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

[Pattern-chaser]

...scientific discovery can lead to finding out what set of behaviors best maximize human wellbeing.

I think not. There is no useful and viable definition of "human wellbeing" that science can create or produce. The factors that feed into human wellbeing are mostly invisible, undetectable, to science or scientific instruments. You don't hire a blind interior designer to colour-coördinate your home decoration. Nor should you apply science to human wellbeing.

[Gertie]

Just finished The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris) and wanted to debate the central thesis of his book.

Do you believe that we can scientifically quantify what it means to be moral? Harris believes so, and says that we can find a way to maximize human well-being through scientific measures. His claim rests on the idea that increasing human well being should be the goal of morality. He defends this by stating that anything that we should care about related to morality is something that actually effects our well being. In other words, while some moral systems reference abstract values, he believes that the only thing we should really define as moral is something that increases human well being.

I imagine a counter example.

What if scientists could invent a machine where users would be given unlimited pleasure and their well being would be taken care of to the utmost. This machine has no drawbacks in that there is no "hangover" from leaving, and it can faithfully simulate the utmost pleasures of real life. This would not be a matrix-like machine, rather we would all be conscious of our participation, and the effects would be just as good as any other source of pleasure/wellbeing. A thin layer of professionals might be required to keep these machines running, but in their off hours they too would be hooked up to the machine. It seems that under Harris's framework, it would be moral to hook us all up to this machine.

Of course, I am writing this because I have an intuition that this is incorrect. There must be some other factor at play other than simply an increase to all human wellbeing. Is it our freedom to actually create worse consequences, to actually lower human wellbeing that in a roundabout way is really what we mean when we think of morality? I hope discussion leads to more ideas here, as I cant carry this train of thought forwards at this time without further reflection and discussion.

I give Harris kudos for bringing his critical thinking skills to the problem of how to develop a secular notion of morality. And imo he's on the right track by trying to establish what is an appropriate conception of right and wrong, the Is/Ought distinction, and then practically addressing how best to achieve 'the good'.

His term 'The wellbeing of conscious creatures' pithily gets to the heart of the matter, to create a moral foundation to extrapolate guiding principles and rules of thumb from. It's about as good as we can get imo. Because our choices only matter to those who have a stake in the consequences of those choices - conscious creatures. It's that mattering which makes the Is/Ought distinction meaningful. (Something Goldstein gets a bit better than Harris imo).

Where I diverge a bit with Harris is with this notion of scientifically quantifying wellbeing. To me, it stretches the scientific toolkit of observation and measurement into an area it notoriously struggles with - the qualiative 'what it is like' nature of what it means to be a conscious, experiencing subject. And also has to deal with the ultimately unknowable idiosyncratic nature and vast range of conscious creatures, including complex humans. So the notion of perfect 'maximisation' is unrealistic, and also implies an authoritative basis for judgement of anything less, which can slide down an authoritarian path. It has the tang of both Religious and Modernist/Enlightenment thinking, both of which are rightly being critiqued now as we see where we've gotten to. But to Harris's great credit, at least he's taking it on.

So I prefer the term ''To Promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures''.

Because our idiosyncracies mean that while we share many basic needs for flourishing, our chosen paths will vary, and that's fine. This means that freedoms have to be part of the formula when considering rules of thumb. And as a consequentialist approach, rules of thumb is the appropriate starting place, as plans often go awry and life is complicated. To me it makes sense to consider basic needs for flourishing as akin to Rights, where-as there should be more flexibility when it comes to laws, social mores, notions of culpability and punishment. And understand there will always be some messiness. Democracies can generally sort out where specific lines are drawn well enough, but need the under-girding of Rights to protect the vulnerable against the tyranny of the majority.

My answer to your hypothetical is that ideally people should be free to choose if/when they hook up to the machine. It actually reminded me of the religious notion of heavenly bliss, which sounds alright to me. But I agree it does leave an uncomfortable feeling of losing something valuable of yourself, a vitality (or the counterpoint of Brave New World's 'soma'). As we're in perfect scenario territory here, I'll take the portable version with an on-off switch please.

