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[Leontiskos]

@Gertie ,

I can understand why you might think that moral rules contain no intrinsic truth, but are merely rules of thumb suggesting how a weighing of consequences - which determines right or wrong - is likely to come out most of the time. Many utilitarians would agree with you.

The basic problem with subjectivist moral theories like Gertie's or CIN's is that they are ungrounded. They provide no coherent, internal way to justify their own claims. They do not even propose their moral claims as being objectively true.

Gertie's <intersubjective agreement> cannot ground morality. Gertie's idea that there can be moral rules of thumb without true moral principles underlying them is incoherent. CIN's crucial claim that utils are measurable in principle and only loosely in practice doesn't seem justifiable. How, for example, would the precise measurement work in principle?

The problem with these theories is quite simple. Morality is objective in nature, and therefore theories which start from subjectivist premises will not be able to support morality. If you don't believe that objective moral judgments are possible, then you don't believe in morality. Attempts to derive morality from subjectivism will either be incoherent or else their product will not be morality, but rather something else. For example, intersubjective consensus results in some form of majority rule, which everyone knows is not morality.

(I will try to respond to some of CIN's particular points soon)

[Good_Egg]

Gertie's idea that there can be moral rules of thumb without true moral principles underlying them is incoherent.

What we mean by a rule of thumb is a simple and not-too-unsatisfactory approximation to a complex right answer. If there isn't a knowable right answer it's hard to see how one can approximate to it. If morality is all about weighing consequences but the value of consequences isn't measurable, which seems to be Gertie's position, then there isn't a right answer to approximate to.

Whereas a card-carrying utilitarian could say that except for very rare situations, an act of rape or murder is likely to create consequences that are on balance negative. And thus "Thou shalt not rape or murder" as a principle is a good rule of thumb. Even though they believe that such acts are not intrinsically wrong and that therefore such a principle is not an eternal absolute truth.

CIN's crucial claim that utils are measurable in principle and only loosely in practice doesn't seem justifiable. How, for example, would the precise measurement work in principle?

We probably share an intuition that saving five lives has to be better than saving one life - the basis of the trolley problem.

So it's tempting to point to stuff like that, which pretty much everybody agrees on, and say that this gets us part of the way there. Add a bit of hand-waving and the suggestion that the rest is a matter of detail that can be left as an exercise for the reader...

But it seems to me that the big distinction is between on the one hand a calculus based on somehow summing preferences of different strengths across all sentient individuals. And on the other hand a calculus based on some objective concept such as health that is impervious to our desires.

I'm not convinced that CIN has yet come down on one side or the other of this question, so I'd hesitate to label his position as subjectivist.

CIN I understand that you're not actually a card-carrying member of the utilitarian persuasion, because alongside your intuition that something that doesn't harm anyone cannot be wrong, you have a sense of justice. Which says that people who stand in the same relationship to a wrongful act should be punished equally, even if this doesn't minimise overall suffering.

[Leontiskos]

Gertie's idea that there can be moral rules of thumb without true moral principles underlying them is incoherent.

What we mean by a rule of thumb is a simple and not-too-unsatisfactory approximation to a complex right answer. If there isn't a knowable right answer it's hard to see how one can approximate to it. If morality is all about weighing consequences but the value of consequences isn't measurable, which seems to be Gertie's position, then there isn't a right answer to approximate to.

Yes, that's exactly right. To talk about moral rules of thumb while denying that there are any objective moral measurements is to be talking gibberish. It would be like talking about how to approximate a centimeter while simultaneously affirming that centimeters do not exist in any way, shape, or form. An approximation presupposes the thing approximated, just as an image presupposes the thing imaged.

Whereas a card-carrying utilitarian could say that except for very rare situations, an act of rape or murder is likely to create consequences that are on balance negative. And thus "Thou shalt not rape or murder" as a principle is a good rule of thumb. Even though they believe that such acts are not intrinsically wrong and that therefore such a principle is not an eternal absolute truth.

I agree. CIN's claims are not nearly as problematic as Gertie's. At the same time I do think they are both attempting to reach an objective moral theory from a subjectivist starting point, and this will leave both in the lurch.

But it seems to me that the big distinction is between on the one hand a calculus based on somehow summing preferences of different strengths across all sentient individuals. And on the other hand a calculus based on some objective concept such as health that is impervious to our desires.

I agree entirely.

I'm not convinced that CIN has yet come down on one side or the other of this question, so I'd hesitate to label his position as subjectivist.

Fair enough. You may be right.

[EricPH]

We probably share an intuition that saving five lives has to be better than saving one life -

But suppose there was a situation where you had to make a choice; if you saved five people, the other one would die. Or if you saved the one person; the other five would die.

Do eternal moral truths depend on numbers?

[CIN]

Gertie's idea that there can be moral rules of thumb without true moral principles underlying them is incoherent.

Agreed.

What we mean by a rule of thumb is a simple and not-too-unsatisfactory approximation to a complex right answer. If there isn't a knowable right answer it's hard to see how one can approximate to it.

An obvious counter-example to your thesis here is pi. Since pi does not have a finite number of decimal places, the answer to the question 'what is the numerical value of pi?' is not knowable, yet we have various rules of thumb (e.g. 22/7, 3.14159) which approximate with varying degrees of closeness to pi, depending on how many decimal places you actually need.

Whereas a card-carrying utilitarian could say that except for very rare situations, an act of rape or murder is likely to create consequences that are on balance negative. And thus "Thou shalt not rape or murder" as a principle is a good rule of thumb. Even though they believe that such acts are not intrinsically wrong and that therefore such a principle is not an eternal absolute truth.

As you acknowledge, I'm not a card-carrying utilitarian, but I agree with utilitarians on this point.

CIN's crucial claim that utils are measurable in principle and only loosely in practice doesn't seem justifiable. How, for example, would the precise measurement work in principle?

We probably share an intuition that saving five lives has to be better than saving one life - the basis of the trolley problem.

