You might be very good at art, math, etc., compared to me.
I’d suggest that we may be able to avoid moral injunctions of the sort that are often found wanting, and yet a need for what we might better call “ethical” considerations would remain. Ethical considerations would be those that involve something more than merely transactional interactions with others.
So I’m here invoking a differentiation between moral injunctions of the “Thou Shalt…” variety, and ethical considerations, were the wants and desires of others are taken into account in deciding what to do.
There’s good reasons to think that universal moral statements that bind us regardless of our circumstances quickly become incoherent. There will always be circumstances that outstrip any given Universal moral statement. Kant’s prohibition on lying shows this neatly.
While we might well be pleasure-seeking machines, we are also deeply embedded in our communal life. And you are right to draw attention to the tense of our utterances. While your considerations so far have been mostly in the first person, as communal beings we might give pause to consider utterances in the second and third person - that is, how our behaviour affects others, and how the behaviour of others affects us.
What do I want might be a beginning, but being communal actors, we must also ask what do you want, and talk about how my behaviour affects you, and yours affects me.
This leads us to broader considerations, as to how we might expect ourselves and others to behave more generally. This encompass recognising not just my own point of view, but that of the community, and what they might hold as reasonable or acceptable behaviour. While we might spurn universal moral obligations, we nevertheless have what we might at the least call communal expectations.
And I hope that we might agree that such communal values are more than just transactional. At the least, they involve what we might call character.
A story might help here. At an event at a Mar-a-Lago club, an elderly man fell from a stage, hitting his head, bleeding profusely. Trump later said
And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away… You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed colour. Became very red… I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say is he OK.
What do we make of the character of such a person? Not just of Trump individually - we might leave that aside - but of someone unwilling to overcome their own aversions in order to help someone in need?
And I hope that what we might show here is that there is more to our communal interactions than mere transactional reciprocity. That our orientation towards others is important, that a man is of more significance than a marble floor.
This is not yet an argument, of course, but an indication of a direction we might take.
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Yes, but I believe that in those past conversations I would ask you to say precisely what you mean by “morally right,” and you were never able to do so. So “morally right” becomes a non-existent goal post. The person I am talking to will tell me that I must get the ball through that goal post, and they will continually fail to tell me what that goal post is even supposed to be. I see this as the core problem with contemporary moral antirealism. That’s why I focused on this problem in my old thread. (Note that your response was something like, “Yeah, it’s an incoherent goal post. That’s why moral talk is stupid in the first place!”)
In any case, yes: if I see nothing as right or wrong then I cannot engage in persuasion, and “persuading someone towards the best outcome” presupposes that the best outcome is the right goal. Further, as I said, if the emotivist chooses to proselytize he will apparently be shaping the emotions of others to be like his own emotions. I wouldn’t call that persuasion. It is more like sculpting a block of marble into my own image.
At this point I should point out the way D. C. Schindler and others have noted that truth is what frees us from infinite self-referentiality. The caricature says that the one appealing to truth (or “right”) is really just trying to impose his view on everyone else. But in fact this is exactly backwards, as it is the emotivist who has no alternative but to try to impose his emotional ideal on others. Once we remove truth then it inevitably becomes an arbitrary contest of wills and manipulation.
Okay, that’s a fair argument. This looks to be a different form of emotivism. I think you are proposing a theory where most moral utterances are instrumental (hypothetical imperatives), and they are ultimately grounded in a desire for a positive emotional state. I almost want to give this a different name to keep the concepts clear, but nevertheless…
It seems to me that although you say there will be no appeal to “the world,” in fact you are appealing to it throughout. “People being hurt” is a reality, as is “the cost.”
So, taking one example, we have two options:
- I am emotionally averse to car crashes because the financial cost they incur is bad.
-or- - I am emotionally averse to car crashes because I am emotionally averse to financial costs.
