I have been distracted for months but I thought I would look in on UD to see if anything had changed. All is much the same but I was struck by this OP from Barry. The thrust of the post is that Barry is a plain-speaking chap stating obvious ethical truths and anyone denying it is using sophistry and is evil. The particular “obvious truth” that Barry is discussing is:
Anyone who cannot unambiguously condemn the practice of chopping little boys and girls up and selling the pieces like so much meat shares in the evil of those who do so.
I would argue that this gives the appearance of simplicity but hides considerable complexity and subtlety. It also illustrates how Barry, like everyone else, is actually a subjectivist in practice, whatever he might say in theory.
There is one obvious way in which this is statement is too simple. It leaves out whether the little boys and girls are alive or dead. Most people find it morally acceptable to reuse organs from people (including babies and infants) who have recently died.
But also the statement is packed with emotional use of language. (Throughout this I assume Barry is referring to the practice of using parts of aborted foetuses for research and/or treatment and charging for providing those parts).
1) “Meat” suggests flesh that is to be eaten. I don’t think anyone is selling foetuses to go into meat pies.
2) “Chopping up”. Body parts from foetuses presumably have to be extracted very carefully under controlled conditions to be useful. To describe this as chopping up is technically accurate but again has connotations of a butcher.
3) “Little boys and girls”. By describing a foetus as a little boy or girl, Barry appeals to our emotional response to little boys and girls that we meet, embrace and talk to.
4) “selling” suggests a product which is being produced, stocked and sold with the objective of creating a profit. It would indeed be shocking if organisations were deliberately getting mothers to abort so they could make a profit from selling the body parts. If you describe the same activity as covering the cost of extracting and preserving body parts of reuse it sounds quite different (the cost has to be recovered somehow or it would never happen).
What interests me is how Barry has chosen words for their emotional impact to make an ethical argument. If it had been described as:
Reusing parts of aborted foetuses for research and/or treatment and charging for providing those parts.
then it sounds a lot more morally acceptable than
chopping little boys and girls up and selling the pieces like so much meat
If morality were objective then it shouldn’t matter how you describe it. It is just a matter of observation and/or deduction – like working out the temperature on the surface of Mars. But ethics is actually a matter of our emotional responses so Barry has to use emotional language to make his point.
All arguments for theistic morality ultimately reduce to subjectivist appeals to emotional revulsion and consequences.
In fact it seems to me all moral systems do this. Morality is ultimately about how people arguing about morality feel about certain subjects. I am troubled, jealoux, scared, feel revulsion at the thought of murder, rape, sexual promiscuity, child-sacrifice etc. etc. – therefore we should all do X so that I don’t feel scared, stressed, revulsion etc. etc.
Yes, this is also something I was trying to illustrate with my “What punishment should be meted out to those who slaughter innocents?” OP.
Removing a bundle of cells != killing innocents.
I’m taking those UD posts as an implicit concession that ID is dead.
UD is no longer an ID blog. It is now a culture-wars blog.
I don’t doubt that Arrington would respond that
is just the euphemistic, medicalized version of
where the former sentence is designed to conceal the “self-evident” immorality of the practice.
I do wonder, however, at some of the conceptual distinctions underpinning this criticism of Arrington. In particular, there’s this:
Firstly, I think there’s a problem with the analogy. Determining the surface temperature of Mars is an example of how we determine an objective fact. Just because the objectivity of values isn’t determined in the same way that the objectivity of facts is determined, it doesn’t follow that there aren’t objective values.
Secondly, one might plausibly think that anger in response to injustice is a normal, healthy response. There’s no question that Arrington (and most of the others at UD) regard abortion as a horrific crime. But getting enraged over a horrific crime is a normal, healthy response. So I think it’s a bit unfair to make their use of emotional language a point of criticism.
Thirdly, I don’t see why we’re supposed to pair “objective” with “observation and deduction” (which is not at all how science works, by the way) and “subjective” with “emotion”. Are emotions not objective? Pretty much everyone here (with a few exceptions) is comfortable with the thought that science is objective and morality is subjective.
