We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.
— Donald J. Trump
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the involvement of President of the United States in the evil of racism. The counter-protesters in Charlottesville lapsed into evil, to be sure. Meeting violence with violence, they handed their adversaries a huge victory. But their error does not make them the moral equivalent of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen. Seizing on their error to construct such an equivalence, as Donald Trump has done, is positively obscene. “Grab them by the pussy” pales in comparison.
Six millionth
Another gimmick creationist charlatans like WJM use to bolster their credentials is pretending they’re atheist converts. I’m always suspicious of such claims
I imagine you’ll take me however your particular mix of chemistry and physics dictates. Perhaps you’ll eat some quinoa (is that the current SJW trendy food these days?) and some happenstance interaction of chemicals will make you think I’m the most profound philosopher you’ve ever met. Who knows? You might even become a racist yourself, expressing your moral outrage over interracial marriage and you’ll believe “social justice” means buying lots of rope and sheets. Carry on my evolutionary brutha!!
No, that’s not what I said. To be fair, though, I don’t really expect you or any other self-proclaimed biological automatons to be able to understand what I’m saying.
Of course racism is just as “legitimate” from an evolutionary perspective. All traits are. That does not mean all traits are equally practical, valuable, fit, desirable, enjoyable, and a slew of other assessments. Some traits suck. Like allergies and scoliosis. We don’t have like or even treat all traits equally.
…and here it is. My first response to you addressed this specifically (because…yeah…I actually did know exactly where you were going with that idiot repeated strawman of yours). So which obviously erroneous situation are you implying William: that moral subjectivists don’t feel pain or emotions, or that our subjective moral perspectives simply are not behaviorally and emotionally motivating? Or both?
See above. When you let your inability to address whether moral subjectivists feel pain or emotion and whether said feelings actually have some basis for behavioral motivation sink in, then we can start discussing the difference between reactions to curly hair vs cancer and racism. While you’re at it, see if your strawman can explain to you why some people get emotionally outraged over skin tone, but not curly hair (that we know of…)
Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not doing that here. That’s why your entire argument is a strawman.
Well you can keep knocking that strawman down as much as you want, but that won’t rebut my valid point.
OOOO! Now the “atoms are just billiard balls” pseudo chemistry/physics strawman too! Oh. Yay…
Sorry William, but physics and chemistry don’t work that way, and behaviors are not simply involuntary programs. Much of the makeup of human (and other animal) trait function is the ability to hone behavioral actions through experience and learning. Alas, this does mean that some people will pick up and hone perspectives and feelings that are anti-social. That the underlying evolutionary processes that allowed such traits to arise are natural and the underlying biology that allows such is (likely) behaving properly and that the underlying developmental processes are also (likely) behaving properly does not mean that the product behaviors need be accepted at the societal level. See that whole pain/emotion/motivating behavior bit above. Rinse and repeat.
And here I thought you weren’t a mindless robot…
This right here captures for me why some people completely misunderstand “super foods”, gluten, and sea salt and buy into other types of woo. Why bother reading a physics or chemistry book and trying to come to terms with what actual physicists and chemists understand when you can just make up your own reality as you go along…
Ah, I do so love the aroma of an overaged brisket of deplorable!
You fail to recognize the full extent of your problem under your worldview, Robin. Or perhaps I should say your “meta-problem”. You keep talking as if there is some capacity outside of evolutionary traits by which evolutionary traits can be objectively judged. How you feel about racism in terms of how practical, valuable, fit, desirable, enjoyable and all other “assessments” are just how evolution has happened to program your thinking. Your “assessment” of racism as somehow “worse” or “undesirable” is no different than the racist’s perspecitve; it’s just how evolution happens to have wired you. Try and understand that: how you think about any particular trait, and how you judge it and assess it, is just as programmed by evolution as the trait itself. There’s no “outside the box” under your worldview by which you can even hope for a an assessment that is not programmed by the same thing that programmed racist views into others.
