Thanks for this ‘ontological version’ of disutilitarianism (i.e. the most harm-prevention/reduction for the most indiviuals … is the good).
Re: post 7 above
2 Likes
Can you help me understand disutilitarianism?
To my knowledge, it’s about reducing suffering but then in your discussion with others you talk about harm, reducing it.
I know that utilitarianism appeared in the west with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The Greatest Happiness Principle is the slogan that we maximize happiness for the maximum number of people. The utilitarians even talked about a felicific calculus but I believe this ran into some difficulties.
Harm-based, yes. But not calculative. I am not sure what you mean by “disutilitarianism.” We can’t cancel one against others to tweak the total harm, because you break a being. Personal sacrifice I see differently.
Harm is wrong not because it hurts or the rules say so; it’s wrong because it works against the structure that makes subjects possible at all. Unfortunately, societies can be the difference that breaks being.
1 Like
Reason has to work harder to accept that the Other has similar stakes to ourselves, and ought to be treated accordingly. But this will always be a problem, no matter what you ground oughts in, it’s how we’re built.
I’m not sure this is how we’re built. I’m probably not an essentialist, but it does seem that humans often gravitate towards the familiar and the predictable. The stranger can be perceived as a source of uncertainty or chaos, particularly if they hold funny beliefs.
Hard to say, people are complicated! The plasticity of our brains means we’re particularly primed for learning from our environment (parenting, culture, education, social mores, etc), but early research re ‘moral intuitions’ I’m aware of suggests this seems more like genetic social predispositions being honed by experience. Researchers are starting to identify the evolutionary history of the neurological processes involved, and provide a broad account of how it works. See for example Pat Churchland’s Braintrust. Amazon blurb -
*''What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the “neurobiological platform of bonding” that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules, and pure reason in accounting for the basis of morality.
Moral values, Churchland argues, are rooted in a behavior common to all mammals–the caring for offspring. The evolved structure, processes, and chemistry of the brain incline humans to strive not only for self-preservation but for the well-being of allied selves–first offspring, then mates, kin, and so on, in wider and wider “caring” circles. Separation and exclusion cause pain, and the company of loved ones causes pleasure; responding to feelings of social pain and pleasure, brains adjust their circuitry to local customs. In this way, caring is apportioned, conscience molded, and moral intuitions instilled. A key part of the story is oxytocin, an ancient body-and-brain molecule that, by decreasing the stress response, allows humans to develop the trust in one another necessary for the development of close-knit ties, social institutions, and morality.
A major new account of what really makes us moral, Braintrust challenges us to reconsider the origins of some of our most cherished values.‘’*
This sort of account is identifying what I’d say is the closest thing to the objective ‘Is’ of human morality - the underlying neurological whys and wherefores of how we came to eventually conceptualise notions of Right and Wrong and Oughts. The evolved neurobiology is something we can point at and agree is an objective ‘Is’ fact about the world. As opposed to the concept of Right and Wrong itself which arose from these genetic social predispositions.
So individual freedoms need to be part of the consideration, rather than a purely authoritarian utilitarian approach. Where we draw the lines will be inevitably be blurry.
My question is usually: who gets to draw the lines and make the definitions? Christian evangelicals? Platonists? Marxists? Libertarians?
Some ideologies are a better fit than others, but I’m not trying to work out the fine details here, just lay a foundation for approaching the questions.
We seem to be struggling in the West with balancing pluralism.
We surely are. And not having consensus around a secular morality to ground us is part of the problem imo. The Far Right are filling the void of this uncertainty by promoting Strong Man nationalist authoritarians like Trump, unifying ingroup support through blaming the Other, and giving him the responsibility to sort it all out as he chooses. This is sweeping across declining western democracies in the face of globalisation. It’s an infantile, tribalistic response to dealing with the morality of governance. It’s a dangerous path we’re on.
2 Likes
Right right, Ok, i certainly missed a trick somewhere. I think this is the correct analysis, fwiw. Onward…
Hmm, ok I’m a little lost here now, although I think i understand the underlying logic of it. My question would be something like… Ok, does this suggest that being human, we are justified in not considering animals equal, morally, because we have a stake in what happens to humans? (fwiw, this seems to be patently, obviously true to me… I guess I’m trying to figure how one can get there by reason rather than intuition).
I agree, on a very basic level, but harms are dealt out pretty willy-nilly by behaviours that never intended them. So, there’s some nuance here that I think is missed by the framework - although, again, I agree on a basic level, that Oughts must have some relationship to human endeavours, and not some free-floating concept.