There is indeed something to that thought. But I think the insight needs to be delicately repackaged. On the one hand, the convergence and consilience of measurement-guided research indicates a stronger cognitive grasp of objective reality than what we find in other discursive practices.
On the other hand, our affects (emotions, feelings, and moods) are just as much “about” the situations we are in as they are “about” us, because affects are just as much embedded within the organism-environment interaction as cognition is. I worry that any argument strong enough to show that emotions are “in the head” will also show that all mental states are “in the head,” and from that position there’s no way of avoiding skepticism and solipsism.
Maybe this is what I want to say: both cognition and affect are part of the perspective that an organism brings to bear on its environment, so all cognitive and affective activity is both reality-involving and perspectival. However, the more different cognitive perspectives that can be integrated and affective responses bracketed or put aside, the greater our cognitive purchase on (contingent) reality.
This preserves the epistemic authority of empirical science for contingent reality, but replaces the objective/subjective dichotomy with a continuum.
It was never anything else. The evolution/ID “debate” was never more than the epistemological dimension of the culture wars.
For the idle, indolent, and curious: this is a meta-ethical position called “expressivism“, and there are some serious problems with it. But it’s a really interesting view and certainly has its fair share of able-bodied defenders.
If morality were objective then it shouldn’t matter how you describe it. It is just a matter of observation and/or deduction – like working out the temperature on the surface of Mars. But ethics is actually a matter of our emotional responses so Barry has to use emotional language to make his point.
Kantian Naturalist:
Bravo! (I mean, I agree completely). Very well said.
We’ve been accused of breaking the Barry Arrington, leaving him “exhausted and physically and emotionally drained“, ruining the fun for everyone else.
We apologize.
Mark Frank: But ethics is actually a matter of our emotional responses so Barry has to use emotional language to make his point.
Not just emotional language, but strawmen invested with emotion. On a side-note, we view ethics as thinking about morality, morality being based on the emotional response to the human condition.
Not just strawmen, but straw men soaked in the oil of ad hominem.
Side note: when KN says. “…all cognitive and affective activity is both reality-involving and perspectival. ” I take that to mean that cognition and emotion have the function of keeping our hands out of fires.
Ethics and morality are grounded in survival and reproduction. Ethics is working out the details and implications.
Couldn’t happen to a more deserving piece of human trash.
Of course it’s not evil to have an abortion. Abortion is a blessing, whenever it’s needed or wanted. If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
You don’t even need to say that there will be ultimate benefits by pointing out that medical research on fetal tissue is saving more children from developmental diseases, saving expectant parents from the sorrow of miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy, and even treating Parkinson’s and other adult diseases. You don’t need to say that, because abortion is a moral good in itself solely for the benefit of the woman and her immediate family.
But it’s worth noting that Barry Arrington and his ilk are the worst kind of hypocrites. They’ll scream about “chopping little boys and girls up” but they would never dream of denying themselves (or their own little boys and girls) the benefits resulting from that medical research. They’ll condemn the people who do the hard work but they’ll greedily grab for the results if it gives them even a minute more comfort in their already-easy life. That’s a cheap cheap sellout of supposedly-holy moral principles.
Sheepskin jacket-wearing vegans have got nothing on Barry Arrington.
I agree that opposition to abortion is mostly a male thing. In my best of all possible worlds, people who cannot be subject to a prohibition would not get to vote on the prohibition.
There’s probably something I haven’t considered, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. I could murder, drive drunk, steal, assault. So if these are prohibited, I’m affected. I cannot (yet) get pregnant.
Medical research, however, is fair game for ethical discussions. We have discussions about using animals (including primates) in research. Does it make a difference whether the target is a cure for cancer or whether it is eye shadow? I think these questions are fair game.
I think it is reasonable to discuss the possible profit motive. I haven’t followed the Planned Parenthood fracas, so I have no opinion on what they were doing, but I think it is reasonable to ask the question. Even if you are an unreasonable person.
The debates over laws regarding child labor would be fun.
