Longbow

That is absolutely 110% true. But, the fact that subjective preferences exist does not mean that an objectively normative statement cannot. I would almost say the same thing to you. If you want the term, then you can have it. I'm perfectly willing to use a term like "universalizability" or some such thing. The question is who can better capture the ideas being conveyed by moral statements. When the villagers say that Genghis Khan had no right to conquer them and turn them into his slaves, it is really strange to think that by this they mean that it really wasn't in his best interests to do so or that he didn't actually want to. Of course this was his preference and for obvious reasons -- it makes him objectively better off to do so. None of that is the point of a moral sentence.

Longbow

They are as fruitless as any discussions.

No it's not. This is a pretty cheap response isn't it? You cannot just dispute everything with "that's not obvious to me". If you really mean it, I think you are just being argumentative, then. One can argue that moral statements ultimately refer to some physical phenomenon. But it is patently obvious that there is no clear choice for one that any moral statements must refer to. By contrast, if I make a factual claim such as "I am typing on my computer," then there is an obvious physical phenomenon that I am specifically formulating a proposition for. What physical phenomenon "It is wrong for me to type on my computer," might refer to is obviously a mysterious matter; otherwise, there would not be so much debate over it.

Well, I am not sure what all "ontologically novel" entails but I am pretty sure the moral realists should qualify. Also depending somewhat on how you define the term, "moral realists" believe that morals literally "exist" like physical objects. That is about as ontologically novel as it gets. Beyond that, naturalistic accounts of morality claim to reduce a set of otherwise a priori statements into empirical ones about natural phenomenon while folks like me say that no such thing can be done. These are two very ontologically different world views since the naturalists claim that what drives moral philosophy metaphysically "exists" while I deny that.

Dr. Retard

Um...I never said moral talk didn't essentially involve "oughts". I just denied that it's always constituted of completely subjective matters. I agree that the concept of "moral" is necessarily tied up with "ought". I disagree that the concept of "ought" is necessarily non-objective. Just like I disagree that the concepts "good", "right", "better", etc. are necessarily non-objective.

I agree that "preference" has probably never been used without reference to a valuer's subjective affection. That seems to be what people mean when they use the term "preference". But "ought"? I think you're obviously wrong. People say things like the following all the time: "You ought not to do that! It's not just my preference that you not do it, it's objectively wrong! It doesn't matter how people feel about your act, it's just plain wrong, period." It's one thing to disagree with such claims. But it's another thing to pretend that people don't make them.

[ October 12, 2002: Message edited by: Dr. Retard ]</p>

Dr. Retard

First, it seems to me that your argument could still be used to attack identity materialism, like so: When humans say, "I feel a pain", they probably do not mean, "My C-fibers are firing". Now, admittedly, this does not show that "feeling a pain" is something different from "having one's C-fibers firing". But it does make this identity antecedently implausible, so that identity materialists bear a heavy burden of proof. In any case, when you start thinking about what you really do mean when you say, "I feel a pain", you will probably leave behind the world of natural properties.

Second, I don't know that anything terribly profitable can be had from really trying hard to invent a proposed meaning for moral statements. It seems likely to me that there is no good common meaning for moral statements. People mean all sorts of different things, and sometimes a person's meaning is completely incoherent. Now if, in identifying a candidate property for, say, goodness, we completely depart from common moral platitudes, our analysis runs the risk of being irrelevant. But that's no reason to have our analysis yield to every single extant use of moral claims. When people claimed that a woman was a witch, they didn't mean that the woman was an eccentric female in a time of prejudice; but that's what 'witches' actually were -- that's the best way to reconstruct people's diverging, oft-incoherent claims so that they turn out to have a real-world referent. So, even if most people don't mean to attribute a natural property when they attribute a moral property, that doesn't mean ethical naturalism is false.

Dr. Retard

If someone keeps claiming something that you don't agree with, and the only support he offers is that it's obvious, how else should you respond? I'm not trying to be stubborn here.

I agree that there is no clear choice among ethical naturalisms. But, first, there's never any clear choice among competing philosophical theories (e.g., hard determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism). You have to think really hard and discuss things with people before anything emerges as the top contender. And second, there's no clear choice as to what physical phenomenon corresponds to "thinking of the number 17". It's mysterious. That doesn't mean that thinking is somehow non-physical.

