dk

Originally posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
I am going to have to ask you, what it is that we "know" in this example?
posted by DRFseven:
What we know is what we believe to be true. It becomes a part of our truth structures, with which we form our model of "the way things are." These structures can change, subject to new input, but at any given moment, we have some specific truth structures.
dk: An effective people advance by solving problems with progress. When a problem challenges a nation or civilization with a problem they can’t solve, the nation and civilization are ruined. Truth structures aren’t arbitrary, but determine the fate of people, families, cultures, languages, and civilization. There are plenty of ruined civilizations, nations, and cultures that make the point quite vividly. People can eek out a minimal existence as savages, but to support a civilization requires substantial overhead. A single insoluble problem will eventually bleed the greatest civilizations of its vitality, as more and more resources are diverted into the black hole. The Ancient Greeks with superior culture, science and technology bled themselves dry waging endless wars between city states. The Western Roman Empire was ruined by the weight of its own decadence, unable to field an army it became the victim of its own mercenaries. Today Europe, with the exception of Britain, has become so decadent it can’t raise enough children to maintain infrastructure, run its industrial complex, or field an army to protect its vital interests/borders.

Originally posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
Hedonism states that ALL human behavior can be explained in this way -- in terms of a desire for J and beliefs about the means of obtaining J. (Actually, hedonists also allow for a parallel process concerning an aversion to pain -- or a desire that "I not experience pain". However, just to prevent a lot of repetitve writing, let's just leave this as an unstated corralary to hedonism).
posted by DRFseven:
Except that most often, people don't have beliefs about obtaining J because they don't know about J, or about physiological mechanisms underlying behavior.
dk: Hedonism can’t explain the sustained progress in Europe from 600-1900AD. Hedonism can’t explain how European, African, and Asian rejects (immigrants) built North America into the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Hedonism does explain the degeneration of Europe, Americas, Africa, Asia and South America over the last 50 years.

Originally posted by Alonzo Fyfe:
In response to my question, what makes it the case that "mistreating kitties is . . . bad and awful and horrible and shameful," true, and that "there is no wrong choice in pizza toppings" also true?, you answered: Mommy saying so.
But that doesn't answer the question.
The question still remains, "What is mommy saying when she says so?" What does "mistreating the kitten is wrong" really mean?
posted by DRFseven:
She means mistreating kittens is a bad behavior, and the two-year-old child incorporates that information about bad behavior into her "primitive" truth structure, just as she has incorporated the information that houses and elephants are big, and caterpillars and ants are little. Later, she will begin to understand that people use reasoning to determine how things are bad, good, big, and little, themselves, and that sometimes it gets complicated. She will apply reasoning to new information, as well as to existing structures, though the reasoning, itself, will be subjected to these structures. In the end, she will still think that mistreating kitties is bad and she will teach her children the same thing; she will have reasons to "back up" her feelings, but her young children will only know that behavior is wrong.
dk: Over the last 50 years there’s been a lot of rhetoric written about the CYCLE of poverty, illiteracy, violence, racism and sexism promulgated by the nuclear family from one generation to the next. This explains why a civilization degenerates i.e. each child inherits the sins of their parents. The CYCLE does not explain how the Franks, Huns, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Celts and Anglo Saxons managed to progress from the Dark Ages after the fall of Western Roman Empire through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to become Modern Civilization.

In fact, how could anyone explain how a primitive locally controlled education system populated by illiterate immigrants managed to educate themselves in a generation, and then with all the advantages of sociology, psychology, Ebonics, and other cultural enrichment programs managed to become inept at educating immigrants and inner city Blacks?

We can try to explain modern civilization with Evolution, but evolution is a tautology that presumes upon reality with self evident doctrines that can tolerate anything but being called a doctrine.

DRFseven

dk, are you talking about subjective morality?

dk

Moral Hedonism, its subjective becuase if everybody liked the same thing there wouldn't be enough to go around.

Alonzo Fyfe

dk: I had a much, much longer post written in response to your earlier post. But I discovered it was mostly redundant. Everything I was saying is captured in the responses given here.


Define "act of judgment". Is this some sort of decision to assign value X to Y? If it is, then I do not think that there is no such "act" to focus on.

We have desires. Those desires have objects. The objects of those desires have value (which turns out to be nothing more than saying that they are objects of desire).

If a person assigns value independent of desire to any object, then that person is simply making things up, like assigning beliefs to a baseball or intention to the chair that one stubbs one's toe on.


Sounds good to me.


