World {x | Fact(x) & ~Thing(x)}

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. / You can't say what you can't say, but you can't whistle it either.

1. Kawada 9.29.09 / 4pm

   Interesting. In a logic course I once took, morality was described as being the current laws handed down by the government, as well as the commandments in the Bible (for Christians/Catholics, anyway). These supposedly make a series of “stop signs” and “yellow flags” that one automatically thinks of as being right or wrong. You addressed this in your first point: If one knows that there will be consequences in doing or not doing some action, he will at least hesitate before carrying it out. They’re ingrained so deeply in society that even the most hardened criminal probably had to train quite painfully to get to a morally apathetic state.

   On a lighter note, regarding your second point, the whims of some gods might make for some truly disturbing moral standards. What, for example, would Haruhi have one do when scammed by a shady organization? Turn the other cheek? Report the group to the proper authorities? Most likely, one would be willed to track the individuals down and use any method humanly possible to make sure they never show their faces in public again. It’s morally wrong from one standpoint yet keeps to another moral code. Then again her doctrine is close to that of hedonism, which would take another full journal post to relate to morality and ethics.

   (Great post, keep it up!)

   Reply
   1. kaiserpingvin 9.29.09 / 6pm

      Yes, morality works a lot by (I like this) propaganda. By society being more or less uniform, certain moral values will be higher/lower evaluated; that is, there will be a certain emotional barrier in performing them, or for that matter an emotional payoff which may not have been there in the first place.

      And, haha, yes. Going by what some people believe(d), even more classical gods than Haruhi would be freaking scary.

      And thanks.

      Reply
2. jp_zer0 9.29.09 / 5pm

   You really disregarded most of the work done in ethics theory. Like utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics.

   There`s definitely some answers in there and I`m not that impressed by your arguments.

   Reply
   1. kaiserpingvin 9.29.09 / 5pm

      It’s true that ethics is far from my board, so I kept away from those as I am not yet knowledgeable enough to say much of anything about them. Partly since, and I see I was misguided about this, I didn’t think them relevant.

      For in what way would these be relevant, insofar as deontology, virtue ethics and utilitarianism are not about moral realism, but rather normative ethics which can function regardless? I’m intrigued by this.

      Reply
      1. jp_zer0 9.29.09 / 7pm

         Well it is true that you can talk about moral realism without talking about normative ethics, but your post is not exactly just that either.

         You touched on the incoherence of moral truth-claims and the possible irrelevance of moral truths. It is more on these points that I have issue with, that I feel norm. ethics has some answers.

         Reply
3. James Gray 11.7.09 / 11am

   I have been doing a lot of reading on metaethics but that isn’t going to be as satisfying as you might like. My personal quest has taken me to my own understanding because everyday experience must be understood in light of realism, or it will become absurd as you have considered.

   My answer is that we can experience moral facts. For example, the experience of pain has “badness” involved. We can then realize other people also experience pain and the “badness” of pain. This is extremely morally relevant and it explains why giving an aspirin to someone with a headache makes so much sense.

   If moral realism is false, we need to know why giving the aspirin makes sense. Why altruism is justified rather than delusional. And so on.

   Reply
   1. kaiserpingvin 11.15.09 / 12am

      Okay, so we can experience moral facts. That at least puts meaning back into moral realism.

      However, few points of critique: As is obvious, we have different moral feelings, if we at all have any. Phineas Gage famously lost his sense of moral (and quite a bit else). Randian Objectivists belive altruism is a great evil.

      Of course, that is nothing spectacular in itself. Some people can’t see because they are blind, doesn’t deny in itself the reality of visual objects. However, in that case, we can think of methods to prove to even the blind person there is a set of properties she lacks the ability to percieve (colour). How would someone go about to do that about moral feelings?

      If this cannot be done, then it is far more parsimonious to assume that said moral feeling is merely a psychological reaction to things that break against what we wish of people, what we have been ‘indoctrinated’ to feel adverse or positive towards, and so on. That is after all an explanation with some kind of empirical proof behind it, too.

      But that’s just a common objection by a newbie, so it’s possible you have written about that already :x Time to archive binge.

      A more pressing question though: Why be moral just because we have a sensation of goodness or badness?

      (As for why it makes sense to give aspirin: It makes sense only if we wish the other person to be well. Otherwise it does not make sense. I appreciate that people commonly do want that, being prone to rather aggressive migraine, and would be quite positively surprised if it was objectively right to give me aspirin.)

