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[detail]

Nietsche for example says in his man work "will to power", that all moral is not made without profit and thus will annihilate itself as a value and nihilism , the absence of all values, will replace this moral and will establish some kind of european way to buddism to reestablish moral which will be then abolished again. So moral is just a part in cyclic universe of birth , death and rebirth of moral.

[Good_Egg]

My own theory is that 'good' and 'bad' are used to attribute properties of goodness and badness (i.e. they're not just approving or disapproving noises), and that these properties are, respectively, the properties of meriting a positive attitude and meriting a negative attitude.

What's your take on promises ? Is there a moral imperative to keep promises ? Or is one free to break them whenever the total negative experience to oneself outweighs the positive to the person to whom you made the promise ?

Seems to me that the very nature of a promise implies that breaking it merits a negative attitude. And maybe therefore your argument for pain-minimising carries through equally to promise-keeping. Leaving them as equal imperatives...

[Belindi]

Nietsche for example says in his man work "will to power", that all moral is not made without profit and thus will annihilate itself as a value and nihilism , the absence of all values, will replace this moral and will establish some kind of european way to buddism to reestablish moral which will be then abolished again. So moral is just a part in cyclic universe of birth , death and rebirth of moral.

All material and all ideal enterprises require power for their establishment, maintenance, and completion. This fact does not in itself undermine the psychological argument for how we learn as the way we deal with Dasein, and the philosophical argument for how we progress from one idea to another; i.e. the dialectic.

[CIN]

What sort of ethic do you get from "explaining" morality as no more than increasing positive experiences and reducing negative experiences ?

One in which it is moral to painlessly kill an old person without family and use their organs to save the life of a younger person with family ? Because that increases the total of human positive experience ?

I think you're mistaking a genetically programmed instinct for a moral principle.

If someone tried to take my organs from me to give them to a younger person, would I let them do it? Probably not, even if I believed it was morally wrong to resist. I'm an animal, genetically programmed with an instinct to survive. I would probably obey that instinct rather than my moral beliefs. I'd probably be more willing to let them take my organs if the younger person was a close relative, but that again is genetic programming - we share some of the same DNA, and being younger than me, they're more likely to be able to pass it on to future generations.

If I resisted, most people would no doubt say I was morally justified, but that's because they have the same instinct that I do, and therefore empathise easily with my response. It doesn't mean they're right.

I'm 69. According to the life expectancy calculator on the UK government website, I can expect to live till I'm 86 - another 17 years. If the state wanted to take my organs and give them to someone who could use them to live 51 years, three times as long, how could that be wrong? They should take my organs, whether I agree or not.

One in which rape of a virgin is justified by the belief that she'll be glad of it in the long term because the total of positive experience in her life will be increased ?

Sorry, you're asking the wrong person. I'm a man, and I have no real idea how to do the felicific calculus on this one. Pass.

Just one question, though. Was God wrong to make the Virgin Mary pregnant? I don't recall that he asked for her consent.

One in which joyriding in someone else's car is morally good if you return it to them before they've missed it, because the total of positive experience is thereby increased ?

So it's like them secretly borrowing a book from my shelves, secretly reading it, and secretly returning it? Good for them, I hope they enjoyed it.

[Pattern-chaser]

One in which rape of a virgin is justified by the belief that she'll be glad of it in the long term because the total of positive experience in her life will be increased ?

This is like saying that breaking your femur would enhance your life. To see, even for the purposes of illuminating a philosophical concept, rape as a positive experience is... disturbing.

[Good_Egg]

One in which rape of a virgin is justified by the belief that she'll be glad of it in the long term because the total of positive experience in her life will be increased ?

This is like saying that breaking your femur would enhance your life. To see, even for the purposes of illuminating a philosophical concept, rape as a positive experience is... disturbing.

Seems to me that holding such a belief is only possible to those in deep ignorance of how others view the act of sex. Such a rapist is.. can we say horribly mistaken ?

