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Moral Relativism

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Posts

  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    All values I know of in differential psych were derived from lexical analysis.

    amazingly, despite being derived from reality, they still have incredible predictive power.

    I don't buy it, sorry. Link your values back to reality, or why mention them at all.

    I can invent the value of pongo wargle if I like, make up a whole morale system based on it. It's completely pointless.

    Morninglord on
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  • RonaldoTheGypsyRonaldoTheGypsy Yes, yes Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    All values I know of in psych were derived from lexical analysis.

    amazingly, despite being derived from reality, they still have incredibly predictive power.

    I don't buy it, sorry. Link your values back to reality, or why mention them at all.

    I can invent the value of pongo wargle if I like, make up a whole morale system based on it. It's completely pointless.

    Reality is just, like, an idea, man.

    RonaldoTheGypsy on
  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Values are based on instinct, survival, and endorphines, current and historical.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    All values I know of in psych were derived from lexical analysis.

    amazingly, despite being derived from reality, they still have incredibly predictive power.

    I don't buy it, sorry. Link your values back to reality, or why mention them at all.

    I can invent the value of pongo wargle if I like, make up a whole morale system based on it. It's completely pointless.

    Reality is just, like, an idea, man.

    I'll give you reality.

    Morninglord on
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  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    Values are based on instinct, survival, and endorphines, current and historical.

    Putting aside my contempt of the myth of "instincts" for now.

    So are you saying Yar's Moral Truth is based on those.

    Because I didn't see it that way.

    I don't have a problem with a value based on such things, but not all values are. Which brings us back to my point.

    Morninglord on
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  • RonaldoTheGypsyRonaldoTheGypsy Yes, yes Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    All values I know of in psych were derived from lexical analysis.

    amazingly, despite being derived from reality, they still have incredibly predictive power.

    I don't buy it, sorry. Link your values back to reality, or why mention them at all.

    I can invent the value of pongo wargle if I like, make up a whole morale system based on it. It's completely pointless.

    Reality is just, like, an idea, man.

    I'll give you reality.

    One more outburst like that and we'll hold you in contempt of court ...

    Why you little!

    Why you little!

    Why you little!

    RonaldoTheGypsy on
  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Putting aside my contempt of "instincts" for now.

    So are you saying Yar's Moral Truth is based on those.

    Because I didn't see it that way.

    I don't believe moral truth is an idea that even makes sense. I'm saying that throw the whole "moral" bullshit aside and just work with what we can measure.

    I can measure the pleasurable chemical impulses I get from being able to make choices rather than follow orders, I can measure whether or not my blood flow changes when I'm exposed to erotica, and I can measure whether or not I'm alive rather than starved to death.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    That's a bit "too" real mate. You can't predict anything from such reductive principles. At least, not yet.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    You work with what you have. We may still be at "alchemy," but sitting our hands until "chemistry" comes along isn't getting us anywhere.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    No I mean you can measure behavior in a more specific sense. For example, exactly how people make decisions. This ignores such things as blood flow or whatever.

    Much the same way an engineer doesn't need to know about the chemistry of his metals to build a bridge.

    There's plenty of literature investigating how people morally reason, as well as cognitive processes we use to make decisions, problem solve, and plenty of evidence as to how we derive our values socially and developmentally. Most of them were derived from observations rather than deduced from the physiological.

    You don't need to go as deeply as you think.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    I can measure most of that without devices.

    The first one is happiness. I know when I am happy, for the most part.

    The second one is an erection. Everyone knows when I have one. :winky:

    The third one is .. well I'm not skinny enough for Hollywood so I'm definately not an emaciated corpse.

    There are some deeper issues that are harder to determine, but for the most part it's pretty easy to see when people are enjoying their lives.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    You've:

    1). Lost me

    2). Started talking about subjective experiences to someone who values empericism.

    3). Mixed this up with your personal biases.

    So I think I want to stop now.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    If you want objective you have to plug shit into someone's body. Make up your mind. You can't just invent a third thing because the two other options are too hard and say that it is real because it would be nice if it were real.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    If you want objective you have to plug shit into someone's body. Make up your mind. You can't just invent a third thing because the two other options are too hard and say that it is real because it would be nice if it were real.

