svensky

No i haven't missed the point. I understand what your saying. The problem is, it is not binding in any way on people. I can easily negotiate in bad faith (why not ?) and I can easily discard the rules to my personal gain, becasue hey, there just a handshake agreement. As long as I don't get caught what difference does it make.

Relative morality reduces all moral values to the level of opinion, you can talk all you like about negotiation and people, but the reality is, any relativistic system with ultimately fall prey to "The Big, Sez Who?". Give me a reason why your negotiated morality is in anyway binding. Short of enforcing your opinion at the end of a gun, the morality isn't binding in any way, so what is the use of it ?

BTW dont caricature absolutist morality like that. Especially as you've just accused me of doing the same thing.

Jason

John Page

Jason:

But isn't this exactly why Michael accused you of doing the same thing?

Perhaps you are not an absolute moralist?

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by svensky:

No i haven't missed the point. I understand what your saying. The problem is, it is not binding in any way on people. I can easily negotiate in bad faith (why not ?) and I can easily discard the rules to my personal gain, becasue hey, there just a handshake agreement. As long as I don't get caught what difference does it make.

No social agreement is binding, except by choice. Neither are absolutist morals. People are either forced to obey them, or they choose to obey them through some process of acculturation, learning, and choicemaking, or they are evolved in and we don't even notice them. There aren't any other options!

So basically you're just ranting here.

Relative morality reduces all moral values to the level of opinion, you can talk all you like about negotiation and people, but the reality is, any relativistic system with ultimately fall prey to "The Big, Sez Who?". Give me a reason why your negotiated morality is in anyway binding. Short of enforcing your opinion at the end of a gun, the morality isn't binding in any way, so what is the use of it ?

So what you are saying is, there are no other social regulatory methods than violence? My, but you are naive. Here in Taiwan the police are indifferent to many activities of the local populace, but amazingly, activities are regulated by social norms. How do you think that takes place?

Svensky, please take a look at the real world. In the real world, those nations that run on democratic principles where negotiation processes help define social norms are stable, wealthy, and good places to live. Those places that have been run on the authoritarian lines you prefer -- Iran, North Korea, China, Calvin's Geneva, Nazi Germany -- are inherently impoverished, unstable, and hell on Earth for their people. So if violence is the only real enforcement mechanism, why does it fail so utterly in practice?

You have a typical absolutist view: that were it not for the threat of violence, society could not function. But that is bullshit. The vast majority of interactions between humans are not regulated by the threat of violence, but by social and cultural norms. People are indoctrinated from birth through acculturation process to behave in certain ways. Later, in life, they can learn how to make rational choices, although most people never evolve out of the morality they were indoctrinated into at birth. It is acculturation and learning, not violence, that keeps people in line and teaches them how to negotiate with each other.

Remember that humans are social animals evolved to find ways to live with each other. Absolutist morals, fundamentally speaking, represent a belief that humans are incapable of living with each other. Your statements above beautifully illustrate that what absolutist moralists really seek is power over others. For them, freedom for others is terrifying.

BTW dont caricature absolutist morality like that. Especially as you've just accused me of doing the same thing.

Please explain how I've "caricatured" absolutist morals. Your own and Xoc's presentation of them are redolent with the language of violence and control. They reek of a stunning lack of faith in your fellow beings. That's sad.

Michael

phaedrus

Adrian

Read your examples regarding our senses and the water requirement with interest.

All we have to do is say and add things like, given these conditions and circumstances, X is deemed to cause Y. This should be fine be most relativists or pomos. What they wouldnt want to see is X is deemed to cause Y been given a privileged status in isolation and trying to give an universal applicability. When we all agree that knowledge is provisional, what is the point in claiming absolute & universal truths? Lets just draw a line under the statement "As far as i know..." instead of saying "i know.. " or "i dont know".

And at the end of your post you say ... wonder whether this of course is a good enough grounding for accepting there must be objective truths out there, and whether the relativist thinks the universe is as we conceive it, not as it is. Also, I'm interested to know if relativists think that there can't be objective truths simply because we can't know them, or don't know them now, or could never know them by definition.

I have been quite interested in the views of Gadamer in this regard. I am giving my take on him which i shared with Ender in an old thread, lets see if it helps the discussion.....

Truth/meaning : Truth is not the correspondence of mental states to objective reality and meaning is not some sort of objective, in-itself state of affairs which merely awaits being "discovered" and is "represented" by the observer. It refers more to the interpretive and interactive process of understanding and they are not the results of such process but are integral parts of that process

Truth is not something simply to be discovered ("represented") but something to be made—through the exercise of communicative rationality. Truth is a practical concept

Knowledge : It is a process of communication and is the shared understanding that the society comes to as a result of a free exchange of opinions and discussions.

