Bill Snedden

If I may jump in here, I think I might understand at what 99Percent is driving.

Every choice we make requires some type of evaluation; a comparison of values gained or lost for every alternative. Therefore, we require values in order to make decisions.

This is the essence of the so-called "naturalistic fallacy": that an "ought" cannot be derived from an "is" because the very transition from "is" to "ought" requires an "ought" to begin with.

The only way to stop the regress, therefore, would be either to discover an objective value (an "is" that is also an "ought"), or an "is" that implies an "ought" without requiring a value judgement.

I assume that you probably already realize this, but I go through it anyway for the "lurkers".

Okay, now I believe that 99Percent's point is that the fact that we are alive (for those of us who are ), implies that we value our lives. It seems self-evidently true, yes? Our lives don't sustain themselves automatically; we require food, drink, shelter, etc, and that's just to satisfy basic physical requirements (One could easily bring Maslow's hierarchy into the picture and talk about psychological requirements as well). If we're actively taking steps to prolong our physical existence, it follows that we do, in fact, value our lives.

Anyway, if true this would seem to be an "is" that contains within itself an "ought" or that this is an "is" that implies an "ought". In either case, it would seem to indicate the existence of an "objective" moral fact: All living humans value their lives.

I put "objective" in quotation marks because I myself am unsure if this truly meets the definition of "objective" in regard to moral facts. Be that as it may, it would seem to be objectively true that all living humans do value their lives.

Does this "is" imply other "oughts" and can it therefore serve as a foundation for an "objective" morality? I'm not sure. For one thing, in the context of this argument, "life" clearly doesn't mean the same thing to all people. While it's clearly obvious that all living people actively seek the sustenance necessary to sustain their physical lives, does this necessarily imply that only the physical existence is morally compelling? Or do the so-called "higher" needs (to use Maslow again) come into play as well?

Further, while the evaluation of alternatives based upon this foundation could clearly be based upon the value of reason, this foundation would seem to be inherently non-rational (i.e., the value of "life" being necessarily chosen before that of "reason").

I wonder if that helps to clarify?

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Alonzo Fyfe

Not exactly (or not in some non question-begging sense).

Not necessarily.

When I work, I produce stacks of scrap paper. Yet, it does not follow that I desire to produce scrap paper -- the scrap paper is instead a side effect of what I am doing (an externality -- to use the economic term).

For most creatures, I would argue, life is an externality. They cannot even comprehend or perceive life, let alone value it. They value eating, drinking, keeping warm, etc. -- all of which happens to prolong life. But they do not value a prolonged life. And, since humans evolved from animals, I doubt it is possible that the same is true for humans.

This is supported by the fact that, when we eat, we do not eat what prolongs our life. Much of what we eat will prevent us from living as long as we could. This is quite inconsistent with the thesis that we eat to live. Rather, life (how ever much of it we end up having) is a side effect of eating for other reasons.

[ May 22, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

99Percent

bd-from-kgIt fails only in the sense that it cannot be derived from objective facts about the real world. In other words, it can’t be derived from non-moral premises.

If that is true then objective morality cannot exist. I don't accept that so I think it is important to prove it.

If you’re talking about objective moral principles it’s not good enough to “think they can be reasonably accepted” or that they “provide a reasonable practical purpose”. You have to show that they’re true.

Yes, true beyond reasonable doubt.

It’s quite possible that Principle X is part of a moral system that “can be reasonably accepted” and “provides reasonable practical purpose” and that Principle Y, which is clearly incompatible with X, is part of another moral system that “can reasonably be accepted” and “provides a reasonable practical purpose”. (In fact, this happens all the time.) Then what? Which one is the objectively true principle?

I see your point. "Practical purpose" cannot be applied in objective morality.

The logic here is faulty. My two-year-old grandchild often suffers for realistically trivial reasons, but it doesn’t follow that his feelings have nothing to do with how I should treat him.

Of course not, but objective morality cannot be based on empathy. That doesn't mean that you cease to be an empathetic person.

OK. Suppose that all slaves led far more comfortable lives that free men, suffered far less, and were much happier. Would slavery still be wrong? If so, why? What moral principle is involved here? How do you deduce it from objective facts about the real world?