    You are still hella stuck on this reductionism thing aren't you.

    Lemme guess all things need The One Solution.

    Don't be simple minded man.

    You can easily work only with what you have observed, without trying to explain it's underlying structure. The hope is to eventually be able to do that, but until then the observation will suffice. This is the reality I am talking about.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Did you just Godwin me...? o_O

    Alternatively: You aren't communicating for shit or have no i-fucking-dea what you're reading.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Maybe. I'm trying to figure out how to explain this to you, actualy.

    Let's try this:

    Empericism doesn't seek to explain the world in one giant leap, or find the truth of a thing. It seeks only to explain what it can, to chop off more of the unknown with every step. It doesn't have to be certain. And it doesn't need to have a supertheory that explains everything. In physics they use observations with specific tools.
    In psych they observe human behavior.

    In both cases, it's derived from the physical world. That's what I think of, when I think of real. It might help if you realised I have almost zero knowledge of classical philosophy, so I do not ascribe to any philisophical notions of "reality" other than the one underlying empericism. (And a bit of aristotle, and some healthy hatred of cartesian dualism.)

    I do understand logic, and I do understand "existence" of a concept. I just consider it in it's context: imagination in a human brain. When it comes to a moral truth, my standpoint would be to look at how human beings behave when given moral situations. Not what they "think" about morals, because introspection has been shown to be inherently flawed, ripe with bias and scientifically unreliable.

    There is so much evidence out there proving how unreliable a single individuals "introspection" is that I don't consider telling someone their opinion is untrustworthy to be in any way controversial. It might hurt some pride, but unfortuantly, its true.

    So, individual opinions are, in effect, worthless to me. I can only work with documented evidence.

    Am I making my standpoint clear at all.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    And...?

    My position is that codes of behavior are useful, but that there is no external agency to guide them. As such, we must come to an agreement on the code ourselves, ideally using something we can measure so that subjectivity can be minimized, so that the code doesn't become a clusterfuck, so as to preserve some measure of efficiency.

    I'm not trying to explain the world, I'm trying to keep Bob from killing my customers so I can have orgies in peace without having to run to the Pope for help.

    --

    I'm not speaking from the position of an academic philosopher, and especially not on classic philosophy, because WTF Plato.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Sure thing.

    But first, it's a damn good idea to work out that measurement. Otherwise you have no idea if what you decide is worthwhile or not.

    The only objective way is to measure behavior. That's what I'm talking about here. That's what I mean.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    The only objective way is to measure behavior. That's what I'm talking about here. That's what I mean.

    Behavior and chemistry, yes. Behavior being the much easier and more practicable one.

    We can't judge "good" and "evil" but we can definately judge "happy as a clam" and "so scared they soiled themselves and then threw up."

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    You are not going to like what I say next.

    Neither of those responses are universal to any given situation. Not even fear of death.

    Some do not have it.

    Emotion is most definitely the worst kind of measurement you could ever rely on, with the runner up being popularity.

    Morninglord on
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  • MrMonroeMrMonroe passed out on the floor nowRegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    Did you just Godwin me...? o_O

    National Socialism is an entirely appropriate and relevant topic for this conversation.

    What I'm still confused about, cenj, is how you can say behavioral codes can be useful without there being any actual physical framework in which they might operate. Obviously the way the universe works and the specific situation informs whether a particular moral code will work better than another at expediting your orgy-making, no? (Also, what has the Pope ever done to help you host an orgy?)

    Thought experiment tiem: objects cannot occupy the same space as each other simultaneously. Thus people cannot walk through walls, and so walls are useful for us. We end up having codes of behavior involving walls and fences, usually regarding an ethical prohibition in circumventing the express purpose of the wall or fence, which is keeping people out, even when the wall or fence isn't very good at doing it. A two-foot fence around a yard still indicates that one ought to knock on the gate, even though it's real easy to just step over.

    Now, what if objects could occupy the same space at the same time? Walls and fences would be useless and thus we'd never build them. We would likewise never come up with any moral or ethical guidelines around what to do with them. If we went to the other side of the world where people could not walk through walls, we would have no idea how to deal with their fences, and probably make giant asses out of ourselves.