........

John Page

Intuition tells me you must have considered the concept of a "uniquely privileged view" for you to mention it in a relevant context. I didn't mean to imply you subscribed to its actual existence.

Tell me what you mean by "consider"? I mentioned it but didnt consider it

I think we project our experience of being "objective" in proscribed cricumstances onto a generalized case, hypothesizing whether a uniquely priveleged, god-like, view can be attained. However, I conclude we cannot attain such an objective view because we are included in the universe (by definition).

Do you concur?

Could yo be kind enough to go through my discussion with Adrian which should give you an idea about the concurrence part?

svensky

Umm ... all social regulatory methods are the use of force. The force is often implied rather than explicitly used, but are there any governments that dont maintain police forces to control the populace in some way ? This is an exercise of force. The force may not ever need to be employed to maintain the peace, becasue the threat of it is often enough. Even democratic nations maintain police forces to maintain civil order. There is nothing totalitarian about it, without regulation and control all you have is anarchy, however hands off the control might be.

Perhaps becasue of the way it is employed ?

Not violence, the use of force (there is a subtle distinction). All societies require the rule of law in some form to function. In fact it isn't possible to have large state sized bodies without the juducial use of force. Would you care to live in a society without law enforcement ? I suspect it would collapse over night.


This is completely false. I dont seek power over others in anyway shape or form.

Apparently your one of the few rare people that has not been on the receiving end of the typical "enlightened self-interest" show by human beings to one anther.

Jason

Adrian Selby

"The 'objectivity' is still proscribed by the scope of the experiment. Maybe there's another dimension? What is the definition of dragon? etc."

Prove there's another dimension, I don't see why the experiment should be limited because of some fancy you have about alternate dimensions. Dragon, large scaly lizard, breaths fire, well developed wings, can fly, usually the size of my back garden if not bigger.

I do realise you, John, need objective truth or absolute truth to relate to something bigger. But I don't see why, if our definition is that something is objectively true for now and for ever, that statements about what humans and any possible measuring device see at a given time in a given piece of space could not be objectively true if there was never a refutation. To anticipate Phaedrus' points, one could argue that we have to define what are meaningful refutations, as I have implicitly done in calling your dimension question a 'fancy'. This might start to show that truth does seem to carry baggage in relation to what we agree can constitute its refutation, but I'm not sure this destroys the whole enterprise.

I wonder whether or not we could only say it was objectively true that there were no dragons in my back garden at the end of time, or at the end of time relating to my back garden, when we had allowed millenia of observations relating to it, none of which disagreed that there were no dragons. If we do argue that this is no way to think something can become objectively true, then we are ruling it out as a possibility, because I'm not quite sure what circumstances would be required in order to make an objectively true statement, though you do mention God John. The thing is, if God concurred that there were no dragons in my back garden, leaving aside all those God issues and going with it for a moment, we might then be inclined to believe that there were no dragons and that this was objectively true, but given that is something I stated prior to God's confirmation, I must have been stating an objective truth, or does it only gain that status when I have the means to verify or falsify it? The statement itself would have been objectively true though I could not have known it to be.

"What they wouldnt want to see is X is deemed to cause Y been given a privileged status in isolation and trying to give an universal applicability."-Phaedrus

I'm sure they wouldn't, but if I found such a statement...Anyway, I am trying to give an example, poor as it is, of a statement that is difficult to refute. If I were a relativist I might wonder what the criteria are for deciding which statement about humans and water was the more correct if I had a competing statement that denied homo sapiens ceased functioning after a week or two without water.

Of these two statements, a relativist couldn't say which was more 'right' because that would mean having a set of standards, namely, the world, which arbitrates on statements made about it. Our senses deliver the information they do, and we build concepts on it. We are forced to concede the point about homo sapiens and water, or lead sinking in pure h20 rather than floating, because all our sense perceptions will consistently deliver a response that can be conceived in only one given way.

I'm not totally sure what truth means, that's a tricky subject, but while the process isn't a simple one such as a correspondence theory, nevertheless we have to either agree or disagree there is an objective world as it is. If we agree there is such a thing, then we have a standard by which to judge the statements we make about it, it forces certain ones and not the contradictory statements to those certain ones.