It would still be wrong. First of happiness is subjective so you cannot measure the success of moral principles on the general happiness of others. The objective facts about the real world are as follows:

1. Man doesn't get what he needs for survival from nature automatically like all other species.

2. Just like a cat's tool of survival is its natural ability to hunt, man's tool of survival is reason. He needs to think in order to make his means of survival since contrary to all other animals man needs to produce what he needs such as clothes, food, shelter etc.

3. In order to think and to reason man requires volition - he has to be free to think. One can never be forced to think. A person under the point of the gun will always say what he is ordered to say, he ceases to think. Under the point of a gun, thinking might be in fact dangerous.

4. Slavery abolishes the freedom to think, it undermines volition. Therefore it is morally wrong.

Anyway, surely the fact that action A would cause everyone to much happier while doing B instead would cause universal misery might, under some circumstances, have some bearing on whether you ought to choose A or B?

Individually you can define your own personal morality and choose what makes you happier, but universal moral principles cannot be based on direct causes of happiness or unhappinesss, since everyone individually has a different concept of what happiness is. For me being happy might involve having lots of children and therefore I will base my decisions for achieving this goal. For another having lots of children might be hell and the first thing he would do is to have a vasectomy. What is universal here is the ability to choose what is good for you, and objective morality is based on that principle - the ability to choose. In fact I would say (but that is just my opinion) that true happiness does not come from just achieving your goals but from the fact that you first thought of what can make you happy and then decided on the actions that took you to that goal. In other words, true happiness comes from having volition and applying reason to achieve your goals.

If it were wrong to base moral decisions on the perceived pain of others, it would be just as wrong to cure someone in order to end his perceived agonizing pain as it would be to kill him. Something seems amiss here.

What is amiss here is that the one who is in pain is the one that has to decide in pursuing medical attention. I cannot force someone to see a doctor if he simply says he is in pain. I can certainly suggest it to him, but it is he who knows exactly just how pain he is in and how much he needs to see a doctor. Likewise I cannot decide to kill him because of what I perceive him to be in great pain. He is the only one who can request to end his life since he is the one perceiving the pain.

So if Albert Schweitzer chooses a life that is not well calculated to help him live “longest and best”, he’s thereby being immoral? Whereas if a man steals tem million dollars, then murders his victim and covers up his crime to avoid being executed, he’s being “moral” because he’s striving to live the longest and best.

He is immoral as long as he is dishonest and affects the lives of others in the sense that he denies them life and liberty. Stealing, murdering and covering up actions are certainly immoral because of that.

Of course I can. I can choose to risk my life to save a drowning child. I can eat unhealthy foods or smoke cigarettes because I prefer the enjoyment to living longer.

You are right. I am confusing deciding individually what to do with your own life vs deciding the value of the life of others.

Reason (at least in the sense of logic) can tell you nothing at all about what to value, or what values should have priority. If by “reason” you mean something more than logic you may have a point, but you certainly haven’t made it clear.

Reason is certainly more than logic. Computers can't be moral because even though they are completely logical they don't reason.

Anyway, as I pointed out earlier, slavery does not go against the free will of men. It just prevents them from doing some things that they would like to do, as do many other things.

And I repeat again, there is an objective difference between restrictions from the whims of men and restrictions from laws that affect everyone equally.

Why are laws supposed to be objective? How do you deduce this from objective facts about the real world?

Because laws are supposed to affect everyone equally. Once you can establish objective morality (from objective facts about the real world) you can then establish objective laws.

How do you know that the fact that the criminal did something immoral justifies depriving him of his freedom? How do you deduce this from objective facts about the real world?

Because the criminal affected others against their will in his immoral actions. Since he has shown disregard for moral principles he has to be locked up before he continues to affect more people.

That’s hardly the argument you made originally. You were arguing that slavery was wrong because it was not good for society; now you’re arguing that it’s not good for society because it’s morally wrong

You are right, I should have been more careful when I made the original argument. Mea culpa.

OK, try very carefully to derive an “objective moral principle” only from facts about the real world. Try to state all of the premises explicitly and for each conclusion state which premises it is based on. You’ll find that it can’t be done. Perhaps then you’ll be convinced.

I tried, in the numbered points outlined at the begining of this post. Let me know what you think.