Neither. My argument, as always, is that moral outrage is not logically justifiable under evolutionary moral subjectivism. In fact, logically, it’s ridiculous to feel morally outrageda bout the happenstance product of chemistry and physics.
Maybe when you can understand the nature of my argument you’ll be equipped t make an assessment about whether or not I’m employing a straw man.
You have yet to show me you even understand my argument. Perhaps that’s why you keep insisting it is a “straw man”; I’m not making the argument you keep insisting that I’m making.
What generates, functions and stores this “ability to hone behavior actions through experience and learning”, if not chemistry and physics? Is something else at play that can override the natural, physical interactions? I think you’re sneaking in concepts here with vague macro-terminology as if somehow the terminology makes what you are talking about something other than the natural interaction of chemistry through the laws and probabilities of physics.
Again, you speak as if there is something going on at any level of human interaction – personal or social – that is somehow something other than the natural interactions of chemistries under the laws and probabilities of physics. You talk as if there exists some capacity to intervene or change the natural (even if unpredictable) course of atoms, chemistry and physics as time goes by.
Using other terms, macro-terms to represent what must be nothing more than agglomerations or systems of naturally-interacting chemistry via physics doesn’t change the nature of what they must be under that worldview. That terminology only serves to hide the fundamental nature of a thing.
Under your worldview:
Assessing = thinking and feeling whatever chemistry and physics commands.
Scientific conclusion = thinking and feeling whatever chemistry and physics commands.
Religious faith = thinking and feeling whatever chemistry and physics commands.
Racism = thinking and feeling whatever chemistry and physics commands.
Moral outrage = TAFWCAPC (acronym)
Moral outrage A, or anti-racism: TAFWCAPC
Moral outrage B, or being against interracial marriage: TAFWCAPC
Thinking “A” is justified: TAFWCAPC
Thinking “B” is justified: TAFWCAPC
Logically, your worldview makes racism and anti-racism, science and religious faith, logic and irrationality fundamental equivalents. There’s no logical reason to be morally outraged over what is fundamentally the equivalent of your own view.
William J. Murray,
I get your argument:
Causes are not reasons, therefore God.
But maybe causes are not reasons and there is no God.
Are physicists and chemists saying something other than whatever happenstance interactions of chemistry generate? Why should I value their chemistry product over my own? How is it that I could even possibly attempt to do anything other than believe in whatever reality my particular chemistry generates as my belief?
Do you think that’s air you’re breathing? Hm?
I said nothing about God. But you’re right, causes are not reasons. All Robin has available is a particular set of causes for justifying his moral outrage, but that same cause justifies the original racism. IOW, if Robin is morally outraged at racism, it is simply because he has been caused by chemistry to be outraged at racism. There is no other “reason” for it.
However, from my perspective as believing in objective morality, I think what happened in Charlotte is pretty much entirely the fault of the antifa and BLM groups, along with either incompetent or complicit police leadership/direction. White Nationalists have – and should have – freedom of speech and assembly, and those rights should be respected.
Trump has repeatedly denounced hate speech and violence wherever it comes from. I’m not sure what more anyone could reasonably ask of him.
Click…whirrr…ticka ticka ticka ticka…*spoink*
– Reciprocating Bill
Species reassignment surgery
🙂 🙂
I think there’s a pretty good chance he’ll resign before Mueller can make his tax returns public. Then Pence will pardon him in anticipation of charges being brought against him–just as Ford did Nixon. I’ve heard, though, that Presidential pardons are only effective with respect to Federal offenses and that Trump may have RICO problems in New York. That would be fitting: I sincerely hope he is sent to prison for a long time.
Rich guys usually do ok in the justice system.
I have no meta-problem whatsoever. I have said nothing about objectively judging evolutionary traits. I don’t care if they are judged at all frankly. THAT they are judged is simply a by-product of our development, which is just fine.