    And yes, WTF Plato, indeed.

    MrMonroe on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    I have no idea what national socialism is, fyi.

    I mean if you find what I'm sayin similar than that's good but I want to be clear it is not the background I'm coming from.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    National Socialism is NAZIism, ML.

    --

    ML: Emotion IS a useful measure, though you need to take the long view of it. If the entire population is horribly depressed there is a good chance that the social contract has not been adhered to. Or else it's fucking doomsday.

    --

    MM: Physical framework? You mean like a Legal System? Perhaps a Constitution if you want to get crazy about it?

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    It's not a useful measure. There are too many variables to ever sort them out.

    Your example doesn't happen. People actually adjust to a changing "contract." They will habituate to and normalise what used to be "unacceptable" given no choice. So your norms will change, and depression doesn't happen.

    Unless you mean war or something? In which case I have no data or knowledge about it, so I wont go there.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    The fact that people can adjust to starvation doesn't negate the fact that they would be far happier if they were not starving.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    That's NOT emotion. You are reaching.

    No, I take that back.

    I think I don't understand what you mean by social contracts.

    I want you to lay out your assumptions, because everytime I think you have worked it out, you seem to dance away from the point. Then I want to discuss the assumptions.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    A social contract is a bunch of people agreeing to abide by certain rules in order to maximize the long-term positive emotion of the population, ideally adjusting based on new information and consideration for future generations being able to modify the contract based on that information so that you don't get stuck in a tradition trap.

    And no, there is no justification for the social contract. It's just a choice one can make.

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Mmmm.

    Can I ask where you got the idea from.

    Morninglord on
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  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    A wide variety of sources and my own observation. I'm sure the idea of the social contract has an origin or twenty, but I don't subscribe to any one person or group's philosophy, though I'm either influenced by or simply came to similar conclusions to Neitsche (I never read his works until a few years ago, AFTER a teacher asked me if I read about him, but I may have been influenced by those he has influenced). Wiki has this to say, in the Nihilism section:

    "While this may appear to imply his allegiance to the nihilist viewpoint, it would be more accurate to say that Nietzsche saw the coming of nihilism as valuable in the long term (as well as ironically acknowledging that nihilism exists in the world so has more gravity compared with categories that refer to a purely fictitious world). According to Nietzsche, it is only once nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.[6]
    "

    Incenjucar on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Well.

    I have the following problems with that viewpoint. They pretty much explain my confusion.

    1). It's not actually possible, currently, to measure emotion on such a wide scale accurately. The reason why has a number of validity/reliability and other statistical reasons, including the huge difficulty of statistical power. From an extremely practical standpoint, it is impossible to accurately judge the emotion of a whole population and determine where it comes from. At least with current techniques. (Although possible for ever).

    So I can't really take emotion seriously on a long scale. Because you see if something cannot be measured, I cannot test a hypothesis. My whole means of determining wether something is true or not goes splutch.

    So there's that problem.

    2). There's a lot of evidence that people don't really so much choose to do anything socially, as be mutually influenced. The idea of rational decision making is, unfortuantly, a fallacy when it comes to everyday life. It works in very academic, structured, trained disciplines, but everyday people don't do it.

    3). This completely ignores the complexity of most social literature, like ingroup/outgroup processes, prejudice literature, cultural identity literature. It's too simplistic for me because there's so many counters in these observed phenomena that this view point isn't explaining.


    But, on the other hand.

    If you could measure peoples emotion reliably, validly, and test it on a large scale. It would be very helpful, I do agree.

    But as it is, I can't agree with your assumptions for those reasons.

