There are a number of professed atheists in this forum. I was curious as to what sort of moral imperative atheists are beholden to when presumably no one is looking. Speaking as a theist, I am constantly cognizant that there is a God who considers what I do and is aware of what I do, even though that awareness on my part may not always result in the moral behavior which I aspire to. But let’s take a fairly mundane example — say theft. We’re talking about blatant theft in a context where one could plausibly or even likely get away with it. I affirm to you that as a Christian, or more relevantly possibly, as a theist, I would never do that. Possibly it has just as much to do with my consideration for the feelings and rights of some other individual, who has “legal” possession of said items, as it has to do with my awareness of an omniscient creator who is aware of what I’m doing and who would presumably not bless me if I violated his laws. I mean, I care about the rights of other people. And, considering other moral tableaus, those of a sexual nature for example — I would personally never consider going to a prostitute for example, in that I feel empathy for that person, and how they are degrading themselves in the sight of God, and how I would not want to contribute to their degradation, so that my own human lust would never result in me victimizing another human being in that way. So in summary, there are all sorts of constraints on my personal behavior that stem directly from my belief in God, and I am honestly curious about the inner life of professed atheists in such matters. In other words, do atheists for example, in such junctures of moral decision, only consider whether they can get away with it, i.e escape the detection of human authorities? I am just honestly curious about the inner life of atheists in such matters.
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William,
That itself is a moral model. Your model is that “experience” (whatever you mean by that) is a reliable indicator of what is and isn’t moral.
If you cared about behaving morally, then you would care very much about whether this model is correct, and whether “experience” really is an accurate moral indicator.
But that do not make the model true, only consistent.
How do you test a moral model? What predicts an atheist moral model?
KN says that morality is “objectively” about the flourishing of humans. What about the growing radical environmentalist movement that basically considers humanity a plague upon the Earth? Some of them believe that humans should be either wiped out or reduced greatly in number and our technological footprint wiped out.
Their moral view isn’t about “humans flourishing”, but rather that the needs (and rights) of every other life form, which they hold as each equivalent to humanity, outweighs the “flourishing” of they consider a cancerous humanity.
It’s easy to consider something to be a species-based “norm” if you believe there are few outliers and the norm embraces selfish and closed-group game theory that is still human-centric; but what about the growing number of activists whose morality is not even human-centric? If they gain dominance and power and start putting humans to death and destroying what humans have built, are they being immoral according to your “norm” – or will that be the new “norm” for morality – a self-policing human population of maybe 10 million that puts to death all infants born over a certain quota and lives like some primitive version of man.
Who gets to define what “flourishing” means? The anti-human environmentalists? The big-oil capitalists? Marxists? Jihadists? Your species-wide norm doesn’t exist even in general terms.
Who gets to define what “better or worse” means? Nazis? Fundamentalist Christians? Atheist scientists? Whoever happens to win the latest war? Whomever happens to run the most effective and widespread media?
The problem with KN’s idea is that while he denies his norms are absolute, he uses them in his statements as if they are absolute – as if there is some absolute definition of “flourishing” for humans, and as if there is some absolute arbiter of “better” or ‘worse” for humanity- as if we are magically generating consensual, cooperative, eco-friendly “norms” that are leading us to some universal conceptualization of “flourishing” and “betterment” that most everyone would agree to, and not our own extinction.
Come to think about it, are Muslim Jihadists even human centric? Are they even interested in the flourishing of humanity? For them, isn’t morality all about doing whatever Allah commands – even if it is destroying humanity with nuclear weapons for the glory of Allah?
KN is wanting to have his non-absolute cake and eat it, too, through inventive semantics, phrasing and concept-stealing. What he calls objective norms are obviously not objective in any significant sense. What “human flourishing” means is subjective without an absolute arbiter and is full of large-group contradiction. What is “better” or “worse” for “human flourishing” is so vague and open-ended and devoid of meaningful content and held in such contradictory perspectives throughout the world that to call them “objective norms” is something only an insulated academic could possibly claim with a straight face.
Not only is subjective, is also illogical. Why the rule of moral should be “human flourishing” instead of “survival of the fittest” or “save the earth”?
Can KN show why we ought to act in order to any of that statements?
Just a question given this description.
If you can attribute bad to an action, doesn’t that mean that you have to admit the existence of badness? And if badness exists, doesn’t that mean that your god caused badness just like everything else? So then, if your god made badness and you want to do what is bad, don’t you then have to do what your god says is bad in order to completely glorify this god of yours?
Robin,
I understand William’s argument and your restatement of it, but I don’t think it works.