Bill Snedden

And yet the scrap paper is still "evidence" that something else exists that drives you to create it. Just as eating, drinking, etc. are evidence that something else exists that drives us to do those things.

I'm not really sure what you're saying, here. Humans are certainly not "most animals". We are unique (or seem to be so) in that we do possess the ability to think abstractly about our existence and can therefore value those things that enable us to sustain life.

Besides, "life" cannot possibly be an "externality" in the economic sense. Externalities are unintended (usually) byproducts of other activities. Life cannot accurately be classified as a "byproduct" of eating & drinking. If we do not eat or drink, we will die; they are required to sustain life. Certainly we may satisfy other values by these activities (physical pleasure, psychological/cultural/social benefits, etc.) but the necessity of physical sustenance must of needs relegate these to a secondary place.

But we do eat that which prolongs our life! The very act of eating does exactly that. Now it is certainly true that we may eat things that are unhealthy in the long run, but only a fool thinks he can sustain life even for a short time by eating metal, plastic, or poison.

And my thesis isn't that we obviously always do things that are beneficial in the long run. It is that we take actions now that are indicative of the fact that we value our lives. Whether we choose to eat a twinkie or a carrot, the very fact that we eat something indicates that we have made a choice to sustain our physical existence; ergo, it's worth something to us.

I've also explicitly stated that "life" must mean more than mere physical existence (see my references to Maslow's hierarchy) and that this in itself represents some questions that must be explored in this formulation of an "objective" moral fact.

Thanks for your thoughts. I'd especially like to see 99Percent's evaluation of my take on his argument and bd's response as well.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

[ May 23, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

Alonzo Fyfe

No. It indicates that we have made a choice THAT sustains our life, which is different from indicating that we have made a choice TO sustain our life.

Consider the following analogy. A person leaves Denver heading north on I-25. At that point, one reasonable explanation is that he is going to Cheyenne WY. But, the moment we see him driving past Cheyenne, we have reason to throw that original assumption out the window -- Cheyenne just happened to sit along the same path as that which he took to his destination.

When people eat, they often go far past eating in order to live. So, there must be something else out there -- some other goal.

Specifically, people eat in order to eat. Eating itself is the primary goal. (As one eats, the desire to eat diminishes -- it is not the only goal and the desire is not constant. But it is still the best explanation of why we eat.)

Now, we are decendents of those people for whom life happened to lie along the same road as that which they desired. Those for whom this coincidence did not hold did not have many offspring. So there is a non-accidental relationship between what we desire and what happens to sustain our life. But that does not prove that we do these things IN ORDER TO sustain our life.

Now, if you want to argue that whatever a person desires has value for him, and that this is some sort of objective value, I would agree with that thesis. In fact, I have dedicated a great number of electrons in defending it.

Every "ought" statement relevant in the real world necessarily makes irreducible reference to a desire. And desire is the root of all value. Desires exist -- they play a role in the causal chain of events (particularly in the fact that they cause action). Thus, desires are the "fact/values" that bridge the is/ought chasm.

Every ought statement -- every true statement using a value-laden term (such as harm, benefit, injury, sickness, defect) makes reference to some desire or set of desires -- perhaps hypothetical. The desire(s) select(s) an end or goal and assigns it a value. Any ought statement that does not make reference to some desire(s) is false.

Desire-dependent value is "objective" in that we can make objectively true and false claims about desire-dependent value, "subjective" in that value is desire-dependent.

Or, another way of saying the same thing (I think) values are belief-objective but desire-subjective. What a person believes is good or bad has no relevance to its true value. But desires are fully relevant -- with the set of desires being relevant depending on the type of value claim being made.

But life has no special intrinsic value on this model. Life has direct value insofar as it is valued for its own sake, which evidence suggests is a weak desire for most people), and has indirect (instrumental) value to the degree that it is useful in doing other things one desires (like eat, have sex, raise children, visit strange and exotic lands, visit with friends). For most people, life has a great deal of instrumental value. But, then again, so does money.

And life has negative value if it brings things that one desires to avoid (e.g., great pain). At which point, death has more instrumental value than life.

