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Juffo-Wup posted:A.) No, I'm correct even if moral claims are merely intended as statements of fact. Which they often are. Sometimes by me. If you are a moral realist who believes that logic is the standard by which moral claims should be judged then that's fine. I disagree, and you sound kind of like a deontologist (or a robot), but that's a position that one can hold without any contradictions. If you don't believe that there is a non-subjective standard by which moral claims can be judged then your version of moral realism is simply that moral claims exist, which would make almost everyone a moral realist.
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May 25, 2016 23:04
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Zaradis posted:If you are a moral realist who believes that logic is the standard by which moral claims should be judged then that's fine. I disagree, and you sound kind of like a deontologist (or a robot), but that's a position that one can hold without any contradictions. If you don't believe that there is a non-subjective standard by which moral claims can be judged then your version of moral realism is simply that moral claims exist, which would make almost everyone a moral realist. The paper I linked, and the summary I gave of it, give a value theory that clearly implies a consequentialist normative theory. I don't know why you think I sound like a deontologist. Edit: That it is internally logically consistent is a necessary but not a sufficient property of a good moral theory. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 23:11 on May 25, 2016 |
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May 25, 2016 23:06
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Juffo-Wup posted:The paper I linked, and the summary I gave of it, give a value theory that clearly implies a consequentialist normative theory. I don't know why you think I sound like a deontologist. Because deontology was literally created as a moral system with logic as its standard of judgment and you seem to have been arguing that logic should be used as a moral standard of judgment. But, your edit is understood. Regardless, the consequentialist moral standard that you proposed is that one ought to always do what they can to increase objective moral good and objective moral good is the application of whatever is objectively good for an individual, according to a perfectly rational individual, across the board for all people (possibly animals, plants, etc.). The obvious problem with this is that there is no such thing as a perfectly rational individual, so this standard is an impossible one to determine the details of, not to mention whether or not it is being met.
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May 25, 2016 23:50
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Zaradis posted:Because deontology was literally created as a moral system with logic as its standard of judgment and you seem to have been arguing that logic should be used as a moral standard of judgment. But, your edit is understood. The subjunctive counterfactual facts about what an ideal observer would want is a way of operationalizing the relevant conception of value. Of course Railton does not think that such observers actually exist, in the sense of being causally efficacious. Rather, facts about what an ideal observer would want the actual version of themselves to want are understood to reduce to, i.e., supervene upon, a collection of facts about the psychological makeup of the individual and the environment in which they find themselves. Now, it's true that we ourselves are not ideal observers. However, we can approximate the standpoint of the ideal observer by coming to know as many things as possible about the reduction base of the subjunctive (i.e., the psychological makeup of the average person and the situations about which we are expected to render moral judgments.) To the extent that empirical knowledge is possible, we do the best with what we have and get as close as possible to the truth, using what we know to be the most truth-conducive methods. If you're gonna stop me here and bring up external-world skepticism again, don't bother, because I am equally happy with the conclusion that we have a similar degree of epistemic access to facts about values as we do to physical, scientific facts. Indeed, just as in the sciences we can do experiments and gauge how well their results fit our expectations, value facts of this sort have a similar feedback mechanism: If we think that something is in our interest, but it actually is not, then we will discover that our initial expectation was wrong when we get the thing and don't feel the way we expected the thing to make us feel. Finally, I don't want anyone to feel like they absolutely must read the paper in order to engage with my argument, but if you're interested, the relevant section, covering both the account of value and the learning/updating mechanism, can be found from pages 174-180. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 00:34 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 00:31
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Objective moral evaluations can occur if we all agree on the same set of subjective moral values. If we don't (and i guarantee we don't), then there will always be situations where we disagree on the correct moral evaluation. Best you can hope for its that for 99% of the possible situations that can come up, you and I share the same subjective moral values that would trace to those situations. Otherwise stopping you from exercising your moral judgement becomes my duty. Sorry.
