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.
walto,
Your position seems to be shifting.
Earlier you wrote that
And you seemed to be arguing for some non-physical influence on our consciences:
Now you are saying that
But what is important to sentient beings is detectable to us, especially when the sentient beings in question are human. And in the case of animals, it can be inferred experimentally and (in principle, at least) through an investigation of their brains.
So I’m unable to reconcile this with earlier statements of yours about objective values being inaccessible to investigation.
We can use science to detect both the emotional and the perceptual states. I take them both as evidence of stuff outside us. You take the perceptual states only as evidence.
(Of course you sermonize as if your own emotional states were things others really should care about, but that’s a story for another thread.)
walto,
You seem to be vacillating between two positions:
1. Objective morality is something nonphysical that our consciences sense, but that is otherwise undetectable. This means that physical reality is not causally closed, because our physical brain states are being influenced and altered by something nonphysical.
2. Objective morality is determined by what is important to sentient beings, and it may shift over time as their priorities shift:
I don’t see how these views can be reconciled.
a) Do you think that physical reality is causally closed, or not?
b) Is objective morality something fixed that influences us, but not vice-versa, or is it something determined by us (collectively)?
I raised this example as another case where realism and objectivity in a domain of interest can come apart.
Suppose we accept that math Platonism is false, that is, that the entities of mathematics are not real. Does that mean mathematics is not objective?
I think all would agree that mathematics is objective once the axioms are chosen. But, by assumption, there is no math reality to tell us what choices of axioms are right (ie in accord with reality).
So does the fact that axioms need to be chosen without a reality to check against mean that all of the subsequent mathematics based on those axioms is subjective?
I think the answer is no. I think there are conditions for saying one axiom set is better than another. For example, mathematicians settle on a small number of interesting axioms systems, possibly because they produce interesting mathematics and provide fertile conditions for further study. I believe you have also commented in another thread on criteria for choosing one math axiom system over another, although I was unable to locate those comments even with my attempts at applying your Google technique.
So I think that mathematics is objective even if there is no math reality to check against.
That is one reason why I think the concepts of reality to check against and objectivity can come apart.
SEP contains an interesting article on this separation of objectivity and reality in science. The article calls the idea that scientific objectivity depends on reality to check against the product approach (to objectivity) and discusses shortcomings of this approach. It then analyzes several process approaches to objectivity which are independent of any assumptions about scientific realism.
I prefer the process approach to objectivity and have argued in a detailed discussion with you last year that it can also be applied to morality; that is, the process for determining moral norms can be objective and this is true regardless of the truth of moral realism. I don’t want to revisit those discussions with you, but I did want to situate them in the current discussion.
I think physical reality is causally closed, and I’ll take B.
But subjective preferences don’t explain moral force. I think people–and perhaps other sentient beings–actually CREATE moral goods and evils. We are value-creating (and destroying) entities, but, as I’ve said, the values exist once created (though not necessarily for ever). They are objective in that if, e.g., someone believes that X is a better state of affairs than Y, perhaps because she likes X better, but for any reason at all, she may be WRONG.
I don’t understand your subjectivist view, though. To take one example, you seem to think that if you discover that someone has been lying, we should share in your disapprobation–otherwise, what would be the point of your sermonizing. I take it that you don’t think that if somebody likes, say, rum raisin ice cream, a flavor you hate, your mentioning your feelings about the matter should make much difference to anybody.
What do YOU think provides the moral force you obviously think some but not all of your preferences have?
BTW, I don’t deny that my views on these matters have evolved over the last two or three years. I think the main thing has been seeing that objectivity and relativity are not mutually exclusive. (I probably would have seen that sooner if I’d read some of KN’s posts more carefully, but I picked it up elsewhere.) I’m not sure whether you’ve grokked that point yourself.
BruceS,
Very interesting post, which, I think comes at some of the same issues I was posting almost simultaneously. The one thing I might demur on is the way “reality” is being used. What we discern with objectivity is reality, IMHO. That doesn’t make me an idealist, I don’t think, because (and I think this is one area where Neil might agree with me), while the world isn’t ready-made just kind of waiting for us to discern all of its pre-classified properties, its not NOT THERE either. It’s….well…noumenal, in the sense that it can’t be described without us cutting it up.