      Reply
4. James Gray 11.15.09 / 1am

   Interesting objections. Here are my current responses:

   First, can we prove morality exists to someone without any moral intuition? I don’t really understand this argument. It looks like the following:

   1. If you can’t prove x exists, then it doesn’t.
   2. You can’t prove morality exists.
   3. Therefore, it doesn’t exist.

   This argument is unsound because we don’t have to be able to absolutely prove anything exists. The only way to provide evidence is when we have shared assumptions. Shared moral assumptions might be necessary to prove morality exists.

   Can we prove morality exists to someone with no moral intuition? Maybe not. Can we prove color exists to a blind person? I don’t know that we can. How do you think we can?

   Do we have to prove morality exists to someone with no moral intuition? No. Why should we?

   However, it is possible to correct moral error though pointing to various features of experience. Someone who never experiences pain might not know pain is bad. That fact doesn’t prove there is no pain. But the rest of us who have experienced pain can think about what it is like and realize we don’t dislike pain for no reason. We dislike it because the experience is bad.

   Second, Why be moral just because we have a sensation of goodness or badness?

   You seem to assume Humean rationality. Hume says that we only have reason to do something if it satisfies a desire. Therefore, you only have reason to give an aspirin “if you don’t want someone to have a headache.”

   This seems false in and of itself. If I gave someone an aspirin and someone else said, “That was stupid! You don’t care about how I feel!” This response is absurd. It appears to make sense to give someone an aspirin whether or not I have a yearning, thirst, hunger, etc. to do so.

   Most moral realists, such as Mark Platts, argue that Humean rationality is false and believe that we can have rational demands other than desire satisfaction. Mark Platts argues that we don’t always feel a desire for things we find desirable (worth striving for), so it is phenomenologically false that we require desires.

   John Searle also says a lot about desire-independent reasons, but he doesn’t relate them to morality in particular.

   Let’s for a moment assume Humean rationality is correct. How could I then defend altruistically (desire-independently) giving an aspirin? Simple. I couldn’t! It’s impossible by definition given Humean rationality.

   On the other hand I just wrote an article about how Humean rationality is compatible with moral realism. The answer is similar to what you just said: We have to desire giving people the aspirin in order to do it. The moral facts alone don’t motivate the action. Nevertheless, that doesn’t prove that moral facts don’t exist. We can simply have a desire that corresponds with a moral demand. We can even nurture desires that correspond to moral demands in order to be more virtuous.

   Reply
   1. kaiserpingvin 11.15.09 / 9pm

      As is evident, I have never studied metaethics (due to the Northern distinction between practical and theoretical philosophy), but I find it quite fascinating a subject so far. I very much apprecaite having arguments to ponder. Clears the mind.

      Not quite a “cannot prove, cannot exist” situation (since I believe we cannot to perfection prove anything, that would be a suicidal option), but close. Rather:

      1) We have an explanation for the feeling of goodness and badness which is based on neurology and psychology.
      2) Moral intuition has no arguments in favour of it.
      C) By Occam’s razor, we should assume that the natural explanation is the true one; adding the property of moral intuition when it neither explains more, nor has an argument in favour of it, is entirely arbitrary.

      So the question is, what arguments are there in favour of moral intuition being something we cannot explain by psychology and neurology?

      Of course, I am a bit confused here, since I am not entirely sure where the moral properties you purport are (in the action, in the mind itself, are there several kinds of it, are they universal, etc?).

      But you posit that shared moral assumptions may be necessary. I would agree that if they are shared, then meaningful talk about morality can be done. While I didn’t cover it here, I do believe that morality is deeply important to debate, that there is no ‘truth’ to it does not mean that ethics is a worthless chase. I also believe everyone have an ethics, since we all have certain things we do and do not do and wants regarding it. …This is a digression.

      Take the blind person. How could we prove to her that we have a sense which she does not? Well, for example, we could ask her to have her right or left hand open. We could reliably see which hand she opened, even in total silence and without touching her. This would point towards us having a way to percieve the world she does not. The experiments could grow more and more sophisticated thereafter.

      I cannot quite see how a similar method could be constructed as regards to morality.

      On to why we should be moral.

      I have as an underlying assumption had the view that ethics is about how we should act. Perhaps an unfair assumption. From this assumption, though, one can wonder how the existence of a certain feeling of goodness or badness would constitute a “should”, whatever a should would in that case mean.

