Dr. Retard

How could moral behavior be justified? That is, what would have to be true for moral behavior to be justified? (Once we know what would have to be true, we can ask whether it actually is true). I think purely subjective matters could not justify moral behavior and neither could any facts about God. I think matters concerning practical rationality could partially justify moral behavior, and more happily, I think they in fact do (the facts really do hold true). But it's only partial justification, it seems. And I don't think internalism's truth could take up the slack. But I cannot think of anything that could provide full justification of moral behavior, the kind hazily presupposed by moral talk. I don't mean that there are no real-world facts that give morality a full justification. (Sometimes moral anti-realists claim that morality would be justified, if only such and such were true, but unfortunately for the moral realist, such and such is false.) I mean that I can't imagine any scenario with some facts that could give morality a full justification. This probably stems from the fact that I don't know what a full justification would look like. Starting...

Some people claim that if you like a behavior, then it's justified. I doubt their sincerity, not because I think they really believe morality is more justified than that. I doubt their sincerity in professing such a weak standard of justification. If that's all you mean by 'justification', then you're using a very eccentric definition of the term. Why not just say you don't think moral behavior is justified? That would be a much clearer means of communicating what is perhaps ultimately the same idea. But some subjectivists claim both (i) that liking moral behavior is sufficient to justify it, and (ii) that there is no justification for moral behavior. Since these two claims are plainly inconsistent, I leave it to subjectivists to tangle out their verbal confusion (and probably opt for (ii) on a normal definition of 'justification').

(And, incidentally, here is a challenge for those who think that morality is especially fact-free. Can you think of any reason for rejecting the factual character of morality that is not equally a reason for rejecting the factual character of your position that morality is fact-free? You hold a position on meta-ethics, a position that contrasts with those who claim that morality is a matter of fact. You disagree with each other. You can't change each other's minds. You're both arguing from vague thoughts and feelings instead of from the facts. In short, this dispute looks quite similar to a moral dispute. Now, in moral disputes, you claim that neither side is better off than the other, because there is no right answer. So shouldn't you say the same thing about this dispute, your dispute with moral realists?)

Other people claim that God's liking a behavior can justify it. This is somewhat of an improvement, for at least God's likes and dislikes cannot be inappropriate or wicked, unlike the desires of humans. But, though God's liking a behavior indeed entails that the behavior is good, it certainly doesn't make it good and it doesn't confer any authority upon the behavior. It seems completely reasonable to (1) know that God likes a behavior, and then (2) infer that it is good, and then (3) wonder and speculate as to what justifies this instance of moral behavior. Deciding whether to behave that way, and wondering whether there is any authority to that standard, the knowledge that God likes the behavior is beside the point. "So what? I wasn't asking for a survey of divine likes and dislikes, I was asking why my behavior ought to yield to norms of moral behavior".

Some claim that God's nature exemplifying moral truths can justify behavior in accordance with those truths. I don't even know what this means. If it's true that pain is a bad thing, I don't how this truth could be exemplified by (or rooted in or located in) the nature of some being. What makes pain bad, if anything does, is that it hurts. You can't save morality by making it unintelligible. But secondly, and more importantly, whatever it would mean for a moral truth to be exemplified by God's nature, the truth of such an arrangement would imply zilch about the justification of moral behavior. Knowing the ultimate sublime seat of value doesn't help you figure out why it makes sense to be moral.

Of course, maybe it makes sense to be moral because it helps you avoid Hell. If people really think this, I can't remember talking with them. And if such people do exist, I'd like to talk to them, because the idea is nuts. But it leads nicely to a popular justification.

Here is one proposal as to how to justify moral behavior: show how moral behavior is practically rational (prudent, advantageous, etc.). If it can be shown that it is rational to behave morally, then moral behavior is justified. Especially if it's always rational to behave morally, and especially if it's like this for everybody. One way to support this claim is by appeal to the great collective advantage offered to humans by moral practices, and the great improvement in human welfare that attends upon the successful adoption and maintenance of these practices. Morality sure looks rational.

There are two ways to doubt this proposal. One way is to deny the first-order factual claim. That is, you can deny that it really is (always) rational (for everybody) to behave morally. You might back up this denial with counterexample cases, wherein it looks irrational to behave morally. The second way is to deny that this is a good justification of moral behavior in the first place. You might say, just because it's (always) rational (for everybody) to behave morally, that doesn't make morality justified. It only makes morality expedient, or merely a useful means of getting what we want.