While in reality moral Perfection is usually unachievable. What thinking about perfection can do is help us establish what we should try to move towards, the notion of progressivism. Looking at the world today, that's a tough enough challenge to be getting on with.

[Lagayascienza]

I agree that Harris' book is a step in the right direction. But I'd like to ask what others make of the critiques of the book by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Simon backburn and Russel Blackford. I'm too low status to be able to post links to their critiques here, but if you would like to read these critiques you can just Google the "philosophers name" followed by "critique of The Moral Landscape" and you will find them. The are all accessible and fairly short reads.

[Gertie]

I agree that Harris' book is a step in the right direction. But I'd like to ask what others make of the critiques of the book by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Simon backburn and Russel Blackford. I'm too low status to be able to post links to their critiques here, but if you would like to read these critiques you can just Google the "philosophers name" followed by "critique of The Moral Landscape" and you will find them. The are all accessible and fairly short reads.

I'm iffy about getting mired in Dennett's thinking, tho I don't know his position on morality.  Did you hear he's died?  I had lots of issues with him, but he'll be missed.  He was an  original thinker who helped popularise philosophy and had some smart insights.  RIP.

Anyway I tried Blackburn (a new name to me) and got some vids I couldn't access and this summary of Blackburn's position under  the Partially Examined Life vid which is privated (to me) -

There is no doubt, he notes, that “science can inform our values” (and I would add that this goes trivially for many other types of knowledge). But “as to whether you need nothing but science”, “I don’t agree with Sam about that and neither do the other three speakers we’ve heard so far.”

Agree.  As PC noted, science is a tool - one  which can help broadly establish what the requirements for flourishing are and how to best get there, so can things like Maslowe's hierarchy, or Rawles' Veil of Ignorance - and general common sense.

Blackburn grounds this in the traditional fact/value distinction but focuses on the functions of mental states rather than on ontology: where beliefs represent the world as it is, desires and concerns represent it as one would like it to be. Values represent a specific kind of desire that you are prepared to make public and insist upon from others.

I say in my post above that  Harris is weak on the 'Fact/Value'  or Is/Ought distinction.  My own view is a bit of a mash up of Harris and Goldstein's similar 'putting her finger on it' on Mattering.    As I say, it's the mattering of having a stake in the 'Is' state of affairs which makes sense of the Is/Ought distinction which lies at the heart of morality as something we do. 

The issue of 'the function of mental states' is currently at least, too complex and inscutable to be practicable.  And I don't see how even if we could monitor every specific neural pattern we consider useful to flourishing, we could weigh one against another.  Experience isn't that type of stuff. Maximisation or Perfection is a red herring with the risks I mentioned, but is helpful in giving a direction to strive towards.  Harris's critical thinking is strong and clear, I wish more were like him,  but can lead him down inappropriate absolutist alleyways  imo.

Blackburn goes on to say that the idea that ethics is about promoting welfare and avoiding suffering is a commonplace of every moral philosopher, not a discovery of science (as he claims Sam Harris has it): “Where the moral philosophers find the going difficult is in having an adequate conception of human flourishing.”

Fair point.  And again maximisation and perfection simply strike me as a pipe dream. Treat scientific knowledge as a useful tool in establishing what we broadly agree generally helps people thrive.  And use the concept of Rights to try to guarantee people at least have access to the basics - a safe home, food, education, or whatever we can come up with.  The UN Declaration on Human Rights isn't a bad attempt.

One might think the good life is merely about dreamlike states of contentedness — something that could be achieved by lies and drugs, the subject of Huxley’s objections in Brave New World. This leads Blackburn to a “fools paradise” objection (one might also call this the Truman Show objection): one might be happy merely out of ignorance and delusion, including deception by others on a grand scale.

Hah yes Brave New World is a strong counter. HL has his 'professional machine engineers' instead of drones, but somebody's got to cook your dinner and sweep the floor too...