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May 26, 2016 00:44
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Juffo-Wup posted:Now, it's true that we ourselves are not ideal observers. However, we can approximate the standpoint of the ideal observer by coming to know as many things as possible about the reduction base of the subjunctive. I think that you are a bit too optimistic about the ability of human beings, with all of our biases and irrationality, to approximate what a perfectly rational observer would morally think about a given situation. Our biases inform everything we do, whether we are aware of them or not, and I do not think moral standards are the sorts of things that lend themselves to peer review since they are not cold, empirically testable facts about the world but the things people hold most dear and most adamantly defend. It is easily conceivable that an ideal observer could conclude that what is in the best interest of human beings is to reduce pain and the threat of pain as much as possible, so the morally right thing to do is kill ourselves. Even if I'm wrong and what you claim is actually possible we may get close to the moral standard you're proposing, but we would never reach that moral standard (or if we did it would be an accident and we couldn't realize that we'd reached it). Juffo-Wup posted:Indeed, just as in the sciences we can do experiments and gauge how well their results fit our expectations, value facts of this sort have a similar feedback mechanism: If we think that something is in our interest, but it actually is not, then we will discover that our initial expectation was wrong when we get the thing and don't feel the way we expected the thing to make us feel. It seems to me that your moral standard begins by assuming that acting in our interests as a whole is a good thing to do. Since this moral claim is an unstated premise that leads to the conclusion of the moral standard it cannot be judged by that standard. So either this assumption is a special sort of moral claim that does not need a justificatory standard, which is not obvious and would have to be explained; or there must be a different moral standard by which to judge the premise, which would also have to be shown. Or moral realism is incorrect, at least according to this argument. Zaradis fucked around with this message at 02:32 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 02:29
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Zaradis posted:I think that you are a bit too optimistic about the ability of human beings, with all of our biases and irrationality, to approximate what a perfectly rational observer would morally think about a given situation. Our biases inform everything we do, whether we are aware of them or not, and I do not think moral standards are the sorts of things that lend themselves to peer review since they are not cold, empirically testable facts about the world but the things people hold most dear and most adamantly defend. It is easily conceivable that an ideal observer could conclude that what is in the best interest of human beings is to reduce pain and the threat of pain as much as possible, so the morally right thing to do is kill ourselves. Even if I'm wrong and what you claim is actually possible we may get close to the moral standard you're proposing, but we would never reach that moral standard (or if we did it would be an accident and we couldn't realize that we'd reached it). On the view I've given, moral facts do, as a matter of fact, reduce to cold, empirically testable facts. Now, you're right that our zoo of cognitive biases makes hard to get and secure knowledge, but nobody ever said discovering things would be easy. This is the epistemic position empiricism puts us in, but in no other case does that make us throw up our hands and declare it can't be done. Zaradis posted:It seems to me that your moral standard begins by assuming that acting in our interests as a whole is a good thing to do. Since this moral claim is an unstated premise that leads to the conclusion of the moral standard it cannot be judged by that standard. So either this assumption is a special sort of moral claim that does not need a justificatory standard, which is not obvious and would have to be explained; or there must be a different moral standard by which to judge the premise, which would also have to be shown. Or moral realism is incorrect, at least according to this argument. This is a naturalistic thesis. We are identifying a phenomenon in the world and trying to explain it. And in this case it looks very much like the way people use the word 'good' in the non-moral sense: we commonly mark a distinction between what a person wants and what's in their interest, and it is natural to ask of someone in an irrational state of mind what they would want if they had their wits about them - this is the moral basis of implied consent in emergency medicine. Railton also thinks it serves to explain some features about our moral phenomenology, and while I don't want to put in a ton of effort reproducing that argument here, I will point out that it closely mirrors Putnam's 'no miracles' argument for scientific realism: it is a theoretical entity's role in successful scientific explanation that gives us reason to believe that it really exists.
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May 26, 2016 03:07
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Juffo-Wup posted:On the view I've given, moral facts do, as a matter of fact, reduce to cold, empirically testable facts. Now, you're right that our zoo of cognitive biases makes hard to get and secure knowledge, but nobody ever said discovering things would be easy. This is the epistemic position empiricism puts us in, but in no other case does that make us throw up our hands and declare it can't be done. I don't disagree that people generally, when acting rationally, act in their interest. However, even granting that this is a "non-moral good," I see no good reason to then say that moral good is just non-moral good applied universally. You cannot derive an ought from an is, and now you are committing a naturalistic fallacy. Edit: I should have pointed out that people generally, when acting rationally, will act in what they believe is their interest. A mother believes that it is in her interest to protect her child, even if that protection comes at the cost of personal harm. Zaradis fucked around with this message at 03:28 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 03:22
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Zaradis posted:I don't disagree that people generally, when acting rationally, act in their interest. However, even granting that this is a "non-moral good," I see no good reason to then say that moral good is just non-moral good applied universally. You cannot derive an ought from an is, and now you are committing a naturalistic fallacy. Again, this is how people use the language - we call people selfish when they only attend to their own instrumental good, and selfless when they don't, and both of those are heavily normatively valenced words. Morality is by nature a social phenomenon - part of what it constitutively is to be a theory of ethics is to tell us how people are supposed to negotiate the needs and interests of other people. Ethics does not arise on a desert island with a single inhabitant for this reason. If I call something a theory of ethics, and all its principles are about how to change the oil in your car, then I expect peoples' response will be to think I'm somewhat confused about what ethics is. Doubly so if I handed them a potato and called it ethics. Domains of inquiry are individuated by their content and objects, and it just so happens that the domain of inquiry primarily concerned with the norms of the social sphere is called ethics. Finally, 'naturalistic fallacy' is the name Moore gave to any account of the good that identifies value with any natural phenomenon. I haven't been shy about saying that the theory in question is naturalistic; I consider it a virtue of the theory, in fact. So it goes without saying that I think Moore is wrong, and that his Open Question Argument is unconvincing. Since the OQA depends on cognitivism about moral facts, I did not expect a professed moral skeptic to take it as the final word in metaethics. Is it worth my addressing that argument? Do you endorse it? Zaradis posted:Edit: I should have pointed out that people generally, when acting rationally, will act in what they believe is their interest. A mother believes that it is in her interest to protect her child, even if that protection comes at the cost of personal harm. Yeah, and sometimes we believe true things and sometimes we believe false things. To the extent that we have a mechanism for distinguishing those two, ethics is an active domain of inquiry. To the extent that we don't, science is no better at getting us the truth than mysticism.
