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.
It’s going to come back to the meaning of “successful” in successful societies ( how well they drive nails, so to speak).
Kitcher thinks more psychological altruism means more successful. He thinks that will naturally lead to greater flourishing because it will increase the potential for people to pursue their life projects. However, I think that part of the book shifts more to Flanagan-style level of reasoning.
He justifies altruism as the goal because that is what human societies evolved to try to maximize. So he is not building that in as an assumption or axiom. At least, not on the surface.
Bruce,
In this case it was pretty easy, since KN made that comment just a couple of days ago. The wetware was enough to find that one.
For harder cases, it’s amazing what you can find with just the right Google query. For the new thread, I used this query:
Kantian Naturalist assertoric site:theskepticalzone.com
Just a couple of pages of results to look through, most of them relevant. The trick is coming up with an unusual word, phrase, or combination thereof that will single out the conversation(s) you’re looking for without being overspecific. ‘Assertoric’ is an obvious candidate for my discussions with KN.
Bruce,
I would say that the not-so-hidden axiom is “Whatever societies evolved to maximize is a moral good.”
That’s quite subjective.
Unaborted fetus.
FWIW, it’s not a choice that does much for me. Sounds like something Herbert Spencer might have said.
That is not what Kitcher is saying.
He is not looking at whatever societies do now and saying that what is good. He continually revisits the question of how we can claim moral progress* so we can judge societies and proposed changes.
As the meta-normative source for moral norms, Kitcher looks at biological evolution and what we can learn about early cultural behavior of humans by studying close primate relatives. He then argues that moral frameworks are an ethical project of societies. The overall norms for judging the effectiveness of progress in those projects should be based on human biological evolution and what it tells us about humanity. We should then consider what we have learned through the various ethical projects of differing societies to date.
As an analogy: we can say that the norms to judge whether a heart is functioning well are based on recognizing the role it plays in fitness as evidenced by biological evolution.
One can argue that norms for hearts are not the right way to think about moral norms. For example, one could argue that using evolution as a basis for morality is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. Or that one is trying to derive an “ought” from an “is”. Philosophers like Kitcher or Pat Churchland or Flanagan who are moral naturalists have counter-arguments for any such claim. I find them effective. YMMV.
Obviously, my brief summaries here don’t capture the subtleties of Kitcher’s arguments. Consult the precis or the book if you want to pursue his arguments.
Over to you for any last words in this round.
———————
* On truth of moral statements: Kitcher says understanding moral progress should precede any conception of moral truth. Truth should then be defined pragmatically based on what works, ie what leads to moral progress.
Bruce,
But the definition of moral progress is inherently and inescapably subjective, so moral truths must also be subjective in Kitcher’s framework.
For example, Kitcher writes:
That may very well be true. But that fact that ethics arose for such a purpose does not make “the remedying of altruism failures” an objective moral good. To someone who thinks that morality consists of fulfilling God’s will, period, “the remedying of altruism failures” might seem like a hopelessly immoral and human-centered goal, placing the satisfaction of human wants above those of God.
How can such a disagreement be objectively resolved?
Bruce,
Imagine telling a black person that his enslavement is immoral not because his own suffering has independent moral weight, but merely because slavery doesn’t promote “white flourishing”. It makes white people less sensitive to the suffering of other white people, leading to less white flourishing.
Ditto. Imagine telling a black person:
Yes, that’s the Singer (among others I suppose) argument that speciesism = racism. I’m sure it has its supporters, although Wiki notes that some consider it trivializes the work of African-American activists.
The argument I gave is something a virtue ethicist or a Kantian might use. Kitcher actually ends up closer to Singer, but based on a different argument, at least initially.
As usual, Kitcher looks to human evolution and early human history and notes the domestication of animals can be thought of as bringing them into an extended human society and so becoming participants in the ethical project. Of course, animals cannot speak for themselves in that project, but neither can children (this is similar to the marginal case argument for animal rights, of course) .
So Kitcher ends up endorsing the expanding circle type arguments that Singer also makes and arguing that the ethical project should address expanding the circle to animals, and eventually to all of nature.
Bruce,
That’s not what I’m arguing. I’m pointing out that if animal well-being matters morally, then “human flourishing” cannot be “Where the Buck Stops”, as KN put it. If animal well-being is only a means to the end of human flourishing, then it can be cast aside if doing so at some future point would benefit humans.
I’m happy to see that KN agrees and is planning to revise his position.
In the same way, if black well-being matters morally, then “white flourishing” cannot be Where the Buck Stops.
Again:
I think keiths is right that one should look for a place to “stop the buck” that does not produce apparently immoral results. Subjective items–like whether one likes broccoli–aren’t like that. You like anchovies or you don’t. Nothing to argue about regarding those issues. With someone who says what matters in morality is what is most likely to make white men (or herrings) flourish, reasonable responses might be–“That’s horrible!” “That’s outrageous!” or “That’s just cruel!” or “You’re an evil person!”