I genuinely have no idea what this post is trying to say.
What does any of this mean?
This seems obviously wrong (along with a couple other elements around there), which is why I can’t use context to figure out the first batch - I don’t mean to sound lazy.
Gertie - But neither do I think morality is just a subjective matter of opinion like a preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream, or supporting my local team. So neither Subjective nor Objective seem to me to capture what makes morality meaningful, or seem like appropriate ways to justify Oughts.
Amadeus - Right right, Ok, i certainly missed a trick somewhere. I think this is the correct analysis, fwiw. Onward…
Great. The obsession over whether morality is objective or subjective is a red herring imo, neither capture what makes morality meaningful.
Gertie - It seems to me that what does make sense of Oughts is having a stake in the factual state of affairs. Hume says you can’t derive an Ought from an Is, but I’m saying that having a stake in what the Is is, changes the playing field.
Amadeus - Hmm, ok I’m a little lost here now, although I think i understand the underlying logic of it. My question would be something like… Ok, does this suggest that being human, we are justified in not considering animals equal, morally, because we have a stake in what happens to humans? (fwiw, this seems to be patently, obviously true to me… I guess I’m trying to figure how one can get there by reason rather than intuition).
So we establish that it’s being an experiencing subject with qualiative experience which makes Oughts meaningful, because it matters what happens to you. This applies to all sentient beings, including other species. Hence it’s consistent to treat all sentient beings with moral consideration. That doesn’t mean identically, because the components for flourishing vary drastically between species.
Gertie - If I harm you, it matters to you, and vice versa. And this is the natural and appropriate territory of Oughts, of Right and Wrong.
Amadeus - I agree, on a very basic level, but harms are dealt out pretty willy-nilly by behaviours that never intended them. So, there’s some nuance here that I think is missed by the framework - although, again, I agree on a basic level, that Oughts must have some relationship to human endeavours, and not some free-floating concept.
A basic level is what I’m trying to establish here - a foundation for grounding Oughts and Right and Wrong. In practice it will be messy, I agree. People are messy, and qualiative experience isn’t tidily quantifiable.
But a strength of the foundation of Try to Promote the Wellbeing of Conscious Creatures is that it is consequentialist. It’s the effect that takes priory. So if you do something, or make a law, which has unforeseen harmful effects you can adjust and change your behaviour and the law. If you don’t have this underlying grounding to check back against you’re stuck with ad hoc rules-based morality which I’d say Deontology and Virtue Ethics boil down to.
You seem to be working along lines parallel to Philippa Foot. Is that intentional?
Nice stuff.
Morality is not just the simple division of right from wrong. For even the golden rule of not wanting to receive harm (say psychological/emotional harm) leads to not causing it can cause non-reciprocation, yet some harms can be useful if we are to go slightly Nietzschean on the aphorism that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” yet by the same token we could also say “what doesn’t kill you can only mess you up”… so which one is it ?
I’d say the former although that largely depends on one’s mindset here, as the former can lead to resilience and strength of spirit. Yet at the same time causing someone some kind of permanent injury will be immoral as it takes away from them what nature endowed them with and even this was practised in the not so distant past where thieves were chopped off their fingers if not hanged by some misconstrued concept of justice.
This would then lead to how injustices are corrected (how justice is carried out in practice) when immoral acts are committed whereby the law of not doing harm to others because we do not want it to be done to ourselves must be suspended in order for justice to be carried out such that certain immoral acts are punitively corrected by the removal of liberties to individuals who do commit immoral acts even though the removal of liberty (jail) is bad in and of itself.
But everything is waffling, where what is viewed as good can be what is viewed as bad. Discussions of morals absent moral facts, sounds like something “mere” to me. You are trying to have a different discussion it seems to me.
Ethics is about what we do in the world, but qualitative judgments happen “outside the world”? So where does the meaning and importance behind our judgements land? In or outside the world? And this seems to set up a dualism, like qualitative judgments are epiphenomenal only, which I don’t think is intended.
But then, why such a loaded word as “exploit”. Why not, life is “consumption”? We draw oxygen and kill and eat stuff. “Exploit” is a word for dramatists.
The OP asks “Can morality be objective?”
I just find that the way we actually live, what we actually do and say, looks like and sounds like people making objective, absolute proclamations; not subjective, contextualized, best arguments.
Raping kids is bad. “The rapist did a bad thing.” Period.