It is a bit much to go into here, but the theory of mental states that makes the most sense to me is BDI (belief-desire-intention) functionalism. I have explained many of the relevant components elsewhere in these posts.

My most recent posts in a thread on .Utilitarianism describe this account.

And the assumption that the physical universe is closed is not untestable. All we need is one instance of an observable that cannot be explained in terms of a physical universe, and the hypothesis of a close physical universe immediately becomes falsified. The assumption is not that no non-physical options are possible, but that no non-physical options have been demonstrated yet and this gives us good reason to believe they never will.


We live in a world of risk and uncertainty. But a great deal of research has been done concerning decision making under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Risk analysis and probability theory are very highly advanced areas of research, and are not especially problematic. These accounts are quite compatible with BDI theory and decision theory.


It is highly likely that much of this misses the point, because we do seem to be talking two different languages here.

Alonzo Fyfe

Technically, the epistemoligist's definition of knowledge is "justified true belief."

X knows that P iff X believes that P, X has good reason to believe that P, and P is true.

But this is beside the point. I was not asking for a definition of knowledge. Your original statement was:

I'm talking about how, when we DO desire something, we know it.

And I was asking, "What, precisely, is the proposition P that we know when you use the word "know" in this sentence?

In one sense, you seem to be saying that whenever "I desire that P" is true, then "I believe that I desire that P" is also true, and the agent has good reason for this belief -- that the criteria for knowledge have been met. But, we have already agreed that a person can "desire that P" and not know it.


Define "bad".


"Bad" means "Bad". Obviously true, but not every illuminating. Could I get more detail, please?

Okay, perhaps this is a bit unfair. You could accuse me of asking for an extentional definition (defining a word by listing the qualities that something must have for the word to be referring to it), while you are offering an intentional definition (defining a word by listing the elements in a set of things that qualify).

An extensional definition of "planet" might include such things as "body moving through space, orbiting a star, having a minimum size of X." An intentional definition of "planet" would be "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc."

Your "that which is designated as 'bad'" can be taken as an intentional definition.

The problem with intentional definitions is that they do not allow for the phenomena of disagreement and debate. Is Pluto a planet? If we are using an intentional definition of planet, we merely look to see if Pluto is on the list of planets. Yes or no?

But SHOULD Pluto be on the list of planets? If we look at the properties of Pluto, and compare them to extentional definitions of words like "planet" and "Kuiper Belt Objects" there is room for debate as to whether Pluto better fits within the extensional definition of one or the other.

Moral propositions are subject to debate, with the possibility of an individual deciding that his or her former opinion was mistaken. This, in turn, implies that an extentional definition of morality will work far better than an intentional definition.

Which, not coincidentally, is one of the major problems with limited individualist-subjectivisms. They do not allow for debate. There is nothing to argue over. Two different people (Able and Barney) making moral claims of the form "X is moral" (from Able) and "X is immoral" (from Barney) are saying two entirely different things, so debate is meaningless.

The only way to make debate meaningful is to say that the two people are saying the same thing, which means that their words should be taken as referring primarily to the objext X, rather than to the subjects (Able and Barney).

If we take Able and Barney as both saying that X has an intrinsic property of moral badness, we now have something that can be debated, and we can now account for a huge set of verbal behavior that individual-subjectivist theories cannot account for.

Note: Universal-subjectivism also allows for debate, because there is only one "right answer" about whether something is good or bad relative to the desires of all people. However, the verbal behavior of those who engage in moral debate suggests that this is NOT what native speakers are talking about when they make moral claims. This is because of the type of evidence people use for supporting claims in debates over whether "X is immoral" or "X is moral." Universal subjectivism rules as "out of bounds" any evidence based on intuition or introspection.

Intrinsic-value theory, on the other hand, in addition to postulating a special value-property in the object being evaluated (in this case, the act of mistreating the kitten), also postulates a special faculty of perception -- a type of moral ESP whereby merely contemplating the act activiates this perceptual organ and allows the agent to "know" its intrinsic property of goodness or badness. If somebody disagrees, it is because they are not looking at it the right way. Discussion begins to help make the other aware of all of the relevant properties, with the idea that once they have the proper understanding of that which is being evaluated, their own "moral sense" will pick up the signals of its intrinsic rightness or wrongness.

The AntiChris

I find it difficult to imagine what might be entailed in making "every effort to fulfill every desire". However I have to admit that I don't know the details of your theory and this probably isn't the thread on which to discuss them.

