Nu

After becoming a hard core strong atheist toward Christian God and weak atheist toward the concept of god, I have tried to make a set of axioms to develop a morality from.

However I have found that I dont know of any rational process or method for creating axioms. it simply ends with me choosing one that intuitively feels right.

Is this the only way? If the only way of justifiying an axiom/morality is through a inner conviction then these axioms/morals seem so aribitrary...thus i head toward Moral Nihilism.

David Gould

What is wrong with choosing axioms that make you feel right?

I am a moral subjectivist and my morals are the ones that I think are right. What other morals would I hold except the ones that I thought were the best?

To me, the question does not make much sense - would you rather hold morals that you did not agree with?

Just how would you go about doing that?

Nu

Arrg, i think i am using the wrong terms here.

Is a rational axiom an oxymoron?

How do moral objectivists argue over what way is best?

How do moral relativists argue that relativism is best?

If we had two sets of morals, one that says random killing with plenty of pain and suffering is good, and the other says the opposite, how can people say one is better than the other?

[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: Nu ]</p>

Alonzo Fyfe

My quest for morality went as follows.

I remember thinking in high school that I wanted to make the world a better place. The problem is, I heard too many people disagree about what would constitute 'better'. Would such a world have capital punishment or not? Would it involve more government regulation or less? So, I set off on a quest to find out what a 'better' world would be.

That quest took me through 12 years of college, studying mostly value theory and moral philosophy.

I came up with the following:

There are a lot of words in our language that have a value component as a part of their meaning. It is true not only of moral terms, but one also cannot use words like danger, warning, exploitation, harm, health, sick, disaster, benefit, beautiful, ugly, fortunate, lucky, helpful, useful, catastrophy, injury, deficient, defective, and . . . well, as you can see, there are a lot of them.

If there was not something real about value, then we have to accept a lot more than moral nihilism. We would have to be rid of a huge part of our experiential life.

So, what is value?

I came up with a simple way to account for all true value-laden claims. A true value claim relates a states of affairs to a set of desires. Different value claims are distinguished by three elements:

(1) The set of desires that are relevant in making the evaluation.

(2) The type of relationship (direct or indirect) that exists between the desires and the state of affairs being evaluated.

(3) The types of states of affairs being evaluated.

For example, take health claims. True health claims describe both indirect and direct relationships between the physical and mental processes of an individual and the desires of the person whose processes we are evaluating.

Another example: The word "useful" refers only to the indirect value that something may have -- the value that it has as a tool or a precondition to something else that has value. The relevant desires are determined by the context in which the term is used -- and may be only a hypothetical desire.

Every alternative to this view I have encountered ultimately contains a component whereby something is said to have value 'just because' (independent of its relationship to any desire -- intrinsic value). But I have seen no evidence that any of these 'just because' values exist. They have no explanatory or predictive powers.

These 'just because' (intrinsic) values are often used to explain how people use certain value-laden terms (such as those in the list above). But, the belief in or assumption of intrinsic values is sufficient to explain the use of terms. It provides no evidence whatsoever that the belief or assumption is true.

So, what about moral value?

We have three elements that we need to figure out.

(1) Which desires are relevant in making a moral evaluation?

Well, 'harm to others' seems to be a significant component of moral evaluations. Theft, murder, lying, acts of violence, the most significant aspects of morality, all seem to be concerned with 'harm to others'.

Harm, itself, is the thwarting of a strong and stable desire (Joel Feinberg, HARM TO OTHERS, Oxford University Press, 1984)

So, morality is ultimately concerned with all strong and stable desires. There is no justification for excluding anybody from this set -- doing so says that the person whose desires are being excluded is being evaluated only for his or her usefulness to others -- by his or her capacity to fulfill the desires that are included. That person is being treated as a mere thing, which is contrary to the common conception of morality.

(2) What types of relationships that are relevant?

Well, clearly, it does not matter whether an action thwarts strong and stable desires directly (e.g., theft, murder) or indirectly (deception, carelessness), in making a moral evaluation.

We do distinguish in our moral evaluation between a person who willingly does harm (has a desire to do harm), knowingly does harm (has a desire for something that he knows he cannot obtain without doing harm, does not intend to do harm, but does not care about the harm he causes), or negligently does harm (is not aware of the harm his actions may cause, but a properly concerned person would have been aware of the harm0&gt;

(3) What types of objects that are the ultimate objects of moral evaluations?

Laws, social institutions, actions, character, are all morally evaluated. However, all moral evaluation ultimately concerns moral behavior, and makes the claim that a person should (intentionally) have done something else.

And all human behavior is caused by desire in a context of belief. (Desire determines our ends, beliefs inform us as to the means to our ends). Thus, it makes no sense to say that a person ought to have done something different unless one is willing to accept the implication that the person ought to have desired something different.