I don't consider it to be an intuition, I consider it to be a rule of thumb deriving from the assumption that most people's lives are more pleasant than unpleasant, so that to save five lives is usually a better thing than to save one.

But it seems to me that the big distinction is between on the one hand a calculus based on somehow summing preferences of different strengths across all sentient individuals. And on the other hand a calculus based on some objective concept such as health that is impervious to our desires.

I'm not convinced that CIN has yet come down on one side or the other of this question, so I'd hesitate to label his position as subjectivist.

I'm not in the business of summing preferences, except possibly as a rough substitute for actual measurement of un/pleasantness of experiences. I do not consider it correct to say that when people prefer pleasant experiences to unpleasant experiences, this preference is merely subjective; I hold that the preference is, at least sometimes and at least partly, caused by properties of the un/pleasantness itself. As I keep saying, pleasantness merits a positive attitude; this is a property of pleasantness, and it is a fact of nature that pleasantness has this property. It just is the case, as a fact of nature, that pleasantness is intrinsically commendable, desirable, to be sought out, to be paid for in good coin, etc etc (pick whichever positive attitude is appropriate to the individual experience). And equally it just is the case that unpleasantness is intrinsically undesirable, discommendable, to be avoided, etc etc..

Nature is asymmetric. Pleasantness and unpleasantness are irreducibly different from one another, and the preference not merely of humans but as far as we can tell of all sentient beings for pleasantness over unpleasantness is not a subjective preference down to individual psychology, but a response dictated by what pleasantness and unpleasantness are like. This is at its most obvious when we are dealing with the extreme unpleasantness of severe pain; it is not a mere subjective preference, due merely to the psychology of the individual or some kind of social conditioning, that makes people and other animals seek to avoid the kinds of things that cause very painful experiences (e.g. fire, being savaged by a larger animal, jumping off a high cliff onto hard ground). It is because of what severe pain is like that everyone avoids it.

Preferring pleasantness to unpleasantness is not like preferring Manchester United to Arsenal, or Beethoven to Mozart, or chocolate cake to ice cream; these preferences reflect the fact that people's psychology is different, and something the experiencing of which is very pleasant for one person may be far less pleasant or even unpleasant for another; so that it would be wrong to say, except as a subjective judgment, that Manchester United merit a positive attitude more than Arsenal do, or Beethoven more than Mozart, or chocolate cake than ice cream. But it is always right to say that if person A finds the experience of eating chocolate cake on a particular occasion more pleasant than person B found the eating of ice cream on a particular occasion, the pleasantness of person A's experience merits a more positive attitude (e.g. is more desirable, is more to be sought out) than the pleasantness of B's experience.

So I believe that my calculus is based on an objective concept - the concept of un/pleasantness having the property of meriting a positive/negative response.

@CIN I understand that you're not actually a card-carrying member of the utilitarian persuasion, because alongside your intuition that something that doesn't harm anyone cannot be wrong, you have a sense of justice. Which says that people who stand in the same relationship to a wrongful act should be punished equally, even if this doesn't minimise overall suffering.

I think you are reading a bit too much into what I've said.

I hold that all and only those beings capable of experiencing un/pleasantness deserve moral consideration - or, in Kantian terms, are to be treated as ends in a kingdom of ends (I think my kingdom is wider than Kant's. but my Kant is rusty; Leontiskos will put me right if I'm wrong)- and that unless there are good reasons to the contrary, all deserve equal consideration and treatment. This, in my view, is the first principle of morality. The second principle is that pleasantness intrinsically merits a positive attitude and unpleasantness a negative attitude. (At present I am not convinced that anything other than un/pleasantness intrinsically merits these attitudes, but as I am not omniscient or infallible, I have to accept that I may be wrong about that.) It follows that the appropriate way to treat such beings, other things being equal, is to seek to maximise the pleasantness of their experiences and minimise the unpleasantness. But of course things are never that simple, and there are bound to be situations, even in theory, where one is faced with choices in the distribution of un/pleasantness that are not obviously easy.

I don't think the above amounts to 'a sense of justice'. In your final sentence you seem to be arguing that a principle of retributive justice should take absolute priority over the principle of maximising pleasantness, and as I see the first as desirable only insofar as it is instrumental to the second, I don't think I agree with you.

[Leontiskos]

Apparently we have two different foundational conceptions of human society. On your conception human society is like a bee hive, where the organism is found in the collective and the individuals are merely accidental parts of an organic whole. On this conception just as I might amputate my foot in order to avoid a deadly infection, we might kill members of society in order to avoid dangers to the societal organism. Or just as I might graft skin from one part of my body to another, we might kill individual parts of the organism in order to shore up another, more important, part of the organism (say, by redistributing healthy bodily organs).

If I have given the impression that I think the collective can have interests of its own and therefore be a moral end deserving our moral concern, then I have clearly been doing my job here rather badly. I hold that the only objects that can be moral ends are sentient individuals capable of finding their experiences pleasant or unpleasant (hereafter to be typed un/pleasant, because I am fed up of typing these long words). This rules out as moral ends not only collectives, but also inanimate objects, robots that are conscious but lack the ability to find their experiences un/pleasant, and pre-sentient foetuses (which means I am pro-choice before the foetus becomes sentient, and pro-life afterwards).

Okay. The thing is, I am having trouble situating your claims regarding things such as the surgeon scenario without positing at least a quasi-collective end. For example, rather than being concerned with the individual per se, you are per se concerned with a set of individuals (or collective pleasure, or somesuch thing).

What would you say your end is in the surgeon case? Maximal collective pleasure?

I hope I am not forgetting parts of our conversation after this long lapse of time, but part of my point with the bee hive analogy is that the maximization of pleasure seems like something quite different from the colloquial understanding of morality. Most people would say that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is intuitive but not specifically moral. "Do good and avoid evil" is a moral principle, but good and evil collapse into pleasure and pain then again, it would not strike the average person as specifically moral.

