@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus@Leontiskos Thanks to both of you for taking the trouble to articulate your views on morality and answering my questions with so much precision.
My main reason for being here is to better understand what other people believe and why, because I have that kind of curiosity.
What stands out in both of your posts is reasonableness and a discipline.
I’m not sure what impact this will have on my beliefs about morality.
My own unphilosophical response to suicide is that, if we can prevent it, that is generally preferable, because people who change their minds are often glad they did not die and go on to live productive and meaningful lives. Amongst other thing’s I’ve worked in suicide-prevention-related roles for some years and have seen this firsthand.
If someone is determined to end their life, they often will. I have a fairly unsentimental reaction to that fact. They made the decision and acted on it. I do not generally ascribe an overt moral status to the act itself. To me, it is primarily an event rather than a moral proposition.
That made me laugh. I will look at your response next.
I should say that I often present arguments that I do not necessarily hold myself. I’m interested in seeing what others make of them and whether there is something more I can understand about the position in question. It’s not intended as sophistry.
I’m not really here to argue in favour of any particular approach, since I don’t have anything resembling an integrated view. But to understand positions, clarification and push back are part of the process. In life, I tend to wing things, and so far that approach has never really let me down.
I also have a disposition that struggles with excessive detail and finely grained points of argumentation, so I’m not well suited to philosophy as a discipline. What interests me more is gaining an understanding of important questions and the range of possible answers people have offered.
Right. A basic theme in Aquinas is desire, movement, and then coming to rest in the object of one’s desire (along with exitus-reditus). These are Platonic themes. You also have the complex, microcosmic mixture of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual aspects of human being (and this is an inheritance from Aristotle). Thus passions become multi-faceted, such as the case where delight can occur primarily in the sensitive faculties (in which case it is pleasure), or primarily in the higher faculties of intellect and will (in which case it is joy), or in the total being (in which case it is beatitude). But the passivity diminishes as you move upward.
Heck, if someone wanted to call “eudaimonia” an “emotion” then they could call Aristotle an “emotivist.” But that sort of move involves a lack of care with one’s sources and with the actual substance of emotivism.
Fair. And from this we can infer that almost any unprovoked harm toward an other person ought not be done, from a push to decapitation.
(And no doubt situational contexts impact upon the above.)
I think 2 makes sense, but I’m not clear why it should be compelling beyond a contingency. By that I mean, it seems a pragmatic response to living in community. And we know that communities work hard to prevent random transgressions from happening in the interest of functioning predictable societies. Is there more than this? (See later)
This is useful and mostly comprehensible, except perhaps some nuances and implications derived from it.
Out of interest (and this is a particularly salient question) would you say for a layperson that 2 is sufficient to base a moral system upon (for an individual?) I have previously subscribed to Rabbi Hillel’s formulation of this, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”
Can you provide a quick sketch for justifying 2?
I think the point of a fact/value sometimes being the same is important. I encountered this through Putnam who said the line between facts and values isn’t as neat as people like to make out. Certainly some descriptions also have evaluative content, cruel, rude, etc. But they are also interpretive and so if I am describing someone as rude, have I read it right or have I projected.
Yeah, those are good thoughts. Justifying the silver and golden rules is an interesting task, in part because they make sense from a lot of different angles and can be justified in a lot of different ways. I tried to avoid that with the first post and instead just stated explicitly that (2) is never justified in that post.
It’s certainly possible. It’s the first place I would go for a “layperson.”
I was thinking about it earlier and I can put down some thoughts when I get back tonight. There are different ways you could go with it. Assuming you think (2) is true, do you have any thoughts about why it is true?
Yeah, I think that’s right. I have read a little bit of Putnam on this. I should revisit that text to get a more contemporary take.
Well this is where I get mystical and perhaps communitarian. Why would I want to do to others what I personally find painful or abhorrent? This maxim intuitively feels right (emotivism?). If I flesh it out, this is connected to respect and “first, do no harm,” and a sense of solidarity that we are all here together and essentially share a common vulnerability as human beings. I also would say that I don’t gain any form of satisfaction harming others and violence generally repels me.
