Supposing we do not agree that something is preferable, would we then need to engage in deliberation so as to agree as to why something is preferable?
For example:
Ben: I think slavery is preferable.
John: I do not think slavery is preferable.
You say, " We might need to engage in deliberation in order to agree that something is preferable," but how could Ben and John do such a thing without breaching the question of “why” and engaging in deliberation about why slavery is or is not preferable? How will they agree that slavery is or is not preferable if they do not deliberate on the “why” question?
No, that doesn’t answer the question, because in that quote you are assuming that Ben and John agree. In my post they disagree. If they agreed then that would have been a sufficient response.
That’s the argument I presented: That if we agree, then we can move on. That we could construct much of our communal regulation by looking at those things about which we agree.
Not, as you claimed, that if we agree then it is true.
Rest on that point for a bit. Can you see how it works?
So do you have any answer to the question I asked about Ben and John’s disagreement? It has precisely to do with the question I asked you about ethical deliberation and “reaching agreement.”
You keep wanting to talk about argumentum ad populum. The reason I pressed that with @Tom_Storm is because he said he is “agnostic” on the question of whether intersubjective agreement generates truth. As to your own argument, I believe Michael addressed that bundle of issues quite well and I am wary to retread the same ground. I believe the point about ethical deliberation which we are now discussing gets to the heart of the matter much more quickly, and in a way that you yourself will more easily see.
If our end requires agreement as to what but not as to why, then material agreement would suffice. You obviously see politics as such an end. I don’t find this confusing.
Sure. And I am attempting to have you comprehend the argument that I presented, and which it seems you misunderstood.
Then you have here agreed with the main body of my argument. Can you see this? Do you now understand why it is not an appeal to popularity? Do you now understand that you were not addressing my argument?
Even in cases of such basic disagreement, we have room for discourse. Both parties can set out their reasoning, and look to the other for coherence, contrast, contradiction and so forth. There are indeed issues here.
And of course, the discourse is not guaranteed to come to a conclusion.
Deliberating on “why?” is not excluded by my argument, but set aside in cases of agreement. What is left was sufficient to show that the nihilist must, despite their disposition, engage in ethical discussion. Ethics is unavoidable.
It might be of interest to continue with a discussion of the differences between Nussbaum and Foot, something that Tim and Tom brought to my attention. Perhaps a new thread. This one is well past it’s use by.
I take it this is presenting a deflationary account of moral realism?
You are saying that morality is not grounded in mind-independent facts about reality, but neither is it a case of simple relativism.
You seem to be arguing that morality arises from shared concerns about suffering and wellbeing (in this case, puppies). Moral truths stem from the ethical commitments people hold and apply to one another, rather than from some independent moral realm.
But the question the objectivist wants answered is why we should hold a particular ethical view in the first place? If someone says, “Fuck puppies, I don’t care about their suffering,” what is the response? Is there anything beyond persuasion, social pressure, or an appeal to shared values?
I think this is why many people read this account as a form of subjectivism. While morality is not determined by a vote, it still seems to depend on the ethical commitments a community happens to hold. If a society came to regard puppies as morally insignificant, would there be any sense in which that society was mistaken, rather than just choosing differently? And we used to send 6 year-olds up chimneys…
This seems to be the challenge the moral objectivists would be presenting. Am I misreading this?
I see you have partially answered my question above.
At some point (not now) I may want to step out how this works one step at a time in clear and brief language, with relevant subsidiary comments in brackets alongside addressing issues like the role of deliberation.
My adjacent interest in how intersubjectivity determines practice and what counts as true needs its own thread some time. I suspect the best account of this would be through the 4E framework. But maybe this is too specialised for laypeople.
Not all obligations are equal. Even if it is true that if something is morally wrong then we ought not do it, it is affirming the consequent to infer from this that if we ought not do something then it is morally wrong. A soldier ought brush his teeth, but it’s not morally wrong for him not to, and he ought salute his superior officer, but it’s not morally wrong for him not to, and so even if he ought not harm innocent puppies it does not follow that it’s morally wrong for him to.
The moral nihilist, like the realist and unlike the subjectivist and relativist, believes that moral claims are doing something more substantial than asserting the existence of certain preferences and institutional/social/cultural norms; that if “this is morally wrong” is true then it is true even if our preferences and institutional/social/ cultural norms were otherwise. Unlike the realist, the nihilist believes that this does not — or even cannot — obtain; there are only preferences and institutional/social/cultural norms.
If the subjectivist and relativist can condemn and convince others without believing that there is some X such that “X is morally wrong even if we believe and act otherwise” is true then so too can the nihilist. The fact that the subjectivist and relativist happen to use the predicate “morally wrong” to describe behaviour incompatible with our preferences and institutional/social/cultural norms doesn’t make a difference. It’s not as if the subjectivist and relativist believe in some additional moral “property” that the nihilist denies; they just interpret the meaning of “morally wrong” differently to both the realist and nihilist.
