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.
Probably a question Gregory would be more direct about asking than me.
But if you want to volunteer more self-labels, where do you stand on Fideism? And does your foundationalism cover what FFM is “arguing” for, (if that can be ascertained with any precision).
For me:
– physicalism with weak emergentism for NRP
– scientific realist but I could be convinced that constructive empircism is superior
– some kind of consequentialism for practical ethics.
– still exploring meta- ethics, but leaning towards some kind of meta-ethical realism
– atheist although I could be convinced of something like pantheism at least as a life-guiding myth
How do “better or worse ways” that things can be associated relate to individual desires and the consequentialism I understand you to hold?
In particular, since everyone could have different desires about how things should relate, how is your viewpoint not still subjective, that is purely personal?
I am guessing that somehow consequentialism comes in.
So I presume you will might say that it somehow involves the relations among things that provides the “greatest” satisfaction of the desires of sentient beings.
That would seem to involve maximizing an aggregating function mapping the desires of all sentient beings to relations of things in the world. Is that close to your thoughts? Then the relation amongs things that satisfies that maximized function is what is objective?
BTW, I believe you sometimes use “desire” and sometimes “preference”. I take these as different in meaning with “preferences” refer to more to what is in a person’s best interest, which may accord with his or her desires. Do you take them as synonymous?
Yes.
I don’t think I’ve used “preference” and “desire” interchangeably (I’ve certainly not intended to!), and I don’t think they’re synonymous. My paper spends a lot of time on that issue, in fact.
BTW, speaking of papers, I see KN uploaded something to academia.edu this morning on scientism and representation.
Thanks.
Is it fair to say your paper gets into the question of how to pick the “right” maximizing function (eg how to deal with some standard consequentialist issues, like killing one patient to harvest the organs to save 5).
I wonder if your argument could be extended to realism in aesthetics, eg the relation among musical notes that maximizes the desires of listerners.
I’ll have to take a look at the KN paper. I guess we can comment on it if we don’t reveal the source in details (which would break the rule against outing?) and we find a relevant topic.
Yes (I mean, I do my best).
FWIW, I have another recent paper circulating* on musical form and aesthetic value. I don’t get too far into those issues there, though. It’s mostly a critique of a paper by somebody else.
*One journal has now had it for over a year.
BTW, dunno if this has been posted here before, but here’s a lecture by David Lewis from 1981 criticizing Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument” which seemed to pose problems for causal closure.Lewis was among the first to give the “ability” reply to what Mary has gained upon leaving her room.
Fideism. I don’t think I like it.
Foundationalism. I honestly don’t know where fifth is coming from. I keep hoping someone will give him an answer and move the conversation along just to see where it leads.
Plantinga recently released a new book that is supposed to be “a briefer, much more accessible” version of his Warranted Christian Belief. I just ordered it.
Knowledge and Christian Belief
I’m liking ethical intuitionism better.
As to what am I leaving out, if we take metaphysics, epistemology and axiology to be “the big three” what might I want to add?
walto,
Right, and I would argue that it’s the physical representations of the number 47 — in brains, computers, calculators, and on paper — that have the causal power, not the number itself.
Okay, but then you are conceding that we don’t detect objective values with our consciences or our emotions, since objective values have no causal power. We’re detecting something else.
I disagree. He’s in a physical state that corresponds to “wants the Cubs to win the Series”, and a suitably altered physical state would correspond to “wants the Cubs to lose”. It is his physical state that causes him to say things like “I hope they make it this year.”
Or to put it slightly differently, he prefers some possible future physical states of the world to others.
And there’s the rub. “Better” is always relative to a standard, and I think the choice of standard is ultimately an subjective choice. Your chosen standard gives great weight to the satisfaction of desires, but how can you demonstrate its objective superiority to another standard that weights them quite differently? I don’t think you can do so in a non-circular fashion.
But since desires are physical phenomena, saying that Bud desires a World Series victory for the Cubs is equivalent to saying something about Bud’s physical state. That’s an ‘is’, and I don’t see how you get from it to an ‘ought’, even when you add kazillions of other sentient beings and their desires to the equation. Even if every sentient being in the universe desires the eradication of Canadian geese, that’s still just a fact — an ‘is’.
I’m glad it’s been helpful.
