The AntiChris

Alonzo Fyfe
Ok.
We'll see.
They do? For the sake of argument let's accept that some subjectivists might use this sort of language.

Your charge is not that subjectivists are merely guilty of the sloppy use of language but that their use of this type of language in some sense 'proves' that they are appealing to something beyond their own subjective preferences. For this to be the case, it must logically entail that such language is only ever used when appealing to something beyond personal preference - this is clearly nonsense.

If you disagree, I'd be interested in your justification for this view.
Personally, I haven't met anyone who isn't in some way "defective" - but that's just my personal opinion!
If my personal preference is so strong that I feel the need to coerce others, it would be irrational for me not to do so given the opportunity. In a democracy, our ability to act on these preferences is constrained - only when there is a sufficient consensus of like-minded people can we coerce others with the force of law.

I see no logical inconsistency in justifying the coercion and punishment of others on the basis of shared intersubjective preferences.
I'm hard-pressed to understand what "moral worth" could possibly mean in the absence of "care for the other".
I have no idea what point your making here. You're surely not suggesting that an objectivist who wanted to kill you would have no choice but to "deem your interests of significance" and be compelled to spare you? Is it your opinion that only subjectivists commit murder?
Yup. And if I were an objectivist it would be exactly the same. You'd have to take your chances with my particular take on objective morality.
Once again I'm at a loss. Are you suggesting that, as a subjectivist, I'd recognise your appeal for mercy as an erroneous appeal to objective morality and therefore have no other option but to kill you?
In my opinion, nothing you've said here justifies this claim.

Chris

Alonzo Fyfe

If they do not -- if their moral language is relevantly equivalent to their pizza-topping language -- then I have no objections to raise against them. As soon as they start drawing implications from moral preferences, that they would not draw from the same statements about pizza-topping preferences, at that point I object.


No it doesn't.

You (or I) can't PROVE that some type of ontological claim is true merely by looking at the way that people use language. You can't use the fact that people speak about a flat earth as if it really is flat as proof that there is a flatness to the earth outside of their own beliefs.


Yes. It is so clearly "nonsense" that I wonder what you think of me that you would attribute such nonsense to me.


Actually, I am not talking about rationality here. If you want to change this into a discussion of rationality, then you will discover my views on rationality are very much in line with the agent-desire-subjectivists.

But it may be rational to do something evil or harmful to others. Slavery may be rational. Stealing may be rational. Rape may be rational.

(I have heard some people attempt to argue that these types of activities are NEVER rational but those arguments go through contortions and distortions much like those use by creationists to prove that the earth could not be more than 6,000 years old. I find such claims more easily attributed to a desire to believe than to reason, and observing such an individual go through his contortions in an attempt to preserve the irrationality of murder under all circumstances more entertaining than educational.)


Then you see nothing wrong with slavery, or genocide, or similar social customs on the basis of shared intersubjective preferences. And if you want to argue that the these preferences are not shared by those who are enslaved or slaughtered, then I answer that if you need unanimity in your instersubjective prejudices for justification then nothing can ever be justified.

You have to argue such things as "Rape is wrong, not because it does violence to women, but it is wrong because too few men have an intersubjective preference for rape. If we can increase this intersubjective preference, we can make rape okay."


You are right. I am surely not suggesting that. It would be stupid.

I am talking about the logic of moral language. I am talking about the source of my counter-examples to agent- and assessor-subjectivism. Namely, that they cannot adequately handle that portion of moral language that says that consideration for the welfare of others is not necessary. All forms of agent- and assessor-subjectivism make concern for the welfare of others contingent.

If you want to be an agent-subjectivist or assessor-subjectivist, or intersubjective-subjectivist, that's fine with me, as long as you are consistent in your subjectivism and hold that concern for the welfare of others is contingent and accept statements like "rape is wrong because too few people have a too-little preference for rape."


