look like a fool, fifth?
Atheists have no trouble explaining it: there is no God to look after animals and simpletons.
As I’ve already explained the argument that you “recognized as fallacious” was never made by me but was imagined by the same biased mind that you blindly trust to help you know stuff.
You could have “recognized” your error with a simple google search or clarifying question but you never once thought to do so
That alone should give you pause
How could you possibly know what a “neutral theist” would conclude?
Please be specific
And what exactly would a “neutral theist” look like? a Unitarian Universalist perhaps
lol 😉
peace
Quit making up shit.
It’s disgusting how anti-Jesus your simple-minded falsehoods are.
Glen Davidson
do you need a nap?
peace
Give it up, fifth. The evidence is all here, in this thread, which I have bookmarked for future reference.
It’s time to move on to your next failure: describing how you distinguish genuine revelations from imaginary ones.
You need to start telling the truth, rather than blaming others for your abject failures.
The fact that you’re too dim and ignorant to understand much is no excuse for your rampant false claims and false insinuations.
Glen Davidson
fifth:
Granting God’s existence is insufficient, because that only establishes the existence of God’s subjective morality. You need more than that.
Just as objective truth is what God believes objective morality is what God values.
from the link I provided
quote:
One interesting implication of God’s omniscience is that he not only knows all the facts about himself and the world; he also knows how everything appears from every possible perspective. If there were a fly on my office wall, my typing would look very different to him from the way it looks to me. But God knows, not only everything about my typing, but also how that typing appears to the fly on the wall. Indeed, because God knows hypothetical situations as well as actualities, God knows exhaustively what a fly in that position would experience—if such a fly were present—even if it is not. God’s knowledge, then, is not only omniscient, but omniperspectival. He knows from his own infinite perspective; but that infinite perspective includes a knowledge of all created perspectives, possible and actual.
end quote:
not only does God know every perspective he knows what is best from every perspective.
Therefore what he thinks is best is truly objectively best
peace
fifth,
If you assume that objective morality exists, then of course an omnisicient God knows what it is. But then you’re just assuming your conclusion.
The question is whether objective morality exists in the first place. God’s existence wouldn’t establish the existence of objective morality — only of his own subjective morality.
No If you assume that God exists then it necessarily implies that what he values is objectively good. That is part of what it means to be God.
That does not mean that X is good because God values it or that God values X because it is good.
It means that Good is who and what God is.
Objective morality is simply the “moral part” of his nature.
peace
No, fifth.
If objective morality exists, then an omniscient God knows what it is, and in that case his own moral preferences will align with it and be objectively moral.
But the question here is whether objective morality exists in the first place. Assuming that it does is pointless. Let’s hear an argument instead.
God, if he exists, presumably has moral preferences. So do you and I. What specifically makes God’s preferences objective if yours and mine are merely subjective?
Note: If you’re tempted to quote Romans 9:20, think twice.
If you want an argument here is a simple syllogism for you centering on God’s nature rather than his preference
Premise -God …is….. good objectified
Conclusion– therefore anything that precisely reflects God’s nature is objective good
corollary: God’s will is simply the active expression of his nature
peace
fifth,
You’re still assuming your conclusion. If you define God as objectively good, and then assume he exists, you are assuming the existence of objective goodness.
fifth,
Then you run into a double whammy.
1) You can’t reliably distinguish between genuine revelations and imaginary ones, which is why you resorted to your inane regress argument in the first place.
2) Even if you could do so, you haven’t shown that a person’s “revealed purpose” is objectively moral. It presumably comports with God’s subjective morality, but you haven’t been able to establish God’s morality as objective.
fifth:
That’s silly. Subjective morality is quite sufficient as a basis for moral outrage.
Some people feel outrage when adulterers are stoned to death. Others feel outrage when they are not. They can’t all be objectively right.
It isn’t necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.
Groucho 1
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
An old comment in which I explain to William why trusting the conscience as a (fallible) indicator of objective morality is not equivalent to trusting the senses as (fallible) indicators of objective empirical truths:
William,
It’s not the same, as I explained to you last year:
It’s not about how I define God it’s about who God is.
The Christian God is objectively good. If and only if he exists then objective morality exists.
The same goes for objective truth by the way.
I know you think that I am assuming my conclusion but it’s not a conclusion it’s a presupposition
peace
I agree it’s not that moral outrage proves objective morality it’s just that our conscience tends to support the idea of objective morality.
For some reason I feel that the moral actions of Issis are wrong and I want to stop them even if I have no relationship with their victims and they have no connection to me whatsoever.
I don’t feel the same way about their culinary choices
peace
It’s not about my ability to distinguish it’s about God’s ability to reveal. And
God can reveal stuff to me in such as way as I can know it
Again I don’t “establish” that God is objectively moral. That is who he is.
The Christian God is objective good. If and only if he exists them objective morality exists.
peace