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May 26, 2016 13:14
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If you believe that how one ought to morally act can be derived from facts about the world then I think we're simply at another standstill. Before Moore elaborated on it, Hume recognized the problem with claiming that because something is then it or something else morally ought to be. I don't see how this is surmountable without having premises which make moral claims leading to the moral standard conclusion, the problems of which I have already addressed. To commit a naturalistic fallacy, these premises are either ignored or are hidden and not recognized. It just seems odd for someone who has often been as committed to a moral system's internal logic being sound as you have to act as if the fallacy your moral system commits is irrelevant. Consider Sam Harris. Harris believes that from facts about the world can we can derive what we morally ought and ought not do. He believes this because he thinks that science can tell us what would be the most conducive to raising the standard of living for the most people. Ignoring the fact that the term "standard of living" carries normative weight, Harris is clearly promoting a form of utilitarianism. He either ignores or does not recognize his unstated premise that 'raising the standard of living for the most people possible is a morally good action.' By ignoring this he can, rather sloppily, claim that he is deriving what ought to be from what is and claim that he just rejects the idea of a naturalistic fallacy. If the premises that lead to a conclusion which sets a moral standard include moral premises then that moral standard cannot logically apply to all moral statements and is not a very good standard for all of morality. I hold that this is the case in examples like your's and Harris' because ideas about what morality should be are individually subjectively imposed on the world and, thus, are not logically suitable to be applied universally, just as one would cannot apply that 'the color purple is the best color' universally. This explains why every system of morality that attempts to make itself universal has flaws. But, like I said, if you do not agree then we're at a standstill again, because I see no good reason not to accept that the naturalistic fallacy is a flaw in reasoning. Zaradis fucked around with this message at 15:23 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 15:07
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Have you read Moore's Principia Ethica? Do you understand how the 'naturalistic fallacy' is supposed to arise? Can you reproduce the argument for it? Because it is not a 'fallacy' like affirming the consequent is a fallacy. It depends strongly on a very simple intuition whose verification Moore does not go to great lengths to establish. Surprisingly, people have thought carefully about the problem in there last hundred or so years since the book was published, and they didn't all become intuitionists! And all the problems Hume thinks mean that you can't derive an ought-statement from an is-statement are still there when you try to derive an is-statement from an is-statement. If any empirical inference is possible, then the inferences I'm depending on are possible. But, you're right: if you're willing to accept the single-sentence pronouncements of centuries-old texts as decisive independently of the arguments given for them, then our disagreement cannot be resolved through argument.
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May 26, 2016 15:28
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Zaradis posted:If the premises that lead to a conclusion which sets a moral standard include moral premises then that moral standard cannot logically apply to all moral statements and is not a very good standard for all of morality. If a set of premises that lead to a conclusion about whether a certain state of affairs constitutes combustion include premises about what combustion is, then that standard of combustion cannot apply to all statements about combustion and that is not a very good scientific standard. All predicates are like this, not just normative ones.
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May 26, 2016 15:33
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Do you have an example of a moral statement that does not itself take moral premises? Because while it's trivial to show that a moral statement can result from moral premises, without a moral statement minus moral premises, you end up with an infinite regression. If you don't have such a premise, then you're belief in moral realism is simply a matter of faith, that this moral statement without moral premises exists. That doesn't seem parsimonious, and thus I think the naturalistic fallacy should be considered a fallacy.
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May 26, 2016 15:41
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Juffo-Wup posted:If a set of premises that lead to a conclusion about whether a certain state of affairs constitutes combustion include premises about what combustion is, then that standard of combustion cannot apply to all statements about combustion and that is not a very good scientific standard. Okay, but this doesn't seem to help your argument. If you form an argument with a conclusion that claims that a certain state of affairs is the standard for what combustion is, and one or more of the premises that lead to that conclusion make a claim about what combustion is then the premise is assuming the conclusion. This is pretty basic begging the question.
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May 26, 2016 15:41
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rudatron posted:Do you have an example of a moral statement that does not itself take moral premises? Because while it's trivial to show that a moral statement can result from moral premises, without a moral statement minus moral premises, you end up with an infinite regression. I'm glad there is someone in here who can tersely and eloquently say what I've been saying this entire time. Well said.
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May 26, 2016 15:43
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rudatron posted:Do you have an example of a moral statement that does not itself take moral premises? Because while it's trivial to show that a moral statement can result from moral premises, without a moral statement minus moral premises, you end up with an infinite regression. This is the epistemic situation we are in with regard to all empirical predicates; they must have reasonably well defined referents for inferences involving them to have any meaning. If you think this means the sciences are logically incapable of producing knowledge, then I'm not interested in having that conversation. If you don't, you should be able to explain where the difference lies.
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May 26, 2016 15:50
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Explain yourself further.
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May 26, 2016 15:55
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To be more specific: do you mean the problem of putting into language the act of recognition of the object (ie define 'chair', then define all the words you use, and so on and so forth), or are you claiming that empirical knowledge suffers such an regression by it's own nature? The former is easy for smoosh, the latter is more interesting, but I'll need more argumentation from you to see why you think that.