In the first case the emotion is justified (and parasitic upon) the avoidance of something which is bad. In the second case the emotion is justified by appeal to yet another emotion, and it is “emotion all the way down.” In the first case the person is emotionally averse to financial cost because financial cost is bad. In the second case the person knows that financial cost will elicit an undesirable emotion, and therefore they try to avoid it. They have no explanation for their behavior beyond the tug of their emotions.
Now you will probably say, “Ah, but ‘bad’ just means ‘a thing I am emotionally averse to’.” But this post is long enough, so I will leave it there. 
I can see this as a thesis, but you’re not an automaton. You make decisions. Your position seems to be that you dont? I’m trying to get any why those decisions are made, consciously. That’s whY i designed a situation where most people probably wouldn’t act because survival instincts tend to be stronger than empathy. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that the evolutionary drive is most likely emotional. Not free-floating impulse.
This is extremely wrong. Morality is the consideration of what’s right and wrong. If those are not motivating factosr (they aren’t for Existism) then there’s no moral calculus occurring and so moral nihilism, on those terms, goes through.
As you see, no he did not. At all.
What are those? And how are they moral? Not all principles are moral. Neither is all behaviour. A moral nihilist does what feels best. That’s not a moral choice. It ignores the moral calculation (because there is no objective one to be made, so why bothere? Hence.. nihilism).
They are not principles. They are emotions. How is this not working for you?
100%
Hmm. Without wading through threads that no longer exist (hehe) my position has always been that “morally right” is incoherent in some really significant sense. It can be used as a fiction, the way i desscribe, but does not tell us anything about the basis for the claim (although, @Banno gives us good stories we can use there, even though he’d reject what I’m saying i think).
Because it’s a fiction. There is no one trying to tell you what is moral so you can reach that goal. That’s actually your job in that discussion. If the other is trying to do so, they’re confused or being a dick (it looks like an older thread got you to see my positoin clearer? Hopefully).
It does not. It just supposes its the chosen goal. I understand from previous conversations you perhaps do not think its possible to have a preference without a moral basis. I think that’s bluntly untrue.
Sure, that’s probably a better way to frame that exercise. The previous conversation we had was about helping someone, in practical terms. “I need to get to third street” “Ok, go two blocks up, three blocks west and you’re there”. Nothing moral in that. It’s instructive. IT doesn’t actually matter why i decided to do it.
That is exactly what moral argument is. Correct.
That’s fair. I think its just a follow-on from the definitional talk about moral statements being expressions of emotion. I think, if so, then this follows. My emotional state, and my desire for some such, is what’s “moral”, motivation-wise. but morality is the wrong word. It is self interest.
That’s not what’s being appealed to, though. I did anticipate this and probably should have shut it down.
What’s being appealed to is my internal emotional state as a result. That people get hurt doesn’t inform the decision/desire. It’s my response which informs that desire (in this case, to avoid). If you do not see this as a legitimate teasing-out, perhaps we see the world differently enough.
Your 1. is incoherent, imo, and ignores the point I’ve clarified above.
2. Is closer, but its actually “I am averse to my negative emotional states. This x causes a negative emotoinal state. I am motivated to avoid it”
This isn’t going to be the only available calculus, though. If a consequentialist calculation gives me an orgasm, i’m going with that (for an extreme example) because its the emotional state it puts me in. Not beucase the outcome itself is somehow morally appealing. It is emotion all the way down (i said turtles in my comment though lol)
I think this is an unfounded assumption, based on the mistake earlier. We can see how it shakes out..
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And my response in the past has simply been to avoid using the word “moral” to avoid a word you deem to be undefinable, but you always seemed to want to bring the word back up:
You are basically saying that you don’t know what morality (or else right/wrong) means, and that I have the burden of proof to explain what it means. I then say, “Okay, I will just avoid that word altogether,” and you object.
If we really wanted to have a serious discussion about these issues, and the word ‘moral’ was unhelpful, then we would just avoid using that word, no?