I think the first-order factual claim is in better shape than most people think. The work of David Gauthier, Derek Parfit, and David Schmidtz persuades me that it is quite rational to select a broad disposition towards collectively advantageous behavior. Not to mention the rather Humean observation that other-directed sentiments enrich our lives in ways that naked avarice never could. But I don't think it's necessary to pursue the point. I think the second problem is more interesting, though I must remark that expressions like "expedient" and "mere means to an end" don't have any pejorative ring to my ears. For I cannot envision any plausible justification of any type of behavior that does not begin with an investigation of whether the behavior improves our lives. But no matter.

The interesting question, I think, is whether moral behavior can be given a full justification by appeal to its rationality. Of course there are different senses of 'justification'. It's trivially true that moral behavior can be given a 'rational justification' by appeal to its rationality; that much is analytic. But perhaps moral talk presupposes another, deeper justification, one that cannot be answered by questions about practical rationality. "Yes, yes, behaving morally is rational, I grant you, but is it justified? Does morality enjoy any real authority over our actions, independent of its rationality?" The question seems to me to be after something. When we think of what would have to be true for morality to be fully justified, we want something more than mere rationality.

Perhaps a full justification of morality would condemn the immoral, not (just) for being irrational or imprudent, but for making some intellectual mistake in not pursuing the good. It might be objected, "If someone behaves irrationally, surely that is itself evidence of an intellectual mistake! That's all the criticism we'd need of the immoral." But for reasons argued by Hume, I don't think irrationality evinces any intellectual mistake. Take some irrational person. Let's say he deliberately frustrates his own desires. What intellectual error has he made? To be sure, he's peculiar, and probably pathological. But for all that, his beliefs might perfectly and accurately represent the world; his intellect might proceed completely without error. The fact that his behavior is so discordant with his desires is a completely separate matter. The intellect seems incapable of criticizing (or commending) behavior. They are in different domains entirely. I'm not sure this possible source of justification is even intelligible. But, nevertheless, it might be what I'm "feeling" when I think of a full justification of morality.

What else might provide a full justification of morality? A popular answer is that the truth of internalism would do the trick, internalism being the view that moral facts or moral judgments necessarily give us motivational "tugs". The idea is that morality somehow influences our motivation, making us feel inclinations to behave differently. So, on one internalism, if you judge that murder is wrong, you will feel at least somewhat less motivated to murder. An implication is that anyone who seemed to judge that murder was wrong, without feeling the slightest motivational influence against murder, would not have made a real moral judgment after all, but merely an ersatz moral judgment, or a moral judgment manque.

There are many arguments for and against internalism. Examples: For internalism, Michael Smith has argued that if internalism were false, and a virtuous agent changed her mind about a moral issue, any resulting change in motivation would have to stem from a general desire to do whatever is right. But, Smith argues, this is an implausible conception of virtuous agents, who shouldn't act from general desires to do whatever is right (Smith calles this a moral fetish), but instead from desires that directly target certain actions, which happen to be right actions. Against internalism, David Brink and others have argued that amoralists are possible, amoralists being people who make a moral judgment without feeling any change in motivation. After all, Brink argues, certainly someone could have his doubts about whether it's rational to be moral, and so make a moral judgment without his rationality-aimed motivations being influenced.

But these disputes are peripheral. The question here is whether internalism's truth would provide morality with a full justification. Obviously, some internalisms provide nothing of the sort. Ronald Dworkin has sketched an intentionally ludicrous caricature of internalism, wherein there exist special moral particles -- morons -- that draw in and influence hapless humans for the better. If we were really at the mercy of such facts, it seems we could still wonder whether our behavior was justified -- the fact that the behavior is causally guaranteed by active real-world facts has nothing to do with it. What about that common internalism wherein making a moral judgment has necessary motivational consequences? This doesn't seem to work either. Suppose that this were true, and that what made it true was a bundle of contingent facts about humans and how they respond to certain facts (therefore designated "moral facts"). Or what if we were all necessarily motivated by norms of etiquette? Would that make etiquette authoritative? How could internalism's truth lend any authority to morality? Just because we're under its influence doesn't mean that we ought to be.