    Morninglord on
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  • darthmixdarthmix Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Yar wrote: »
    darthmix wrote: »
    It's those complicated impulses - not the pursuit of an abstract virtue - that form the basis of our moral structures.
    The depends on what you mean by the basis. Is the basis of mathematics the first three axioms of set theory, or is it humans learning to use our fingers or seashells to keep track of things? That's the distinction you're drawing here. And yes, morality is defined to be only that which seeks to increase happiness and decrease sorrow, and "Good" and even "Truth" ultimately are only that which increase satisfaction and joy and minimize disappointment and sorrow. But the ontological argument is probably not where we want to go right now.
    I feel myself growing more and more distrustful of the conclusions you're trying to draw by comparing morality to mathematics. Setting aside for the moment the fact that mathematical axioms probably don't correspond to anything in physical reality - 1 and 1 don't exist as equal quantities in nature, so they can't actually equal 2 - the premise that 1 + 1 = 2 is still perceptually inevitable. In order for it to exist as a concept, it requires only that rational beings exist to observe it, and as long as they're rational it's true independently of their need or desire for it to be. But the fact that that premise is perceptually inevitable does not imply that yours is too, and I'm having trouble finding in your post any argument that it does imply that. Morality, unlike math, is grounded in a set of needs and desires that humans have, needs which are physical and biological and psychological; if we did not have such needs, morality would never have been conceptualized or implemented regardless of how rational we were. In that sense morality is actually defined by, and is dependent on, a set of specific structures - us - that have a complicated set of needs. It is unlike mathematical axioms, which rely only on rational perception to be determined true.