One of the most basic rules, then, is that an innocent person cannot be harmed, and anyone who does harm an innocent person incurs a debt (both to that person and to the societal order which they have disrupted). The reason "You shall not harm the innocent" is a hard and fast rule of morality is because it is presupposed by and necessarily linked with the entire moral paradigm. To undo this rule would be to undo and undermine all of morality. We could call it a first principle of moral reasoning.

I agree that a wrong action incurs a debt. This is where the idea of moral obligation comes from: ‘ought’ is cognate with ‘owe’. Oddly, we now locate the debt immediately prior to the wrong action, and say ‘you ought not to do X’, when in fact it is doing X that incurs the debt; ‘ought’ has become a warning that we will owe if we perform the action. I don’t agree that there is any debt to the societal order, for the same reason that society cannot have interests; the debt is to the individuals that make up that society.

I should have said, "...and to the society whose order they have disrupted." I agree that the transgressor is indebted to the individuals that make up the society, not to some reified collective. That said, a society does have (emergent) interests that individuals do not have on their own, but I digress.

The reason "You shall not harm the innocent" is a hard and fast rule of morality is because it is presupposed by and necessarily linked with the entire moral paradigm. To undo this rule would be to undo and undermine all of morality. We could call it a first principle of moral reasoning.

However, I don’t see where innocence comes in. You seem to have introduced that idea without preamble or any kind of supporting argument. You say that “You shall not harm the innocent” is ‘presupposed by and necessarily linked with the entire moral paradigm’, but I fail to see why this should be the case. Perhaps you can expand on this.

I should probably take more time to think on this, but at present I would say that when we are talking about interpersonal moral systems what we are really talking about is justice, and that the positive role of societal justice is to rectify moral debts (injustices). It follows from this that any legitimate or justified harm can only be meted out by the public authority in the rectification of an injustice. For example, we can only fine individuals who have broken the law; we cannot fine individuals who are innocent of any transgression.

I will leave it there for now, since your replies could go in so many different directions.

It is interesting to ask whether your consequentialism should be considered a moral system at all--whether it involves real normativity of any kind. This is especially true if I am right in my supposition that it is coming from a place of materialism/determinism/moral skepticism. Even if we could measure utils in principle, why should anyone agree with you that the collective is the organism, or that the util you have identified should be maximized?

As I've indicated above, I don’t in fact hold that the collective is a moral end.

But then why would you kill the one to save the five?

As regards materialism and determinism, I am sceptical as to whether there is free will in the sense that moral responsibility requires (i.e. that in any given situation we could have done differently), but I continue to talk as if humans had moral responsibility because to keep qualifying my every statement with ‘of course this may all be a mere metaphysical fantasy’ would become tiresome.

Well, your consequentialism strikes me as being rather compatible with the denial of moral responsibility, in a way that classical moral systems are not.

In theory, utils should be maximised because to the extent that we don’t do that,we incur a debt to those individuals who would have experienced them had they been maximised.

So you think that individuals deserve, in justice, to have their pleasure maximized? And if someone fails to maximize another's pleasure (or the collective pleasure) then that person would incur a debt? This is a strange, seemingly controversial claim, apparently much more controversial than my claim that innocents should not be harmed.

The more threatening and powerful Hitler becomes, the more plausible is his claim that Jews must be exterminated, at least for the consequentialist. This is because insofar as Hitler is powerful, the consequences of denying his claim become bad indeed.

I don’t think I agree with this. The more powerful Hitler becomes, the more people he will kill, and the more will have to be killed to stop him. You have a graph with two rising curves, and the right thing to do, for the consequentialist, is to stop him as soon as you can, to keep the numbers killed as low as possible.

I can't help but wonder if you are here reintroducing classical moral reasoning in an ad hoc way. Everything will depend on how powerful Hitler is perceived to be. For example, if Hitler is strong and the war looks unwinnable, then clearly the consequentialist should surrender to Hitler and let the Jews die. So I think my original claim about Hitler holds, at least on the supposition that Hitler is only aiming to kill certain minority groups.

What bothers me about hedonism isn't the "fact-value gap." It is the reduction of good to pleasure. The idea that pleasure is good seems uncontroversial to me.

Well, I’m not actually reducing good to pleasure, I’m identifying pleasantness as the only intrinsic good. But perhaps that doesn’t help you.

It doesn't help me much.

"Good" is a concept that bridges sensate and intellectual objects, and your definition falls on the intellectual side.

I don’t see this. If, as I hold, ‘good’ means ‘merits a positive attitude’, then surely there are attitudes appropriate to sensate objects just as there are for intellectual objects. In the case of the ice cream, an appropriate attitude is appreciation of the sensory experience of eating the ice cream – of its taste and texture.

I don't deny that such an attitude is appropriate and merited by the ice cream. What I deny is that when we say, "This ice cream is good," we are talking about how one ought to relate to the ice cream. In that case we are saying something much more immanent and 'sensate', "I am enjoying this ice cream," "This ice cream delights me," "This ice cream brings me pleasure." I suppose, riffing on your pleasure-end, we would say that pleasure is a positive attitude/experience, not that pleasure merits a positive attitude.

Similarly, "good" is a concept that bridges descriptive and normative judgments, and your definition falls on the normative side, because the claim that something merits a positive attitude is the claim that someone should respond to it with a positive attitude.

I think the current orthodox view is that ‘good’ is a ‘thin’ evaluative term without descriptive content, rather than a ‘thick’ term such as ‘courageous’ or ‘generous’, which both evaluates and describes (https://iep.utm.edu/thick-co/). This sounds right to me. If you can think of an example of ‘good’ being used not merely to evaluate but also to describe, perhaps you could post it, together with an explanation of what you consider the descriptive content to be.

This sort of contemporary philosophy strikes me as an inheritance from Hume, and I doubt I will agree with much of it. I see the difference between 'good' and 'courageous' as a matter of degree and abstraction, but not kind. As an example, a civil engineer might go around the country inspecting bridges for possible repairs. He may well call the bridges that require no repairs "good bridges." It seems to me that such a use is descriptive (as well as evaluative). To give a parallel, an army recruiter might go around the country searching for courageous men and women, and he would be wielding that quality in much the same way that the civil engineer wields 'good'.