[ May 23, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

0n0w1c

i am very much enjoying this thread, thanks to all who are contributing.

if we are to discuss if objective morals exist, how can we by definition exclude all uses of the word ought, is this not the definition of moral?
if you exclude the inclusion of ought, you remove the exactly what the discussion is about.

the question is... is there an ought that is objective? yes, we may think of it as subjective but can the objective exist with or without the subjective? if i look at a bug and it is alive, can i say it ought to continue living until something causes to it cease? is this subjective or objective? i would say it is a subjective interpretation of an objective. "one ought to continue to survive" is a subjective interpretation of a possibly objective moral. can one argue that survival is an objectively 'good' action? to continue in the natural progression of life. the destruction of a planet is an objective 'bad' because it destroys the natural progression of a planet.
the killing of a viral infection in a human is an objective moral dilemma of the conflict between two objective morals.

Alonzo Fyfe

[b]Originally posted by 0n0w1c:

If we are to discuss if objective morals exist, how can we by definition exclude all uses of the word ought, is this not the definition of moral?
if you exclude the inclusion of ought, you remove the exactly what the discussion is about.[b]

True.

the question is... is there an ought that is objective?

There are countless oughts that are objective.


If i look at a bug and it is alive, can i say it ought to continue living until something causes to it cease? Is this subjective or objective?

It depends on which definition of 'ought' you are using. For some of them, it is subjective. For others, objective. For a few, a little of both. Then, there are oughts for which 'the bug ought to continue living' and 'the bug ought not continue living' are both objectively false.


Language is an invention. There is no law of nature that dictates how the word 'ought' must be used. We determine this by social convention -- and different people put forth different proposals and argue for them. Because the use of terms is not dictated by natural law, these arguments are necessarily subjective.

But it is a subjectivity of language, not a subjectivity of ethics itself. The same problem applies to terms in any field -- yet implies nothing about whether the field itself is subjective or objective. (If it did, then all fields would be subjective.)

First, identify what it is you are talking about when you use the word 'ought' -- then, we can go about determining if you are talking about something objective or subjective.

bd-from-kg

Koyaanisqatsi:

You have accused me of intellectual dishonesty - of deliberately misrepresenting what you said. I do not take this kind of accusation lightly. So I’m taking valuable time from a serious discussion of the issues to rebut this charge.

Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that you’re right about one thing: in dealing with you it is necessary to keep quoting the same things over and over, both to avoid being charged with taking things out of context and to clarify the order in which things were said.

So let’s review once again what was said, and when.

From your post of May 17 (09:49 AM)

From my post of May 20:

From your post of May 21 (10:02 AM):

From my post of May 21 (2:48 PM):

Now as to your latest post:

You repeatedly accuse me of representing you as making arguments that you never made. In particular, regarding my May 20 statement that “... your only argument as to why [my analogy to the age of the Earth] isn’t applicable is your unsupported claim that there are no objective moral truths,” you say:

But as can be seen by reading your May 17 post, this was the only argument you made, and you did make it directly. Thus: “Who is ‘objectively’ right or wrong here? No one, because such labels have no intrinsic meaning in regard to morality...”

You also made some comments about the analogy being “flawed” because of a “confusion of the contextual meanings of the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’” But I never even used the words “right” and “wrong” in the analogy, so it’s hard to see how I could have “confused” their “contextual meanings”. Anyway, your point here, as I understand it, is that one cannot meaningfully use the words “correct” and “incorrect” in the context of moral statements – the reason being, presumably, that there are no objective moral truths. So you also made this argument implicitly – i.e., indirectly.

And of course this argument doesn’t show in the least that my example is flawed. The point was simply that the fact that people disagree about something doesn’t show in itself that there is no objective truth involved. It did not purport to show that there is necessarily an objective truth involved. Obviously it’s possible for people to disagree about something under the impression that there is an objectively correct answer when there really isn’t.

In fact, you’re the one who is misrepresenting your own argument. You now say:

The arguments I did make - that your scenario was inherently subjective "and here's why"; that it would not be possible for you to demonstrate what about it necessarily entailed an objective solution... were simply ignored by you.[/quote]

The first point seems to be yet another way of saying that there are no objective moral truths, a point that I can hardly be said to have ignored. As to the second point, I could hardly have ignored it on May 20 because it hadn’t been made yet. All of your statements raising this point are from later posts.