LOL!
But I think the prohibition is on the prospective employer, rather than the prospective employee…
Debates on the drinking age would be fun…
Five separate state commissions and the feds have verified that Planned Parenthood didn’t do anything illegal or unethical in its transactions. Every single one of the smears is based on lies. No one is “trafficking” in fetal tissue, as if they were trafficking in stolen kidneys. There is no illegitimate market for aborted fetal organs; there is only the legitimate – and highly regulated – academic/medical “market”. PP doesn’t have a profit motive in the money they charge in exchange for carefully extracting, storing, and transporting fetal tissue which the med labs (who pay for it) have no other route to legally acquire.
The alternatives are:
Med labs stop doing this vital, life-saving research altogether.
Med labs start performing illegal, and possibly non-consensual, abortions themselves to acquire their new research tissue.
Med labs increase pain and suffering in captivity of alternate research animals, particularly primates, as a substitute for human fetal tissue; meanwhile their results are not as accurate/useful.
Yes, med research labs have profit motives in performing their research. Even supposedly science-for-science’s-sake research in an academic setting has ulterior motives: the prestige of the institution, attracting top talent, encouraging alumni donations …
But that’s not relevant to the hypocritical and lying stink folks are pushing about Planned Parenthood in the run-up to 2016 elections.
My problem here is I cannot imagine what an objective value would be. It seems to me to be part of the meaning of the word “value” that it is subjective. So the only kind of analogy I can draw is with objective facts.
I do think anger is a normal healthy response. I don’t criticise Arrington for using language that engages our emotions to make an ethical point. I would do the same. (I also criticise him for being misleading. I hope I don’t do that.) My point is that he is acting like a subjectivist – which he cannot help doing because that is the nature of morality. I criticise him for maintaining that morality is objective while his behavior demonstrates otherwise.
I suggest that we stay clear of philosophy of science – one too many complications. Emotions are neither objective nor subjective. That is a category error. Statements or propositions are subjective or objective. As I understand it a statement is objective if it is true in virtue of a state of world independent of people’s reaction to that state. So if I say you are angry that is an objective (hopefully false) statement about you and an emotion. You are angry (or not) whatever I think about it. A statement is subjective if it is true at least in part in virtue of one person or people in general’s reaction to the thing. So if I say you are infuriating (also false) that is a subjective statement because it is true in virtue of my emotional reaction to you (but it is not a statement about my emotional reaction to you which would be objective).
Absolutely emotions, feelings and moods are about something outside us – just as cognitions are. But they take place “inside” us just as our cognitions do. You can have a subjective statement which is true in virtue of our cognitions as well as one that is true in virtue of our emotions. To say something is dazzling or inaudible or painful is to say something about how our cognitions react to it and is subjective. The key difference is not the kind of reaction we have to a state of affairs but whether the statement is true in virtue of our reaction or is true independently of any human reaction to it.
Possibly but there is a difference between getting a purchase on reality which nevertheless exists independently of us and making subjective statements which are at least in part true in virtue of our reaction. In the second case the human reaction is part of the meaning of the statement. In the first case it is an attempt to determine the truth of something the meaning of which has nothing to do with our reaction. There are of course many cases where it is not clear whether we are using a statement subjectively or objectively – often because there is such a robust correlation between the external facts and our reaction that there has never been a need to differentiate between the objective and subjective – statements about colour come to mind.
Turquoise is the best color. Turquoise makes people feel happy, excited and peaceful at the same time. 🙂
Zachriel,
Our buddy Virgil does not have a high opinion of you(s).
“Zachriel isn’t evil. Zachriel is an ignorant and insipid troll who is in love with substance-free double-talk. And yes, Zachriel is also a pathological liar.
But hey, what else would you expect from an evolutionist?”
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Anyone here on the PZ Myers band-wagon? It’s only meat.
Very interesting and thoughtful responses.
