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

[Sculptor1]

The absurd idea that moral claims are the same as empirical claims. They are not.
A moral claim asks us to judge a situation. An empirical claim is simply about observation.
You cannot look at a moral like you can a brick or a cheese burger.
Whilst empirically we can agree that a burger is on the table we cannot so easily agree to like burgers, or to decide whether or not a burger is good for you.
Then how much more difficult is it to decide on the truth of a moral question?

You're right that moral rightness or wrongness is not directly informed by the physical senses. But what difference does that make ?

When you walk past someone's house and see through the window that there's a burger on the table, do you think that is an act of pure observation, untainted by judgment ? Or are you in fact using judgment to interpret your sense-perception and reach a conclusion as to whether there's a burger on the table ? Rather than just a picture of a burger, or a stage prop, or some other food which happens to be arranged into a vaguely-burger-like shape ?

If one of the windows is open and you can smell a meaty frying sort of smell to corroborate your visual sense, then it's more likely to be a burger.

But you're still comparing what you know about this thing with an idea or template of what a burger is, and using your judgment to reach a conclusion.

If you look through the window of the next house and see what looks like a man slapping a woman and hitting her with a stick, and judge that you're witnessing a crime in progress, is the process really that different ?

Where's the philosophically-significant difference that justifies your conclusion that a moral judgment lacks objective reality ?

If you had not noticed you answered your own question.

The chance of objectivity is difficult to say the least, but you can agree that a burger is a burger.
What you do with it, what you want to do with it and what you ought to do with it are all subjective.

As for a woman being beaten we can agree that the stick exists and that blows are being received by the woman. None of those are moral judgements.
"Beat" is already a moral judgment.
The woman might be enjoying it as part of a sexual game.
The man might own the woman and have every right to beat her, such as in slave owning cultures (most of human history).
There is no objective moral reflection we can make here - even if the woman would rather it were not happening.

[Pattern-chaser]

So consensus is necessary in order for truth to exist ?

Consensus is necessary if truth is to be agreed upon

Consensus is people agreeing. So your statement is an example of the form "X is necessary for X". Don't see how I can argue against that...

OK, I got caught out. Perhaps I could've said this:

While truth is important of itself, it is not accepted unless most people agree that it is true. Consensus simply reflects that acceptance. Without it, in practice only, there is no truth.

[CIN]

What do you think is required for the surgeon to treat all six patients as ends in themselves?

Well, if they are each to be treated as ends in themselves then we surely can't kill one of them for the sake of the others. There is probably no more obvious way to transgress such a principle than to murder someone--to destroy their very existence--as a means to a further end. Again, this should be perfectly obvious.

So if you let the five unhealthy patients die when you could save their lives, how is that treating them as ends in themselves?

How is it not? What is your argument? Apparently it is something like, "You have to give medical care to everyone who needs it, otherwise you are not treating them as an end in themselves." That idea makes no sense to me. Feel free to defend it.

Well, if they are each to be treated as ends in themselves then we surely can't let them die when we could save their lives. There is probably no more obvious way to transgress such a principle than to let someone die when you could keep them alive. This should be perfectly obvious.

[Good_Egg]

Well, if they are each to be treated as ends in themselves then we surely can't let them die when we could save their lives. There is probably no more obvious way to transgress such a principle than to let someone die when you could keep them alive.

Not so. The opposite of treating someone as an end in themselves is to treat them as a means to your own end. To treat them as a thing that exists for no purpose other than to he used by you for your purposes.

If I place a limit on the help that I will give you, that is not the same as using you. If I could save your life by paying for an operation but it would cost me my home and the tools I need for my job, I might decide that the price is too high, and I'll settle for doing a few little things to make your last hours more pleasant... That's not using you. That's treating you as an end in all my dealings with you, but placing a limit on how much I'm prepared to put into our relationship.

[snt]

I would like to believe there are eternal moral truths and a moral order. That are actions in this life matter and that no evil can become of a good man. But sometimes I wonder if moral truths are just made up by man and passed down through tradition. But deep down I do believe that things like "always helping a person in need" is a moral truth or good that all people should ascribe to.

When morality is meaningful beyond a subject human concept it would necessarily need to precede human nature and give meaning to the human and its concepts. In such a situation morality would be the origin of good in the world, which is passed on by culture, tradition and wisdom. That good is a product and is questionable while morality itself would be pure or eternal of nature.