Suppose you’re playing chess. You make a bizarre, illegal move, and your opponent objects. You reply: “My move is permissible, because there is some game out there that allows this move, and the rules of chess have no non-arbitrary superiority over the rules of that game. Every move is therefore permissible.”
Should your opponent be swayed by your argument?
Read it again, keiths. That is your erroneous interpretation. That is not what I said. My experience is not a model. I experience falling off a high object and hurting myself. That is not a model; that is the fact of my experience. I can then generate a model of gravity (among other things) based on that and other similar experiences.
I experience running into moral walls or falling off moral cliffs. I know those acts are immoral. It’s not an “indicator” of immorality; I know those things are immoral inasmuch as I know anything. I experience the immorality of it and the damage it does to me. That is not a model. that is experience. You are apparently having a hard time understanding what I’m saying here because you have an a priori commitment to the idea that morality is not something you can directly, factually experience like a wall or a cliff. In your mind, you probably think that the morality or immorality of a thing can only be inferred. Obviously, to a moral objectivist, that view is rejected. To a moral objectivist, one can directly sense through the conscience – at least in part, at least the major features – the moral landscape.
I then use those moral experiences when I am creating a model that I will use to help me navigate the moral landscape – to help predict where the moral cliffs and walls are as well as them moral spas and banquets. I test that model every day. If it runs me into a moral cliff or doesn’t get me to the spa or banquet, it’s time for a new model that better predicts the moral landscape.
Blas:
I think you overlooked something:
Your question is correct. And yo have the solution true de maniqueism, a God of the evil that is contradictory or the better solution of being the badness the lack of goodness. To much to explain here. If you want take it as a third premise of my explanation.
I also asked:
And stil that do not make it true. What do you mean by true?
Yeah. Let’s use that analogy.
Agreeing to play chess with someone carries with it an implicit, necessary agreement to abide by the rules of chess; if you do not abide by those rules, you are not playing chess. As soon as someone makes a non-chess move, they are no longer playing chess.
The point is that chess is not a more valid game than spades, checkers or backgammon. It’s just the game (moral system) you happen to feel like playing (abiding by the rules thereof).
In this analogy, my argument is that you, keiths, as an atheistic moral subjectivist, are playing chess and admitting that your game is no more inherently “valid” than spades, checkers or backgammon, each of which have different rules from the game you’re playing. You walk over to another table where other people are playing checkers, and after someone makes a valid checkers move, you claim that move was wrong because it was not a chess move.
BZZT!
You have no grounds to make such a claim. Holding the checkers players accountable to your chess rules is absurd. Your only rational option is to admit that their move is perfectly valid in the game they are playing and you have no right to call it “wrong” or intervene because the move would have been invalid had they been playing your game – chess.
The only premises that validates you going over to another table where a different game is being played and judging a move (that is valid by their rules) ***incorrect*** and in some cases intervening is (1) if you assume your rules apply to all games (objectively valid rules), or (2) you believe it is okay to use your might to force everyone else into playing the game you happen to prefer.
William,
It’s not the same. You know you fell off the high object (unless you’re a brain in a vat, or dreaming, or some such thing), but you don’t know whether something you do is moral or immoral. You may feel that something is moral, or not, and your feeling may be a strong one, but that doesn’t make it true — unless, ironically, you are a moral subjectivist.
To get from a feeling about what is moral to a truth about what is moral, you need a model — specifically, one in which your feelings about what is moral are accurate.
If you care about moral behavior, then you will care whether that model is accurate. There’s no way around it.
No, you experience the feeling of the immorality of it. Whether that feeling is correct is a different story, unless, again, you are a moral subjectivist.
Also, not everything that damages you is immoral, unless you choose to define immorality that way.
No, your argument is actually quite easy to understand, but it seems irrational to me. You are mistaking a feeling for reality, just like someone who looks at an optical illusion and swears that it’s real.
What are your criteria for which parts can and cannot be sensed accurately, and why? Please be specific.
Yes I do, regardless of your insistence otherwise. You are responding in exactly the way that would follow from how I characterized your a priori worldview.
All you are doing now is insisting that that your concept/characterization of my experience is more accurate than my own. You make claims such as this:
As if this never occurred to me, as if I didn’t begin with this very premise as an atheist before I began my investigation into morality. My investigation into what I was sensing with my conscience and whether or not it could be properly characterized as a subjective feeling was extensive. Feeling a wall is also a subjective sensory feeling. Hearing music is also a subjective sensory feeling. Because it is a subjective sensory feeling doesn’t mean that subjective sensory feeling is not of something that is objectively existent.
And that is defining difference between our position; your position is that morality is not an objectively existent thing that generates subjective corresponding sensory input through the conscience, my position is that it is. All you are doing here is assuming your consequent in claiming that I am mistaking a feeling for something objectively existent.