Much of Everett Hall’s book Our Knowledge of Fact and Value is devoted to this topic. One reason I enjoyed KN’s post so much is that it is very Hallian. On Hall’s view, emotions provide evidence of values, much as perceptions provide evidence of facts. They may be corroborated in similar ways too: we can ask experts, consider the issue from different angles, note whether other cultures would take similar positions, etc. I agree that none of those are dispositive, but I don’t think perceptual corroboration can be absolutely dispositive either–though the level of corroboration we may reach with perceptual judgments is admittedly higher.
Furthermore, I think we just might take as a basic truth (that cannot be demonstrated, but must be sort of taken on faith) that satisfaction of desires is a good thing, in other words, that, all else equal, it’s better for desires to be satisfied than not. (I believe Hobbes was one of the first philosophers to suggest this.) Naturally, my desire to kill somebody might produce a lot of collateral unpleasantness which also must be considered, but consider two possible worlds in which there is nothing but one person and one desire: in one the person’s desire is satisfied, in the other, not. I take the first world to be intrinsically better (although, again, I can’t “prove” it). If that’s right, human beings are value-creating entities. Those values are objective, though: all else equal, satisfaction good, non-satisfaction bad–any (subjective) view that conflicts with that would be wrong–according to my axioms, at any rate.
So, as your definition of “subjective” above requires that anything emerging from a person’s emotional responses in this fashion must be subjective, it doesn’t float my boat.
I’m not going to waste any of my extremely limited supply of mind-reading power to try reading what you mean by that cryptic comment.
If you want to unpack it a bit, perhaps I’d be interested.
GIven, no one has a soul. Given, scumwads like Barry Arrington can not care less about the result of any pregnancy no matter whether it’s a “human soul” or not — cheerfully allowing born children to starve while voting for government welfare for the richest, cheerfully allowing born children to die of painful preventable diseases rather than see anyone overrule the imaginary-religious objections of the parents, cheerfully sending born children to die in wars of imperialism — and can care only about the political advantage their hypocritical faux rage might win them. Given, no person has the right to force you to make a blood donation without your consent, even if it’s to save the life of an innocent born child, not even of your very own born child for that matter. Given, no one has any right to force any woman to donate her blood via placenta and umbilical cord to a fetus that happens to be connected to her without her consent. Given all that, and more, it’s not very likely that I’ll find PZ to be on the wrong side of the abortion issues or the Planned Parenthood issues.
But please do make yourself clear. If you wish to. Or don’t, if you don’t wish to.
Ha! William J Murray manages to get comment #1 consisting solely of his 3 current favourite words.
I wonder what this tissue is destined for if it is not used in research?
I carry a donor card. Chop me up. I would consider it an honour.
hotshoe_, you’re a dear soul.
The references to meat in Barry’s post have a context in which they were made and thus a context that ought to be engaged in order to ensure a proper interpretation.
For example:
It’s just meat. Meat he would eat. Would he like to try Mung’s Baby-Q sauce with that meat? “It gives a whole new zing to your baby back ribs!”
To me, and to Barry, the idea that “it’s just meat” is revolting. The challenge to PZ Myers is to explain his distaste of this particular kind of meat.
Why wait until you’re dead, Allan? Donate away.
Tu Quoque Mung is on the case! Can I get an ASSF? As we actually have practicing scientists?
walto,
I shall try to read Hall’s book one day. It sounds interesting. I don’t understand how emotions can be evidence of values, but maybe the book will make it clear. I would not deny that your emotional response to some facts can be changed or confirmed in just the ways you list.
It may be a basic truth but that doesn’t make it an objective truth. My definition of subjective is consistent with it being true that “satisfaction of desires is a good thing”. It just doesn’t make an objective truth.
I suggest there are some important distinctions here:
1) What do we mean by “subjective”? I offer a definition on the lines of “a statement or proposition is subjective if it is true or false in virtue of a person or people in general’s potential response to the facts. This seems to me to accord pretty closely to common English usage. If someone has an alternative definition that would be interesting but I don’t see one yet.