A second accusation of the same kind comes a little later in your new post:

Apparently the “false argument” you are saying I “accused you” of is “stating repeatedly” that it doesn’t “make sense to say that it is objectively true or false ... that an act is morally wrong”. Actually, as I pointed out, this isn’t an argument at all, false or otherwise. And at that point (that is, as of May 20) you had yet to offer anything that could be called an argument to this effect, although you had made this assertion repeatedly.

In attempting to show that you had made such an argument, you helpfully quoted the relevant passages from your posts that predated my May 20 post, which demonstrate clearly that you made no such argument, and in particular that you never even brought up the question of whether moral statements could be demonstrated to be true.

To be sure, in your earlier posts you appear to be arguing (though it’s hard to be sure) that (1) the fact that moral beliefs (or attitudes if you prefer) are often socially conditioned shows that there are no objective moral truths, and (2) the fact that people often disagree about moral questions shows that there are no objective moral truths. But as I had pointed out even before my May 20 post, both of these are simply non sequiturs, which is to say that they aren’t arguments at all. So whether or not you meant these points to be taken as arguments, you had not actually made any arguments to the effect that there are no objective moral truths.

Of course, you finally got around to making an argument in your May 21 post, namely that objective morality cannot be demonstrated to exist. This is a valid point; in fact, for a logical positivist it is decisive in showing that “objective morality” cannot exist in the same sense that physical objects exist, and that “stealing is wrong”, for example, cannot be objectively true in the same sense that “Chicago is north of Texarkana” is true. (But as has often been noted, the claim made by logical positivism that a non-tautological statement is only meaningful if it can be verified operationally, at least in principle, is itself a non-tautological statement that cannot be verified operationally, even in principle. So even a positivist must agree that there is some sense in which a statement which cannot be verified operationally can still meaningfully be said to be true.) I dealt with this point in a preliminary way in my very next post addressed to you; a fuller answer will have to wait.

But my statement on May 20 that you had made no argument to the effect that there are no objective moral truths was not false or misleading: at that point you hadn’t.

I can put up with a steady stream of pointless verbal abuse and a steady stream of vulgarity, but I do not tolerate being falsely accused of deliberately misrepresenting what someone else has said. So our discussion is over.

By the way, if you think that "rational belief" is an oxymoron, why were we having a discussion in the first place?

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

A surprisingly large part of your last reply to me was devoted to criticizing my own theory, which I haven’t even presented here. Besides, you created another thread (“Morality is Evil” which turned out to have the sole purpose of criticizing this theory, and that thread is still open. So I’m ignoring all such comments. Instead, I am going to continue to analyze your claim that “there is a single objectively correct ‘all things considered’ right answer” to moral questions.

But future or potential desires don’t count? If not, does that mean that future or potential desires of adults don’t count either?

I didn’t know you were God. How did you come to know that no animals (even chimps) have a “perception/conception” of life? But supposing this to be true, surely animals have a desire not to die at any given moment? This appears to be one of the very strongest instincts in all animals.

Besides it seems pretty clear that human infants have no “conception of life” either, and hence no “desire to continue living”. Does this mean that it would be no more wrong to kill an infant than a dog?

The idea here, I gather, is that once one has made a plan one has a desire to see the plan come to fruition. Thus someone who has plans has more desires that would be thwarted by his death that somone who does not.

This line of thought has some disturbing implications. Infants have no plans at all, and one-year-olds have very few plans. So by your reasoning it would seem that killing a one-year-old is much less wrong that killing a normal adult, and killing a newborn is even less wrong. Also, many adults have very few plans, while others have a great many. By your reasoning it would seem that killing someone with a great many plans is more wrong than killing someone with few. In particular, a retired person will typically have far fewer plans than a young man just starting out in life. Is it therefore more wrong to kill the young man than the older one?

Also, both humans and animals have a great many desires that do not involve any plans at all, nor is survival involved in the great majority of choices. For example, I want to eat the venison steak on my plate simply because I’ll enjoy eating it, but Fido, Spot, and Flash want to split it up between the three of them for the same reason. I have plenty of other food and so do they; it just happens that we all particularly like venison, which is in short supply at the moment. How do you resolve this according to the “all things considered” criterion? So far as I know their desires might be much stronger than mine. What’s more, they helped me get the venison in the first place. So do I have a moral obligation to give them this delicious steak? If not, why not?
Could you shed some light on how “hermeneutic circles” or “coherentist and connectionist epistemologies” lead to this conclusion? As you may have noticed, most of us here are not professional philosophers.

