Can you, Tom, not give a fuck?
Somehow I think not. Our preferences are involuntary.
We’re embedded in making these fucking decisions, and forced to muddle along.
The difference with Tim is the implied Divine Guidance, which is in the end no more than a power move. Keep in mind that to accept divine guidance as morally authoritative is already a moral act performed from within the practice.
Well, what if I give a fuck about the wrong things (racial purity, eugenics)? How do we determine what things we give a fuck about are correct?
If all we have is conversation and a putative set of agreements then you can see how some people would find this unsatisfying if not bereft.
@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus as I understand him is arguing that there are moral facts and that these can be identified using reason. Is this correct, Tim?
This has been a long road of getting into the weeds on reason, meaning, teleology and Hume’s guillotine.
We seem to have arrived at two positions. Neither of which seem inherently satisfying (to me).
Yes! Our existence is in this view tragic!
So will we be honest about our predicament, or pretend that what we ought do is written into the universe?
You and I can exclude demands for racial purity on grounds of coherence and consistency - what counts as a “race” cannot be clearly evidenced, our ethical concerns extend to all humans regardless of trivialities such as skin colour, and so on. That is a part of the discourse.
You’re right, it’s not satisfying. but it might be what we have to deal with.
Yes, but there are true moral sentences only if folk ought not [kick puppies], which you have not shown to be true.
Perhaps, but that one holds that a sentence that expresses a preference is true is not that one holds that a moral sentence is true.
The moral nihilist accepts that “I prefer that others not kick puppies” is true but does not accept that “kicking puppies is morally wrong” is true.
So it’s not an argument against moral nihilism.
Then you’re not engaging with the discussion, which concerns the truth, not pragmatism.
Perhaps you are beginning to see what I am doing.
Unless you are trying to argue that a genuine moral nihilist is committed to anarchy, refusing to condemn or condone the behaviour of others, and so that moral nihilists who prefer that others not kick puppies are hypocrites, I’m afraid I don’t.
If you are trying to argue this then I don’t think it works. There’s nothing hypocritical in arguing that a) I/we prefer that others not kick puppies, that b) if kicking puppies is morally wrong then it’s morally wrong even if (a) is false, and that c) nothing in physics or logic allows for the consequent of (b) to be true.
Sure, although pace @Banno I don’t think facts about the human good (e.g., that it is, ceteris paribus, bad to be set on fire, to be wrathful, intemperate, rash; or that it is good to be healthy, to have fortitude, etc.) require anything like divine revelation to know, nor do I think they are particularly unknowable, and this is why lists of the virtues are fairly uniform across disparate cultures. But the differences here seem to lie in upstream metaphysical assumptions.
For one thing, to call all such claims necessarily nothing but a “power move” would seem to reduce the acts of all authorities on the human good, or some element of it, be they parents, mentors, doctors, psychologists, or teachers, to players in power struggles. There would be no real difference between manipulation and indoctrination versus education and formation. No doubt people argue this, hence all the debates over the “ontologies of violence,” but it strikes me a dismal view, and also self-refuting to the extent that it’s advocates fall victim to their own critiques.
As @Tom_Storm is astutely pointing out, on your view it is much worse than this. On your view not only is there no one-size-fits-all moral argument (a strawman, by the way), but there are no moral arguments at all! That’s why you have not presented a single argument for a moral truth in 600 posts.
On Banno’s view morality and ice-cream-preferences are exactly the same insofar as neither are argument-apt. In fact neither are truth-apt, but Banno equivocates by calling evaluation “truth.” Anything that is not possible to argue about is not subject to truth.
Again, this is a mild variant on “might makes right.” It is simple majoritarianism, where whatever majority of people happens to hold the same non-argument-apt beliefs gets to impose their preferences on everyone else. Tom already pointed to the outcome of this when speaking about reducing “truth” to intersubjective agreement:
As you rightly point out, the whole point of moral philosophy and ethics is to present moral views that are substantive and persuasive. When @Banno pretends to be engaged in ethics, but he does not ever attempt to offer a persuasive or even valid argument, he is not really engaged in ethics. He has nothing substantive or persuasive to present.
Now Banno has admitted this, and he says he is doing “metaethics” instead of ethics. What that usually means is, “I am talking about ethics rather than presenting anything at all that could be used to adjudicate different ethical viewpoints.”
