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.
Laws and sausage.
I’m still not sure how all the terms are getting shaken out here, but for the time being, I think of ethics as objective but relative: the ethical adequacy of any system of social norms is determined by how well those norms promote the flourishing of all individuals whose behavior is governed by those norms. So human flourishing is Where the Buck Stops. But there are genuine facts about the kinds of beings that human beings are that determine the conditions of human flourishing. Here’s Nussbaum’s list:
Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.
Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.
Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.
Senses, Imagination, and Thought. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in a “truly human” way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid non-beneficial pain.
Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and people outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.)
Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.)
Affiliation
Being able to live with and toward others, to recognize and show concern for other humans, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. (Protecting this capability means protecting institutions that constitute and nourish such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedom of assembly and political speech.)
Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails provisions of non-discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin and species.
Other Species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature.
Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.
Control over one’s Environment
Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association.
Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.
I submit that there are biological, psychological, and socio-political facts about the kinds of being a human being is that function as criteria for the ethical evaluation of a system of institutions and practices.
Ethics is therefore objective in the relevant sense (since the facts are not invented by human beings or exist only in our collective imagination) but also relative in the relevant sense (since the criteria are grounded in facts about human beings; if human beings were differently constituted, or there were no human beings at all, then the criteria wouldn’t exist).
Or, to quote Owen Flanagan, “ethics is human ecology”.
In terms of the overarching logic of the anti-abortion movement, I agree.
The major flaw in the anti-abortion movement is their inability to see that if they really want to lower the number of abortions, they should embrace comprehensive sex education, expanded maternity leave and (shock! horror!) paternity leave, raise the minimum wage, and work to reduce economic inequality and poverty.
Personally, I think that the whole pro-choice/pro-life debate would be quite different if there were more public space for people who are liberal, feminist, and pro-life. I’m not a big fan of Hillary Clinton, but one thing she got right was her position on abortion: “safe, legal, and never”. One can think both that women have the right of full control over their own bodies, and hence that no woman should never be forced to give birth against her will, and also that the ideal number of abortions is zero.
But many ethical questions are not settled by social norms (the trolley problem is an example). So it comes down to personal decision. That’s why people see a subjective aspect.
One could say similar things about war and about police shootings. You cannot prevent these by outlawing them. You have to invent ways of minimizing them,.
That is why I argue that ethics and morality are — or should be — proactive.
We don’t disagree on the fact that pain hurts. Badness is rather obvious. What is not obvious is what to do.
I would like to see the word choice disappear in discussions of morality.
I realize that individuals find themselves in difficult situations, not unlike the thought experiments I dislike, and individuals have little power and little time to do anything but choose between a limited slate of evils.
But societies can evolve by inventing better ways of doing things. It is lazy to think that societies have to choose between limited and bad options.
What do you mean by “settled”?
Perhaps “settled” refers to a causal description of how people make a decision? For example, the relation between reasoning and emotion in how people actually make the decision about what to do with that weight-challenged fellow.
Or is it a philosophical decision about what people should do ?
Or something else?
Generally agree. Not sure about there not always being one correct answer, though. The usual problem is not that there’s more than one correct answer, IMHO, but that it’s humanly impossible to figure out what that correct answer is. That’s the typical situation for consequentialists–the calculations are too hard, so we have to use handy rules of thumb….and then sort of wing it.
For some time now I’ve been contemplating creating an OP on objectivity, but I just had my doubts about whether people would be able to approach the subject objectively.
If morality is a framework for a society, and not just a single choice, it’s not clear to me that there is a globally optimal framework. More like locally optimal for a given time and based on the history of that society (since societies cannot realistically change many things at the same time).
There are analogies to biological evolution.
A person with my taste in sense of humor. Are you Canadian?
Sorry, but that’s just … silly.
Sure, in a completely unreal universe where birth control never fails, where literally no person ever makes a mistake …
Then solely in that “ideal” sense is the number zero.