I agree that how we frame truth, how we use it, is a lot more malleable than rigid correspondence designation, concept x truly describes event x etc. But if the principle of there being an objective reality is agreed, then the view that there is no way to decide between competing statements about reality is false. We must concede that statements about reality that contradict each other can't both be right, so one is going to be right or both will be wrong, and if I'm stating that a dragon isn't there in my garden, the only contradictory statement is that there is one in the garden, either way, there is or there isn't, and one of us would be objectively right, because there cannot both be and not be a dragon in my garden simultaneously. To argue that the right one hasn't expressed an objective truth suggests to me that there is the additional proviso to stating objective truths that one must know they are objective truths. I'm sure we all sensibly take a step back and 'deem' things to be true, which keeps relativists happy. Or does it, because if someone deems the contradictory to be true, doesn't the relativist just shrug, and suggest both could be true, and suggest there is no way to arbitrate, given our subjective viewpoints?

I'm arguing for the principle that they are possible, not that we could know them now, I also wonder whether, if it is thought we could never know them, what standards we do have that allow relativists to dismiss certain competing claims about reality.

Adrian

Vorkosigan

Originally posted by Adrian Selby:
"
I'm arguing for the principle that they are possible, not that we could know them now, I also wonder whether, if it is thought we could never know them, what standards we do have that allow relativists to dismiss certain competing claims about reality.

Adrian[/QUOTE]

What does relativism have to do with this? You select your goals -- do you want reliable knowledge about reality, or is it power, control, etc, you're interested in? Based on that, you choose your methods. Methods are only means to an end, and the choosing of the end and methods can only come from values.

Michael

Vorkosigan

Umm ... all social regulatory methods are the use of force. The force is often implied rather than explicitly used, but are there any governments that dont maintain police forces to control the populace in some way ?

Svensky, you've been posting on Internet forums for some time. Didn't anybody ever tell you not to use the word "all?"

Let's look at some mechanisms for maintaining social order. Just randomly as they pop into my head

-- shunning
-- marriage and other familial alliances/relationships
-- cultural beliefs about behavior
-- economic structures
-- the length of the workday and the workweek (hint: what is the political purpose of a six-day workweek?)
-- racism/sexism/ethnocentricism
-- educational system
-- the promise of economic success
-- freedom
-- tolerance
-- government committment to service of the people

I could go on. Suffice to say that your position is not...um....very deeply thought out. The proper functioning of society does not rest on absolutist thinking -- which produces inhuman, unstable, and impoverished societies -- but on habits of behavior, shared values, in-group and out-group definitions, mutually recognized negotiation processes.

This is an exercise of force. The force may not ever need to be employed to maintain the peace, becasue the threat of it is often enough. Even democratic nations maintain police forces to maintain civil order. There is nothing totalitarian about it, without regulation and control all you have is anarchy, however hands off the control might be.

I agree that without regulation you have anarchy, but it does not follow that all regulatory mechanisms rest on force. Force is only one method in a packet of tactics societies use to maintain the social order. States that rest on force generally do not live long. If force is so important, why do authoritarian states place so much emphasis on political/religious indoctrination?

Not violence, the use of force (there is a subtle distinction). All societies require the rule of law in some form to function.

Look at these sentences. In the first sentence you argue that society rests the use of force (if there is some distinction between "force" and "violence" it escapes me). In the second you talk about rule of law. The two sentences have no logical connection. ROTFL.

You need to spend about ten years in China to get the full flavor of how societies function without rule of law. As the saying goes in Taiwan: "there is no law in Taiwan." Do you honestly believe that rule of law rests on enforcement? That is merely on aspect of it.

In fact it isn't possible to have large state sized bodies without the juducial use of force.

I agree that isn't possible to have large states without the use of force, but it does not follow that the existence of stable societies over large areas rests on force. Force is only one very small aspect of the entire spectrum of social control mechanisms. Do you think that the citizens of the US adhere to rule of law because of the threat of force only? Or is it because violations of the rule of are met with instant social disapproval, educational systems stress rule of law, Americans conceive of themselves as strongly law-abiding, etc? Why does everyone line up meekly in the US? Because the police arrest queue-jumpers? LOL. Because that's how Americans are socialized. Ever see a policeman arrest a driver for not giving way politely? Yet American drivers do all the time, even to the point of taking turns. Such regulatory mechanisms exist and you do not even notice them, until you move to Saudi Arabia or Taiwan or France, and encounter different ones.

Would you care to live in a society without law enforcement ? I suspect it would collapse over night.

Actually, I've lived in two such states. Where I lived in Kenya there were no police. In Taiwan prior to the end of martial law the police were not much interested in crime, but in political control. And mind you, Taiwan was growing 8% a year in those days. Clearly enforcement mechanisms are more complex and robust than you think.

Apparently your one of the few rare people that has not been on the receiving end of the typical "enlightened self-interest" show by human beings to one anther.