      I suppose one can answer that the feeling of goodness in itself is the should, that “good” means “should do”. There must then, however, be an argument for this.

      As for Humean rationality, I suppose my sloppy wording would imply as much. I meant a wider idea, though related.

      We only do things we have reasons to do.
      (The reasons can be whatever; they need not be simple desires.)
      Do we have a reason to be moral just because we have a feeling of goodness?
      Why should that be a reason not to do other things?
      And if these questions cannot be answered, how can the feeling of goodness be in any ways about morality, if morality is about what we should do?
      (I notice a slipping here on my own part, from “reason” to “should”. If asked, ”Why should I do x?” then someone could answer, ”The reason you should do x is…”. Whether the words really do have this relation to eachother is something I have nor pondered yet, so mayhaps this is invalid.)

      But I see your post is about these things too, apart from mere Humean rationality, so on to reading that one.

      Reply
      1. James Gray 11.16.09 / 12am

         2) Moral intuition has no arguments in favour of it.

         This is false. If anything it might have insufficient evidence, but almost all philosophy requires the use of intuition. Science even requires intuition. Whether or not ethics can be self-evident is still up to debate, but the fact that intuition (whatever it is) can be a reliable source of knowledge is pretty well accepted.

         If you get rid of intuition, then you are right that we can’t get anywhere. Intuition is precisely where we would have to start.

         We have an experience of pain that says pain is bad. Either that experience itself implies that pain is better not to exist, or it intuitively implies it.

         I have written my personal defense of intuition but I’m not as familiar with the literature as I should be. Richard Boyd’s “How to be a moral realist” covers a naturalist view of intuition.

         C) By Occam’s razor, we should assume that the natural explanation is the true one; adding the property of moral intuition when it neither explains more, nor has an argument in favour of it, is entirely arbitrary.

         There are moral realists who are naturalists. They just aren’t reductionists. Of course, Occam’s razor would be against all irreducible properties. (Morality can’t be reduced to non-moral facts.) The irreducibility of morality could be referred to as the is/ought gap. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord argues that the is/ought gap is just like the is/thought gap.We can have a pretty good argument that the mind is another example of something irreducible, and the way we know it is similar to how we know psychology isn’t reducible to non-mental facts.

         So the question is, what arguments are there in favour of moral intuition being something we cannot explain by psychology and neurology?

         I don’t know if we have to. It might be that morality is a kind of psychological fact. Pain seems to be both an irreducible psychological and irreducible moral fact. You don’t know what pain is unless you know it’s bad. Non-moral facts can’t help you understand that.

         But you posit that shared moral assumptions may be necessary.

         Just like scientific assumptions are necessary. They are necessary for just about any theory or hypothesis. Assumptions don’t indicate that something isn’t real.

         Take the blind person. How could we prove to her that we have a sense which she does not? Well, for example, we could ask her to have her right or left hand open. We could reliably see which hand she opened, even in total silence and without touching her. This would point towards us having a way to percieve the world she does not. The experiments could grow more and more sophisticated thereafter.

         This is an interesting question. So the point is that we can prove we have vision because of the causal implications. Then the question is, “What are the causal implications of moral facts?” Well, it tends to involve how we respond emotionally. If we believe something bad happens, we respond to it negatively. If someone does something terrible, they will lose friends.

         Perhaps the best example is pain. We don’t simply dislike pain. We dislike pain precisely because it’s bad. If we can prove pain is “felt to be bad” to someone who can’t feel pain that would help. I don’t think anyone completely lacks pain, though, because emotional pain is the worst kind of pain. I don’t think anyone completely lacks that.

         Whether or not we can prove pain exists to such a person is at least partially irrelevant because we know pain is bad from the start. To require that they understand the causal efficacy of pain in order to validate our belief in pain would be absurd.

         Reply
         1. kaiserpingvin 12.16.09 / 10pm

            Pardon the much too late reply, but my parents lately broke up and inbetween moving, settling in at a new house, and school work, I was not quite up to the task nor time to meet your thought.

            This is false. If anything it might have insufficient evidence, but almost all philosophy requires the use of intuition. Science even requires intuition. Whether or not ethics can be self-evident is still up to debate, but the fact that intuition (whatever it is) can be a reliable source of knowledge is pretty well accepted.