According to Aristotle such a person is not flourishing — although this is something no neurological measure could tell us. If wisdom and knowing the truth are measures of flourishing, then mere knowledge about mental states (and accompanying brain states) is not enough. The same brain state accompanies a true belief as a false one, when they have the same content (and all other things being equal).

This is a trickier one.  Wisdom and knowing the truth aren't as simple as they sound, but I agree there's something vitalising  and  flourishing about striving and struggling with real life.  Prescriptive Heavenly Bliss sounds enticing, but boring and debilitating.  As I say, a portable version with an on-off switch would suit me!

According to another conception, flourishing is a matter of self-mastery, of suppressing rather than satisfying desire, as in Buddhism. The litmus test for the debate might be whether a scientist could ever tell us whether was Buddha was right. According to Blackburn, that simply will never be the case.

Again, the  idiosyncrasy of experiencing subjects neccessitates some freedoms as an aspect of the good.

Finally, he notes that “philosophy problematizes question of well-being,” and that saying everyone should be happy provides absolutely no guide to how to live one’s life. He further seems to suggest that what constitutes flourishing might vary radically from one individual to another.


(I’m not endorsing all of these arguments — I still have to think them over; although I’ve described my objections to Harris in previous posts (and hopefully will be able to do so in more detail in the near future)).

As above.



I think my post broadly covered most of this, they're not left field objections. And for now at least, perfection is not realistic.  We need a morality which works for us now, in this globalised post-modern limbo we're in.  'Try to promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures is the best contender imo'. 

The real challenge is to come up with something better.

[Sculptor1]

Just finished The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris) and wanted to debate the central thesis of his book.

Do you believe that we can scientifically quantify what it means to be moral? Harris believes so, and says that we can find a way to maximize human well-being through scientific measures. His claim rests on the idea that increasing human well being should be the goal of morality. He defends this by stating that anything that we should care about related to morality is something that actually effects our well being. In other words, while some moral systems reference abstract values, he believes that the only thing we should really define as moral is something that increases human well being.

Sam Harris exemplyfies the arrogance of the scientific minds' inability to understand the meaning of toxic reductionism.

This sounds like second hand Benthamist Utilitarianism.
I have no doubt that Harris would be quite capable of making a calculation that (in the long duree), if all Arabs were "removed" from Palestine, this weould lead to the net happiness of all the people that lived there.
By the same token you caould make the argument that more happiness would result from disappearing all Jews from the face of the earth. I'm pretty sure Hitler thought that.
The conflict has continued for 75 years, and it has brutalised both sides of the conflict, and led to dehumanisation. There is no prospect of resolution.
But how would you chose between the two alternatives?
Fact is there are more things to consider than human happiness, and even that is impossible to quantify.

[Lagayascienza]

I agree that Harris' book is a step in the right direction. But I'd like to ask what others make of the critiques of the book by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Simon backburn and Russel Blackford. I'm too low status to be able to post links to their critiques here, but if you would like to read these critiques you can just Google the "philosophers name" followed by "critique of The Moral Landscape" and you will find them. The are all accessible and fairly short reads.

I'm iffy about getting mired in Dennett's thinking, tho I don't know his position on morality.  Did you hear he's died?  I had lots of issues with him, but he'll be missed.  He was an  original thinker who helped popularise philosophy and had some smart insights.  RIP.

I'm very sorry to hear that he has died. I've recently finished his latest book "I've Been Thinking". I've read pretty much all he wrote. Most of the politicians, actors, writers, friends that have been in my face or in my life have dropped off the perch. I know more dead people than live people. Dennett was a smart guy. I went to a Global Atheist Convention about 15 years ago and heard him speak and met him very briefly.

