scigirl

Hi Nathan,

I liked your first post. In regards to your subject line, "Morals as a matter of taste, maybe this thread will help!



scigirl

tronvillain

Alonzo Fyfe:
What exactly are the "standard English ways" in which morals terms are used? As far as I can tell, the standard English ways that the moral term "wrong" are used are essentially "what bothers me" and "what bothers other people" (with some degree of overlap), neither of which are inconsistent with "morality as taste." Perhaps you would care to back up your assertions with something? In any case, you are mistaken when you guess that "even today you use these terms in these ways ways without giving it much though" for the simple reason that I virtually never use those terms except to describe facts as correct or incorrect.
Given that you have not defined how many sides a triangle has (the "standard" English meanings of moral terms), it is a little ridiculous to complain that I am talking about it having four sides. The only modification that I can see to my definition of the standard English meaning of "wrong" is the opinion of some people that there is something objectively correct about what bothers them or specific other people, which is ridiculous in the same manner as someone asserting that there is something objectively correct about finding broccoli disgusting.
Again, you have provided no evidence that there are any differences between the "taste" theory and the traditinoal English meaning of the term, other than the assertion that there is something objectively correct about ones tastes. Give some definitions or shut the hell up.
Not being overly attached to labels, I am afraid I do not follow you. I am not switching to anything: I occupy the same position that I have all along.
1)Ah, but do native speakers take such a difference to be a contradiction? As far as I can tell, they take it to be a disagreement in the same way that "broccoli is delicious" and "broccoli is disgusting" is a disagreement. Differences in moral taste cause conflict in a way that normal taste does not because there is only one dish: one group wishes to eat broccoli, another group does not, and only one group can be satisfied.

2) Native speakers only speak of the well being of others as relevant to questions of right and wrong to the degree that they care about the well being of others.

3) It is not at all apparent that moral claim are required to be universal. Oh, one could use that definition, but it would seem to exclude a large number of what would seem to be accurately described as moral claims. In any case, this would not be a flaw in the theory, since as I have pointed out that one's moral sense of taste is exposed to the entire world one experiences, while one's normal sense of taste is exposed only to what one eats one's self.

4) So, morality is interpersonal and taste is personal. So what? All this says is that without other people there is little or nothing to which to expose the moral sense of taste.

5) People discussing right and wrong take a claim such as "I like x" to be irrelevant in settling such issues for the same reason that a claim by someone such as "I like olives" is irrelevant in settling what toppings are going to be on a pizza I am going to share with them. Everyone accepts that "I like x" means that you do not think it is wrong in the same way that "I like x" means that you think it tastes good, but neither can resolve a discussion involving others with different taste who are going to have to experience what you experience.

6) So translating 'taste' terms in another language into 'moral' claims in English is considered a mistake? Perhaps you could give an example, but I suspect that it is simply a matter of what has already been discussed: the moral sense of taste is exposed to the world and translating into normal taste terms would imply otherwise.

7) Ah, but what do we mean by "mistaken" in such cases? As far as I can tell, we simply mean "disagrees with my taste, which I do not like because we have to share the same dish." Anything more requires the assertion that there is something objectively correct about one's moral taste. When we say someone is wrong to think something is right, do we mean that they have some fact about the world incorrect, or do we mean that we are bothered by them thinking something is right. I suspect the latter, but I also suspect that some people confuse this with the former.

*shrugs* It looks perfectly capable of accounting for the way that native English speakers use moral terms, as long as you realize that some people are under the dellusion that there is something objectively correct about their own tastes.
Except that in the real world people's moral claims depend on their own desires and on the desires of others to the degree that their own desires make relevant, which makes the taste theory of morality a far more accurate description. What you describe is one possible moral perspective, but you give no reason why it should be the moral perspective. If you tell me that an action that I consider "right" is in fact "wrong" under such a universal perspective, why should I or anyone else care?
The evolution/creationism debate is not a controversial science question: as far as science is concerned, there is no debate. Now, what I meant by evidence being relevant to a matter of taste is this: suppose you are opposed to the death penalty because the possibility of killing an innocent bothers you and you do not think there are any benefits, and then someone comes along and tells you that it acts as a very effective deterrent against future murders. They have more fully exposed the dish to your palate (assuming they are correct), but whether you change your position depends on whether you are more bothered by the possibility of executing an innocent or failing to prevent future murders: it is a matter of taste.