If you'd prefer a different example, consider the Inquisition. A person who sincerely believes that they can save another person's immortal soul, thereby procuring for them eternal bliss in heaven, by torturing their body during their short time on earth.

You may think such a belief is total crud, and I wouldn't disagree.

But if you believe in a consequentialist morality of minimising suffering or maximising well-being, then you're left agreeing with their ethics but disputing their theology.

Whereas in my naivety I can tell both the rapist and the inquisitor that regardless of whether they're right about the consequences, the victim has a moral right over her own body and therefore their action is morally wrong. As they should know.

And incidentally save CIN from the organ banks...

Just one question, though. Was God wrong to make the Virgin Mary pregnant? I don't recall that he asked for her consent.

According to one Catholic convert I know, she said "let it be done unto me according to Thy will" thereby giving consent, from which we can deduce that consent was sought, even if that's not obvious from the recorded words of Gabriel.

But a lot of things happen to us humans that we don't consent to. And I'd tend to agree that this is an issue for those who believe in an omnipotent good God.

But then I'm not arguing for a religious foundation for ethics...

[CIN]

My approach is that philosophy ought to think about morality in the appropriate terms. The starting place is how do we derive Oughts from the inter-subjectively falsifiable facts of the world we call 'objective.' Those facts are generally established inter-subjectively through observation and measurement. I point and say there's a red apple over there. Everybody else who looks agrees. We also agree that apples always fall downwards, according to specific, lawlike equationss which can be checked, and we agree gravity exists. Conscious experience isn't observable and measurable in that way,

Gravity isn't observable, only its effects. It's the same with conscious experience. The effect of your conscious experience is to make you say things like 'that apple is red', and when I look at the apple I see that it looks like what I call 'red', and the fact that you also say it's red leads me to the reasonable inference that you have essentially the same conscious experience when you look at the apple as I do. There's no reason to doubt the objective reality of our conscious experience; it's part of the universe just as gravity is. And while we can't measure conscious experiences with the same accuracy that we can measure gravity, we can at least tell from a person's behaviour and testimony whether one pain is greater than another, which leads to the reasonable inference that pleasant and unpleasant experiences vary in intensity of pleasantness and unpleasantness. That's a very rough kind of 'measurement', and good enough for our purposes in ethics.

and neither are the concepts of right and wrong.

The concepts themselves aren't, but we can certainly measure rightness and wrongness, at least in a relative sense. If I drop a bomb that murders two people, my action is twice as wrong as if it murdered one person. If it murders a thousand, it's a thousand times as wrong.

And deriving an ought from an is isn't observable or measurable or falsifiable in that way either. It's simply not the appropriate way to think about morality.

So you say, but what about my theory? In a nutshell, I hold that 'bad' means 'merits a negative attitude', that unpleasant experience merits a negative attitude, and that we ought not to cause what is bad. You could falsify this in one of three ways: by showing that 'bad' has a different meaning, or no meaning at all; that unpleasant experience merits a positive attitude or does not merit any particular attitude (here I think you would have to consider evidence from the way animals behave in relation to unpleasant experiences such as pain); or by arguing that in fact there is no obligation not to do what is bad (though why you would argue this, except out of a desperate desire to save ethical subjectivism by any means whatever, I really don't know).

You might be able to come up with some form of words where morality can be defined as objective, but morality is still all about the nature of being an experiencing Subject.

Of course, but my theory covers that. The subjectivity is entirely in the experiences; none of it is in correct moral judgments about those experiences.

About meaning, mattering, value, purpose, needs and desires, feelings, flourishing and suffering.