As @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus pointed out, Banno is effectively a moral nihilist. He says he believes ethical “truths,” but it is clear by now that he does not (and he has even admitted that his “ethical truth” is different from a standard account of truth—it is grounded in nothing more than the idea that people have preferences). He is just following his age, for much of contemporary philosophy is nihilistic vis-a-vis morality. Banno’s subjectivism+consensus is but one flavor of the now-popular moral nihilism.* When an age falls into moral nihilism they naturally pivot over to “metaethics,” where “metaethics” is taken in the specific sense which actually precludes ethics altogether.
* And Banno’s subjectivism+consensus is just a particular outgrowth of liberalism. It flows from the idea that we cannot argue about values or morality and therefore the whole of morality is nothing more than a matter of political consensuses. Indeed, it is not even a matter of converting people to your political view. All you can do is try to find people who already hold your views, for argument and persuasion are not possible.
I think the proper dividing line for the genus of views that @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus or I belong to was delineated in this post. In a word, it is the difference between people who believe that normative ethics exists and people who do not believe that normative ethics exists.
(Usually it is seen as the difference between moral realism and non-realism, but @Banno’s highly confusing use of “truth” is obscuring that distinction. He tries to make himself someone who believes in ethical truths without believing that there is any ethical normativity. It would be like saying that I believe in mathematical truths, but I don’t believe that any argument or persuasion can really occur in the field of mathematics.)
I think what you’d have to say is that for the moral nihilist there is no possibility of moral persuasion, and therefore the moral nihilist has recourse to nothing beyond coercion.
For example, you are claiming that a genuine moral nihilist can condemn the behavior of others. But to condemn behavior is at the same time to hold that the behavior is wrong. Given that the moral nihilist does not believe that any behavior is wrong, they are not able to condemn behavior. In order to maintain such a thing one would have to devise an equivocation on “condemnation” (just as @Banno has done with “truth”).
We could set aright what Banno has been mucking up around “T-sentences”:
So if Jen thinks it is true that 2+2=4, then Jen is committed to truth-aptness in the domain of mathematics, and she is also committed to the possibility of genuine argument in the domain of mathematics.
To the point above, if Jen condemns the rapist for his rape then she is committed to truth-aptness in the domain of ethics (and this presupposes that to condemn X involves holding that X is wrong). In other words, when Jen does that she is also committed to the claim, “There are right and wrong behaviors, and rape is a wrong behavior.”
This is a move to the level of commitments. The person who is committed to moral nihilism is committed to the belief that nothing is right or wrong. The person who condemns others is committed to the claim that some things are wrong. Therefore the person who is committed to moral nihilism cannot consistently condemn others.
(What’s interesting here is that in his early critiques Michael was able to distinguish a more general critique of Banno’s logic from a critique based in Michael’s idiosyncratic distinction between “moral” and “practical,” but at this point those two critiques have flowed together. He is effectively saying that the would-be moral nihilist is “morally” hypocritical but not “practically” hypocritical.)
This doesn’t make it weak theory. You’re 100% right about emotions, and this also applicable to most people’s moral positions(even the religious). They run in concert. There’s nothing “Weak” about this. It just is, or isn’t, the case. It may be that it makes it weak for you which would, ironically, be a emotionally motivated take. That’s fine.
In any case, I disagree. Hedonism essentially just claims that humans are motivated by avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. I’d think what you’re pushing on is utilitarian hedonism. That’s fine. But a clearly irrational theory, anyway. The Repugnant Conclusion seems to suggest so. On it’s face, hedonism is just an unncessarily restrictive emotivist take (that is, though, to assume that pleasure and pain themselves are emotionally unified experiences… i.e pain is “bad” emotionally for the experiencer and vice verse).
This is an altogether hyperbolic statement, but I’m not really disagreeing. I’d say that’s right, and the job of religious has been to hijack that motivational process. Often, reducing all emotional motivation to fear.
We’re done here.
That’s not what you claimed earlier in this conversation. You specified that there was a proper way for a human to be, and that variation from that was what constituted being “bad”. That is what was found objectionable, and what @Tom_Storm objected to using disability and sexual orientation as examples.
What you have said here is a long way from your usual essentialism, much closer to Foot’s position, and indeed, like my argument, the " fairly uniform across disparate cultures" is the very appeal to agreement I’ve proposed.
If you have indeed dropped your essentialism, we may be quite close to finding agreement.