But if someone says that they like anchovies, the worst they might get in return is, “Hunh–kind of salty, aren’t they?” or “You’re weird.”
But if you are trying to argue that animal flourishing should matter morally, isn’t the above circular?
I must be missing what you a trying to argue.
My recollection for the context is that human flourishing is taken as a given and the discussion is about whether it needs to be expanded to include animal flourishing.
Just to be clear: I personally am taking no position on this issue. I’m just exploring the philosophical arguments.
I find Kitcher’s ideas attractive because he treats morality as an ongoing social project updated through “dynamic consequentialism”, which takes into account both scientific knowledge and the learning from past social experiments.
In this approach, ideas like the central nature of human flourishing and the expanding circle of altruism are treated analogously to scientific theories: always open to revision, but with the understanding that some have been widely tested and accepted, and so require extraordinary evidence to revise significantly.
I find less attractive approaches that rely solely on rationality (like Kant) or place what I see as undue emphasis on reflective equilibrium and other armchair reasoning (like Rawls). I also find consequentialism which pre-specifies the evaluation criteria to be less attractive for similar reasons.
Subjectivity is removed by the rules which structure the process, as I’ve posted about earlier in the thread (and not by construing the process as a search for real moral truths).
Of course, the process has to be able to deal with those who refuse to participate, who refuse to acknowledge the outcomes, or who treat moral decisions as equivalent to choices of preferred vegetables or ice cream flavor.
Bruce,
Here’s a rehash:
1. KN described ethics as objective and based on a criterion of human flourishing.
2. I pointed out that the criterion of human flourishing excluded animals, which made it unacceptable to me.
3. I noted that the choice of whether to include or exclude animals was ultimately subjective, meaning that KN’s ostensibly objective ethical system was in fact subjective.
4. KN stated that he didn’t actually wish to exclude animals, and conceded that his ‘human flourishing’ criterion therefore needed to be broadened.
5. You defended the ‘human flourishing’ criterion by arguing that a) it already ‘covered’ animal well-being, and that b) we shouldn’t complicate things by including animals until after we’ve come up with societies that get the ‘human flourishing’ part right.
6. I criticized those defenses, noting that they took animal welfare from being a good in itself, demoting it to being merely a means to the end of human flourishing. I pointed out the moral unacceptability of an analogous demotion of black well-being to a means to the end of ‘white flourishing’.
My main points are that
a) the decision to include or exclude animals from the criterion is ultimately subjective, and this is one example of why morality cannot be objective; and
b) if we think that animal welfare matters, then the ‘human flourishing’ criterion is inadequate and must be expanded.
From what I can tell from your posts, he pre-specifies them too (e.g., human flourishing); he just admits that they are subject to change. You have to start somewhere.
keiths takes the view that if one has a choice of first premises, the result must be that everything using that premise is subjective. I think you (and others) have been persuasive in your denials of that supposition. The main point is, I think, that such a criterion for subjectivity would seem to make EVERYTHING subjective. The claim that one shouldn’t do this or that because it’s wrong, isn’t really that much like “Mmmm! Yummy!”
OK, got it thanks.
walto,
No, I think that once you've made your subjective choice of moral axioms or criteria (assuming they are consistent and sufficiently well-defined), you can then proceed objectively. That won’t lead you to objective moral truths, however, because the initial choice was subjective and cannot be adjudicated objectively.
Belinda says that the ultimate moral good is human flourishing and Bob says that it’s unquestioning obedience to God. Who is objectively right?
Neither, I contend. Morality is inescapably subjective.
No, I don’t think he pre-specifies flourishing.
Instead, he first argues for increasing psychological altruism as a goal based on his reading of human evolution and early history. He derives human flourishing from that. Of course, you may not accept his arguments or his reading of biology and early anthropology.
One can also refuse to accept naturalized approaches to morality. He quotes Dewey approvingly on that issue: “moral conceptions and processes grow naturally out of the very conditions of human life”.
I look at the animal welfare issue somewhat orthogonality.
Nature is full of death and pain, much of it beyond amelioration.
I look at animal rights (so to speak) as the business of categorizing people who interact with people. We seen to have a built in “leper” response, a fear or aversion of sick people. We learn rather early in life to avoid dangerous people and animals. The list of dangerous beings and situations is culturally derived, but the tendency to build such lists seems to be innate.
When I see a person being cruel to animals, I add that person to my list of dangerous people. I see cruelty as habitual. I assume that a person who is cruel to animals will be cruel to people, and likely to be cruel to me.
I see it not so much as a question of morality, but a question of making the world safer in general.