(Question: What of a person who does something wrong because of a false belief? Answer: We look to see if the person showed proper concern that his belief was justified. Did he look for another alternative? Did he ask the appropriate questions (given the opportinity). Even instances of false belief ultimately go back and ask questions about the desires of the agent.)

Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that the ultimate object of all moral evaluation are desires themselves.

Moral evaluations, then, relate desires (directly or indirectly) to other desires. Desires are good if they can exist in harmony with other the strong and stable desires; bad if they conflict with (tend to thwart) the strong and stable desires of others.

A person is good if he has good desires; evil if his desires are bad. An action is right if it is the action a good person would perform; law is immoral if a properly motivated person (a person with good desires) could not support it.

And this is my conception of morality.

Now, there is a certain arbitrariness to it. But it is not the arbitrariness of morality, it is the arbitrariness of language. Language is an invention, and we can use a term any way we choose. We may choose not to use the word 'morality' the way I have done so here.

I can give no argument showing that says that everybody must use the term 'moral' in the way described here. But, then, I also cannot provide any argument insisting on a particular use of any word in any field of study.

There is an objective, knowable, "good all things considered" that is the same for all people. It does not cease to exist simply because we have decided to call it something else.

Now, on to the question, "why be moral?" If a person comes up to me and asks, "Why should I be moral?" I pretty much take the question to mean, "Given my present desires, why should I have the desires of a good person?"

My answer to such a person must necessarily be, "Maybe you have no such reason. What is good 'all things considered' may be quite different from what is good 'your desires alone considered.' I will use these facts to judge whether you are a good person or an evil person, but only a good person will find moral oughts persuasive. Evil people will ignore them as unimportant. It's just a fact; it would be nice if the world is different, but it's not."

(Note: I could still try to convince the evil person that he "has a reason" to do good -- but any argument would be deceptive. In fact, he has no such reason, but it may be best if he did not know that, so I will make up a story -- about a God who knows everything he does that will punish him in the afterlife, about rationality, or whatever. Still, it's just a story.

Given this, it would be a mistake to get caught in the trap of our own deception -- to go from inventing some myth whereby everybody has a reason to be moral, to a story whereby what is moral is what each person has a reason to do. Many subjectivists and rationality-based theorists fall into this trap.)

That being said, I can give the evil person a reason of a different type to do what is good -- the threat of violence (social and legal sanctions) if he is caught doing evil. The evil person will still do evil in cases where he believes he can benefit from it. This is just a fact of life -- live with it.

[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

David Gould

I would not bother arguing over which particular set of morals was best.

Sets of morals are abstract things.

Instead, I would talk to the individual who held a set of morals different to mine and ask him what he valued.

For example, a particular Nazi might value the preservation of the German state. He might believe that the extermination of the Jews would assist in the preservation of the German state.

I would then attempt to demonstrate that such a belief was wrong. I would not attack the core value in any way.

It is doubtful that someone would value the pain of others. What they value is their pleasure, and they have found that the pain of others gives them pleasure. I woul dthen look for other things that gave them pleasure. I would also point out to the person that hurting others was likely to lead to an end to that person's pleasure because the objection of others would likely be strong and violent, probably leading to his injury, incarceration or death.

Moral systems are simply a way of achieving what we value.

Jamie_L

Morality looks out for your long-term interests, especially when that conflicts with short-sighted immediate-gratification deisres.

In a long life, you have a lot of opportunity for s*%t to hit the fan. If it does, you will be best off if you have a network of resources to support you: strong friendships, caring family, good professional and financian relationships - trustworthy, loyal human beings who will look out for you.

It is unlikely you will achieve that network by being immoral. Maybe doing something nasty once and a while is no big deal - but maybe it isn't. With imperfect knowledge, there's no way to know if the person you screw today is the person you need help form tomorrow. Maybe you'll get lucky and step on people every day and die an old man without ever needing someone's help. But you never know.

Furthermore, being moral contributes to a stable society, and a stable society serves you better than one in chaos.

So what does being moral mean? Generally, it means doing those things that contribute to creating that loyal support network and that stable society. That means not doing things that hurt other people or things that hurt society.

Luckily, the quirks of our psychology make humans generally enjoy the benefits of a moral life (if we're raised properly). People like to have friends, companionship, and security. People don't like to be hurt, and most people have empathy. Thus, people generally aren't interested in hurting people for its own sake. So, building a morality on what feels right is not a bad place to start for most of us. It's not the whole story, but it's not insignificant.