However… in some circumstance I would cheerfully retaliate and be violent if pressed by others. I’m not a turn the other cheek guy in all cases.
Like almost all people, I’ve a product of now and here: my preferences are shaped by culture, upbringing and by Christian education, particularly the parables. We all inhabit an environment that is a kind of bricolage of transcultural and historical influences we cannot really escape.
I’m not sure where I land on the meta-ethical landscape, because I’m woefully under-read. But there’s a question I have about emotivism:
In this thread, when we talk about emotivism, we almost always talk about our emotions about kicking puppies, when it’s about “Kicking puppies is bad”. I think I’m some sort of social relativist, so I feel like emotivism falls short here, but given how unfamiliar I am with the whole meta-ethical landscape I’m neither sure I’m really a relativist nor am I sure I’m not underselling emotivism.
What’s the bundle here? What’s the emotional landscape we’re looking at? There’s the emotions we feel when contemplating the act, the emotions we feel when we watch others do the act, vaguer emotions regarding belonging and self-image (i.e. derivative of what we think our positive reference groups think), structural deduction (I dislike cruelty and kicking puppies is part of that), fear of people capable of kicking puppies (if they can kick puppies what might they do to me?), and so on.
Ethics and morality are ongoing iterative social processes, and our emotional make-up grows while participating: that is our emotions about “kicking puppies is bad” partly derive from the expectation that people around us think so and will think badly of us if we think differently. It’s not quite a chicken-egg relationship; it’s more chaotic, but it’s sort of like that.
Threads like these always choose things like “kicking puppies or babies” or “slavery”, and I think it’s because we don’t expect them to be controversial. They’re convenient topics due to their expected status. Even if some of the people in this thread were closet (or even passionate) puppy kickers, they’d be familiar with this sort of usage in this sort of thread, no?
So I read:
And I’m unsure what to do with this. What is there to accept? I don’t happen to find kicking puppies fun, even though I’ll admit I’ve never tried it. If I saw someone kick puppies with apparent glee, and, horrified, I’d ask them why they would such a thing, and they’d reply “because it’s fun,” I’d definitely accept that they’re having fun (as it’s consistent with what I’m seeing). There’s no such thing as people-independent fun that attaches to acts, no?
And given that, if we think that “kicking puppies is bad”, we don’t want other people to kick puppies, ethics and morality isn’t just about the emotion towards the act; it’s also about the emotion towards the emotion about the act. If someone finds kicking puppies fun, they probably can’t help it, but they can still refrain from kicking puppies. And people who find kicking puppies fun can feel about bad about finding kicking puppies fun. (We see that a lot with, say, pedophiles.)
So how would an emotivist navigate the emotional jungle? If it’s really all about the emotion towards “puppy kicking”, it sounds like the answer is “cut a straight line with a machete.” I suspect it isn’t that simple.
As for me, as possibly a relativist of some sort, if I view morality as an organism, it’s most alive where there’s conflict (say, abortion or euthanasia), while topics like “kicking puppies” are comparatively old, maybe ossified - lending structure, barely active, routine antibody reactions to violations - uninteresting (though its history might be interesting).
How do you define relativism? People describe this variously. Relativism, as I understand it, basically holds that moral judgments are not universally true or false but depend on the values of particular cultures or groups. So it’s not that “no one is ever wrong,” but that what counts as right or wrong is relative to a given framework. So, a culture that believes women are worthless and can be owned as property and a culture that believes women are equal to men would each be judged within their own systems of values, rather than by an external universal standard. Is this what you believe?
Emotivism basically holds that moral claims don’t state facts. So saying “abortion is wrong” is more like expressing disapproval something like “boo abortion” rather than describing a feature of the world. But emotivism is often applied a bit crudely when used to describe certain positions, and there are more developed versions that respond to the standard criticisms made against the earlier version Ayer put forward.