Internalism does seem to capture the idea that moral facts, if they exist, shouldn't be completely sterile. To apprehend a moral fact, then say, "Oh yes, how interesting (yawn), that action is morally odious", and then proceed to perform the action anyway, would be seemingly absurd. Moral facts are supposed to hold authority over our behavior -- in this they are quite different from facts about etiquette. Someone who recognized a moral fact, but who simply didn't care, wouldn't just be a cad, but would have to be making some mistake. Immoral people are supposed to have clouded judgment, not merely eccentric priorities. (Brink, an externalist, holds suggests that the rational authority of morality, the authority lacked by etiquette, lies in the already discussed fact(?) that morality serves practical rationality; in this, his view is comparable to neo-Hobbesians like Gauthier). But morality's possessing a necessary motivational influence doesn't seem to do the trick all by itself, for reasons given in the last paragraph.

So what else could do it? I have no idea. My suspicion is that this common-sense idea of morality's authority over our behavior, this idea that cannot be supported by rationality or internalism (much less subjective matters), is an unintelligible one. I have no problem with revising meta-ethics in this way, as I think morality's grounding in practical rationality is quite good enough. The rather troubling thing is that practical rationality is itself subject to the exact same problem. I can think of no way to justify the gut feel that certain rules -- for instance, act to promote one's interests -- hold authority over our behavior. We recognize such behavior to be rational, not just because we're hard-wired to like this behavior, but because there's really something about it that makes it authoritative. I see no way around this problem, not in naturalism, and certainly not in any of the fancy flights of metaphysics or theology.

And finally, take 'practical nihilism' to be the thesis that norms of behavior hold no authority whatsoever over us; some people follow some, others follow others, you can give explanations of behavior, but not justifications. Many people argue against this practical nihilism with the rhetorical question, "Why don't you go out and murder people?" But this is an inappropriately loaded question, for it assumes that there can be a reason for or against doing something. And this is just what practical nihilism denies. So deeply ingrained is the belief that certain behavior should follow from certain cognitive states (beliefs, matters of the intellect) that, when we are confronted with someone who denies it, our immediate response is to presuppose its truth, to employ it even! It is impossible to show any inconsistency between what a practical nihilist claims and how he behaves, because his thesis is precisely that behavior cannot bear any justification-relevant relation (like inconsistency) to anything.

bd-from-kg

Dr. Retard:

This sounds at first like a reasonable question. Unfortunately, you then proceed to rule out every conceivable answer, including “It’s rational” and “It’s in your self-interest” and “It’s what you really want to do deep down”.

You say:

This is the understatement of the year. It is logically impossible that there could be even a partial justification for doing anything at all under your ground rules.
What exactly is the point of asking a question to which you have already rejected every imaginable answer?

You say:

If you don’t consider the fact that acting in a certain way is rational to be a justification for doing it, there’s no point in continuing. For suppose that someone were to present an airtight argument proving that acting in a certain way is rational. You could simply say “Why should I accept the conclusion of your argument?” If he answers “Because it’s the conclusion of a sound, valid, rigorous argument whose premises you accept, so it would be irrational for you not to accept it”, you can simply reply “So what? Why should I do something merely because it’s rational, or because not doing it would be irrational?” And of course there could be no possible answer to this; it is impossible to reason with a madman who rejects reason itself.

By asking the original question (or any question) you are implicitly accepting the authority of reason. And this includes what you call “practical reason”. For example, it is irrational to rush to the train station to catch a train that you know doesn’t run that day. It is irrational (under ordinary circumstances) to choose to eat spinach rather than strawberries if you hate spinach and love strawberries. If you have to choose between two alternatives one of which will result in eternal bliss (which you desperately desire) and the other eternal misery (which you desperately want to avoid), but you don’t know which choice leads to which result, it is irrational to have no interest in finding out.

You say:

Well, of course! Once you reject every possible ground as a justification for doing anything at all, you have emptied the term “justify” of all content. You might just as well declare that “stawn” and “grapper” don’t mean anything and then ask how to stawn a grapper.

You talk about something you call “practical nihilism” which you say denies that there can be a reason for or against doing something. Well, it’s up to you whether to accept this idea. Obviously it is impossible to offer anything that would be regarded by a practical nihilist as a reason for rejecting practical nihilism! If you decide to join the human community, which means at a minimum accepting the authority of reason, we can have a discussion; otherwise there’s nothing to say.