            If you get rid of intuition, then you are right that we can’t get anywhere. Intuition is precisely where we would have to start.
            This is interesting and you got me reformulating some thoughts I have had on this, so I wrote something harebrained on it.

            There are moral realists who are naturalists. They just aren’t reductionists. Of course, Occam’s razor would be against all irreducible properties. (Morality can’t be reduced to non-moral facts.) The irreducibility of morality could be referred to as the is/ought gap. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord argues that the is/ought gap is just like the is/thought gap.We can have a pretty good argument that the mind is another example of something irreducible, and the way we know it is similar to how we know psychology isn’t reducible to non-mental facts.

            True, the razor razes whatever is not reducible. But I think physicalist/naturalist reductionism is not the sole possible version; one can well have great use of it in other areas.

            For example: In chess problems, economy is important for the æsthetic value of the problem. This is pretty much a case of Occam. Likewise, a formal theory of logic which has more rules of deduction or other properties than it needs, is not a good formal theory.

            So Occam does not pose a direct problem against moral realism – as far as a justification as to why a certain moral fact is exactly a moral fact, and not, as I would contend, a psychological fact of second-degree wants. (Or whatever other non-realist position there may be).

            It might be that morality is a kind of psychological fact. Pain seems to be both an irreducible psychological and irreducible moral fact. You don’t know what pain is unless you know it’s bad. Non-moral facts can’t help you understand that.

            Now what I understand from your position, moral facts are contained within a feeling of badness. There is no way to bridge this gap between people. They may well be said to be entirely psychological. Then what here makes this a moral realism as differentiated from subjectivism? For if badness lies in the intuitive feeling of it, and our feelings on this do differ immensely; and since the truth of a moral claim relies on its correlating with this on subject dependant feeling of badness, then it is scarcely different at all from saying that what is immoral is what we feel is immoral, without the addition of unnecessary entities.

            For if someone feels it is good to casually murder people, then that is what he should, according to this analysis. This isn’t very realist at all, as what’s introduced seems to be just another way to explain reasons (a cautionable act), indistinguishable from subjectivism by more than mere jargon. But, we know that killing people is something we should not do because of the feeling of badness they will feel – question here is, how can the badness of their experience in any way imply a should for our dandy murderer? For “should” here is reduced to entirely “what is to be done to avoid feelings of badness”, no reason is given as to why this should be universalised (or for that matter, internalised). That is the large problem of realism – we can always just say, even if we do admit something morally true, we do not desire to do so. Say that it was discovered killing children was objectivelly, really, a good thing (not too far off – it does save them from a lifetime of probable pain and horror). But no one – I hope – would go out and start clobbering children for that. The truth here obtained about a moral proposition is of an entirely different kind than a should.

            To sum it up: “Why should we be moral according to this system?” That is the all-pervasive problem of moral truth, for it cannot be satisfied unless the moral system is already accepted. One may protest, say – “logic is only true if logic is accepted!”, but this is slippery. For someone who refuses to follow a moral system may well – and it is irrational not to – accept that what that moral system says is truely immoral is truely immoral according to that system, as well as someone who refuses ordinary logic can well say that according to logic what is truely sound is truely sound. What is rejected here is not that.

            Pain can only be understood as a badness, you say, but – this is trite, but it is an important but – then whence masochists and sadists? To a masochist, the feeling of pain can be tainted good in the right circumstance. “This is a good kind of pain”, as it were. To a sadist, causing pain has a goodness to it.

            This isn’t against your idea at all, it would work very well with it, it is just false to say that pain always has badness.

            But – I do think it indicates a possible other solution which seems more reasonable – that goodness and badness are entirely results of whether we want the case to be or not.

            Reply
5. James Gray 12.17.09 / 12am

   Now what I understand from your position, moral facts are contained within a feeling of badness. There is no way to bridge this gap between people. They may well be said to be entirely psychological. Then what here makes this a moral realism as differentiated from subjectivism? For if badness lies in the intuitive feeling of it, and our feelings on this do differ immensely; and since the truth of a moral claim relies on its correlating with this on subject dependant feeling of badness, then it is scarcely different at all from saying that what is immoral is what we feel is immoral, without the addition of unnecessary entities.

   I am saying that pain is bad no matter who feels pain. I am not saying that pain is the only thing that matters. When we feel pain we don’t say, “I just don’t like it.” We say, “I don’t like it because it’s bad,” and we seem to understand it’s bad for everyone. I might not be able to prove this has to be the case, but I attempted to show it to be a plausible view in my personal argument for moral realism.