    Can you conflate the entirety of human need into the desire to be happy? Can you widen your definition of happiness so that includes the fulfillment of all human need? Absolutely you can. But you're playing a game that never gets you very far past semantics. Our desire for truth, our desire for physical pleasure, our desire for love, and our desire to not be eaten by wild animals are all experientially dissimilar, and claiming that they all amount to acquiring happiness doesn't illuminate them or prepare us to go about satisfying them in any real way. It doesn't make them alike in any real way. It's just a sloppy label for a vast array of needs that we don't even entirely understand. What good is it as absolute truth?
    Saying "all morality is about increasing happiness" is a way of describing that long and nuanced process, and it's not an especially good or useful one, so I'm very skeptical of it as a universal truth.
    It's an essential one if morality is to have much meaning at all beyond whimsy.
    You think? Throughout history people have subscribed to moral systems that they took very seriously, that they associated with absolute truth, without saying that they were strictly about the pursuit of happiness or any other single experience or quality. I don't think you have to apply reductive definitions like that in order to have a useful moral system.
    In practice it turns out to be not much more than an aura of infallibility that people wrap around whatever it is they already believe.
    I see no evidence of this.
    If you could somehow get every person in every culture to agree on paper that morality was entirely about the pursuit of happiness, that this was the true and universal metric by which all moral systems could be judged, then they'd simply conclude that whatever moral system they already subscribed to was the one which leads to the most happiness - just as they previously claimed it was the one that best corresponded with God's will, or any other supposedly infallible metric of virtue. That's why, when the rubber meet the road, to folks who claim the existence of a universal metric of morality aren't any better off than those of us who admit there isn't one. It's the reason we see statements like "They [relativist arguments] generally take the form of 'if they think female circumcision is cool, who are we to judge?' in which case i say bullshit, it causes and sustains much more harm and suffering than any joy it causes, and I'm sure we can measure that somehow if need be." You don't offer an objective means of measuring happiness, or comparing different experiences of it. You don't even imply that you know what one would look like. You're just confident that one exists, and if you had it, it would affirm the position you already happen to hold: that female circumcision is wrong. This is how so-called absolute metrics of right and wrong tend to get used in the real world: not for actual measurement of right and wrong, but simply as a superficial way of adding rhetorical force to this or that moral position.
    Was that all because they wanted to be happy? Or did it serve the same end that their tools served, and their lungs served, and their opposable thumbs served?
    Such are one in the same, and obviously so to me. It hurts not to breathe, not to eat, not to keep warm.
    But why, Yar? Did we evolve lungs and thumbs so we could be happy? Does it make sense to you to describe the evolutionary process that way? I think morality is a social construct that evolved (not in the genetic sense, but still unconsciously, and in a way that corresponds to the principle of natural selection) out of our intelligence and social nature. It's best understood that way. What you call happiness and suffering are two tools our bodies and minds have developed to receive feedback from the environment that tells us whether we're meeting the same set of needs an amoeba has. Does an amoeba live to be happy? Does it enlighten our understanding of the amoeba to think of it that way? I think you're grafting a pretty simplistic concept onto a vast and complicated set of realities and experiences, and the reason you're able to get away with it is because the statement doesn't have any real consequences. It has little real meaning. Again, it's not exactly wrong, but isn't too helpful either.
    What I disagree with is that this means there must be some other true source of morality. In practice, moral decisions arise from all sorts of instinct and social intuition and custom and culture. In theory, they all seek the most reasonable solution to the plight of human suffering.
    I'm not suggesting that morality has any source or foundation outside the material circumstances of our lives. I'm just skeptical that the theory, which is a simplistic and overly-abstract notion of a complicated, organic social process, really articulates the guiding principles of moral practice in any useful or predictive way.
    I guess what I'm saying to this point is that yes, intuitively, even if we have never thought it consciously, the root of every moral thought anyone ever had was, on some deep subconscious or even biological level, a statement about what path they felt would make existence a happier place for all those capable of happiness. And nothing else.
    You're probably just not going to convince me. To the extent - probably a very large extent - that the foundation of our morality is fixed, set in place by the "roots" of our biological structures and circumstances on this planet and evolutionary background, it can't simply be described as happiness because those structures clearly don't exist to promote happiness. To the (much more limited) extent that it can be made purely rational, that it can be a pursuit of an abstract quality, it can't be fixed to happiness, because in that case it's the product of beings with free will who can presumably set whatever goal for it they want.
    MrMister wrote: »
    First off, I think you are simply wrong to claim that ethics, as practiced as a discipline, has no substantial impact on our actual practice. For instance, consider the work of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism:
    The philosophy of Utilitarianism influenced many of the social reforms in Great Britain during the early half of the nineteenth century. The name most frequently associated with Utilitarianism is that of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's philosophical principles extended into the realm of government. These principles have been associated with several reform acts entered into English law such as the Factory Act of 1833, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the Prison Act of 1835, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the Committee on Education in 1839,the Lunacy Act of 1845, and the Public Health Act of 1845.
    Similarly, the writings of Locke influenced the writers of the American Constitution, and Peter Singer's work has greatly strengthened the animal rights movement.
    It's never been my argument that the work of idealist philosophy can't influence the language or even the passage of specific pieces of legislation, although I would argue that the actual reasons for culture-shifting events like the American or French revolutions and the political philosophies that came out of them are much larger and bound up in the material circumstances of those societys than the ideas of Bentham or Locke might lead us to believe. The colonial Americans, just as an example, found themselves in a society where the rigid class culture they inherited from Europe no longer seemed to apply, since any man could presumably go west and live more or less autonomously, which is why suddenly you see this dramatic enthusaism for the ideal of personal liberty during the period running up to the revolution. When a society faces a contradiction like that, the first thing it looks for is a philosophy to articulate and justify the change it seeks, but the philosophy is not really the motivating force. Even when it does directly define the provisions of a specific law, it doesn't even come close to really affecting the moral assumptions of the culture.
    You will find few places with more vegetarians than a philosophy department--it turns out that exposure to ethical theories does change people's behavior in predictable ways.
    I guess your idea here is that being in a philosophy department somehow control-tests you against arriving at your moral positions through less-than-rational means? Leaving aside for the moment the fact that academic societies in general and philosophy departments in particular probably self-select for the sort of people who're likely to be sympathetic to vegetarianism anyway, the point to remember here is that a philosophy department is a community, and its members transmit moral ideas through the same kinds of emotional and social appeals as any other community. Of course if they're idealists, their idealist justifications for those positions will be much more involved than we see in the general population. My feeling is still that most moral philosophy begins with some kind of moral intuition and then invents a structure to justify it which is at best imperfect and at worst totally irrelevant and misleading.
    You could claim that the rational arguments of Bentham, Locke, and Singer didn't actually change people's moral code. Instead, people's moral code shifted as part of some underlying cultural change that happened at the same time. You could even say that those philosopher's writings were an expression of that cultural shift, rather than a cause of it.
    Very close to what I would say, and have said.
    However, I don't see any compelling reason to accept that view. You might as well say that my typing of this message was not caused by the movement of my fingers, but instead by a cultural system.
    So, wait - in this analogy, the movement of your fingers is equated to the ideas of Locke and Bentham, and I'm out of line for not giving them credit for the substance of your posts? I think it makes sense to recognize the complicated system of thoughts and impulses behind your fingers - I'm referring now to you, the person - and approach it as the output of a thinking individual rather than of a typing tool.

