Unless I've misread you wrong MrMonroe and you are talking about how we should make decisions? Because some of those examples seemed to me to be using how people make decisions as evidence for the validity of any one should value judgement.
In which case it's not evidence, people use lots of different values. You can't get an answer from that.
The methodology of philosophy is generally a mix of description and prescription. Philosophers try to make prescriptive claims about how people should behave and how they should reason. Often, they use descriptive claims about our intuitions to try to help support these claims. To what extent we should try to preserve our intuitions versus revising them is an issue of legitimate debate.
Often, it seems to me, philosophers are attempting to resolve our incoherent and conflicted intuitions into the most appealing coherent package. Any imposition of coherence will almost always result in jettisoning at least some things we find intuitively true.
It is generally counted as a strike against a theory if it requires that we reject our intuitions in exchange for no real gain in coherency or plausibility over its alternatives.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Unless I've misread you wrong MrMonroe and you are talking about how we should make decisions? Because some of those examples seemed to me to be using how people make decisions as evidence for the validity of any one should value judgement.
In which case it's not evidence, people use lots of different values. You can't get an answer from that.
The methodology of philosophy is generally a mix of description and prescription. Philosophers try to make prescriptive claims about how people should behave and how they should reason. Often, they use descriptive claims about our intuitions to try to help support these claims. To what extent we should try to preserve our intuitions versus revising them is an issue of legitimate debate.
Often, it seems to me, philosophers are attempting to resolve our incoherent and conflicted intuitions into the most appealing coherent package. Any imposition of coherence will almost always result in jettisoning at least some things we find intuitively true.
It is generally counted as a strike against a theory if it requires that we reject our intuitions in exchange for no real gain in coherency or plausibility over its alternatives.
Then philosophy is off in its own little world. I'm not sure I should listen to them.
Plausibility and coherency are value judgements that have been consistency shown, in the decision making literature, to produce bad decision making.
I find this ironic.
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How does the nihilist choose her values? For instance, in the example given, how does the nihilist choose whether she values comforting her friend or finishing her thesis more? Or do you think it is not possible to choose what one values? Because that was precisely the question I was raising, and you haven't addressed it.
Varies between individuals. You may as well ask where atheists get their ethics from.
As for values, within the degree of choice allowed by determinism, yes you can choose your values, to a degree, in some cases, depending on the individual, the value, the context, and so forth.
You have said "I do what I value" without explaining why you value any particular thing over any other.
Varies.
Allow me to give you a little primer on what it is for something to be trivially true.
Psychological egoism is only clearly true if you define what someone wants to do as the thing that they do. But in that case it's obvious that everyone does what they want, because they are defined as the same thing: "everyone does what they want" becomes a completely non-empirical truth that is a function of how we use language rather than how we actually behave.
In that case, "everyone does what they want" becomes like "all bachelors are unmarried" rather than "people in situations of diffused responsibility tend not to act to help strangers." The last one describes an actual, independent feature of the world we live in, whereas the first two just extrapolates from a definition.
"Everyone does what they want," which is a more complex statement than you may realize, entails a great many things. It is hardly a trivial statement. Truth also remains truth, even if it's not especially interesting or useful in and of itself.
Then philosophy is off in its own little world. I'm not sure I should listen to them.
Philosophy is intimately connected to everything. For instance, how you interpret scientific results is a philosophical, not a scientific, question. Similarly, what should be in the constitution is a philosophical question. Or how you should treat your neighbor.
So I think you must be misunderstanding something.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited December 2008
I'm talking about academic, secular philosophy, not the common definition of the word.
When I interpret a scientific result I don't turn to the libraries philosophy section.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
You have said "I do what I value" without explaining why you value any particular thing over any other.
Varies.
Well that's helpful. From where I sit, it looks like what things you value are arbitrary. And if they're arbitrary, then you have no justification for valuing them over anything else.
"Everyone does what they want," which is a more complex statement than you may realize, entails a great many things. It is hardly a trivial statement.
It's entirely trivial if you define "what someone wants" as "what they do." In that case, it's no more enlightening than saying "everyone does what they do." Psychological egoism is only interesting if you define wanting as a certain sort of mental state, and it's not at all clear that if you do that it will actually turn out to be the case that people always do what they want. For instance, I wanted to eat a whole cake the other day but then I didn't.
A bigger problem for psychological egoism is that some behavior does not seem to be explained by self-regarding desires. Say a soldier throws himself on a grenade to prevent others from being killed. It does not seem that the soldier is pursuing his perceived self-interest. It is plausible that, if asked, the soldier would have said that he threw himself on the grenade because he wanted to save the lives of others or because it was his duty. He would deny as ridiculous the claim that he acted in his self-interest.
The psychological egoist might reply that the soldier is lying or self-deceived. Perhaps he threw himself on the grenade because he could not bear to live with himself afterwards if he did not do so. He has a better life, in terms of welfare, by avoiding years of guilt. The main problem here is that while this is a possible account of some cases, there is no reason to think it covers all cases. Another problem is that guilt may presuppose that the soldier has a non-self-regarding desire for doing what he takes to be right.