I can as easily say that you are mistaking an objectively existent phenomena for a subjective feeling.
That depends on one’s individual sense of conscience and/or their particular psychological biases. Some people just have better sight than others. Some are color blind. In any event that has multiple witnesses, usually some of those witnesses will describe the event in completely different, contradictory ways. There was an example I read in a psychology book where people looking at a film of a staged event were later asked if the saw anything strange; many of them had not even noticed that in the middle of the stage number a man in a gorilla suite ran through the center of the stage. They didn’t believe it until they watched the tape again.
This is where you and I differ fundamentally on what morality is. I consider it an objectively existent commodity that I have access to through a sensory apparatus, even if my interpretations of that sensory input are fallible.
Some aspects of the moral landscape are pretty much universal to everyone with a conscience – such as, is it moral to torture a child for personal pleasure and is it your moral obligation to intervene in such a situation, regardless of what that those people believe – just as “is the sky blue” pretty much gains a universally similar reply.
William,
Yes, though it is possible for the players to agree on a rule change.
The phrase “happen to feel like” is inappropriate when applied to morality. Most people take morality far more seriously than that, and they don’t change the rules blithely. But yes, morality is subjective. Different people will espouse different moral rules.
If by ‘valid’ you mean ‘objectively valid’, then I agree. That’s what moral subjectivism is: the claim that there is no universal, objective morality.
However, there is also contextual validity. A move that is valid in chess may be invalid in checkers, and vice-versa. That doesn’t mean that “all is permissible”; it just means that what is permissible depends on the game you’re playing.
No, the correct analogy would be that I walk over to the other table. I observe one of the moves and comment that it looks invalid to me. The player and I talk it over and discover that we are playing by different rules. At that point we can discuss the rules and try to come to an agreement, or we can compromise, or one of us can force the other to play by our rules, or we can offer each other incentives, or we can just disagree, with each player sticking to his or her guns.
Did you enjoy typing that? 🙂
Which is why I wouldn’t make such a claim.
Not if I believe that chess is the game they should be playing.
No, I have all of the options I mentioned above, and I can agree that their move is valid in the game they’re playing, but not in mine.
As to whether I have the right to intervene, that depends on the moral system being used to judge my intervention, doesn’t it?
No. I can acknowledge that the move is valid by their rules, but invalid by mine, and I can employ any or all of the strategies I mentioned above if I want them to abandon their rules and conform to mine.
Enough of this “might makes right” canard! There are plenty of options other than forcing everyone else to play my preferred game. And if I do force them, that doesn’t make my game right and theirs wrong. A move that is valid in their game continues to be valid in their game, even if I force them to play my game instead.
Might does not make right, and all is not permissible.
Games are certainly illuminating analogies for norms in general, e.g. how someone playing a game agrees to abide by the rules, accepts the authority of the other players to hold her accountable to the rules, and acknowledges her own authority to hold other players accountable for their behavior. However, the voluntaristic element of games — one can always leave, stop playing, knock over the table, refrain from playing, etc. — makes games a problematic analogy in other respects, a point that WJM has nicely exploited in his favor.
To bring norms more fully into view, one would have to think of something like “a game that we don’t know how to stop playing” or “a game that, if we stop playing, we wouldn’t be able to do anything else”. (Here I’m thinking, perhaps too much, of inferential norms — the norms that make possible assertion and judgment.)
With respect to norms, there’s going to be a spectrum that runs from extremely optional — paradigmatically, games — to non-optional — paradigmatically, reasoning. And there’s going to be lively debate about where some set of norms falls on that continuum. Someone who has “liberal” attitudes towards sex and gender will see those kinds of norms as closer to the game-pole of the continuum.
One measure of optionality/non-optionality is going to be the consequences of transgression. There’s a very interesting point here: all norms are transgressable. In fact, the very concept of a norm and the very concept of a transgression are interdependent — no transgressions without norms, no norms without transgressions.
In playing a game, the penalty for transgression — say, cheating — are fairly minor, but more the point, the penalties are themselves often well-regulated. There’s usually a broader system of rules that encompasses transgressions and assigns penalties for them. (American football is like this.) In less optional normative frameworks — say, the law — the consequences for transgression are much more substantive. And when it comes to reasoning, I think it is fair to say that someone who is unable to acknowledge when he or she is acting irrationally is widely recognized to be a danger to themselves and to others.
Clearly there’s a pretty strong relation between how optional a set of norms is, how easily revised they are, and how prone we are to conceive of the norms are revisable. I don’t know what a revision in our inferential norms could even look like. (Then again, Buddhist logic is rejects the principle of non-contradiction.)