Anyway I tried Blackburn (a new name to me) and got some vids I couldn't access and this summary of Blackburn's position under  the Partially Examined Life vid which is privated (to me) -

There is no doubt, he notes, that “science can inform our values” (and I would add that this goes trivially for many other types of knowledge). But “as to whether you need nothing but science”, “I don’t agree with Sam about that and neither do the other three speakers we’ve heard so far.”

Agree.  As PC noted, science is a tool - one  which can help broadly establish what the requirements for flourishing are and how to best get there, so can things like Maslowe's hierarchy, or Rawles' Veil of Ignorance - and general common sense.

Blackburn grounds this in the traditional fact/value distinction but focuses on the functions of mental states rather than on ontology: where beliefs represent the world as it is, desires and concerns represent it as one would like it to be. Values represent a specific kind of desire that you are prepared to make public and insist upon from others.

I say in my post above that  Harris is weak on the 'Fact/Value'  or Is/Ought distinction.  My own view is a bit of a mash up of Harris and Goldstein's similar 'putting her finger on it' on Mattering.    As I say, it's the mattering of having a stake in the 'Is' state of affairs which makes sense of the Is/Ought distinction which lies at the heart of morality as something we do. 

Yes, it's about mattering. And mattering is about feelings.

The issue of 'the function of mental states' is currently at least, too complex and inscutable to be practicable.  And I don't see how even if we could monitor every specific neural pattern we consider useful to flourishing, we could weigh one against another.  Experience isn't that type of stuff. Maximisation or Perfection is a red herring with the risks I mentioned, but is helpful in giving a direction to strive towards.  Harris's critical thinking is strong and clear, I wish more were like him,  but can lead him down inappropriate absolutist alleyways  imo.

Blackburn goes on to say that the idea that ethics is about promoting welfare and avoiding suffering is a commonplace of every moral philosopher, not a discovery of science (as he claims Sam Harris has it): “Where the moral philosophers find the going difficult is in having an adequate conception of human flourishing.”

Fair point.  And again maximisation and perfection simply strike me as a pipe dream. Treat scientific knowledge as a useful tool in establishing what we broadly agree generally helps people thrive.  And use the concept of Rights to try to guarantee people at least have access to the basics - a safe home, food, education, or whatever we can come up with.  The UN Declaration on Human Rights isn't a bad attempt.

One might think the good life is merely about dreamlike states of contentedness — something that could be achieved by lies and drugs, the subject of Huxley’s objections in Brave New World. This leads Blackburn to a “fools paradise” objection (one might also call this the Truman Show objection): one might be happy merely out of ignorance and delusion, including deception by others on a grand scale.

Hah yes Brave New World is a strong counter. HL has his 'professional machine engineers' instead of drones, but somebody's got to cook your dinner and sweep the floor too...

Difficulties with the meaning of wellbeing and its maximization and aggregation are common to all consequentialist moral schemes.

According to Aristotle such a person is not flourishing — although this is something no neurological measure could tell us. If wisdom and knowing the truth are measures of flourishing, then mere knowledge about mental states (and accompanying brain states) is not enough. The same brain state accompanies a true belief as a false one, when they have the same content (and all other things being equal).

This is a trickier one.  Wisdom and knowing the truth aren't as simple as they sound, but I agree there's something vitalising  and  flourishing about striving and struggling with real life.  Prescriptive Heavenly Bliss sounds enticing, but boring and debilitating.  As I say, a portable version with an on-off switch would suit me!

According to another conception, flourishing is a matter of self-mastery, of suppressing rather than satisfying desire, as in Buddhism. The litmus test for the debate might be whether a scientist could ever tell us whether was Buddha was right. According to Blackburn, that simply will never be the case.

Again, the  idiosyncrasy of experiencing subjects neccessitates some freedoms as an aspect of the good.

Finally, he notes that “philosophy problematizes question of well-being,” and that saying everyone should be happy provides absolutely no guide to how to live one’s life. He further seems to suggest that what constitutes flourishing might vary radically from one individual to another.

Yes, it's all very well to say that we hit moral bedrock at "wellbeing" but what if I think that, say, duty or virtue and where it's at?