Eternal moral truths are to be discovered in the face of an unknown future. Morality is about the quest (the potential for moral consideration).

When a purpose or reason of life (moral truth) could be defined beforehand, it would not be required to discover it and that would cause life to lose its meaning. While this seems difficult and problematic, in the same time it provides meaning.

The same is the case with morality. It starts with the quest (the potential for moral consideration).

[Leontiskos]

Well, if they are each to be treated as ends in themselves then we surely can't kill one of them for the sake of the others. There is probably no more obvious way to transgress such a principle than to murder someone--to destroy their very existence--as a means to a further end. Again, this should be perfectly obvious.

So if you let the five unhealthy patients die when you could save their lives, how is that treating them as ends in themselves?

How is it not? What is your argument? Apparently it is something like, "You have to give medical care to everyone who needs it, otherwise you are not treating them as an end in themselves." That idea makes no sense to me. Feel free to defend it.

Well, if they are each to be treated as ends in themselves then we surely can't let them die when we could save their lives.

Why?

This is a philosophy forum. Why not try making some arguments?

[CIN]

Well, if they are each to be treated as ends in themselves then we surely can't let them die when we could save their lives. There is probably no more obvious way to transgress such a principle than to let someone die when you could keep them alive.

Not so. The opposite of treating someone as an end in themselves is to treat them as a means to your own end.

No, the opposite of treating someone as an end in themselves is not treating them as an end in themselves.

To treat them as a thing that exists for no purpose other than to he used by you for your purposes.

You're making the same mistake that @Leontiskos made - confusing treating someone as a means with treating them as only a means.

If I place a limit on the help that I will give you, that is not the same as using you.

No, it isn't, but this is irrelevant, because you got the first bit of your argument wrong.

If I could save your life by paying for an operation but it would cost me my home and the tools I need for my job, I might decide that the price is too high, and I'll settle for doing a few little things to make your last hours more pleasant... That's not using you.

Same error as the previous sentence.

That's treating you as an end in all my dealings with you, but placing a limit on how much I'm prepared to put into our relationship.

It's treating me as an end, but as less of an end than if you paid for my operation.

When you say 'the price is too high', you are making a utilitarian calculation, weighing up the benefits to me from paying for my operation against the benefits to you from not paying for it. See, I knew you would convert to utilitarianism if you thought about it properly! Welcome to my side of the argument!

[CIN]

So if you let the five unhealthy patients die when you could save their lives, how is that treating them as ends in themselves?

How is it not? What is your argument? Apparently it is something like, "You have to give medical care to everyone who needs it, otherwise you are not treating them as an end in themselves." That idea makes no sense to me. Feel free to defend it.

Well, if they are each to be treated as ends in themselves then we surely can't let them die when we could save their lives.

Why?

This is a philosophy forum. Why not try making some arguments?

Why don't you make some arguments to support your contention that 'There is probably no more obvious way to transgress such a principle than to murder someone--to destroy their very existence--as a means to a further end'?

You made your claim first, so I think you should go first. (I'm very polite.)

[Astro Cat]

I would like to believe there are eternal moral truths and a moral order. That are actions in this life matter and that no evil can become of a good man. But sometimes I wonder if moral truths are just made up by man and passed down through tradition. But deep down I do believe that things like "always helping a person in need" is a moral truth or good that all people should ascribe to.

I don't think there are moral truths. As a moral noncognitivist, I don't think the utterance "moral truths" has a cognizable referent to reference. Up front, I use correspondence theory of truth in that something is true if it corresponds to something in reality.

I think that moral beliefs behave philosophically a lot like preferences. So let me talk about preferences for a moment. When we make a preference statement, it's usually non-controversial to say that the preference statement isn't propositional (it doesn't have a truth value). If I snack on a string cheese and say "String cheese is tasty*," I haven't said something that corresponds to mind-independent reality; it's neither true nor false. It's a preference statement. After all, what corresponds to reality about "being tasty," and how does the string cheese do it? How do we check reality for it even in principle?

(*-by this I mean it tastes good, not just that it has physical properties that activate taste buds)

At the same time, I could concoct a statement about this that is propositional. "Astro Cat thinks string cheese is tasty." There's a correspondence to reality here: we have an object of the statement (Astro Cat) and we have a statement that she has some mental state (thinks string cheese is tasty). This statement is propositional, it has a truth value, it's possible for it to be false and we can check reality for it by seeing if Astro Cat has this mental state.