The major point I would insist on, however, is that the only agents — the only ones who have the ability, authority, and obligation to follow and enforce the norms — are those who are also subjected to those very norms. There are no meta-norms, and there’s no normative magic where norms are just brought into being by a snap of the metaphysical fingers.
keiths:
William:
As I already remarked:
keiths:
William:
You overlook a lot of simple and obvious things. How am I supposed to know whether this is an exception?
We’ll see if it was extensive enough.
That’s right, but in all of those cases there are multiple independent ways of checking the correctness of the subjective impressions. The methods aren’t foolproof, of course, which is why I argue that absolute certainty is a myth.
With morality, you don’t have sufficient, independent ways of checking the validity of your impressions. All you can do is check for consistency and compare your moral intuitions to those of other people. That’s not good enough, because a) people disagree about morality, and b) even in the rare cases of near-universal agreement, you can’t determine that a moral intuition is accurate.
No, I’m saying that you haven’t offered any evidence that the conscience is an indicator of objective morality. You’re assuming that it is. You are assuming your conclusion, not me.
You can assert that, but can you support it?
keiths:
William:
Exactly. So how do you decide whose account is correct, particularly if you aren’t even sure that the event happened at all?
How do you distinguish between reliable and unreliable moral impressions?
Universality doesn’t guarantee accuracy. We all see illusions, but that doesn’t make them real.
KN,
I don’t see how the voluntaristic aspect of games makes a difference to the debate, since neither William nor I are suggesting in our analogies that anyone can, or does, stop playing altogether.
Three things come to mind:
1) I don’t think personal whimsy and disregard concerning the rules of a game fall into the same category as moral subjectivity. I think the moral or ethical dilemma presented in that hypothetical is addressed by how the other players respond.
2) Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory does that very action all the time (the card Infinite Sheldon comes to mind and it does not violate the rule against using home-made cards because he made it at work…) and while the other characters get tired of it, they all freely admit that their only real course of action is to stop playing games with Sheldon. This of course means they can play very few games, however, as most of the games they enjoy are four-player games and Sheldon is still their friend.
3) All that aside, in such a situation I personally would note to the “cheater” that while it may be true that across the diversity of other players and games as a whole universe of chess playing variation, within this particular game of chess we the majority have agreed upon a set of rules. Thus, your variation of the game rules, while perhaps valid in some other chess system, is not valid in this one. You lose.
As I’ve said, I do not claim certainty, but to the degree that I know anything (other than “I experience”), I know some things about morality through my experience and by subjecting that experience to extensive and thorough examination & testing. I’m not claiming that examination or testing would satisfy you, but it satisfies me and it works for me.
I’m not claiming to be able to, nor am I obligated to, satisfy what your requirements are for “checking the validity of” my experiences and what I know about them. Your implication that “all I can do” is “check for consistence and compare” my moral “intuitions” is another example of you assuming that your concept of reality and how you evaluate it is binding on me and can serve as the proper or authorized means of arbiting my view. Your characterization of my moral experience as “intuition” reveals your a priori conceptualization of what a moral experience “is” in the first place. Your necessary inclusion of “other people” as arbiters of what I can call knowledge is rooted in your own consensuality-based paradigm of “what reality is”.
None of that applies to my world-view and how I establish the difference between knowledge (what I experience) belief (which in my world is “assumption”) and models (functional extrapolations of knowledge and belief not assumed to be true, only required to be useful).
Long ago I rejected your kind of worldview, keiths. Not because I consider it to be untrue, but rather because it didn’t work for me and it contradicted some of what I actually experienced. I don’t arrange my activities, processes or views to accommodate that view, and I don’t recognize criticism from that worldview as substantively valid wrt my worldview.
Consensuality doesn’t have final say in any of my worldview matters. Consensuality is not the arbiter of my views; my actual, empirical experience is the arbiter of my views, meaning that I will not hold a belief that contradicts anything I actually experience, and I will not act from models that are not functionally useful. You can continue characterizing my experience in terms of your worldview and asking questions and making objections from that perspective, but as I have told you repeatedly in the past, they are – for the most part – non-sequiturs wrt my actual wordview.
You keep applying your reality paradigm to my descriptions of my views and processes as if it is somehow relevant to the conversation. It would be relevant if I were trying to convince you of the validity of my process. It would be relevant if I were trying to gain approval from you through your paradigm. It would be relevant if I was trying to coordinate my worldview with yours. All I’m doing is explaining my worldview to those that ask questions.
Your negative appraisals and objections (as you have offered them) are irrelevant to me because my system works for me. I’m not asking you to adopt it. I’m not claiming it would work for you. I’m not even claiming that your system is wrong.
