Alonzo Fyfe

Internalism: Moral oughts depend on our ultimate ends.

Instrumentalism (the number 1 theory of action): Our ultimate ends are arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason.

Therefore: Moral oughts are arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason.

[ May 07, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

Your argument is:

P1: Moral oughts depend on our ultimate ends.

P2: Our ultimate ends are arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason.

Therefore:

C: Moral oughts are arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason.

The logic here is defective.

Consider:

Let's assume that when I play chess I try to make the "best" move - i.e., the one most likely to win, or failing that, to avoid losing. (In fact, this seems to be pretty much what it means to play chess.) Then we have:

P1': The "best" move depends on the rules of chess.

P2': The rules of chess are arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason.

Therefore (by your logic):

C': My choice of move is arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason.

But obviously my choice of move is not arbitrary or beyond the reach of reason.

Besides, ultimate ends are not "arbitrary" as this word is normally used. A typical definition of "arbitrary" (this one from the Wordsmyth Dictionary)is something like:

Ultimate ends are not a matter of "whim" or "caprice", and so cannot be properly called "arbitrary".

However, it is certainly true that they are "beyond the reach of reason", if by "reason" you mean logic. Logic has nothing to say about ends other than a few hints about how to reach them.

Alonzo Fyfe

The analogy between morality and chess breaks down at the point of the assumption that you make before discussing the chess example. This assumption counts as an extra premise tacked on to the chess example, which not only does not exist in the morality example but contradicts one of the premises in that argument.

More precisely, with the chess argument, you assume an ultimate end of winning the game (as determined by the definition of chess). Once an end is assumed, making moves is purely a matter of means-end rationality, at which point there is an answer as to which move is best as determined by reason.

With the morality example, there is no assumed common end. Indeed, an assumed common end is precisely what is denied under Premise 2 (instrumentalism). Rather, instrumentalism holds that each person comes to the morality game with a different conception of victory. And some how we must come up with a conception of best move which is true for all of them regardless of the differences in their "ultimate ends."

An appropriate analogy would be a chess championship where one player takes winning to require having her queen occupy square QB4 for the most number of consecutive turns, another considers victory to belong to the side which takes the most pawns, and another takes victory to be having the fewest number of pieces remaining on the board at the end of turn 20.

Now, it is true that, for each player, given their particular "ultimate end", there is almost always a "best move" to be made. But there is no "best move" that is common among all players regardless of their different and arbitrary ultimate ends.

Of course, one could say that these different conceptions of winning violate the definition of chess.

This does not defeat the objection, it merely provides another way of stating that the two arguments are fundamentally different. Internalist morality states that moral ought is grounded on each person's ultimate ends whatever they may be. It is not grounded on some universal ultimate end about which they may or may not care. Instrumentalism says that there is no common end true of all moral players -- that these ultimate ends are arbitrary.

So, in order to make the analogy of chess apply to the morality argument, we must conceive of chess as being similar to morality in the relevant ways. And this means that we must conceive of chess as a game in which each player can bring his or her own conception of victory into the game.

In which case, again, there may well be a "best move" for each player based on their own victory conditions, but no "best move" common among all players regardless of their victory conditions.

Relating this back to my original point that morality is evil, in the morality game some of the 'ultimate ends' that a person might bring into the game is that of inflicting as much pain as possible, wiping out a particular segment of the population, or collecting as much wealth as possible regardless of who they have to kill to get it. Internalist morality states that if these are, indeed, your ultimate ends, then whatever moves you make in order to accomplish these ends are morally right; and any move you make inconsistent with these ends are morally wrong.

Which is why I assert that (internalist) morality is evil.

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

victorialis

I've got some big problems with this argument.

Just to make things clearer -- anybody here want to take a crack at defining evil? Then at least I could see the purpose, or attempt to infer one.

Alonzo Fyfe says:

Anyone who believes that ultimate ends are arbitrary --

and that the primary meaning of arbitraryis "based on whim or caprice" --

--should not be arguing that morality is either evil or good. Based on those premises, morality can be nothing but irrelevant.

The instrumentalism defined here may actually be "the default view in the field," but that doesn't render it coherent, useful or accurate. I have no reason to doubt your source, but I would reserve judgment on the integrity of the ideas being circulated there.

definition of arbitrary from <a href="http://www.yourdictionary.com:" target="_blank">http://www.yourdictionary.com:</a>

The first definition encapsulates the usage of the word arbitrary that I have most often encountered. The second definition, less so. Notice how far down the list you have to go before you encounter the word capricious.