(I’m not endorsing all of these arguments — I still have to think them over; although I’ve described my objections to Harris in previous posts (and hopefully will be able to do so in more detail in the near future)).

As above.

I think my post broadly covered most of this, they're not left field objections. And for now at least, perfection is not realistic.  We need a morality which works for us now, in this globalised post-modern limbo we're in.  'Try to promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures is the best contender imo'. 

The real challenge is to come up with something better.

Maybe something like "wellbeing" or "the promotion of flourishing" is the best we can do. But, whatever we decide on, it will still be based in human feelings. The questions I'm then driven to ask are: Why do things "matter" to us morally? Why do we have these moral feelings? Where do they come from ultimately? Can a moral judgement be objectively true? Do our moral feelings track objective moral truth? Or is objective moral truth an illusion?

[Gertie]

I agree that Harris' book is a step in the right direction. But I'd like to ask what others make of the critiques of the book by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Simon backburn and Russel Blackford. I'm too low status to be able to post links to their critiques here, but if you would like to read these critiques you can just Google the "philosophers name" followed by "critique of The Moral Landscape" and you will find them. The are all accessible and fairly short reads.

I'm iffy about getting mired in Dennett's thinking, tho I don't know his position on morality.  Did you hear he's died?  I had lots of issues with him, but he'll be missed.  He was an  original thinker who helped popularise philosophy and had some smart insights.  RIP.

I'm very sorry to hear that he has died. I've recently finished his latest book "I've Been Thinking". I've read pretty much all he wrote. Most of the politicians, actors, writers, friends that have been in my face or in my life have dropped off the perch. I know more dead people than live people. Dennett was a smart guy. I went to a Global Atheist Convention about 15 years ago and heard him speak and met him very briefly.

He was part of my intro to contemporary philosophy too, with Harris and Churchland back in the heady new atheist days. (Pat Churchland opened my eyes to the evolutionary story behind our moral intuitions, she was also on the ball with trying to trying to get a new field of neurophilosophy to take off). And I admired Dennett's intelligence and insights, and the relish he had for ideas and language. I just found his style didn't get me to the answers he promised. It's a similarishly torturous stylistic frustration I have with the phenomenologists. Obviously not for you

Anyway I tried Blackburn (a new name to me) and got some vids I couldn't access and this summary of Blackburn's position under  the Partially Examined Life vid which is privated (to me) -

There is no doubt, he notes, that “science can inform our values” (and I would add that this goes trivially for many other types of knowledge). But “as to whether you need nothing but science”, “I don’t agree with Sam about that and neither do the other three speakers we’ve heard so far.”

Agree.  As PC noted, science is a tool - one  which can help broadly establish what the requirements for flourishing are and how to best get there, so can things like Maslowe's hierarchy, or Rawles' Veil of Ignorance - and general common sense.

Blackburn grounds this in the traditional fact/value distinction but focuses on the functions of mental states rather than on ontology: where beliefs represent the world as it is, desires and concerns represent it as one would like it to be. Values represent a specific kind of desire that you are prepared to make public and insist upon from others.

I say in my post above that  Harris is weak on the 'Fact/Value'  or Is/Ought distinction.  My own view is a bit of a mash up of Harris and Goldstein's similar 'putting her finger on it' on Mattering.    As I say, it's the mattering of having a stake in the 'Is' state of affairs which makes sense of the Is/Ought distinction which lies at the heart of morality as something we do. 

Yes, it's about mattering. And mattering is about feelings.

This is specifically to do with the qualiative 'what it's like' nature of being Lagayascienza, rather than being say a rock or carrot. Hence the 'conscious creatures' part. It doesn't matter to the rock if I smash it, it doesn't have Quality of Life which matters to it, so I don't need to have moral consideration for the rock. ( Hence in a n a universe of only robots, rocks and carrots morality would be meaningless).