I see your point, and I largely agree with the issue of performative contradiction at play in the nihilists account. However, I am not sure if it can be given such a simple account.
For one thing, might this not be proving too much? If I have a preference for eggplant parm over chicken parm, am I committed to the gustatory truth that the former is tastier than the latter? I already asked this and this was your reply:
But note that, syntactically, what you are claiming are disparate forms of judgement have the same exact form: “x is bad.” As a result, the entire argument relies on our translation of other’s words, i.e., the demand that whenever someone says “x is bad,” in reference to puppy kicking, they mean something quite different from when they say “x is bad” in reference to their meal.
The anti-realist is going to say that all value preferences are of the same sort, akin to “a matter of taste,” (because value is subjective). Thus, your argument either fails through improper translations of people’s intended meaning or commits us to all sorts of truths, a truth corresponding to any preference at all. But if most people don’t take these preferences to commit them to such truths, then our translation starts to seem suspect.
This is, I take it, part of @Michael and @AmadeusD’s objection here, that specifically “moral” preferences are not distinct from tastes, whereas @Tom_Storm’s agnosticism would seem to preclude the assertion of “truths” here, and @Joshs, for other reasons would probably assign a different meaning to the same syntax. Hence, there isn’t wide agreement on the linkage between syntax and belief.
I would say then that the performative contradiction is more difficult to pin down, although it is surely there, since people invariably make appeals to normative standards that go beyond mere taste and power.
I assume you mean how we want things to be, not how they are?
But then “warfarin is bad for rats” and “Socrates was a good man,” are value statements that are prima facie descriptive, and moreover, there is no obvious translation that renders these into statements about how we want the world to be.
Plus, I am still not sure about this collapse of the evaluative and deontic. “I would prefer the eggplant” does not translate to “you are obligated to cook eggplant for us” and clearly “I want Kristen Stewart to be in a romantic relationship with me,” doesn’t commit someone to “Kristen Stewart is obligated to be my girlfriend.”
The English “ought” here is particularly fraught because in philosophy it is often taken to denote obligation (in line with its etymology) but in common usage it is frequently used for mere suggestions re tastes (“you ought to see Swan Lake live”) or even for probable causes (“that ought to fix it”).
Moreover, people can be conflicted about such things. Someone can desire a romantic relationship with someone, and also believe that such a relationship would be bad for various reasons, so that the desire for x doesn’t not entail thinking it is true that x ought to obtain. Lots of people, do to their commitments to political liberalism or other ideologies, will say that “people ought to x,” but then deny that this is obligatory, objective, or a statement of truth. Particularly, those who deny any meaningful epistemic access to such truths, are practically in the same position as those who deny those truths.
Is this nihilism? Well, in the epistemic context the belief that we can never know, even if there is something to know, is still often described as nihilism.
Anyhow, to @Leontiskos’ point, even if we accept the linkage between “all people have preferences” and “preferences (of a certain “moral” character) commit us to truths about how the world should be,” I am not sure how these truths have any relevance to the negotiation of standards being described. So, it seems to me that the utilitarian, the Kantian, the advocate of teleology, etc. will all reject this framing, the extent that these truths never ground ethics, while the nihilist will probably agree to this framing, and agree precisely in the reduction of ethics as practiced to instrumental negotiation and power relations. This is what I mean by “functionally nihilistic.”
With regard to these top-down taxonomies it is well worth noting that we have different groups of people who pretend to be talking about the same thing but are not talking about the same thing (i.e. ethics). Occasionally the equivocation is recognized and put down to the difference between “ethics” and “metaethics,” but this introduces more metabasis eis allo genos within the term ‘metaethics’. More simply, the different groups are very often engaged in hostile translation. The confusion that this generates would be hard to overestimate.
When I presented the argument for self-contradiction some years ago the method was twofold: 1) identify the precise kind of judgment in question (non-hypothetical ought-judgments), and 2) show that everyone does engage in such judgments, even if they deny it. There is a simple way to get around taste preferences, and it is by confining one’s scope to judgments which also apply to the behavior of others. This move is present in @Banno’s posts in seed form. But you’re right: there is no principled way to distinguish taste judgments if all we are going on is the T-schema.
So let’s say everyone agrees to ought-statement P. Everyone agrees that it’s true. That’s not moral realism. Moral realism is the notion that we answer to a higher power than ourselves.
A moral nihilist might happily agree that P is true, depending what it is, but might also suggest that morality is a path of growth and learning that each individual walks.