Yes, indeed. If one has preferences - any preferences - then one holds that certain sentences are true - exactly those sentences that express the preference.
That’s not hard. Yes, for any particular preference it remains open for one to say it is false; so the next half-step: we all have preferences. Even nihilists. SO yes, “If no such antecedent is true then there are no true evaluative sentences and the moral nihilist is correct”. But even nihilists have some preferences. Hence even for nihilists there are true sentences expressing a preference.
Just so. But irrelevant. Our agreement licences communal action, not truth; the argument indeed “sidesteps the truth”, the point entirely.
In a nutshell, we don’t need to agree on why kicking puppies is unacceptable; just that it is. From there, we can move on to stoping pup-kicking.
It is not a knock-down anti-nihilst refutation, just an argument that even nihilists might accept the need for communal sanction.
Not really. Moral nihilism is usually taken as the view that there are no moral truths. They might think all moral claims are false, after Mackie, or that they are not truth-apt, after Ayer; or something else. it doesn’t matter.
What I’ve shown is that even so, folk have preferences, that the preferences point to action, and that we can act.
Anyone who has preferences is committed, by simple disquotation (the T-schema), to there being true sentences that express those preferences.
Folk - including nihilists - have preferences.
Therefore folk are committed to some true evaluative sentences.
In practice, we don’t need to resolve any moral dispute about why kicking puppies is wrong. If we agree that it is, then that this is enough to ground communal action.
We use the true evaluative sentences that concern what we do, and on which we agree, in order to build our communal preferences.
So far as it goes, the commitment here is quite minimal.
It doesn’t tell us what is right or wrong. So Tim is correct at least there. But I take this as a strength, not a weakness.
I think it does, but it may depend on the belief. As I said, I may sometimes talk about human nature while at the same time having a sympathy for anti-essentialist accounts. I might use religious language and theological frames (e.g., spirituality or a sense of the sacred), yet not be a believer. I think this often happens because we are the product of so many influences and traditions that form part of the fabric of how we communicate. I don’t think any of this causes cognitive dissonance for me, as there isn’t really all that much at stake.
No. You wrote about colonial slavery for the same reason I wrote about Pol Pot - it is a convenient example. But you seemed displeased when I did it and said “the usual suspects” it’s a very small point, I read you as being unhappy and I thought this odd. Let’s move on since it isn’t a key point.
Thanks for clarifying. I guess we’re all products of our backgrounds. Some might say that the point of philosophy is to find ways of thinking that free us from reactive accounts of reality shaped by our experiences, allowing us to engage more fully with the world as it is rather than simply through the lens of our upbringing and circumstances.
Morality interests me because I used to be fond of judging other people’s actions and being scathing about the moral bankruptcy of politics. But I eventually came to think that it’s problematic to judge others unless you believe there is some foundation for doing so.
But I would say that most people do not have a formal moral system. They generally react to the world based on intuitions and feelings shaped by their culture, upbringing, and the linguistic practices of the communities they inhabit.
Yes, I did see that, and I used to do this a lot also. I wonder, though, whether it can sometimes be a way of avoiding engagement with an issue because of its difficulty. My conclusion about most philosophy is that it is extraordinarily demanding. If you really wanted to get to the bottom of almost any question, it could involve a lifetime of study and reading. Even then, the answers to many of our biggest questions may remain indeterminate. And yet, despite that uncertainty, we still have to act.
Ultimately this is the most interesting point. If shooting children for fun is wrong, you’d think we’d all be able to identify why easily and succinctly.
Unfortunately, yes. But again, it doesn’t make it right. What do you think?
I spoke about it here:
The result is in effect a bypassing of moral arguments about what is good or bad or right or wrong in order to focus on the political problem of what to do collectively.
So now, we can move to the politics of Rawls and Nussbaum. But givent he difficulties folk are having with understanding the argument so far, that’d best be kept for another thread, perhaps. Ethical disputes don’t need to be resolved before political reasoning can begin.
It seems to be saying that moral “oughts” do not require any external grounding beyond human practices of expectation and accountability, and once this is recognised, the demand for a deeper foundation is unnecessary.
That’s an interesting idea, but what’s the reason for it; because we still have to act, and theoretical resolution may remain indeterminate?
Yes, there is some conceptual work to be done. Importantly, one’s preferences are of the utmost import. The issue is, how do we deal with them?
A nurse doesn’t need you to answer the question of how you know you are in pain before giving you paracetamol.
Similarly, we don’t need to answer the question of how we know gassing people is wrong in order to agree that it is wrong.
That it is wrong functions as a “hinge”, on which our collective actions can turn.
Is it wrong? Foot and Nussbaum might agree that we hopefully recognise it as wrong, and that there is something amiss in someone who does not recognise it as wrong. They might disagree as to why.
The less radically obvious cases are the ones that bring about the most discussion. Thats were we introduced he dialogical process of making our preferences explicit, and looking for coherent, charitable agreement. And of course, that’s not always possible.
I’m not offering an algorithm that will settle all our disputes. I hope you would not trust anyone who did.
But more than one nurse has decided that people in pain need more than paracetamol and have conducted self-appointed mercy killings to end their suffering.
I have to say I am dissatisfied with this even if it is true: we don’t need to answer the question of how we know gassing people is wrong in order to agree that it is wrong.
