Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Peter Holmes]

As I understand it, GEM's argument is that morality can be objective in the sense that the consistency of an action with a goal is a factual matter, so that an assertion of consistency - action X is consistent with goal Y - is factual and so has a truth-value independent from opinion. (I've suggested this echoes Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty's 'subjective goal / objective means' argument, which I think is unsound.)

When you say "which I think is unsound" does that imply that you think GEM's argument that "morality can be objective in the sense that the consistency of an action with a goal is a factual matter" is unsound?

If so, I disagree. Whether it constitutes "morality being objective" or not, it seems obvious to me that the consistency of an action with a goal is indeed a factual matter.

Fair point. No - my objection is to the argument that morality is objective - that there are moral facts - simply because an action can be consistent with a goal.

[Steve3007]

Fair point. No - my objection is to the argument that morality is objective - that there are moral facts - simply because an action can be consistent with a goal.

Fair enough. In that case I agree. But it does seem to me that a lot of the time, when people think they disagree as to what is morally right and wrong, on closer examination they actually disagree on matter of fact as to which actions are likely to achieve the goal.

In the classic political arguments (left vs right, big vs small government, liberal vs conservative, etc) I think this is often the case. Not always, but often.

[Terrapin Station]

Fair enough. In that case I agree. But it does seem to me that a lot of the time, when people think they disagree as to what is morally right and wrong, on closer examination they actually disagree on matter of fact as to which actions are likely to achieve the goal.

Until you run into me, lol

[Steve3007]

Until you run into me, lol

I guess you're talking about the free speech thing. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think there may still be a chance that that's an example of disagreement as to which actions/rules/policies will lead to which goals but agreement about the underlying goals. The part where we disagree as to whether human actions can have prior causes - I guess that's not a moral disagreement. More of a disagreement as to how to use the word "action" or perhaps a disagreement about ontology.

Anyway, I think one of the most interesting aspects of disagreement is pinning down exactly what it is that people are disagreeing about.

[Sculptor1]

No moral question can ever be answered with the objective method.

Agreed. And yet the delusion of moral objectivism persists. The more I witness the spectacle of intellectual contortion required to keep believing there are moral facts, the more I'm convinced that we're dealing with a quasi-religious belief - as hard to shake off as any other.

Indeed.
I have laid down this challenge many times and the posts remain either unanswered of avoided with obfuscation.
I've made it as easy as possible for them too; such as "objectively proves that killing is immoral".

[Sculptor1]

error for "proves" read "prove"

[Terrapin Station]

Until you run into me, lol

I guess you're talking about the free speech thing. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think there may still be a chance that that's an example of disagreement as to which actions/rules/policies will lead to which goals but agreement about the underlying goals. The part where we disagree as to whether human actions can have prior causes - I guess that's not a moral disagreement. More of a disagreement as to how to use the word "action" or perhaps a disagreement about ontology.

Anyway, I think one of the most interesting aspects of disagreement is pinning down exactly what it is that people are disagreeing about.

I actually have pretty unusual views on a bunch of moral stuff.

[Sy Borg]

A strong enough totalitarian dictator could make any morality he, she or it wanted to be "objective". The public will all enthusiastically agree because anyone with a variant opinion will "disappear".

Otherwise, morality is simply an aspect of the argy-bargy of social animals. Might most often is accepted as right. Take, for instance, human attitudes towards animals. It's considered right in many circles that non-human animals be objectified, treated as though they had no sensibilities. Our laws regarding animal treatment and control reflects inherently speciesist attitudes. There will come a time when humans realise that their treatment of animals was morally wrong and needlessly cruel, just as European descendants gradually came to the realisation that their treatment of indigenous people was morally wrong and needlessly cruel.

But, for now, objectification and harsh treatment of other species is well accepted in all societies, and seems likely will continue until so many animals have been wiped out that that scarcity will render living specimens more valuable than dead ones.

I couldn't agree more. In discussions will moral objectivists, I've often been informed that moral concerns apply only to humans - as a matter of fact.

And agreed - I think our descendants will look back on us with a moral disgust identical to the disgust we feel for our slave-owning ancestors.

Exactly. History will paint us as unprincipled, irresponsible and lacking in empathy. Our notions of morality have significant blind spots, which makes a mockery of any attempt to be too fussy about the morals we embrace, like slave owners who saw themselves as good people for the trivial good deeds they performed, while unthinkingly embracing atrocities on a daily basis.

[Sculptor1]

A strong enough totalitarian dictator could make any morality he, she or it wanted to be "objective". The public will all enthusiastically agree because anyone with a variant opinion will "disappear".

Otherwise, morality is simply an aspect of the argy-bargy of social animals. Might most often is accepted as right. Take, for instance, human attitudes towards animals. It's considered right in many circles that non-human animals be objectified, treated as though they had no sensibilities. Our laws regarding animal treatment and control reflects inherently speciesist attitudes. There will come a time when humans realise that their treatment of animals was morally wrong and needlessly cruel, just as European descendants gradually came to the realisation that their treatment of indigenous people was morally wrong and needlessly cruel.