You apparently don’t even understand the nature of how to criticize or evaluate my system. You keep trying to criticize it from the perspective of consensual agreement – a commodity that is relatively worthless in my worldview. I don’t care if nobody else sees the pink leprechaun in my basement; if the pink leprechaun makes useful predictions about my experience, I’m going to use what the pink leprechaun says in my model. Whether it is a delusion or not is irrelevant wrt the usefulness of the pink Leprechaun model.
Since I do not rely on the accounts of other people to construct my models, I don’t have to decide whose account is correct. I have my own empirical experience to experiment with.
Not sure what you mean here. In the instance of homosexuality, it is not self-evidently immoral. When you apply reasoning from self-evidently true moral statements, it’s IMO a tortured natural law path to get to homosexuality being immoral. If I have to be convinced of the immorality of a thing by an at-best tenuous argument, I consider it not likely to be immoral enough to matter. Trying to prevent homosexual behavior is more evidently immoral than homosexual behavior itself, because you are directly trying to interfere in the free will choices of consenting adults.
From self-evidently true moral statements, I apply logic to find necessarily true moral statements, generally true moral statements, and conditionally true moral statements.
I would be the last person to imply such a thing.
I said:
You replied:
You’ve already said that their game is as inherently valid as your own. Why would you believe that they should be playing your game, instead of theirs?
Robin,
It’s true that games aren’t a perfect analogy for morality, but analogies are never perfect. They’d be identities, not analogies, if they were perfect.
I agree with your point about whimsy, which is why I pushed back against William’s characterization of morality as “the game (moral system) you happen to feel like playing (abiding by the rules thereof)”:
I introduced the game analogy to show why “all things are permissible” is not a problem for subjective morality. Complaining that everything is permissible under subjective morality is as silly as complaining that games are bogus because “all moves are permitted”.
We don’t play all games at once. We pick one and play it. We may tweak the rules over time, or even choose to play a different game altogether, but we don’t try to play all of the games at once. All things are not permissible.
William:
keiths:
William:
Because I think it’s a better game. Otherwise I’d be playing their game, or some other game, instead of mine.
As I explained earlier:
To be more specific, the term “morality”, in the analogy, = “game”, not any specific game per se. “Morality” is not just chess. Chess is **a** game, not **the** game. However, we cannot lose sight of the kind of morality this analogy serves: subjective morality. IOW, if we were talking about objective morality, we could not use the analogy of equally valid but different games with sometimes contradictory or irreconcilable rulesets. The objectivist analogy would be that there is only one game – chess – and that no matter what game you think you’re playing, you’re actually playing chess so it would be wise to learn the rules and employ them as best you can.
So, when the phrase “all things are permitted under subjective morality” is employed, it means that under the concept of “subjective morality”, all rule-sets are permitted and equally valid – chess, checkers, backgammon, chutes and ladders, parchesi, etc. It doesn’t mean that all things are permitted in every individual, subjective ruleset. That’s obviously an incorrect interpretation of the phrase. Nobody in their right mind would imply that “all things are permitted” in any individual, particular set of moral rules, whether it was presumed objective or subjective in nature.
You’re begging the question. Why would you think it is a better game?
William,
You can’t play the abstract category of “game”. You have to play a specific game.
“Morality” is an abstract category. My morality is a specific instance of that abstract category. I can’t follow “morality”, but I can follow my morality.
You’re confusing the whole with its parts. The concept of subjective morality is not itself a moral system, in which some things are permitted and others are not. It’s a category containing specific instances of subjective morality.
Each of us holds a specific morality, in which some things are permitted and others are not. All things are not permissible.
You’re effectively saying, “Games are bogus! You can make any move you want!”
Do you see your mistake?
William:
keiths:
William:
Because it fits my personal moral axioms. Remember, we’re talking about subjective morality.
William,
You’ve defined what “works for you” as whatever gives you “an intellectually satisfying sense of being a good person.” Unless your intellectual standards are appallingly low, this argument is not “intellectually satisfying”:
Yet that’s exactly what you’re doing when you appeal to your conscience as an indicator of objective morality.
You’re practicing subjective morality while simultaneously condemning it.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. If moral axioms = rules of the game, it reads like you’re saying that the rules of your game are better because they are the rules of your game. Is that correct? If not, please explain.
No, I haven’t. As I’ve said before, your paraphrasings are generally never close.
I would suggest that what you would define as “appalling low”, I would more accurately describe as “unacceptably different” than the framework of your own intellectual standards.