I will note, just for the record, that not all of biological development and behavior is a product or even affected by evolution. But that’s clearly waaaay above your level of understanding at this point, so we’ll side-step that for the moment.
First, I’ve already stated I have made no assessment of “better” or “worse”, so I’m simply going to ignore your strawman from now on.
Second, I’ve already stated in no uncertain terms that my assessment of racism’s “undesirability” is as “legitimate” (evolutionarily speaking) to the racist’s assessment of race. Don’t care. See feeling pain/emotions and the motivation of my behavior there from. See also how evolution actually works. The trait that supports outrage with racism is spreading faster through the human population than the trait supporting racism. So it’s just a matter of time.
Why is a racist attitude slowly diminishing and why are number of people feeling outrage over said attitude increasing is, in fact, a direct product of the effectiveness of evolution. Funny how that works.
This is not quite correct. Evolution does not “program” anything; it is a process of selective differentiation of hereditary characteristics (traits) based on their relative effectiveness in varying environmental conditions. There are certainly some innate characteristics in organisms that can be thought of as analogous to programmed behaviors, but even those are not actually the same thing. But things like “assessments” of traits are not “as programmed by evolution…” anything. That’s just plainly not understanding anything about the subject.
Of course it is, William. You said so yourself upstream: it’s just as legitimate (evolutionarily speaking) as the moral outrage racists feel toward other races. We feel William and we react to those feelings. And guess what, our feelings are spreading faster through the population than the silly basis for racism. That racist behavior is ultimately displaying a quality of being less successful than our behavior of moral outrage. Go us! Oh wait…go evolution!
Why is my moral outrage any less legitimate product of evolution (and thus logically rational) than the racist’s moral outrage? You’re not making sense William.
Maybe when you can actual deal with the nature of my argument logically, you’ll be equipped to acknowledge your strawman…
Oh, I’ve dismantled your strawman argument. You’re still two steps behind mine.
Emergent properties, processes, and systems. Things like memory, biofeedback, organism growth and development, muscular development, neurological development, and so forth.
Yes. Higher order systems.
I realize you some difficulties with emergent systems theory, but that’s not really my problem.
There are, William. They don’t make my outrage over anti-social behavior, or even societal outrage over anti-social behavior for that matter, “better” or “worse” than the anti-social behavior. They do make it possible to assess the relative impacts of both behaviors in societal terms, however, and pretty quickly determine which one is gaining ground and which one is losing ground. It also does, in fact, mean that people can (and lo an behold some do!) choose to adopt, modify, and even discard behaviors based on learning and assessment against outcomes. People change behaviors situationally all the time. Our ability to make assessments may well be influenced by the chemistry and physics it is based on, but that does not mean that we can’t actually access or that the assessments are invalid. We are not slaves to chemistry and physics; we are products of them. Our foundations are based on chemistry and physics, but the higher order systems of memory, biofeedback, organic growth, development, etc allow systems to monitor, assess, and modify other systems. So we can assess things like people’s expressions/emotional states or social situations like “formal”, “casual”, “informal” and quantify and qualify characteristics of those assessments. Things like behavior X will get me Y in this situation or given this person’s expression. Even a purely deterministic person can understand the validity of that basic logic.
Yeah…riiight. And sodium and chloride together have the same exact qualities and behaviors as they do apart…
But of course, that’s all irrelevant. You’re getting lost in the noise William. The real point is that regardless of whether you believe feelings are a higher order system than metabolism, they do motivate behavior. The only issue is whether the underlying characteristics for my feelings are shared by more people than the underlying characteristics for the feelings shared by racists and (and this is really the point), whether our outrage has any impact overall on the spread of the underlying characteristics of racism. Thankfully, it appears to.
William, you’ve completely hosed your own argument. By your argument, there’s no such thing as “logical reason” or “moral outrage”, so why are you complaining about whether I have either or not?