Leon, as is his habit, continues to misrepresent what I have said.
Moral nihilism is the view that there are no moral truths. The grain of truth here is that ethical truths are not found in the way we find physical truths. The reason is that we find out how the world is by looking around, but that is not how we find out how the world might, or should, be.
What I’ve shown is that despite there being no moral truths in the way supposed we do have preferences, and we can reach agreement. Hence the need to engage in ethical deliberation.
the moral nihilist still has to participate in a community.
Ergo, he believes in normative ethics. Or in other words: ethics. It’s merely the idea that there are better and worse ways for a human to be. You don’t believe that. You don’t think there is any normative way to measure your “preferences.”
If there is no hierarchy or normative theory of the emotions, then who cares? Who cares if someone reduces all emotional motivation to fear? Or to shock value? Or to sadism? Or to anxiety?
On your view there can be nothing at all wrong with that. “Religions reduce all emotional motivation to fear” cannot be the ‘dig’ against religion that you wish it to be. Your theory has you shooting blanks.
I agree that if he has moral intuitions, then the moral intuitions exist, regardless of how they came to exist. However, this doesn’t argue against how morals are not objective.
Right. And I think this is a critical point. Which brings me to my next points (all very basic so far)
@Leontiskos Are there forms of moral realism you believe to be more inadequate than others? For instance, is there a minimalist realism view that you think is passable?
I remember you mentioned natural facts as a foundation some weeks ago.
My brief understanding is that moral facts are grounded in facts about human beings, such as needs, capacities, vulnerabilities and the conditions that allow us to flourish. So, morality isn’t something mysterious or separate from the natural world, but grows out of the realities of human life.
So, and apologies if this has been covered in some of the earlier “into the weeds” discussions, the obvious challenge is explaining why this should matter morally. Even if we knew every fact about humans, it’s not clear why those facts should create obligations. In other words, how do we get from “this is how humans are” to “this is how humans ought to behave”?
So as I udnetand it Foot takes Aristotle and maintains a secular focus. I’m not sure if her response counts as teleological - is it soft teleology, perhaps? Foot seems to argue that there isn’t a sharp divide between “is” and “ought” as per Hume. The norms are already built into what our life-form is, so once you understand what a human being is, you already have the basis for saying what counts as good or defective for that kind of creature.
To me this seems to be working hard to stay out of transcendent space. How convincing do you find it?
I would think @Banno’s argument works against the naive nihilist who both asserts “x ought not be done” and “there are no truths as to what ought to be done.” This would be a performative contradiction.
But someone like Mackie is going to make a distinction between the pragmatic usage of first-order moral language and higher order understandings of moral facts, or the nihilist might claim that such statements are not truth-apt, etc. So, the entire argument seems to hinge on the opponent accepting this framing.
Nevertheless, the fact that the values anti-realist is invariably involved in a sort of performative contradiction is a strong one. It’s just that this point can be pushed far stronger through various observations about the human good than through simply asserting a particular formal translation of the anti-realists verbal utterances.
I’d draw an analogue to free will debates here, or eliminitivism. Invariably, the person who denies free will or “folk” notions of consciousness ends up invoking the language of both. But, while pointing out the apparent performative contradictions involved in this is fair game, it is only so strong a move on its own, since they have their own explanations for why this must be so, and their own formal translations of such utterances.
I’d say the part that tends towards nihilism is that there is absolutely no linkage between:
“You must affirm that there are at least some moral truths, on pain of contradiction,” and the truth status of any of the moral truths affirmed by individuals or communities. There is no clear relationship between these truths and what is affirmed, and the way norms are derived and enforced is utterly divorced from the truth of any “moral facts” (or at least there is no clear relationship between them) so that the result is a system that is functionally nihilistic.
Doesn’t any realism presuppose this? If a system declares that it can make no judgement about what is better or worse, being a Ted Bundy or Adolf, or a Saint Francis or Mahatma Gandhi, what exactly is it “realist” about?
@Banno and @Leontiskos I’m sure many of us learn a lot reading both of you, particularly when you disagree. Dialogue like this is a rich way to understand philosophical ideas. While this may not be my business, is there a way you can both be more civil, perhaps even charitable with each other? I find myself reading some wonderful, stimulating content and then suddenly we’re plunged into a high school level of rhetorical disparagement. Is this philosophy? 