Abortions are not morally bad. There isn’t a valid reason to wish to reduce abortions to zero other than the cost (time, personal energy expended in getting one, social capital expended in training doctors to perform them who might otherwise be performing some other health care we value higher) — but those costs are far far exceeded by every pregnancy carried to term, so that’s not sufficient reason to discourage abortion.
Perhaps if we lived in an ideal world where every male had a vasectomy at puberty – and government supplied sperm storage in case he eventually found a partner who wished to conceive with him – so it would be impossible to have any accidental pregnancies, we might say there should be no abortions except for medical emergencies. Even then, the ideal number would not be zero: it would be whichever number of abortions preserves the life, overall health, and future reproductive capabilities of each woman.
Even in that “ideal” scenario, we would be wrong to say that a pregnant woman should not change her mind for non-medical reason. After discussing with her partner, after waiting for the right day in her cycle, after successful insemination, it’s still possible for the woman to wake up next week and realize she has made a terrible mistake. Not that they can’t afford it, not that she’s going to have to survive without medical care due to poverty. Just that she’s made a mistake, that she cannot be responsible for being a parent to this prospective child and she cannot be responsible for bringing it into a world where both its parents don’t want it after all. She should have an elective abortion at that point. She should be lauded for her courage to admit the mistake and her sense to rectify it before it results in worse consequences. What she should not have hanging over her head is some unrealistic prejudice against abortion with a social/political goal of “zero”.
I am willing to agree that abortions should be safe, legal, and as rare as they can be commensurate with women’s happiness and health.
I beg to differ. My kids — who have friends who’ve had abortions — say its always a relationship ender. Perhaps they exaggerate, but their opinion is it’s an undesirable thing because of what it is and not just because it’s medically unpleasant.
Among educated women who work, having a child is not something that just happens. It’s a major (and optional) event. A life changer. You cannot treat pregnancy — even an unwanted pregnancy — as a neutral medical problem.
Only been there a few times to visit. 🙂
I agree with you that “preserving the life, overall health, and future reproductive capabilities of each woman” is the basic criterion. We don’t disagree on that fundamental point.
However, I do think that there is something to the idea that intentionally terminating a pregnancy is a moral wrong. Where the pro-life movement goes wrong in the slide from:
(1) intentionally terminating a pregnancy is a moral wrong
to
(2) intentionally terminating a pregnancy is a graver moral wrong than forcing a woman to give birth against her will.
I can see the arguments for (1), but I think (2) is false. (Note: I do not think (1) is true — only that not all of the arguments for it are bad arguments.)
If (1) is true and (2) is false, then the best way forward is to enact social policies that are likely to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. We have some pretty good data that abortion rates are lowest, world-wide, in Western European countries where there is comprehensive sex education, less economic inequality, easy access to low-cost and effective contraception, easy access to safe and legal abortion facilities, and a stable and well-funded social safety net.
The main reason why I think that the pro-life movement is misogynistic is because the people who want to restrict access to abortions usually also advocate restricting or eliminating the social policies that drive down the abortion rate. The result is going to be more unsafe abortions and more women bearing children against their will.
By contrast, if driving down the abortion rate were really the goal, they should endorse liberal and left-wing social and economic policies.
Well, yes, we will have to agree to differ. I have never met a woman who regretted having an abortion. I understand there are some, differing studies suggest some small percentages do – but I know dozens, perhaps hundreds of women who have had a least one abortion and none regret it.
You’re right that pregnancy is a life changer. Which is exactly why abortion is a moral good, because it allows an educated woman who works to avoid having her life changed when she wants/needs it to remain stable. Abortion is a life changer only in the sense that most women say afterwards it was the biggest relief, the best decision they’ve ever made in their lives. And I’m pretty sure most women don’t actually say that about the children they have, as much as they love them; having a child changes them in ways both wonderful and horrible.