So for easy reference, let me call these S1 and S2:
S1: String cheese is tasty.
S2: Astro Cat thinks string cheese is tasty.

S1 is not propositional, but S2 is. That's an important distinction that I think gets muddied up in moral debates.

I think moral statements behave a lot like S1 and S2. Consider:

S1a Feeding the needy is good.
S2a Astro Cat thinks feeding the needy is good.

Now I think we can all agree that S2 and S2a are propositional (and in this case, true). But why is it that most people are willing to agree that S1 is non-propositional, but at the same time insist that S1a is propositional? The moral realist/moral truthist must be able to elucidate, somehow, whatever quality it is that makes S1a propositional that wouldn't also apply to S1, and I've never seen anybody able to do this.

What about being "good" as in "feeding the needy is good" corresponds to reality, and how do we check reality for this quality even in principle? How could there be a truth about that?

We can make propositional statements about it: "If we feed the needy, then they will not suffer." That's propositional and true. We can admit that we have preferences about it: I certainly prefer that people don't starve or suffer, and I will go to great lengths to try to ensure they don't. But this doesn't answer the question of where any sort of ought would come from: why ought we to feed the needy? Why ought we care if they suffer?

What does it mean for an ought to correspond to reality? I submit that I've never heard of a good way for one to, hence the noncognitivism.

I think that our moral beliefs are preferences. I think we make hypothetical imperatives based on our values (I value life and happiness, so I ought to feed needy people). But I don't think we can ground those hypothetical imperatives because there will always be a microcosm ("well, why ought I value life and happiness?") There will eventually be microcosms for which the answer seems to simply be "because I happen to value x" for any x. But we will never answer why we ought to value x. We just do.

I think there are evolutionary explanations (altruism as a social trait for instance). There are obviously both nature and nurture reasons. I think doxastic voluntarism is false (we don't choose our beliefs consciously out of force of will: I can't look at an empty garage and will myself to truly believe it contains a dragon no matter how hard I try), so I don't think we will our "oughts" into existence either. I think we just have them for whatever reasons, and then we make hypothetical imperatives based on them to arrive to our morality. But all of this, at the end of the day, seems like something else we know: preferences.

I don't know why I like string cheese or think I should help feed the needy. I just know that I feel that way. But I don't think those are truths.

[Robert66]

something is true if it corresponds to something in reality.

"If we feed the needy, then they will not suffer." That's propositional and true.

Not if their need is for something other than food. Even if they are hungry, feeding them may only postpone their suffering from hunger, and have no effect on their persecution, homelessness, mental illness etc.

[Astro Cat]

Not if their need is for something other than food. Even if they are hungry, feeding them may only postpone their suffering from hunger, and have no effect on their persecution, homelessness, mental illness etc.

You are right of course, it was poor phrasing on my part. What I meant to type is “If we feed the needy, then they will not hunger.” Of course food doesn’t correlate to other forms of suffering and I didn’t intend to insinuate it. I was typing late into the night! ^_^

[Good_Egg]

This statement is propositional, it has a truth value, it's possible for it to be false and we can check reality for it by seeing if Astro Cat has this mental state.

So for easy reference, let me call these S1 and S2:
S1: String cheese is tasty.
S2: Astro Cat thinks string cheese is tasty.

S1 is not propositional, but S2 is. That's an important distinction that I think gets muddied up in moral debates.

If a child says "String cheese is tasty!" we might parse that as the first-person equivalent of S2 - a young Astro Cat reporting factually that the pleasure-centres of her brain are positively stimulated by the taste of string cheese.

If a socially-gracious adult Astro Cat makes the same remark to her anxious hostess at a party, it could conceivably be a polite lie, designed to reassure that the offered refreshment is fully acceptable.

In that interpretation, S1 is just as propositional, and in theory falsifiable, as S2.

But if a nutritional biologist speculates that string cheese is tasty because the body needs salt and fat and thus the desire for both has survival value in an evolutionary context, then they're saying something about human nature. Which remains valid if a few individuals lack this desire.

I think moral statements behave a lot like S1 and S2.

Seems to me there's a valid parallel. One might say "people should be polite" with the meaning "it gratifies my sense of how people should behave when they are polite (and offends that sense when they are rude)", which could be a true report of one's internal mental state, or a lie that is a form of social manipulation.

Or one could say the same thing as a proposition about human nature, saying that communities in some sense function better when people are polite. Which could be true even if individuals lack the sense of it.