   For if someone feels it is good to casually murder people, then that is what he should, according to this analysis. This isn’t very realist at all, as what’s introduced seems to be just another way to explain reasons (a cautionable act), indistinguishable from subjectivism by more than mere jargon.

   Subjectivism says that I should care about my own pain, but I have no reason to care about your pain. There is a huge difference between that and saying pain is bad for everyone. Subjectivism is not compatible with utilitarianism, but the idea of pain having intrinsic value is.

   But, we know that killing people is something we should not do because of the feeling of badness they will feel – question here is, how can the badness of their experience in any way imply a should for our dandy murderer?

   Because what matters is intrinsic value. You can believe whatever you want about right and wrong, but that doesn’t make your belief correct. If murder causes pain, then it would give us something intrinsically bad.

   For “should” here is reduced to entirely “what is to be done to avoid feelings of badness”, no reason is given as to why this should be universalised (or for that matter, internalised).

   For a subjectivist perhaps. That is not my view. Can I explain why morality is universal? Yes. We should maximize intrinsic value and minimize intrinsic disvalue. What has value of this sort is the same for everyone.

   That is the large problem of realism – we can always just say, even if we do admit something morally true, we do not desire to do so. Say that it was discovered killing children was objectivelly, really, a good thing (not too far off – it does save them from a lifetime of probable pain and horror). But no one – I hope – would go out and start clobbering children for that. The truth here obtained about a moral proposition is of an entirely different kind than a should.

   Why isn’t that also a problem for antirealism? We don’t want someone to murder other people either way. We do tend to desire things of intrinsic value for some reason. We do give someone an aspirin who has a headache. To say, “That’s stupid! You need to justify such self-sacrifice!” would not appear to be an appropriate response.

   There might be intrinsic values we can’t care about. If rocks have intrinsic value, then we probably just can’t care about it. But if giving an aspirin helps, then the desire to help others in that way should be nurtured rather than ignored or neglected.

   To sum it up: “Why should we be moral according to this system?” That is the all-pervasive problem of moral truth, for it cannot be satisfied unless the moral system is already accepted. One may protest, say – “logic is only true if logic is accepted!”, but this is slippery. For someone who refuses to follow a moral system may well – and it is irrational not to – accept that what that moral system says is truely immoral is truely immoral according to that system, as well as someone who refuses ordinary logic can well say that according to logic what is truely sound is truely sound. What is rejected here is not that.

   Because doing good things can lead to real value (intrinsic value).

   Pain can only be understood as a badness, you say, but – this is trite, but it is an important but – then whence masochists and sadists? To a masochist, the feeling of pain can be tainted good in the right circumstance. “This is a good kind of pain”, as it were. To a sadist, causing pain has a goodness to it.

   A masochist gets something he believes has value (pleasure). Why take a philosophy class? It’s painful. However, it also can give us something of value. A utilitarian would want to justify actions based on a cost/benefit analysis. It seems absurd to say that philosophy classes aren’t worth it, so either such a class helps us get something of value (knowledge, pleasure, happiness, etc.) or it helps us avoid pain.

   This isn’t against your idea at all, it would work very well with it, it is just false to say that pain always has badness.

   But – I do think it indicates a possible other solution which seems more reasonable – that goodness and badness are entirely results of whether we want the case to be or not.

   Not sure that I understand what this means.

   Reply
6. kaiserpingvin 12.21.09 / 11am

   I am saying that pain is bad no matter who feels pain. I am not saying that pain is the only thing that matters. When we feel pain we don’t say, “I just don’t like it.” We say, “I don’t like it because it’s bad,” and we seem to understand it’s bad for everyone. I might not be able to prove this has to be the case, but I attempted to show it to be a plausible view in my personal argument for moral realism.
   But badness is merely the ‘property’ of us not wanting it. I cannot see how badness makes sense in any other way. If one accepted the view that badness is independent of this, then we have the bizarre possibility of someone wanting something they think is bad. That is not how the words work.

   That is of course not the largest problem, the largest problem is that there is no logical link from “pain is bad to everyone” to “I should never cause pain”. For your badness is merely a simple property of perception, and not a should, an ought, or a law, it’s just a new class of natural entities.