I think deontological prohibitions, which may seem on the surface to be absolute, are often disguised consequentialist rules. Why do we think it so terrible to convict someone of a crime they did not commit? Because if we convict them, we send them to jail (or even, in some countries, execute them). If all we ever did was write down ‘Fred is guilty of murder’ in a ledger somewhere and take no further action, it would be no worse than the fact that some inattentive official got my brother-in-law’s name wrong on his death certificate (yes, really).

Let's suppose you know Fred is innocent and yet you accuse him of murder. This leads to his conviction, his imprisonment, and his execution. Now the consequentialist is committed to the claim that at each step nothing per se evil is occurring, but only something that will likely lead to bad consequences.

No, because his imprisonment is unpleasant for him, and his execution terminates his pleasant existence prematurely, and so both are intrinsically evil.

Okay, true, and I think I acknowledged this in my edit. There is more to this, but I will let it lay for now. For now I would just want to clarify that when you say something is intrinsically evil, what you mean is that that thing represents a net negative when taken in isolation?

Is anything morally wrong on your view? I'm still not sure whether you're positing a moral skepticism/descriptivism, or whether you really are committed to a normative moral theory.

I certainly intend my theory to be normative. If a state of affairs merits a negative attitude, then it is bad, and if it’s bad, we ought not to bring it about. The difficulties are:
a) because the effects of actions widen out into the future like ripples on a pond and become unpredictable, we often cannot discover in practice whether the consequences of an action will be good or bad, and
b) there can be apparently unresolvable conflicts between the imperative to maximise net pleasantness and the imperative to distribute un/pleasantess fairly (see further below).

Okay, thanks. I admit that I can't remember my train of thought for questioning the normativity of your theory a few weeks ago, but the elucidation is useful.

If we follow Thomas Aquinas we would say that every act is subjectively considered to be good by the actor. In consequentialist terms we would say that the agent, in the moment of acting, believes their act will produce more good consequences than bad consequences, and that this is a necessary condition for acting.

I don’t see why people should not sometimes deliberately do things they think will have more bad consequences than good. In fact I should think it’s pretty common, because people often give their own interests far greater weight than the interests of others. Anyone who beats an animal must be aware that the animal’s pain outweighs their own pleasure, but they don’t care because at that moment the only being they care about is themselves.

But you've more or less conceded my point when you say, "...because people often give their own interests far greater weight than the interests of others." If their weighting were correct their act would be good. Incidentally, Aquinas basically says that sin (or moral evil) consists in putting one's finger on the scale and ignoring a moral law that you know ought to be applied.

If that psychological account is correct then if no external objective reality can be brought to bear on the individual's subjective valuations, no moral evil can exist. Since consequentialism is so mired in subjectivity I'm not sure how this can be overcome.

I think the objective reality is that many actions do produce actual un/pleasantness, and I think this is enough to refute the charge of subjectivity.

[Objective fault]

In which case you would be required to say that the individual has weighted their own interests in an objectively incorrect way. In order to say that, you would have to be able to identify--at least vaguely--the correct way as well as the discrepancy. Anticipating some further argument, this sort of objectivity is going to require a number of moral axioms, and I don't see how a number of those axioms could ever be self-supported by consequentialism. For example, the equality principle whereby one person's interests must be weighted equally to another person's interests. It isn't clear to me how consequentialism in itself could ever hope to justify that principle.

I’m a hedonist and a consequentialist, but I don’t think I’m a utilitarian, for the following reason:

[...]

My current view is that the fact that there are sentient beings capable of experiencing un/pleasantness gives rise to two consequentialist moral principles not one: the principle that we should aim to maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness where possible, and the principle that we should aim to distribute pleasantness and unpleasantness equally. Conflicts can arise between these two principles, and at present I am not aware of any way of resolving the conflicts other than making a subjective choice.

Well, you're already beginning to answer my question about the equality principle, so that's good. Two points:

An agent could face a choice between two actions, A and B; A will minimise total pain but the distribution will be unfair, B will result in more total pain but the distribution will be fair. Which is the right choice? The traditional utilitarian would say A, but I think this is not always the case.

Suppose A results in 50 units of pain for both Fred and Bill, whereas B results in 95 units of pain for Fred and no pain at all for Bill. Which should the agent choose, A or B? A totalist utilitarian would say B, because 95 is less than twice 50; an averagist utilitarian would agree, since an average of 47.5 is less than an average of 50.

I think both are wrong, by which I mean that is it not clear, as they think, that B is the moral choice. By focusing only on total or average pain, utilitarians ignore the fact that 2n units of pain experienced by one person is not the same as n units of pain experienced by each of two people.

This seems to merely be the claim that the units are unequal, or that they have not been measured correctly, or that pain tolerance is not linear. None of this strikes me as a substantial critique of utilitarianism.

For example, let's suppose that one unit of pain is that which causes the average human being, in a state of neutral homeostasis, to wince. This definition of a unit of pain is objective and quantitative. Now when we apply that same quantitative unit of pain to someone who is not in a state of homeostasis, but is rather in a state of susceptibility or distress, they will be caused significantly more subjective pain than the homeostatic person (although for all I know the effect could be just the opposite at a certain threshold). You seem to be claiming that the person who measured Fred and Bill's pain was making a mistake by measuring in an objective rather than subjective manner. Or to be blunt, the unit of pain applied to the distressed person is more than a unit of pain.

I think you need to ferret out this measurement problem before considering the principle of equality, because they are two different problems. I am not even convinced that the measurement problem of utilitarianism is surmountable, but it is surely separate.