That misses the point. You have taken the fact that one has a choice over first premises in the case of morality to imply that morality is subjective. But you either do not think that the fact that one has a choice of first premises in the case of fact-finding makes fact finding necessarily subjective. Or you don’t think we have a choice of first premises in the case of fact finding. Which is it?
As indicated, I should read his stuff before commenting. (I haven’t even looked at the precis you’ve kindly linked.) I have a general sense that it won’t be my cup of tea, but I realize that’s not really fair.
walto,
We’ve had this discussion many times already.
There’s agreement among people from different natures, cultures, and religions on the charge of the electron and the chemistry of photosynthesis. There isn’t agreement on the morality of abortion.
Why? Because there are objective means of adjudicating the former, but not of the latter.
Tell WJM that!
ETA: I know you have. But he is not convinced by the “objective” methods.
There’s agreement among people from different natures cultures and religions that the gratuitous torture of infants is wrong. There isn’t agreement on the nature of collapse of the wavefunction.
walto,
Yes, but not because there is a way of demonstrating it objectively. There isn’t.
That’s right. Nobody’s found an objective way of deciding which interpretation of QM is correct.
I note that, in trying to show that fact talk may be objective but morality talk never is, you like to contrast such items as
Premarital sex is wrong, and abortion is wrong
with such items as
there being keyboard in front of me and the chemistry of photosynthesis
Hahaha. Circle complete.
walto,
Of course. I think they’re good examples of each category.
walto,
Think of it in terms of the Quinean web.
Revising the charge of the electron or denying the chemistry of photosynthesis would cause reverberations throughout the web. Vast swathes of physics, chemistry, and biology would need to change, and their associated predictions would change as well. We accept these things — the charge of the electron, etc. — as facts precisely because they fit so well into the web, and because denying them threatens well-established, fundamental beliefs at the center of the web.
Now suppose that we simply deny the objective immorality of gratuitous child torture. How is the web affected? Do vast swathes of it need to change? Does it even jiggle?
As far as I can see, the world should look the same whether or not gratuitous child torture is objectively moral or immoral. There is no reasoning we can do, no observation we can make, that will settle the question.
Our consciences certainly don’t settle the question, because we have no independent means of verifying their “accuracy” in determining objective morality.
How then can anyone argue that the immorality of GCT is an objective moral truth?
Well, other than that (i) legal and moral codes would require substantial amendment all over the world (including that portion of statutory law, common law, regulation codes and executive edicts that would have to be committed to the flames), (ii) household, school and daycare rules everywhere would require complete re-writing, and (iii) a significant portion of fiction (including so-called “gospels”) since the beginning of recorded time would make almost no sense, not much jiggling, I suppose. I guess it’d be just another day at your house, anyhow.
walto,
None of that would obtain, because everyone but us would go on believing that GCT was immoral.
Think of it this way. Suppose that at midnight tonight, the charge of the electron changes dramatically. Will people notice? You bet they will, if they’re still able to notice anything.
Now suppose that at midnight tonight, GCT shifts from being genuinely, objectively immoral to being genuinely, objectively moral. Who will notice?
No one. Nothing about our world would change, other than the brute fact of GCT’s morality or immorality — and no one has access to that brute fact, through conscience or otherwise.
Oh, I see. I misunderstood your post. I take it now that you’re asking what if it were really the case that something that was immoral yesterday became moral today.
On my view, human emotional responses would change, just as, in the case of the electron difference, human perceptual responses would change. My supposition with respect to neither of those changes is provable, but I think it is true in both cases.
walto,
In the case of the changing electron charge, we can use physics to predict the consequences.
But in the case of the changing morality, nothing physical has changed in the world. How would a physical brain detect the difference, so that a person consulting her conscience would sense the change in morality?
Values aren’t facts and aren’t detectible in the same way. The change in values would be detectible by changes in people’s reactions to events and other behaviors,, and eventually in changes in moral standards, laws, penal codes, etc.
Unlike objectivity! Objectivity is inescapably objective.
In the case of the changing electron charge, physics would change. Assuming that physics would even be possible.
walto,
People’s reactions and behaviors are functions of their physical brains. If a shift in objective morality occured at the stroke of midnight, why would physical brains behave any differently than they did the moment before? People would go on believing that GCT was immoral, despite the fact that it no longer was.
This is why I say that subjective morality is the only kind of morality that actually makes a difference in the world. Even if objective morality somehow existed, it would be hermetically sealed, with no influence on the real world.
If you want to argue otherwise, you need to explain how a shift in a non-physical objective morality could somehow alter the physical processes in your brain, resulting in different moral judgments than before. How is that possible? The laws of physics don’t take objective morality into account.
I can only wonder what might happen to brains if the charge of the electron changed.
I can only wonder what might happen to beliefs if the charge of the electron changed.
I can only wonder what might happen to beliefs about physics if the charge of the electron changed.