As I understand it, for Stevenson, a moral debate is not a disagreement about objective facts, but a clash of attitudes where each side is trying to influence the other’s feelings and commitments.
I generally avoid the “kicking puppies” version and just get right to it. Is it wrong to shoot children for sport? If it is, tell me why in a way that gives us reason to treat this as a moral directive.
I don’t know, to be honest. Vaguely, I think of it as the opposite of believing in a moral absolute. I’ll go through your paragraph line by line to see where this takes me.
Yes.
Almost yes. My hunch goes down to the individual. I think this may be instructive: I think that moral conflict is the heart of morality - the fallout of conflict is routine. A moral right that no-one questions becomes invisible and not in need of slogans. Basically, I place emphasis on wondering what’s right over knowing what’s right (on the individual level), and thus the role of culture isn’t so much telling you what to do, as providing the framework for working it out.
In other words, we don’t go around chiding slave owners, because there aren’t any. But we do use the word in constructions like “wage slavery” - as a rhetorical move. “Kicking puppies is bad,” has a similar function in threads like this. “Slavery is bad” is routine (and the canonical image we have is that of the recent American version, rather than the more remote Roman or Egyptian versions).
Yes and no. I’d say “what can count as right and wrong is intelligible within a given framework”. We can only begin to understand other cultures via our own, unless we start to participate. We can assume similarity because of situational compatibility (I’d do the same thing, but that I arrive at the action via different modes is hidden), but there’s always the possibility that I’m missing something.
The kicker is that this also holds between sub-groups of one culture, down to the individual level. This is why emphasise conflict: it gives us a more differentiated view.
As a relativist, I don’t ask what is right or wrong in a culture; I ask who thinks what and how sure are they about it and what psychological processes underpin this. For example, people who accuse me (if I call myself a relativist) of being unable to say that slavery was wrong in 17th Century USA forgets that I’m socially situated, too, and they also forget to ask 17th Century slaves if they agree: that is, I as a 20th-to-21st Century Austian can sympathise with slaves over slave owners. It’s not a huge moral accomplishment. There’s no meaningful conflict over this. There’s no cost to doing so. But that’s not a sign of “slavery” being absolutely wrong.
Note that there are terms that include moral wrongness, such as “murder”. Murder is always wrong, but that says nothing about life: it’s always wrong in the sense that bachalors are always single. Someone arguing that killing is never wrong shouldn’t be saying murder is fine: they should say there’s no such thing as murder (i.e. wrongful killing).
By now I hope you can see my take. I’d be asking: to what degree have women internalised this system? Are there elements that question the default setting in that culture? Me disagreeing with that culture from a position of the second culture is impossible until I understand the system, and to do so I need to partially participate in the culture, which means I’d likely gravitate towards pockets of discontent in that culture. But while we might envision the same ends, it’s unlikely we’re “pulling at the same strings”. I might try to be an ally of the “oppressed” (my term), but at some point our projected actions might become incompatible. That is, mixing the cultures might break open what was hitherto unreflected routine.
Mix cultures and morality comes alive. Right and wrong are mostly just motivational ideals, and they might lead to moral routine - the relegating of decision making to habit. (Habit is unreliable in situations of conflict, but life without habit is strenous for everyone.)
Yes, I’ve read that often enough. The problem is that “boo abortion” is a complex bundle (see above) in its own right. So what does that even mean?
I can work with that. But it’s important to note that each side isn’t a monolith, and finding a site to clash over is often not about that particular topic, but about strengthening the internal pressure. The more you can relegate to routine, the less you have to control. (This is often not a conscious process, I think. You want there to be a right or wrong, so you don’t have to always think, think, think and worry. And you also want to be part of your family, circle of friends, the Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society, or whatever else.)
Isn’t “is it wrong to shoot children for sport” just the edgy big brother of “kicking puppies is wrong?”
My point is that this is a pointless moral directive, because hardly anybody shoots children for sport, and those who do have a fairly good idea of the consequences when they’re found out and instead of arguing that they be allowed to do so, they attempt to hide it, no?