Alonzo Fyfe

Well, for one type of 'objectivist', my credentials should be considered entirely lacking. This is the view that holds that there is desire-independent value. My standard criticism of subjectivism is not that subjectivism is wrong, but most people assert a version of subjectivism that is problematic. You could, perhaps, call the view that I defend "subjectivism plus".

Unfortunately, the "plus" contains elements that some assert is inconsistent with subjectivism (as they understand it), so instead of calling this account "subjectivism plus", some people seem more comfortable with labeling it as a sort of "objectivism lite."

I hate labels.


Hmmmm. Not . . . exactly.

The only way to know the meaning of a word is to know how it stands in relationship to other words. If I were to give you a set of symbols in some foreign language, you have absolutely know way of knowing what those symbols mean. But, once you see a stack of symbols in different context, you can get an idea of its meaning.

This -- which is necessary when understanding what words mean -- is what you seem to be calling about concern over 'how we apply and react to our ideas.' Rather than being irrelevant, it is the only relevant type of evidence when we are concerned with what something means.

You state that you are concerned, instead, with epistemology. However, we cannot even meaningfully ask a question about how we know about 'it' until we first have settled the question of what 'it' is.

What is it, exactly, that we are seeking to epistemologize?

Which, ultimately, identifies the main point of my objection to some of your claims. What you are trying to epistemologize when you epistemologize 'morality' is something quite different from what most people are talking about when they talk about morality.

It's a bit like doing all sorts of episemology about the 'mustang', and coming up with all sorts of claims about how we know what we know about mustangs, only to have those you were talking about say, "I'm not talking about the horse, I am talking about the car."

And the only way to determine what a person really means when they use the word mustang is to note the context in which they use the word, and come up with a theory of mustang that makes the most sense of the use of that word in those contexts. Application and context is not only relevant, it is vital to this task.



Yes, it does, actually. But, this is because I have been arguing about the basics, and have not gotten down to some of the gory details. Now, you are going to force me to get my hands dirty.

Here, one has to talk about the distinction between 'reductionism', 'revisionism' and 'eliminativism'.

For an example of reductionism, when 'water' gets reduced to 'H2O', almost everything originally held true of water still holds true of H2O. The boiling and freezing temperature remains the same, as well as the tendency of water to expand at temperatures below 39 degrees F, and the like. We, perhaps, have a better understanding of why it is true, but its truth does not change. This is reductionism.

Eliminativism, on the other hand, happens when our better understanding of something requires throwing that something out. Well, I am an eliminativist about ghosts, unicorns, and gods, for example. These concepts cannot be reduced to a set of natural phenomena, there is no place for them, so they are to be eliminated instead.

Revisionism is everything between reductionism and eliminativism. In virtue of better understanding, we take something, throw away part of it, and reduce the rest to other concepts. 'Malaria' -- which means literally 'bad air' could not be entirely reduced to concepts about bacterial. We had to throw away a part of it (e.g., we had to be eliminativists about a 'bad air' disease), and what was left over (the set of symptoms themselves) could then be reduced to facts within the bacteria-theory of disease. The same applies to reducing the concept of an 'atom', which originally meant 'indivisible particle' to facts about these conglomerations of electrons, neutrons, and protons which clearly ARE divisible. A straight reduction is impossible -- reduction first required eliminating 'indivisible' from the meaning -- then what was left over could be reduced to facts about these bundles of electrons, neutrons, and protons.

Now, one of the principles of reductionism/eliminativism is to throw away as little as possible, and to keep what one can. We could, for example, have completely tossed away the ideas of 'malaria' and 'atom' and simply said that such things did not exist.

I have been arguing as if value claims are 'reducible' to claims about relationships between states of affairs and desires. Ultimately, when pressed (as you have done), I must admit that I am not really a reductionist, I am a revisionist. There are certain 'intrinsic value' elements built into our value claims. The theory that I claim is revisionist in that the 'intrinsic value' elements have to be thrown out first, and the theory I defend is what one is left with after the error of intrinsic value is thrown out.