This is a more straightforward disagreement. I'm pretty sure that most naturalist moral realists get their moral facts on the cheap, without enlarging their ontology a whit. Remember that even physical objects are just linguistically useful abstractions we use to refer to clusters of fundamental physical particles. I think most naturalist moral realists would say that moral facts are just useful high-level abstractions we use to refer to base-level physical facts. Now, G. E. Moore would say that moral properties are indeed something over and above natural properties; but, after all, he was a non-naturalist moral realist.

Longbow

That is why the burden of proof is on the naturalist. Unless there is a commonly recognized natural phenomenon, the one that claims there should be has the burden of proving so. The one that develops their philosophy independently of the physical world, does not have the extra contention to defend. And that is where the is/ought dichotomy lies. It is the disputation of the assumption that morality must be about physical phenomena.

Primal

[quote] posted October 11, 2002 03:02 PM
Primal:

False analogy. Simply because the usage of a word is debatable and questionable, does not mean there are no rules whatsoever. Scientists may not all ahdere to what science should be defined as, that is debated, but if anyone says "creationism is science" they are obviously wrong. What I propose is that naturalistic definitions of morality can be made, that such definitions will fit into the spirit of what ethics are at some level supposed to study. Aristotle for example, one of the first ethicists did this, so to rule out naturalistic definitions 'a priori' as "senseless" is unwarranted. The open-ended argument does just that.

I'd very much disagree as that entails constructivism from the onset.

But how a commonly used word should be understood is what they disagree about. Hence such inquiry makes little headway.


This would be far from agreeing that the word "immoral" was rudundant or superfluous. Maybe they wished to point out that this person is capable of other immoralities.

That would be irrelevant as atheist to them was "someone immoral who also denied God". So showing them an immoral believer would do nothing to upset this definition. In any case, this would all involve questioning the definition of the majority.


Yes, so to then ask "if an act good that promotes the greatest good for the greatest number?" would be a meaningless question.

The subtsansive disagreement would at some level involve the alternate definitions of course. Virtue theorists for example would have to reject their own definition of "good" to ever concede to the utilitarian position. Hence the definition of what is good, at some level, determines the answers to these questions.

Yes, marxists have a naturalistic definition of goodness, something impossible via Moore's standards.

bd-from-kg

Dr. Retard:

Yes, it could. I’m not sure why you consider this to be a criticism of it. When humans say “I feel a pain”, they certainly do not mean “My C-fibers are firing.” And this means that identity materialists do indeed bear a heavy burden of proof if they claim that feeling a pain is logically equivalent to having one’s C-fibers firing.

In fact, I think it’s highly implausible that feeling pain is logically equivalent to having one’s C-fibers firing (or anything else of this sort). The fallacy that I think is involved here can perhaps be illustrated by an analogy. Suppose that a certain race had not invented computers but had thrown all their energy into space exploration. One day they discover a world where the former inhabitants had died, but had left behind millions of computers, all identical and loaded with the same software. Eventually they figure out how to use them, and learn that one of the things they can do is to play chess. In time a group of them discovers that whenever a computer is playing chess, it is invariably executing the XYZCHESS program; in fact, its “playing chess” consists of its executing this program. So they announce triumphantly that, for computers at least, “playing chess” is logically equivalent to executing the XYZCHESS program.

But eventually, as computers come to be better understood, they learn that there are a few copies still in existence of another program, ABCCHESS, which can be loaded onto any computer, and which also plays chess; in fact, it plays better than XYZCHESS. (Apparently it was suppressed for legal reasons – copyright infringement, perhaps.) But if the “identity theorists” were correct, saying that ABCCHESS plays chess would be completely nonsensical. After all, according to them, playing chess is logically equivalent to executing the XYZCHESS program, so how could executing the ABCCHESS program constitute playing chess?

But this is exactly the same kind of claim as the claim that feeling pain is logically equivalent to the firing of C-fibers. And I find this claim of logical equivalence implausible for the same reason that I would find the claim that (for a computer) playing chess is logically equivalent to executing a particular program implausible.

If by “natural properties” you mean things like C-fibers firing, that’s absolutely true. On the other hand, I consider “being in pain” to be a natural property. If not, what kind of property is it? It’s certainly not a supernatural property!