They are not entitled to ignore this fact, because in so doing, they ignore the morally relevant fact that Fred and Bill count equally as moral ends. My current view is that the fact that there are sentient beings capable of experiencing un/pleasantness gives rise to two consequentialist moral principles not one: the principle that we should aim to maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness where possible, and the principle that we should aim to distribute pleasantness and unpleasantness equally.

Why think that your second principle is any more consequentialist than it is utilitarian? It strikes me as an egalitarian principle that is altogether separate from consequentialism, and it is just the sort of thing that would be required to establish objective fault, which I referred to above.

[Leontiskos]

What we mean by a rule of thumb is a simple and not-too-unsatisfactory approximation to a complex right answer. If there isn't a knowable right answer it's hard to see how one can approximate to it.

An obvious counter-example to your thesis here is pi. Since pi does not have a finite number of decimal places, the answer to the question 'what is the numerical value of pi?' is not knowable, yet we have various rules of thumb (e.g. 22/7, 3.14159) which approximate with varying degrees of closeness to pi, depending on how many decimal places you actually need.

The precise target that pi approximates is not a numerical quantity, it is a ratio, namely the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Pi is the numerical quantity that approximates this ratio.

[Good_Egg]

So I believe that my calculus is based on an objective concept - the concept of un/pleasantness having the property of meriting a positive/negative response.

Sure - your reason for saying we should act to maximize utility (I.e. maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness) is that utility merits a positive response.

The question was instead whether, in your conception of it, knowing the utility of the consequences of an act is a matter of consulting the preferences of individuals.

Suppose the managers of an airport have the choice between playing Mozart or playing Beethoven over the sound system when they're not using it to make announcements. What is the moral choice ?

Given that people experience various degrees of pleasantness or unpleasantness when hearing the music of one or the other, maximizing utility would seem to involve asking a representative sample of airport users for their preference and the strength of that preference, and basing the decision on that.

Do you agree ? Is any other moral decision any different in kind ? People vary. Including for example, having different levels of risk-aversion.

unless there are good reasons to the contrary, all deserve equal consideration and treatment. This, in my view, is the first principle of morality...
... I don't think the above amounts to 'a sense of justice'.

In the example you gave, having weighed up all the consequences and expressed them in utils, you thought an outcome of -50 to Bill and -50 to Fred was to be preferred to an outcome of -95 to Bill and 0 to Fred. Despite the net difference of 5 meeting a positive attitude....

Four comments/questions in reply:

1. I take it that you're not advocating that the guilty and the innocent should be punished equally. So that you're not advocating equal outcomes for the sake of equality, but because your unstated premise is that Bill and Fred are equally innocent, equally deserving, so that it is just that they be treated equally.

You cover this by saying "unless there are good reasons to the contrary".

2. "Equal consideration" doesn't cover it. If your ethic is indifferent to whether it is Fred or Bill who gets the -95 then it considers them equally, gives them equal status under the moral law. You might, for example, consider that flipping a coin and giving the loser the -95 gives both of them a better expected outcome than -50.

3. It's not clear whether it's your sense of justice or their sense of justice that is relevant. If Bill says to you, "Fred is my brother. I'd rather suffer 95 units of unpleasantness myself than suffer 50 and see him suffer 50", would you reply that it would be morally wrong of you to comply with his request ?

4. Some utilitarians would get around this by including in their utility calculation the unpleasantness of knowing an outcome unjust and being powerless to change it. You took a different approach, treating distributional justice as a separate principle....

[CIN]

The thing is, I am having trouble situating your claims regarding things such as the surgeon scenario without positing at least a quasi-collective end. For example, rather than being concerned with the individual per se, you are per se concerned with a set of individuals (or collective pleasure, or somesuch thing).

The surgeon treats all six individuals alike, as individuals, not as a set. He assigns just the same moral consideration to the healthy patient as he does to each of the five unhealthy ones. At no stage is he thinking that the patients constitute a collective which has interests over and above the individual interests of the six patients; he merely calculates that by killing the healthy patient and giving his organs to the five unhealthy ones, he alters the outcome from one living person with a life assumed to be pleasant to five such living persons.

What would you say your end is in the surgeon case? Maximal collective pleasure?

Maximising experienced pleasantness across all six patients, the five unhealthy ones and the one healthy one.

I hope I am not forgetting parts of our conversation after this long lapse of time, but part of my point with the bee hive analogy is that the maximization of pleasure seems like something quite different from the colloquial understanding of morality. Most people would say that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is intuitive but not specifically moral. "Do good and avoid evil" is a moral principle, but good and evil collapse into pleasure and pain then again, it would not strike the average person as specifically moral.

I think most people would probably say that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain for oneself was not specifically moral; but what about doing these things for other people? I think they might consider that to be moral.

But in any case, is it reasonable to insist that a theory in moral philosophy should conform to the moral views of the average person, who is unlikely to have ever studied philosophy and is also unlikely to have thought about the matter very deeply? Is there any other field in which you would expect theories to conform to the opinions of the uneducated?

I should probably take more time to think on this, but at present I would say that when we are talking about interpersonal moral systems what we are really talking about is justice, and that the positive role of societal justice is to rectify moral debts (injustices).

You snuck in the word 'societal' before the second occurrence of 'justice', and hence I think you are using the word 'justice' in two different senses. You go on to talk about legitimacy residing with a public authority, a notion which fits reasonably well with the idea of societal justice, but not with a notion of justice that makes it co-terminous with morality as as whole; morality includes such matters as whether I should keep my promise to my wife to pick her up from the hairdresser, something that is hardly going to be of interest to the public authorities. Since your view of morality here seems to depend on 'justice' meaning the same throughout, I think your view cannot be correct.

It follows from this that any legitimate or justified harm can only be meted out by the public authority in the rectification of an injustice. For example, we can only fine individuals who have broken the law; we cannot fine individuals who are innocent of any transgression.

But if, as I have suggested, morality is broader than societal justice, these constraints do not necessarily apply to the whole of morality.