If we ignore the part about “causally closed”, then those two positions seem to be the same. You seem to be accusing walto of vacillating between two identical positions.
Unless we can pin down exactly which atoms are the physical part of “important to sentient beings”, then “physical” and “non-physical” are indistinguishable.
Yes, I agree with you on that. There is a human-independent reality. But what we say about it and how we describe it is not human-independent.
The difficulty with “objective” is that people use that word in ways that are connected with what we say about reality (so in ways that may not actually be human independent), but they like to claim that “objective” implies human independent.
In terms of the thread topic, I see a continuum between what we consider to be objective (but perhaps not actually human independent) and what we see as subjective. And there’s disagreement on where to draw the dividing line.
Fair enough, but my point is there is no need to get into that argument to accept objectivity as a property of the process.
What reality does math discern?
No idea. (I make a point never to opine on philosophy of math. Totally out of my wheelhouse.)
How does one determine that some moral positions are wrong? Is it based on the “desires” of or “what is important” to sentient beings (which is how I understand your above post.)
My own take is that it’s largely a function of utility calculations where satisfaction and failure of satisfaction of desires are the main utile. But I have some refinements/adjustments and also some qualms.
I could send you a draft of my paper on the subject if you PM me your email. I’m sure you’d have some useful comments too. (But I absolutely can’t make it any longer!)
Bad walto.
Bruce,
Here’s an example that illustrates what I think is our perennial sticking point.
Suppose Buford hates geese — Canadian geese, to make it more personal. 🙂
He thinks they’re abominable, the devil’s birds, and that their very existence is a moral affront. In Buford’s eyes, actions are moral to the extent that they impede or reverse the proliferation of Canadian geese (all else being equal) and immoral to the extent that they promote such proliferation. To Buford, the destruction of these birds is a moral imperative. It is his true calling.
This is clearly a subjective moral view. Others, like me, don’t find the existence of Canadian geese to be morally problematic. In fact, we find Buford’s indiscriminate and relentless persecution of geese to be immoral. Ours is also a subjective view.
Buford commissions a thousand-page report on the best ways of suppressing the goose population using limited resources. A skilled group of objective and impartial wildlife biologists, ornithologists, and economists recommends a strategy of goose extermination and population control that gives the best bang for the buck. Everyone agrees that this strategy is the best.
I take a look at the report, and I also agree. They’ve come up with what is clearly, objectively the best strategy for reducing the goose population on a limited budget.
Does that mean that I think the strategy is objectively moral? Of course not; I’m opposed to goose persecution. Is it objectively moral? Again, no. It’s objectively the best way of eliminating geese, but the elimination of geese is not an objective moral good. It’s clearly subjective.
Is the strategy an example of objective morality? No. It’s merely an example of an objectively optimum strategy for promoting a subjective moral good. It’s subjectively moral to Buford and subjectively immoral to me, but it is neither objectively moral nor objectively immoral.
What if every sentient being in the universe comes around to Buford’s view, besides (or maybe even including) the geese? Does the strategy become objectively moral then? I certainly don’t think so. It just means that everyone is ganging up on the geese.
Substitute Kitcher for Buford, the promotion of “moral progress”, however currently defined, for the destruction of geese, and I claim you have an analogous situation: no objective morality, but merely an objectively effective means of promoting a subjective moral good.
Thanks for the offer but I fear I would have little useful to offer as comment and would instead pester you with questions.
I prefer to save such pestering for the forum. So when it is published, if you want publish a link to a free (pre-pub version) copy on your academia page, and maybe even do an OP on it, that would be great.
On consequentliasm: As I recall, Kitcher ends up being a “dynamic” consequentialist. It’s his metaethics rather than his practical ethics that might differ from many consequentialists’, since he puts understanding ethical progress ahead of understanding ethical truth.
He says any definition of ethical truth should be pragmatic (as in the philosophy) and based on progress. However, he does not see that line of argument — pragmatic ethical truth — as particularly important to his overall point of view
Thanks for taking the time to prepare this detailed post.
I agree with a lot of this. You do have to start with values to obtain values–as many wise folk have noted you can’t derive “ought” from “is.”
But the post is itself a little defective with these entirely unsupported remarks:
The fact that there is disagreement on something does not make one or both positions on that thing subjective. I could easily substitute two factual claims for your geese claims above–say something about the collapse of the wave function being caused by someone in the universe thinking of mung’s mother.