The psychological egoist might reply that some such account must be right. After all, the soldier did what he most wanted to do, and so must have been pursuing his perceived self-interest. In one sense, this is true. If self-interest is identified with the satisfaction of all of one's preferences, then all intentional action is self-interested (at least if intentional actions are always explained by citing preferences, as most believe). Psychological egoism turns out to be trivially true. This would not content defenders of psychological egoism, however. They intend an empirical theory that, like other such theories, it is at least possible to refute by observation.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I'm talking about academic, secular philosophy, not the common definition of the word.
When I interpret a scientific result I don't turn to the libraries philosophy section.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, however, I think you have a simplistic view of scientific progress. At many points there have been substantial philosophical questions about how to interpret the results of scientific experiments: two major examples are the period when both Newtonian and Ptolemaic models were competing to explain the motion of the planets and when both particle and wave models were competing to explain light. In those periods, the competing models both had different things to recommend them and to motivate their adoption, and which to believe was a matter of deciding what was most desirable in a scientific theory.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited December 2008
Okay.
I'm talking about what you would learn if you went through a bachelor of philosophy as opposed to wondering about things on your own without ever reading into the history of philosophy or knowing anything about the various theories.
And I'm talking about within the constraints of moralistic reasoning. Why do I wish to know about physics MrMister?
Psychology came from philosophy in the first place, and it has made specific pains to divorce itself from the traps inherent in philosophy when it comes to studying human behavior. It is in this context that I made those statements, not science as a whole. I'm sorry if I did not make that clear.
I may appear biased against philosophy, but in fairness this is the overwhelming attitude of most of the lecturers at my university so I probably picked it up from there. I have tried my best to at least listen to philisophical points of view, but when it comes to this topic I cannot accept plausability/coherency as valid criteria. The reason for this is I doubt the criterion for determining plausability/coherency comes from observation of human behavior, but rather from previous philisophical theorising based on rationality. Simply looking at human behavior in a confirmatory way is not going to prove anything. Another theory could look at the same behavior and confirm it's own tenants.
You must look at behavior from the position of either no theory, such as traits theory, or a self correcting paradigm. You must be willing to deliberately construct circumstances in which you are wrong then specifically test them against some criterion of verifiability, or you can never tell wether you are wrong. Introspection, that is human judgement alone, is not reliable.
This is what science does and how it progresses, at least nowadays. A theory is devised based on previous work and they specifically go about proving it wrong. If it survives then it's given more attention. If there is no way the theory could be proved wrong, it's not given any attention at all. There's no way to verify it, so it's left to the philosophers to go at it.
However there are some topics in moral reasoning which I think psychology can clarify, so I talk about those. What people should do is not one of those. How people do is. The two are seperate, but a lot of people conflate them, and prove should with incorrect conceptions of how.
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I'm talking about academic, secular philosophy, not the common definition of the word.
When I interpret a scientific result I don't turn to the libraries philosophy section.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, however, I think you have a simplistic view of scientific progress. At many points there have been substantial philosophical questions about how to interpret the results of scientific experiments: two major examples are the period when both Newtonian and Ptolemaic models were competing to explain the motion of the planets and when both particle and wave models were competing to explain light. In those periods, the competing models both had different things to recommend them and to motivate their adoption, and which to believe was a matter of deciding what was most desirable in a scientific theory.
You're going to have to provide some examples of these philosophical questions, because, frankly, what you wrote is wrong. The quality of a scientific model is simply the accuracy of its results: the better a model the closer its numbers will be to what we observe in an experiment. For example, the heliocentric model of the solar system is superior to the Ptolemaic model because it produces results which are closer to our observations.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
And I'm talking about within the constraints of moralistic reasoning. Why do I wish to know about physics MrMister?
Because you seemed to be saying that you disagreed with philosophical methodology generally, and that it should be replaced with our much-lauded modern science. I was saying that philosophy is both omni-present and irreplaceable, and that it even infects everyone's favorite subject: our vaunted hard science.
You're going to have to provide some examples of these philosophical questions, because, frankly, what you wrote is wrong. The quality of a scientific model is simply the accuracy of its results: the better a model the closer its numbers will be to what we observe in an experiment. For example, the heliocentric model of the solar system is superior to the Ptolemaic model because it produces results which are closer to our observations.
Oh, but were it only so simple. Here's an excerpt from Kuhn that's a nice introduction to what I'm talking about. And keep in mind, that I was not referring to Copernicanism and Ptolemaic astronomy as if that were a current, live debate in science. Instead, it is typical of the sorts of debates that are important in science, but are not themselves settled (in any direct sense) by science.