It is interesting to ask whether your consequentialism should be considered a moral system at all--whether it involves real normativity of any kind. This is especially true if I am right in my supposition that it is coming from a place of materialism/determinism/moral skepticism. Even if we could measure utils in principle, why should anyone agree with you that the collective is the organism, or that the util you have identified should be maximized?

As I've indicated above, I don’t in fact hold that the collective is a moral end.

But then why would you kill the one to save the five?

For the same reason that you would give food to five thousand rather than to just one; because it benefits more sentient beings and creates more net pleasantness. The concept of a collective is irrelevant. Were the five thousand that Jesus fed a collective?

As regards materialism and determinism, I am sceptical as to whether there is free will in the sense that moral responsibility requires (i.e. that in any given situation we could have done differently), but I continue to talk as if humans had moral responsibility because to keep qualifying my every statement with ‘of course this may all be a mere metaphysical fantasy’ would become tiresome.

Well, your consequentialism strikes me as being rather compatible with the denial of moral responsibility, in a way that classical moral systems are not.

I think any moral system has to be centrally concerned with 'oughts', and since 'ought' implies 'can', a denial of moral responsibility undermines my consequentialism just as much as any other moral system. I keep my thinking about morality and freewill in separate compartments; when thinking about morality I assume that we have freewill, otherwise there is no point thinking about morality at all; when I think about freewill I ignore the fact that my belief that we have no freewill destroys morality except as a metaphysical fantasy. In reality, one or other of these has to go, but I pretend that this isn't the case in order to be able to talk about both of them.

In theory, utils should be maximised because to the extent that we don’t do that,we incur a debt to those individuals who would have experienced them had they been maximised.

So you think that individuals deserve, in justice, to have their pleasure maximized? And if someone fails to maximize another's pleasure (or the collective pleasure) then that person would incur a debt? This is a strange, seemingly controversial claim, apparently much more controversial than my claim that innocents should not be harmed.

The logic of hedonistic consequentialism is inescapable: to the extent that each of us has the ability to push our fellow sentient beings farther up the stair that leads from the basement of misery to the attic of happiness but fail to do so, we are to blame. I'm as guilty as anyone in this regard. Well, no, not anyone. I'm a better human being than Vladimir Putin, I think. But that's not saying much.

The more threatening and powerful Hitler becomes, the more plausible is his claim that Jews must be exterminated, at least for the consequentialist. This is because insofar as Hitler is powerful, the consequences of denying his claim become bad indeed.

I don’t think I agree with this. The more powerful Hitler becomes, the more people he will kill, and the more will have to be killed to stop him. You have a graph with two rising curves, and the right thing to do, for the consequentialist, is to stop him as soon as you can, to keep the numbers killed as low as possible.

I can't help but wonder if you are here reintroducing classical moral reasoning in an ad hoc way. Everything will depend on how powerful Hitler is perceived to be. For example, if Hitler is strong and the war looks unwinnable, then clearly the consequentialist should surrender to Hitler and let the Jews die.

Well, okay, let's go along with this. Hitler is bound to win. The world population in 1939 is 2300 million. If we surrender, then once the 6 million Jews are out of the way, the other 2294 million people in the world are going to have reasonably pleasant lives. But if we fight on, 70 million, let's say, will die, not just 6 million. So these are the guaranteed outcomes, and it's a clear binary choice - 2294 million reasonably happy people and 6 million dead, or 2230 million reasonably happy people and 70 million dead. As a hedonistic consequentialist, I say we should surrender and accept the loss of the 6 million, as the lesser of two evils. What do you, as a non-consequentialist, think we should do, and why?

"Good" is a concept that bridges sensate and intellectual objects, and your definition falls on the intellectual side.

I don’t see this. If, as I hold, ‘good’ means ‘merits a positive attitude’, then surely there are attitudes appropriate to sensate objects just as there are for intellectual objects. In the case of the ice cream, an appropriate attitude is appreciation of the sensory experience of eating the ice cream – of its taste and texture.

I don't deny that such an attitude is appropriate and merited by the ice cream. What I deny is that when we say, "This ice cream is good," we are talking about how one ought to relate to the ice cream.

I deny that too. Saying that something merits a positive attitude is evaluative, but attributing a value to something is not the same as prescribing any attitude or action relating to it. We are saying that the ice cream merits a positive attitude, but we are not making the further assertion that it is incumbent on anyone to adopt that attitude. (In any case, 'this ice cream is good' is always false, because it is not the ice cream that merits the positive attitude, it's the pleasant experience I'm having while eating it. Everyone always gets this wrong, but what can you do?) We are only talking about the ice cream; we are not talking about any actual person's relation to it.

In that case we are saying something much more immanent and 'sensate', "I am enjoying this ice cream," "This ice cream delights me," "This ice cream brings me pleasure." I suppose, riffing on your pleasure-end, we would say that pleasure is a positive attitude/experience, not that pleasure merits a positive attitude.

But you are now conflating three distinct things - pleasure, attitude, and experience. Pleasure is neither an attitude nor an experience, it is a property of an experience, which is why we talk of the pleasure of eating ice cream, the pleasure of listening to Bach, etc., and which is why I prefer to call it pleasantness; and an attitude is neither pleasure not an experience.

Similarly, "good" is a concept that bridges descriptive and normative judgments, and your definition falls on the normative side, because the claim that something merits a positive attitude is the claim that someone should respond to it with a positive attitude.

I think the current orthodox view is that ‘good’ is a ‘thin’ evaluative term without descriptive content, rather than a ‘thick’ term such as ‘courageous’ or ‘generous’, which both evaluates and describes (https://iep.utm.edu/thick-co/). This sounds right to me. If you can think of an example of ‘good’ being used not merely to evaluate but also to describe, perhaps you could post it, together with an explanation of what you consider the descriptive content to be.