So what you do here is beg the central question about whether moral judgments must be subjective by simply repeating (six times!) that they are.
Again, however, I think the stuff about the differences between the moral judgment and the ways of putting the world in line with it is right–if trivial. Facts aren’t values.
ETA: I should point out, too, that the fact that one cannot obtain values from facts is one of the problems with your own view that morality consists of nothing more than human attitudes. Those aren’t values.
I think KN has said something similar recently on the presuppositions thread–and cited Hegel(!) as an authority.
Again, I don’t think Kitcher would be exactly my cup of tea, but I guess I should probably suck it up and read a little of him.
As I understand the naturalist position, it says that it is correct that one cannot deduce values from facts. However, one can abduce values from facts and philosophical arguments.
In particular, facts about human altruism or perhaps human flourishing can be used to justify moral values abductively.
One could argue that using (eg) altruism is already assuming a moral value, but I think the naturalist would reply that such an understanding is instead something that flows out of the vary nature of the human condition and how morality is to be understood for humans (see previous Dewey quote).
Interesting.
FWIW, I finally DID read the Kitcher precis you linked. (I take it that his book takes a position that is similar to that you’re pressing above.) Very interesting.
I have a general aversion to historicism, but I admit that I find the meta-ethical argument he makes very difficult to answer. Consider, e.g., that there is agreement on something like “flourishing” as our goal. Perhaps we have “intuited” that or something. But now suppose further that–to use keiths’ example–we have moved from white male flourishing to species-wide flourishing. How does that get to be considered “progress” without (what I’d consider a) descent into historicism? That’s a tough one. Seems to me there must be an answer, but I’ll have to think about what it might be.
walto,
From your comments, it appears that the satisfaction of the desires of sentient beings is pretty much “where the buck stops” morally, and that actions are objectively moral or immoral to the extent that they promote or hinder this good.
Someone else argues that “what satisfies God’s will” is where the buck stops morally, and that actions are objectively moral or immoral to the extent that they promote or hinder the realization of God’s desires.
He is objectively wrong in your view, and you are objectively right. How do you establish this in a non-circular fashion? What is it that tells you that you are right and he is wrong, rather than vice-versa?
Bruce,
And I would.
If a race of Bufords structured their societies around the central goal of eradicating Canadian geese, would that mean that goose eradication was an objective moral good, at least for them, in your view?
Those first principles are, in a sense, articles of faith. They can be supported only by things like parsimony, consistency with common sense, explanatory power, simplicity, etc. I’d take the claim about God’s desires to require a lot of business about what God is, why anybody should believe in such a thing, why there’s evil at all then, etc. So I think it’s an extremely poor choice of an axiom. But I can’t demonstrate its falsity.
The important point is that if values exist at all, as they can’t be deduced from facts (I won’t get into Bruce’s/Kitcher’s abduction hypothesis), we’re stuck with having to start from “first values.” That is, axiology is an Aristotelian category–something one can’t get beyond.
That’s a good question. I take it that the Kitcherian answer is Yes. I find that sort of historicism really unsatisfying. But I don’t have an answer to his moral progress challenge.
walto, have you heard of Ethical Intuitionism?
Yes, it’s the view made popular by G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica, a book which was much admired by Virginia Woolf and the other Bloomsburyites. I’m not an intuitionist, myself, though. I don’t think there would be any values if there were no sentient beings.
walto,
I don’t see how these three statements of yours can cohere:
#1:
#2:
#3:
You say that objective values depend on the existence of sentient beings and are determined by what is important to them. Yet there are facts about what is and isn’t important to sentient beings.
Why then do you say that values can’t be deduced from facts? What’s missing?
Is (fact) / ought (value) ?
walto,
Let’s suppose that, like me, Brenda is morally opposed to Buford’s indiscriminate persecution of Canadian geese. Let’s further suppose that Brenda considers this an instance of objective morality.
Now let’s consider three possible worlds:
1. A world in which Brenda is right, and Buford is wrong, about objective morality. The indiscriminate persecution of Canadian geese really is objectively immoral.
2. A world in which Buford is right, and Brenda is wrong, about objective morality. The persecution of Canadian geese is an objective moral imperative. Down with Canadian geese!