Begin with accuracy, which for present purposes I take to include not only quantitative agreement but qualitative as well. Ultimately it proves the most nearly decisive of all the criteria [for evaluating the strength of competing theories], partly because it is less equivocal than the others but especially because predictive and explanatory powers, which depend on it, are characteristics that scientists are particularly unwilling to give up. Unfortunately, however, theories cannot always be discriminated in terms of accuracy. Copernicus's system, for example, was not more accurate than Ptolemy's until drastically revised by Kepler more than sixty years after Copernicus's death. If Kepler or someone else had not found other reasons to choose the heliocentric astronomy, those improvements in accuracy would never have been made, and Copernicus's work might have been forgotten. More typically, of course, accuracy does permit discriminations, but not the sort that lead regularly to unequivocal choice. The oxygen theory, for example, was universally acknowledged to account for observed weight relations in chemical reactions, something that the phlogiston theory had previously scarcely attempted to do. But the phlogiston theory, unlike its rival, could account for the metals' being much more alike than the ores from which they were formed. One theory thus matched experience better in one area, the other in another. To choose between them on the basis of accuracy, a scientist would need to decide the area in which accuracy was more significant. About that matter chemists could and did differ without violating any of the criteria outlined above, or any others yet suggested.
However important it may be, therefore, accuracy by itself is seldom or never a sufficient criterion for theory choice. Other criteria must function as well, but they do not eliminate problems. To illustrate I select just two--consistency and simplicity--asking how they function in the choice between heliocentric and geocentric systems. As astronomical theories both Ptolemy's and Copernicus's were internally consistent, but their relation to related theories in other fields was very different. The stationary central earth was an essential ingredient of received physical theory, a tight-knit body of doctrine which explained, among other things, how stones fall, how water pumps function, and why the clouds move slowly across the skies. Heliocentric astronomy, which required the earth's motion, was inconsistent with the existing scientific explanation of these and other terrestrial phenomena. The consistency criterion, by itself, therefore spoke unequivocally for the geocentric tradition.
Simplicity, however, favored Copernicus, but only when evaluated in a quite special way. If, on the one hand, the two systems were compared in terms of the actual computational labor required to predict the position of a planet at a particular time, then they proved substantially equivalent. Such computations were what astronomers did, and Copernicus's system offered them no labor-saving techniques; in that sense it was not simpler than Ptolemy's. If, on the other hand, one asked about the amount of mathematical apparatus required to explain, not the detailed quantitative motion of the planets, but merely their gross qualitative features--limited elongation, retrograde motion, and the like--then, as every schoolchild knows, Copernicus required only one circle per planet, Ptolemy two. In that sense the Copernican theory was the simpler, a fact vitally important to the choices made by both Kepler and Galileo and thus essential to the ultimate triumph of Copernicanism. But that sense of simplicity was not the only one available, nor even the one most natural to professional astronomers, men whose task was the actual computation of planetary positions.
Because time is short and I have multiplied examples elsewhere, I shall here simply assert that these difficulties in applying standard criteria of choice are typical and that they arise no less forcefully in twentieth-century situations than in the earlier and better-known examples I have just sketched. When scientists must choose between competing theories, two men fully committed to the same list of criteria for choice may nevertheless reach different conclusions. Perhaps they interpret simplicity differently or have different convictions about the range of fields within which the consistency criterion must be met. Or perhaps they agree about these matters but differ about the relative weights to be accorded to these or to other criteria when several are deployed together...
So, I do not agree with everything Kuhn says, even in that passage (oh god no)--but I think the above is a good introduction to the sorts of debates important to the scientific community which are themselves philosophical rather scientific in nature.
Well that's helpful. From where I sit, it looks like what things you value are arbitrary. And if they're arbitrary, then you have no justification for valuing them over anything else.
Depends on how you mean arbitrary or justified. Most values are formed based on events, experiences, and so forth, and are rooted in at least a perception of reality and some assumptions based on it. However, for the most part, this is correct. Values have no external validation. People just agree or disagree with them.
It's entirely trivial if you define "what someone wants" as "what they do." In that case, it's no more enlightening than saying "everyone does what they do." Psychological egoism is only interesting if you define wanting as a certain sort of mental state, and it's not at all clear that if you do that it will actually turn out to be the case that people always do what they want. For instance, I wanted to eat a whole cake the other day but then I didn't.
"Interesting" is a poor way to judge the truth of something.
As for doing what we want, that's an entirely complex concept with its own thread's worth of implications and debates.
Psychological egoism turns out to be trivially true. This would not content defenders of psychological egoism, however. They intend an empirical theory that, like other such theories, it is at least possible to refute by observation.
And?
Are you seriously telling me that philosophy frowns on boring truths? Is it that juvenile?
Sometimes reality is trivial.
--
And you still have no evidence to present as to the reality of morals.
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
And I'm talking about within the constraints of moralistic reasoning. Why do I wish to know about physics MrMister?
Because you seemed to be saying that you disagreed with philosophical methodology generally, and that it should be replaced with our much-lauded modern science. I was saying that philosophy is both omni-present and irreplaceable, and that it even infects everyone's favorite subject: our vaunted hard science.
This. I wrote a response, but I was on a public computer so I got a time log out after I finished :P
Essentially, the scientific method is a very fine tuned method of inquiry that philosophical in its foundations.
For instance, do I visit my friend in the hospital or do I finish my honors thesis on time? One is better for me, and one is better for her: which should I do? The nihilist claims that there is no rational resolution to this question, and indeed, that it must be meaningless. There is simply no fact about which I should do.