All of those are relevant to morality, but if your analysis only takes you as far as a disparate set of unrelated features, then I would suggest that it's not going as deep as it could. Take flourishing and suffering, for instance; you speak of them as if they were opposites, like good and bad, but they aren't: the opposite of flourishing is not suffering but withering, and the opposite of suffering is not flourishing but enjoying. The fact that you have not arrived at a pair that are opposites, like good and bad or right and wrong, suggests that either flourishing or suffering is not basic. I would suggest that while suffering is basic and can't be analysed further, flourishing is not; we can ask 'why is it a good thing to flourish?', and the obvious answer is 'because it leads, or can lead, to more enjoyment'. But if we ask 'why is it a bad thing to suffer?', I think the only sensible answer is 'if you've suffered, you don't need to ask the question.'

But as I said, that doesn't make morality just a matter of subjective opinion either. Rather it means we need to give the existence of subjective experience its proper due when thinking about morality. In terms of interests in the state of affairs. That's the reason it matters how we treat each other. Hence Oughts.

Agreed.

wellbeing doesn't boil down to only pain-pleasure.

True, but I don't think you've given any reason to think that wellbeing is intrinsically good.

So what line of argument gets a moral foundation based on subjective experience to be considered objective, in that you can point it out and every reasonable person will agree, like when I point to an apple every observer will agree there's an apple?

Every reasonable person agrees that the theory of evolution is true. That's not like pointing to an apple, it's a case of considering the evidence and looking for the explanation that accounts for it best. That's how I see a theory of morality getting accepted.

And why not just say this is the appropriate way to think about morality, rather than try to force it into the apple box?

Because at the end of the day, you can't wish away the distinction between an objective truth about how the world is and a merely subjective idea of how it is; that's a real distinction, and we're entitled to ask, with putative moral truths, whether they are the former or the latter.

You can even ask a self-proclaimed moral subjectivist if they act as if being kind is good and being cruel bad in their own lives, and unless they're a sociopath they'll probably try to live their lives according to the foundation you and I roughly agree on. Again re other humans at least.

Very true, and it's part of the evidence that suggests that subjectivism is mistaken.

As I said, wellbeing and suffering can manifest in lots of different ways, aside from pain-pleasure. Often overall wellbeing depends on some suffering. Wellbeing can mean different things for different people, at different times (and differ radically for different species).

I think I have dealt in a reply to someone else with your point that wellbeing and suffering are broader than pain and pleasure. I dealt with it by replacing the terms 'pain' and 'pleasure' with 'unpleasant experience' and 'pleasant experience'. If you mean anything more than that, then I think the extra is instrumentally good or bad, not intrinsically good or bad.

This means individual freedom has to be a moral consideration too. It's right for people to pursue their own harmless goals and desires, just as it's right for people to play a role in the common good. And sometimes the two will conflict which creates a moral dilemma.

I think freedom is ethically neutral. Any goodness or badness it possesses is the result of the goodness or badness of whatever it is instrumental towards. It certainly isn't an intrinsic good. People in the USA are free to own guns, and look what that leads to - every year, 30,000 Americans killed unnnecessarily by their fellow Americans. The freedom to take hard drugs does nobody any good. And would you like everyone to be free to drive on whichever side of the road they like?

[CIN]

My own theory is that 'good' and 'bad' are used to attribute properties of goodness and badness (i.e. they're not just approving or disapproving noises), and that these properties are, respectively, the properties of meriting a positive attitude and meriting a negative attitude.

What's your take on promises ? Is there a moral imperative to keep promises ? Or is one free to break them whenever the total negative experience to oneself outweighs the positive to the person to whom you made the promise ?

Seems to me that the very nature of a promise implies that breaking it merits a negative attitude. And maybe therefore your argument for pain-minimising carries through equally to promise-keeping. Leaving them as equal imperatives...

Excellent question.

According to John Searle ( https://www.finophd.eu/wp-content/uploa ... tandis.pdf ), the purpose of making a promise is to put the promiser under an obligation: that's what promises are for. He argues that it is therefore tautologically true that one ought to keep one's promises. I think he's right.