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May 26, 2016 16:04
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Here's Moore's argument for the naturalistic fallacy method of refutation, as well as I can recall it right now: Imagine that I say of some feature of the world, say pleasure for example, that it is identical with the good. Now imagine you point at a particular instance of pleasure and ask 'I know that's pleasure, but is it really good?' if we take the identity claim seriously, the question shouldn't make sense. But it does make sense - it seems like an open question to ask of any particular instance of the supposedly identical with the good feature whether it really is good. Since our intuition that the question is sensible is stronger than our intuition that the identity claim is right, we conclude that the identity claim is false. Here's a parallel argument: Imagine I say of some feature of the world, for example violently rotating columns of air, that they are identical with tornadoes. Now imagine you point at a particular instance of rotating air and ask 'I know that's a rotating column of air, but is it really a tornado?' Again, we either side with the identity claim and say that the question doesn't make any sense, or we side with the intuition that the question is meaningful, and thereby reject the identity claim. What went wrong here? Well, Moore is depending on a particular early 20th century intuition about identity claims, which is that they are inherently analytic and therefore carry no information, and should not be surprising. Of course, since then a couple things have happened. First, in 1951, Quine wrote Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which argued, among other things, that the analytic-synthetic distinction is circular and hence that no appeal to that distinction should figure into philosophical argument. Second, in 1980, Kripke wrote Naming and Necessity, which demonstrated that, even if you still want to hold onto analyticity, there are truths that are both a priori and synthetic, most famously scientific identities like 'Water is H2O.' Either of these serves as an explanation of why 'but is it really good?' sounds like a legitimate question even if the identity claim is true. And that's why the open question argument either A.) generalizes to all empirical truths, or B.) simply fails. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 17:06 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 17:02
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You're responding to an argument no one has actually used (moore's argument). You were the first person to bring up Moore, and the person you originally used it against did not seem to care about them, beyond your mention of him. The fact that they immediately jumped to Hume after you mentioned them should have been a give away. The argument you're presenting seems more related to the nature of definitions and reference w.r.t the objects they're referring to, it is not germane to the topic at hand.
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May 26, 2016 17:29
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The naturalistic fallacy argument is Moore's argument. If you say 'naturalistic fallacy' you are talking about Moore, full stop. If we're gonna just mention arguments by name rather than actually spelling them out, then we ought to at least use the right names. As for Hume, as Railton points out, Hume's argument depends on an intuition (not shared by me) that if there are moral facts, they have categorically motivating force, while he thought that scientific facts do not. And since reason is essentially constituted by means-ends reasoning, the former kinds of facts don't exist while the latter do. But this is only convincing if you buy Hume's intuition about the practical nature of moral reasoning. However, to quote Railton: P. 168 posted:Hume is surely right in claiming there to be an intrinsic connection, no doubt complex, between valuing something and having some sort of positive attitude toward it that provides one with an instrumental reason for action. We simply would disbelieve someone who claimed to value honesty and yet never showed the slightest urge to act honestly when given an easy opportunity. But this is a fact about the connection between the values embraced by an individual and his reasons for action, not a fact showing a connection between moral evaluation and rational motivation. In other words, Hume's argument concerns the moral psychology of individuals, rather than the metaphysics of value. I can only assume that this is the Humean argument that was on the table.
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May 26, 2016 17:48
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Moore's naturalistic fallacy is essentially Hume's is-ought problem minus the idea that it excludes moral realism. Both agree that what ought to be cannot be derived from what is and that is the entire purpose of pointing out that you are committing the fallacy. Given the is-ought distinction, Hume does not think moral realism is possible, while Moore thinks that the is-ought distinction does not necessarily rule out moral realism. However, the important point is that they both agree that an ought cannot be derived from an is and Moore coined the term 'naturalistic fallacy' to point out when this is being done. Edit: To elaborate, there's a link between the two. If one commits the naturalistic fallacy by saying, "'pleasure is good' means that pleasure has property A" then they would consider the argument that 'pleasure has property A, therefore pleasure is good' to be valid. But the first clause is a fact that follows the first premise while the second clause is a value judgment and, thus, they've violated Hume's is-ought distinction. After one has committed Moore's naturalistic fallacy it makes it simple to violate the is-ought distinction. Zaradis fucked around with this message at 18:15 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 18:03
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The phrase 'naturalistic fallacy' is not used solely to describe Moore's argument, a quick google search will dispel that notion. Perhaps all those other usages are incorrect, but I think it's more important to be a little generous about what people mean, rather than jumping on specific terminology. As for Railton: all he does is simply show that the is-ought problem has not been conclusively proven either way - an emotivists would deny the existence of a metaphysics of value in the first place (value as a thing in and of itself), and would absolutely concur with you that Hume's argument is about the moral psychology of individuals, because that's what morality is. Your challenge is to prove that there exists a metaphysics of value beyond the moral psychology of individuals, because you're the moral realist. Has the is-ought gap been conclusive proven by Moore or anyone else? No. Is assuming the gap is real the right choice? Yes. Why? Because you're assuming the existence of a statement that has not been shown to have even one example, that of a moral statement that does not take moral premises. It's a bit like atheism/theism, I guess. rudatron fucked around with this message at 18:24 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 18:15