This discussion is clearly personal to me and I’m not interested in getting into a hypothetical win-by-anecdotes. But please consider that the statistics are accurate: about one out of every three women you know has had at least one abortion. That loving wife in a decades-long marriage to her highschool sweetheart? One out of three chance that she’s a woman who has chosen to have an abortion. Your former coworker who divorced one husband because he drank too much and a second because he would chase anything in a skirt? One out of three. Your Mormon neighbor whose husband left her with four kids when she was a mess with post-partum depression? One out of three. Your daughters (if any of your kids are women)? One out of three.
Your kids are short-sighted if they infer having an abortion is a “relationship-ender”. It’s just confirmation bias that they don’t know when an abortion solved the problem and saved the relationship – which does happen – or when having the baby ruined the relationship – what happens all the time without being noticed as the blame is put on drinking or unfaithfulness, not the fact that the couple should never have had that (first, second, third …) child. Unplanned pregnancy, especially for young people not in a lifetime-commitment, is quite likely to be a “relationship-ender” no matter how the pregnancy itself is resolved.
No one thinks abortion is a “desirable thing” in and of itself. No one is getting pregnant just so they can go to the abortion clinic like going to the amusement park. But it is an enviable blessing compared to the alternatives.
My aversion to politics stems from the tendency toward counterproductive policies. Not just toward abortion, but also drug use, crime in general, poverty and lots of other things.
Yes, this exactly.
So-called “Pro Family” people are never actually pro-family in their policies.
I’ve met women who regretted having been in circumstances such that having an abortion was the best choice for them, which is different from regretting having had an abortion given those circumstances. A subtle but crucial distinction.
They are if you mentally substitute “patriarchy” for “family” when you read or listen to anything they say. You just have to see the fnords!
Yes. Perhaps I should have used “answered” rather than “settled”.
Just do it.
Of course people will approach it objectively, even if that only means that they will actively object.
Or maybe it is multiple choices, but not really a framework.
For a framework, you would need to systemize morality. But it resists systematization.
The framework need not be explicit; it could refer to dispositions to make a a certain moral choice. And that could differ for a given person within an given moral community by context (time and other circumstances).
In other words, it is a theoretical term for prediction and explanation only.
I’m not a framework realist!
KN,
But your choice of ‘human flourishing’ as the fundamental criterion is itself highly subjective.
I find it objectionable because it gives no weight to the well-being of non-human animals, but you apparently don’t mind. Can we objectively resolve the difference? I don’t see how.
Your choice to exclude non-human animals, and my moral objection to that, are both ultimately subjective.
Kantian Naturalist,
“So human flourishing is Where the Buck Stops”
And if someone disagrees and says the buck stops at doing God’s will – how do you objectively prove them wrong?
Well, you can’t prove them wrong. That’s a fool’s errand.
They have at minimum the burden of bringing evidence that their god even exists to begin with before we have any obligation to take them seriously in their implication that someone (presumably them – but that’s a whole ‘nuther step they need to bring evidence for) knows what “doing god’s will” is.
Otherwise we might just as well concede that the buck stops at “doing Voldemort’s will”.
Right.
I don’t understand what you mean in this post, Bruce. Can you spell this out a bit more?
I don’t think there are EVER proofs regarding where the buck stops. For theists or anybody else.
This is a good point, I think, but I wouldn’t use the same terms. I’d put it (likely KN wouldn’t, however) that If it’s true that KN “doesn’t mind” about excluding animals, then one of his first premises or “articles of faith” involves human flourishing only. If, like you, he does “mind,” his value axioms will instead use “sentient entities” or something that includes animals and possibly aliens or angels whose flourishing would also matter.
You may say, now, “Sure, but THAT choice is subjective!” I point out, though, that If we make the fact that our initial axioms or categories are, to some extent, a matter of choice, then nothing is objective–not just values go bye-bye, but also trees, other people, pain, molecules, pasts, etc. We always have to start somewhere.