Much of one's perception of the world can hang precariously on the quality of one's dictionary. And seein' it on the internet don't make it so.

Alonzo Fyfe says:

Such an absolutist case cannot be built using relativist arguments, which is what that whole "instrumentalism" farrago appears to be. If we want to take a manichaean approach, and say that internalist morality is evil, then what kind of morality are we proposing as the corresponding good?

Alonzo Fyfe

The purpose of my original statement, "morality is evil," was to illustrate an inconsistency common-sense or folk morality. An inconsistency that centers around the question "Why be moral?"

Folk morality contains two incompatible elements.

One is internalism -- if I tell you that you (morally) ought to do something, this only makes sense if you have a reason to do it. To say that you ought to do something you have no reason to do is just plain wierd.

The other is altruism -- the primary characteristic of evil is that it disregards the welfare of others. Rape, murder, theft, abuse, assault, are all defining characteristics of the evil person.

"Morality is evil" can be translated into "internalism promotes actions that are harmful to others; or, at best, only contingently discourages it."

And the question "Why be moral?" becomes "What reason do I have to be concerned with the welfare of others?"

Much of ethics is an attempt to find an answer to this question. You ought to be concerned with the welfare of others because, if you are not, an all-knowing benevolent God will send you to hell for eternity. You should be moral because life in a state of nature is nasty, cruel, brutish, and short. Ultimately, what you have a reason to do is that act which you are willing to hold as at the same time as a universal law. Immoral activity is a violation of an inalienable right. Think of life as a series of perpetual prisoner's dilemma and we see that the most rational strategy is that known as 'tit for tat.'

Ultimately, all of these attempts can be defeated. There is no God. If I can make my own life less nasty by doing evil, there is still no reason why I should not do so. I have no reason to be concerned whether my actions are consistent with some sort of categorical imperative. There are no inalienable rights. Life is not a series of prisoners' dilemmas because those dilemmas assume that the 'defector' is always caught.

I advocate simply accepting the truth of the matter and moving on. A person might actually have every reason to do what he morally ought-not to do (in the 'harm to others' sense of ought-not).

We should accept this fact and move on.

This means giving up internalism, which some people argue is the very essence of moral philosophy. To give up internalism is to give up morality.

To which I answer, "If this is the way you want to use the term, then my claim that we should give up internalism translates into the claim that we should give up morality. Because morality is evil (in the harm-to-others sense of evil)."

(But I am consistent. If your concern with morality is in the 'what the agent has a reason to do' sense -- subjectivists being the largest but not necessarily the sole species within this family -- then likewise you should abandon 'harm to others' as ultimately relevant to morality.)

Still, the internalist answers, "What you say makes no sense, for how can you say that I should do something that you yourself say I may have no reason at all to do?"

I answer: Simple. I am talking only to those who are concerned about morality in the "harm to others" sense. If you are not concerned with harm to others, you will undoubtedly find my words irrelevant. If you are concerned with harm to others, then you do, in fact, have a reason to cast off moral internalism.

Again, that reason is because moral internalism is evil.

[ May 13, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

99Percent

Alonzo, I am having a hard time understanding what you are actually saying.

You mean morality is evil because a "good" person would never have to have morality in the first place? He will always act "good" without having a moral ought? So if a person needs morality it means he is not "good" to begin with and therefore morality is evil?

victorialis

Alonzo Fyfe, you've said that "I have no reason to be concerned whether my actions are consistent with some sort of categorical imperative."

With this I can agree only if you don't live with other human beings. Categorical imperatives can be, and are, ignored with impunity, but the consequences of actions are a bit harder to dodge. The presence or absence of a categorical imperative doesn't matter much, if someone with whom you must deal is cheesed off at you.

Philosophy came about as a reflection of human life and interaction -- not the other way around. The principles you are mixing and matching are not determinants of human behavior. The cart alone won't pull the horse anywhere. But if we leave the horse to do what it likes, it will go somewhere on its own.

So far, "morality is evil" makes no more sense to me than the statement "chicken is Tuesday." I could put scads of stream-of-consciousness boilerplate into post after post "demonstrating" that chicken is Tuesday; that wouldn't sell anybody on the idea, much less make it a fact, and when everybody else lost interest and went away, that would not mean I had proven the point.

If evil is, specifically, disregard for the welfare of others (and that may be a sufficient definition for our purposes here), then good would require that the welfare of others be defined with clarity and a great deal of precision -- so that we may "regard" it effectively rather than disregarding it.