However, there's more to say. Suppose I have promised to deliver two batches of life-saving medicines to two hospitals. Batch A will save the lives of 10 people, while batch B will save the lives of 20 people. My promising has created an obligation, but is the moral burden on me the same for both obligations? I would say no; the moral burden of the obligation to deliver batch B is exactly twice that of the obligation to deliver batch A. (If you doubt this, consider this: if I find I can only make one of the deliveries, which should it be? Obviously it should be batch B. So the moral obligations to make the two deliveries are not equal. The obvious inference is that the moral obligation is proportional to the number of lives saved.)

But if it's exactly twice, then all of the moral obligation must be coming from the good that is done by delivering the batches, not from the making of the promise. If we represent the total moral obligation to deliver batch A as (mA + mP), where mA is the moral obligation arising from the good done by delivering batch A and mP is the moral obligation arising from the promise itself, and if we similarly represent the moral obligation to deliver batch B as (mB + mP), then since mB is exactly twice mA, (mB + mP) can only be exactly twice (mA + mP) if mP, the obligation arising from the promise itself, is zero.

I think, therefore, that although making a promise creates an obligation, the obligation is merely a notional one with no moral weight, i.e. there is no moral imperative per se to keep a promise. Supposing otherwise gets us into difficulties, because if promising to deliver the batches has moral weight in addition to the moral weight of the good done by delivering the batches, how do these moral weights compare? Is mP greater than or less than mA? If it is less, by how much is it less? If greater, how much greater? These questions are obviously unanswerable. It's simpler to assume that the obligation created by the promise has no moral weight of its own.

I conclude, therefore that there is no moral imperative to keep a promise unless the promise does some good (or alleviates some harm). This is encouraging, because it means we can also say that there is a negative moral imperative to keep a promise if keeping the promise would do harm: if keeping a promise would do harm, there is actually a moral obligation to break the promise.

Another interesting point arises from this. If I'm right, and all the moral weight of the obligation to deliver the batches comes from the good that delivering them will do, rather than from the act of promising, then since delivering the batches will do just as much good if I do it without having promised, it would seem that I ought to deliver the batches even if I haven't promised to do so, simply because of the good that will do. If this were not the case, then we would have the odd situation where promising to deliver life-saving medicines creates an obligation because that's what promising does, but the obligation is merely notional and there is no moral imperative to actually make the deliveries. I don't think that fits in with our usual understanding of how the world works.

[Belindi]

My approach is that philosophy ought to think about morality in the appropriate terms. The starting place is how do we derive Oughts from the inter-subjectively falsifiable facts of the world we call 'objective.' Those facts are generally established inter-subjectively through observation and measurement. I point and say there's a red apple over there. Everybody else who looks agrees. We also agree that apples always fall downwards, according to specific, lawlike equationss which can be checked, and we agree gravity exists. Conscious experience isn't observable and measurable in that way,

Gravity isn't observable, only its effects. It's the same with conscious experience. The effect of your conscious experience is to make you say things like 'that apple is red', and when I look at the apple I see that it looks like what I call 'red', and the fact that you also say it's red leads me to the reasonable inference that you have essentially the same conscious experience when you look at the apple as I do. There's no reason to doubt the objective reality of our conscious experience; it's part of the universe just as gravity is. And while we can't measure conscious experiences with the same accuracy that we can measure gravity, we can at least tell from a person's behaviour and testimony whether one pain is greater than another, which leads to the reasonable inference that pleasant and unpleasant experiences vary in intensity of pleasantness and unpleasantness. That's a very rough kind of 'measurement', and good enough for our purposes in ethics.

and neither are the concepts of right and wrong.

The concepts themselves aren't, but we can certainly measure rightness and wrongness, at least in a relative sense. If I drop a bomb that murders two people, my action is twice as wrong as if it murdered one person. If it murders a thousand, it's a thousand times as wrong.

And deriving an ought from an is isn't observable or measurable or falsifiable in that way either. It's simply not the appropriate way to think about morality.