Because it seems to me a moral system is largely constructed to educate those folk who do see this as wrong. The very existence of “the law” seems to suggest that people do not, in fact, behave in accordance with moral norms or in harmony without considerable state coercion.
What would you make of someone who did not recognise that it is not OK to gas people? Is there a problem with the moral system that they endorse, or with how they see the way things are?
Well, we live in a world full of folk who hold variations on such views. It doesn’t matter so much what I think of someone, if we all have are competing views with no robust way to set them apart except for some notes on approaches by Wittgenstein.
And to debate moral issues. There are normally all sorts of vigorous disagreements within communities. And people are often converted to new points of view through arguments as to why something is wrong, as can be seen in the history of abolitionism, both in the modern era, and in slavery being largely abolished across most of Europe in the medieval period, despite having been a pillar of the economy previously. In both cases, material conditions played some role, but the main force of the movement was moral and theological (particularly in the earlier case).
So, even on a deflationary behaviorist view that eschews reasons in favor of “public” behavioral outputs, it still remains that fact that discourse and inquiry into morality has been a crucial part of every major reform movement. So either this discourse is epiphenomenal (i.e
people just happen to engage in inquiry and debate when their actions are already changing for unrelated reasons), which frankly seems absurd to me, or there is sometimes (and seemingly often) a strong causal relationship between moral debate, inquiry, education, and formation, and what the “community” finds acceptable.
Now, if someone says that moral education and debate just will be whatever it is going to be, and that is can never be better or worse, or more or less accurate, that certainly strikes me as something that qualifies as “nihilistic.”
Actually, I brought up “slavery” because it’s the example that I’ve encountered as a supposed counter to relativism most often. (An article in Philosophy Now comes to mind, specifically, though I forgot the author.) I brought up “colonial slavery” in particular, because I think that’s the reason its a talking point, these days. This is a hypothesis I could be wrong about.
Yeah, I’m sorry aobut my wording here. That’s how I treat myself, so it’s hard to get out of the habit.
Which they interact with according to personality, so that the same upbringing doesn’t have the same result for everyone. Pretty much that.
I wouldn’t actually think that. Stuff that’s obvious to you is the stuff that’s hardest to explain, because you don’t understand how it’s not obvious to others. That’s why I emphasise conflict as where morality is most alive. It’s difference that shapes explanations, by bringing stuff up.
And the “usual suspects” are brought up because they’re not controversial. So, of course, it’s hard to explain why it’s wrong. They’re often seen as pointing towards a baseline morality. But to me they’re just moral routine: hard to explain, because we don’t usually think about that.
A hidden difference of the whys can eventually lead to conflict elsewhere. Be patient and you will learn. The hard way, of course, but I don’t really think it can be helped. We don’t have formal moral systems, as you say, so if we waste time quibbling over details we’re not that sure of to begin with, we’re gassing too many people in the mean time, and neither of us want that, right? (And once we decide what to do, we’ll have to decide how to go about it - that’s a good opportunity for conflict to arise - and to learn more about what we each think.)
Hah. I’d not want to associate with them, and if this is a common reaction, and people actually end up not associating with them, they’ll mostly associate with each other. If they can find others, that is. Which is why what I make of them is problematic. I mean here I have been constructing a “them”, no? Not part of “us”, no.
We tend to distribute like that, though. The default and enclaves/pockets.
People disagree. They also agree. That’s a description of the situation, not an objection to the account given.
Could there be an argument or method that compels agreement on all ethical issues? I don’t think so. And neither do you.
We can look for clarity and precision, in the ongoing discourse in which we are situated.
And again Tim proposes that there must be some cosmic moral fact or all we have is relativism. He misses the middle path, of discourse and hard work; accountability, coherence-seeking, and dialogical expansion of ethical concern constitute the standard of better and worse.
No need for “cosmic” there, “moral facts” will do.
Also, are “accountability,” “coherence-seeking,” and the “dialogical expansion of ethical concern” meta-standards here? If not, then they are merely the “standard of better and worse” just in those cases where the community thinks they are.
Well I have explored a variation of this with @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus several times so it’s not like I’m immune to deflationary approaches (if that’s what this is called)
I suspect Tim comes from a Thomist background, but I may be misrepresenting him. It seems clear that for Tim morality has a foundation and an objectivity that transcends us.
I’m just trying to get to the bottom of both approaches.
I found Richard Rorty at one point who essentially argues something similar to your points: he rejects the idea that there is any neutral, metaphysical standpoint from which moral claims can be justified or grounded. For Rorty moral disagreement is not a matter of uncovering or missing independent moral facts, but of operating within different contingent vocabularies shaped by history, culture, and socialisation. Moral progress, therefore, is not a matter of getting closer to truth, but of expanding the scope of “we” extending solidarity to those previously excluded from the moral community. Contested moral questions are ultimately about which descriptions of people and suffering we are prepared to treat as salient, and which forms of cruelty we are trained to recognise as matters of our concern.
But the question here is why should we give a fuck? Rorty might answer that we are the kinds of animals who have developed over time to care, we experience solidarity. Except for those, many of those, who don’t. How do we determine which view should predominate?
There is no meta-standard; there is just what we do. You demand something from outside our considerations, forgetting that in order for it to be salient, it must already be a part of our considerations. Or put simply, to accept some ethical adjudication is already a moral act.