But this doesn't answer the question of where any sort of ought would come from: why ought we to feed the needy? Why ought we care if they suffer?

What does it mean for an ought to correspond to reality? I submit that I've never heard of a good way for one to, hence the noncognitivism.

This is the heart of the problem. Why ought we to do anything at all ?

Once one has accepted that there is a set of things that one ought to do, one can reason about whether any particular thing belongs with the others in that set or not. Pattern recognition is what we're good at.

But establishing that such a set exists - that's the hard bit.

All I can note here is that a statement about what is can be validated or falsified against what our senses tell us actually is. But if we expect a statement about what ought to be to be capable of validation or falsification against what is, then we're looking in the wrong place. Ethical propositions need to be validated against our sense of what ought to be.

Of course it is objected that we don't agree on what ought to be. But we don't allow disagreements about what is to drive us to the conclusion that there is no objective reality. Or do we ?

[snt]

What does it mean for an ought to correspond to reality? I submit that I've never heard of a good way for one to, hence the noncognitivism.

I think that our moral beliefs are preferences. I think we make hypothetical imperatives based on our values (I value life and happiness, so I ought to feed needy people). But I don't think we can ground those hypothetical imperatives because there will always be a microcosm ("well, why ought I value life and happiness?") There will eventually be microcosms for which the answer seems to simply be "because I happen to value x" for any x. But we will never answer why we ought to value x. We just do.

The argument "We just do" (have values based preferences) would be similar to the argument "God did it" in my opinion. It doesn't provide a fundamental explanation for morality (the mentioned 'ought').

Your logical consideration of the apparent infinite regress in the attempt to escape 'ought' by depending on values based preferences indicates that the concept 'good' is applicable as an a priori factor.

When it concerns values, it equally involves the concept 'good' because valuing does not concern a choice between good and bad but a valuation on the basis of just good.

I think there are evolutionary explanations (altruism as a social trait for instance). There are obviously both nature and nurture reasons. I think doxastic voluntarism is false (we don't choose our beliefs consciously out of force of will: I can't look at an empty garage and will myself to truly believe it contains a dragon no matter how hard I try), so I don't think we will our "oughts" into existence either. I think we just have them for whatever reasons, and then we make hypothetical imperatives based on them to arrive to our morality. But all of this, at the end of the day, seems like something else we know: preferences.

That conclusion is not justified in my opinion. The mentioned infinite regress that would result from values based preferences indicates that it cannot be a fundamental explanation for morality.

When it concerns a philosophical explanation for morality, it will be important to explain 'whatever reasons' fundamentally.

I don't know why I like string cheese or think I should help feed the needy. I just know that I feel that way. But I don't think those are truths.

That would seem like a proposition for moral intuitionism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism-ethics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_intuitionism

[Astro Cat]

If a child says "String cheese is tasty!" we might parse that as the first-person equivalent of S2 - a young Astro Cat reporting factually that the pleasure-centres of her brain are positively stimulated by the taste of string cheese.

If a socially-gracious adult Astro Cat makes the same remark to her anxious hostess at a party, it could conceivably be a polite lie, designed to reassure that the offered refreshment is fully acceptable.

In that interpretation, S1 is just as propositional, and in theory falsifiable, as S2.

But if a nutritional biologist speculates that string cheese is tasty because the body needs salt and fat and thus the desire for both has survival value in an evolutionary context, then they're saying something about human nature. Which remains valid if a few individuals lack this desire.

What you're saying is true, so perhaps I just need to be more careful about what I mean.

S1 is supposed to represent a statement that string cheese tastes good: not that the current taster believes it tastes good, but that the string cheese itself has some property of tasting good.

In the same way that some people say "one ought not to steal," and we know they don't just mean that they themselves believe one ought not to steal but that in general one ought not to steal, S1 is supposed to represent the same sort of general statement in structure.

Seems to me there's a valid parallel. One might say "people should be polite" with the meaning "it gratifies my sense of how people should behave when they are polite (and offends that sense when they are rude)", which could be a true report of one's internal mental state, or a lie that is a form of social manipulation.

Or one could say the same thing as a proposition about human nature, saying that communities in some sense function better when people are polite. Which could be true even if individuals lack the sense of it.

While true that one could evaluate S1a as a truncation of a longer statement (e.g., "people should be polite" really being a truncation of "it is my belief that people should be polite"), the form of my argument doesn't treat it this way; so again I guess the onus falls on me to make sure that's clear.