But in that case there is no persuasion occurring. Your interlocutor has no reason to be interested in your “chosen” goals. “I chose this goal” has no power to persuade.
Similarly, to ground a string of hypothetical imperatives in one of your emotional preferences also looks to have no persuasive power. After all, it’s your emotional preference, not theirs.
And this is an example of the difficulty. You claim that you don’t know what the word “moral” means, and yet you make substantive claims like this (“Nothing moral in that”). If you don’t know what the word “moral” means then I’m not sure how you could be saying anything here. In order to assess whether there is anything moral occurring I would have to know what the word “moral” means.
But an argument is not an arbitrary contest of wills, and an arbitrary contest of wills is not an argument. So this makes no sense. It also has the same problem of being a substantive claim that uses the word “moral,” which you seem to think is a nonsense word.
Okay, good. But that sort of emphasizes my point. Self-interest is by definition not persuasive to others, and therefore an argument grounded in your self-interest will not be persuasive to your interlocutor. In fact it is not an act of persuasion at all so much as an accounting of how your current actions are conditioned by your self-interest. Thus the big problem of persuasion persists.
Hmm, I cop to this but I think you’re misreading hte motivation: We’re talking about morality. It seems to me that if we jettison that to have a discussion about some concept of co-operation, thus leapfrogging the type of questions hte OP is asking, would be to run off the rails. But I concede entirely, its not a great basis for hte kind of chat we’re having. I just don’t think you can “pin it” on me in this way. I agree with you - it just seems to me not using the word “moral” takes out out of the context of the thread (which isn’t altogether bad, but it is clogging hte thread if so).
I very much hope my first reply above suffices. I see and agree with your concerns. My side of the discussion should, rightly, boil down simply to “morality is a description of…” and then give my take. That I haven’t done htis is unclear and makes it harder for you to respond. I apologise. But given my initial take on this, I don’t really see another option. Do you accept that morality doesn’t obtain? I wouldn’t have thought so..
Yeah, totally. That’s why you have to then engage in things like a manipulation - there’s nothing to appeal to except either achievement of an empirical goal (you could imagine giving tips on how to make ice cream, and tips on how to kill a baby in the same breath here - our emotions will tell us which is “good”, not some external standard). It’s denying this that makes people socially pernicious or parasitic to my mind. Those of us who wish others to assent to their political views under the guise of “we don’t debate human rights” are a great example. I get that this is both uncomfortable, and hard to pin-down in words. That may take some more time and writing on my part.
I’m not really seeing what your objection here really is. My position is that in the scenario, I am trying to get someone to do what I want them to do. The suggestion that I cannot persuade someone to do something that I want them to do seems to be a totally bizarre and empty claim. I can, literally, do exactly that, and do daily. IN fact, there are plenty of scenarios where how we feel is the single factor we use to persuade someone to do/not do something.
Mate, no. “moral” is equivalent to “is it right or wrong”. That’s a meaning. It just holds nothing we can action. They are very different denials. I’m not sure If this is something I’ve said before, but it is a utter either misreading or mis-typing (which, if you have examples, I’ll cop to but ask you to remain in the present) to say that I do not know what “moral” means. That I think it does not obtain is a separate issue.
You’ll see that we do(imo), and that there is nothing moral in the scenario.
That’s right, but you’re not quite groking what’s happening on my part, and maybe i should stop trying to be clever(but also, your reduction of “argument” to a logical or reasonable adversarial exchange is a bit unfair - we(people) have illogical/irrational arguments all the time that don’t fit your description. “having an argument” does not entail what you’re talking about and indeed, almost always, statistically, does not): Morality is not a logical argument; It is a contest of competing emotional states cloaked in the costume of “moral positions”. You’re coming closer and closer to the point i’m making: In my view, and that of (as best I can ever make out) the emotivist, is that talk about morality is simply not about an objective standard and instead, the above. This makes most words we use redundant. They talk about an assumption baked into most “moral” discussion that it is an argument in the sense you’re saying. The emotivist understands that to be bullshit. We can negotiate.