I suggest it’s a moral routine that even people who break it don’t try to rectify. Too high a social cost. (And if there was a culture where shooting children for sport was accepted, I’d imagine parents would have the right to protect theirs, or their neighbours… You wouldn’t want to be an orphan.)
Interesting reponses. I have rarely ever had to think about morality and just act. I do most things by intuition.
But I guess we can ask, is this the right way to be? Am I making mistakes by not being more scrupulous? Is it time to examine why I think something is right or wrong?
I think it makes the example stronger because much more is at stake than cuteness. But yes that too.
Agree. But are people somehow aware of moral facts but just don’t recognise them as such? What is the reason we condemn Stalin or Pol Pot, who cheerfully murdered children? The West watches as millions of children die every year from preventable diseases, is this civilisation’s equivalent of shooting children for sport, sacrificing them for prosperity and entertainment?
Surely killing children is wrong, can we explain exactly why this is?
I think this is fairly clear. It’s “Abortion upsets me”. Details not required.
Well it’s sometimes argued that slavery is bigger today than it was 200 years ago, it just looks different. Modern slavery today includes forced labour in agriculture, construction, mining, cargo shipping and fishing, where people are trapped by debt, coercion, or the confiscation of documents, and cannot leave. They are beaten if they resist. This can also include forced marriage and human trafficking, where untold numbers of women and children are exploited, and can’t refuse or escape. But I grant you this latter example is slightly different.
I’ve often held a similar view to this. But do we need to understand a culture in order to understand a justification for an aberration? If maiming and capital punishment are the response to apostasy or homosexuality, do we just say, well, that no doubt makes sense from their perspective, so nothing further to see here? I don’t know about this. Can we really say that moral truth is just a matter of translation, where anything goes as long as it’s intelligible within a given culture?
I guess the extension of this approach could then operate within a culture too. We could say that, since everyone has unique personal experiences through upbringing and education, we shouldn’t judge rapists and murderers, what they do has a logic and makes sense to them. While there is some truth to this, I would not consider this exculpatory (although some might). Thoughts?
An interesting adjacent point to me is that who we are depends to some extent on how we differentiate or align ourselves with others, we build identity (our habitual approaches) by copying or contrasting and it seems to me an inherent judgment and valuation is implicit in who we are right from the beginning.
Well “turn the other cheek” and “do not do unto others” are not the same commandment. Do you see that? Edit: perhaps they are closer than I realized, but I still think there is a significant difference…
One interesting thing about the silver (and golden) rule is that it does not prohibit any material act outright. For example, if one would not mind being punished for a crime then they would not be transgressing the silver rule in punishing others for a crime.
Sure. I honestly think that someone who has sufficient spiritual maturity is able to see the truth of the silver rule directly.
Okay, interesting. Harm is definitely part of the silver rule, although it also goes beyond harm.
Yes, that is one of the approaches I had in mind. As you say, it’s that idea of solidarity, namely the idea that “we’re in this together” or “we’re on a team,” and therefore one should be conscientious towards those with whom one is in solidarity.
A similar one would be a kind of “common cause,” where humans are social animals and therefore the other members of society are valued as being part of the superorganism.
I think both of these approaches require the idea that humans all share in the same nature (or essence), such that what is good for me is roughly also what is good for the other (or that what I would have done to me is what I should do to others). For example, the silver rule does not necessarily hold for other species, such as dogs. I might not want to have my chocolate taken away while I am eating it, but it does not follow that I should not take away chocolate from a dog that is eating it, and this is because what is good for me is not necessarily what is good for the dog. On the other hand, these justifications would hold in limited ways for creatures who belong to the same genus as us (like mammals, for instance).
I realize there is a lot of anti-essentialism that has been ground into TPF, but most people would not find this controversial. Your sentence that, “we essentially share a common vulnerability as human beings,” is essentialist through and through without intending to be. Are there justifications that avoid essentialism? Possibly - I’m not sure. The anti-essentialists seem to prefer something like the “Platinum rule.”