Otherwise, what we have defined as evil is not avoidable, and morality is a non-issue.

...Unless you'd like to take on responsibility for determining what constitutes the welfare of others.

I wouldn't touch that one.

That's the danger of a manichaean approach.

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

That was not an analogy. It was a demonstration that your reasoning was fallacious.

An action, or an attitude toward an action, which has a recognizable purpose is not ordinarily called “arbitrary” merely because the purpose itself cannot be “justified” in some cosmic, ultimate sense. Normally it would be called “arbitrary” if it either doesn’t serve any recognizable purpose, or if the purpose is not one that is considered appropriate for the type of action in question. (For example, a judge’s ruling might be called arbitrary if it was based on a whim, or if it was motivated by the fact that one of the parties was a personal friend. It would not be called arbitrary if it was a reasonable, unbiased interpretation of the law, merely because the purpose of the law in question – to promote social harmony, economic progress, or whatever, could not be justified in an “ultimate”, objective sense. The reason is simple: no purpose can be justified in this sense; if this were the criterion of “arbitrariness”, all actions and attitudes would be “arbitrary”.

But if actions and attitudes that serve a recognizable purpose appropriate to their context are not “arbitrary”, then moral “oughts” are not “arbitrary” in general, any more than a chess move chosen because it seems to give the best chance of winning the game is “arbitrary”. Similarly, if a moral “ought” can be supported by a plausible argument to the effect that adopting the underlying moral principle would serve some appropriate, recognizable purpose, it cannot be reasonably said to be “beyond the reach of reason”.

Besides, the exact same argument can be applied to what you call the “all things considered” criterion. The “things” in “all things considered” refers to “reasons”; that is, you say that an act is “right” if it takes into account all of the reasons that anyone has for the agent’s making a given choice. But these “reasons” all relate to desires, or motivations, or ends, that are just as “arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason” as any one person’s “ultimate ends” are. Lumping them all together doesn’t make them one whit less arbitrary or beyond the reach of reason.

Moreover, it seems that you’re arbitrarily excluding some “reasons” from your so-called “all things considered” criterion. For example, a beetle may have very good reasons for you to step here rather than there – namely that if you step there you’ll crush him. Why isn’t this just as good a “reason” as any?

So far as I can see, instrumentalism says nothing at all about how we come to have ends, or goals, or purposes, or about whether everyone has the same goals. Obviously everyone does not have the same goals, but this is an elementary empirical observation, not a tenet of instrumentalism. Besides, why are you so hung up on what instrumentalism holds when neither you nor I agree with it? This seems rather like expounding on what Mormonism holds when neither of us is a Mormon.

You’ve been very loose in describing what you mean by “internalist morality”. In one place you said that the “internalist condition” is that “moral facts must be tied in some way to the agent's motivation”. Let’s leave aside for now the question of whether it makes sense to talk about moral “facts”. As I pointed out earlier, a “tie” between the “rightness” of an act and motivation can take many forms: the agent might actually desire to do it, or it might be rational for him to desire to do it, or perhaps he would desire to do it if he’d had a proper upbringing, or you might be trying to induce or persuade him to desire to do it. You’ve never been clear about which of these kinds of tie you think a moral theory must claim to exist in order to be called “internalist”. In fact, you said “in the context where I used the phrase, it applies to every one of the interpretations you mentioned” (except for a quibble about the word “proper”). This would seem to imply that the term “internalist morality” applies to any theory which involves a tie of any of these kinds between act and motivation. But this must not be right because you’ve made it clear by now that your theory involves such a tie. Thus, you say: “A person who is evil ... will do evil deeds (harmful to others) and no amount of moral argument can persuade him otherwise.” The implication, of course, is that for those who are not “evil”, moral arguments can persuade them to refrain from harming other people.

At any rate, it’s clear that you have used the term “internalist morality” in this sense, and that the point of your OP was that any such morality is “evil”. But you’ve also used this term in some very different ways. For example, you said that internalist morality “basically tells people ‘do what you will; and if what you will involves harming others, then harm others’”. This hardly seems to be a “morality” at all; in fact, it’s hard to say what it is. People are going to do what they will in any case, so it would seem pointless to tell them to do so. In another place you say that it entails that “a person who understands that he morally should do something will actually do it”. This doesn’t make much sense; no one believes that anyone who understands that he should do something will necessarily do it. So here you seem to be denouncing a type of moral theory that no one actually holds. Yet again you say that such theories “tell people ‘you did nothing morally wrong so long as what you did is consistent with what you ultimately want to do.’” I suspect that this is closer to what you really have in mind. But your meaning is rather opaque unless you define what you mean by saying that one “ultimately” wants to do something.

