Vorkosigan

This is not to say that everyone would choose to do the same thing in all cases. Even when everyone’s interests are treated equally there is often room for disagreement about which course of action is “best”.

BD, I just can't agree with the overall analysis here. There isn't any definition of "best" out there we can agree on (I speak wearing my policy wonk hat). That's why moral oughts should really be concentrated on processes rather than outcomes, on what SingleDad used to call moral strategies. I think the mistake in your formulation is that it is outcome-focused rather than process-focused; it views morality as an instrumental process that provides a framework for behavior whose output is "good."

Vorkosigan

Pomp

bd-from-kg,

I just want to make one quick point before I leave for the weekend. Hopefully, I'll have time to address your comments in the other thread next week.

I don't so much dispute your first point as I disagree with you regarding what constitutes "enough" K&U. In my view, the degree of K&U necessary to efficiently pursue our ends is "enough." You, on the other hand, assert that only the degree of K&U necessary to identify empathically with everyone else's ends is "enough." I've yet to see you give a compelling reason for a rational agent to pursue more information than necessary to pursue its own values. In fact, as I pointed out to 99Percent earlier in this thread, to do so would actually be counterproductive in many cases.

bd-from-kg

Vorkosigan:
That's what I said. Or rather, I said that while (given enough K&U and rationality) we could sometimes agree on what's "best", in many (probably most) cases we couldn't even under these ideal circumstances. But more often we could agree that certain actions are clearly not "best".

But agreement on strategies is contingent on agreement on goals. While we wouldn't have to be in perfect agreement about all goals, there would have to be some agreement on some goals. After all, you can't reasonably expect to get agreement on strategy with members of the opposing team!

As for your last sentence, you lost me.

[ April 26, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Pompous Bastard:

While I’m replying I might as well reply to your earlier post as well.

I’ll take your word for it that this is true according to your terminology. It has become quite apparent that you have no interest in whether your terminology has any resemblance to anyone else’s. What you call “subscribing” to your moral code is exactly what most people would describe as “being a hypocrite”, which is generally regarded as pretty much the opposite of subscribing to the moral code in question.

OK, I won’t accuse you of abusing language. I’ll just say that it has become clear that it is pretty much impossible to have a meaningful discussion with you. By now I find myself questioning what you mean by every word you use. For example, when you say that this usage of “subscribe” is somewhat different from traditional usage, I’m not sure what you mean by “understand”, or “usage”, or “somewhat”, or “different”, or “this”.

As you use words, perhaps this is true. It’s hard to tell. Most people would say that the fact that most things that you ought to do happen to have property Z as well does not make the observation that an action has property Z a “prescriptive” statement. On the other hand, maybe you mean something different by “prescriptive” (or “lends”, or “view”, or “obey”) than I do.

By all means continue your campaign to drain language of all meaning. But don’t be too surprised if some of us don’t join you.

As you know perfectly well, by “enough” K&U I mean an amount such that still more would not change your decision. As you also know, this meaning is an integral part of the theory; it wouldn’t make sense if some kind of limit were imposed – that is, if there were such a thing as “too much” K&U. To say that you don’t “dispute” my first point is rather like a Communist claiming that he doesn’t dispute that democracy is the best form of government and that free elections are essential to it, but that he just disagrees with the notion that an election isn’t “free” if only one person is allowed to run.

Generally there is no compelling reason. It would be irrational to spend all one’s time trying to increase one’s knowledge and understanding. Premise 1 does not say that one should always try to get as much knowledge and understanding as possible before making any decision; it says that a rational person wants to make the decision that he would make if he had enough K&U, and more concretely that he will do something if he knows that he would do it if he had enough K&U. An obvious corollary is that a reason to believe that one would do something if one had enough K&U is a rational reason for doing it. A “moral principle”, properly understood, is a “rule of thumb” to the effect that one would almost always do (or more often that one would almost always not do) certain kinds of things if one had enough K&U.

That’s another word you’re playing games with. By “counterproductive” you mean that it might result in your giving less attention to attaining your old goals because you would be pursuing new ones. Some people (namely rational ones) don’t consider this to be the catastrophe that you apparently do. Thus, if I learn that I love playing chess even more than playing the flute, and as a result play the flute less in order to devote more time to playing chess, to your way of thinking this would be “counterproductive”: I shouldn’t have learned that I love to play chess. While you may consider this attitude rational, I suspect that few other people do.

Alonzo Fyfe

No.

Both Mackie and Hume follow the same line of reasoning. After demonstrating that conventional moral practices contain a significant error (Mackie: a false assumption; Hume: a logical fallacy), they both go on to defend a form of utilitarianism.