I would agree that there isn't a "right" thing to do here. This is where you weigh your values and make your predictions and then roll the dice to see if you judged the results of your decision correctly. Many people will agree with your decision and many people will disagree with it and none of them will have anything to back it up but their own personal values.
...
The reasoning process [of the nihilist] is simply "how do I fulfill my values" instead of "how do I fulfill the universe's values." A nihilist can at least show some evidence of their values, though they may not understand them fully.
How does the nihilist choose her values? For instance, in the example given, how does the nihilist choose whether she values comforting her friend or finishing her thesis more? Or do you think it is not possible to choose what one values? Because that was precisely the question I was raising, and you haven't addressed it.
You have said "I do what I value" without explaining why you value any particular thing over any other.
I wanted to address this.
The nihilist, like everyone else, does not choose their values. Their values are established by preexisting factors socially, biologically, etc. Even if the individual reflects on their moral system and rationally changes it, say by becoming a vegetarian, it is because they have been trained to value rational conclusions. The very fact that they value the logical conclusion that they shouldn't eat meat over their intuitive desire to eat meat and their intuitive prioritizing of humans over animals is a result of an imposed value system.
I think that a hard determinism is the only satisfactory solution to this question. When people make decisions, they are actually just acting out the values that they have received. When you ask "How do I decide what to value?", the question is empty; the decision is illusory. You do not control what you value; the attempt to control what you value is itself the result of pre-existing, imposed values.
For instance, do I visit my friend in the hospital or do I finish my honors thesis on time? One is better for me, and one is better for her: which should I do? The nihilist claims that there is no rational resolution to this question, and indeed, that it must be meaningless. There is simply no fact about which I should do.
There is no fact about what you should do, at least if by fact you mean a universal imperative or anything of the like.
However, this does not necesitate nihilism, if by nihilism you mean that it is indeed meaningless. The resolution of the conflict between your two obligations has meaning in terms of what you end up doing. This in turn has meaning in terms of how that affects other matters, how others respond to your choice, and so forth. It does not however have some grander meaning derived from any sort of metaphysical principle or object, but only that meaning that is derived from your interaction with humanity and the human condition.
It ultimately comes down to what kind of person you are. And that is not something that exists a priori and ex nihilo, rather the thing we call moral character exists only in relation to others and arises only from one's interactions with others. A man alone on a deserted island has no moral character both because he has no need for ethics and no means by which to exercise it.
The only judge for moral action is the consequences of that action. Many actions have fairly obvious consequences and are easily judged by society. For example, the vast majority of people will agree that murder is very harmful for individuals and society and thus immoral and thus something to be proscribed by society. Those who disagree are acted against for the good of society, which is also the good of most of the individuals forming society.
In something like your example, society does not have a clear judgement to make. This is because of a variance in moral character. Some will cosider a friend's problem important enough to inconvenience themselves to a great degree, others to only a lesser, all across a spectrum of possible degrees of inconvenience traded for help to another. To suggest that there is one optimum value is to me obviously ludicrious. And what makes the difference is not the present circumstances, there would be difference even in identical sitations, but rather the sum total of all previous experiences. Some people will have been formed by life to be more generious and considerate, others less, and so forth. There is no right answer to how generious or considerate you should be (beyond the broad boundary conditions of "enough to get by in life without making every person I meet hate me forever"), only a fact of how you are right now.
HamHamJ on
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It's entirely trivial if you define "what someone wants" as "what they do." In that case, it's no more enlightening than saying "everyone does what they do." Psychological egoism is only interesting if you define wanting as a certain sort of mental state, and it's not at all clear that if you do that it will actually turn out to be the case that people always do what they want. For instance, I wanted to eat a whole cake the other day but then I didn't.
"Interesting" is a poor way to judge the truth of something.
True, but it's an excellent way to judge the utility of something.
I pretty much buy into psychological egoism, as far as it goes. But I recognize that, at the end of the day, it doesn't say much. "You always do what you want to do" works out roughly to "you always do what you tell your body to do", which is tautological and of limited utility. It leaves open the question of why people want to do these things, and that is the more interesting question.
Sure, I donated money to charity because doing so made me happy. Why did it make me happy, though? What does that fact say about me? You can eliminate psychological egoism from the equation entirely by replacing every instance of "doing X" with "wanting to do X". A theory that can be cast aside by doing a global, terminological copy-and-paste job isn't really the be-all-end-all of philosophy.
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EDIT: But otherwise the egoism arugment is a crappy cop-out.
It boils down to you saying that you "like" doing good things, so that's why you do them.
And then we say, "yeah, but we're talking about what makes an action good or not."
Which is a helluva lot more useful of a discussion than whether or not you like doing it, since people like doing things that are pretty damn evil, too.
EDIT: But otherwise the egoism arugment is a crappy cop-out.
It boils down to you saying that you "like" doing good things, so that's why you do them.
And then we say, "yeah, but we're talking about what makes an action good or not."