What you WILL or WILL NOT do, as a subjectivist or objectivist is irrelevant. I am concerned with what you OUGHT or OUGHT NOT do.

One error that you seem to be making is to take my objections to subjectivism to be a defense of objectivism. Now, objectivism is typically associated theories that base morality on some sort of "intrinsic moral properties." Because, the objectivist who does this is grounding his morality on a false assumption -- and there is no way to predict what a person with false beliefs may do or come to believe that he ought to do.

I will ultimately be defening a form of subjectivism that makes the welfare of others necessary, rather than contingent. It will not be agent-subjectivism, or assessor-subjective, or intersubjective-subjectivism, or evolved-disposition-subjectivism, or any of these other limited types of subjectivism being offered here.

As a rough approximation, certain types of utilitarianism, impartial observer theories, and social contract theories deny intrinsic value while holding that the welfare of others is NOT contingent. A subjectivist who moves from their limited subjectivism into one of these camps will find themselves very close to where I am also camped.

dk

Originally posted by dk
First, maybe you can explain the difference between subjectivism and objective relativism.
Posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
I typically do this by pointing to location as an example of objective relativism. Nothing has an absolute location -- you can't even talk about the location of something without talking about where it is relative to something else. And, yet, there is a verifiable (or falsifiable) scientific fact of the matter as to where one thing is relative to another.
Thus:
Even though location is not "absolute", it is "objective".
Even though location is "objective", it is an objective relationship and, thereby "relative".
dk: I admit this is a cheap shot, but shortest distance between two points is a straight line, therefore the distance between NYC and Peking is non-arbitrary, and measurable at any point in time . The location of Peking and NYC are therefore relative facts because 1) the earth is not a sphere, 2) the surface of the earth not regular 3) the shape of the earth is not static.
Posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
Objective relativism.
Value-laden terms describe relationships between states of affairs and desires. Desires exist as brain states in the mind -- the presence or absence of a desire is a knowable, objective fact. The same can be said about the states of affairs being evaluated relative to those desires. But it is a relationship that is being described. Thus, "objective relativism".
By the way, because all value-claims make an ineliminable reference to at least once desire, and desires are "in the mind", there is a sense in which this account is also subjective.
(This is the sense in which I have said in other posts that values live in a ground where "objective" and "subjective" overlap -- they concern, in part, "objective" facts about the human brain.)
dk: Rather the appearance of desire is determined by abduction from a loosely constructed hypothesis from a number of assumptions, truisms and tautologies inferred to be the best possible explanation. Implicit within your claim “to know desire” is that desire looks like a “brain scan”. I personally find the evidence reminiscent of phrenology, which by the way is also making a comeback. What we know is that desire appears (correlate) to be related to a specific loci of the brain. Neuro-science continues to search for a coherent theory of consciousness to explain brain function. I’ll grant you this is genuinely breakaway science, but the conclusions are clearly overstated, and the results less than certain. Over the last 10 years we’ve seen an explosion in the happy pill market. While those that suffer from severe mental illness clearly benefit, these same pills have been abusively prescribed with incalculable side affects that allegedly entail drug addiction, murderous psychotic episodes, and dozens of less severe side affects like insomnia, impaired cognition and chronic headaches.

dk

Originally posted by dk:
As I understand any form of relativism, it means that people only perceive value from changing circumstances
Posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
This is not how I understand it. Relativism states that the value of a state of affairs is not absolute but depends on some sort of relationship between that which is being evaluated and a valuer.
dk: The “state of affairs” (evaluated and evaluator) expressed in relational terms produces values of a relational nature. If people can only perceive change then by logical necessity what people perceive is relative. Nonetheless the priori of relativism in all its forms, rests solely upon its own merits alone, which is a contradiction in itself. I must conclude by logical necessity that objective relativism for all its merits has no intrinsic value, and taken in its entirety, on its own, is a contradiction in itself.