Mackie calls himself an "act-rule-motive utilitarian" and Hume's formula of "pleasing to self, useful to self, pleasing to others, useful to others" is just a long way of saying "maximize utility."

Are they being inconsistent? No. They both recognize that language is an invention, with natural law dictating that terms must be used in the future exactly as they have been used in the past or are used at present.

I took the "atom" analogy from Mackie's book "ETHICS: INVENTING RIGHT AND WRONG" where a false assumption was found in our language (atoms do not have parts). We could have tossed out the word 'atom' and said 'atoms do not exist' -- a move that you might well have called 'atomic nihilism'. In place of atomic nihilism, we changed the meaning of the word 'atom' (discarding 'without parts' from its meaning) and continued on.

This is how Mackie (and Hume) treated moral terms. We eliminate the mistake (Mackie: discard the assumption of intrinsic values; Hume: avoid the is-ought fallacy) and move on with what we have left (some form of utilitarianism).

Alonzo Fyfe

I have no dispute with (1). I dispute (2) and (3).

My first question is: Which has priority. Is empathy good because it would come from sufficient K&U? Or does "sufficient K&U" have value because it leads to empathy?

If it is the former, then even if (2) is true, the moral value of empathy (altruistic behavior) is pure concincdence. It's still the case that IF increased knowledge and understanding had the effect of making people more selfish, then you would be forced to argue that selfishness is a virtue -- that you would have to conclude that people ought to do the selfish thing. That Smith's right not to be killed for his money depends on an accident of human evolution.

In other words:

Even if (2) is true, it is unimportant, on your account. One could easily rephrase your account is that "people should do what they would do under sufficient K&U (and, oh, by the way, it also turns out to be the case -- lucky for us -- is that what people would do is act altruistically, thank God, because if they would instead have a tendancy to rape, murder, and pillage, we would then have to give these acts our moral blessing.)"

In fact, it seems that if just one person with sufficient K&U would have raped, pillaged, and murdered (if just one person with sufficient K&U would have taken my money out of my desk drawer), you would be forced to conclude that it was not wrong for the person to have actually taken it.

Now, I am not disputing whether (2) is true or false. Let us assume that (2) is true. It is still the case that I must answer "thank God nobody with sufficient K&U would have taken my money because if, in fact, one person would have, I would not be able to call the actual theft wrong."

(Of course, if (2) were true, then this objection would be purely academic. The objection is given more weight if (2) were false. And I believe it is false. People always act for the maximum fulfillment of their own desires, which may be selfish or altruistic. K&U only serves to illuminate the most efficient means to those ends. The sadist, with sufficient K&U, would know the most efficient way to inflict pain without getting caught. So your theory gives the selfish people a moral sanction to be selfish; the sadist the moral sanction to inflict pain, the rapist the moral sanction to rape, the serial-killer the moral sanction to murder.)

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

Alonzo Fyfe

Nope. Mackie argues that moral terms contain, as a part of their meaning, an assumption that things have an intrinsic "ought to be doneness" or "ought not to be doneness" -- that does not exist.

"Y is right" is false in exactly the same sense that "Winchester Mansion is haunted" is false. The word "haunted" presupposes the existence of ghosts, but there are no ghosts. so the statement is false. The word "right" presupposes an intrinsic property of "ought to be doneness", but there is no such property, so the statement is false.


Mackie's argument (like Hume's) was that moral arguments do not make sense without this presupposition.

If you look at the arguments, you find an unexplained leap from "is" statements to "moral-ought" statements (Hume). It is possible to explain this leap with the assumption that the facts describe in the "is" propositions contain an intrinsic property of "ought-to-be-doneness" or "ought to beness" (Mackie).

Internalism -- the thesis that right and wrong are what a person WOULD do if under conditions X, is a part of this assumption. Because this property of 'ought to be doneness' is a property that would motivate people who view them properly.

Intuitionism -- the practice of determining right or wrong by inventing a story and then 'feeling' for the right answer -- which is typically "what I would do under this situation without feeling guilty" -- is also best accounted for by a theory that moral values are intrinsic properties that we somehow have the faculty to sense.

Both Mackie and Hume faced the objection that "your theory says that we should do things this way, but people are actually doing things that way, so your theory fails." Both of them answered the same way. "That way of doing things contains a significant flaw. Yes, my way of doing things is different. It's not flawed."

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

This is a reply to your April 24 post.

IMO, your comments about Hume were sufficiently answered in my previous reply. Although Hume obviously held that there is no such property as “goodness”, it’s equally obvious that he did not believe that moral language could not be reasonably understood as saying anything other than that some acts have such a property.