Which is a helluva lot more useful of a discussion than whether or not you like doing it, since people like doing things that are pretty damn evil, too.
Yes but defining whether an action is good or not will not make people actually do it. The academic discussion of what makes something moral is generally not what actually motivates people to take action.
Unless I've misread you wrong MrMonroe and you are talking about how we should make decisions? Because some of those examples seemed to me to be using how people make decisions as evidence for the validity of any one should value judgement.
In which case it's not evidence, people use lots of different values. You can't get an answer from that.
The methodology of philosophy is generally a mix of description and prescription. Philosophers try to make prescriptive claims about how people should behave and how they should reason. Often, they use descriptive claims about our intuitions to try to help support these claims. To what extent we should try to preserve our intuitions versus revising them is an issue of legitimate debate.
Often, it seems to me, philosophers are attempting to resolve our incoherent and conflicted intuitions into the most appealing coherent package. Any imposition of coherence will almost always result in jettisoning at least some things we find intuitively true.
It is generally counted as a strike against a theory if it requires that we reject our intuitions in exchange for no real gain in coherency or plausibility over its alternatives.
Then philosophy is off in its own little world. I'm not sure I should listen to them.
Plausibility and coherency are value judgements that have been consistency shown, in the decision making literature, to produce bad decision making.
I find this ironic.
I'm sorry, but this is becoming obnoxious. You are not any sort of expert in the appropriate criteria for developing theories. Coherence and plausibility are two of the most important requirements of any scientific theory. If you don't understand this, you need to go back to about eighth grade.
True, but it's an excellent way to judge the utility of something.
I pretty much buy into psychological egoism, as far as it goes. But I recognize that, at the end of the day, it doesn't say much. "You always do what you want to do" works out roughly to "you always do what you tell your body to do", which is tautological and of limited utility. It leaves open the question of why people want to do these things, and that is the more interesting question.
Sure, I donated money to charity because doing so made me happy. Why did it make me happy, though? What does that fact say about me? You can eliminate psychological egoism from the equation entirely by replacing every instance of "doing X" with "wanting to do X". A theory that can be cast aside by doing a global, terminological copy-and-paste job isn't really the be-all-end-all of philosophy.
The problem lies in the tendancy of people to ask the wrong questions. Some questions have no answer. Like that show, "Lost." People have this dangerous habit of trying to find order and patterns and meaning when sometimes something just IS. It's like the old Liliputian debate.
On the notion of psychological egoism, why prefer that over psychological altruism?
I mean, the kind of justifying that egoists do to try to "prove" that people do things because they are selfish can be done in just the opposite direction to prove that no one is concerned with their self interest.
Also, all the people that love science should hate psychological egoim, due to the fact that psychological egoism is unfalsifiable. The only way you win out with it is if you can make it a necessary truth.
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
I'm not sure anyone is actually arguing strictly FOR any form of egoism or nihilism or anything else MrMister has brought up instead of showing us evidence of the existance of morality.
They're mostly mentioned as a distraction.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I'm not sure anyone is actually arguing strictly FOR any form of egoism or nihilism or anything else MrMister has brought up instead of showing us evidence of the existance of morality.
Nihilism, at least the sort that I've ever argued, is simply the lack of evidence of moral truth. If there is something more to the concept of nihilism than the equivalent of "atheism" towards morals, then my argument is whatever the proper word for that is. Isms are dangerous to argue with because people always attach a bunch of shitty baggage to it.
And we already went over the fact that nihilism has all this extra bullshit attached to it so I abandoned using the term and just stuck with simple statements instead of horribly baggage-laden philosophy jargon.
I was mistaken to use that term, as apparently I don't know what it actually means in Philsophy-land. We have already determined this.
So where is your evidence?
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
The nihilist, like everyone else, does not choose their values. Their values are established by preexisting factors socially, biologically, etc. Even if the individual reflects on their moral system and rationally changes it, say by becoming a vegetarian, it is because they have been trained to value rational conclusions. The very fact that they value the logical conclusion that they shouldn't eat meat over their intuitive desire to eat meat and their intuitive prioritizing of humans over animals is a result of an imposed value system.
I think that a hard determinism is the only satisfactory solution to this question. When people make decisions, they are actually just acting out the values that they have received. When you ask "How do I decide what to value?", the question is empty; the decision is illusory. You do not control what you value; the attempt to control what you value is itself the result of pre-existing, imposed values.
I think that this is one consistent answer to the question that I raised. I do not subscribe to it myself, because I suspect that one can control what one values in a more significant sense than you acknowledge. Basically, I think your commitment to hard determinism here is at odds with the actual experience we have of making decisions about things like becoming vegetarian.
Edit: mainly because even if it's some sort of illusion, I am constantly faced by questions of what I should choose to value. A hard deterministic position gives me no method of resolving those questions, because it essential denies that they exist. So I am cast adrift, so to speak.
I'm not sure anyone is actually arguing strictly FOR any form of egoism or nihilism or anything else MrMister has brought up instead of showing us evidence of the existance of morality.
They're mostly mentioned as a distraction.