I guess the basic way I would justify it is by saying that we understand through experience that other people are like us, with the same sorts of needs and desires. Like things should be treated alike. It would be odd to think that two things which are alike should be treated in wholly different ways. For example, if there are two perfectly good apples, I will not eat one and throw one out. I would only treat them differently if the two apples were different, such as if one was good and one was rotten.
Any society must account for all sorts of people. Do you have a problem with your way of life? If no, what reasons would you have to change. I mean we could muse: maybe you get by on intuition because you’re well integrated and don’t constantly run into people telling you off. Maybe you’re kind of a blockhead, always sure of himself, forcing other people to live around you. Morals is what you can get away with; ethics is how you justify yourself when you get caught.
So what’s at stake about kicking puppies is cuteness? I don’t want to hurt puppies; I don’t want to hurt childres. Not much of a difference to me. How about “shooting rapists for sport”? It’s morally more interesting, and thus less useful for people who wish to demonstrate moral facts. But there’s a potential throughline here; a throughline not everyone has to follow.
Mentioning the usual suspects and using words such as “cheerfully murdered”. Let me re-write the sentence:
“…who self-righteously killed…”
That’s a different way of condemning, no? It shows an attitude that differs.
Do any of us know their emotional states? Do we need to emphasise the wrongness by using “murdered” vs. “killed”? When are we called out for our wording? How about:
“…who casually ordered the execution of children…”
We participate in a variety of social narratives, many compatible, like a social bouquet of condemnation. Thus:
We rarely need to and this is why we don’t know how to explain this. The obviousness is the result of the lack of opposition. I’m sure there are plenty of theories: vulnerability and defenslessness, protecting your seed… But once you collect them you’ve got the task to tell motivational reason from ex-post rationalisation, and that’s never easy.
This is the full paragraph of which you quoted the first line:
See the word “wage slavery”? See how I said that the “canonical image” is the recent American slavery? The term has a history, and is available for rhetorical effect. We can try to direct some of the misgivings from one particular social institution to another. Is forced marriage slavery? Is online piracy theft?
Theoretically we could create a supertype and see what the various institutions have in common. But what we’re really after when we do this is a transferral: We all agree that that behaviour over there (routine morals) is bad, and we should all agree that this behaviour over here is just as bad. It’s skin-deep. We express that something we’re more emotional invested in, because it’s here and now, is just as bad this thing we all agree that this thing we all routinely agree is bad, but are less emotionally invested in (because it’s routine).
Out of time. I’ll just quote myself again:
Step back and look at yourself and the other as a instance of conflict. Don’t exculpate, but procede with the knowledge “where” everyone is (in the moral landscape, not a time-space co-ordinate). It helps with strategy, for one. But beware, you might learn things about yourself you didn’t want to know.
I recognise this. If you knew me, you’d know that I hold essentialist, theological, and realist views, even though I am not a necessarily believer in any of these. Which is why I say I am not integrated. But I tend to think that for many of us what we think is true is not necessarily how we act.
The long history of using puppies in such arguments is that they are a surrogate for the vulnerable. I prefer to skip past the polite analogue and get to something serious. Children. If someone kicks puppies, I think they are cruel. If they shoot children for fun, I think they are sociopaths.
Not really. Many people would see the above as common sense.
Usual suspects? Who else would we mention? Should I have mentioned Mengistu Haile Mariam, Francisco Macías Nguema, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Mobutu Sese Seko, Rafael Trujillo? Then people would probably have to look them up. And I wrote “cheerfully” because it seems they made a happy, willing, and positive decision to have others killed. This was not an attempt to guess their internal state of mind. But even if they were unhappy to have others killed, the example remains unchanged. The point is some people will not stop at killing children to have their way.
You might also note that neither Pol Pot nor Stalin personally killed children. They were killed on their behalf by goons acting under their regimes. Yet we have no difficulty attributing moral responsibility to them.
We can unpack almost any statement into incoherence if we focus on individual words at the expense of the overall meaning.