Some of the other stuff isn’t worth discussing further. So let’s proceed to the comments about your post on the <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000137" target="_blank">Moral Subjectivism: One View</a> thread.

Of course it is. Your objection to PB’s theory was that it is concerned only with what people do desire, whereas “I hold that morality is ultimately concerned with what people ought to desire”. But of course this begs the question of whether there is a distinction between what people do desire and what they ought to desire. According to PB’s definition of “ought” there isn’t. So your objection comes down to “You don’t define ‘should’ the same way that I do.”

You then continued, “The right act, for example, is that act which a properly motivated person would perform, where a properly motivated person is a person with good desires...”. But PB defines “right” differently, as an act which conforms to a certain “moral code”, and holds that one ought not always do what’s “right”. Moreover, he denies that the terms “properly motivated” and “good desires” mean anything; any motivations or desires are just as valid as any others. Once again your objection amounts to nothing more than that PB’s terminology differs from yours.

The language here (“I hold that...”, “The right act ...is that act which...”) would lead one to suppose that you are disagreeing with PB on some substantive point. It certainly seems as though you are saying that PB is wrong about something or other. But as you reveal a good bit later, this isn’t the case at all:
So the question of whether to adopt PB’s terminology or yours is just a coin toss; PB tossed a coin and it came up heads, you tossed one and it came up tails. So what’s the big deal? Suppose you and Jim are both trying to decide whether to go to a movie or the mall. You both decide to toss a coin; if it comes up heads you’ll go to the movie. Jim gets heads; you get tails. So Jim says, “OK, going to the movie is the thing to do.” One would be baffled if you were to reply “No, no, no. The mall is the right choice.” Yet that seems (in retrospect) to be exactly what you were doing in this post. Did you really have a point other than that your coin came up differently than PB’s? If so, what? And also, if so, in what sense is the choice between your “moral theory” (or more accurately, your terminology) a “coin toss”? If there’s something to choose between them - if there are good reasons for saying that the one choice is preferable to the other - it’s not a “coin toss”.

You don’t qualify as an objectivist under any reasonable definition. Your position, (assuming that you follow Mackie) is that there is no way to construe moral statements which is both reasonable and meaningful (in the sense that I explained more precisely in my last post). This is neither objectivism nor subjectivism, but nihilism. The fact that you then proceed to define a new sense of “right” which does not pretend to be an interpretation of the traditional sense, or to have any particular relationship to it, doesn’t change this.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose that you conclude that it’s meaningless to discuss whether a piece of music is “beautiful” because the only way to construe the statement “this music is beautiful” is as an assertion that it has the objective property of “beauty”, and there is no such objective property. Now suppose that you then propose to define “X is a beautiful piece of music” as meaning that X is on a specified list of musical pieces. Even if it were true that this list corresponded pretty well with what many people call “beautiful music”, and even though it’s true that it can be objectively determined whether a given piece of music is on the list, it would be absurd to claim that you now held an “objective theory of beauty”.

Wrong. There is no reasonable sense in which you qualify as a moral subjectivist either.

This usage of “moral objectivist” is too grotesque to be worth discussing.

Well, yes, eventually – after a number of posts

Yes, and so would a “revised moral language” that looks solely at the “value” of maximizing the amount of purple ink.

This is a really curious statement. In the first place, in what sense is the fact that an action satisfies an arbitrary criterion that you happen to like “part of the real world”? And secondly, in what sense is this fact “important”? It seems to me that (on your showing) its “importance” lies wholly in the fact that you have assigned some significance to it. But this is the same kind of “importance” that a child might assign to not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk.

This is inconsistent with your position. According to you, there is no such thing as “discovering” how a person “should” act. To say that this is possible is to say that there are objective moral truths. All that one can do is to define how a person “should” act. In doing so, one has two choices.

(1) One can define “should” so that the things that everyone “should” do correspond precisely to the things that you would have them do. But in that case, what exactly is your objection to my statement? Obviously if one is going to encourage people to act in a certain way, it will be the way that one would have them act.

(2) One can define “should” so that in some cases a person “should” do what you would not have them do. But this would seem to be completely pointless, not to say illogical.

Well, let’s take a closer look at the context of the first statement in question. you said:

I had pointed out that, while many people believe that to say that an act is “wrong” is to say that it has the property of “wrongness” and that simply “seeing” that an act has the property can somehow prevent a person from doing it, the logic of moral reasoning doesn’t require any such thing, and that “the task of the moral philosopher is to analyze ... what constitutes validity in moral reasoning, not to toss it all in the rubbish heap.”