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I hope you'll forgive me if I take a step back for a moment to look at the big picture. Hume and Moore, in the arguments we're discussing, have more or less the same method. Which is to determine a priori what features moral facts must have if they are to be moral facts, and then to go looking for them. Hume doesn't find any, and Moore does but they're strange and sui generis. I'm not interested in playing that game. It's the same game zaradis was playing earlier about knowledge: determine a priori what sort of thing knowledge must be if it's to exist, then go looking for it (surprise! there isn't any). But why start from that a priori determination? For one thing, it seems unmotivated; on what grounds do we say that it is constitutive of moral facts that they are this way rather than some other way? Frankly, it sounds to my ears very much like saying 'Look, whatever else moral facts are, they have to be magic. But magic doesn't exist, so there's no moral facts." It leaves no room for a non-magical conception of moral facts; it shuts down the possibility of discovery before the inquiry has begun. Second, I think it has never really been satisfactorily articulated what exactly are the necessary features of moral facts that makes them so troublesome; not in the literature (though I could have just overlooked it), but certainly not in this thread. So, I reject a metaethics that starts with an a priori definition of / grounding for value-laden terms. What method of inquiry does that leave us? Well, it leaves us with the same method of inquiry we've always used to probe the universe: empiricism. Which, in this case, means looking at the vast body of value-laden human discourse, and trying to discover if it is in any way systematic. It means coming up with a theory and using it to explain both why common moral judgments are so common and why anomalous judgments are anomalous. It means showing that the way people react when their instrumental rationality yields a different result than they expected really is by taking themselves to have learned something, either about what they value, or else about how to get it. In short, the project of discovering value in the world is coextensive with (is, in fact, identical to) the project of discovering what it is that people value. This isn't earth-shattering, it's not terribly exciting, and it's certainly not anything to build a religion around. But what it is is of a piece with the normal process of human discovery. So far, the position has been attacked on metaphysical and epistemic grounds. I want to urge any of you still interested in this line to reconsider; the account is metaphysically innocent and epistemically grounded. That's not to say that there is no reasonable criticism of it, but those criticisms will be either empirical or themselves normative. An empirical critique of the theory would say that I've got my facts wrong, that my explanation of people's value-driven behavior doesn't fit with the facts. If you think a different system of values obtains, then you show how that system better explains the phenomena. If you think that no system of values obtains, then you show that human behavior from a normative point of view is so unsystematic that the only theories that adequately capture the facts are too wildly disjunctive to count as a unified theory. Alternatively, you could critique the theory on normative grounds by arguing that it gives, in too many cases, the wrong answers to moral questions. This would require you to have a distinct and independently motivated normative theory, and very strong intuitions about the crucial cases. There isn't really a values-nihilist argument from this latter direction. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 21:14 on May 26, 2016 |
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May 26, 2016 20:19
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All you're doing is assuming the existence value-in-itself, then declaring that this assumption cannot be attacked, because any attack on that assumption (and that assumption alone) 'shuts down the possibility of discovery before the inquiry has begun'. Have you shown that there is actually something to discover? I could just as well take everything you find, repackage them and throw them into an empirical subject called 'psychology of human beings', which would contain a great many statements that were true (or false), but none of which moral. Your assumption that turns that into a morality is 'human beings tend to perform the good', which you should very clearly see doesn't not contradict, nor does it fit poorly, with the emotivist conception of morality - you, as a human being, would prefer that statement, absent the existence in reality of morality, but it doesn't actually have to be a statement that is true. Observe also: the argument above is neither normative nor empirical. It also gets a little worse for you, because an integral party of scientific theory (which I'll assume you're applying to 'discover' your moral realism) requires you to adopt simpler theories among competing explanatory theories. Now whose conception of morality is simpler?
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May 27, 2016 00:32
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rudatron posted:All you're doing is assuming the existence value-in-itself This is false. I've been pretty clear throughout this conversation that I think facts about value supervene on, reduce to, and are translatable without remainder into the language of facts about the physical world. You're right that facts about human psychology will end up being highly relevant, but facts do not stop being facts just because they are about psychology. Nor are those the only facts that form, on my account, the reduction base of value facts - also relevant are facts about how human psychology interacts with various features of our various environments in various contexts. That humans value things, and that they do so in a systematically explicable way, and that they occasionally misjudge and revise their beliefs about those things that they think are in their interest, again in a systematically explicable way, is, as far as I'm concerned, all there is to objective value facts. If you are determined not to describe these things using value-laden language on the grounds that values, whatever they are, have to be something 'over and above' the physical facts, well, all I can say is that I do not share that faith. Maybe we can talk about schmorality and schnormativity and schmought-sentences instead; would that still run afoul of your 'is-ought gap' intuitions? When I say 'naturalism,' I really am quite serious about it.
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May 27, 2016 01:05
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If you believe that 'facts about value' (I assume you mean statements) should be seen as statements of the physical world, then you are assuming the existence of value as an object property - that is, value-in-itself. You can't get away from that. That's not a matter of faith, that's a matter of skepticism - you are the one who is making the leap of faith in assuming that property exists. Let me ask you a question, to help you realize this: you describe this as moral realism, but where exactly do you differ from an emotivist? They'd be more than happy to jump at your 'naturalism', but they would dispense with the idea that those statements of psychology are anything but that, that they have no value inherent to them, because there is no objective value. How is that in any way less meaningful? What discovery is 'lost' because that inquiry has been shut down?