This sort of contemporary philosophy strikes me as an inheritance from Hume, and I doubt I will agree with much of it. I see the difference between 'good' and 'courageous' as a matter of degree and abstraction, but not kind. As an example, a civil engineer might go around the country inspecting bridges for possible repairs. He may well call the bridges that require no repairs "good bridges." It seems to me that such a use is descriptive (as well as evaluative). To give a parallel, an army recruiter might go around the country searching for courageous men and women, and he would be wielding that quality in much the same way that the civil engineer wields 'good'.

On reflection, I am going to distance myself from the thin/thick distinction, but in the opposite direction from you. I now think that 'courageous' is not evaluative, but merely descriptive; any evaluative content it may seem to have is the result of a shared background assumption by the speaker and his audience that courage is good, an assumption which does not find its way into the words uttered.

That is the problem with your examples: both the civil engineer and the army recruiter are making incomplete statements which are completed by unstated assumptions they share with their audience. When the civil engineer says 'this is a good bridge' to another civil engineer, they share an idea of the properties a bridge must have for them both to call it 'good'; it is that unstated idea that has the descriptive content, not the phrase 'good bridges'. 'Good bridges' tells you nothing about the bridges except that they merit a positive attitude (which is always false, for the same reason as the ice cream; bridges are just lumps of concrete or stone, which don't in themselves merit any kind of attitude). And when the army recruiter looks for courageous men and women, he does so without stating his assumption that courage is a good thing for people in the army to have, so in his case, the evaluative content is in that unstated assumption, not in any use of the word 'courageous'.

I would just want to clarify that when you say something is intrinsically evil, what you mean is that that thing represents a net negative when taken in isolation?

I mean that it merits a negative attitude because of what it is in itself, not because it is instrumental in bringing about something else that merits a negative attitude. I think that comes to the same thing as what you are saying.

If we follow Thomas Aquinas we would say that every act is subjectively considered to be good by the actor. In consequentialist terms we would say that the agent, in the moment of acting, believes their act will produce more good consequences than bad consequences, and that this is a necessary condition for acting.

I don’t see why people should not sometimes deliberately do things they think will have more bad consequences than good. In fact I should think it’s pretty common, because people often give their own interests far greater weight than the interests of others. Anyone who beats an animal must be aware that the animal’s pain outweighs their own pleasure, but they don’t care because at that moment the only being they care about is themselves.

But you've more or less conceded my point when you say, "...because people often give their own interests far greater weight than the interests of others." If their weighting were correct their act would be good.

It would; but I'm suggesting that people can sometimes choose evil knowing it's evil, because they want to do evil, as Satan does in Paradise Lost:
"Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold."
Satan knows the difference between good and evil, but chooses evil anyway.

I think the objective reality is that many actions do produce actual un/pleasantness, and I think this is enough to refute the charge of subjectivity.

[Objective fault]

In which case you would be required to say that the individual has weighted their own interests in an objectively incorrect way. In order to say that, you would have to be able to identify--at least vaguely--the correct way as well as the discrepancy. Anticipating some further argument, this sort of objectivity is going to require a number of moral axioms, and I don't see how a number of those axioms could ever be self-supported by consequentialism. For example, the equality principle whereby one person's interests must be weighted equally to another person's interests. It isn't clear to me how consequentialism in itself could ever hope to justify that principle.

I agree, it couldn't. Since consequentialism is merely the view that an action's rightness is determined by its consequences, it will always have to be supplemented by some view as to what those consequences should be. So yes, there have to be further axiom(s).

I’m a hedonist and a consequentialist, but I don’t think I’m a utilitarian, for the following reason:

[...]

My current view is that the fact that there are sentient beings capable of experiencing un/pleasantness gives rise to two consequentialist moral principles not one: the principle that we should aim to maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness where possible, and the principle that we should aim to distribute pleasantness and unpleasantness equally. Conflicts can arise between these two principles, and at present I am not aware of any way of resolving the conflicts other than making a subjective choice.

Well, you're already beginning to answer my question about the equality principle, so that's good. Two points:

An agent could face a choice between two actions, A and B; A will minimise total pain but the distribution will be unfair, B will result in more total pain but the distribution will be fair. Which is the right choice? The traditional utilitarian would say A, but I think this is not always the case.

Suppose A results in 50 units of pain for both Fred and Bill, whereas B results in 95 units of pain for Fred and no pain at all for Bill. Which should the agent choose, A or B? A totalist utilitarian would say B, because 95 is less than twice 50; an averagist utilitarian would agree, since an average of 47.5 is less than an average of 50.

I think both are wrong, by which I mean that is it not clear, as they think, that B is the moral choice. By focusing only on total or average pain, utilitarians ignore the fact that 2n units of pain experienced by one person is not the same as n units of pain experienced by each of two people.

This seems to merely be the claim that the units are unequal, or that they have not been measured correctly, or that pain tolerance is not linear. None of this strikes me as a substantial critique of utilitarianism.

No, I'm assuming that the units are equal and have been measured correctly. I'm saying that in asserting that it does not matter to whom the units are given, utilitarians are ignoring the possibility that giving n units of pain to each of two people may be morally better or worse than giving 2n units of pain to one person.

I think you need to ferret out this measurement problem before considering the principle of equality, because they are two different problems.

I don't know about 'before', but I agree that they are separate.

My current view is that the fact that there are sentient beings capable of experiencing un/pleasantness gives rise to two consequentialist moral principles not one: the principle that we should aim to maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness where possible, and the principle that we should aim to distribute pleasantness and unpleasantness equally.

Why think that your second principle is any more consequentialist than it is utilitarian? It strikes me as an egalitarian principle that is altogether separate from consequentialism, and it is just the sort of thing that would be required to establish objective fault, which I referred to above.

I agree that it isn't a consequentialist principle. I shouldn't have said that it was.

What we mean by a rule of thumb is a simple and not-too-unsatisfactory approximation to a complex right answer. If there isn't a knowable right answer it's hard to see how one can approximate to it.

An obvious counter-example to your thesis here is pi. Since pi does not have a finite number of decimal places, the answer to the question 'what is the numerical value of pi?' is not knowable, yet we have various rules of thumb (e.g. 22/7, 3.14159) which approximate with varying degrees of closeness to pi, depending on how many decimal places you actually need.