SRB

Dr R
How could moral behavior be justified?

SRB
I am not fully clear on what the question is supposed to mean. Presumably you are not after a moral justification for behaving morally, so what are you after? Maybe your question is better written, "Why should I be moral?" I suggest that question means the same as, "Why suppose it is rational for me to be moral?" or equivalently, "Why think that performing moral actions would help me to fulfil my basic desires in life?"

My best answer to the latter three (equivalent) questions is along the lines you mention. For some people, a desire to do what is moral is itself a basic desire, so those people need give no further reason to be moral, beyond pointing out that the moral course of action is the one they want to take. For other people this is not the case. A desire to do what is prudent (to avoid jail and condemnation from others), and a desire to live a fulfilled life, give most other people good reasons to be fairly moral. Immoral behaviour is often too risky, and would make people feel guilty and unhappy in the long term, which is something almost everyone wants to avoid.

However, consider sociopaths, those people who feel no guilt or great inclination to do what morality requires. Suppose a sociopath knows for sure he could get away with a serious crime and he knows for sure that he would feel no guilt or other adverse effects after performing it. Let us also say that the sociopath very much wants to commit the crime. In that very rare circumstance my conclusion is that the rational course of action is for the sociopath to do the immoral thing and commit the crime. For him to refrain from behaving immorally would be irrational. Even if God exists, I don't see how it is rational for the sociopath to refrain from committing the crime (unless entrance to the afterlife is based on our works).

The requirements of rationality and of morality overlap significantly, but not perfectly in all conceivable circumstances. This is not especially shocking or surprising.

SRB

Dr. Retard

Quickly! I'll respond to these responses soon. I'm typing things up on a laptop and porting them to Internet access places here in this Czech city. So, it's slow going.

Dr. Retard

First, I hadn't already rejected every imaginable answer. I tried to think of all the imaginable answers, and then to see if they could really answer the question.

Now, why ask such a question, when in doing so, it might turn out that all the imaginable answers are poor ones? Well, if you do so, and this happens, then you might reveal the question to be a pseudo-question. Let's say you're arguing about metaphysics, about whether properties exist or whether tropes exist. Then you step back and think, "Hold on, what could settle this issue one way or the other? What would have to be true for property theories to be better or worse than trope theories?" If you think about it and you cannot think of a single way that could even in principle decide the issue, then that's good grounds for (tenatively) concluding that the question is a pseudo-question. And if, by carefully considering a question in such a way, you actually do show a seemingly important philosophical question to be a pseudo-question, then that's an interesting and useful result. Now you can try to find out what the real question is, if there is one, or whether the whole thing is just a nest of confusion.

I do consider it a justification. But it doesn't seem to be the 'full justification' that people talk about. Suppose, hypothetically, that I derived great pleasure and self-satisfaction from torturing some helpless person, whom I had imprisoned in my basement. And further stipulate that only we two existed. Torture serves my ends, so it's rational, so it's justified in some sense. But surely any full justification of moral behavior must be a different type than this!

Indeed, most people, I suppose, would like to say, "Yes, it's rationally justified, but it's not morally justified. You have reasons for action of practical rationality that recommend torture, and reasons for action of morality that discommend torture, and the moral reasons are stronger." But if the moral reasons consist in nothing more than end-serving, then they should recommend torture.

OK, pretend that I'm a nihilist about reasons for action. I say there is no reason to acccept the conclusions of perfect arguments, because I say there is no reason to accept any propositions, assuming that accepting propositions counts as an action. I might still recognize that truth-sensitive humans tend to accept such conclusions and harbor a strong desire to be truth-sensitive. And since, human beings are hard-wired to act on such desires, I would accept the conclusion. Of course, I wouldn't believe I had any reason to do so, but I would accept it. And I would accept other conclusions of other perfect arguments. Reasoning with me wouldn't be impossible; it would be a breeze. I hardly think that I could be described as a madman. Instead, I would be a perfectly reasonable person who harbored strange philosophical opinions about reasons for action.