We moral subjectivists do have feelings, William. Those feelings do actually motivate behavior. Funny enough, the behavior of racism is declining. I can, as a moral subjectivist, assess that difference over time. You can insist there’s no logical reason for me to make such assessment or react to such an assessment, but I disagree: I feel a preference to one over the other. Reacting to that feeling seems pretty logical to me.
ETA: To add, reacting to that feeling seems pretty logical to me, but also the fact that the collective reaction to that feeling appears to have a direct impact on the reduction of the behavior we are reacting to makes that “moral outrage” reaction all the more logical (and has the added bonus on indicating that evolution actually works.)
Happenstance chemistry does not generate anything that physicists or chemists say, William.
I don’t know that you should. Whether or not an accurate understanding of chemistry and physics has any benefits to you is something only you can assess. But your product is certainly not benefiting you in this discussion…
Perhaps you can’t. Those of us who understand that chemistry doesn’t generate belief, nevermind attempts to do things, however, have learned how to assess situations and chose behaviors that lead to preferred outcomes. We can do these things because chemically generated systems like neurons have properties that exist because of the interactions themselves and are not limited to the properties of the chemical components. At a higher level, the pre-frontal cortex and temporal cortex, made up of neurons (among other components), have even higher emergent properties and they themselves generate even further emergent system properties and processes in their interactions.
Yeah. Let me know when you stop doing so for a few hours though…
Further evidence that if William believes X and I believe Y, Y must be true.
Charlotte? OMG! What happened in Charlotte?
[Curious as to where William is getting his news.]
If William believes shit went down in Charlotte, then that’s what happened.
He has that power.
🙂 +1
Must be his belief in objective morality…
But hey…if you try to correct him, he’s likely to complain that you’re attacking his heritage and trying to change history.
Really? It’s just a mistake – Charlottesville. Good Grief.
Robin said:
Unless the “emergent system properties” you refer to are not caused/determined by chemistry and physics, you haven’t changed anything except the terminology and the location of your problem. Are there any “emergent system properties” that are not caused by a combination of chemistry and physics? If so, what causes them?
Robin said:
Can you really not tell when I’m making a statement to show what your view should be if you accepted the logical ramifications of your own view?
I have noticed that biological automatons do have difficulty sorting that kind of stuff out in a conversation.
The tearing down history is so funny coming from the Trumps, who have now happily torn up items revered by preservationists for nearly one hundred years to build their grotesque eyesores wherever the hell they’ve pleased.
Truly an amazing comment. You state your belief in objective morality and reveal your ethical incoherence — in a single sentence. Then you move to unethical behavior of your own, telling a deceitful story of an event in which a fascist killed a woman.
The hyper-sickness is that, having paraded your sickness, you want to argue about the capacity of anyone who denies objective morality to point out your sickness.
I need not embrace moral realism to recognize the internal incoherence of your first sentence. I need not embrace moral realism to recognize the deceitfulness of your account of what happened in Charlottesville. I need not embrace moral realism to tell you how disgusted I am by your behavior.
Yeah, you’ve made this assertion a number of times, but I’ve yet to see any substantiation or support for why anyone should accept it. Got anything other than your opinion on the matter?
What to mean caused by? The properties of water are not caused by either the hydrogen or the oxygen or some sprinkling of physics. The noted phenomenon is that the whole system generates a new level of unique operating properties and processes not present in the previous level. That’s why the term emergent is being used there.
Of course I can. I’m just taking one of your absurd arguments to its absurd conclusion.
…says the man who mistakenly referred to “Charlotte”…
Do let me know when this mysterious…immaterial…unidentifiable…interface of some kind you think you have that allows you to transcend your base physics and chemistry makeup manifests you as a self-actualized, libertarian free-willed being capable of admitting his own mistakes.
I think my statement there represents a challenge, not an assertion. The challenge is for you to tell me how “emergent system properties” are generated and by what, if not chemistry and physics.
