bd-from-kg

Pompous Bastard:

It would be more accurate to say that you misstated it. But I didn’t really misunderstand it in any serious way. I assumed that you would eventually clarify that you had a fairly specific “moral code” in mind. But the important point is that you don’t subscribe to it. True, you say that violating it is “wrong” , but that’s only because you define a “wrong” act to be one that violates this code. But you also say “I do not hold that we always ought to obey normative ethical principles”, or as you put it here, “there are situations... where ... an agent ought to defect from the contract...” Now a “moral code” is a specification of what actions one ought and ought not to do. to say that one subscribes to a given moral code is to say that one subscribes to its specifications of what one ought and ought not to do. So if you say that you sometimes ought not to do what your so-called “moral code” specifies, you do not subscribe to it.

Thus, as I said, your use of “right” and “wrong” is purely descriptive; when you say that an act is “wrong”, you mean that it violates a “moral code” that you don’t subscribe to. Indeed, you conceive of this “moral code” as being in the nature of a “contract”. (Although it has certain rather peculiar features for a contract: it doesn’t exist; no one has signed or otherwise agreed to it; no one knows what its terms are; most people who are supposedly “bound” by it don’t even know about it; there is no enforcement mechanism; etc.) Now I can take any contract (real or imagined, signed or unsigned) and define an action that is mandated by it as “belight” and an action that violates it as “deboren”. Surely it’s obvious that these terms are purely descriptive? To call an action “belight” is to say nothing more than that it is in accordance with the terms of the contract, and to call it “deboren” is to say nothing more than that it violates those terms. That’s exactly how you’re using the terms “right” and “wrong”. You have decoupled them from morality (even subjective morality) altogether. For example, to say that an action is “right” in your sense doesn’t mean that anyone approves of it or wishes it done, or prefers the consequences, or will be better off. And it doesn’t mean that the agent has assumed an obligation to do it, or has such an obligation.

Not so. I said only that you have no particular reason not to kill Smith, such as empathy for him and his family. In other words, no self-interested reason exists.

Now of course it is possible to define "self-interest" in such a way that everyone always does what's in his self-interest. However, the only way to do that is to make the latter statement a tautology. But besides reducing the claim to a triviality, it makes your "moral theory" rather boring: it amounts to saying that one always ought to do whatever one actually does. It makes statements like "Smith should not have done that" self-contradictory. It makes moral statements about the future into mere predictions "Smith ought to do X" becomes synonymous with "Smith will do X") and moral statements about the past mere factual statements ("Smith should have done X" becomes synonymous with "Smith did X"). So if you don't want to reduce your moral theory to nonsense or irrelevancy, you must define "self-interest" in such a way that people do not always do what is in their self-interest. And in that case you cannot say that self-interest is the only motivating force that is observed to exist. Whenever anyone does anything that is not in his self-interest, he has by definition acted on some motive other than self-interest.

So if you intend your theory to be nontrivial, your position must not be that there are no motives other than self-interest, but that there are no rational motives other than self-interest.

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

99Percent

I am going to scratch my premise that it is irrational to shut off the source of information when killing a human being and attempt again to argue for the rational self-interest of moral actions to prove objective morality in a different way (though I still think it is an important factor to consider the possible source of information of the moral agent being intentional eliminated).

Suppose that I had the opportunity to kill Smith without the risk of any impunity whatsoever. A rational decision to do so would have to be because there was tangible benefit in doing so. What kind of benefits would be reasonable? Those that enhance my own chances of survival only, which would have to be economical in nature for example money. So like bd says, in that situation it would always be rational to kill for economical gain, in fact it would be your moral imperative. However that proposition strikes us as somehow completely wrong and irrational in an intuitive way and I have lately been trying to find out exactly why this is so. A subjectivist would say that you find it wrong because you value the life of others more than the value of pure reason. But I reject that argument because I believe reason is the ultimate source of morality, not feelings or even social conditioning.

Ok, so if faced with the decision to kill Smith for x amount of dollars what would actually stop me from doing so rationally if I am actually obtaining a tangible benefit with no risk of being punished? What would actually stop anybody with sufficient ability to reason? First of all I would recognize I am commiting an immoral act because I am initiating violence by actively going against the will of another moral agent. I recognize it is immoral because I know that faced in the similar situation I would not be able to be a moral agent myself and would have to retaliate by killing my aggresor (as my survival is entirely at stake). So what I can say my immoral action is worthwhile as I am going to benefit myself with the money I took. But this is called falsely rationalization and by violating the principle of truth in reason you cease to have reason yourself. By knowing through reason itself that reason is the ultimate tool of survival as a human being you betray yourself and put your life at risk. Ok, again so what? I did obtain a substantial economic benefit that enhanced my survival by killing Smith. However the problem is that you are no longer being truthful to yourself. You cannot be sure anymore in the future about your moral judgements and your ability to choose correctly. You have undermined reason itself the fundamental directive of human survival.

Lets assume a hypothetical scenario where I killed Smith for million dollars. I have two options when confronted with the question of where I got the money. 1)I can lie outright and live a lie all my life. In this case I am constantly undermining my ability to reason because I am lying to myself and others. In effect I have entered an a state of irrationallity for the rest of my life. 2) I can chose not to hide the truth of my killing so everybody can know that I actually killed Smith for his money. In this case I openly put my life at risk because everyone with sufficient sanity would not dare be close to me with this knowledge or if they do it would always be with protection of their own carrying a weapon and being all the time suspicious of my activity since I have shown that I am willing to kill for economic gain. In effect I have entered a state of violence for the rest of my life.