Your response, in essence, was that our “common moral practices” “presuppose” this, and therefore are not valid. Thus:

In the context, the clear implication is not merely that the concept properties such as “goodness”, “rightness”, “wrongness”, etc. should be discarded, but that practically all moral reasoning should be tossed in the rubbish heap with them. Although you don’t want to call such reasoning “meaningless”, it makes no sense to toss it out unless it’s pointless – i.e., unless it has no useful function or purpose.

Now it’s true that I’ve been “begging the question” of whether moral reasoning has a useful function or purpose, because I think it’s completely obvious that it does. This is nicely illustrated by Stephen Toulmin in Reason in Ethics:

But language that has a useful function is perforce “meaningful”. As I pointed out earlier, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with moral language; it is exquisitely suited to its intended purpose.

You denied this, saying that a “false assumption” is “built into the very meaning of our moral terms”. But this is a fallacy, as I’ve been trying to explain. Moral language and reasoning is not properly evaluated by asking people (especially ordinary, unreflective people) to define what they mean by it, but by understanding its purpose and function, observing how it is actually used, and examining how well this actual usage fulfills its purpose and performs its function.

By the way, defining “A should do X” as meaning “It is in A’s interest to do X” is clearly not calculated to help moral language to perform its intended function, but to prevent it from doing so, which is why this sort of thing can hardly be called a “moral theory”. It would be like calling a book devoted to methods of blowing up bridges a “construction manual”.

Indeed, at one point you seemed to recognize this, since you said:

Indeed. The reason PB’s use of moral terms creates confusion and serves no practical purpose is that it is flatly incompatible with the function and purpose of moral language.

The rest of your post seems to be an attempt to justify the “all-things-considered” criterion, as you call it, of “rightness”. This attempt is doomed to failure from the start. What you’re trying to do, in essence, is to show that this criterion gives “correct” results while others give “incorrect” ones, or that it gives “better” results than others. Needless to say, this requires that there actually be an objectively “correct” or objectively “better” result, which is the very thing that you deny.

Thus:

But in what way is it like such a debate? Isn’t it more like a “debate” between someone who says that "2 + 2 = 4" and another who says that "2 + 2 = 1" because he’s using “modulo 3” addition?

I have no idea why you call those who consider only the desires of the agent “moral realists”; this usage is highly nonstandard. But leave that aside for now. Certainly such people will get different answers to moral questions than those who consider all desires. But in what sense is this a “mistake”?

The plausibility of the first statement derives from the fact that one naturally thinks of the agent’s desires and interprets “reasons” as “motives”.

But now you say that desires that the agent does not have are “reasons” for his doing something, so clearly by “reasons” you do not mean “motives”. In that case, not only does the earlier statement not look so plausible but one wonders what it means. In what sense are desires the agent doesn’t have “reasons” for doing something, and why can’t anything else constitute a “reason”?

As I suggested earlier, it appears that you are laboring to show that if people apply the “all-things-considered” criterion in deciding what to do, their actions are more likely to satisfy the “all-things-considered” criterion. No doubt this is true, but what of it? If everyone applied the “maximal amount of purple ink” criterion in deciding what to do, the result would probably be to produce a lot of purple ink. But it’s not clear why this should be considered a “reason” for applying this criterion.

[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

You can't "dispute" (3). (3) is a definition.

Neither. Empathy is a form of K&U, as I was careful to explain. It’s not “good” or “bad” per se. And “sufficient K&U” doesn’t exactly have “value” either. (In fact, I didn’t even use the word “value” in the exposition of my theory, so it’s a bit unfair to phrase criticisms or questions in terms of “value”.)

The thing that makes “sufficient K&U” significant is that it is a basic axiom of rationality that an opinion or attitude based on greater knowledge and understanding “trumps” an opinion or attitude based on less. Thus, if you thought that Smith was guilty of murder, but changed yur mind after obtaining more information, you take it for granted that your new opinion “trumps” your original one. There is no question of thinking that they are on an equal footing, even though it might happen that he really is guilty after all. Similarly, if you thought that it would be a good idea to buy stock in the XYZ corporation, but later decided that it wasn’t such a good idea based on new information, your new opinion “trumps” the old one. Yet again, you might be inclined to blame someone for something that they did, but decide that they weren’t really to blame after you developed enough empathy that you understandood just how he came to do it. (Then again, you might not; I do not believe that understanding necessarily brings forgiveness.) If so, once again there would be no question of treating your old attitude and your new one as being an equal footing. Also note that in each case, if you knew only that you would change your mind if you had more K&U, you would change your opinion or inclination on that basis alone; you would not insist on actually having the K&U in question before doing so.