If these “unique operating properties” are not caused by chemistry or governed by physics, what are they caused and governed by?
Uh … I just admitted a mistake. Read comment #20.
No, you don’t, but if morality is subjective, there’s really no reason for me to give a crap what you write about it. It’s just another bag of chemicals making happenstance marks on the screen, no more valid than anything I say or write. Who cares what your chemicals happen to produce?
Now that William is on a site in which he can’t go running to Barry to have someone banned who asks questions that William can’t answer, maybe he will finally answer them. But I doubt it.
Slavery, child labour, debtors prison, the jailing of homosexuals and forced Christian conversions were all once considered morally acceptable, as long as specific rules were followed. Now they would all be considered morally objectionable by most. Which side has the objective truth supporting it? And since they change over time, how do you know?
Is the abortion of a first trimester fetus objectively wrong? If so, why?
Is ritualistic cannibalism objectively wrong? Why?
Is suicide objectively wrong? Why?
If morality is objective, why do the vast majority of people grow up accepting the faith of their parents. If we are capable of somehow discerning objective truth, how do you explain this fact given the fact that different faiths have different morality?
If objective morality is correct, why do you have to mischaracterize what subjective morality is to argue against it?
Maybe you should start quoting Plato. That always seems to work for KF.
If/when you can actually point to some science-based theory or research that presents either some alternative to the current model of emergent properties of atomic structures or perhaps some underlying issues with the model, I’ll be happy to consider such. But I’m under no burden to consider your challenge when all you’ve offered is your obviously erroneous opinion on how chemistry and physics must work.
All properties are subject to some physical conditions and parameters present in this universe, William. But, not all systems, processes, and principles are subject to all or even the same conditions, and systems that emerge from the interaction of atomic structures are not necessarily subject to the same physical parameters that govern their constituent atomic parts. “Physics”, for example, isn’t just one law or parameter or condition, so even your use of the term is inaccurate in this context. Given your question as written though, I’ll answer this way: many unique operating properties are not caused by chemistry or governed by physics, but instead are caused by other physics and governed by other physics.
If you want a more specific answer, ask a more specific question.
Funny how you sound just like a biological automaton…
But William, you don’t give a crap what any of us write. So what point do you think you’re making?
How exactly is your behavior here not a ringing endorsement that morality is, without any doubt, subjective?
Here’s an illustration of the problem with your overall argument, William:
The “physics and chemistry” that causes a helium balloon to rise and governs it’s movement are not even remotely the same as the “physics and chemistry” that causes dialysis to pull elements and molecules from the blood and governs the process. Yet your argument treats them (and the plethora of other unique physical and chemical parameters) as the same thing. This is a classic example of a reductive fallacy. You’ve then compounded compounded the fallacy by “challenging” (heh!) the notion that emergent properties aren’t just simply physics and chemistry as well.
So your “billiard ball physics” fallacy is noted and rejected. Got anything else?
Kantian Naturalist,
Mmmm. What I don’t get (among many things) is how objective morality avoids the charge levelled. If moral outrage is in some way unjustifiable because ‘it’s all just chemistry’, how is it justified by ‘it’s all souls’? Why get outraged on behalf of a third party’s view of right & wrong? Still less, why get outraged on behalf of a ‘natural law’? I wouldn’t be shaking my fist at an anti-gravity device.
That’s a philosophically cretinous response. You obviously didn’t arrive at your “objective morality” by study of philosophy. You’re rationalizing the efforts of majorities to impose their religious notions of morality on minorities by political means.
I think what your puzzlement indicates is that there have to be axioms of morality. They must be fundamental, i.e., can be no more helped by God than by chemistry. But that doesn’t mean that we (or I suppose God) didn’t “create” them. Being an artifact doesn’t make something “subjective.” People made The Pyramids, but they’re really hard and big for all that.