Jamie

dk

My quest for morality went as follows.
I remember thinking in high school that I wanted to make the world a better place. The problem is, I heard too many people disagree about what would constitute 'better'. Would such a world have capital punishment or not? Would it involve more government regulation or less? So, I set off on a quest to find out what a 'better' world would be.
Alonzo Fyfe-
That quest took me through 12 years of college, studying mostly value theory and moral philosophy.

I came up with the following:
dk: Why do you think nihilism provides a reliable foundation to build upon?
dk: - I hate to break this to you Alonzo but medicine by and large is a trial by error process that frequently engages double blind studies to discount the relationship between the mental and physical process of the patent, nurses, doctors and researchers. Bad example.
dk: - In a radical utilitarian sense people shape useful tools from desire. In a radical idealistic sense the cerebral shapes reality from desire. In a materialistic sense experience shapes perception from desire. In a rational sense elementals shape self justification from desire. In any sense I can think of desire isolates the ego in a conflicted abstract reality built from self absorption.
dk: - I assume “self evident” equates to “just because values”. I'd argue mechanical forces are self evident, when rightly ordered make sense, and are independent of human desire. Reason ordered by one’s desires degenerates into a self absorbed void.
dk: - Morality aligns human desires, instincts, feelings intentions and emotions with reasonable standards of conduct that make understanding, empathy and trust possible. Without understanding, empathy and trust people exist in a community deprived of identity (shared value); so each individual exists in a state of deprived isolation driven by loneliness to gratify themselves on their neighbor by any means possible. Naturally as a society becomes increasingly immoral litigation comes to dominant, but is often conflicted. In such a world love, friendship and peace are mere illusions, and a mob mentality though fleeting and destructive offers the only refuge. Fascist governments are instituted to channel a mob mentality, they feed on the fear and distrust generated by unchecked egotistical desire. Freedom is not just another word.

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

free12thinker

I have to second this as well. Worrying about a name or a label or a fitting for your morals isn't what's important.

What's important is the substance behind them. Are they selfless, or self serving. Are they consistent through and through and do they represent thoughts and ideas that negatively impact others, and can you uphold these morals with conviction, without questioning yourself.

I don't know what to call the line of rationale behind my morals; but I know that there is a consistency to them and I know that my beliefs and actions behind such morals do not negatively impact anyone else.

Bottom line: If you can stand behind your morals, without questioning your rationale behind them, and they do not negatively impact someone else, than you've got what most people don't have at all.

Most peoples morals are either self-serving, inconsistent, or simply not their own, but instead Gods or the bibles.

Alonzo Fyfe

dk:

Why do you think nihilism provides a reliable foundation to build upon?

Note: I am curious as to why you offer this interpretation to what I wrote. It is such a clear and obvious straw man that I find it difficult to imagine that you would fail to recognize it as such. So, why is it here?

Nihilism about what? I am a nihilist about intrinsic values, but not about relational values. Relational values are a part of the real world -- they are subject to scientific scrutiny and study (like location, direction, and center of mass -- which are also objective, relational properties.)

I draw no implications from the nonexistence of intrinsic values other than that all arguments that depend on their existence are unsound (and that most moral arguments depend on their existence).

All of the substantive conclusions I have drawn come from relational values, which have the three components I described.


I hate to break this to you Alonzo but medicine by and large is a trial by error process that frequently engages double blind studies to discount the relationship between the mental and physical process of the patent, nurses, doctors and researchers. Bad example.

This process you describe is that used to determine if A causes B. It is not the process used to determine if B counts as a disease, illness, or injury on the one hand, or is a sign of health on the other. The latter requires a value judgment -- is having condition B bad (sickness, injury) or good (health)?

Now, I think you can empirically discover whether something is good or bad -- by measuring the relationship between the specific form of physical and mental functioning under investigation and the desires of the person functioning in that capacity. But this is the only way to do it. No state of functioning is intrinsically good or bad == that state and the desires of the person


I assume 'self evident' equates to 'just because values'.

I would be reluctant to accept this equation. 'Intrinsic values' has to do with ontology -- what exists, and what does not. "Self-evident" is an epistemological term -- what do we know and how do we know it.

I tend to support coherentist epistemologies -- theories that say that a belief is justified if it is a part of a maximally coherent set of beliefs (roughly). Nothing is "self evident" in this view. Foundationalists accept "self evidence" as being a part of the foundation upon which other beliefs are built.

Mostly, I come to this conclusion on the huge number of examples of people claiming something to be "self evident" that is not self evident at all.


Reason ordered by one’s desires degenerates into a self absorbed void.

Our desires are the only entities that exist that provide motivation to act. Without desires, there is no action -- no reason to do anything.

This is an ontological claim -- I have seen no convincing evidence for any other type of entity motivating intentional action. (Beliefs are relevant, but not as motivating force. They help determine the best means to an end, not ends themselves.)