When one discards 'intrinsic value' as a part of the discussion of the value of art, food, and the like, one does, in fact, end up with a set of agent-centered or assessor-centered preferences. In these areas, the agent-subjectivist and the assessor-subjectivists are correct.

However, when it comes to morality, if one 'throws out' the universalizability and the noncontingency of the well-being of others, one is throwing away things that are so much a core of the concept, that what one is left with is not recognizable as 'morality'.

With respect to moral value, there is a way of discarding intrinsic valuedness without also discarding universalizability and noncontingent relevance of others.

Indeed, if you pay attention to the standard criticisms of subjectivism, they have nothing to do with the fact that subjectivists throw out (or deny) 'intrinsic value'. It has to do with the fact that subjectivists throw out universalizability and the noncontingency of others. And this criticism, when leveled against the most common form of subjectivism (though not the forms I defend), is perfectly legitimate.

In summary, I sometimes write like a reductionist. However, I am actually a revisionist. My ultimate position is that agent-subjectivism is a very poor revision/reduction of moral terms, and that desire-utilitarianism is a much better revision/reduction of moral value. A major part of my argument is that agent-subjectivism eliminates universalizability and noncontingency of the wellbeing of others, while desire-utilitarianism preserves universalizability and noncontingency of others.



So, is 'having three sides' a fundamental, or an incidental, property of a triangle? I hold that it is fundamental in the sense that eliminating the property leaves you with a term that others simply will not be able to comprehend. To say that capital punishment is wrong -- but to eliminate from this any implication of whether George Bush ought to practice capital punishment or not -- is like talking about a triangle while eliminating from this any implication about the number of sides the figure has.



True. Nothing prevents you from inventing your own language. But the relevant question remains -- are we talking about what 'wrong' means in Njhartsheese, or in English.

Nothing prevents you from insisting that triangles have four sides -- and indeed such a tyrant can have all of the dictionaries changed so that every picture of a rectangle is accompanied by the word 'triangle' -- and every student learns that the correct answer to the question of 'how many sides are there in a triangle' is 'four' -- and in this way invent a whole new language in which the word 'triangle' in that language has the same meaning as 'quadrangle' has in our language.

And yet, after you have done all of this, the 20th-century English 'triangle' still has three sides, and morality still requires universalizability and noncontintengy of the wellbeing of others.



This depends on what you mean by 'the ballgame'. If you interpret my arguments as defending some sort of mind-independent intrinsic value, such that the admission that all value is desire-dependent, then you are likely to find much of what I write to be very confusing, because none of it depends on desire-independent value. Desire-independent value does not exist.

Which takes us back to the beginning -- my objectivist credentials. When it comes to defending mind-independent value, there was never a time in my life that I would have qualified for 'objectivist credentials.'

If you mean by this assertion that if we deny intrinsic values, agent-subjectivism or assessor-subjectivism is the only other alternative -- that these are the only possible forms that desire-dependent value can take -- then you are mistaken. Limiting people to speaking about relationships between states of affairs and desires to relationships between states of affairs and the desires of the agent or the assessor is entirely artificial -- it is like limiting descriptions of location to statements about distance and direction from the agent. Other types of relationships exist. And where it makes sense to talk about those, rather than agent-centered or assessor-centered relationships, then what reason can be offered not to do so?

Moral claims are, in fact, one of these types of relationships other than agent-centered or assessor-centered.

njhartsh

Quite--which makes the great majority of your comments off-topic on this thread.

You don't like my (and tronvillain's) use of the words "morality," "ethics," etc.? Fine--read "value" for those instead. On your terms, I am defending "mind-dependent value" against those who argue for "mind-independent value." Taste and ethics are analogous because they're both mind-dependent.

Hey, reader! Is there a real objectivist out there who would like to take issue with the taste-ethics comparison?

- Nathan

Pyrrho

"Off topic"? I think his were among the most interesting comments made. And among the most illuminating.

I regard Alonzo Fyfe's comments as a criticism of your characterization of "subjectivism", which you use in a more restricted sense than you defined the term in your original post:


With that definition of "subjectivism", it is broad enough to include ethical theories like Alonzo Fyfe's, but it is very different from your characterization of what "subjectivism" is in your later explanations.