Uh, morality exists, in some form. Whether it is entirely relative, or objective is the question. However, it seems silly to doubt that moral reasoning occurs.
If you want evidence, would you accept my testimony that I engage in moral reasoning?
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
Basically, I think your commitment to hard determinism here is at odds with the actual experience we have of making decisions about things like becoming vegetarian.
You don't think vegetarianism can be explained in a deterministic universe...? o_O
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I gave my argument for why I am not a nihilist on the page before last. I also believe that an absence of moral facts implies nihilism. Hence, I believe there are moral facts. You may not agree with my argument, but it would be disingenuous of you to suggest that I'm not presenting one.
MrMister on
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Basically, I think your commitment to hard determinism here is at odds with the actual experience we have of making decisions about things like becoming vegetarian.
You don't think vegetarianism can be explained in a deterministic universe...? o_O
No, [I do think that vegetarianism can be explained in a deterministic universe]. "Hard determinism," by contrast, is a special term that describes the position wherein a deterministic universe supposedly excludes the possibility of free will. I am a compatibilist: I believe that any meaningful conception of free will can go together with determinism.
You described that you weren't a nihilist because of emotional reasons. That isn't evidence. That's faith and hope and dreams.
You aren't looking for something empirical right?
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
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I think you misinterpreted me: I don't think that there's anything wrong with the universe being deterministic. As I said, I am a compatibilist. You got confused because "hard determinism" is a technical term which refers to a position above and beyond simple determinism. See the edit.
I think you misinterpreted me: I don't think that there's anything wrong with the universe being deterministic. As I said, I am a compatibilist. You got confused because "hard determinism" is a technical term which refers to a position above and beyond simple determinism. See the edit.
I consider "Free Will" to be as much a nonsense term as "Moral." So.
I'm looking for anything more solid than the claims made about deities.
Okay, so would you accept that any moral truths are going to be a priori in nature?
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
In the course of human existence situations will arise where decisions must be made. Principles are employed by individual humans to negotiate these situations. It may be that these principles are derived from an external or internal source, and may vary from person to person, or many may share these same principles. These principles are called morals. Groups of principles are many times referred to as ethics.
There, morals exist. As to whether they are objective, relative, situational, or absolute I can't say. For hundreds of years these questions have been asked, and it's a bit unreasonable to suppose that MrMister has the answers. I mean, he seems like a smart fellow, but I don't think he's got it all figured out yet flawlessly
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
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The methodology of philosophy is generally a mix of description and prescription. Philosophers try to make prescriptive claims about how people should behave and how they should reason. Often, they use descriptive claims about our intuitions to try to help support these claims. To what extent we should try to preserve our intuitions versus revising them is an issue of legitimate debate.
Often, it seems to me, philosophers are attempting to resolve our incoherent and conflicted intuitions into the most appealing coherent package. Any imposition of coherence will almost always result in jettisoning at least some things we find intuitively true.
It is generally counted as a strike against a theory if it requires that we reject our intuitions in exchange for no real gain in coherency or plausibility over its alternatives.
Then philosophy is off in its own little world. I'm not sure I should listen to them.
Plausibility and coherency are value judgements that have been consistency shown, in the decision making literature, to produce bad decision making.
I find this ironic.
Varies between individuals. You may as well ask where atheists get their ethics from.
As for values, within the degree of choice allowed by determinism, yes you can choose your values, to a degree, in some cases, depending on the individual, the value, the context, and so forth.
Varies.
"Everyone does what they want," which is a more complex statement than you may realize, entails a great many things. It is hardly a trivial statement. Truth also remains truth, even if it's not especially interesting or useful in and of itself.
And here we have empathy. :P
Philosophy is intimately connected to everything. For instance, how you interpret scientific results is a philosophical, not a scientific, question. Similarly, what should be in the constitution is a philosophical question. Or how you should treat your neighbor.
So I think you must be misunderstanding something.
When I interpret a scientific result I don't turn to the libraries philosophy section.
Well that's helpful. From where I sit, it looks like what things you value are arbitrary. And if they're arbitrary, then you have no justification for valuing them over anything else.
It's entirely trivial if you define "what someone wants" as "what they do." In that case, it's no more enlightening than saying "everyone does what they do." Psychological egoism is only interesting if you define wanting as a certain sort of mental state, and it's not at all clear that if you do that it will actually turn out to be the case that people always do what they want. For instance, I wanted to eat a whole cake the other day but then I didn't.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, however, I think you have a simplistic view of scientific progress. At many points there have been substantial philosophical questions about how to interpret the results of scientific experiments: two major examples are the period when both Newtonian and Ptolemaic models were competing to explain the motion of the planets and when both particle and wave models were competing to explain light. In those periods, the competing models both had different things to recommend them and to motivate their adoption, and which to believe was a matter of deciding what was most desirable in a scientific theory.
I'm talking about what you would learn if you went through a bachelor of philosophy as opposed to wondering about things on your own without ever reading into the history of philosophy or knowing anything about the various theories.
And I'm talking about within the constraints of moralistic reasoning. Why do I wish to know about physics MrMister?