The issue of 'the function of mental states' is currently at least, too complex and inscutable to be practicable.  And I don't see how even if we could monitor every specific neural pattern we consider useful to flourishing, we could weigh one against another.  Experience isn't that type of stuff. Maximisation or Perfection is a red herring with the risks I mentioned, but is helpful in giving a direction to strive towards.  Harris's critical thinking is strong and clear, I wish more were like him,  but can lead him down inappropriate absolutist alleyways  imo.

Blackburn goes on to say that the idea that ethics is about promoting welfare and avoiding suffering is a commonplace of every moral philosopher, not a discovery of science (as he claims Sam Harris has it): “Where the moral philosophers find the going difficult is in having an adequate conception of human flourishing.”

Fair point.  And again maximisation and perfection simply strike me as a pipe dream. Treat scientific knowledge as a useful tool in establishing what we broadly agree generally helps people thrive.  And use the concept of Rights to try to guarantee people at least have access to the basics - a safe home, food, education, or whatever we can come up with.  The UN Declaration on Human Rights isn't a bad attempt.

One might think the good life is merely about dreamlike states of contentedness — something that could be achieved by lies and drugs, the subject of Huxley’s objections in Brave New World. This leads Blackburn to a “fools paradise” objection (one might also call this the Truman Show objection): one might be happy merely out of ignorance and delusion, including deception by others on a grand scale.

Hah yes Brave New World is a strong counter. HL has his 'professional machine engineers' instead of drones, but somebody's got to cook your dinner and sweep the floor too...

Difficulties with the meaning of wellbeing and its maximization and aggregation are common to all consequentialist moral schemes.

True. I'd say ones which see maximal perfection of wellbeing as the foundational goal have particular problems. As we agree, wellbeing can't be measured with the precision required to identify perfection. It's a fools errand which can lead to erroneous thinking. But also once you believe you have the indisputable perfect answer, it can instill an imperitive to impose it. Like the god-botherers knocking on your door to save your soul. And that can slide into authoritarianism.

Where-as realising perfection isn't possible when it comes to idiosyncratic experiencing subjects means some freedoms need to be built into the 'moral landscape'. That means you end up with a messy balancing act, rather than crisply satisfying perfection - but that's the nature of the experiential beast.

According to Aristotle such a person is not flourishing — although this is something no neurological measure could tell us. If wisdom and knowing the truth are measures of flourishing, then mere knowledge about mental states (and accompanying brain states) is not enough. The same brain state accompanies a true belief as a false one, when they have the same content (and all other things being equal).

This is a trickier one.  Wisdom and knowing the truth aren't as simple as they sound, but I agree there's something vitalising  and  flourishing about striving and struggling with real life.  Prescriptive Heavenly Bliss sounds enticing, but boring and debilitating.  As I say, a portable version with an on-off switch would suit me!

According to another conception, flourishing is a matter of self-mastery, of suppressing rather than satisfying desire, as in Buddhism. The litmus test for the debate might be whether a scientist could ever tell us whether was Buddha was right. According to Blackburn, that simply will never be the case.

Again, the  idiosyncrasy of experiencing subjects neccessitates some freedoms as an aspect of the good.

Finally, he notes that “philosophy problematizes question of well-being,” and that saying everyone should be happy provides absolutely no guide to how to live one’s life. He further seems to suggest that what constitutes flourishing might vary radically from one individual to another.

Yes, it's all very well to say that we hit moral bedrock at "wellbeing" but what if I think that, say, duty or virtue and where it's at?

Then you'd need to make your case for them as a more appropriate conception of morality, and if I find it more persuasive I'll agree. That's the philosophy biz.

My view is that we do need to establish that foundational moral bedrock which distinguishes between the Is state of affairs, and Oughts. Which Goldstein's notion of Mattering puts its finger on. Ideas like Virtue Ethics and Deontology are workarounds for not having such a foundation imo. And so are ultimately ad hoc, or ad populum based on what Hume identifies as basically a ''Yuck/Yum'' intuitive response.