    I realize I'm belaboring your a comparison. But I think there's plenty of room to recognize and analyze the complicated set of cultural dynamics that exist beyond the individual, and outside the bounds of rational discourse, that dictate the moral structures of society. I think those structures have always and probably will always be the driving force behind social and moral change. And I don't think this kind of analysis is as nebulous or useless as you would make it seem.
    But regardless, even if turns out to be true that a cultural system caused the movement of my fingers, that's a completely worthless fact to me as an individual. It has absolutely no potential to inform my actions or change my evaluation of the world in a meaningful way.
    I totally disagree. The recognition of the emotional and intuitive process through which people develop moral positions amounts to an argument for action and social activism over theory. Human society addresses and resolves moral problems experientially, emotionally, through various moral sensitivies that people have already learned. Demonstrations, political movements, civil disobedience, and other kinds of direct dialogue have the effect of bringing the instances of injustice (real or peceived) before the culture, into conflict with their moral sense, over and over and over again. When people accept something like gay marriage, when they realize that banning it is unfair, it's finally not through any abstract arguments about fairness or sanctity (just as those are not the real reasons they opposed it in the first place) but through an empathetic, emotional understanding of the circumstances of gay people, their connection to gay people, etc. The suffering group is brought into their society, a co-benefactor of their moral contract. This is how civil rights movements happen, how sex revolutions happen, and so on. Social activism addresses the culture in conversation and enlarges its experience, and gradually the culture makes moral decisions informed by that experience. It doesn't always make the decisions you want, but it does always benefit from your continual effort to put the question before it.
    Furthermore, I think you are correct in your claim that few philosophers who endorse relativism also endorse the 'anything-goes' attitude that we cannot ever pass judgment on members of other cultures for their practices. However, the fact that they do not endorse the 'anything-goes' attitude does not mean that their theories don't entail it. Of course it depends on the specific formulation the relativist takes, but in general I suspect that their theories do entail an 'anything-goes' attitude, regardless of whether they like to tell themselves otherwise.
    The question is whether the dichotomy between absolute, fixed morality and anything-goes, commit-genocide-if-that's-how-you-roll moral relativism is a real dichotomy. It's pretty clear to me that it's not; to paraphrase Haidt again, I submit that moral facts do exist, but not as objective facts which would be true for any rational being anywhere in the universe; they are true only with respect to the kinds of creatures human beings happen to be. The moral positions we hold most sacred are considered important because they address needs that are for all practical purposes universal to our species. But it's possible to imagine a sentient, rational species for whom none of our moral propositions would be true; like, a race of intelligent bees, or something, who depended for their existence and functioning on a rigid class system with a monarch supported by a vast group of workers who live and die with few benefits and little influence over their culture. As intelligent creatures, capable of abstract thought, they can imagine freedom and desire it; the only consequence of seizing it would be the extinction of their species. Our moral ideas about freedom and the right of self-determination would actually be dangerous and destructive to that society because of structures that exist in their very nature; their culture would immediately define them as immoral, despite the fact that we regard their status-quo as reprehensible and wrong. But if there's a universal metric of morality that dictates individual freedom, this species would be morally obligated to self-destruct.

    If you understand morality as a social adaptation that addresses needs that are practically universal to us, but not representative of universal truths, you have room for the kind of practical moral pluralism I've mentioned before. Since the needs are not themselves moral rules, but rather problems that morality is intended to solve in some way, it's conceivable that there may be more than one solution to the same set of problems that work about as well. But this does not oblige us to accept any moral idea posited by any culture, since we still have the practical metric of whether or not it satisfies this complicated set of social needs for which all morality is designed.

    darthmix on
  • IncenjucarIncenjucar VChatter Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    1). It's not actually possible, currently, to measure emotion on such a wide scale accurately. The reason why has a number of validity/reliability and other statistical reasons, including the huge difficulty of statistical power. From an extremely practical standpoint, it is impossible to accurately judge the emotion of a whole population and determine where it comes from. At least with current techniques. (Although possible for ever).