In any case, it appears that you’ve been misleading us as to the nature of your “objective morality”. All of those comparisons between “some things considered moralities” and “taking partial sums” on the one hand and your “all things considered morality” and “taking the full sum” on the other suggested that what was “right” always depends on the actual relevant desires that exist. But we now learn that this is far from true. It turns out that your so-called “all things considered” morality doesn’t operate by taking sums at all; it works by finding the limit of an infinite recursive process.

Now infinite recursive processes have properties that may be surprising to those unfamiliar with them. In particular, it’s simple to define such a process with the property that the final result (i.e., the limit) has nothing to do with the starting value. As a simple example, say your process obtains the (N+1)th number in a sequence by dividing the Nth number by two and adding one. It can easily be shown that the resulting sequence will converge to 2 no matter what number you start with. Thus the final result of an infinite recursive process can depend solely on the process itself and not at all on the initial inputs.

It appears that the kind of evaluation you’re describing is of just this kind. In the end, I suspect, it won’t matter how many Nazis there are or how few Jews; it will always turn out to be wrong to exterminate the Jews. While I find this result admirable, it cannot honestly be described as the result of “taking all desires equally into account”. If it doesn’t matter what desires actually exist – if the outcome is determined by the “recursive process” by which they are “evaluated” – the result is built into the methodology itself. And it seems likely that a great many such results are “built in” in the same way.

So this kind of procedure needs to be examined very carefully to see whether it is really designed to be “objective” or whether it was “tweaked” to guarantee the results that you want – i.e., the results that you consider on other grounds to be “right”. And even if it is “objective” in the sense of not being designed to give desired results, it still needs to be shown to be objective in the sense that there are no other “reasonable” ways to evaluate desires according to how they stand in relationship to other desires. Is there really only one, self-evidently correct, way to do this?

But my weighing of my reasons is completely subjective. The question was how you objectively decide how to weigh all of the reasons.

Let’s look at a simple case: only two people, Smith and Jones, have any desires relevant to a choice between actions A and B. Now Smith can weigh up his desires and determine objectively what his decision would be based only on those desires, and Jones can do the same with respect to his desires. Both answers are right by definition, so we have a clear, “objectively correct” result in each case. But when Smith weighs his and Jones’s desires combined he may well get a different result than Jones does when he does the same thing. In this case there is not an “objectively correct” result. For this reason the intrapersonal weighing of reasons is not a good model for the interpersonal case.

Your discussion of this question is completely abstract, whereas I offered two concrete examples illustrating why I find this seems unreasonable. It often happens that an abstract idea seems reasonable until you look at how it plays out in relevant test cases; that’s why I like to look at such test cases. It would shed some light on your thinking here is you were to actually discuss the examples and explain why you think it would be OK for a group of sadists to create people who desire to be tortured even though it causes them only suffering, or why you think one would have a duty to refrain from disturbing a static, stagnant, “Brave New World” type of society even if you knew that disturbing it would create far more happiness and personal fulfillment in the long run.

In that case the only values (or more precisely, desires) that can legitimately be counted are the agent’s. Smith’s desires do not cause Jones’s muscles to move – i.e., to act. It’s not at all clear why the fact that Smith’s desires cause him to act should have anything to do with what Jones should do. If Smith’s desires are relevant to what Jones should do even though they don’t cause him to act, why can’t things that don’t cause anyone to act be relevant?

Also, while a given desire might have the potential to cause Smith to act, it may be that it never actually does. It’s even possible that it certainly never will, because Smith has another, stronger desire that’s incompatible with the first one. Why would such a desire be relevant to what Jones should do when it can never even affect what Smith does?

Or again, Smith may desire that something will happen that he has no control over. Such a desire by its very nature will not cause Smith to act. Does that mean that there is no “value” involved, or that such desires don’t get “counted”? What if Smith’s desire is very strong and you could easily do something that would fulfill it?

Finally, Smith may not desire something because he hasn’t thought of it; he may not be aware that such a thing is even possible. But if he knew about it he would desire it greatly. Now such a potential desire is not an actual desire; it certainly will not cause Smith to act. Does that mean that such a desire doesn’t count? Are all potential desires morally irrelevant? Do they never have anything to do with what one ought to do?