But, for now, objectification and harsh treatment of other species is well accepted in all societies, and seems likely will continue until so many animals have been wiped out that that scarcity will render living specimens more valuable than dead ones.

I couldn't agree more. In discussions will moral objectivists, I've often been informed that moral concerns apply only to humans - as a matter of fact.

And agreed - I think our descendants will look back on us with a moral disgust identical to the disgust we feel for our slave-owning ancestors.

Exactly. History will paint us as unprincipled, irresponsible and lacking in empathy. Our notions of morality have significant blind spots, which makes a mockery of any attempt to be too fussy about the morals we embrace, like slave owners who saw themselves as good people for the trivial good deeds they performed, while unthinkingly embracing atrocities on a daily basis.

I'm pretty sure that history will move on and the moral landscape will change but I do not accept you can predict in which direction it will go.
You seem to think things will get more empathetic, or shall we say "nicer". That may be the case but that would be dependant on many other things.
IN the short term things are looking pretty bad.
The reforms in sexual freedom, have been reversed in many countries. Homosexuality gathered much distain in the US and many of the reforms of the Harvey Silk era have been reversed in many states.
With the continuation of Trumpism I do not see that getting better anytime soon.
What you see as moral improvement may be linear in a certin direction. But if you consider what happened to the homosexual liberalism of ancient Greece, its clear that things can rise and fall.
Respect for the welfare of animals may well disappear, as it has in the past. But may return to the respect accorded to them many so-called "primitive" hunter/gatherers which, depsite eating animals had more respect for them than we have today.

[Sy Borg]

A strong enough totalitarian dictator could make any morality he, she or it wanted to be "objective". The public will all enthusiastically agree because anyone with a variant opinion will "disappear".

Otherwise, morality is simply an aspect of the argy-bargy of social animals. Might most often is accepted as right. Take, for instance, human attitudes towards animals. It's considered right in many circles that non-human animals be objectified, treated as though they had no sensibilities. Our laws regarding animal treatment and control reflects inherently speciesist attitudes. There will come a time when humans realise that their treatment of animals was morally wrong and needlessly cruel, just as European descendants gradually came to the realisation that their treatment of indigenous people was morally wrong and needlessly cruel.

But, for now, objectification and harsh treatment of other species is well accepted in all societies, and seems likely will continue until so many animals have been wiped out that that scarcity will render living specimens more valuable than dead ones.

I couldn't agree more. In discussions will moral objectivists, I've often been informed that moral concerns apply only to humans - as a matter of fact.

And agreed - I think our descendants will look back on us with a moral disgust identical to the disgust we feel for our slave-owning ancestors.

Exactly. History will paint us as unprincipled, irresponsible and lacking in empathy. Our notions of morality have significant blind spots, which makes a mockery of any attempt to be too fussy about the morals we embrace, like slave owners who saw themselves as good people for the trivial good deeds they performed, while unthinkingly embracing atrocities on a daily basis.

I'm pretty sure that history will move on and the moral landscape will change but I do not accept you can predict in which direction it will go.
You seem to think things will get more empathetic, or shall we say "nicer". That may be the case but that would be dependant on many other things.
IN the short term things are looking pretty bad.
The reforms in sexual freedom, have been reversed in many countries. Homosexuality gathered much distain in the US and many of the reforms of the Harvey Silk era have been reversed in many states.
With the continuation of Trumpism I do not see that getting better anytime soon.
What you see as moral improvement may be linear in a certin direction. But if you consider what happened to the homosexual liberalism of ancient Greece, its clear that things can rise and fall.
Respect for the welfare of animals may well disappear, as it has in the past. But may return to the respect accorded to them many so-called "primitive" hunter/gatherers which, depsite eating animals had more respect for them than we have today.

I understand why you would hold that view. I see bifurcation. The educated will become more empathetic and the uneducated (ie. victims of neoliberal manipulation to increase the numbers of easily-led dupes) will become more atavistic.

Given that the vast majority of large non-human animals per se will soon be eliminated from the planet, I think that our natural valuing of scarcity will come into play. That is, I expect other animals to be more valued by people only when it's much too late. A little like the way children love dinosaurs - fascinating relics.

To that end, it will be interesting to see if attitudes towards slavery similarly bifurcate.

[GE Morton]

Yet those debates still occur between people who agree about that ultimate aim, and not just between people who disagree about it. I think the main underlying reason for this is that the principle I mentioned above can never be unambiguously converted into practice. There is always debate about whether a given set of rules will in fact cause the desired end result and how long and/or indirect a chain of events should be considered. The latter is, I think, a particularly common underlying reason for disagreement.