So you say, but what about my theory? In a nutshell, I hold that 'bad' means 'merits a negative attitude', that unpleasant experience merits a negative attitude, and that we ought not to cause what is bad. You could falsify this in one of three ways: by showing that 'bad' has a different meaning, or no meaning at all; that unpleasant experience merits a positive attitude or does not merit any particular attitude (here I think you would have to consider evidence from the way animals behave in relation to unpleasant experiences such as pain); or by arguing that in fact there is no obligation not to do what is bad (though why you would argue this, except out of a desperate desire to save ethical subjectivism by any means whatever, I really don't know).

You might be able to come up with some form of words where morality can be defined as objective, but morality is still all about the nature of being an experiencing Subject.

Of course, but my theory covers that. The subjectivity is entirely in the experiences; none of it is in correct moral judgments about those experiences.

About meaning, mattering, value, purpose, needs and desires, feelings, flourishing and suffering.

All of those are relevant to morality, but if your analysis only takes you as far as a disparate set of unrelated features, then I would suggest that it's not going as deep as it could. Take flourishing and suffering, for instance; you speak of them as if they were opposites, like good and bad, but they aren't: the opposite of flourishing is not suffering but withering, and the opposite of suffering is not flourishing but enjoying. The fact that you have not arrived at a pair that are opposites, like good and bad or right and wrong, suggests that either flourishing or suffering is not basic. I would suggest that while suffering is basic and can't be analysed further, flourishing is not; we can ask 'why is it a good thing to flourish?', and the obvious answer is 'because it leads, or can lead, to more enjoyment'. But if we ask 'why is it a bad thing to suffer?', I think the only sensible answer is 'if you've suffered, you don't need to ask the question.'

But as I said, that doesn't make morality just a matter of subjective opinion either. Rather it means we need to give the existence of subjective experience its proper due when thinking about morality. In terms of interests in the state of affairs. That's the reason it matters how we treat each other. Hence Oughts.

Agreed.

wellbeing doesn't boil down to only pain-pleasure.

True, but I don't think you've given any reason to think that wellbeing is intrinsically good.

So what line of argument gets a moral foundation based on subjective experience to be considered objective, in that you can point it out and every reasonable person will agree, like when I point to an apple every observer will agree there's an apple?

Every reasonable person agrees that the theory of evolution is true. That's not like pointing to an apple, it's a case of considering the evidence and looking for the explanation that accounts for it best. That's how I see a theory of morality getting accepted.

And why not just say this is the appropriate way to think about morality, rather than try to force it into the apple box?

Because at the end of the day, you can't wish away the distinction between an objective truth about how the world is and a merely subjective idea of how it is; that's a real distinction, and we're entitled to ask, with putative moral truths, whether they are the former or the latter.

You can even ask a self-proclaimed moral subjectivist if they act as if being kind is good and being cruel bad in their own lives, and unless they're a sociopath they'll probably try to live their lives according to the foundation you and I roughly agree on. Again re other humans at least.

Very true, and it's part of the evidence that suggests that subjectivism is mistaken.

As I said, wellbeing and suffering can manifest in lots of different ways, aside from pain-pleasure. Often overall wellbeing depends on some suffering. Wellbeing can mean different things for different people, at different times (and differ radically for different species).

I think I have dealt in a reply to someone else with your point that wellbeing and suffering are broader than pain and pleasure. I dealt with it by replacing the terms 'pain' and 'pleasure' with 'unpleasant experience' and 'pleasant experience'. If you mean anything more than that, then I think the extra is instrumentally good or bad, not intrinsically good or bad.

This means individual freedom has to be a moral consideration too. It's right for people to pursue their own harmless goals and desires, just as it's right for people to play a role in the common good. And sometimes the two will conflict which creates a moral dilemma.

I think freedom is ethically neutral. Any goodness or badness it possesses is the result of the goodness or badness of whatever it is instrumental towards. It certainly isn't an intrinsic good. People in the USA are free to own guns, and look what that leads to - every year, 30,000 Americans killed unnnecessarily by their fellow Americans. The freedom to take hard drugs does nobody any good. And would you like everyone to be free to drive on whichever side of the road they like?