No matter how much you insist on your conceptualization of what I must actually be experiencing and interpreting, that doesn’t make it so. It’s just your assertion about something you can’t have any direct access to whatsoever. I’m the only one with my experiences. That makes you rather unqualified and foolish to insist that my experiences are not what I say they are.
I haven’t ever condemned subjective morality that I know of. I’ve only made arguments about what it necessarily – logical – means.
William,
No, the rules of the game are derived from the moral axioms.
Regarding the grounding of the axioms, something is subjectively immoral if you feel that it’s immoral. That’s what “subjective” means.
You don’t have that luxury. You claim to be concerned with objective morality, and something doesn’t become objectively immoral merely because you feel it’s immoral. You need more than that.
keiths:
William:
This is pitiful, William. Have you forgotten that your comments are actually recorded here? You wrote:
William,
No, I think that even you would reject “because I say (or feel) so” as an intellectually satisfying answer to the question “why is X objectively moral/immoral?”
We all have experiences, William. Even you acknowledge that your experience isn’t an infallible guide to objective morality:
If your conscience is fallible, you can’t know that a particular moral intuition is objectively true — unless you corroborate it somehow. I’m still waiting to hear how you would do that.
All you’ve said is this:
That doesn’t explain how you justify supposedly “self-evident” truths. “I feel it strongly, so I can’t be wrong” is not an intellectually satisfying answer.
I consider harsh criticism to be condemnation, but whatever.
The point is that you practice subjective morality while claiming to reject it. It’s one of the many ways in which your views are inconsistent.
keiths:
William:
William, earlier:
Oops.
I think some people who believe emotions are the basis for moral judgment in much the way sensations are the basis for peceptual judgments have suggested that the former can be corroborated in much the same way as the latter: ask others, consider it from different perspectives, see whether it conflicts with other of your judgments, etc.
There’s no escaping fallibility in either realm, sadly.
William,
A general comment. When you find yourself in a tough spot in these conversations, you tend to deploy a “get out of jail free” card: You say that you don’t care whether your views are true, that our criticisms don’t apply, and that all that matters is whether your system “works” for you.
That would be fine if your goal was just to feel good about yourself (though that would negate your claim to be describing an objective moral system).
However, you insist that you don’t merely want to feel good, and that you actually do care whether your actions are truly, objectively moral.
You’ve forfeited the right to play the “get out of jail free” card. Now it actually matters whether your views are true.
“It works for me, so I don’t care whether it’s actually true” is no longer good enough.
P.S. On a different topic, when you quote someone, could you make it a habit to indicate who you’re quoting? You often don’t, and that makes it hard to figure out who you’re replying to sometimes.
I wouldn’t want to push this comparison too far, because there’s a perceptual element to moral cognition (to see an act as an act of cruelty or of kindness) and probably an affective correlate to judgment generally, but the point is well-taken.
The problem, in my view, is figuring out what do with “the basis for”, which is no less clear than “grounds” and similar metaphors. Here’s how I see the problem.
It’s easy enough to see that merely having a sensation is necessary for having a perceptual judgment, but is it both necessary and sufficient? Those of us who follow C. I. Lewis and Sellars would say that one needs the application or actualization of concepts in order to get a genuine perceptual judgment, not just merely having a sensation. But then, why is the contribution of the sensation? Is it merely a causal triggering of the rational capacities?
Those of us who think that Kant was onto something tend to think that there’s got to be something right about the distinction between reasons and causes. On this picture, having a sensation (or an emotional response) is merely causal — a mere happening or event — which is then taken up by the conceptual capacities in the formation of judgment. So the picture is:
physical objects –> sensings of sense contents –> noninferential beliefs –> inferential beliefs.
Here’s the problem, then: it seems obvious that the first arrow is a merely causal arrow. Physical objects cause our sensations by virtue of how photons and molecules affect the neuroceptors in our retinas and cochlea and epithelial surfaces. And it seems obvious that the third arrow is a rational arrow — noninferential beliefs serves as reasons or justifications for inferential beliefs (“I see that the streets are wet, so I have good reason to believe that it was probably raining earlier”).
But what is the second arrow? Is it causal? Rational? Both? Neither?
Keiths,
This is exactly what I mean when I say your worldview interpretation is rendering you unable to comprehend what I’m saying. You offer quotes that directly refute and disprove your characterizations as if they support them.
For example, you seem to think that somewhere in the following quote:
…. is an implication that universality guarantees accuracy. There is no such implication in that quote. Your other quotes share the same problem. I’m sure that to you, what you are quoting supports your view. To me, they prove your characterizations blatantly false.
Let’s note again how you continue to misinterpret what I say. You say:
Then you say:
You’re conflating two different things – whether or not my actual acts are moral (which I care about), and whether or not the model I use to help me navigate the moral landscape is true (which I don’t care about). I don’t care if the model is true as long as it helps me navigate the moral landscape.