Morality is a negotiation between essentially incompatible minds.
False, as noted above. Self-interest is often the defining, tipping-point in a change of mind in the other. I think I understand what you’re getting at, but syaing “I want this more than you” can absolutely motivate someone to desist. In this way, I do not see your final sentence as saying anything about the world, or a realistic take on what happens when we appeal to our self interest when treating with others. And, clearly, it is their emotional reaction to our appeal which has them motivated to change course in whatever way. Emotions are dictating these decisions. That we dress that up in terms of “moral position” is a social norm. It feels shit to tell someone “I don’t want you optimate happiness right now, becaue I would prefer my own”. we’re taught that this is unacceptable (based on what, I couldn’t tell you. Its doctrinal almost).
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Where next.
An old parable of mine concerns a case were a teen, overly angry at a football loss, kicked a small puppy.
Now this might be a better example than Trump, not just because it bypasses the politics, but because it can be framed so as to remove considerations of reciprocity, communal expectations, and transactional approaches; we can say that the Pup is a stray, not owned or valued individually by any one involved in the story. The Pup is not in a position to help or harm the teenager, so there is no further transaction.
Most folk would I hope agree that kicking a pup out of anger is wrong. And given the structure of true statements, that seems to commit them to saying that it is true that kicking a puppy is wrong.
Can we move from that to it being true that one ought not kick a pup out of anger? If it is wrong to kick a pup out of anger, then it seems only a question of grammar to say that it is true that one ought not kick a puppy out of anger.
And this seems not to involve any universal moral law, or divine command, or evolutionary imperative or contractual agreement.
So it seem that the suffering of the Pup matters. And that it matters is not a conclusion of some moral argument that appeals to things outside of the incident; but just to a recognition on our part that suffering, anywhere, is best avoided.
I’m not sure I would agree that you ought not kick the puppy objectively.
I want to be very clear here, and make what I take to be an important point.
What is the word “objective” doing? it’s not a word I used anywhere in my reply.
And if it causes you to baulk at agreeing, what happens if we just drop it?
So, can we agree that one ought not kick the puppy?
(addenda: Being candid, the hope here is to simply bypass a whole epistemic quagmire of what is objective and what is subjective by setting it to one side, and seeing were that gets us.)
I find this thread entertaining. 
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Even if “most folk would hopefully agree”? And if the moral truth is “only a question of grammar”?
Yeah, I don’t see any valid inferences occurring in that post. It looks like another case of argumentum ad puppulum.
well, I put objectively just to try to establish what was meant by ought, but I see what you mean. Either way I wouldn’t agree that one ought not kick the puppy.
Really? So puppy-kicking is ok by you? Would you kick a pup?
Somehow I think that unlikely. People who kick puppies in order to relieve their frustrations are not nice people. I, and perhaps most folk, might choose not to associate with them.
The case for objective morality is really simple when you just grant a simple axiom.
To start with an analogy with medical nihilism: there’s no objective metric to consider death to be worse than life. Following your same argument it can be said that considering life better than death is just an "appeal to majority’, isn’t it?
Therefore there’s no objective reason for a medic to apply a treatment that would certainly save a patient’s life, because life is not objectively better than death.
Hume argued that you cannot derive an ought from an is, so even if it is the case that the treatment would save a patient’s life, that doesn’t mean a medic ought to apply that treatment.
That is exactly what you are arguing but for morality, isn’t it?
if suffering is foundationally wrong based upon direct experience, what else is of that class? The deprivation of life, liberty, or property? What else might we claim is readily apparent?
Okay, good, but to say, “We’re talking about morality” itself presupposes that we know what we’re talking about and that we have a definition of ‘morality’. But that’s the very thing that’s missing.