Psychology came from philosophy in the first place, and it has made specific pains to divorce itself from the traps inherent in philosophy when it comes to studying human behavior. It is in this context that I made those statements, not science as a whole. I'm sorry if I did not make that clear.
I may appear biased against philosophy, but in fairness this is the overwhelming attitude of most of the lecturers at my university so I probably picked it up from there. I have tried my best to at least listen to philisophical points of view, but when it comes to this topic I cannot accept plausability/coherency as valid criteria. The reason for this is I doubt the criterion for determining plausability/coherency comes from observation of human behavior, but rather from previous philisophical theorising based on rationality. Simply looking at human behavior in a confirmatory way is not going to prove anything. Another theory could look at the same behavior and confirm it's own tenants.
You must look at behavior from the position of either no theory, such as traits theory, or a self correcting paradigm. You must be willing to deliberately construct circumstances in which you are wrong then specifically test them against some criterion of verifiability, or you can never tell wether you are wrong. Introspection, that is human judgement alone, is not reliable.
This is what science does and how it progresses, at least nowadays. A theory is devised based on previous work and they specifically go about proving it wrong. If it survives then it's given more attention. If there is no way the theory could be proved wrong, it's not given any attention at all. There's no way to verify it, so it's left to the philosophers to go at it.
However there are some topics in moral reasoning which I think psychology can clarify, so I talk about those. What people should do is not one of those. How people do is. The two are seperate, but a lot of people conflate them, and prove should with incorrect conceptions of how.
You're going to have to provide some examples of these philosophical questions, because, frankly, what you wrote is wrong. The quality of a scientific model is simply the accuracy of its results: the better a model the closer its numbers will be to what we observe in an experiment. For example, the heliocentric model of the solar system is superior to the Ptolemaic model because it produces results which are closer to our observations.
Because you seemed to be saying that you disagreed with philosophical methodology generally, and that it should be replaced with our much-lauded modern science. I was saying that philosophy is both omni-present and irreplaceable, and that it even infects everyone's favorite subject: our vaunted hard science.
Oh, but were it only so simple. Here's an excerpt from Kuhn that's a nice introduction to what I'm talking about. And keep in mind, that I was not referring to Copernicanism and Ptolemaic astronomy as if that were a current, live debate in science. Instead, it is typical of the sorts of debates that are important in science, but are not themselves settled (in any direct sense) by science.
So, I do not agree with everything Kuhn says, even in that passage (oh god no)--but I think the above is a good introduction to the sorts of debates important to the scientific community which are themselves philosophical rather scientific in nature.
Depends on how you mean arbitrary or justified. Most values are formed based on events, experiences, and so forth, and are rooted in at least a perception of reality and some assumptions based on it. However, for the most part, this is correct. Values have no external validation. People just agree or disagree with them.
"Interesting" is a poor way to judge the truth of something.
As for doing what we want, that's an entirely complex concept with its own thread's worth of implications and debates.
And?
Are you seriously telling me that philosophy frowns on boring truths? Is it that juvenile?
Sometimes reality is trivial.
--
And you still have no evidence to present as to the reality of morals.
This. I wrote a response, but I was on a public computer so I got a time log out after I finished :P
Essentially, the scientific method is a very fine tuned method of inquiry that philosophical in its foundations.
I wanted to address this.
The nihilist, like everyone else, does not choose their values. Their values are established by preexisting factors socially, biologically, etc. Even if the individual reflects on their moral system and rationally changes it, say by becoming a vegetarian, it is because they have been trained to value rational conclusions. The very fact that they value the logical conclusion that they shouldn't eat meat over their intuitive desire to eat meat and their intuitive prioritizing of humans over animals is a result of an imposed value system.
I think that a hard determinism is the only satisfactory solution to this question. When people make decisions, they are actually just acting out the values that they have received. When you ask "How do I decide what to value?", the question is empty; the decision is illusory. You do not control what you value; the attempt to control what you value is itself the result of pre-existing, imposed values.
There is no fact about what you should do, at least if by fact you mean a universal imperative or anything of the like.
However, this does not necesitate nihilism, if by nihilism you mean that it is indeed meaningless. The resolution of the conflict between your two obligations has meaning in terms of what you end up doing. This in turn has meaning in terms of how that affects other matters, how others respond to your choice, and so forth. It does not however have some grander meaning derived from any sort of metaphysical principle or object, but only that meaning that is derived from your interaction with humanity and the human condition.
It ultimately comes down to what kind of person you are. And that is not something that exists a priori and ex nihilo, rather the thing we call moral character exists only in relation to others and arises only from one's interactions with others. A man alone on a deserted island has no moral character both because he has no need for ethics and no means by which to exercise it.
The only judge for moral action is the consequences of that action. Many actions have fairly obvious consequences and are easily judged by society. For example, the vast majority of people will agree that murder is very harmful for individuals and society and thus immoral and thus something to be proscribed by society. Those who disagree are acted against for the good of society, which is also the good of most of the individuals forming society.