I hope to have proved conclusively why it is always irrational to initiate violence even without the risk of impunity and why this is why intentional murder is objectively wrong.

Vorkosigan

I hope to have proved conclusively why it is always irrational to initiate violence even without the risk of impunity and why this is why intentional murder is objectively wrong.

There isn't any way to prove this. Just try and define "objectively" in an objective way.

Michael

Vorkosigan

Briefly, because self-interest is the only motivating force that self-evidently exists and, as far as I can determine, the only motivating force that is observed to exist. c, again, as far as I am able to determine.

I think "self-interest" as basis for morality is totally wrong. Let's set aside the subjective question of whether motivating forces are a proper basis for morality -- and concentrate on the empirical claim:

• It’s more valid than other reasons because it is the only reason that possesses the capacity to motivate agents to act

Here are some other motivating forces that exist:

1. sex drive
2. empathy with other humans
3. love of social status
4. love of one's children
5. hunger
6. pain

etc.

Consider all the morality around sex -- but sex cannot fit any conventional construction of my self-interest; it represents a risk and an expenditure of energy. And the consequences -- children -- represent an even bigger drain on my resources. Right there, Pomp, you've got a huge problem, it seems to me, because one of the key motivators of human beings, sex, isn't in an individual's self-interest -- unless you want to define it in a sociobiological way. It seems to me you're taking all the other drives a human have, and taking them for granted while putting forth a conception of self-interest that reads like an economic one.

Michael

tronvillain

99Percent: Emotions inform reason. Any attempt to explain why it is intuitively wrong to kill for money that does not incorporate emotion in some way will fail, as yours does.

tronvillain

99Percent:
Nothing about lying about where you got the money requires you to lie to yourself, and there is nothing irrational about lying to others. You have not demonstrated any way in which reason would be undermined.

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

Well, I didn’t choose either of these options, so perhaps you’re mistaken.

Not quite. I hold that moral ought is intimately connected to an agent’s potential desires – specifically the ones he would have if he had sufficient knowledge and understanding.

I deny that a rational agent with a full understanding of the situation would ever shoot Smith for his money. (Well, hardly ever. It’s conceivable that circumstances could arise in which such an agent would do this, but these circumstances coincide with the ones in which many standard consequentialist theories would say that it would be right for him to do so.)

Well, yes. And the dollars in your bank account exist; I can’t rationally deny that they do. But what does that have to do with whether I can write this check without having it bounce? I don’t see the relevance. You say that Smith’s reasons are relevant, but so far as I can see this relevance exists only in your mind (and in Smith’s).

So far as I can see, your “objective morality” simply defines a certain criterion of “goodness” or “rightness” and declares that anything that meets it is “good” or “right”. It fails to give any reasonable explanation of why the fact that a possible action satisfies this criterion entitles us to expect in any sense that the agent will do it, or to put it another way, why knowing that it meets this criterion might be regarded by the agent as a reason for doing it. I don’t say that he wouldn’t regard it as a reason, but there’s nothing in your theory to explain why he might.

I can define lots of possible criteria of “goodness” or “rightness”; for example, I could define an action as “right” if it maximizes the assets that Bill Gates will have when he dies. But it seems doubtful that most agents would regard the fact that an action is “right” in this sense as a reason for doing it. And this seems to me to be connected to the fact that few people would regard it as a reasonable criterion of “rightness”. What’s needed is a reasonable account of why many people would regard the fact that an action meets your criterion as a reason for doing it, whereas virtually no one (except Bill Gates, perhaps) would regard the fact that it meets my criterion as such a reason. In other words, you need to explain why your criterion is “special”.

To say that an action is “right” is not the same kind of thing as saying that a ball is blue. You can examine a ball to see whether it has the property of blueness, but you can’t examine an action to “see” whether it has the “property” of “rightness”. To say that an action is right is not merely to say that it meets some criterion. It is to say that, in some sense, we are entitled to expect that the agent will do it (if he fully understands the situation). One common way of expressing this is to say that if an action is “right” the agent has an “obligation” to do it. To decouple the notion of “rightness” from the notion of “obligation” is to fail entirely to understand the nature of moral statements (PB notwithstanding).

[ April 18, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

tronvillain

bd-from-kg:
So, do you just deny it, or can you show how a full understanding would necessarily make it irrational for a rational agent to shoot Smith for his money? Say shooting Smith will get me ten million dollars - what exactly would I need to understand about the situation for me to realize that doing so would be irrational?

Pomp

turtonm,

I think your disagreement with my statement about self-interest may stem from the fact that I am defining "self-interest" much more broadly than you are. Briefly, I am claiming that "self-interest" involves the pursuit of all of an agent's values. I think that you're focusing too heavily economic self-interest, which may be my fault as I agreed that my definition is similar to the economic definition.

Here are some other motivating forces that exist:

1. sex drive
2. empathy with other humans
3. love of social status
4. love of one's children
5. hunger
6. pain

etc.

All of these are subsumed under my use of the term "self-interest." I seek sex because I enjoy sex. I avoid harming others because I identify with them empathically and their suffering causes my distress. I seek social status because I enjoy the admiration of my peers. I would care for my children, if I had any, because I loved them. I eat because hunger is not pleasant. I avoid injury because pain is not pleasant.

Again, when I say "self-interest" I mean something like "the fulfillment of one's values." Does this make any sense?

tronvillain

Well, that's how I've always understood self-interest anyway.