2) Are values subjective? It seems pretty clear to me that they are. You offer a counter-example “satisfaction of desires is a good thing”. While this may be almost universally accepted as true that does not show it is objective. There are plenty of subjective assertions that are pretty much universally true (dog shit smells bad for example).
3) How are emotions connected to values? I don’t know Hall’s argument but I would suggest that value statements are subjective statements where the response that defines the attribute (good, beautiful, just) are primarily emotional responses. As discussed before, for other subjective statements the defining response is not an emotion e.g. funny, inaudible, incomprehensible.
And don’t forget the all important rider that in practice some objective facts are so strongly correlated to certain responses that the attribute is used to both describe the facts and the response without having to distinguish which is the defining the characteristic e.g. blue.
Mung,
You’re a scream.
Illustrate this by showing the correspondences.
E.G.
UD claims to be about the science of ID. Yet it talks about abortion and other culture war items.
TSZ claims to be about X. Yet it talks about Y.
What are X and Y?
Well, I’m certainly not reading Barry’s post. Life is too short to waste more of it reading pig squeals.
Ought to be engaged in? Well, maybe, but not under the protection of UD, and therefore only to the extent that someone else, like you, thinks it appropriate to quote him here.
Did you have a link back to where PZ wrote that? Do you understand the context? Do you have any basis for your slur that PZ’s word “meat” means something “he would eat”?
Do you really think that atheists eat babies? I mean, I know the christians for hundreds of years have repeated that blood libel against the Jews, the lie that Jews kidnapped and killed christian children for their blood (to make Passover matzot). And I know it’s a joke amongst atheists that the blood libel has spread to include atheists as well (although obviously we kill ’em just for BBQ, not for matzo-making) — but I never thought that anyone genuinely believed the libel. Do you believe it?
You might want to be careful who you throw stones at, since one of the common christian metaphors is “flesh” for people’s bodies (eg the sins of the flesh). Elsewhere in the bible that same word “flesh” is used to mean the meat of an animal, an animal intended for eating and subject to dietary laws.
Surely you do understand that christian brethren think your own body is nothing but flesh.
Do you assume that your brethren mean your body is flesh they would eat?
If not, then why would you let Barry’s faux rage make you assume that’s what PZ means?
I guess there isn’t much point arguing about what one should mean by “subjective.” My own sense is that it ought to be reserved for one (but only one) of the sorts of cases where “thinking makes it so.” On another thread I mentioned that while, e.g., to the right of is certainly relative to individuals or things, we don’t think of it as subjective for that reason. Something is or is not to my right, whether I believe this or not. So I “make it so” only in the same sort of way that people make artifacts. That the thing I’m looking at is or isn’t a pot is not made more subjective by having been made by somebody (even if that somebody was me).
So, I guess, whether or not something’s being beautiful or good just is or isn’t like being a pot is the key issue for me, and the fact that I made the thing is irrelevant. If it IS like being a pot, it’s objective, to the extent that being a pot is objective. You say it’s not like being pot in important and relevant respects here, and I say that, in those respects it is like being a pot. But I’m afraid that’s something we’re unlikely to settle by argument. I concede that I can do little more than appeal to our common-sense anti-relativism–maybe what Arrington appeals to in his post (which I haven’t read). I probably appeal to the sorts of “intuitions” that Moore does in his Principia Ethica, but I don’t believe that these properties are really “intuited”: I mimic Hall in thinking they’re revealed to us by our emotions in much the way (but less dispositively) that “fact properties” are revealed to us
by our perceptions.
For the purposes of this site (and UD), what I think is important (and what the theists don’t ever seem to grok) is that there’s no good argument from objective values to God. They just prefer a command morality for some reason. As I mentioned elsewhere recently, all they really do is take something that’s a bit mysterious and provide an explanation that is entirely wacko, as if that might be helpful.
BTW, that Hall book is available free on-line in a couple of places.
Of course. Do you really think I’d post something like that here without begin able to back it up?
He didn’t say he would eat it though, that was drawn from the OP:
1) “Meat” suggests flesh that is to be eaten.