    Baby and the bathwater. Accuracy is not available, no. It may never be. This is why we have statistics and democracy and psychology and sociology and history. You can't get a perfect result, but you will generally get closer to what you want unless an outlier gets in the way and musses the equation.
    So I can't really take emotion seriously on a long scale. Because you see if something cannot be measured, I cannot test a hypothesis. My whole means of determining wether something is true or not goes splutch.

    So there's that problem.

    It can be measured via census and vote. It's a shitty measure, but it's a measure nonetheless. Again, you work with what you have.
    2). There's a lot of evidence that people don't really so much choose to do anything socially, as be mutually influenced. The idea of rational decision making is, unfortuantly, a fallacy when it comes to everyday life. It works in very academic, structured, trained disciplines, but everyday people don't do it.

    Certainly. Humanity is a superorganism. No man is an island, as they say. Everything is connected - it's not even limited by species or state of animation. I would never, ever count on human beings to be rational. That's why I generally advocate manipulating the fuck out of them by teaching them humanism, which is basically a pre-built social contract in the guise of a moral system.
    3). This completely ignores the complexity of most social literature, like ingroup/outgroup processes, prejudice literature, cultural identity literature. It's too simplistic for me because there's so many counters in these observed phenomena that this view point isn't explaining.


    But, on the other hand.

    If you could measure peoples emotion reliably, validly, and test it on a large scale. It would be very helpful, I do agree.

    But as it is, I can't agree with your assumptions for those reasons.

    Information is always helpful, but the resources for obtaining it is finite. So you work with what you have instead of waiting for the singularity to do it for you.

    ---

    Darth: A+

    Incenjucar on
  • LoserForHireXLoserForHireX Philosopher King The AcademyRegistered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Darth, I have two questions, one of which you seem to have alluded an answer to, the other perhaps not.

    First, when you say that we evolved into our moral positions, you also claim that this does not reflect any sort of objective fact about the nature of the universe such as "beings that evolve in this way will evolve these manner of moral truths..."

    Second, it seems to me that you're advocating for utility. It seems as though your position with the sentient bees only serves to support a completely objective conclusion. That conclusion being "what is morally right is what provides the greatest utility to your species." That simple axiom could in fact be an objective standard applied to any moral action undertaken by any species.

    I think that my last point only serves to highlight one of the common mistakes I think many make when approaching any study of ethics, which is that it's hard to take seriously any absolute stance on any particular moral. Kant's whole deal with being unable to lie ever, to anyone, is silly and I've come across few who would defend that. Rather it seems that any objective system maintains coherency only when its form is something along the lines of the generic utilitarian idea of "that which results in the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people is what is right." Simple, elegant, and totally objective.

    Note: Not necessarily advocating Utilitarianism.

    LoserForHireX on
    "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
    "We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
  • darthmixdarthmix Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Darth, I have two questions, one of which you seem to have alluded an answer to, the other perhaps not.

    First, when you say that we evolved into our moral positions, you also claim that this does not reflect any sort of objective fact about the nature of the universe such as "beings that evolve in this way will evolve these manner of moral truths..."
    To the extent that we might expect another sentient species to evolve in more or less the same manner we do, like they always seem to on Star Trek, we would probably see a very similar sent of needs - the need to eat, to maintain social connection, to live in some kind of relative safety, and so on. These are hard-wired biological or psychological facts of their construction - they manifest themselves as realities of the physical universe. But again, while these things present problems they have to deal with in order to thrive, they are not puzzles; nature and evolution did not have solutions in mind when they thrust upon us the problem of how to form a society. We stumbled onto that problem ourselves, and we're going to have to invent our solutions ourselves. While these needs we have do place certain limits on us in forming our culture and our moral systems, I don't think we should expect there to be one single best way to go about meeting them, though there will be many that clearly don't work at all. That's what I mean when I refer to practical moral pluralism. I certainly don't think that anything about our circumstance or the circumstance of any other race in the universe predicts one objectively correct moral system.