That’s what people believe when they hunt down and stop the rapist.
We say “Trump is evil.” We say “Trump is doing bad things.”
We don’t say, “Because of my values, and the majority support of other value-ascribers, given historical context and disposition within current cultural norms, at this time, a web of relations has intersected such that many think rape is a bad thing, and I agree with them.” We just say “Rape is bad. Period.” And further, we say “I won’t ever do rape because I am a good person”, and further still, we seek to take down and punish the rapist, maybe leading to the rapists justifiable death.
Morality involves all of that, including the punishment (the guilt and repentance), not just the use of the word “bad” in our coherent sentences.
If judgment of what is good and what is bad was always contextual, it means Hitler and the things he does aren’t actually bad (the “is”), they are just viewed as bad in a context (the “ought”). Hitler and the things he does can be good, or great, if we find a different context and value different things.
To me, that drains morality of any significant importance, and it is not how we live anyway; it’s not the morality we practice, and not why we practice morality. People die and kill others based on moral judgments. We don’t sacrifice our lives for goods that we believe could one day be seen as bad. We don’t win a moral victory when we convince someone else that “rape is bad in this context.”
Maybe we shouldn’t stop the dad who is raping his kids because, who are we to really know his context, and judge his values and the kids values?
Maybe one day we will appear as tyrants, imposing our moral facts on a world that has none. Still, people hang Trump in effigy, hoping someone actually does the deed, and celebrating when others like him are killed. That’s what we do, and what we inquire into the morality of.
I apologize, my friend, for any injustice.
I guess I didn’t understand how solid the line between subjectivity and intersubjectivity was. I discussed my understanding of intersubjectivity and how it seems to borrow subjective and objective elements, but I concluded that it is only seemingly objective (at least to me), and ultimately remains a shifting ground like subject-based grounds are, unlike more objective grounds.
The whole point of objectivity is introducing an element that no subject or group of subjects can waffle on. If that intersection between subjects becomes something fixed to outlast the subjective contributors, then something objective has emerged, and I was mistaken about your view.
If there are moral facts, we can state with analytic precision things like “rape is evil.”
If the determination of “evil” is always dependent on something outside the object (here outside of the “rape”) and comes from a subjective evaluation, then it seems to me it can be useful (I wouldn’t dare say “objectively true”), but it can be useful at times to say “rape is evil” AND at other times to say “rape is good.” Rape is just rape, and its value comes from on high or just, somewhere else.
So let’s go through it a bit.
Let’s define that “rape is non-consensual, violent sex.”
And let’s say, in our culture, we do not value “non-consensual violence”.
Given these definitional facts of what rape is, and the context of what the society values, we can form a coherent, valid argument about the immorality of rape and make a law that says “rape is bad and should not be allowed” and even enforce the law justly, stopping rapists, because rapists don’t see our values (or the values).
I think that analysis could comport with objectivist, subjectivist, and inter-subjectivist moralizers.
And all types of moralizers could redefine what rape is, and say "the smart rapist knows what the other person really wants, so rape isn’t really coercive, and it’s not really violence if any accidental harms can be rectified with healthcare, and everyone still loves babies which are needed for society, so rape really isn’t ‘non-consensual, violent sex,’ it’s really just “a one-sided instigation the same old act of pro-creation.” By changing the definition of rape, we can retain the same values (that coercive violence is bad), but can conclude “rape is good” since it isn’t coercive and violent enough. (There’s more to it to reach this conclusion, but my point is that shifting the definition of act allows one to keep the values fixed but arrive at a different moral conclusion about the act.)
That’s the same process of analysis more subjective or objective approaches take, just with a new characterization of the facts to form a new definition of rape.
OR, we could leave our original definition of rape and change our values, which a subjectivist must allow as valid, and conclude “yeah, rape is violent non-consensual sex, but we value babies most of all so I believe coercion is needed and more valuable here, and violence doesn’t matter to us, for sake of the greater community in the long run.” Now we’ve retained the definition of rape, but because we changed our values, we’ve changed the context, so we can conclude again “rape is good.”
If we take all objectivity out of the value propositions, we have to say that rape can be good and rape can be bad. Is/ought remain firewalled. Right?
But is that all we are actually doing when we form moral judgments - balancing facts against mutable, subjectively situated value propositions? We are saying “for now, we’ve defined the facts in the world, AND/OR, we’ve formed newer values, never saying definitions and values can’t change again, but nevertheless, you are, for now, an [evil/good] rapist.” Is that what we base our justice on? No. We don’t live like that. We don’t accept that as justice, and we don’t hand that out as justice.