Originally posted by dk:
I’m arguing that people have intrinsic value as “an end in itself”, knowable in relationship to the intrinsic value of others.
Posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
I am arguing that the only thing that people have are desires. A person has a desire that P.
There are two types of value; value as an end and value as a means.
If a person has a desire that P, then that person values P as an end in itself -- independent of its consequences. But Q may be a useful tool for bringing about P, in which case the person values Q because of its consequences (P), which is desired "for its own sake" or "independent of consequences." Still, P has no value independent of its being desired -- no intrinsic value.
dk: I don’t question the propositional logic, if people define reality in terms of change, then the subsequent values become relational. I accept the relative value of knowledge on its pragmatic and demonstrable merits, but not in isolation.
Posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
Now, I hold that all of this is true of SIMPLE value. The form of subjectivism that I object to stops here and says that this description accounts for all types of value including moral value. Thus, it fails to distinguish between the value for one type of pizza topping over another, versus the value of crashing airplanes into skyscrapers -- what I call "pizza topping morality."
dk: If by Simple Value you mean “in itself” then its a contradiction.
(snip)
Posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
The reasons that I favor this account...
(a) It requires no ontological oddities -- nothing but desires, states of affairs, and the relationships between them (unlike "intrinsic value" or "absolutist" theories).
(b) It is both objective (moral claims are knowable and true or false independent of any given agent's beliefs or desires) AND subjective (depends irreducibly on desires -- but ALL desires, not the desires of any one agent), thus reducing the objective/subjective debate to irrelevance.
dk: Ok, if it makes you happy to believe that “Objective Realism” has inherent value, don’t let reason dissuade you.

Alonzo Fyfe

First, I am talking about location, not distance.

Second, your decision to pick "New York" and "Peking" is arbitrary.

Third, there is nothing that you said here that is inconsistent with my claim -- that it is not possible to give a location of anything without making reference to something else, but given that something else the answer to the location question is objective. In giving the location of New York, you have selected Peking as your "something else". Given this "something else", the distance to New York is an objective fact.


I will fully agree that my claims about beliefs and desires and their relationship to value are dependent on discoveries about the validity of BDI theory (Belief-Desire-Intention theory) of human. If BDI theory should end up in the trash bin along with geocentric theory of the solar system, the "bad-air" theory of disease, and the like then much of what I wrote will end up there as well -- unless BDI can be "reduced into" the improved substitute theory.

DRFseven

All this distinguishing among subjectivists is pointless. Everyone who feels things are right or wrong, does so because they have learned to do so. Subjectivist, objectivist, everyone, we all judge according to personal feeling which has been internalized as a part of the individual mindset. This process begins long before the cognitive mechanism is mature, before the ability to reason. As reasoning develops, it does so in light of already-internalized belief structure, and with a vast under-layer of unconscious associative memory.

The securely attached nine-month-old has a very vague sense of right and wrong; she has learned that some behaviors cause displeasure in others and that these others sometimes direct that displeasure toward her, but she doesn't know what distinguishes "bad"; she can't even frame that question. All she can do is, like the family dog, associate certain behaviors with negative consequences.

By the time the toddler is two, however, she has very definite notions of which specific behaviors are bad and which aren't, and she can tell you! She knows things are bad because Mommy and Daddy have said so, very emphatically. And that's what makes things true; Mommy and Daddy saying they're true. For instance, it's bad to break dishes.

Sometime around age six or seven, the child will understand that there are reasons that people consider things bad. She will understand that playing with Mommy's dishes and breaking them is a bad thing, while accidently dropping Mommy's dishes while trying to help clear the table is NOT a bad thing, even if a whole stack of them break. This knowledge did not suddenly appear in her head; she absorbed it by example, object lessons, instruction. Even though these lessons have been forthcoming all her life, she has been unable to comprehend the meaning of reason and intent until now, simply because her cognitive processes were too immature. She still thinks her parents' opinions are "true" and denies the validity of any contradictory opinion, which is why mock presidential elections held in elementary schools are always right on target. But this will soon change!