In other words, your response to my question: “If these “unique operating properties” are not caused by chemistry or governed by physics, what are they caused and governed by?” .. is that they are in fact caused by chemistry and physics. Chemistry and physics causes my moral views, yours, my thoughts and feelings, yours, etc. As I said. (Under your explanatory wroldview.)
Unless you provide an agency not caused by chemistry and physics and which has some sort of independent, top-down power over chemistry and physics, then no matter how many different terms and phrases you use on top of “chemistry and physics”, that’s all you’ve got as cause for everything you say and think. And that goes for everyone you disagree with as well. We’re all just saying and thinking and feeling whatever our particular mix of chemistry and physics commands. Nothing more, nothing less.
Why would I need to rationalize it? Someone’s going to impose their morality on others – and if it’s all subjective, why not the one I prefer?
I’m pointing out the ridiculous nature of the arguments those who defend moral subjectivism makes. Including implying that my “endorsement” or how I behave matters one bit wrt the logic involved.
Heh. I’m happy to leave our debate as it stands. I think I’ve shown everything I wanted to show to anyone that is willing to see it.
walto,
The outrage is an emotion, and I’m not sure one can get very far in trying to logically justify emotion anyway. One still can rationalise it. In the exercise of that emotion, there is an interplay of what appears to be innate and what one learns. It’s a curious thing that one learns to get angry about – say – homosexuality, or the evils of dancing. We ape our peers. It doesn’t follow, of course, that one should abandon morality on realising that ‘it’s all culture’ (not that it is), any more than any other account of its source or motivations. But, it’s noteworthy that ‘objective moralists’ who look outside humanity for its justification get exercised about things that are actually quite local to them and their peer group.
I’m not crazy with the Pyramids analogy, but you’re certainly right that something’s being ‘socially constructed’ (whatever that means) doesn’t make it “subjective.” There’s pretty good evidence that some moral values show up cross-culturally, I think.
I need to look into it more, but my sense is that psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have gathered good evidence for the idea that there’s a core moral system that’s a human universal, with different cultural elaborations. Morality could be like language: different cultures have different languages, but there’s no human culture without some recognizable language of some kind.
If that’s right, then it hardly makes sense to say that morality is “subjective”, any more than language is. It would make far more sense to say that morality, like culture and like language, is an objectively real feature of human biology.
And that’s leaving aside the question whether nonhuman animals can be moral. Rowlands’ Can Animals Be Moral? is on my long-term reading list here.
The literature is complicated, and there’s definitely a regrettable tendency to anthropomorphize in problematic cases. But I think there’s plenty of room for a defensible view in which some aspects of morality are culturally variable, others are species-specific human universals, and others yet are widely shared across intelligent social animals.
But there’s no room for any plausible view as long as folks are tossing around all sorts of terms like “subjective” and “objective” without any explication of how those terms are being used or why one explication is better or worse than another.
I think you’ve touched on some of the central problems there: how do we make sense of objective morality when the evidence for something being good or bad is always primarily emotional. Like all the central problems of philosophy, it is indeed difficult. Not impossible though, I don’t think.
If you’re interested, you may want to take a look at (my guru) Everett Hall’s book Our Knowledge of Fact and Value, which is available free on line. The second half of it is largely about just those matters (the first part involves knowledge of fact). I’ve published several papers on Hall and put out a book containing excerpts of his work and a bunch of papers by others on it, but I mostly avoided his stuff on value theory in the book.
Anyhow, the part emotions can play in the justification of value statements is a big focus of his work.
Yes. And with so much literature available on that too!
BTW, I’m very excited to report that The Journal of Philosophy has accepted a paper of mine on knowledge and skepticism. And I was prompted to start examining those issues by a couple of threads here!
William believes in ghosts and faith healers. And aliens too. And that his wife has been abducted by aliens multiple times, IIRC.
And he wonders why he does not get taken seriously.
Why should I respect those rights? I’m Canadian. We don’t have the same freedom of speech that the US does.