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May 27, 2016 02:09
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rudatron posted:If you believe that 'facts about value' (I assume you mean statements) should be seen as statements of the physical world, then you are assuming the existence of value as an object property - that is, value-in-itself. You can't get away from that. That's not a matter of faith, that's a matter of skepticism - you are the one who is making the leap of faith in assuming that property exists. I really do mean 'facts about value.' Facts are propositions about states of affairs. A normative fact reduces to a collection of physical facts. Since statements are not the proper objects of reduction and supervenience, that can't possibly be what I meant. Anyway, I've explained to you what, on my account, values reduce to. You are not disputing the reality of the constituents of the reduction base, and you are not disputing the empirical supervenience claim. You still seem to be convinced that I'm committed to there being value facts that are independent of any set of physical facts. But I'm not, that's just not how scientific reduction works. For example, people who believe that combustion is a real phenomenon are not committed to thinking that 'combustion' is something that exists in addition to and independently of all the fundamental particles and their interactions. That you are convinced that nothing of this sort could hold for normative facts is a prejudice of yours that I am currently engaged in resisting. rudatron posted:Let me ask you a question, to help you realize this: you describe this as moral realism, but where exactly do you differ from an emotivist? They'd be more than happy to jump at your 'naturalism', but they would dispense with the idea that those statements of psychology are anything but that, that they have no value inherent to them, because there is no objective value. How is that in any way less meaningful? What discovery is 'lost' because that inquiry has been shut down? An emotivist thinks that normative claims are not truth-apt. But on my account, since normative facts reduce to physical facts, and bivalence holds for all physical facts, it holds for normative facts too. Hell, on the emotivist account normative claims can't even contradict each other, and all moral disagreement is a mere illusion. As I've already said, the set of facts that constitutes the reduction base of a normative fact includes, but is not exhausted by, facts about psychology. If you think that one domain being reduced to another means that only the latter domain 'really exists,' then I encourage you to read Fodor's Special Sciences, but that's not really the focus of the present disagreement.
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May 27, 2016 04:00
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As a pragmatist what is the actual result of your argument? Because it does seem that if you can prove truth of your statement then what the gently caress are you doing here. Why aren't you a world leader some where ,because in order to win your argument you have to prove something that's pretty much never been proven. None of this seems to have any actual practical use so it can be dismissed. When actual application of a persons morals and general morality is examined most people actually are utilitarian in practice.
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May 27, 2016 05:27
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'Combustion' is a short hand for a set of relations between particles which are assumed to exist, such that you can point to an objecting burning, say 'this is undergoing combustion', or equally describe the process of combustion in full. It is therefore a valid object property. Perform the same maneuver with value relations. Or, reduce some example value statement, to purely a set of physical facts, since you claim this is somehow possible. I guarantee you will not succeed. Edit: Your account of emotivism is also wrong, because you're assuming every moral statement in an emotive system has an emotional reaction only as its basis. Empirical claims can inform normative claims, so moral disagreement is possible - it simply only makes sense between two persons who share the same basic emotional reactions. Between two person's whose fundamental emotional reactions are different, there is still a moral disagreement, in that the moralities are conflicting, it is just an irreconcilable difference. Again, I will ask you: what is meaningful lost with this approach, when compared to yours? What advantage is conferred? rudatron fucked around with this message at 06:30 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 06:13
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Hollismason posted:As a pragmatist what is the actual result of your argument? Because it does seem that if you can prove truth of your statement then what the gently caress are you doing here. Why aren't you a world leader some where ,because in order to win your argument you have to prove something that's pretty much never been proven. Well, the world isn't really in the practice of making people leaders on the basis of their philosophical work. Anyway, as I've already mentioned in this thread, over half of philosophy faculty are moral realists and fewer than a third are outright anti-realists. Most of what I've said in this thread has just been a defense of (professional) philosophical majority views. Your insistence that if I'm right the discovery is earth-shattering is based on a prejudice you have about what normative facts ought to be like if they're to exist at all. I encourage you to let go of this belief. The kinds of things I'm talking about aren't magic; they're real, tangible, relatively mundane things. Hollismason posted:None of this seems to have any actual practical use so it can be dismissed. I don't know what 'actual practical use' means, but you're free to dismiss whatever you like, I suppose. rudatron posted:'Combustion' is a short hand for a set of relations between particles which are assumed to exist, such that you can point to an objecting burning, say 'this is undergoing combustion', or equally describe the process of combustion in full. It is therefore a valid object property. Perform the same maneuver with value relations. Or, reduce some example value statement, to purely a set of physical facts, since you claim this is somehow possible. I guarantee you will not succeed. That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. Take whatever relation you think holds between combustion and the complex of objects and properties to which it reduces, and apply that same relation to the proposition "When you're hungry you should eat real food rather than candy" and the complex of psychological, biological, and chemical facts that ground it. To say, in that situation, 'you should eat real food' is translatable without remainder into a sentence composed of just those physical facts and nothing else. This reduction discharges the normative language. Rather than challenging me to perform the reduction in front of your eyes, instead ask yourself why you're convinced it's impossible. I strongly suspect you'll find that what's stopping you is the assumption that at no point in the reduction will the normative language be discharged. But I'm telling you it is. Maybe this language will be clearer: if you prefer, imagine that I am stipulatively redefining value-laden terms such that they are merely shorthand for certain ostended complexes of physical properties. So if someone points at a situation and says 'badness obtains here!' their claim is an empirical one, and if it turns out that a complex of physical properties of the sort that constitute badness did not in fact obtain, then they were simply mistaken, because badness is nothing more than (nothing 'over and above') the presence of that complex. It will then be open to you to argue that my stipulation is arbitrary and unmotivated, but your grounds for this argument will necessarily be the empirical and normative lines of argument I mentioned a few posts ago. rudatron posted:Edit: Your account of emotivism is also wrong, because you're assuming every moral statement in an emotive system has an emotional reaction only as its basis. Empirical claims can inform normative claims, so moral disagreement is possible - it simply only makes sense between two persons who share the same basic emotional reactions. Between two person's whose fundamental emotional reactions are different, there is still a moral disagreement, in that the moralities are conflicting, it is just an irreconcilable difference. The emotivist's position is that the semantic content of an apparently normative claim is completely exhausted by the expression of an affective attitude. Empirical reference does not factor into the semantic content of value claims on this account. That's just what emotivism is. And while you might be right that you could construe "hooray abortion!" and "boo, abortion!" as being in disagreement, the thing I actually said was that normative claims, on this account, cannot contradict each other. Expressions that are neither true nor false cannot be contradicted, period. rudatron posted:Again, I will ask you: what is meaningful lost with this approach, when compared to yours? What advantage is conferred? Bivalence. We lose (at least) bivalence for normative propositions. Bivalence is necessary for the application of standard predicate logic.