Where there’s no certainty available, not just morals, but science and common sense are also fallible, and also dependent on initial definitions that are used because of fecundity, explanatory power, parsimony, etc. Obviously, one can define terms how one likes, but it’s my view that what makes a proposition “objective,” is something like what Bruce and KN have said–it makes sense to argue about it. Thinking doesn’t make it so the way liking something makes that thing appeal to me. Where there’s subjectivity, there IS certainty, largely because nothing interesting is being asserted. Elsewhere there don’t need to be proofs, because…well…there are never proofs available for anything except where our axioms are in place.
As I’ve said, I take the position that the main problem with value talk is not subjectivity, but that if we accept everything on the Nussbaumian list that KN posted, we still can’t figure out what to do in the Crimea. It’s not because the questions don’t have right answers–given whatever definitions we choose–but because we don’t have the capacity to figure them out. Too many probability estimates involving too many facts that we know almost nothing about.
Agreed. And if there is no way of objectively proving where the buck stops then it seems to that the decision on where the buck stops is a subjective one. So morality is at core subjective.
My sense is that decision on where the buck stops to be based on the same sort of stuff (or maybe just somewhat similar stuff) to what we use in our fact (non-value) world. Does the axiom comport with common-sense? Does it lead to self-contradictions? Is it fecund? Etc. E.g., as indicated, I take “satisfaction of desires” as intrinsically valuable. I prefer it to “flourishing” because of its “first person” aspect. (I could be wrong about what makes me flourish, and I guess I’m more anti-paternalistic than Nussbaum.) But I concede, again, that this is just an article of faith. If you make utilizing such articles a mark of subjectivity, then I think everything turns out to be subjective–from gardening to physics.
One response is that societies which are cruel to animals will have people who are become less sensitive to suffering of people too, leading to less human flourishing. So animal cruelty is already covered by human flourishing.
You could expand flourishing to all sentient creatures, but you then get the added problem of how to weight people versus fish. That seems over complicated especially since we are so far from having societies that produce conditions for human flourishing.
And as I said in the other thread, even in the formal case there are conflicts over the validity of proofs among trained mathematicians. Although much less severe than moral conflicts.
And yet we do make moral and political decisions all the time.
There is never enough information to make a perfect decision. Either at individual level or society level.
At individual level, we deliberate for a time but then we just act and learn from consequences.
Societies do the same. The success of the society, as judged by its members and also by its interaction with other societies, will influence its future behavior and norms. The better the society is at incorporating such feedback, the more successful it will be.
The political institutions it has in place to generate decisions and incorporate feedback will be part of the that experiment/feedback mechanism in successful societies.
I realize that “successful societies” requires unpacking at some point, but let’s see where the above takes things.
(BTW, most of this stuff comes from Kitcher’s The Ethical Project which I posted about last year. He gets the basis from Dewey).
I wondered because so many Canadians move to US to pursue successful careers as comedians.
For example, Ted Cruz.
It seems that in your usage of “objective”, there is no way of objectively proving anything in science as well.
So would you call science subjective?
If not, what is the difference between the ongoing, evaluation of scientific theories by impartial, structured* conversation among scientists (which includes experimental results) and similarly structured conversations about morality (which includes scientific information on human psychology and the history and structure and success of human societies).
—-
* structured = transparent presentation of one’s evidence, peer review, honesty, recognition of standards for evaluation of theories like simplicity, falsification, etc
Sorry. In applying my standard to edit quoted posts so as not to clutter the thread, I mistakenly editted out the material I was responding to. Namely:
I disagree that there is one correct answer, if that was part of your point.