Sounds like you don’t have a moral justification not to kill children. Will you venture to try to provide one?
The usual suspects? Your justification here is why I mention Pol Pot. But I think it is important to recognise that slavery is very much a current problem, and I thought it worth mentioning since you said it isn’t happening today. Sure, it has a contemporary form, but the themes remain - loss of freedom, coercion, violence, debt bondage, trafficking, etc. We don’t need to get into this since it is an aside to the main issue.
If a) most folk think that we ought not kick puppies then b) most folk think it is true that we ought not kick puppies
If (b) is true then there are true evaluative sentences
(a) is true
Therefore, (b) is true
Therefore, there are true evaluative sentences
Argument B
If a) most folk think that we ought not kick puppies then most folk think it is true that b) we ought not kick puppies
If (b) is true then there are true evaluative sentences
(a) is true
Therefore, (b) is true
Therefore, there are true evaluative sentences
A2 is false and B4 is an invalid inference.
As it stands you simply cannot get from “most folk think it is true that we ought not kick puppies” to “therefore, there are true evaluative sentences”.
That’s not what the nihilist supposes. As the OP says, “I don’t believe there are any objective rights or wrongs”. You might not like the word “objective” but its use serves a purpose, and to strip it from the claim is to misrepresent the claim.
That the material conditional “if kicking puppies is (un)acceptable then it is true that kicking puppies is (un)acceptable” is true is not that there are true evaluative sentences. There are true evaluative sentences only if antecedents like “kicking puppies is (un)acceptable” are true.
That the antecedent being true “remains open” is precisely the point of the discussion. If no such antecedent is true then there are no true evaluative sentences and the moral nihilist is correct.
That we agree that something is true does not entail that it is true, and so your direction isn’t from “popularity to truth” or from “truth to action” but from “popularity to action”, which sidesteps the truth (and so the discussion) entirely.
That’s not an argument against moral nihilism, because the moral nihilist doesn’t claim that we can’t or don’t “construct communal behavioural expectations”.
The moral nihilist argues three things:
The moral sentence “one ought (not) X” is truth-apt
If there is some X such that the moral sentence “one ought (not) X” is true then one ought (not) X even if everyone believes or acts otherwise
There is no X such that the moral sentence “one ought (not) X” is true
An argument against moral nihilism must argue that one or more of these are false. The moral non-cognitivist argues that (1) is false, the moral relativist and subjectivist that (2) and (3) are false, and the moral realist that (3) is false.
Unless you are arguing for moral relativism, such that “most folk prefer that we kick puppies, therefore we ought kick puppies” is a valid inference, it’s not clear which camp you fall in, or the relevance of “constructed communal behavioural expectations” to the discussion.
Right. It is the same problem we started with nearly 500 posts ago.
The OP claimed that there are no moral truths, you objected, he asked you to explain why there are moral truths, and you have been deferring that question for almost 500 posts. Michael’s most recent question is just another variant of the OP’s question. It is the same thing I noted:
You keep saying things like, “If X, then there are ethical truths,” and then you insinuate that you have shown that there are ethical truths. But you never justify the antecedent of your conditional, and when it is pointed out that your antecedent really has to do with thinking there are ethical truths, or believing there are ethical truths, or evaluating that there are ethical truths, you try to deny that as well.
Your claim that I misrepresented your argument has gone nowhere for a very, very long time. Many of us understood your argument better than you did, some 500 posts ago. The fact that you keep calling me “disingenuous” strikes me as ironic.
But I’m not sure that makes any sense. To hold X is to believe X, isn’t it? I don’t think belief is some airy thing disconnected from our actions, our behavior, and our arguments. Indeed, in common language to “hold” to something is at least to believe it.
Whereas I would say that if someone says that there is no such thing as water and yet constantly drinks water, then they believe there is such a thing as water (despite their protestations to the contrary). I would say that we sometimes lack self-knowledge, such that we think we believe something that we do not genuinely believe (and our actions bear this out).