For example, some people who might be classed as "socially conservative" and who argue for various restrictions on things like personal sexual behaviour will often clash with people who might be classed as "socially libertarian". But if the social conservatives aren't invoking some kind of moral authority like a God, then the two groups are disagreeing as to the extent to which wide, long term consequences of various behaviours should be taken into account. I've had these debates with non-God-invoking social conservatives myself. They generally base their arguments on what they propose to be the empirical consequences of various behaviours related to sex. The argument then can't continue unless it starts deviating from philosophy and plunges into statistics.

That's all quite true. Many "moral" disagreements are actually factual ones, when the facts are not clear. It's the problem of decision-making in the absence of complete information.

[GE Morton]

Whether anything amounts to well-being is just the same though. You can't publicly see anyone's feeling of well-being. You can publicly see them state that something creates a feeling of well-being in them, and you can observe states that _you_ count as well-being, but that's just the same for my feeling of unease. You can observe me make statements about it, and you can take observable states to count as it, but you can't actually observe my feeling.

I don't have to observe your feelings. I only have to observe your behavior to learn what is in your interests and thus what contributes to your welfare. What I count as well-being has nothing to do with it.

[GE Morton]

A strong enough totalitarian dictator could make any morality he, she or it wanted to be "objective". The public will all enthusiastically agree because anyone with a variant opinion will "disappear".

That someone agrees with a morality doesn't make it objective, even if the agreement is not secured under duress (as in your example).

Otherwise, morality is simply an aspect of the argy-bargy of social animals. Might most often is accepted as right. Take, for instance, human attitudes towards animals. It's considered right in many circles that non-human animals be objectified, treated as though they had no sensibilities. Our laws regarding animal treatment and control reflects inherently speciesist attitudes. There will come a time when humans realise that their treatment of animals was morally wrong and needlessly cruel, just as European descendants gradually came to the realisation that their treatment of indigenous people was morally wrong and needlessly cruel.

There is a substantial philosophical literature on the moral status of animals. Most contemporary philosophers agree that (many) animals have some some moral status --- they are "moral subjects," or "moral patients," but not moral agents.

[GE Morton]

Fair point. No - my objection is to the argument that morality is objective - that there are moral facts - simply because an action can be consistent with a goal.

It depends upon how you understand the term "morality." If you take it, as I stated above, to refer to the a set of rules governing interactions between moral agents in a social setting, the aim of which rules is enabling all agents in that setting to maximize their well-being, then whether a proffered rule advances that goal is an empirical matter, and thus objective.

But of course, if you construe "morality" to refer to something esoteric, mystical, or a product of emotions and psychological idiosyncrasies --- i.e., as having some non-rational origin or basis --- then it will not be objective.

A morality must be rational to be philosophically respectable. Constructing a rational morality is a pragmatic endeavor, just as is (as I mentioned) constructing a workable set of traffic rules. The vernacular moralities that many people follow and espouse do not have a rational basis and hence will not be objective.

[Sy Borg]

A strong enough totalitarian dictator could make any morality he, she or it wanted to be "objective". The public will all enthusiastically agree because anyone with a variant opinion will "disappear".

That someone agrees with a morality doesn't make it objective, even if the agreement is not secured under duress (as in your example).

But, if the control is great enough, there could be strong consensus of the "objectivity" of morality amongst both generally and amongst "captive experts" (for want of a better term).

Otherwise, morality is simply an aspect of the argy-bargy of social animals. Might most often is accepted as right. Take, for instance, human attitudes towards animals. It's considered right in many circles that non-human animals be objectified, treated as though they had no sensibilities. Our laws regarding animal treatment and control reflects inherently speciesist attitudes. There will come a time when humans realise that their treatment of animals was morally wrong and needlessly cruel, just as European descendants gradually came to the realisation that their treatment of indigenous people was morally wrong and needlessly cruel.

There is a substantial philosophical literature on the moral status of animals. Most contemporary philosophers agree that (many) animals have some some moral status --- they are "moral subjects," or "moral patients," but not moral agents.

Other species are moral agents within their own groupings. There are certain rules amongst wolf packs, lion prides, herds of cattle and so forth. This is not something that most humans appreciate, and one of the reasons why other species are so often mistreated by people.

I agree that other species can rarely act as moral agents in human societies, though, mainly because their senses and brain configurations do not allow certain kinds of perceptions that are needed by humans to determine and abide by moral rules, eg. inability to distinguish similar-sounding words from each other, inability to project years into the future. Also, most other social mammals have a strong focus on smell and hearing, while most human cues are visual, with relatively subtle variations resulting in important differences, eg. gender symbols on toilet doors.

So, dropping a poop on the ground in your territory would be considered normal and fair in many mammal groups but this is rather less well regarded in human societies. On the other hand, being visually-oriented animals, humans tend to stare, and this is considered to be an act of aggression by many species. The faux pas can go either way.