Or, in other words, there is more than one type of "subjectivist".

njhartsh

I won't dispute that; as I said, Alonzo "write[s] and argue[s] better than most people I've debated on iidb.org." But "interesting" and "illuminating" don't necessarily imply "on-topic." Alonzo's got his own threads.

I agree. I contend that his criticism is irrelevant to the comparison I was making in the OP. If he wants to call it "mind-dependent value" (on a previous thread he referred to it as "subjective(3)" ethics), fine; that's what I'm defending, and I'd like to get to it.

It is? How?

- Nathan

Alonzo Fyfe

::Pouts Takes ball. Goes home.::

njhartsh

Aww--after all of my compliments? Why, I oughtta...

Surely you understand that I was attempting to elicit a response from "mind-independent value" advocates (of which there are millions), a response that is growing less and less likely. I'm discouraged that I'm going to have to post the OP a third time (I'll wait a while) to spur the actual discussion I'm looking for.

- Nathan

99Percent

njhartsh: I will try to answer your op from my objectivist stance.Its not so much that we view subjectivist ethics as a "matter of taste" what we see wrong, but that subjectivist ethics is reduced to relativistic range of value, which we view as contradictory. In objectivist ethics there is no range or relative values, actions are simply deemed right or wrong with no in betweens.As an objectivists I don't deny that there are different tastes and values in an individual basis but that doesn't mean that there are absolute values (like truth) which is entirely independent of these tastes.See you are already commiting a fallacy of relative values here. You are saying that ethics are "far more important" than taste in food. As an objectivist I say that there is no point of comparison. Ethics are simply above tastes and prejudices. Your fallacy can lead to the false and dangerous conclusion that your personal tastes (and immediate pleasures) might be more important than your ethics. For example you might value a this moment the pleasure of killing than the life of your victim. As an objectivist, there is no comparison of values. Killing for pleasure is simply wrong (and with reason, not because of theistic moral codes).There is of course no objective truth as to the taste of broccoli in the individual sense. But you can derive from your statements that Bush Sr. would rather eat something else instead of broccoli because he values the taste of peas (say) than broccoli. But the taste of broccoli is not a moral conundrum, its simply an individual taste, because unless broccoli is harmful to the individual (which would still make it an individual moral issue, not an objective one) there is nothing wrong or right about eating broccoli.The mistake you are making here is that by analogy you are dismissing this moral question as a "taste" when it is clearly not so because there is a justified and plausible reason. By dismissing it so easily you seem to want to avoid the moral issues. To begin with, capital punishment involves the life of another human being beside your own which makes the issue completely beyond individual "taste" like the possible deliciousness of broccoli.

Objective moral ethics are derived from thinking out logical and reasonable explanations of why such actions that involve other humans are morally wrong or right. Objectivism is not based on empirical observations or consequentialism, its based on reason - rational explanationsThis is the type of statements objectivist find particularly repugnant, because, simply it denies individual free will and moral responsibility. It implies that we act not because we consciously decide to act, but because we have been conditioned by genetics and cultural conditioning. If a person brutally kills his father, he can be acquitted because "he has been socially conditioned and because its his genetic nature", for example.This is analogy entirely of your own fabrication. There is no relative value in moral judgements. Actions are either right or wrong because we objectively exist, we have consciousness, free will and truth in the human realm are objective.Again, you are confusing (and dangerously so) individual relative values and tastes, with objective moral truths.I am up to the challenge, but be forewarned - I am not the one to dictate absolute moral truths, you are going to have to discover them by yourself

Pyrrho

To give one example of an added restriction, you have asserted that taste and ethics are epistemologically the same. From your original post:

That puts an additional restriction on your version of "subjectivism" that is not entailed by your initial definition of "subjectivism":

Alonzo Fyfe's idea of ethics fits your definition of "subjectivism", but with it, taste and ethics are not epistemologically the same, as ethics involves finding out about the sentiments of others, which is wholly unnecessary for taste.

Indeed, your claim of them being epistemologically the same is implausible, which can be illustrated with one example of each. When deciding whether or not broccoli tastes good, one tries it. One "knows" that broccoli is good by trying it. However, one "knows" that murder is wrong without ever trying it. In fact, most ethical judgments are made without ever trying the action in question. But to "know" if something tastes good, trying it is essential. So, epistemologically, the two are extremely different.