Yes I knew what you were responding to and I understand that we disagree about whether there is one correct answer. But I still don’t understand this:
I’d think there’s a sense in which “all morality is local.” By that, I mean that I or my town or my society or world, etc. is in some situation and must make a choice. I think there is one correct choice, whether or not there’s any chance of us figuring it out. There’s probably also one correct–but perhaps different–choice that should be made given our vast ignorance of the relevant utilities and future probabilities (maybe one taking fewer risks if we’re wrong about something). But set up the problem as you may, I think there’s one correct answer to it–supposing one’s axioms include excluded middle, non-contradiction, etc.
Where did all the PZ Myers defenders disappear to? Don’t you all just see meat too?
I look at them unflinchingly and see meat.
– PZ Myers
A quick point for me to elaborate on later: it’s flourishing that I treat as intrinsically normative, not human flourishing per se. There are conditions of flourishing for nonhuman animals and even plants of course as well. It was never my intent to appeal to Nussbaum as a way of eliminating ecological ethics entirely. Though I’m closer to social ecology and ecofeminism than to deep ecology these days, I’m not remotely hostile to ecocentrism and to other criticisms of humanism.
I’m disappointed in you for pulling this shit after I already answered you.
KN,
That’s not what you told us:
Animal behavior is not governed by our norms, and animal flourishing is not identical to human flourishing.
walto,
My response is the same as all the other times we’ve had this conversation. Senses can be cross-checked in ways that moral intuitions cannot. Absolute certainty is impossible, but I can have high confidence that there is a keyboard underneath my fingers. I cannot have high confidence that premarital sex is, or isn’t objectively moral. How could I make that determination?
Child.
I think we are talking about two different things.
I understand you are looking at one particular moral decision.
I am referring to the total moral framework employed by society. I am leaving the door open for pluralism (but not relativism).
Humans are social animals who have individual life projects.
So it seems conceptually possible that an “Eastern” society which puts more emphasis on the social harmony and a “Western” society which puts more emphasis on individual projects could have frameworks which lead to equally high levels of human flourishing.
Possibly there is a global, single framework and both could improve by adopting it. But the fact that framework-affecting conditions like scientific knowledge and technology are also changing would seem to make that unlikely — the global optimum, if it existed, would be a moving target. There is also the issue of the need to limit changes to the framework to small steps to preserve social stability.
That does not preclude them learning from each other.
I agree with that. Facts are facts and values are values. Emotions may be intentional without that making them perceptions. I doubt there will ever be a “science of values” and I’m not sure what it would look like. That means that at most of us, most of the time, can only have a level of confidence in our moral judgments that is lower than that of in our factual judgments.
But the question is whether those differences require the subjectivity of one and the objectivity of the other. If our moral judgments were “subjective” wouldn’t our confidence in them be at the highest level possible? How could we be wrong.
Finally, look at the two items you’re comparing there: one, about the existence of a particular keyboard, the other a general statement about the morality of pre-marital sex. Some of the lack of confidence in the latter is a result of its generality. If we made the first one “Apparent keyboards are keyboards” confidence might fall; if we made the second one “In this particular case, pre-marital sex would be the wrong thing to do” confidence might rise.
But again, I don’t want to downplay the differences between facts and values. I just don’t attribute them to an “objectivity gap.”
Well, when you’re right, you’re right. I’ll have to reformulate my Flanagan/Nussbuam position on ethics in order to make enough room for animal rights and environmental ethics.
Do you have a database system which allows you fast lookup by keyword or topic for all previous posts of someone you are conversing with?
I stll think I don’t fully uderstand this. Maybe I’m having trouble with ‘pluralism.’ I probably should read some of the stuff you’ve been citing as background!
Here’s a precis of Kitcher’s book.
It’s an extension of Dewey’s idea of morality as social technology. Using the technology metaphor, moral systems can be ranked by how well they function, ie how well they meet goals.
If hammers are ranked by how well they meet goals, you might look at cost, grip comfort, weight, etc (IANAC).
Two hammers could be equally good because they differ in which factors they optimize. That’s hammer pluralism. But that does not mean all hammers are equally good. That would be hammer relativism.
Hmmm. Have to think about that.