3. A world in which objective morality doesn’t exist, and neither Buford nor Brenda is right.
How can we decide which world we inhabit? (There are other possible worlds, but let’s neglect those arguendo.)
Rich,
I think that an objective ‘ought’ cannot be derived from an ‘is’, but walto seems to indicate otherwise when he says that objective values are determined by what is important to sentient beings.
Yet he states that “many wise folk have noted you can’t derive ‘ought’ from ‘is'”.
“What is important to sentient beings” is a fact, an ‘is’. If objective values are determined by what is important to sentient beings, then as far as I can see an objective ‘ought’ is being determined by an ‘is’.
I’m curious to see how (and if) walto reconciles his statements.
Since Canadian Geese would seem to have nothing to do with the biological evolution of man and the origins of the ethical project as evidenced by anthropology, the answer for Kitcher is likely no.
Plus have you ever tried to walk though a park after the Canadian geese visit it? How they got to be called Canadian beats me. Ted Cruz, Geese, maybe there is something to be said for critisizing automatic citizenship for native-borns.
Have you not alluded to Moore’s Open Question argument several times in past posts (but not recent ones). Or did I misread those.
If you don’t remember, it’s fine, I’m older than you, so it’s my memory that’s probably failing.
There is a similar approach to math platonism: we can know the abstract math objects which exist outside the space-time causal nexus through some mystical, mathematical intuition.
Plus Sensus divinitatis would seem to be analogous.
Revelation also seems to be in the same vein. As you may have noticed, it does come up from time to time here at TSZ.
I’m not sure of the details of historicism or how you are applying it. I am going from Wiki:
Since Kitcher treats morality as a social technology, the analysis of history is treated as the analysis of experiments in the effectiveness of achieving the goals of the ethical project (which are in turn grounded in the biological nature of man and the origins of the ethical project).
Whether the changes in the history of those societies constituted moral progress is analyzed using that standard. So the standard is not relative to a given time and place. As I’ve said, a core goal of Kitcher is to demonstrate that there is moral progress and not just change.
I’m not sure if that treatment as history as analysis of the results of experiments is what you have in mind by historicism. It does seem different from the Wiki explanation.
What’s missing is that there’s no deduction. You have to start with a value premise to get value conclusions. I start with
Satisfaction of desires are intrinsically good.
and
The more good the better.
Those can’t be demonstrated–unless by some sort of Kitcherian abduction (which I doubt).
It’s my view that we decide by consulting our emotional responses and those of others, just as we would decided whether everything was green in our world by consulting our perceptual responses.
I don’t “derive” an ought from an is. Values must exist to be noticed. On hedonist views, the good is the pleasurable; for them, the coming into the world of pleasures and pains produces values. On the satisfaction view, the satisfaction and non-satisfaction of desires creates values.
Yes. I think Moore’s open question argument is very compelling.
I don’t care for that wiki definition–except for the remark about relativism, which I think is right. Maybe there’s something on SEP? The leading exponent was probably Collingwood, if that helps.
Some stuff on Popper and philosophy of science is all I found after a quick look for historicism. Quick look at Collingwood said it was not clear what he believed, but perhaps it was that the task of metaphysics was solely to study what people in different historical periods thought, and not to provide normative conclusions .
That interpretation does not apply to Kitcher as I argued above.
Dagobert Runes’ old Dictionary of Philosophy gives this, which is pretty much how I understand the term:
But you write that Kitcher says this:
I think you’re right that that suggests Kitcher’s not really a “historicist,” since he takes it that the historical positions on values must be judged in accordance with how they do with respect to his “standard.” My impression was (again, based solely on the precis you linked) that the relevant standard itself shifts, based on the historical positions regarding what’s right and wrong.
I’d think that if his standard is indeed independent of the historical positions taken, then there’s nothing too unique or “pragmatic” about his position. It’s just a garden variety objectivist view. And he’d have as much difficulty explaining moral progress as pretty much everybody else.
But as I really have very little idea what his views actually are, I should obviously not be evaluating them and shut the hell up.
Getting back to keiths’ questions for a sec, I think the process goes something like this:
1. We note that some judgements seem to have moral force: they aren’t factual, but they don’t seem like personal preferences either. Our very language seems to require objective values to make sense.