   Subjectivism says that I should care about my own pain, but I have no reason to care about your pain. There is a huge difference between that and saying pain is bad for everyone. Subjectivism is not compatible with utilitarianism, but the idea of pain having intrinsic value is.
   I was, however, thinking of subjectivism as the view that morality is created by each individual subject, not the myopic egocentric version (which I have never heard of, goes to show how much I’ve read eh).

   For a subjectivist perhaps. That is not my view. Can I explain why morality is universal? Yes. We should maximize intrinsic value and minimize intrinsic disvalue. What has value of this sort is the same for everyone.
   But, again, there is no reason to jump from these sensations of badness to a should.

   It’s a case of equivocation I think; you conflate the common moral meaning of ‘bad’ with this particular perceptory kind, and no reason exists why this is justified.

   Why isn’t that also a problem for antirealism? We don’t want someone to murder other people either way. We do tend to desire things of intrinsic value for some reason. We do give someone an aspirin who has a headache. To say, “That’s stupid! You need to justify such self-sacrifice!” would not appear to be an appropriate response.
   There might be intrinsic values we can’t care about. If rocks have intrinsic value, then we probably just can’t care about it. But if giving an aspirin helps, then the desire to help others in that way should be nurtured rather than ignored or neglected.
   It isn’t a problem of antirealism; it is a natural consequence no antirealist should have problem confessing.

   Your view of rationality is weird. Rationality isn’t inherent in serving one’s own or others’ interests. Rationality is about realistic modes of inference and assumption. It can never be rational to either give aspirin or not, it can never be rational to steal a million dollars or not. Rationality is a tool, not a property. As far as praxis goes, rationality is about taking steps which actually serves making one’s will reality.

   Again – if Adams wants Bob to not have a headache, it’d be rational of him to give Bob aspirin. And if Adams doesn’t, it wouldn’t, even if it meant Adams would be a douche.

   Because doing good things can lead to real value (intrinsic value).
   But why should we have that? The only way that makes sense is if we want this intrinsic value.

   Not sure that I understand what this means.
   I meant the preceeding example to show that “good” and “bad” means “wants” and “does not want”, vaguely. I do not think there is an universal moral language, people mean different things when they speak of it, and some may be wholly in error, so I would not universalise this meaning. It is just one that makes sense, and actually conforms to how the words are used.

   Reply
7. James Gray 12.21.09 / 12pm

   But badness is merely the ‘property’ of us not wanting it. I cannot see how badness makes sense in any other way. If one accepted the view that badness is independent of this, then we have the bizarre possibility of someone wanting something they think is bad. That is not how the words work.

   Why not? I think R. M. Hare even explains how that can happen given his anti-realist theory. Someone can think that being a thief is wrong and still do it. They often feel guilty about it.

   I don’t see how denying “weakness of the will” is in any way obvious, a priori, or based on any other form of justification. The opposite seems to be true based on experience and common sense. In fact, this is a huge argument used against many anti-realist theories, such as emotivism. It ignores what most people find to be obvious, that weakness of the will is possible.

   That is of course not the largest problem, the largest problem is that there is no logical link from “pain is bad to everyone” to “I should never cause pain”. For your badness is merely a simple property of perception, and not a should, an ought, or a law, it’s just a new class of natural entities.

   Not all links need to be logical. It makes perfect sense to me not to give you pain because your pain is bad just like mine. You might want to read my argument for Moral Realism and tell me exactly what is wrong with it.

   You can say to some extent that what I have to say is speculative, but it is not therefore unjustified. More on this below.

   I was, however, thinking of subjectivism as the view that morality is created by each individual subject, not the myopic egocentric version (which I have never heard of, goes to show how much I’ve read eh).

   Intrinsic value is not “invented by the person” by definition. It’s an interpretation of our moral experiences as involving facts.

   But, again, there is no reason to jump from these sensations of badness to a should.

   It’s impossible just because you can’t think of it right now? There are different answers to this problem. One is: Moral obligation means something like “Terrible things will happen if you don’t do x.”

   Another: I recently read one of R. M. Hare’s book on prescriptivism. What he says there could actually work equally well for me. He is an anti-realist, but he thinks “oughts” comes from universal will (the categorical imperative.)

   Searle argued that “ought” comes from commitments. This is obviously not moral oughts he is talking about. What justifies his step? That it seems to make sense.