Here you lose me completely. It appears that you are now saying that the fact that desires that don’t exist yet can’t legitimately be counted because the things that might bring them into existence are causes and causes are by nature contingent. But the same is true of the desires that do exist: they were brought into existence by things which might not have existed, or might not (if causal relationships were different than they are) have caused them.

In fact, this is the most obvious, serious objection to your whole scheme: existing desires might have been different than they are, for reasons, or in ways, that most people feel should be morally irrelevant, and if they were the “rightness” of an act would be different.

For example, suppose that Smith has only two choices, A and B, while Jones in the future will have the choices A' and B'. Now suppose that A and A' are essentially the same in all morally relevant ways, as are B and B', and moreover that the consequences of A and A' are essentially the same in all morally relevant ways, as are those of B and B'. Most people would say that under these conditions, according to anything that can be reasonably called an objective morality, if it is right for Smith to do A it is right for Jones to do A', and if it is wrong for Smith to do A it is wrong for Jones to do B'. But in your system this is not necessarily the case. If the aggregate of relevant desires is different in Jones’s case from what it was in Smith’s case, it can happen that A is right for Smith while A' is wrong for Jones, or vice-versa.

In any case, it’s not clear why logical necessity should be a condition of something being morally relevant. For example, are you saying that if fundamental human nature were different, this would have not bearing on what actions are right and wrong? this seems to me to be completely untenable.

No, but you haven’t shown that it isn’t. And it doesn’t seem plausible to me that “values” must necessarily derive from desires. For example, it seems plausible to me that values can derive from the effect that an action might have on the happiness of people who don’t exist yet, regardless of whether anyone now living cares about them or has any desires relating to them (or to “posterity” in general). It seems plausible to me that knowledge, understanding, and rationality might have value independently of whether anyone alive at the moment desires them, or is even capable of desiring them.

To see this, imagine a world containing only one being, who has the ability to bring about a world with billions of happy, fulfilled, rational beings with a high level of knowledge and understanding

Now consider the following two possibilities:

(1) This being has no desire to bring about such a world, but no particular desire not to either. In fact, the only reason he doesn’t have such a desire is that the possibility of doing so hasn’t occurred to him, or he isn’t aware that he has the ability to do it.

(2) The being does want to bring about such a world.

According to your reasoning, in scenario (1) there is no reason whatever to bring about this world, and it would not be desirable for him to do so. But in scenario (2) there is a reason to do so, and it would be desirable. I don’t think this makes sense. I think that the fact that the people he could bring into existence would find life very meaningful and enjoyable if he did is a good reason for doing it, and for saying that it would be desirable if he did. And I would say that he ought to do it on the grounds that he would do it if he had enough knowledge and understanding.

bd-from-kg

Bill Snedden:

OK, but this will have to be brief.

I think that you're misunderstanding 99percent's position. but he would know more about that than I do, so I'll let him speak for himself.

Alonzo's points are very good here on the whole. I'll just expand and clarify the point about instrumental value, since I think it's one of the most important.

If life is held to be "good" because it is valued or desired, we have to consider why it is desired. Does anyone desire a life in which he would be completely unconscious? Of course not. So life is not valued for itself. But what about consciousness? Is it valued for itself? Consider: if you were offered the possibility of living (and being conscious) an extra 20 years, you would certainly want to enquire into what those 20 years would be like. If they were going to be miserable, you probably would say "no thanks". Similarly, few people think that the prospect of being tormented horribly in Hell for eternity is more attractive than the prospect of total annihilation. So consciousness isn't desired for itself either. Both life and consciousness are valued as preconditions for those things that we do value for themselves. But that means that they are instrumental goods. And instrumental goods are by definition not fundamental: if A is valued only because it can get you B, or is a precondition for B, then B is more fundamental than A. Thus, to the extent that life and consciousness are "goods", they are not fundamental goods, and thus cannot be the foundation of a reasonable moral system.

To all:

This will probably be my last post here for a few days (though I might sneak one in early tomorrow); I'll be on holiday during the Memorial Day weekend. See you on Tuesday.

[ May 24, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>