We think and live like this: [Politician] and everyone who supports [Politician] are objectively ignorant and wrong on the facts, or objectively evil and wrong on the values, or both. They must be physically stopped or badness in the world (not just in my opinion) will continue happening in the world.
Seems to me, people who punish someone else in any way for immoral behavior are themselves immoral tyrants, if their only justification for the punishment is their own context, based on tenable facts, or both.
If you want to reduce morality to debates over whose argument aligning values to facts is more coherent, you can, but that, to me, isn’t morality, or a useful morality, and I think fairly dismissible, compared to a morality that seeks to justify stopping bad guys because they are bad (as opposed to because we think they are bad given our values).
None of what I said refutes that morality may in fact be subjectively based, contextual, changing with the times.
I’m saying none of us truly live like moral judgment isn’t objectively meaningful. We live in the world staking universal moral claims and imposing absolute punishments for violations of laws anyway.
Without it being true that “rape is bad, not because of my values, but because of what persons and sex are” in the world objectively, without objective moral facts, it seems imposing my values, or our values, on anyone, would always be unjust (which now looks like a moral fact, unfortunately, maybe prompting a reassessment of whether there are moral facts…)
And that brings me to my original point, which is: why should any of us submit to the moral judgment of anyone else, or any nation, or impose our moral judgment on anyone else, or any nation, if that judgment can be oppositely good and bad depending on fallible, mutable, bound-to-change, circumstances and value choices? We don’t live like that, and why would we, or should we? And if we aren’t imposing moral judgments at all, who gives a crap about any of this? Anyway, we are imposing moral judgments.
We need to be more careful, and need to believe in the objectivity we enact to make the care worth the effort. In my humble assessment/opinion.
That’s the question. Am I wanting to find meaning where there is none? Kidding myself?
But I also ask, what might I want, to subtract an objective ought from what is? Who am I kidding when I conclude rape is sometimes good?
We all ride a wave of assumptions. Too many.
Everyone here at least attempts to examine them.
I remain unimpressed with the arguments that assert we only invented truth so that we could prove to each other that truth is a lie. Same with the good. We don’t just call friendship good; we know good friends. Package deal.
1 Like
Because Nietzsche is wrestling with his conscience ! He is a sensitive, kind-hearted person. We should understand him IMV as wrestling with Schopenhauer’s vision of horror.
He is not some brutal fascist rejoicing in cruelty. But he also refuses to ignore his own complicity. In Jungian terms, much of Nietzsche’s work is an attempt to “integrate the shadow.”
What’s wrong with drama, by the way ? Does Sophocles suck ? Or Shakespeare ? No. Their work is profound.
Yes, Nietzsche is a dramatist. He wears many masks.
1 Like
so, what do you think is good?
Thats not about good, it’s about you.
And notice that you have no choice but to decide.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Cool point.
1 Like
Hey, quick question. If you had to respond in a sentence to the statement ‘morality cannot be objective’, what’s your high level response?
That neither can chalk be held responsible.
There’s a category error here. A misuse of language.
Has to do with a ‘transcendental source of values’ which we’re not to discuss now that God has been declared dead.
1 Like
So how would transcendental values or morality be transmitted to us mortals ?
I agree that, at heart, the discussion about objective morality is often an avoidance of this idea.
But even if you can demonstrate that there is a transcendent source of values, how do we identify instantiations of this in our morality? Surely, it all comes down to argument and inference, and not everyone is led to the same conclusions. Thoughts?
1 Like
Well you can begin with the 10 commandments even adding some amendments to it to preclude the existence of god if you’re an atheist. This does not mean that the commandments themselves come from a transcendent god but that they contain moral guidance to the effect of right from wrong.
Or what you ought not to do and in so doing grant permission in what you ought to do.
The question is whether there’s transcendental morality or ideas at all, for there might not be. So moral rules must be designed in such a way that sovereignty, respect, dignity of other beings is afforded to them.
Any supposed “transcendental value” still falls to the open question - ought we do as it says?
Fundamentally, there is no way to decide what to do, apart from making a decision. No algorithm, no divine command, no golden rule, no utilitarian calculus, unless you decide that that is what you ought do.
There is, as @gertie has been patiently pointing out, our situatedness, our being embedded in a world, that necessitates our deciding.
1 Like