Usually if someone is making a point and uses a word that their interlocutor does not understand, the interlocutor would question them and they would explain precisely what they mean by the word. So if you are giving a critique of morality I might say, “I don’t know what you mean by that word. Can you define it or tell me precisely what you are critiquing?” Or if I am arguing for morality, and that word is unclear, then I would point you to my thread in the archives where I define a moral judgment as a non-hypothetical ought-judgment. That’s what I have done in the past, even going so far as to drop the word ‘moral’ altogether.
Now some people might want to argue over contentious and undefined words, and we have seen that occur on TPF for pages and pages. But I don’t want to do that. If I don’t understand what the central terms of our discussions mean then I don’t think the discussions will go anywhere.
But is that true? Why would your feelings be persuasive to another person? Don’t your feelings guide you because you feel them? And I don’t think other people feel your feelings, do they? I don’t see how telling someone how you feel will persuade them (unless you are implicitly threatening them or something like that).
Okay, but how does a “contest of competing emotional states” occur? Does each person just do their darndest to try to make the other person’s emotions conform to their own?
For example, suppose you are excited and I am chill, and you want me to be like you and I want you to be like me. So I strap you down and inject you with a mild tranquilizer, thus making you chill. In that case have I won a “moral argument”?
…and so if I successfully manipulated your emotional state with the tranquilizer to achieve my empirical goal, I have found moral success? I have won the moral argument?
It sounds to me that you think some things are bad (without scare quotes), like being “socially pernicious or parasitic,” or getting “others to assent to their political views under the guise of ‘we don’t debate human rights’.” At the same time, you only think these things are bad because of the way you emotionally react to them, right?
But classical morality is about transcending emotions to one extent or another (or else ordering them rightly). This goes hand in hand with the rearing of children, who are highly emotional and need to be matured in such a way that they stop giving so much weight to their emotional responses.
For example, the toddler has a tantrum and the father places him in “timeout.” He talks to him, provides him with physiological ways to calm himself down, explains to him that he will end up making poor and regretful decisions if he goes through life in an unrestrained emotional state, etc. Now apparently on your view this is just the child’s emotions vs. the father’s emotions, each trying to manipulate the other to satisfy their emotional needs. Neither one is right. Neither one is wrong. It’s just emotions all the way down. That almost sounds like a conspiracy theory to me — this idea that it’s all really about emotions and that’s all there ever is.
All religious and moral traditions would find such an idea bizarre, but I am thinking especially of Buddhists and Daoists, who see the emotions as a kind of infantile outer shell of our being. Of course all of these traditions would grant that the vast majority of human beings are infantile slaves at the mercy of their emotions, but the whole point is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The point is that the father knows something the child doesn’t. The father is right and the child is wrong, and the child will suffer immeasurably if he does not learn.
So I don’t deny that the emotivist is driven by emotion. The emotivist strikes me like someone who is born into slavery, and who adheres to a doctrine which states that slavery is the most one can hope for. He is a slave to his emotions and he convinces himself that this is the best—or only—way to be. After all, everyone is born a slave to their emotions, and most people never grow out of that, so it’s an appealing doctrine.
Incidentally, Plato understood this at a remarkable depth. He understood that the passions had the capacity to set up their own kingdom in the underworld, declaring themselves kings and queens. He also understood that it tends to occur in democratic societies, where rule depends on swaying an emotional electorate. As soon as someone is convinced that everything is emotion, they have subtly given themselves license to indulge themselves and their emotions in whatever way they please. Once that happens it will materialize. Their whole life will become purely driven by emotion. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and one that is easy to maintain for 80 or 90 years in an age such as our own. So if you ever have kids I wouldn’t recommend baptizing them into your emotivist philosophy. 
I am sorry but this is absolutely wrong.
Morality is about the individual saying to the wider group that if you do or simply don’t condemn doing the thing that they call immoral, they will do their best to impose negative consequences on you. Once you get a critical mass of people doing this you get morality.