Bruce, to walto:
walto:
For a sufficiently well-defined function f(S), where S represents a physical state of the world, we can say objectively whether f(S1) > f(S2). That’s an ‘is’.
I don’t think we can get an objective ‘ought’ from it, however. Walto also believes that we can’t get an objective ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Where is the ‘ought’ coming from in the case of maximizing his function, then?
keiths, I think I’ve addressed your most recent comments and criticisms here:
As I’ve said, I agree with all the stuff about the causes of emotions having to be physical events and processes. Values can’t be causes of anything: they aren’t individuals, properties, events, or processes of any kind, physical, mental, or ectoplasmic. But we have to start with ethical premises, to derive ethical conclusions, just as we have to start with mathematical axioms to derive mathematical conclusions. They aren’t empirical judgments, but that doesn’t mean the brain processes associated with them are the result of non-physical processes.
Your claim that what is better must always be relative to a standard, I sort of agree with: but we have different notions of what that entails. I don’t see how you can explain the apparent moral force of some judgments, and their apparent differences from wanting the Cubs to win the Series. There can be no real excuse for disapprobation of others (even those suspected of murdering their kids or lying on internet sites) on your view. So, even though I can’t DISPROVE subjectivism or emotivism (and I don’t think anybody can), they seem to me to be missing important elements of the human condition.
Have to start with it.
Also, in the area of ethics a lot of care has to be spent defining the “<” too. That’s what Bruce was noting, I think. But once you’ve ironed that stuff out and stuck them in your axioms, you can, as you rightly say, play with “IS” matters exclusively.
Thanks. I had not bothered to find a picture of Lewis before; after seeing it, I’d definitely have to say that Brandom has him beat in the sage’s beard department.
I’ve encountered the knowledge argument many times in reading phil of mind, so I only listened to the first 10 minutes or so just to see how he would introduce it and what he sounded like.
I’m not familiar with it being argued as violating causal closure. I understanding it as asserting that there must be facts about reality beyond what even the maximally-knowledgeable physicalist can know, hence physicalism is false. Perhaps we can use the same argument to reject the causal closure of physicalism by claiming something non-physical must be causing Mary’s “what-it-is-like” knowledge (such as the non-physicalist properties in property dualism perhaps).
The three standard counter-arguments say the thought experiment only shows something epistemological. That is, all we can conclude is Mary lacks a certain type of knowledge: an ability, a certain form of knowledge by acquaintance, or of a phenomenal concept. The last seems most popular, at least in the philosophers I read.
Prinz has a nice summary of the pros and cons of the three counter-arguments in his The Conscious Brain. Then he goes on to “show” how his model of consciousness combines the three to include all their strengths while eliminating their weaknesses! A nice trick.
I don’t think it is possible for FFM and some of his interlocutors to come to any agreed answer because I don’t think they can agree on the criteria such an answer would need to meet.
Is revelation an acceptable way to justify some belief as knowledge? FFM has a different view of the answer than others. They’ll never agree on that because FFM sees it as a presupposition whereas the others think is can be questioned.
So it’s a pointless conversation if one is looking for a resolution. But I think a lot of posters simply enjoy the argument for its own sake.
I think it is similar to that book you posted about regarding cognitive approaches to arguments for God’s existence. If you have a prior, theistic belief, then your conclusions may differ from someone who does not. And there is no further argument unless one accepts some way to determine priors, like “expert opinions”. But then who determines what an expert is?
As I posted in the presupposition thread, for science it starts by assuming the goal to predict, control, and explain the world in a way that works for anyone. But if you have a higher-priority goal, then you won’t accept scientific expertise as an input to your priors.
Practical ethics? Non-analytic philosophical approaches to your interests?
Of course, the answer depends on what your priorities are.
It’s in the conference presentation section for anyone who is looking for it.
As I read him (assume this prefix throughout the following):
He is trying to justify an approach to metaphysics for neo-pragmatists who distrust it. He does this by combining Kukla’s “embodied stances” approach to Dennett’s real patterns with Ladyman and Ross’s use of real patterns in an ontology which is based on their approach to verification through the sciences.
Kukla’s embodied stances paper which he posted a few months ago did not appeal to me. The “measurement stance” that KN defines here (based on ideas in Kukla) is an embodied stance involving the interaction of people, measuring instruments, and the real patterns they “lock onto”. But it seems to me to miss core cognitive aspects of how science is done.