In your world, it appears that you cannot navigate the moral landscape without a true model. This obviously isn’t true in the world of the moral objectivist, where good and evil are real things that you run into. Obviously, since I hold that atheist (and anyone else) is capable of good moral behavior, I don’t hold that a true model is necessary for good moral behavior.
William,
That’s another “get out of jail free” card — the “you don’t share my worldview, so you can’t even comprehend what I’m saying” card.
I understand your argument just fine, assuming that your statements about it are accurate. I understand it, but it’s a bad argument.
More on this later.
WJM: “You’ve already said that their game is as inherently valid as your own. Why would you believe that they should be playing your game, instead of theirs?”
keiths: “Because I think it’s a better game. Otherwise I’d be playing their game, or some other game, instead of mine.”
William: “You’re begging the question. Why would you think it is a better game?”
keiths: “Because it fits my personal moral axioms. Remember, we’re talking about subjective morality.”
WJM: “I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. If moral axioms = rules of the game, it reads like you’re saying that the rules of your game are better because they are the rules of your game. Is that correct? If not, please explain.”
keiths: “No, the rules of the game are derived from the moral axioms.”
So, if we go back to:
keiths: “Because it fits my personal moral axioms. Remember, we’re talking about subjective morality.”
What does it mean to say that “the belief (that my game is better) fits my moral axioms”? Does that mean it is itself axiomatic, or does it mean it is derived from other axioms? You have said it is not the latter (which are moral rules), so if it is axiomatic, you are saying “I believe my game is better for no reason. It is axiomatic.”
But you say this:
keiths: “Regarding the grounding of the axioms, something is subjectively immoral if you feel that it’s immoral. That’s what “subjective” means.”
Apparently you are saying that moral axioms are based on feelings, so that would mean that you believe your moral system is better, and try to talk others into it, because you feel it is better.
Is that correct?
Kantian Naturalist,
Those of us who prefer Hall to C.I.Lewis or Sellars are more likely to hold that emotions as well sensations are intentional (and prima facie evidence providing) all the way down.
See https://archive.org/details/ourknowledgeoffa00inhall
and
keiths, to William:
walto:
Yes, but there are some key differences.
You can detect both moral and perceptual errors by checking for logical coherence. If I claim that civil disobedience and killing are always morally wrong, then there is an obvious inconsistency: the government might draft me and order me to kill. I can’t honor one moral commitment without violating the other. My moral system needs revision.
If there are no inconsistencies, then the only way to detect error is to test the model against observations Let’s compare a couple of cases.
Suppose I look at the Müller-Lyer illusion and decide that one line is longer than the other. I want to know if this is really true. The idea itself doesn’t seem inconsistent, so I look for observational corroboration. Everyone who sees the illusion thinks that one line looks longer than the other, so that is an argument in its favor. However, I find that if I cover up the ‘arrowhead’ and the ‘feathers’, the lines appear to be the same length. I also find that if I measure them against a ruler, the result is the same — the lines are the same length.
A number of similar exercises give the same results. I conclude that the lines are the same length, and the rest of the (sane) world agrees. The perception was an illusion.
Now consider a moral case. Suppose I’m a moral objectivist, like William, and that my conscience tells me that it’s morally wrong to egg my next-door neighbor’s house for fun. I want to know if my moral intuition is correct, so I test it.
I check for logical inconsistencies, and find none. I look for missing moral axioms, and I don’t find any. I talk it over with lots of people, and no one can find inconsistencies or missing axioms.
I also ask these people about their own moral intuitions, and they all agree that it’s wrong to egg my neighbor’s house for fun.
All of that is evidence in favor of my intuition, but I want to be sure. After all, this might be a moral illusion, just like the Müller-Lyer illusion. Maybe I, and all the people I asked, have a moral blind spot that prevents us from seeing the truth: that egging my neighbor’s house is objectively moral.
So I decide to double-check my intuition by… what? What can I do that I haven’t already done? This isn’t like the Müller-Lyer illusion, where I can get a ruler and actually measure the lines. I’m stuck.
This is exactly why every sane person in the world can be persuaded that the Müller lines are the same length, while sane, intelligent, and sincere people can disagree on moral issues, such as whether abortion is permissible.
The best hope for moral progress lies not in accessing objective morality — I don’t think it exists, and if it does, we clearly don’t have reliable access to it — but rather by gradually forging a general consensus on the critical moral axioms.
Unfortunately true. I dedicated an entire thread to that topic.
All you are attempting to do here is indemnify yourself against me pointing out that you are fundamentally misinterpreting what I am saying in the future.