The years from puberty to adulthood mark the period of time that an individual's morals are most unlike those of their parents, with parents and children sometimes being in direct opposition. After age 20, however, there is a gradual return by the grown children to many of the same beliefs as held by the parents, and by middle-age, the children's values will be more like those of their parents than like anyone else's on earth. This all varies somewhat, of course, according to personal circumstance, but this is the way it goes, in general.

This process of moral acquisition applies equally to those who refer to themselves as objectivists, and to those who refer to themselves as subjectivists. Subjectivists recognize the nature of a value judgement, as do some objectivists. In the case of the objectivist who does not deny the process of moral development in children, this process is often thought to be objective in that it is "genetically programmed" in humans to develop this way. This is clearly wrong, also, because children who do not experience psychological attachment and who are not given moral example, do not develop morals. And children who do develop a moral system, develop those of the system they learned. This is true all over the world.




Values are ONLY in the mind, present as a learned (electro-chemically changed) sequence of central nervous system activation. Two people watch the same war on CNN and value it two different ways. The external event is the same; it's the action of the brain that differs, and it differs according to preset structure.

Quote:

It does not matter where the feeling comes from or how it was created, it matters what the feeling is.

No, it doesn't! Whether the feeling is that something is right or that something is wrong doesn't determine that the feeling is a moral feeling. What determines moral opinions is that they DO feel right or wrong; this is what distinguishes them from other opinions, such as taste preferences.

Alonzo Fyfe

Executive Summary:

I know that this post is long, but to save time I can briefly argue what I give in more detail below.

The history of how we come to acquire these moral feelings are irrelevant to the types of inferences that can be drawn from those feelings. The latter depends on CONTENT, not on GENESIS.

What we learn through the elaborate process you describe contains an error -- we are taught to treat as valid a form of inferences that is, in fact, invalid. Nothing about how we learn to make this mistake prevents it from being a mistake.


And everybody who believes that the world is no more than 6000 years old does so because they have learned that, too. There is a distinction between how one acquires a belief, and what that belief is about and whether the thing believed is true or false. How it is learned is of historical interest only, it implies nothing about the content or its varacity.


The number of people who make a mistake does not prevent it from being a mistake. Yes, the habit of objectifying our feelings and treating them as being caused by external "intrinsic values" striking the senses is widespread. Yes, it is a common habit that both objectivists and subjectivists have. Yet, it is still unjustified.

You can offer as much explanation as you want as to how these beliefs and/or desires came into existence -- tell me as much as you want about its genesis. When you get to the end of your story you will continue to be faced with a logical gap, that your story has nothing to do with what these propositions mean and what logically follows from them.

A long history of how a person acquired a belief of "Water = H2O" is irrelevant when what one is interested in is examining what "Wather = H2O means" and the logical implications of "Water = H2O"

Objectivists and subjectivists make different mistakes, but both mistakes lead to the same point. The objectivist mistake is ontological -- that this tradition is justified on the basis of "intrinsic values" is false, intrinsic values do not exist. The subjectivist mistake is logical; subjectivism means that the wellbeing of others is at best contingent, yet subjectivists still talk in every way as if the wellbeing of others is necessary.



Desires are only in the mind -- the term refers to the functional organization of the neurons and the signals passing amongst them. And value describes a relationship between a desire and a state of affairs. The desire is an ineliminable part of the description of value. Much of what you describe are relevant to the way we acquire certain desires, particularly those desires that we then associate with moral judgments.

All of this is true and irrelevant to the point that I am making. I accept all of this. What I do not accept are the implications you want to draw from this, that what we learn through this method is free of error. They contain a very significant error in that we are taught to treat as valid logical inferences that are, in fact, invalid. We are taught to make inferences from subjective values that would only be valid if values were objective.

Now, if you want you can go through the whole story again in even more detail, explaining HOW we acquire our moral sentiments. And I am going to come back once again with the same response -- that your story is irrelevant. The thing learned through this elaborate remains a mistake.