   Another: Goals also give us an “ought.” A fact can then give us an ought, but it’s not necessarily a moral ought.

   I suppose I can justify a moral ought by saying that it’s a moral goal.

   I have written about the is/ought problem you seem to be referring to. You can take a look at my article if you want to tell me specifically what I say that is wrong.

   It’s a case of equivocation I think; you conflate the common moral meaning of ‘bad’ with this particular perceptory kind, and no reason exists why this is justified.

   It is justified in various ways. One is that it seems to make a lot of sense. That can be a coherence justification.

   When you justify ethical theory, you don’t have to justify every single step, just like a scientist doesn’t have to. There are lots of things in science not yet understood, but that doesn’t prove it is false. To ask me to develop a theory that explains everything is not reasonable. Part of the big picture is how well my theory does compared to other theories. You would have to read those other theories to decide.

   Newton thought God caused gravity. Gravity was so mysterious and unjustified that it could have been taken to be an “unjustified step.” However, some things can be taken as axiomatic until further investigation is fulfilled.

   It isn’t a problem of antirealism; it is a natural consequence no antirealist should have problem confessing.

   Anti-realists want to make sense out of morality. If anti-realism leads to an unsophisticated “nothing matters, don’t worry about morality,” then the anti-realist philosopher is no better than the freshman student. Based on my understanding of anti-realism, the anti-realist does not want to confess to completely counter-intuitive statements like the one I gave. It’s absurd.

   Your view of rationality is weird. Rationality isn’t inherent in serving one’s own or others’ interests. Rationality is about realistic modes of inference and assumption. It can never be rational to either give aspirin or not, it can never be rational to steal a million dollars or not. Rationality is a tool, not a property. As far as praxis goes, rationality is about taking steps which actually serves making one’s will reality.

   I was describing Humean rationality. Yes it is probably weird, but it is a completely realistic way of understanding “moral reason” given anti-realism. If nothing really matters, then we still have desires, and we will do what we can to fulfill them.

   Again – if Adams wants Bob to not have a headache, it’d be rational of him to give Bob aspirin. And if Adams doesn’t, it wouldn’t, even if it meant Adams would be a douche.

   And would I be crazy to give him an aspirin even if I didn’t care about his headache?

   But why should we have that? The only way that makes sense is if we want this intrinsic value.

   So much is at stake. This “really matters.” It seems like complete common sense to me, but I already admitted that we might not be able to care about the intrinsic value of rocks and so forth. It is possible for overlap. I don’t see a new challenge provided here. It’s the same one all over again and I already responded to it twice.

   I meant the preceeding example to show that “good” and “bad” means “wants” and “does not want”, vaguely. I do not think there is an universal moral language, people mean different things when they speak of it, and some may be wholly in error, so I would not universalise this meaning. It is just one that makes sense, and actually conforms to how the words are used.

   We are just going in circles then. I already explained that we dislike some things “because they are bad.” Do say pain is bad only because I dislike it is to miss the point about why I dislike it. Desires are not mere choices we make or thoughtless impulses from instinct. They can be based on our experiences that provide new desires.

   If you want to read my posts on many of these topics, you can go to ethicalrealism.wordpress.com. It might be better to take a look there to see that I have already discussed many of these points in order to narrow down exactly where I go wrong.

   Reply
   1. kaiserpingvin 1.13.10 / 9pm

      If you want to read my posts on many of these topics, you can go to ethicalrealism.wordpress.com. It might be better to take a look there to see that I have already discussed many of these points in order to narrow down exactly where I go wrong.
      That sounds reasonable enough. I’ll come back later (Emperor Norton alone knows when), with a proper post, on why I disagree… or agree, if it happens your posts change my mind.

      I do think it is ultimately a disagreement on how language works and what a rationally justifiable position is.

      Reply
8. James Gray 12.21.09 / 2pm

   You didn’t like my use of the word “rationality” and I was discussing a common view of practical reason that some people call Humean rationality. It is the view that we can rationally decide what to do in order to satisfy our desires. Everything is means-end reasoning because the theory is based on the idea that rationality requires motivation.

   “Instrumental rationality, in its most basic form, instructs agents to take those means that are necessary in relation to their given ends.”

   http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/practical-reason/

   I agree that there is something strange about calling such action “rational” but it is basically just about success of means-ends reasoning, which is fairly scientific.

   Reply

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Hemingway by warpspire.

Entries RSS Comments RSS