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May 27, 2016 14:14
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Juffo-Wup posted:Rather than challenging me to perform the reduction in front of your eyes, instead ask yourself why you're convinced it's impossible. If I claimed that I could fly without the aid of technology and you doubted me and asked me to fly in front of you to show that it was possible, that would not be an unreasonable request. If I then said, "why don't you ask yourself why you think it's impossible that I can fly instead," you would be well within reason to continue to doubt and/or ignore my claims. You continue to claim that normative claims are fully reducible to physical facts. Rudatron and I continue to doubt that this is even possible, but it is the sort of claim that can be demonstrated logically. That you refuse to do so seems to mean that you are either unwilling or you can't complete the request. Since we already believe that the latter is the case, you are simply giving us more reason to doubt you. Juffo-Wup posted:I strongly suspect you'll find that what's stopping you is the assumption that at no point in the reduction will the normative language be discharged. But I'm telling you it is. Then give us an example beginning with a normative claim and reducing it to purely physical facts. If this is the fact that you keep claiming that it is then it should not be a problem for you to reduce a normative claim to physical facts, not give an example of physical facts reducing to physical facts and then claiming that's how normative claims work too.
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May 27, 2016 16:02
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Zaradis posted:Then give us an example beginning with a normative claim and reducing it to purely physical facts. If this is the fact that you keep claiming that it is then it should not be a problem for you to reduce a normative claim to physical facts, not give an example of physical facts reducing to physical facts and then claiming that's how normative claims work too. Railton, p. 174-175 posted:For example, Lonnie, a traveler in a foreign country, is feeling miserable. He very much wishes to overcome his malaise and to settle his stomach, and finds he has a craving for the familiar: a tall glass of milk. The milk is desired by Lonnie, but is it also desirable for him? Lonnie-Plus can see that what is wrong with Lonnie, in addition to homesickness, is dehydration, a common affliction of tourists, but one often not detectable from introspective evidence. The effect of drinking hard-to-digest milk would be to further unsettle Lonnie's stomach and worsen his dehydration. By contrast, Lonnie-Plus can see that abundant clear fluids would quickly improve Lonnie's physical condition-which, incidentally, would help with his homesickness as well. Lonnie-Plus can also see just how distasteful Lonnie would find it to drink clear liquids, just what would happen were Lonnie to continue to suffer dehydration, and so on. As a result of this information, Lonnie-Plus might then come to desire that were he to assume Lonnie's place, he would want to drink clear liquids rather than milk, or at least want to act in such a way that a want of this kind would be satisfied. The reduction basis of this objectified interest includes facts about Lonnie's circumstances and constitution, which determine, among other things, his existing tastes and his ability to acquire certain new tastes, the consequences of continued dehydration, the effects and availability of various sorts of liquids, and so on. To spell it out: + The normative fact is: Lonnie ought to drink clear liquids. + The meaning of the normative fact: If Lonnie had more relevant knowledge about his condition and so on, he would desire to drink clear liquids. + The reduction basis of the normative fact: That Lonnie would have such-and-such a desire in such-and-such a case is a fact that is wholly constituted by facts about Lonnie's standing preferences, the condition of his body, the biology of digestion, the role of water in mammalian metabolism, etc. Notice that the word 'ought' got discharged almost immediately. It got replaced with a complex synonym, which, as it turns out, is itself synonymous with (a type of) physical state of affairs, which we can check to see if it was instantiated or not. Here's a brief abstract discussion that I hope is illustrative: Imagine that, instead of the account I gave, I said something like "when people talk about 'value,' what they really mean is 'a banana.' So if you want to find out what the normative value of something is, check to see if it's a banana, because that's just all that value is." What would be your response to this be? I think it would not be the response you are now giving me; you wouldn't say 'but prove that values reduce to bananas!' Rather, I expect it would be something like "yes, if I accept your definition of 'value,' then obviously bananas are it. But that's just not what people are talking about when they talk about value, sorry.' The only differences between the banana account and mine are A.) the reduction base I'm proposing is more complex, and B.) I think I have compelling reasons to believe that the physical facts I'm talking about really are what normative language refers to; I don't think my proposed semantics of normativity is merely arbitrary. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 16:43 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 16:32
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Juffo-Wup posted:The normative fact is: Lonnie ought to drink clear liquids. This is simply a rewording of the physical fact that the consumption of clear liquids, or water, hydrate the human body. What it means is that for Lonnie to become hydrated he should drink water. It is not a properly moral, normative claim, it's a physical fact made to resemble a normative claim. So it is a bad example. You're just semantically making physical facts look like normative claims. You continue to do this and continue to seem to find no problem with it. What I want to know is how a claim like "one ought not murder" reduces to physical facts.