Making inferences from subjective values that are only valid if values are objective remains an error no matter how much detail you add to your description of how we come to learning this error.

The only inferences that one can validly make from subjective values are those LIKE the ones that a person would make from having a preference for certain types of pizza toppings. That these moral feelings are not, in fact, preferences for pizza toppings -- that they are given a different name -- is not relevant. In all relevant respects, the relevant properties of these moral feelings are no different from preferences for pizza toppings, and the types of implications that can be drawn remain the same. The fact that we are taught to treat these moral feelings as somehow pointing to properties where these types of inferences are valid does not change the fact that they point to things that have no such properites and these inferences remain invalid.

Instead of giving me more history as to how we acquire these feelings, give me something that justifies the inferences that people draw from these feelings. You can't answer this by looking at its history, only by looking at its substance (by looking at all of the distinctions that you want to dismiss).

DRFseven

Don't you get it, Alonzo? So what if it's a mistake or not? We agree that we all learn to value certain things in certain ways. That is all that is needed to determine that we operate under a subjective system of morality. The question of whether "facts" we learn are true or not has nothing to do with the fact that what we know is learned. Suppose I learn to desire "world peace" and, further, learn that associating with red-haired people will ruin the chances of world peace, and therefore determine that associating with red-haired people is wrong. It's still a subjective judgement, whether it's wrong, right, something else, or nothing.

Suppose I learn to desire "world peace" and, further, learn that associating with red-haired people will not affect world peace, and so conclude that associating with red-haired people is NOT wrong. This is a subjective judgement, whether it's wrong, right, something else, or nothing.

Suppose an objectivist learns that associating with red-haired people is inherently wrong. This is still a subjective judgement, whether it's wrong, right, something else, or nothing.

All valuations made by anybody are judgements. Your own pronouncement that moral opinions being objectified are "mistakes" shows that you don't understand how morality works. Hint: it has to seem to work toward something.

Alonzo Fyfe

DRFSeven

Your last post is substantially without substance, I'm afraid. The first two paragraphs (except for the part that says "So what if it's a mistake or not?" I agree with. I would use different language to describe it, but in substance the two descriptions seem to subscribe the same thing.

Your last paragraph...

All valuations made by anybody are judgements. Your own pronouncement that moral opinions being objectified are "mistakes" shows that you don't understand how morality works. Hint: it has to seem to work toward something.

...is written in the tone of a partent teasing a small child, and thus demonstrates a great degree of arrogance and is highly insulting.

If you have an argument to make, then make it.

I will agree that in part morality is an invention that is intended to serve a purpose, but because of the "mistake" that I described earlier, it falls far shorter of success than it would if that mistake is corrected.

The forms of subjectivism that I am raising objections to here fail as well, and not coincidentally reach about the same mistaken conclusions that would result from objectification. The subjectivist's mistakes of logic match the mistaken conclusions that would be reached by the objectivist's mistakes of ontology.

The AntiChris

Alonzo Fyfe
Then I have no idea how your statement that subjectivists "tend to draw conclusions of the sort 'and you should like this too'" supports your contention that subjectivists are logically inconsistent.

How on earth do you draw conclusions about my approval/disapproval of any specific "social custom" from this? Does everyone who supports the democratic process in principle agree whoeheartedly with all outcomes from that process?
I'm perfectly willing to accept that certain subjective moral theories may be logically incompatible with "traditional" moral language and behaviour (as you interpret them). However, this was not the original point at issue.

If you recall, you said that subjectivists fail to "abandon the standard tenants[sic] of traditional morality (with its assumption of objectivity)". In the absence of any qualifier for the the term "subjectivist" I took it to mean quite simply anyone who denied that moral judgements could be evaluated as objectively true or false. On that basis I still disagree that subjectivism is necessarily incompatible with "traditional" moral language and behaviours.

Chris