But I think the mismatch often involves the moral sphere, where there is both akrasia and self-deception. Further, in the moral sphere there is often a desire to live up to some communal expectation or norm while at the same time falling short and perhaps even secretly questioning whether it is right to follow The Crowd in that matter. We see that sort of thing, for example, when Central Planners try to push an ideology like transgenderism, and the populus becomes conflicted and unstable as a result (because that new moral-societal norm conflicts with their longstanding beliefs). John Gray is an example of someone who speaks to this phenomenon.
Fair enough. Someone can have conflicting beliefs, it’s true. And they can recognize this and experience the cognitive dissonance.
Focusing on (2) for a moment, there are two significantly different approaches that I want to single out, and they have to do with the idea of “retrospect.”
Let’s simplify the idea:
2a. There is some moral sentence that is true even if everyone believes and acts otherwise.
On a “classical” view 2a is true in the sense that everyone who disagrees with the moral sentence would, in retrospect, see that they were wrong and that the sentence was in fact true. Elaborating, the idea is that, given enough time, effort, and fortune, each person could be moved to a different vantage point in which the retrospective claim obtains. That vantage point would itself both be and be seen to be superior to the previous vantage point. “Vantage point” is meant to be very broad, and could involve things like habits, ways of thinking, speculative insights, breadth of experience, logical capacity, affective patterns, etc. The classical view is in no way limited to forms of rationalism, and therefore it is possible (and probable) that the shift of vantage point would not necessarily occur simply by (for example) reading and writing text on a philosophy forum.
An opposed view, which I think is quite popular, denies all this. On the opposed view there is no possibility of a retrospective acknowledgement of the moral truth. For this view the moral truth is somehow per se unknowable by one or more individuals.
This goes hand in hand with the idea that “morality” is undefinable or nonsensical (which is tied to the Kantian inheritance). The paradox is that, for the second group, “moral truth” is translated as “something that cannot be reliably known.” It is understandable to deny the existence of some species of truth, but the uncontroversial error lies in translating the interlocutor’s statement about “truth” as if it were a statement about a per se unknowable proposition. As if the interlocutor thinks they know of a truth which large quantities of people could never come to know even in principle.
First, I’d like to say that when I wrote above post I was in a hurry, and the further down I got, the less I edited the thing. I normally take a very long time to compose a post, and if I’m not happy with the result I don’t post. This time I was drawn between wanting to reply, looking at the watch, and wondering whether to discard the draft and try again the next day (which would have been now.) I still don’t know if posting was the right thing to do.
If we’re going to talk about my moral set-up, it’s complicated. First, both issues are abstract and don’t register emotionally. This is enhanced by the fact that I’ve never witnessed anyone kicking puppies (or dogs for the matter), and I haven’t ever seen anyone shooting children for sport either. This makes both these things not only abstract, but remote from daily life.
Second, I’m not a humanist. Both puppies and children radiate vulnerability in the abstract. As the “is human” aspect doesn’t resonate with me much, and thus - as an example - both examples run to the same end.
Third, even though I’m not a humanist, and the “is human” aspect doesn’t resonate, I’m not a vegetarian, and I’m aware of the implications. Which means I must own being the villain in some respect. I haven’t figured this out, and I’m also aware that not figuring this out helps with the villain in this respect, as habit pulls me forward.
Fourth, I feel this illustrates how deeply rooted in-group/out-group behaviour is within me, too, which in turn makes me more understanding of the various -isms (racism, nationalism, speciesism etc.) around. I don’t approve, which includes not approving of myself entirely, but also not feeling terribly bad about this sort of disapproval (perhaps because cross-species communication is even harder than human-to-human).
Fifth, I think “moral purity” is impossible while living in this world, and I also think that part of this is rationalisation to keep me from trying hard enough: perhaps, I could become a vegetarian?
Unrelated to this strain, I’m fairly easygoing and not prone to violence, and I’m instinctively a little afraid of people to whom violence comes easy. This includes puppy kickers and children shooters. (The moment I have to kill my own meat, I am a vegetarian.)