Saw away keiths. Saw away.
No doubt you are certain of this.
But what if the charge of some electron in your brain got changed somehow. It’s logically possible, right?
If I understand you correctly, an analogy for your argument would be the status of mathematical platonism versus the results of mathematics.
Whether or not math platonism is correct would not appear to affect the results of mathematics.
For if math platonism was true, one still would need to find an argument to show that changes in the properties of the real, abstract mathematical objects somehow affected physical brains in spatio-temporal reality. And no one has found a generally accepted argument to do so, although some have tried (and there are analogous attempts with regard to moral realism).
Some people do argue that mathematics is subjective, since it happens only in one’s thoughts.
What I think it boils down to, is that when people disagree over whether morality is subjective, then are mainly disagreeing over what they mean by “subjective.”
This is a good question, but I think it might presuppose a bit more neurophysiological progress/success in the reducibility of any judgments–moral or otherwise– to physical processes in brains than is actually warranted at present. I take it, e.g., there’s some understanding of how cells in our cerebral cortex may be changed by photons of various types striking our retinas. Similarly there’s some understanding of processes that go on when we have emotional responses like disgust or empathy to something. But (as the first batch mung’s list of presuppositions on another current thread illustrates) that these bodily responses are signs of the world outside us being this or that way requires intentionality–something that, I don’t see how we can reduce. You make perceptions intentional, but emotions not. Or, put another way–you make the apparent causes of your perceptual experiences OBJECTS as well as causes. And you think that the nature of your experiences provides some evidence of the sorts of properties of those objects actually have. Emotions can be taken the same way–I do so, you don’t.
As Neil says, this is largely a matter of what we want to mean by “subjective.” And we’ve been over that a number of times.
Also whether objectivity requires realism in that domain (eg math platonism, or scientific realism, or moral realism)
Yes.
Are you referring to ontological reduction or epistemological reduction?
And if the former, that is if you are saying intentionality cannott be reduced somehow to physical process/properties at least in principle, do you think intentionally is possibly not even constrained by physics?
I was referring to ontological reduction. I confess that I’m not sure what it would mean for intentionality to be constrained (or not constrained) by physics. I don’t deny that every mental state is identical to some physical process, but when pressed at that point to explain intentionality I guess I get pretty mysterian and want to limit my response to solemnly chanting some Wittgensteinian remark about what can only be shown.
I’m not convinced that everything can be understood. BWTHDIK–even (or especially) about THAT?!
If you say “understood” I interpret that as epistemological reduction.
I don’t think an explanation of intentionality in the language of physics is possible.
But I also don’t think an acceptable naturalistic explanation of intentionality can invoke causal processes or laws which contradict known physics. That is what I mean by the constraint of physics. I interpret you as agreeing with that.
Chalmers and other property dualists disagree as I understand them. Tim Crane might too. I think he accepts the Zombie argument against physicalism, but I am not sure what precisely that implies about his belief that intentionality is not reducible.
By the way, I do think an explanation of intentionality in terms of neuroscience might be possible. Chris Eliassmith wrote his PhD thesis on one attempt and he has at least one subsequent paper published expanding on it. I have not read either yet. I can send links if you are interested. Of course, I’m not saying he is right. Only that this shows what is possible.
I don’t think that was correct. Understanding an ontological reduction would be epistemic. That wouldn’t make the reduction an epistemic reduction.
Bruce,
Yes, that’s a good analogy. Neither the platonic realm nor the realm of objective morality would appear to have any prospect of influencing physical reality. Since brains are physical, this would appear to seal them off from any such influence.
walto,
But you would presumably agree that in our thought experiment, when gratuitious child torture changes from ‘objectively immoral’ to ‘objectively moral’ at midnight, the physical brains of people will enter different subsequent states than they would have had GCT had remained immoral. Correct?
If so, then the nonphysical fact of GCT’s moral status has an influence, direct or indirect, on the physics of brains, and physical reality is not causally closed. It sounds like a full-blown dualism to me.
What is the equivalent of Descartes’ pineal gland in this case? How does the influence of objective morality leap the gap from the non-physical to the physical?
Again, as I’ve indicated, I don’t take “objective” to mean non-relative to human interests, and I’ve also said that I take it as axiomatic that satisfaction of desires is intrinsically good. I also take as fundamental that the more good there is in the world, the better, that it’s not just my own good that is valuable.
So I suppose what would have to happen for gratuitous torture of children to suddenly become morally respectible would be a sea-change in what is important to sentient beings. I don’t see either that that requires that there be no causal closure of the physical world, or that the specified relativity makes morality subjective–any more than whether my computer keyboard is now in front of me or behind me is subjective. If I claim that it’s behind me now, I’m wrong, just as I’m wrong if I claim that it’s ok to torture babies for no reason.