The precise target that pi approximates is not a numerical quantity, it is a ratio, namely the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Pi is the numerical quantity that approximates this ratio.

Well, no, pi is not an approximation to the ratio, pi is the ratio, though it is equivalently expressed as a number by taking the diameter to be 1 and then not bothering to mention it:

"The number π (/paɪ/; spelled out as "pi") is a mathematical constant, approximately equal to 3.14159. It is defined in Euclidean geometry as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter... As an irrational number, π cannot be expressed as a common fraction, although fractions such as 22/7 are commonly used to approximate it." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi)

And the point here is that the ratio is unknowable even in principle:

"We have known since the 18th century that we will never be able to calculate all the digits of pi because it is an irrational number, one that continues forever without any repeating pattern." (https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/ar ... enpatterns)

Thus when we use 22/7 or 3.1459 or somesuch as an approximation for the ratio of circumference to diameter, we are using a rule of thumb to approximate something unknowable in principle, which makes it a counter-example to Good Egg's thesis.

[NewToThinkingGuy]

I can see no coherent way to justify the belief in objective morality. I see many good arguments where the reasoning and logic is fine, but the problem is in the axioms. I see no way the axioms can come from anywhere other than the collective values of individual people.

At such morality is dependant on the values of people and if such values are different in different societies and through different times, then morality is relative.

[psyreporter]

The basic problem with subjectivist moral theories like Gertie's or CIN's is that they are ungrounded. They provide no coherent, internal way to justify their own claims. They do not even propose their moral claims as being objectively true.

Gertie's <intersubjective agreement> cannot ground morality. Gertie's idea that there can be moral rules of thumb without true moral principles underlying them is incoherent. CIN's crucial claim that utils are measurable in principle and only loosely in practice doesn't seem justifiable. How, for example, would the precise measurement work in principle?

The problem with these theories is quite simple. Morality is objective in nature, and therefore theories which start from subjectivist premises will not be able to support morality. If you don't believe that objective moral judgments are possible, then you don't believe in morality. Attempts to derive morality from subjectivism will either be incoherent or else their product will not be morality, but rather something else. For example, intersubjective consensus results in some form of majority rule, which everyone knows is not morality.

Morality is neither subjective or objective. Morality involves meaning beyond value (a priori or "before value").

Morality is the result of addressing the simple question "What is good?.

The quote in my footnote provides reasoning by which morality cannot be objective.

"If life were to be good as it was, there would be no reason to exist."

[psyreporter]

So I believe that my calculus is based on an objective concept - the concept of un/pleasantness having the property of meriting a positive/negative response.

What about acts of selflessness that are supposedly carried out based on a sense of morality alone? The corresponding experience could be highly unpleasant or even painful and yet, the individual finds motivation to get through it.

Suppose the managers of an airport have the choice between playing Mozart or playing Beethoven over the sound system when they're not using it to make announcements. What is the moral choice ?

When it concerns a choice that concerns the good of others, then it can be said that morality is involved.

[Pattern-chaser]

Morality involves meaning beyond value (a priori or "before value").

Morality is the result of addressing the simple question "What is good?.

Surely morality is a human value judgement? It is not "before value", it is (the assignment of) value, IMO. Oh, and I don't think the question "What is good?" is as simple a question as you say...?

[psyreporter]

Morality involves meaning beyond value (a priori or "before value").

Morality is the result of addressing the simple question "What is good?.

Surely morality is a human value judgement? It is not "before value", it is (the assignment of) value, IMO. Oh, and I don't think the question "What is good?" is as simple a question as you say...?

For valuing (assignment of value) to be possible, something is required and that something provides morality with substance (meaning). That something cannot be objective since then it would need to have been valued, which is a logical impossibility.

The product of valuing is value. A value judgement is an ethical notion and belongs to ethics. The origin of a value judgement is the addressing of the question "What is good?" by which a value judgement can be said to be moral, however, morality is never fixed and thus is not within a value judgement. One can merely make a case that the question "What is good?" is answered accurately on behalf of all relevant aspects involved (e.g. other people, animals, the environment), which is ethics.

Which may be of interest, philosopher Bertrand Russell was opposed ethical claims (subjective moral judgements) because, in his view, such claims result in violence.

(2020) The politics of logic - Philosophy at war: nationalism and logical analysis
Russell told one colleague that the talk (On Scientific Method in Philosophy, Oxford) ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions.
...
In private, Russell referred to the essay as ‘Philosophers and Pigs’.
...
Russell’s antiwar protest was so extensive that it would cost him both his job and, for a time, his personal freedom. His theoretical antidote to the irrational, sectarian vitriol between European nations was to try to show how logic could function as an international language that could be used impartially and dispassionately to adjudicate disputes. His theoretical antidote was, in other words, analytic philosophy.

‘The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany … it is in its essence neutral’
https://aeon.co/essays/philosophy-at-wa ... l-analysis

Truth = "meaning before value" or 'good' = origin of morality.

Aristotle considers a state of philosophical contemplation (eudaimonia) the greatest virtue (highest human good). It is a strive to serve life: the discovery of "good" from which value follows. It would be an everlasting quest and thus philosophy (morality) would have no end and would advance into infinity.

With regard the question "What is good?". It consists of three words, but other than that, simplicity would depend on the case in which the question is applied.

[Pattern-chaser]

Morality involves meaning beyond value (a priori or "before value").

Morality is the result of addressing the simple question "What is good?.

Surely morality is a human value judgement? It is not "before value", it is (the assignment of) value, IMO.

For valuing (assignment of value) to be possible, something is required and that something provides morality with substance (meaning).

And surely that 'something', in the context of this discussion, is a human being?

That something cannot be objective since then it would need to have been valued, which is a logical impossibility.

Something that is 'objective' - meaning "universal", or perhaps "eternal", I assume? - can surely be assigned value by a human being?