(I asked him in another thread if he was interested in discussing the paper here).
I’ve long been a fan of the “ability” (or “knowledge how”) response to Jackson’s argument, though maybe not as far back as 1981, the date of this Lewis talk. I think he does a generally effective (if sllooooowwww) job. But one thing I think he does that doesn’t help his case, is to analogize what Mary gains with learning to wiggle one’s ears or eat with chopsticks. I think it must be conceded that if what Mary has gained really is no more than an ability, it’s definitely an unusual one.
I had never heard Lewis speak before. His accent(s) seem(s) very affected. It’s a little painful to listen to for me.
He seems about as nerdy as one can be without being Kripke.
Which thread?
The last one he comments in — the recent one about self evident truths
There appears to be an HTML error in a recent post that is affecting the display of subsequent posts.
With the KN paper reminding me of stances and Dennett-style real patterns, I wondered whether the relationship between states of affairs and sentient beings’ desires which maximizes your function can be thought of as a real pattern in L&R’s sense, which would make it metaphysically real (I think) according to their ontology. (Maybe you’d need to get a community of scientists involved and adopting it as a research program too, but how hard can that be?)
I’ll leave off pursuing that unless KN wants to have a go at his paper.
Repeating myself: if you envision morality as proceeding from choosing axioms like mathematics (which I don’t but…), then the example of mathematics shows that some choices are preferable to others and that does not make the resulting work not objective.
At least, not to me.
A nice coincidence: On my way to work today, I found myself behind a Losee’s Goose Control car. I resisted the urge to follow it to its destination to determine if what they were doing was objectively moral. 🙂
keiths:
walto:
But then you are repudiating the is/ought distinction after all, at least in this particular case.
And if you assume an objective ought in your premise, it’s hardly surprising that you arrive at objective oughts in your conclusion. The premise, not the argument, is doing all the ‘objectifying’ work.
🙂
I therefore favor a different account of our culture’s attitudes towards morality: I suggest that they are incoherent; indeed, blatantly so. Whatever thoughts most individuals have about the nature of value would not withstand a minute of scrutiny.
– Michael Huemer
I don’t think so. I’m insisting on it.
Yes that’s correct.
And that exchange, and others regarding proof and disproof, assume morality has to be framed as a logical enterprise, structured as premises and logical deductions.
Bruce,
We’re not assuming that morality has to be framed that way, but it’s certainly a useful way of framing it. Doing so in this case makes it obvious that walto is assuming, not demonstrating, the objectivity of values.
keiths:
walto:
Quite the opposite. You’re saying that if the physical world is in state S1, then X is objectively immoral, but if the physical world transitions to state S2, then X becomes objectively moral. You’re getting ‘oughts’ from ‘ises’.
And those ‘ises’, being physical states, should be amenable to detection, but you’re arguing that they somehow resist detection except via conscience/emotion.
keiths:
walto:
Then it sounds like you’re saying:
1. Moral intuitions seem different from mere preferences. They have moral force.
2. The moral force derives from the fact that they are not mere preferences; they are somehow a function of all the desires of all the sentient beings in the universe.
3. And, by the way, let’s assume that the optimal satisfaction of the desires of sentient beings is an objective moral good.
#3 seems superfluous. The argument over optimal satisfaction can proceed without it.
Bruce,
I addressed that earlier in a reply to walto:
In other words, mathematical claims are objectively true only if the axioms from which they are derived are objectively true. You can objectively derive conclusions from false axioms, but those conclusions do not become objectively true merely because they are derived objectively.
Likewise, a state of affairs may objectively maximize walto’s utility function, but that state of affairs is objectively moral only if the maximization of walto’s utility function is an objective moral good. He assumes this but does not demonstrate it.
What does it mean for an axiom to be “objectively true”?
My axioms are objectively true.
Your axioms are true from your point of view.
His axioms are rubbish.
Apologies to Sidney J Harris
http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/The-Connotative-Power-Of-Words.htm
That’s not what I’m saying. And, tbh, I think I have a better sense of what I’m insisting on than you do.
The emotional responses don’t, indeed CAN’T make anything objectively moral or immoral, as I’ve stressed numerous times. All they can do is provide what evidence we have on that matter. Same thing is true for responses to colors and the evidence they provide. Change our physiologies, you get different responses and different propositions become warranted.