Believing in morality has two 3 massively positive effects. 1) you are not sanctioned by your community for ether not being sufficiently deferential to there’s morals and you are less likely to be sanctioned for the immoral act. The sanctions imposed can be evolutionary very problematic especially in none modern western societies. 2). It means you are more likely to not live in a society where rape, murder and theft is common which translates to reproduction 3). Your society is likely to be more functional meaning it is more likely to be successful meet challenges such as failed harvests and competition.
I have focussed on morals but same arguments work for ethics in general.
Immaagion two species of human identical in every way except one of them is capable of ethics and morality to their own species of human and the other isn’t. If you fast forward 1000 years, which one of them is more likely to still be there? If you imagine somebody in Hunter gatherer tribe who happily went round telling people if both ethics and morality of bullshit who are they gonna get married to, how many children are they going to have, might they not get kicked at the tribe? Add a company I once worked out I had to write an anti-discrimination statement as part I’m getting the job. I am thinking that if I wrote that morality doesn’t exist and ethics including as it relates to discrimination also doesn’t exist and as a result, I’m fine with discrimination I would not have got the job. To be clear, I am not okay with discrimination, I wrote that and got the job and that job has allowed me to feed my children who are my evolutionary legacy. If I didn’t think the rape people morally repugnant My wife wouldn’t have had children with me.
Obviously, there are people who have a low commitment to certain ethical standards and this can under certain circumstances have some evolutionary benefit, but so can having or atleast espousing some ethical and moral standards.
You’re making it up. It’s a just-so story with no actual cases cited, other than what you imagine must be the case.
Consider the variation in the food that people eat. My grandad would love tripe he would boil it and eat it and it grossed me out. I like really spicy food. My wife doesn’t some people eat insects I don’t. Despite this variation, I think it’s fairly obvious but we evolved to eat food.
You can even look at skin colour I mean you’ve got some pretty dark skins out there and you’ve got milk bottle white albinos. Just because there’s a variation and skin colour does it mean that there’s not a genetic component?
So there’s actually lots of reasons why people would have different ideas about morality and ethics and it still be evolutionary based. One of them is that people will have different genes that may well affect their propensity to believe in and follow moral norms.
Also, we are quite likely evolved to pick up the morals of the people around us in society as a general rule. Same as Food preferences but like Food preferences they will also change overtime as well in the process known as cultural evolution. I think you would argue that we are basically evolved to be programmed with the ethics of societies or groups that we attach to at particular receptive times in our lives. The other reason could be that it is evolution really good to have some variety. Let’s say the rule is you fight in a village war and it considered ethically good to be brave. One of your children turns up to fight any other child runs away and hides. No, no matter how the battle turns out one of your children made the right choice. You see this kind of effect with HLA genes present in infectious disease to your immune system. If you have descendants with a variety of HLA genes there’s a higher chance that at least one of your children will survive a pandemic.
I think in relation to this, I will quote the Willie Nelson song. I have seen all of the world I care to see.
“Seeds that are growing in love less gardens, Will their fruits bitter be”
Places to say individuals that are genetically different that have different examples that go through different things in their life thousands and millions of different experiences and see different Will act wildly different.
The part of it about the two tribes is a thought experiment I was obviously inviting you to participate in. Maybe it’s beyond your capabilities.
I am obviously making an argument that there is very good reason to think the ability and willingness to engage with ethic norms is evolutionary important. It’s actually rather obvious if you read what I wrote.
If you want a reference “ https://www.uv.mx/personal/tcarmona/files/2010/08/Dobzhansky-1973.pdf”
Also, it’s a check that you are telling me that I am making it up. I didn’t see any references when you dropped your incredibly hot take that ethics isn’t evolutionary relevant. Rather hypocritical.
What you said makes no sense and it is completely at odds with any sciantist studying evolution.
If not evolution where do ethics come from? If not the brain where is the information associated with ethics kept?