So, by asking the original question, I am not implicitly accepting the authority of reason. I am merely accepting the efficaciousness of reason for me, and you, and other similarly disposed humans, who were all shaped by the same sorts of natural forces. Similarly, with:

Joining the human community, I would guess, doesn't require that you accept the authority of reason in any philosophical sense -- believing in the existence of reasons for action. It merely requires that your epistemological dispositions be truth-sensitive -- whether or not you happen to opine that their being so is grounded by reasons for action.

To be fair, I didn't empty it of all content. My very tentative judgment is that the way people talk about justification has emptied it all of content. People want something for morality (and practical rationality) that cannot be got, even in principle.

[ November 13, 2002: Message edited by: Dr. Retard ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Dr. Retard:

But in this case (as often happens) whether the original question is a pseudo-question depends on how it is interpreted. And it seems to me that by ruling out all possible answers, you have ruled out all reasonable interpretations. In other words, you’ve made the question a pseudo-question by ruling out all possible answers.

Or perhaps that the question is one of what conceptual framework would help you organize your thoughts and understand and think about your experiences in a way best calculated to lead to effective action. In other words, the question of whether properties or tropes “exist” is not the same kind of question as the question of whether your right hand exists. Either answer is fine as long as it’s part of a consistent and useful conceptual framework.

In this connection you might want to consider the status of something like Ockham’s Razor. Supposing that it actually expresses a proposition, ask yourself what would have to be true in order for it to be falsified. After a little thought it should be clear that no facts whatever could falsify it. So what exactly is it? Is it an empirical claim? No. If it were, it could be falsified (at least in principle) by appropriate evidence. Is it an analytic statement? Clearly not; it does not follow from the axioms of logic. So is it just a personal preference? Suppose I prefer to adhere to it while Jones chooses to ignore it. Has Jones simply chosen a different attitude toward Ockham’s razor than I have? No. If Jones really wholeheartedly rejects Ockham’s Razor he is stark raving mad. So maybe your criteria for what makes something “meaningful” need to be rethought.

That’s not clear. Perhaps the problem with your example is not that the kind of justification offered (namely that the acts in question are rational) is of the wrong kind, but rather that it is mistaken. Perhaps these acts are not rational, and would never be rational for any person.

Some people might say that, but quite a few moral theorists would disagree. A very old tradition in moral philosophy holds that virtue consists of acting in accordance with reason.

That would mean that you do not accept that there is such a thing as a reason for doing anything. That’s just absurd, unless you’re a rock or a tree. Of course you have reasons to do things; otherwise you wouldn’t do things.

This doesn’t make any sense at all. How could you possibly imagine that you had no reason for an intentional act? The very notion is logically incoherent.

Once again your use of words baffles me. If I say that I accept the authority of my boss, I mean that I am prepared to do what he says because he says to do it. If I say that I accept the authority of the law, I mean that I do what it says (and refrain from doing what it forbids, because it says to. If I say that I accept the authority of the Pope, I mean that I am prepared to act as he recommends or prescribes because he recommends or prescribes it. It would be absurd to say that I do not accept my boss’s authority but that his orders are “efficacious” for me in the sense that I always do what he says because he says to, or that I do not accept the authority of the law but that it is efficacious for me in the sense that I always obey it, or that I do not accept the authority of the Pope but that his pronouncements are efficacious for me in the sense that I always do what he recommends or prescribes because he recommends or prescribes it. So what the heck are you saying here?

It’s not a matter of believing something. It’s a question of whether the fact that an action is recommended by reason is a reason (i.e., a motive or cause) for your doing it.

Anyway, not believing in the existence of reasons for action is ridiculous. To say that you have a reason for doing something is to say that you have a motive for doing it. What else could it mean? But you have rejected arguments purporting to show that you have a motive for doing something as not showing that you have a reason for doing it. And I don’t know what you could mean by having a “justification” for doing something other than that you have a motive for doing it or that it’s the right thing to do. The latter meaning in this case is ruled out since what you’re asking for is a justification for doing what’s right, so again there seems to be no way to construe your request for a justification for doing what’s right other than as a request for a motive for doing it.

What people would those be then? My sense that most people who ask “Why be good?” are asking for a motive – either a motive that they already have, or one that they would have if certain conditions held – for example, if they were perfectly rational, or had enough knowledge and understanding. And since they already want to be rational, etc., the latter would count as a motive of sorts – a second-order motive, as it were.