In something like your example, society does not have a clear judgement to make. This is because of a variance in moral character. Some will cosider a friend's problem important enough to inconvenience themselves to a great degree, others to only a lesser, all across a spectrum of possible degrees of inconvenience traded for help to another. To suggest that there is one optimum value is to me obviously ludicrious. And what makes the difference is not the present circumstances, there would be difference even in identical sitations, but rather the sum total of all previous experiences. Some people will have been formed by life to be more generious and considerate, others less, and so forth. There is no right answer to how generious or considerate you should be (beyond the broad boundary conditions of "enough to get by in life without making every person I meet hate me forever"), only a fact of how you are right now.
True, but it's an excellent way to judge the utility of something.
I pretty much buy into psychological egoism, as far as it goes. But I recognize that, at the end of the day, it doesn't say much. "You always do what you want to do" works out roughly to "you always do what you tell your body to do", which is tautological and of limited utility. It leaves open the question of why people want to do these things, and that is the more interesting question.
Sure, I donated money to charity because doing so made me happy. Why did it make me happy, though? What does that fact say about me? You can eliminate psychological egoism from the equation entirely by replacing every instance of "doing X" with "wanting to do X". A theory that can be cast aside by doing a global, terminological copy-and-paste job isn't really the be-all-end-all of philosophy.
EDIT: But otherwise the egoism arugment is a crappy cop-out.
It boils down to you saying that you "like" doing good things, so that's why you do them.
And then we say, "yeah, but we're talking about what makes an action good or not."
Which is a helluva lot more useful of a discussion than whether or not you like doing it, since people like doing things that are pretty damn evil, too.
Yes but defining whether an action is good or not will not make people actually do it. The academic discussion of what makes something moral is generally not what actually motivates people to take action.
I'm sorry, but this is becoming obnoxious. You are not any sort of expert in the appropriate criteria for developing theories. Coherence and plausibility are two of the most important requirements of any scientific theory. If you don't understand this, you need to go back to about eighth grade.
The problem lies in the tendancy of people to ask the wrong questions. Some questions have no answer. Like that show, "Lost." People have this dangerous habit of trying to find order and patterns and meaning when sometimes something just IS. It's like the old Liliputian debate.
I mean, the kind of justifying that egoists do to try to "prove" that people do things because they are selfish can be done in just the opposite direction to prove that no one is concerned with their self interest.
Also, all the people that love science should hate psychological egoim, due to the fact that psychological egoism is unfalsifiable. The only way you win out with it is if you can make it a necessary truth.
"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
They're mostly mentioned as a distraction.
Uh, okay.
I was mistaken to use that term, as apparently I don't know what it actually means in Philsophy-land. We have already determined this.
So where is your evidence?
I think that this is one consistent answer to the question that I raised. I do not subscribe to it myself, because I suspect that one can control what one values in a more significant sense than you acknowledge. Basically, I think your commitment to hard determinism here is at odds with the actual experience we have of making decisions about things like becoming vegetarian.
Edit: mainly because even if it's some sort of illusion, I am constantly faced by questions of what I should choose to value. A hard deterministic position gives me no method of resolving those questions, because it essential denies that they exist. So I am cast adrift, so to speak.
Uh, morality exists, in some form. Whether it is entirely relative, or objective is the question. However, it seems silly to doubt that moral reasoning occurs.
If you want evidence, would you accept my testimony that I engage in moral reasoning?
"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
You don't think vegetarianism can be explained in a deterministic universe...? o_O
I gave my argument for why I am not a nihilist on the page before last. I also believe that an absence of moral facts implies nihilism. Hence, I believe there are moral facts. You may not agree with my argument, but it would be disingenuous of you to suggest that I'm not presenting one.
No, [I do think that vegetarianism can be explained in a deterministic universe]. "Hard determinism," by contrast, is a special term that describes the position wherein a deterministic universe supposedly excludes the possibility of free will. I am a compatibilist: I believe that any meaningful conception of free will can go together with determinism.
[Edit]
Wow.
You aren't looking for something empirical right?
"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
I think you misinterpreted me: I don't think that there's anything wrong with the universe being deterministic. As I said, I am a compatibilist. You got confused because "hard determinism" is a technical term which refers to a position above and beyond simple determinism. See the edit.
I'm looking for anything more solid than the claims made about deities.
I consider "Free Will" to be as much a nonsense term as "Moral." So.
Okay, so would you accept that any moral truths are going to be a priori in nature?
"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
No.
Unless I'm missing something regarding that term, it's just taking someone's word for it. People use that for deities all the time.
In the course of human existence situations will arise where decisions must be made. Principles are employed by individual humans to negotiate these situations. It may be that these principles are derived from an external or internal source, and may vary from person to person, or many may share these same principles. These principles are called morals. Groups of principles are many times referred to as ethics.
There, morals exist. As to whether they are objective, relative, situational, or absolute I can't say. For hundreds of years these questions have been asked, and it's a bit unreasonable to suppose that MrMister has the answers. I mean, he seems like a smart fellow, but I don't think he's got it all figured out yet flawlessly
"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