All of this makes me a little bit of a villain, and a little bit of a hypocrit, and so on. And I think that’s inevitable to some degree or another, and I have no idea how I compare to the avarage, since juging others isn’t something I spend a lot of time and energy on. And I wonder how much thinking this is in some way self severing.
Yes, and that frightens me. I’m being thrown into a world full of violence. (You’re talking to someone who noticed that if you carefully pick up a horsefly as it’s feasting on you and dunk it under water for a short while, then release it [above water] it will fly away in a straight line. Of course, that means it’ll be back for seconds eventually, or it will bother someone else.)
Welcome to my inner life. Maybe you can imagine now why it takes me so long to compose a post. I pasue between sentences (sometimes within sentence), delete, start anew…
If we were actually talking about whether it’s moral to shoot children for sport, I (probably) wouldn’t have done this. But this is a meta-ethical thread, and I think our instinctive (or contemplated) word choices can teach us things about ourselves. What I’ve done to your wordings is an exercise I’m doing to myself on occasion. Remember that you asked me about my “relativism”. This is part of my tool-box. How closely does my word-choice fit my intended meaning, and in what ways does desire for consistency push my intended meaning in an unintended direction? Do I prematurely pocket the 8-ball on the pool-table of morality?
I might attempt this if this was what the thread was about. As it is, I don’t need a moral justification, because nobody here (I assume) really wants to shoot children for sport. That’s an exercise for people who think ethics makes sense out of context. Or that there’s some free-floating essence of don’t-shoot-children-ness out there.
What justifications I’d come up with, would depend on what kind of arguments I’d need to counter, and even then most of the justifications would likely be ex-post rationalisations of something pre-decided. A lot of ethical discourse, I think, is either for diplomacy or for self-assurance.
My justifaction for what? Do you think I’m justifying “wage slavery” for instance? I think I might have lost the thread.
It is certainly important to notice these problems. But here’s the thing: there’s a term we all agree is “bad” and that’s slavery, and if we think one or the other of the above issues is not bad, the gut-reaction rhetorical move is to say: “it’s not slavery”.
But that doesn’t mean that “it’s not slavery” automatically implies “it’s not bad.” It can be a move in the current political attention economy. “Don’t use my term to distract from my problems!” See the difference?
I’m not focussing on moral issues; I’m focussing on moral framing. This is important to bear in mind, if you want to understand my approach to morality. I remember typing (but am to lazy to check if I posted it, too) that moral relativity prepares terms to be intelligible for conflict, not set rights and wrongs. This is part of it. You focus on commonalities; your vis-a-vis focusses on differences: it’s (not) slavery - the mix. Ingredients in the current moral brew. May stabilise into something or may blow up. Who knows?
My meta-ethical principle is “don’t judge others without judging yourself”. My morality expresses differently when I clash with different people. Do I have a core? It’s not that I can’t have judgements. That would be absurd and would preclude morality altogether. It’s that, if I take a step back, what I think doesn’t matter more than what my vis-a-vis thinks. (And as background, I’m Austrian, and growing up a child in 1970ies Austria was being confronted with “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” [“coping with the past”, meaning World War 2 and our contribution of, say, Hitler]; so popular support isn’t quite the re-assuring backdrop for me, it would have been for others. That’s the result, I think, of an interaction effect between upbringing and personality.
So if I don’t find moral certainty in my own opinions, nor in social agreement, where else do I look? It’s not surprising to me that I would end up a relativist of some sort. I stopped looking for certainty and just own my opinions as much as I can bear. I live in the moral wilds.
Even with the edits, neither of those arguments is the one proposed. The argument concerns simple disquotation. We have
Folk ought not kick puppies if and only if “Folk ought not kick puppies” is true.
One committed to the anticedent is committed to the consequent. The whole of the argument is that one who expresses a preference is thereby committing to the truth of that preference. No syllogism is involved,
Consider the alternative, that one thinks folk ought not kick puppies but does not think “one ought not kick puppies” true. This is Moore’s paradox.