Presumably you discuss your theory in the "Ethics Without God" series? If so, I'll check it out.

Chris

DRFseven

But knowing something is knowing something; no matter whether it conforms to reality or not. What goes on in the brain is the same, knowing flat earth or ball. That jolt makes the internal dialogue go, "Yup; true. Uh-huh." What produces the jolt? Emotion "coded for" when certain schematical standards are met.



And I said that we get that jolt.



Knowing some behavior is bad? I'm sure you'll agree it means different things to different people at different times. I've explained that two-year-olds see "bad" in much the same way that dogs see it. To a dog, it is a sound, and a memory of a sound, associated with unpleasant emotion. I can tell my dog he's bad and he always agrees, no matter what, even if he actually didn't do the thing he's being accused of being bad for doing (I'm such a god!). To the toddler, bad things are things that have that unpleasant association. To the mother, bad things are things that make her feel unpleasant, and/or things that meet certain criteria (contained in truth structures) she has built up to designate "bad."



You gotta give me more information, honey. Obviously, "bad" could mean many things to me; examples:

Tastes like crap.
Is complicated or tedious ("This traffic is bad.")
Disobeys/is mischievous
Is clever/brilliant ("We bad!")
I don't want you to do that! ("Mistreating kittens is BAD!")

Norge

Alonzo,

Let's just keep this very simple. Given an atheistic worldview, give me one good reason why a soldier shouldn't rape a woman during warfare. Or, if that example gets entangled in discussions of war, something much simpler, give one reason why one shouldn't torture children. What I would like you to do is frame your response in language in which you talk to the person about to conduct the act. You need to speak in a manner to convince them not to go through with their act. And you've got to do all of this as a determinist, without violating your beliefs as a determinist. That's the first thing.

Second, your ideas need some work. Clearly, you have an unworkable belief system, based on grounding moral behavior on desires. This is obviously unworkable. Note what you wrote here:


It is obviously impossible to include all desires in the overall behavior of persons. That should be very obvious. If two people have a desire and it involves harming you. If we don't carry out our desires, then you're violating our desires and you've just written that "all desires" should be included. Quite apart from the fact that quite clearly morals don't have anything to do with desires, your solution is logically impossible, so let's dispense with that.

I don't want to be rude, but you spend an awful lot of time trying to work out a description of morality and applying labels etc, but you're still no closer to giving reasons for the imperative nature, the "should" that grounds morality. ie. Why we should act morally. That's why I have asked you the questions above. I look forward to hearing your response.

DRFseven

I'm an atheist and a determinist, so I'll do it. "You shoudn't torture that child because if you do, I'll call 911 and you'll be arrested."

I think torturing children is wrong because I was socialized to have that feeling, and, furthermore, I think that abuse represents a debilitating influence in our world, and should be stopped so that we can continue to live. I want my world to continue.

Norge

Thank you, DRF, for replying. Let's take a look at your response.

First of all, you base your grounding for morality on what looks like utilitarianism of some kind.

In other words, morality is what works for me and my environment. But that is clearly wrong. Let's imagine for a moment, that I'm on a desert island, and being a very bad person (let's leave aside for the moment that atheists don't really have an account for the intrinsic ontological status of "bad") I decide to torture a child. First, your reasons fail to impress. I can simply say that I'm outside of civilization, that no one can call 911, but does that lead to the idea that you now have no reasons to give me as to why I shouldn't torture a child. Intuitively no, but certainly not on your reasoning, which has failed.

Second, you have reached your conclusions on the basis of socialization. But this is also a hopeless cause. It grounds the idea of morality in the social framework we inhabit. But what of societies where immorality flourishes? Indeed, it is encouraged. It would seem that if I am from such a society, not only would I most likely act immorally, but on your account, I SHOULD act immorally, for I am more likely to survive and since that was your final comment - survival - I don't see that you have given any reasons for acting morally within a largely immoral society.

You wrote as follows:

The most common example is Nazi Germany, where certainly acting immorally was quite a successful way of surviving. We tend to think of Germany, because it lost the war as an unsuccessful society, but it wasn't. It was very successful and very immoral. It is certainly possible that Germany could have won the war. Europe today could be composed of a dominant and immoral society, based on intransigent racism. Within such a society, immoral behavior would flourish.

One final point. As far as I understand you, it looks like the most you have to say is that you don't like torture, not that you think it's wrong. Can you clarify this? Are morals simply personal preferences? If so, then that would be good to know, before I write a response to that position. Thanks.