I really don’t understand your point here. How is what I’m doing different from what moral philosophers do all the time? To say that it’s a complete waste of time to try to construe ordinary moral language is to say that there is no such subject as morality. It’s possible (at least in principle) that this is really true; maybe there really isn’t any such subject. But this is far from obvious. In fact it seems highly implausible. After all, even people from quite different cultures seem to be able to discuss moral questions and to understand one another. There is general agreement as to what kinds of arguments “count” as moral arguments and what kinds of considerations are relevant. True, people often disagree about moral questions, but it is very rare (if it ever happens at all) for such a discussion to conclude with something like: “Oh, I see. When you folks say that an act is right you mean one thing, and when we say that it is right we mean quite another. So when you say that Smith should be hanged for killing Jones and we say that he should be considered a hero, we aren’t really disagreeing after all! What silly fools we’ve been!”

Anyway, as I’ve said many times, the proper object of moral philosophy is not to determine what people say they mean by moral language, but to figure out how to construe moral language in a way which is as consistent as possible with common usage. To put it more precisely, the question that moral philosophy should be dealing with is what (if anything) most people would agree they “really” meant when they used moral language if they were to acquire enough knowledge and understanding. For example, suppose that someone who interprets moral principles as expressions of God’s commands or His will came to understand that there is no God; would he then conclude that morality is an illusion, or would he say that he “really” meant something else – and if so, what? If most people would be pretty much in agreement as to what they “really” meant if they were to acquire enough understanding, then there really is such a subject as morality. Otherwise there isn’t; that is, moral language cannot be properly said to mean anything in general, although of course a given individual may mean something by it.

Maybe it doesn’t mean that it’s false, but it is certainly very strong (in fact practically conclusive) evidence that it’s false. For example, when someone says that an act is right if and only if it produces the “greatest good for the greatest number”, and that this is a substantive statement about what’s right and not a definition of what he means by “right”, it would be very odd indeed if he were wrong – if what he means by “right” were actually logically equivalent to “producing the greatest good”, but he failed to realize it. After all, unlike the example of pain that you cite, he recognizes a strong connection between the two things but does not consider them logically equivalent. It’s as though someone were to say that a polygon is a triangle if and only if it has three sides, yet were to insist erroneously that the property of being a triangle is not logically equivalent to the property of being a three-sided polygon. Besides, if two concepts are logically equivalent, this is something that can be demonstrated. Yet no one has even begun to demonstrate any such thing in the thousands of years that the subject has been debated. Indeed, I daresay that no one has even begun to see how there could be any such equivalence. As Hume notes, moral arguments often begin with factual observations and then mysteriously segue into moral assertions. The fact that no one has seen any way to “close” this gap is a very strong argument that there is no way to close it. If there were a logical equivalence of the sort you suggest, there would be a way to close it, and surely someone would have noticed it by now.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

Primal

So basically you are saying because morals don't seem to be natural according to many people that morals are not natural? That to me seems like a very weak argument. Such an argument in any case is a poor defense of a dualistic position and hardly one that displaces the principle of parsimony.

This is a separate issue from the is/ought dichotomy but isn't that like saying that eating food and digesting food are two different things? This makes no sense to me, if it can be shown that the firing of certain neurons corresponds to pain, then it makes sense via Occam's Razor are one in the same.

That is an analogy based on a straw man of identity theory. The identity theorist would say each computer played chess differently, and that for the previous computer XYZCHESS program was the equivalent, whereas for the other ABCCHESS program was equivalent.

This is like saying that since I say playing with a parker brother board is equivalent to playing chess, that playing with an old fashioned wooden board is not. They both constitute playing chess because chess is a game, that is completely material and hence must be reduced to the material in some way, but what exact material is open-ended. What makes a game chess then is that is follows certain rules, in a certain format, with ertain pieces. However at any one time, with any chess set up the chess game will always be identical with the underlying material structure.

For example a leg, a leg can be said to be equal to the cells composing it. Does the fact that there are insect legs and lions legs disprove this? No, each leg would be equal to it's own cells. It is the overall form that makes such structures a leg of course but each form is the equivalent to it's own cells arranged in a given order. Sort of like buildings made of different material. In this sense one recognizes the importance of form, but keeps in mind that form is a completely material entity. That does not mean the same form cannot be made out of different specific material but this does recognize that every form ultimately is equivalent to its own material.

doubtingt

When the villagers say it wasn't "right" they are referring to their own subjective preferences, not to Kahn's. If Kahn's actions were in no way contradictory to the preferences and desires of the villagers the notion of "right" or "moral" would not even be raised.
Also, the concept of "universality" is separate from objective. Everyone in the universe could believe that dogs have 10 legs, but this has nothing to do with whether its is objectively true. Universality means simply that all subjective minds share the same preference, but that preference still refers to a property of subjective minds and does not refer to an objective property outside the mind.