(Note: Actually, I think that the script model is better than the belief-desire model. However, the BD model requires much less explanation, is the dominant view in the field, and contains the same relevant characteristics.}

Now, desires themselves (like beliefs) can take virtually any proposition as an object. They can be self-interested desires (I want a nice juicy steak for supper) or other-interested desires (I hope that you get the nice juicy steak that you want for supper) or even other-thing-interested desires (save the cows).

Some confuse this type of account, failing to distinguish between the self as the subject of the desires that motivate one's own actions, and the self as the object of the desires that motivate one's own action.

All of the desires that motivate one's own actions come from the self as subject (simply in virtue of the fact that desires are encoded in the brain, and the only brain directly attached to my muscles is my own brain -- so the only desires that can move my muscles that count as my actions are those in my brain).

But this very easily includes any altruistic desires I may have.


Morality aligns human desires....

I don't actually see anything in this that contradicts what I wrote.

I'm not saying that I agree with it. Rather, whether true or false, it specifies potential concerns relevant in making an all-things-considered judgment, while I did not get specific in my original post.

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

dk

dk:- Why do you think nihilism provides a reliable foundation to build upon?
Alonzo Fyfe: Nihilism about what? I am a nihilist about intrinsic values, but not about extrinsic (relational) values. Relational values are a part of the real world -- they are subject to scientific scrutiny and study (like location, direction, and center of mass -- which are also objective, relational properties.)
dk: - By extrinsic you mean the basic units of mass, length or time; and all other units derived thereof. I still have no idea what you mean by intrinsic, though its clearly the topic at hand.
Alonzo Fyfe: I draw no implications from the nonexistence of intrinsic values other than that all arguments that depend on their existence are unsound (and that most moral arguments depend on their existence).
All of the substantive conclusions I have drawn dome from relational values, which have the three components I described.
--- dk: - Why do you describe intrinsic values as unreliable, then assert relational values are reliable?
dk: Around the 1900s I’m sure Typhoid Mary would have agreed. As a carrier of typhoid fever she didn’t suffer the symptoms. In fact medical protocols are stringently designed around ethical guidelines (or used to be) grounded in reliable proven principles. Conceptually the public health is secured by the propositions of medical treatment, personal hygiene, clean air, water & sewage standards, proper food preparation and sanitary food processing. In principal if all the participants comply then it’s a simple matter of rooting out the source of contagious diseases, and isolating the cotangents when breakouts occur. Over the last 40 years public health has been politicized by practical considerations. In the U.S. young people and the fringes of society have met with tragic consequences; and in many 3rd World Countries the life expectancy has been cut in half. I personally find the evidence quite compelling.
dk: - Mathematics is built from axioms, for example points, lines and planes; the only justification for the surreal concepts are self evident. Moral philosophy like mathematics requires axioms. Is it your contention that mathematics lacks scientific certitude?
dk: - You’d have to give me an example, but I think its fair to say axioms, moral principles, and concepts don’t quit fit into an practical empirical world view. How remarkable it is that so much of mathematics can be applied in the real world.
dk: - There are several schools of thought on moral philosophy. Instrumentalists believe that statements and theories are truth-like, independent of the possibility of truth or falsity. I find this to be a pragmatic model suitable to narrow well defined subjects in a best guess scenario. Instrumentalism succeeds by terminating in a truth-like solution benchmarked by the next best theory presented. For this reason I believe instrumentalism may be unsuited to broad general subjects like moral philosophy. Can you present any broad based empirical evidence.
In what senses are “desires” entities?
dk: - Ultimately ontological claims are self evident, or best guess? Why don’t you reject statistical analysis, correlation and probabilities because they are based on self evident claims?
dk: - If objects differ complexly there are many propositions unsuited to many objects; only in an atomized mechanical universe can desires take on any proposition as an object.
dk: - That depends on whether ones desires and self are suited to one another. Between experiences, emotions, desires and directed action there are a plethora of propositions that can twist a person. The proposition of moral truth orders one’s self with good intentions communicated by suitable conduct. Unfortunately people’s desires are often misdirected to act out destructive behaviors, all intentions aside.
dk: Have you ever suffered a muscle cramp, or a heart attack? From an empirical standpoint the study of consciousness and emotions is at a pre-embryonic stage, because there is no empirical definition of consciousness. Most mental health professionals, counselors, parents and teachers are overwhelmed by the neural mirages that permeate the last century with misnomer.
dk: - “What is the source of desire?”. From an empirical perspective there simply is no evidence to distinguish desire from life, are we to assume from the existence of life that creatures experience life or desire life. As a practical matter I can’t distinguish one from the other.

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>