There are people in the world that will make statements of the form S1a where they mean "feeding the needy is good," and it is not just a truncation of S2a: they mean to say that regardless of how they personally feel about feeding the needy, that there is a quality about feeding the needy that makes it "good."

So while yes, we can look at statements like S1 and say it might be a truncated form of S2, or similarly with S1a being a truncated form of S2a, I just need to be clear that in my argument, S1 is not a truncated S2, and S1a is not a truncated S2a, even though some people might with such meanings.

This is the heart of the problem. Why ought we to do anything at all ?

Once one has accepted that there is a set of things that one ought to do, one can reason about whether any particular thing belongs with the others in that set or not. Pattern recognition is what we're good at.

But establishing that such a set exists - that's the hard bit.

All I can note here is that a statement about what is can be validated or falsified against what our senses tell us actually is. But if we expect a statement about what ought to be to be capable of validation or falsification against what is, then we're looking in the wrong place. Ethical propositions need to be validated against our sense of what ought to be.

Of course it is objected that we don't agree on what ought to be. But we don't allow disagreements about what is to drive us to the conclusion that there is no objective reality. Or do we ?

Yeah, that's the tough bit. I think that we have a series of nested values from which we derive hypothetical imperatives (if I value x, then I ought to do y) that drive our morality. Some of those values might even be mutually exclusive in some contexts, whence moral dilemmas come from:

e.g., I value life, I value property. So if someone must steal bread to survive, that's a "moral dilemma."

However, I think our values come in hierarchies: we value some things more than others. In this case, I value life more than I value property. I would probably look the other way if a starving person stole a loaf of bread.

Someone else's hierarchy might look different, and thus lead them to different moral hypothetical imperatives.

[Astro Cat]

The argument "We just do" (have values based preferences) would be similar to the argument "God did it" in my opinion. It doesn't provide a fundamental explanation for morality (the mentioned 'ought').

Indeed it doesn't, but it's not what I set out to do. I set out to question whether the phrase "moral truth" is cognizable. In essence, my thinking was that I don't have to give an explanation for where our preferences come from in order to poke holes in moral realism.

I did engage in some limited speculation: our preferences are probably a combination of nature and nurture, with some evolutionary background and our parental/societal/incidental upbringing as factors. So when I say "I don't know why I prefer x over y, I just do," where this preference came from might be irrelevant to the context at hand; what's more relevant is how that preference philosophically behaves. Where it comes from seems a separate issue.

Your logical consideration of the apparent infinite regress in the attempt to escape 'ought' by depending on values based preferences indicates that the concept 'good' is applicable as an a priori factor.

When it concerns values, it equally involves the concept 'good' because valuing does not concern a choice between good and bad but a valuation on the basis of just good.

I understand every word in these sentences, but I'm not understanding the way you've put them together. Can you rephrase this for me possibly?

Also, to be clear, I don't think the "ought" regress is infinite; rather that we eventually hit a foundation, and that foundation is just some kind of value that we have. The ultimate answer to "why ought we feed hungry people?" isn't "because if we don't feed them, they'll suffer" because there's a microcosm question: "why ought we care if they suffer?" We hit the end of the regress when we reach some value: "why ought we care if they suffer?" "Because I value altruism, I value preventing and alleviating suffering. So I ought to feed hungry people."

The point was to point out that moral realism would have us believe that there's an answer to the question "why ought we value altruism?"

I don't think there's an answer to that question, because I don't think we "ought" to value altruism. I do value altruism, and I was saying that the reasons why are inconsequential, but the moral realist has some onus of evidence to show why we "ought" to. The noncognitivist is more concerned with whether the value is valued, and it's simply either true or false that it's valued. Their job is done. The realist has to go on and demonstrate why we "ought" to value it.

That conclusion is not justified in my opinion. The mentioned infinite regress that would result from values based preferences indicates that it cannot be a fundamental explanation for morality.

When it concerns a philosophical explanation for morality, it will be important to explain 'whatever reasons' fundamentally.

Hopefully my response just above covers this objection.

That would seem like a proposition for moral intuitionism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism-ethics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_intuitionism

Moral intuitionism can still be reliant on there existing moral truths, which is what I dispute as a moral non-cognitivist. However, it's not entirely wrong that we do intuit and introspect our own values. So I can see why you would say this.