jlowder

John Post describes his argument as follows:

Post then describes precisely what the existence of objective values entails:

Post then explains what he means by the "determinacy of valuation":

Post says that the following principle is true:

Thus, moral properties supervene on natural properties in the sense that nothing can differ in its moral properties without differing also in its natural properties. That is what Post means when he says that moral properties are determined by natural fact.

Post then presents his argument for the determinacy of valuation.

The first premise of the argument appeals to the "weak supervenience" of the moral on the natural:

The second premise is simply the application of the law of noncontradiction to moral judgments:

(MEA stands for meta-ethical antirelativism)

The determinacy of valuation follows from the conjunction of EP and MEA. And if Post's thesis about the determinacy of valuation is correct, then it follows that moral realism is true.

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The point about ordinary language I quoted in previous posts relates to the argument in the following way. Post writes:


Jeffery Jay Lowder

[ November 07, 2002: Message edited by: jlowder ]

[ November 07, 2002: Message edited by: jlowder ]</p>

Jamie_L

That's the general idea, but it's more complex. Causing harm increases the chances of eventually suffering harm yourself.

A short-sighted moral theory does not reach that conclusion. However, a moral theory as I described previously does reach that conclusion, as I'll try to elaborate.

That is because you are defining self-interest in terms of short-term gain with little or no consideration for the unintended consequences from outside influences beyond your control and knowledge.

Well, your scenario is a bit of a strawman. There are virtually no situations in which you KNOW that breaking the rules is in your long-term self-interest. We are not omnisicent. The short-hand rules of morality help us build lives and societies that look out for our long-term self interest without us having to scratch our heads in every situation and think about all the things that might go wrong with our plans.

I do not mack such a claim. I claim that there can be many unitended consequences to breaking the rules. I claim that it is very difficult to know with certainty that breaking the rules will be in your long-term best interests or not.

Do moral theories need to provide reasons for hypothetical situations that never exist? I don't think so. My personal (admittedly self-created) moral theory deals with this hypothetical by admoniting the moral agent that this hypothetical is extremely unlikely to ever exist, and one should not count on one's own ability to detect such a situation. Therefore, one should act morally because you just never know.

And my morality is not just about the individual. It is about maintaining a society that supports you as an individual. Causing harm to the society by chipping away at it's moral foundation can lead to devastating consequences for everyone in the society - including you. It's not just in your best interests to do things that benefit you. It's in your best interest to do things that benefit the whole as well. Because the whole provides for you.

Jamie

ManM

Jamie_L,
That is the argument against utilitarian ethics, and I somewhat agree with it. However, that particular knife cuts both ways. I also do not know that following the rules is in my long-term self-interest. I do not know that I should even worry about the long-term, for I could die tomorrow. Still, we do have a limited ability to predict the future, and that allows us to say that following the rules is generally beneficial to our interests. But that also means it is possible to predict that a certain non-moral action could actually be in our best interest.

Let's say a person is diagnosed with a rare disease and is given X months to live. That foreknowledge significantly decreases the chance of unforseen long-term consequences to breaking the rules. In fact, I would suggest it swings the probability the other way around. In that case, acting according to the rules has a good chance of being less profitable than breaking them. The person is going to die long before he faces any long-term consequences. And so even though the rules might generally be in your interests, there exists real situations where you can reasonably say they are not. A system of morality based on self-interest works for the majority of situations. However, there are certain scenarios where it just does not explain what we would consider to be moral behavior. As such it is a decent theory, but I cannot accept that it is the correct theory.

You first claim that morality is not about the individual, and then you proceed to justify maintaining a society by using individual self-interest. Is it about the individual or not?

Jagged

MM

To quote myself from another thread:

The self is our only real point of reference.

I hear an underlying distrust for the self in your posts along the lines of the "total depravity" Calvinist theory of self-esteem.

I know you won't believe me, but I've taken that ride to the end of the track and the only thing you get as a souvenier is extremely fucked up.

Jamie_L

ManM,

The way I see it, morality is a system that seeks to protect both the individual and the society. The point I was trying to make was that if an individual thinks only of himself, he may harm the society which may ultimately do the individual harm as well.

Interesting, but perhaps beside the point, is that we are usually programmed for morality at birth, and that programming takes the form of emotional responses. If I had 10 months to live, I wouldn't go around killing people because doing so would make me feel bad. I'm not sure how that fits in, but it's something worth noting.

Comparing my admittedly quite subjective morality to a God-based morality: IF God exists and IF he indeed punishes the immoral after death, then yes, that morality has an ultimate application to all situations. However, this is only after death, with no real threat prior to death. My morality doesn't care about after death, only during life. In a way, God-based morality is much less immediate, and I think that is it's weakness and why there are so many immoral believers.

Jamie

ManM

Jagged Little Pill,
I believe it is immoral to harm someone unjustly, even if it would ultimately further your own interests to do so. A person who believes that self-interest is at the root of morality will have a hard time making that statement while remaining consistent with their moral theory. This has absolutely nothing to do with the horrible idea of total depravity.