If you actually know of someone who asks this question and insists that he means something else by it, the best course is to get him to explain what he means. Most likely he is asking a pseudo-question. But I don’t know of any such person.

Dr. Retard

I never appealed to any criteria for meaning. I just said if you can't think of an in principle way to decide some question, then that's good grounds for (tentatively) concluding that the question is a pseudo-question. I never said that the only way to decide a question was by logic, or by appeal to the empirical consequences of the different positions, or whatever. Perhaps Ockham's Razor gains its justification from its utility in directing our scientific research, than from any direct relation to a theory's truth. Perhaps trope theories help organize our metaphysical convictions in a more felicitous way than do property theories -- this would, presumably, be good grounds for favoring trope theories. But I can't see a way, even in principle, to justify moral behavior (or practically rational behavior) in keeping with the ideas seemingly presupposed by talk I observe.

So, instead of using the loaded term "rational", I'll use "ends-serving" (I'd use "instrumentally rational," but that too might be loaded). In such a case, torture is ends-serving, so inasmuch as ends-serving-ness justifies behavior, it's justified in some sense. But this is not what most of us have in mind when we call moral behavior justified. Apparently, it's not what proponents of your "perhaps" position have in mind when they call rational behavior justified. So if not ends-serving-ness, then what?

Sure, but I would guess that most of those people disclaim a purely ends-serving account of reason.


When by "reason to do things," you mean (something like) "consideration that motivates," then, yes, such nihilists are stupid. But when you mean something more, something normative, something I know not what, then nihilism is not obviously false.

Only under the "consideration that motivates" conception of reasons for action. I would hope it clear from my text that I wasn't using such a conception.

So your conception of accepting the authority of something is (something like) "being disposed to do what it says". Under this conception, everything you have said is right. But your conception means that a self-loathing fat man accepts the authority of his restless appetite, since it in fact motivates him to eat. It also means that I accept the authority of my boss when I think he's a worthless numbskull but nevertheless obey him from considerations of pure self-interest.

Another sense of accepting the authority of something is (something like) "believing that what it says deserves obedience". Under this conception, the fat man does not accept the authority of his appetite, because he believes it makes his life worse. Similarly, I don't accept the authority of my boss because I think his orders are absurd -- I think they deserve ridicule. Surely, I hope, you'll admit that this conception or something quite like it is in common use!

Similar remarks here. As a motivating impulse, reasons for actions quite obviously exist. As something else, who knows? Since I don't know anything that could (even in principle) do the job people want seem to want it to do, we might be in agreement about what exists and disagreement about how people use certain terms.

Well, talk to the people here who sneer that morality's justification lies not in its mere "expediency". Or talk to philosophers like Jean Hampton who seek a non-circular justification (not a mere motive, idealized or not) for practical rationality (well, not to her, because she's dead). I agree that I should set to collecting specimens of this moral talk to prove that it's not something I came up with. It would be a rather strange hobby, inventing unclear philosophical presuppositions.

[ November 16, 2002: Message edited by: Dr. Retard ]</p>

Nova Andromeda

--I haven't yet had the time to do more than skim the topic, but I think moral behavior can be rationally justified. I have discussed this in a bit of detail at stardestroyer.net:

<a href="http://pup.phpwebhosting.com/~mrwong/viewtopic.php?t=622&highlight=&sid=dcfb98de35fb7d5 66c82c74ce3df15c4" target="_blank">http://pup.phpwebhosting.com/~mrwong/viewtopic.php?t=622&highlight=&sid=dcfb98de35fb7d5 66c82c74ce3df15c4</a>

<a href="http://pup.phpwebhosting.com/~mrwong/viewtopic.php?t=864&start=90&postdays=0&postorder= asc&highlight=&sid=dcfb98de35fb7d566c82c74ce3df15c 4" target="_blank">http://pup.phpwebhosting.com/~mrwong/viewtopic.php?t=864&start=90&postdays=0&postorder= asc&highlight=&sid=dcfb98de35fb7d566c82c74ce3df15c 4</a>

Basically, what it boils down to is that any intelligent entity falls into two catagories. They either have the power to accomplish their goal or not. If they have the power then morality is a moot point. If they do not their best option to attain their goal is to act equitably with respect to other intelligent entities. Now there are a good number of complications in this analysis, but I don't have time at this moment to get into them. Perhaps later.