On the contrary, Jason, I have seen more awful shit than I care to discuss, having lived next to a guerilla war and worked for an independence movement. But which example should I take inspiration from? The evil men who throw people in jail, or the ones who stand up for their fellow humans?

Michael

[ March 05, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

John Page

Adrian:

If I may respond to the above portion of your response.

1. The first sentence is not true! Indeed, I am denying that an "absolute truth" as defined earlier in this thread can exist. The first sentence would only be true if I agreed with it, thereby illustrating the relativity of any human (mind) value.

2. Perhaps we are falling over different definitions again. You seem to be saying an objective truth must necessarily be an absolute truth. The examples I gave in response to your dragon experiment were not intended to be refutations - merely hypothetical examples of how our understanding of reality might vary depending upon our viewpoint.

A good actual example might be the once commonly held belief that the world was flat, now replaced by the commonly held belief that the world is roughly spherical. Could there not be in the future a discovery that explains a property of light that resolves the illusion that people in the antipodes are standing upside down? Ergo, what was considered an "absolute truth" has, in fact, changed.

Final example. Consider the farmer who rounds up his sheep and finds that three are missing. In my view, he doesn't "have" "minus three sheep". The entity "minus three sheep" is a mental one, resulting from the comparison of the quantity of sheep remembered, say, yesterday, and the quantity of sheep measured today. Not a perfect example, perhaps, but I think the "absolute truth" is like the "minus three sheep".

Final point. My position is that "absolute truth" is a concept about the properties of our external reality. This concept exists in our minds but can never be attained in reality and, therefore, does not exist in our external reality. I think apparent contradictions occur because of the ability of our minds to imagine unreal or illogical circumstances.

Does this help to bridge the difference in our perceptions? I'm especially keen to learn if you concur that my final point above reconciles how we can have opposing points of view.

Cheers

xoc

</strong>

What I meant was that we can't allow(we as the "we" of society) everyone to have their own "philosophy" which they live out as well. By enforcing the law we despise the philosophy of the lawbreaker- they say "stealing is acceptable" and the society says: "no it is not" by incarceration. The society makes moral judgments and enforces them; I think the enforcement of laws is a practicle statement where the government says: "Our moral views are right, and yours are wrong." Any one promoting any "Moral view", or making any kind of "moral judgment" on others has an assumption that their moral "code" is true, against the actions of those who "fail" to keep the code.
"The people chose what the laws will be." When? I live in a democracy and have not had oppurtunity to decide "what the laws will be"; this is more the work of legislature and various "Houses", that represent the people(save an occasional referendum). Well the king was supposed to "represent the people" too, it's just that he,(depending on the age) in his "glory" didn't have to abide by checks and balances as much as democratic leaders do.

As for the "Church" bit, it really depends on the denomination. There are such things as "church boards" and such where things are decided by vote. A lot of the same kind of politics goes on in the "Churches" as it does in the State.
Not all, but a majority. And the minority opinion must bight the bullet accordingly; I'm sure there must be at least some Taiwanease(?) who weren't keen on the laws on gum. And the "Majority rules" view has difficulty in condemning the annhilation of a smaller group by a larger; if you have to go by the "majority" to decide what will be called right. That reveals a need for a "transcendent" moral code. Morality doesn't just deal with the actions of individuals in a society but actions of nations in a world. Will this just be by majority vote again?

That systems of law "worked out" by a net of people would be successful is not a problem. They need to accept similar considerations first; important considerations like "equality" of individual people, or not. These may be the moral "absolutes" they agree on, although I think I'd prefer to call it a "transcendent moral code." The idea of a democracy presupposes things like the equality of citizens, that is when "all people can vote."
First, to claim one moral system is better than another requires some standard to "measure" the one against the other; this standard must give a "real" measurement of difference between the two and to give a value of one over the other.

Second, believing in one or more "Moral absolutes" doesn't mean that the "absolutes" are whatever "I" personally believe, or feel "I" or anyone else should enforce on others. It just means that there is a real truth behind words like "right or wrong" rather than it just being rhetoric; and ultimately this must be "God's Opinion" on the matter, as morality is only ever relevent in relation to personhood.
But you have to presuppose some kind of standard to measure moralities in the first place. That is a kind of transcendent moral order that is presummed, and it is based on the assumption that the killing of such and such or killing over ideologies is bad. This is not decided by a majority vote, certainly not of the people involved neccesarily, but appeals to an "absolute" or "objective standard" of morality transcendent of culture to begin with.

[ March 05, 2002: Message edited by: xoc ]</p>