The only argument I’m pursuing in this thread is about subjective morality. You’re the one apparently attempting to make some kind of argument about my moral system, and I’m pointing out your conceptual errors as you attempt to do so. Like the one where “my only option” was to look to some kind of external, consensual agreement for validation.
That ain’t how my system works.
walto,
That’s really interesting! I know nothing about Hall, but just last weekend I reviewed a paper that talked a lot about Hall in relation to the American reception of Carnap, along with Gustav Bergman, Quine, and Sellars. And I have a friend who defended his PhD a few years ago who has also written on Hall in these contexts.
My own view, for it’s worth, is that perceptions (and probably emotions, too, though I haven’t thought about emotions hardly at all) are fully intentional — but they not conceptual, if by ‘conceptual’ one means the full-blooded discursive states and statuses that Brandom and his ilk are talking about. This is why the central distinction I make is between discursive intentionality and somatic intentionality.
Right now I’m working out how embodied perception and action provides the ‘friction’ for discursive states that are about the world. Perhaps there’s an analogous way in which embodied affective responses provide the ‘friction’ for moral judgments?
William,
Ultimately, yes. Besides feelings, what else could a subjective morality be based on in the final analysis?
Take the egg-throwing case I mentioned above in my reply to walto. If I were seriously contemplating the egging of my neighbor’s house, my reasoning would probably go something like this:
1. It would be fun to heave the eggs at my neighbor’s house, see them splat on the garage door, and watch the yolks run down.
2. It’s amusing to contemplate the look of surprise on my neighbor’s face, particularly if he heard the splats, came outside to see what was happening, and saw me standing there with the carton in my hand.
3. On the other hand, this would really upset my neighbor, plus he’d have to clean off the eggs and maybe even repaint the garage door.
4. It feels wrong to inflict all of that on my neighbor just for the sake of a cheap thrill.
You can analyze moral dilemmas up to a point, but then you simply have to decide whether something feels moral.
No, William. If I genuinely misunderstand something you say, feel free to point it out.
Just don’t pretend I misunderstand you as an excuse for not replying to my criticisms of your arguments.
KN, is one of those two other Hall guys Peter Olen? I know he’s interested in early Sellars and his colleagues.
I’m really happy if I’ve done done anything (even my fairly skeletal wikipedia article) to encourage any renewed interest in Hall. I think he was a terrific philosopher
Yep. Pete is a friend of mine.
I go by a pseudonym on these pages because I worry that if I posted under my real name, anyone who goes looking for me will find my contributions to these discussions. And I think that a search or tenure committee might well conclude that the effort I put into these posts I really ought to be putting into my scholarship or teaching. So to avoid causing problems for myself I put under a pseudonym.
But now that I think about it, nothing really prevents me from linking to my academia page — it doesn’t really matter to me if you all know my real name or not.
William,
Another favorite ploy of yours is to to claim that you’re being misrepresented. This diverts attention away from the questions you’re unable to answer, because your critic has to spend time explaining why he or she isn’t misrepresenting you.
Here is your most recent attempt:
Of course I do, because you wrote it in response to this question of mine, which you quoted:
I ask for your criteria, and you state in response that everybody thinks child torture is wrong, just as everyone thinks the sky is blue. Then you complain when I characterize universality as being a criterion for you!
If universality isn’t a criterion, then why did you mention it? I asked about criteria, and you didn’t mention any others, so of course I took you to be saying that
universality is a criterion.
With that out of the way, can we get back to the actual debate?
William,
One implies the other. If you care about whether your acts are moral, then you want your model to be as true as possible. A crappy model is unlikely to produce accurate results, and if it does, it’s pure luck.
This is especially important given that you can’t look to see whether the results are accurate. You simply don’t know.
No, because in “my world” morality is subjective. Under subjective morality, what my conscience tells me is moral is in fact moral. There’s no objective standard I can refer to. Nor do I need to.
You need a model to explain how and why your conscience is an accurate indicator of objective morality. I don’t, because my morality is subjective.
The fact that you consider some things good and other things evil does not make them objectively good or evil.
As I explained above, a believer in objective morality could get lucky and stumble upon a model that’s untrue, yet happens to produce correct answers about what is and isn’t objectively moral. The problem is that you don’t know whether it’s producing correct answers.
It’s the same problem you have with the conscience: you don’t know when it’s right and when it’s wrong, with no prospect of figuring that out. You’re left with nothing but a subjective impression of what’s moral and what isn’t.
Like I said, you’re practicing subjective morality while claiming to reject it.
Far as I’m concerned, what you’re doing here is in large part teaching. Although I guess the fact that none of us are paying could make that problematic.