Keeping promises is a mainstay of civilisation. If nobody could be relied on to keep promises nobody could trust anybody else, from closest family members to the President. Money would no longer be trustworthy and trade would break down.

[CIN]

Keeping promises is a mainstay of civilisation. If nobody could be relied on to keep promises nobody could trust anybody else, from closest family members to the President. Money would no longer be trustworthy and trade would break down.

Very true. But the reason promise-keeping is so highly valued is that most of the time, when people make promises, they're promising something good, and if they don't keep their promise, the good thing doesn't happen (and something bad may happen instead). Promise-keeping is therefore (usually) instrumentally good. It is not intrinsically good.

[CIN]

And incidentally save CIN from the organ banks...

Very kind. But in practice they would have to get past my wife and my dog, and they're both pretty scary. Especially my wife.

[Pattern-chaser]

One in which rape of a virgin is justified by the belief that she'll be glad of it in the long term because the total of positive experience in her life will be increased ?

This is like saying that breaking your femur would enhance your life. To see, even for the purposes of illuminating a philosophical concept, rape as a positive experience is... disturbing.

Seems to me that holding such a belief is only possible to those in deep ignorance of how others view the act of sex. Such a rapist is.. can we say horribly mistaken ?

Someone who holds such an extreme position has already learned to lie to themselves, and to believe those lies, despite the cognitive dissonance. This enables them to justify the unjustifiable. Such a person is no longer rational, and cannot be reasoned with. To them, the 'truth' is no longer available or understandable, and this topic is about "truths". I don't see how such aberrant behaviours as you describe can be anything to do with truth, moral or otherwise.

[CIN]

If you'd prefer a different example, consider the Inquisition. A person who sincerely believes that they can save another person's immortal soul, thereby procuring for them eternal bliss in heaven, by torturing their body during their short time on earth.

You may think such a belief is total crud, and I wouldn't disagree.

But if you believe in a consequentialist morality of minimising suffering or maximising well-being, then you're left agreeing with their ethics but disputing their theology.

Whereas in my naivety I can tell both the rapist and the inquisitor that regardless of whether they're right about the consequences, the victim has a moral right over her own body and therefore their action is morally wrong. As they should know.

So you're saying that, in this case at least, the consequences of people holding your moral views are better than the consequences of people holding consequentialist moral views?

Isn't that a consequentialist argument?

[Good_Egg]

Isn't that a consequentialist argument?

No, I'm not saying that you should do or not do anything because of the consequences.

I'm suggesting that if you were to hold the beliefs:

1) torture by the inquisition can be known to be morally wrong
2) the truth or otherwise of propositions about the afterlife cannot in this life be known
3) torture can be justified by good consequences

then your beliefs would be logically inconsistent and therefore one of them must be false.

With 3) being arguably the best candidate for being thrown overboard.

Were I to phrase it that you might be uncomfortable denying 1) or 2), then you might take it that I was advising you to value comfort over truth, which could be taken as consequentialist advice...

[Belindi]

Keeping promises is a mainstay of civilisation. If nobody could be relied on to keep promises nobody could trust anybody else, from closest family members to the President. Money would no longer be trustworthy and trade would break down.

Very true. But the reason promise-keeping is so highly valued is that most of the time, when people make promises, they're promising something good, and if they don't keep their promise, the good thing doesn't happen (and something bad may happen instead). Promise-keeping is therefore (usually) instrumentally good. It is not intrinsically good.

It's true that good intentions are not always fulfilled. What I wrote was simplistic and I should also have mentioned that my claim depends on an optimistic view of human nature. While it's reasonable to trust the benevolent intentions of husband, mother, sister, wife or child, it's not reasonable to trust that all politicians have benevolent intentions.

So, taking promise-keeping as an example , might we say that the eternal moral truth that underlies promise -keeping is knowledge plus judgement i.e. reason?