Jagged

Lemme see how many assumptions you've made within this statement.
1. Harming someone could possibly further self-interest in the long run.
2. There is a standard "unjustly" which you have not defined.
3. A self-interested person views him/herself as the "root of morality."
4. A self-interested person would *also* have a seperate "moral theory."
5. The self-interest and the moral theory must be in conflict.
6. This conflict would bother the person.

I think #5 pretty much sums it up for you. You keep trying to seperate "self-interest" from an outside sense of "morality." If not a Calvinist view, this at least shows a major distrust of the self.

Look how you used "morality" in reference to self interest and later in the same sentence "moral theory" as if there was a seperate entity involved. It's seperation of the self, most likely because of the belief that the self is faulty, flawed, not trustworthy. Finally I've never said I'm interested in consistency with any moral theories.

Pomp

I apologize for my inactivity in this thread. I've been very busy both with my real job and with my II "job" this week. Luvluv, I'll try to answer you in the next few days.

SRB

SRB:
(a) To give a reason to believe a claim one needs to give some sort of argument for it.
(b) Luvluv has given no argument whatever for the claim that no objective moral theory can be rationally justified if atheism is true.
(c) Thus, Luvluv has given no reason whatever to believe that no objective moral theory can be rationally justified if atheism is true.

Luvluv
My contention is that, within atheism, all moral decisions, as Pomp says, boil down to statements of value (ex: self-preservation) which cannot be rationally justified.

SRB
I don't understand what it is for a statement to boil down to a value (including one which cannot be rationally justified). Can you clarify that? Do you just mean that atheists are committed to the view that their moral utterances express statements that cannot be rationally justified? If so, you have begged the question yet again. I asked you for some reason to support that view, and it seems you have simply repeated it. You need some noncircular argument for your highly extravagant claims.

Atheists can (and many do) think sentences about morality are correctly analysed in a way such that moral claims are not unjustified. For example, "X is good" is taken by utilitarians to express (roughly) the proposition "X increases happiness." On that analysis, since it is clear what would justify the belief that an action increases happiness, it is clear what would justify the belief that an action is good.

SRB
To decide which theory is correct we need to carefully observe which theory best captures what people are trying to communicate when they use the term "morally good."

Luvluv
What do you mean, "correct"?

SRB
I mean "true." What words mean is determined exclusively by how people use language. If everyone took the word "duck" to mean what we currently mean by the word "car" then it would be true in such a situation that the word "duck" refers to a vehicle with a motor. As it stands it is true that the word "duck" actually refers to a certain small creature that swims, since that analysis of the word "duck" best captures what people mean by the word "duck." To determine what is meant by the term "morally good" a similar sort of investigation is called for. Utilitarians, for example, have performed such an investigation and have concluded that their analysis (see above) is the correct one. Others disagree, and think a different analysis of "morally good" better squares with common usage. But the mere fact that there is disagreement over the facts does not establish that the beliefs concerned are not rationally justified.

Luvluv
Wouldn't you get a different answer for every person you asked?

SRB
I didn't say anything about asking people any questions. I mentioned listening to how people use language.

SRB

luvluv

SRB:


I really think we may have been arguing two different things. You seem to be only concerned with what people mean when they make moral statements. I'm basically speaking of comparative morality.

For instance, how would you go about answering the question "Which is more morally good, social darwinism or utilitarianism?" According to the way you are proceeding, it would be an unanswerable question. What is good to the social darwinist could be bad for utilitarianist (probably not generally, but for the sake of argument). They would disagree because they define goodness DIFFERENTLY because they have different VALUES. Given that, if they are both atheists, neither could give a rational justification for why their basis of value is superior to the others, partly because THAT VALUE ITSELF is what defines their notion of "moral superiority". The social darwinist would say his morality is better because it fits in better with the values of social darwinism, which is ultimately circular. Therefore, the values of atheists are not rationally justified, they are arbitrary.

A theist is not in any such connundrum because a) Theists do not hold their beliefs to that which can be rationally justified and b) The omniscience of God is a rationally consistent means of justifiying their values.

An atheists values can't really be justified except by begging the question or arguing in a circle.

Really, this has nothing to do with what I am talking about. I'm more inclined to ask "How do you know that that which increases happiness is good?" "How did you come to define goodness in that way?" Ultimately, the atheist will have to come down to "I just do." Which is not any more of a rational justification for belief in a moral principle than "I just do" is a rational justification for a belief in God.

No, but I would think that the fact that they can't be rationally justified establishes that they can't be rationally justified. It wouldn't matter if there was an absolute consensus on the issue. Even if everyone agreed, but couldn't give a rational justification of that belief, it still would not be rationally justified.

Pomp:

No problem, by that time I will have figured out what jlowder's last post means. <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[ November 10, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>