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May 27, 2016 16:51
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Zaradis posted:You continue to do this and continue to seem to find no problem with it. Yes, that's right. I think that normative facts are, in a sense, 'rewordings of' physical facts. I've said this over and over and you just can't seem to come to accept that that really is what I'm saying. Why? Because such things 'aren't properly normative,' according to you. Well, I say they are, and that your obstinacy in this regard is an unmotivated prejudice which I do not share. But even then, you're making the wrong argument. You've been saying 'the reduction doesn't work!' when what you should have been saying is 'that's not what values are!' I have no diagnosis for why this is.
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May 27, 2016 17:00
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Juffo-Wup posted:Well, the world isn't really in the practice of making people leaders on the basis of their philosophical work. Anyway, as I've already mentioned in this thread, over half of philosophy faculty are moral realists and fewer than a third are outright anti-realists. Most of what I've said in this thread has just been a defense of (professional) philosophical majority views. Your insistence that if I'm right the discovery is earth-shattering is based on a prejudice you have about what normative facts ought to be like if they're to exist at all. I encourage you to let go of this belief. The kinds of things I'm talking about aren't magic; they're real, tangible, relatively mundane things. A moral truth cannot be observed and is not tangible as the world changes so do these "truths" as you describe them. What's the observable outcome of your argument? What is its practicality?
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May 27, 2016 17:02
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Juffo-Wup posted:Yes, that's right. I think that normative facts are, in a sense, 'rewordings of' physical facts. I've said this over and over and you just can't seem to come to accept that that really is what I'm saying. Why? Because such things 'aren't properly normative,' according to you. Well, I say they are, and that your obstinacy in this regard is an unmotivated prejudice which I do not share. But even then, you're making the wrong argument. You've been saying 'the reduction doesn't work!' when what you should have been saying is 'that's not what values are!' I have no diagnosis for why this is. I'm not making the wrong argument. I've made both the arguments you're talking about because there is a lot wrong with your moral theory. How do you explain historic changes in our understanding of right and wrong? Hell, how do you explain disagreements about what is right and wrong across cultures today? What is to be done when which physical facts a normative claim reduces to are disputed and there are no flaws in either reduction? Your reduction is more right than mine? Disregarding all this, even if I grant that 'normative facts' are just rewordings of physical facts, I have yet to hear from you what physical facts are being represented by the claim, "one ought not murder?" I suspect this is because any attempt at this reduction must necessarily make some normative assumption and then you're stuck in a infinite regress.
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May 27, 2016 17:16
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Hollismason posted:A moral truth cannot be observed and is not tangible as the world changes so do these "truths" as you describe them. As the world changes, so do facts about the world? That seems obvious, and doesn't really sound like a problem. Anyway, what is your ground for thinking of moral facts that they cannot be observed? Is this an a priori commitment about the constitutively necessary features of such facts? Or something else?
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May 27, 2016 17:19
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How would a moral statement reduce to physical concepts like in the "drinking liquids" example? It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure what that would look like.
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May 27, 2016 17:29
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Zaradis posted:I'm not making the wrong argument. I've made both the arguments you're talking about because there is a lot wrong with your moral theory. How do you explain historic changes in our understanding of right and wrong? Hell, how do you explain disagreements about what is right and wrong across cultures today? What is to be done when which physical facts a normative claim reduces to are disputed and there are no flaws in either reduction? Your reduction is more right than mine? I haven't given a moral theory, I've given a value theory. Anyway, you already know about me that I take reference to be an objective relation which is determined by the history of causal interactions between the referent and the referring term (or mental representation). So there is a fact of the matter about which physical facts are causally intertwined with the moral discourse in general. Zaradis posted:Disregarding all this, even if I grant that 'normative facts' are just rewordings of physical facts, I have yet to hear from you what physical facts are being represented by the claim, "one ought not murder?" I suspect this is because any attempt at this reduction must necessarily make some normative assumption and then you're stuck in a infinite regress. What we're talking about here is metaethics and what you're asking me to do is something like normative ethics or applied ethics. It is an obvious consequence of my view that arriving at anything like a general moral principle will take a concerted effort by researchers in various domains. I'm only here to provide a grounding for moral facts; I never said the facts themselves would be easy to get. Anyway, I worry that 'one ought not murder' is already a rigged principle: if you think that 'murder' means something like 'kill unjustly,' it follows as a matter of course that you shouldn't do it. A more plausible principle is probably something like 'in general, it is wrong to kill unless doing so preserves some other more significant value.' Which probably would rest on a general observation that people have life plans and goals which, ceteris paribus, they would prefer to see fulfilled, which itself rests on psychological, sociological, and biological facts. E: Goon Danton posted:How would a moral statement reduce to physical concepts like in the "drinking liquids" example? It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure what that would look like. The idea is: what is distinctive about the moral discourse, as opposed to the discourse of instrumental rationality, is that the moral discourse takes something like a social perspective. When people say "Yes, that's good for you, but is it right?" What they're really asking me to do is to consider the objective interests not just of myself, but of all affected parties. If this is right as a matter of empirical fact, then since we already have a meta-ethical account of objective interests in the context of instrumental rationality, morality merely asks us to aggregate those objective interests. That's the idea, at least in broad outlines. I worry that the above paragraph is excessively jargon-filled. Did it make sense? Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 17:38 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 17:29
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