Google PZ Myers dead baby meat
Yeah, I did check PZ’s original post — I had read it when it was first written in 2011 — and no, in that context “meat” does not suggest “flesh to be eaten”, unless you also claim that all your christian friends suggest your body is “flesh to be eaten”.
In spite of the fact that you claim to be “able to back it up”, you have either not read PZ’s actual post, or you are not able to comprehend it in context, or for some reason you are not willing to comprehend it. Any way you put it, you’re in a bad light here, and you’re apparently extending charity to your christian brethren that you refuse to extend to others such as notorious-atheist PZ.
Don’t be inconsistent. If you want to claim that PZ deserves some kind of blame for his words. then be consistent and openly blame your bible and 2000 years of christian preaching first and foremost.
And if you want to claim that abortion is disgusting because it turns “babies” into “meat” then be specific with your claims. Don’t be coy with sly references to BA’s wanking over at the cesspool UD.
By the way, for transparency, this is PZ’s post which Mung quoted above (which is apparently the scandal du jour over in Barry’s little fiefdom).
Curtain twitcher, contemporary.
Ah, I had to look that up:
Exactly. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
UD stands in quite nicely for East Germany here.
Barry’s argument would be more persuasive if he drew a distinction between abortion at varying stages of pregancy. An argument that depends on human form being present clearly fails where that condition is lacking.
The anti-abortion lobby argues against “emergency contraception” and argues it is just as much “murder” as infanticide. Barry’s argument undermines that position.
I’m pretty sure they don’t care which lie they can make stick, as long as they can make something stick which allows them to keep women as incubators.
I tried making love to an incubator once. Bad idea.
Yep, bad idea. Go do something useful and tell all your christian friends to stop treating women as merely incubators with legs.
hotshoe_,
Vive la difference!
I think some posts in this thread mix the concepts of objectivity with realism. It is helpful to separate them
Realism applies to things that would exist regardless of the existence of any human beings at all. In that sense, human morals can be argued to be not real. “To the right of” also seems to be a non-real in that sense: the concept is meaningless if no humans existed. (Shaky ground there, perhaps).
Objective can be argued to be about resulting from an impartial process that is open to study and criticism by any human. So the rules of chess are not real but they are objective in that sense. So is “to the right of”.
Using those approaches, a naturalistic morality can be formulated by appealing to practical, impartial reasoning to create moral systems which best fulfill the goal of human flourishing or the goal of creating societies which maximize altruism. The definitions of “flourishing” and “altruism” have to be open to an objective process for formulation and review, which likely needs to incorporate scientific analysis of human psychology, sociology, anthropology, and biology.
(BTW: Gandhi would edit blockquoted excerpts for length).
I find many posters at TSZ confuse these three issues:
1. the metaethical question of what moral norms are metaphysically
2. the philosophical question of what we should do in a situation requiring a moral decision
3. the scientific question of what causes people to perform moral acts, reason or emotion, which these posters answer by appealing to biological evolution or anthropological analyses of differing norms in different societies.
They then say morality is subjective by appealing to how science answers question 3. So you are right in a previous post when you say many posters at TSZ think morality is subjective (or at least culturally relative).
But then they have trouble making a consistent argument to dodge philosophical subjective or cultural relativism when challenged with questions which are really addressing 1 or 2 .
Thanks, that’s very helpful, and your next post is as well. I really should think more about this sort of stuff–I’m just avoiding it, mostly because my paper is already circulating, and I don’t want to notice all the wrong or incomplete things in there. Also, it’s already too long. 🙁
Bruce,
But the choice of those goals is inherently subjective, as we’ve discussed so many times.
Regardless of the process, the final step of deciding that a goal is or is not morally desirable will be inherently subjective.
Right.
Which is why we have politics.
Depends what “subjective” means.
Subjective = not objective. And objective, separated from real, means impartial and open to rational discussion and relevant scientific evidence.
Which does not mean there is always one correct answer.
As Petrushka notes, when laws are made, politics matters most (but hopefully can be influenced by rational, objective discussion).
Of course, laws can still be objectively immoral.