    I guess if you wanted you could consider our needs - the need to eat, etc. - to itself be a moral truth, which we would presumably share with any species that evolved the same way we did. But I don't find that very satisfying.
    Second, it seems to me that you're advocating for utility. It seems as though your position with the sentient bees only serves to support a completely objective conclusion. That conclusion being "what is morally right is what provides the greatest utility to your species." That simple axiom could in fact be an objective standard applied to any moral action undertaken by any species.
    This gets back to my conversation with Yar about happiness. It certainly seems that all our efforts to implement morality in our culture are driven by a desire for something, probably something we haven't, or can't, even conceptualize. I think we know intuitively what it is to be alive, to live in a society and be part of its various conversations, but I don't think we have, or need, an accurate definition of what we're seeking when we do those things. We can claim that it's happiness, or social utility, or even survival, but all these seem to me to conflate a vast set of experiences and values, many of which we don't even understand, so it's not clear how saying them helps us learn anything about morality. Hell, even nature doesn't objectively favor survivors; it's just that survivors tend to be the only ones left. If the goal is an objective standard we can actually apply, in practice, claiming that morality amounts to the pursuit of any single abstract concept strikes me as pretty useless, since we can fit virtually any arbitrary set of desires we want to emphasize inside those abstractions.

    darthmix on
  • MorninglordMorninglord I'm tired of being Batman, so today I'll be Owl.Registered User regular
    edited December 2008
    Incenjucar wrote: »
    1). It's not actually possible, currently, to measure emotion on such a wide scale accurately. The reason why has a number of validity/reliability and other statistical reasons, including the huge difficulty of statistical power. From an extremely practical standpoint, it is impossible to accurately judge the emotion of a whole population and determine where it comes from. At least with current techniques. (Although possible for ever).

    Baby and the bathwater. Accuracy is not available, no. It may never be. This is why we have statistics and democracy and psychology and sociology and history. You can't get a perfect result, but you will generally get closer to what you want unless an outlier gets in the way and musses the equation.
    So I can't really take emotion seriously on a long scale. Because you see if something cannot be measured, I cannot test a hypothesis. My whole means of determining wether something is true or not goes splutch.

    So there's that problem.

    It can be measured via census and vote. It's a shitty measure, but it's a measure nonetheless. Again, you work with what you have.
    2). There's a lot of evidence that people don't really so much choose to do anything socially, as be mutually influenced. The idea of rational decision making is, unfortuantly, a fallacy when it comes to everyday life. It works in very academic, structured, trained disciplines, but everyday people don't do it.

    Certainly. Humanity is a superorganism. No man is an island, as they say. Everything is connected - it's not even limited by species or state of animation. I would never, ever count on human beings to be rational. That's why I generally advocate manipulating the fuck out of them by teaching them humanism, which is basically a pre-built social contract in the guise of a moral system.
    3). This completely ignores the complexity of most social literature, like ingroup/outgroup processes, prejudice literature, cultural identity literature. It's too simplistic for me because there's so many counters in these observed phenomena that this view point isn't explaining.


    But, on the other hand.

    If you could measure peoples emotion reliably, validly, and test it on a large scale. It would be very helpful, I do agree.

    But as it is, I can't agree with your assumptions for those reasons.

    Information is always helpful, but the resources for obtaining it is finite. So you work with what you have instead of waiting for the singularity to do it for you.

    ---

    Darth: A+

    There are much better measures than emotion, is my point. Not that you should throw out the baby with the bathwayer, or wait for the singularity.

    Census and votes are not, in fact, measures of any usefulness or validity for emotion. For other things, maybe, but not emotion. And, like I said, there's other measures of much more use that census and votes can measure.

    No, I'm saying sometimes, you have to wait, until information does become available, because you are working, step by step, to get to it. This is the process of science. At no point am I saying "do nothing". I'm saying "crawl before you can walk". Your theory would probably be useful in the future, but it's not right now, there's nothing to back it up. So keep it in mind, and scale with what you've got.

    The idea of educating humans as they grow up in the moral system you deem best would most likely work though. I got no problem with that.

    Morninglord on
    (PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
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