If men were impervious to the effects of their actions on others, or if the effect of making someone understand in intimate detail the suffering that his proposed action would cause to others would be to make it more likely that he would do it, morality would have no function or purpose, so concepts like “right “ and “wrong” wouldn’t exist. But then, neither would society.

The first statement is a tautology. The second is a factual claim, and it is plainly false. The effect of increased K&U is not only to “illuminate the most efficient means” to the ends one already has. Very commonly it changes the ends themselves – that is, it changes what one desires.

Of course, you can define “ends” in such a way the the only end of all action is, say, happiness, so that increased K&U doesn’t change our “ends”. But this changes nothing. In that case I would say that increased K&U changes how one goes about attaining this end, because it changes what makes one happy.

Assuming that the person in question is also fully rational, this is correct. (Of course, what I’d really do in that case is to conclude that my theory is wrong.) But I don’t think that even one fully rational person with sufficient K&U would do so.

The thing that seems to be difficult to get across is just what the “sufficient K&U” clause really entails. A perfect understanding of the effects of an action on another person would involve thinking his thoughts, feeling what he feels, etc. This means that we would experience the effects of our action on him, because only by experiencing something can one have a perfect understanding of it. It is inconceivable to me, for example, that a rational agent would rape a woman if he actually experienced the effects (including the long-term effects) that the rape would have on her, not to mention the effects it would have on those who know and care about her.

Obviously this degree of K&U is far beyond what is humanly possible. But it is humanly possible to imagine sufficiently well what it would be like, for example, to experience the effects of being raped. And this would constitute “sufficient” K&U, because once someone had it, he would realize that he wouldn’t commit such an act if he did have a perfect understanding of the effects it would have.

Now suppose that someone is rational enough to want to do what he would do if he had enough K&U, but unfortunately lacks the imagination or insight to have any kind of clear idea of what it would be like to be raped. However, knowing that he’s something of a dim bulb in this department, he’s willing to take the advice of those who are more insightful. They advise him unanimously that it is a horrible, humiliating experience that changes one’s life forever in negative ways. He concludes that he wouldn’t choose to rape anyone if he had enough K&U, and therefore decides not to do it even though he doesn’t have anywhere enough K&U to really understand or imagine the effects it would have on the victim.

To me, this is the essential function of morality. For those who want to act rationally, moral principles offer advice as to what they would do (or more often, what they would not do) if they had enough K&U. In other words, a typical “thou shalt not” moral rule or principle is a statement to the effect that the kind of action involved is almost always irrational (and that it’s well-nigh impossible to identify the rare exceptions before the fact).

Of course, this will have no effect on anyone who has no desire to be rational in the first place. But my theory says only that a rational person will want to do what he would do if he had enough K&U. (Admittedly I was a little sloppy about making this clear in the earlier post, but obviously there’s no way to make any nontrivial generalizations about what irrational people will do.)

[ April 29, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Alonzo Fyfe

There are two types of definitions.

Stipulative definitions are to be taken "as is", in the same sense as a person who says, "Assume X is true."

However, one can still raise legitimate objections against a stipulative definition -- if a person fails to use the terms consistently (as stipulated) or a person fails to recognize the logical implications of their stipulation. These are the potential objections that I raised.


The other type of definition is a descriptive definition -- a definition that attempts to describe the way a term is used in a society.

Against a normative definition, it is legitimate to raise objection that the definition fails to provide an accurate description of the way the term is used in society in fact. In addition, it remains legitimate to object against a descriptive definition that it is inconsistent (in this case, society at large, rather than the individual who offered a stipulative definition, has failed to use the term consistently or failed to acknowledge the implications of their use of a term).

Either way, definitions are not "safe territory" about which no objection can be raised. You yourself have devoted several kilobytes in objection to other peoples' definitions.

Elsewhere, you have argued that your definition of "should" is an attempt to offer a sense that corresponds to common usage. Which means that your theory of "should" is a descriptive theory.

As a descriptive theory, it can be criticized if it can be shown that it does not correspond to the way people actually use the term.

Now, one of the implications of (3) is that those who use the term in this way must be saying, "When I tell you that you should not rape this person, I am saying that no person sufficient knowledge and understanding would commit rape. If it turns out that I am wrong in this, that there exists even one person who would rape even with full knowledge and understanding, then my statement that you should not rape this woman is false, and you may proceed."

If you do not believe that people would actually accept this implication, then there is a problem with your descriptive definition of "should." People do not actually use the term the way you say they do -- or, at the very least, that people use the term in a confused and inconsistent manner whereby you are attempting to smooth out the wrinkles.

In other words, you are offering an error theory.

[ April 30, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>