2. We come to understand that it is emotional responses that seem to be what provide our evidence for these. That means that emotions are, like perceptions, intentional. (As we’ve discussed previously, though, there’s no “science of values”: when there are disagreements, we have to make do with less dispositive evidence. There are no measuring devices we can turn to.)
3. We concoct what we take to be plausible theories to explain 1 and 2.
Theists, e.g., may claim that the most plausible theory is that God makes these values and makes them available to our emotions. Subjectivists like keiths, e.g., may simply deny 1 or 2 (or both of them). Intuitionists like Moore don’t think our apprehension of values are empirical at all; on that view, they don’t require emotional responses to be intuitable. And Moore doesn’t require that some God make the values for us, perhaps vi Commandment. They’re just….there.
On my theory, people (and perhaps other sentient entities) make values. That relativity doesn’t require values to be either imaginary or subjective, however. If my theory is correct, any denial that the satisfaction of desires is intrinsically good (though the satisfaction of some of them may be extrinsically bad) is false.
But I can’t PROVE this theory. I just say that it’s better than the alternatives.
I assume that your paper expands on your theory, so I’ll look forward to reading more details about it.
walto,
It still seems to me that your position runs afoul of the is/ought distinction.
You’ve said that your view is compatible with the causal closure of the physical world. If the physical world is causally closed, then nothing that happens in the physical world can be caused or influenced by something outside of the physical world.
In your view consciences detect objective values, and consciences influence our physical actions. Thus there is a causal chain from objective values through consciences to physical actions. If the physical world is causally closed, objective values must therefore be part of the physical world.
You’ve said that if sentient beings didn’t exist, there would be no values. You’ve also said that a “sea change” in what is important to sentient beings could change what is objectively moral.
So we have “what is important to sentient beings” — a characteristic of the physical world, given causal closure, or an ‘is’ in other words — determining objective values, which are ‘oughts’, and are also a physical phenomenon by the reasoning outlined above.
How is that not a case of getting an objective ‘ough’t from an ‘is’?
That could only be the case if there actually is an is/ought distinction.
I seem to be blind to those sorts of things.
Trying to figure out where I stand.
Realist (probably)
Foundationalist (probably)
Direct Perceptionist (probably)
Ethical Intuitionist (who knows)
What am I leaving out?
I don’t have time to respond to this tonight, but I will say now that I don’t remember ever mentioning “consciences.” I’m also curious whether you think the fact that people can understand mathematics violates causal closure, and if not, rhat we can infer that mathematical objects must be physical and that mathematical claims must be subjective.
walto,
You’ve used “emotion” here, but I think “conscience” is more appropriate for the faculty that ostensibly senses objective morality. The word isn’t important as long as you understand what I mean.
No, of course not.
I’m not a platonist, so I don’t think that abstract mathematical objects actually exist, and I certainly don’t think that nonexistent objects can causally influence our physical reality. Our representations of mathematical objects are physical, and they can therefore can be operated on by physical brains and computers, but they don’t refer to real mathematical objects, just as “the President who was born with six arms” is intelligible but doesn’t refer to a real entity.
They’re objective with respect to the relevant axioms — for example, “the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees” is objectively true with respect to the axioms of Euclidean geometry, but it is not objectively true, full stop.
keiths,
I mentioned math because there we are accustomed not to worry about true objective judgments causing a problem for causal closure of the physical. Why? because we don’t think the number 47 is actually a “thing.”
Values are like that, I think. They aren’t particulars or properties (natural or non-natural), states of affairs, or events that one can have a causal relationship with. Consider someone who wants the Cubs to win the World Series. He wants something, but there’s no property, event or state of affairs in the world–physical or not–to which he has some causal connection. What he wants is for things that are actually in the world to become associated in certain ways–ways that they may not now be associated. To say values are objective is to say that some such associations are intrinsically better than others. The better is not some item in the world we take in, the way we “take in” green when we see an oak tree in summer.
To answer your question more succinctly, our emotional responses are to things, properties and events that ARE in the world. To say that there are values is to say that some ways things, properties and events may be associated are better or worse than other ways. In my view, it is desires that make that the case. Hope that’s helpful.
And I want to add that your line of questioning here has been very acute and useful to me in thinking the matter through. So thanks.
You forgot to pick two from Column B. The deal comes with appetizer and dessert.