Incidentally, the literature on the effect of such physiological changes is voluminous. E.g., Stalnaker and Block alone each have a couple of papers focusing on that issue.
That seems OK to me.
That’s not quite how I’d put it. I’d say the moral force suggests that they are not mere preferences. And the stuff after the semicolon is another moral axiom: The more good the better. It can’t be derived, any more than Bentham’s “counting each person as one and no person as more than one.”
I take that as an axiom. That is, supposing one explains what “optimal satisfaction” is.
And you actually need at least one principal in addition to avoid many of the common objections to utilitarianism.
I don’t think any plausible argument gets too far without something like a Pareto principle regarding what’s optimal or Rawls’ maximin principle, or something else along those lines (I don’t use either of those myself). Otherwise, if you consider simple hedonism, it would seem that one guy having 100 pleasure units and everybody else getting none would make a better society than 100 people each getting one unit.
Good question. Because the fact that one doesn’t “demonstrate” the axioms one chooses doesn’t entail that they must the just be “assumed.” That locution misses what can make one system preferable to another (consistency with common sense and language, explanatory coherence, simplicity, etc.)
Yes, that has been part of my point.
Further to my point: can the results of applying those preference criteria (or any others generally accepted by mathematicians) be objective in some sense (which I’ll leave open for now)?
If not, why is it that there are so few axiom systems of interest and studied and so many more potential ones that are ignored?
I can see some possible counter-arguments, but I’m trying to get out of the habit of taking an argument too fast into down potential paths.
ETA: By the way, I continue to think that philosophy of morality is more like (but not the same as!) science than it is like math. But I had the “morality can be as objective as science” discussion last year with Keith and don’t want to revisit it.
BTW, I’m still waiting to hear what keiths’ own view is of why we should care about his (presumable) disapprobation of murder and (demonstrable) dismay regarding alleged internet lying, but we are not expected to care about his dislike of rum raisin ice cream? If they’re all just subjective, well then, la di da or la di di. Let’s let Donald Trump pick!
ETA: Revised some pronouns as a result of Bruce’s intervening post.
You and me both.
He’s kind of a Harris wannabe, I think. They’re both, you know….pretty good. The best philosophy books, like the best movies, music, etc. aren’t the big sellers, I don’t think.
BTW, speaking of Plantinga, I think I bought one of the first copies of The Nature of Necessity ever sold. I was in England for a week after graduating college, the summer of 1974, and I picked up a copy at the Oxford University bookstore. It was expensive, and I was broke! It was one of only two books I bought there and lugged around for the rest of my (mostly hitchhiking) trip. It wasn’t available in the U.S. yet.
Hall (in that book you picked up), calls himself a “trinitarian” and just sticks with the three you mention. But it kind of depends on how you demarcate, I think. Like maybe you could include logic and/or philosophy of language?
Bruce,
The same thing it means for any claim to be objectively true: it corresponds to reality.
Since I’m a physicalist and not a platonist, I regard something like Euler’s identity as objectively derivable from the axioms of the system it is embedded within, but I regard it as objectively true only to the extent that the axioms themselves are objectively true.
Parallel reasoning applies to objective morality.
keiths:
walto:
I’m going by what you’ve written.
You’ve said:
And:
Before the “sea change” we’re in state S1 and GCT is objectively immoral. After the sea change we’re in state S2 and GCT is no longer objectively immoral.
walto,
“Subjective” does not mean “trivial”, and not all subjective preferences are equal. Isn’t that obvious?
What makes some of my subjective preferences moral preferences? Their strength plus my feelings about whether they should apply to others.
I may not like rum raisin ice cream, but my dislike isn’t that strong, and I certainly don’t think that others should be prevented from eating it. It harms no one, as far as I can see.
On the other hand, my disapproval of murder is extremely strong. It harms the victim, the victim’s family and friends, and society in general. I prefer to live in a society where murder is absent. I want others to refrain from murder, and I am willing to see my preference (which is shared with the majority of my fellow citizens) imposed on those who disagree, via the government’s power to prosecute and imprison murderers. None of this depends on murder being objectively wrong.