At any rate, it would seem that your real complaint is not with any moral theory that posits any kind of connection between acts and motivations, but with those that say that the belief that an action is “wrong”, or that one “shouldn’t” do it, will induce or motivate the agent to refrain from doing it under certain conditions.

As I pointed out earlier, while there are quite a few moral theories that do not imply this, there are a fair number that do, starting with Aristotle’s. To characterize Aristotle’s moral theory as “evil” is bizarre.

Most such theories (including Aristotle’s) claim that acting morally – i.e., doing the right thing - is rational, while acting wrongly is irrational. The gist of your complaint about such theories, I think, can be seen by considering the following propositions:

(A) It is irrational to knowingly act wrongly.
(B) Any fully rational person who knows that a given action is wrong will not do it.
(C) If any fully rational person would do a given thing, it is not wrong.

Now statement (A) seems innocuous at first sight. The trouble comes from the fact that it logically implies (B), which in turn implies (C). And you consider (C) outrageous, because it says, for example, that if just one fully rational person would rape someone, it cannot be wrong to rape people.

But this is basically a misunderstanding. Many of the people who subscribe to (A) hold that a proper understanding of what it means to be rational precludes the possibility that a fully rational person could knowingly act wrongly, so that it is impossible in principle for (A) or (B) to be false. And of the others, if most of them were to become convinced that it is possible for a fully rational person to do something clearly wrong, they would not conclude that the action in question is not “really” wrong; they would instead conclude that (A) is false. Virtually none of them would reason (as you seem to imagine all of them would), “Smith is fully rational, yet he raped that woman knowing that it was wrong. Well, I’ll be. I guess I’ll stop condemning rape. In fact, I’ll try to get the laws against it repealed.”

In any case, instead of using emotionally charged terms like “evil”, it would be more productive to examine why some people think (A) is plausible, in the face of the obvious fact that many seeming rational people do seem to knowingly act wrongly. Since I have already given some of my reasons for thinking (A) plausible, you might start by seriously addressing my arguments.

Finally, I want to comment on the last part of your reply to victorialis:

But this hardly seems adequate. Let’s say that Smith kills Jones to get the money in his wallet. You arrest him and propose to hang him. He asks why. What can you say in reply? You can’t tell him that you’re punishing him because what he did was wrong, because you use moral language only when you’re are talking to those who are concerned about “harm to others”. You can’t explain that “justice” demands it, or that he “deserves” it, because these are also moral terms. In the end, you’ll have to admit that your reasons are arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason: they are meaningful to those who care about such things, but not to those who don’t, and that’s all that can be said about them.

As long as you restricted yourself to using the words “right” and “wrong” in a purely descriptive way, there was no problem. But now you’re proposing to hang someone on the grounds that you use certain words in a certain way! This will hardly do.

To bring out the point more clearly, suppose that Smith informs you that he also uses words like “right”, “wrong”, “justice”, and “deserve” in a purely descriptive way, and that according to his definitions you’re the one who deserves to be hanged. It seems to me that at this point you either have to say that you’re using moral language in something more than a purely descriptive way, and that your usage is somehow more objectively valid than his, or else you have to say that he’s just as much “in the right” as you are – that is, that there is no objective, disinterested way to determine whether he’s the one who “deserves” to be hanged or you are. Whichever choice the hangman makes will be arbitrary and beyond the reach of reason. Or to put it another way, the only objective truth is whose head is in the noose; everything else is just two different ways of describing this reality. It seems to me that if any moral theory “deserves” to be called “evil”, it’s this one.

Finally, your “internalist” has a point. It’s generally believed that it is wrong to blame someone for doing something if he was incapable of doing otherwise. Moreover, since no one ever does anything without a reason, it seems reasonable to conclude that no one is capable of doing something without a reason. Now let’s say that the situation is such that you are not in a position to threaten Smith if he should do X, but you can point out that it’s wrong (i.e., it will clearly harm a great many people). But if knowing that doing X is wrong is not a reason for Smith to refrain from doing X, it would seem that he has no reason to do so, and therefore that he was incapable of doing otherwise, and therefore cannot reasonably be blamed for doing it. Do you agree with this? Would it be wrong to blame Smith for doing X even though he knew it was wrong? If not, why not?

Ender

Alonzo, are you saying something like "morality is the herd-instinct of the individual?"

~WiGGiN~