Buford thinks that the existence of Canadian geese is a moral evil. It’s not a slight preference; the destruction of geese is his true calling in life. As far as he’s concerned, good people are the ones who help him toward his goal of eradicating geese; evil people hinder him.
Most of us would agree that the existence of Canadian geese is not intrinsically evil, and that Buford’s moral conviction is not objectively true. Yet to him geese are clearly a moral issue; he feels strongly about it and thinks others should follow his lead and join in the persecution.
What does it mean for math axioms to correspond to reality for someone who is not a platonist? What reality do they correspond to? How can one tell which axioms correspond and which ones do not?
When you say you are a physicalist, is that something that has some bearing on what makes math axioms objectivity true? Or was it just explaining why you are not a platonist?
(My answers to this line of questioning are in the above posts on process versus product objectivity and on realism versus objectivity).
I wondered about your function and what Harris claims will be possible in some future neuroscience in his Moral Landscapes book.
Specifically, assuming his brain-reader worked for all sentient beings, is your function the one that gets maximized on his moral landscape? Also assume his brain-reading machine reads from sentient brains the preferences (or desires?) that your function takes as input.
What does “objectively” mean for you in “objectively derivable”?
You make a good point there. I think the supposition of such a change, like the supposition of a change in how one responds to red objects on another planet, stretches our (or maybe just my own?) ability to talk sensibly right to the (my?) limit. The papers I mentioned above are about that issue. I think we really don’t know what to say about some of those situations, as, for example, when we come to start calling red things “red” again, even though they had “looked green” to us for a few months.
On the other stuff, I don’t think the “strength” of one’s like or dislike makes any difference to moral force. If you really REALLY hated rum raisin ice cream, and only disliked internet lying a little bit, it would make no difference to my point. The fact that you think others should care is what matters.
You say, in effect, “well, their not caring about murder could affect ME”–but it wouldn’t matter if it couldn’t, would it? Even if you were Superman, I suppose you’d think it would matter whether people were OK with murder. Or if you were about to die of some disease today anyhow. So it’s neither the “strength” of the emotion nor the effect of the behavior on you. What is it?
I say that the force is a result of conformance or violation of an axiom you take to be true–where truth is not a function your acceptance. If it WERE, you couldn’t ever wonder whether you were right or wrong and it would make no sense to revise. But, if it’s neither strength nor effect on you, and revisions make sense, what can your explanation be?
No idea–I haven’t read that.
What Harris did seems similar to me to some of what you do. Harris emphasizes sentient “well-being” which would need to be the same as whatever it is you maximize (I’m waiting for the paper rather than bugging you now to repeat the details).
Similarly to the tact Keith is taking with you, most reviewers said Harris went too far in claiming his results were scientific, because he relies on assumption that flourishing is the goal of morality. He responded by sponsoring an essay contest to find the best expression of that counter-argument. The contest was judged by Russell Blackford (who BTW also found that standard fault in his review of the Harris book).
You can find the winning essay here (after Blackford intro to it) and Harris’s reply here.
That seems like an allusion to Block’s inverted Earth, since it involves both the qualia change and another planet. Was that your intent?
In any event, as I understand Keith’s challenge (I have not read all of his posts on it, I admit), the situation is not hypothetical. It seems to be very close to what happened in societies which sacrificed babies to their gods when they ceased doing so because they no longer accepted that practice as desirable..
But would that change in (religious-based) desires have affected the maximum of the function you evaluate? It would seem it cannot if you are able to deal with issues for consequentialism like harvesting organs (where the one person is put to death to serve the desires of others, just like the babies).
BruceS,
Dunno if we’re really saying similar things. I definitely wouldn’t claim my suggestions are scientific, at any rate.
BTW, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I think I was at least partially responsible for Harris not judging that competition himself as well as for having the rules changed so one didn’t have to buy his book to enter the contest. I sent him a tweet to the effect that, as originally set forth, the game was likely illegal in Mass as well as being ridiculous.
walto,
My point really isn’t that arcane. If objective values are created by sentient beings via their desires, then an ‘is’ — the physical state of the world, including the minds of those sentient beings — is creating an objective ‘ought’. You and Hume can’t both be right.
And since you accept causal closure, the objective ‘ought’ is itself a physical phenomenon of some kind. Yet you claim it isn’t detectable by any means other than our consciences/emotions. Why?