To sum up my Goldstein/Harris mash up -

- Having a stake in the state of affairs, the state of affairs mattering to us, is what makes the Is/Ought difference.

- Only experiencing critters have this mattering stake in the state of affairs.

- Therefore the appropriate foundation for morality is trying to promote the wellbeing of of conscious creatures.


I feel like you'll go part of the way with me on that, but the fact that our intuitions are explainable by evolution and mostly work brings you pause?

(I’m not endorsing all of these arguments — I still have to think them over; although I’ve described my objections to Harris in previous posts (and hopefully will be able to do so in more detail in the near future)).

As above.

I think my post broadly covered most of this, they're not left field objections. And for now at least, perfection is not realistic.  We need a morality which works for us now, in this globalised post-modern limbo we're in.  'Try to promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures is the best contender imo'. 

The real challenge is to come up with something better.

Maybe something like "wellbeing" or "the promotion of flourishing" is the best we can do. But, whatever we decide on, it will still be based in human feelings. The questions I'm then driven to ask are: Why do things "matter" to us morally? Why do we have these moral feelings? Where do they come from ultimately? Can a moral judgement be objectively true? Do our moral feelings track objective moral truth? Or is objective moral truth an illusion?

It's a fair point that our feelings will be a factor, it's part of how we see the world. But 'Mattering' in my formulation is about the qualiative nature of being an experiencing subject - full stop. That quality of life experiencing subjects have which matters to us, and gives us a stake in what happens to us.

And your questions are valid. But we know broadly how our 'moral/social' intuitions evolved. Our evolved moral intuitions are part of Hume's IS state of affairs. My argument is a response to the challenge Hume sets us of how to derive Oughts from the the IS state of affairs, I think we still can.

I think we have to take a different approach to the Objective vs Subjective one to meet that challenge. That is, to identify Mattering, or having a stake in the IS state of affairs, as what makes the Is/Ought difference.

Here's my spiel -

We can agree we now know what we call human 'moral intuitions' are a result of our evolution as a social species (this is the angle Churchland addresses in her book Brain Trust, she has youtube talks too which are accessible to lay people). And The Moral Foundations Theory peeps have done research which broadly categorises how these transform into environmentally influenced broad cultural norms. We can take all that as read, with just some tinkering and the details yet to be sorted.

The above constitutes part of what Hume would call the 'Is' state of affairs - the 'objective' physicalist reality. Objectively speaking, that's it. No more to be said. And ''morality'' is just a concept we came up with before we understood this objective reality. So we could say this abstract concept of ''morality'' is explained, job done. We don't need to philosophise or worry about right and wrong or oughts any more, just get on with being human. I would add to that last sentence ''for better or worse'', but there is no ''better'' or ''worse'' in this 'objective' framing. It just Is what it Is. That's as far as the physicalist objective approach gets us.

A way of understanding that approach would be that morality is 'subjective', as in a feeling or opinion, with no other justification than this feels 'right' to me - and if it feels 'wrong' to you, that's equally valid. There's no objective benchmark to test our different feelings against, so everything is permissible. And in the end, the most powerful will get their way. In effect, Might is Right.

My approach says we lose something valuable seeing things through this lens of Objective vs Subjective. Something which matters, regardless of its Objective/Subjective status. This 'Mattering' aspect of the state of affairs is what we lose. It matters to experiencing subjects what the Is state of affairs happens to be - it matters to us what happens to us. And what we do can matter to other experiencing subjects.

And that 'Mattering' seems to me to identify a different territory to objective facts and subjective intuitions/opinions, a territory where Oughts make sense. Oughts make sense on the basis of us having a stake in the objective 'Is' state of affairs. If I steal your stuff, that matters to you. If I'm homeless but society grants me a Right to a home, that matters to me. That's Goldstein's 'mattering map'' landscape where we can find a moral bedrock. A foundation for right and wrong as more than a mistaken concept about objective reality.

As it turns out, that foundation is inherently consequentalist, and is rooted in the idiosyncratic qualiative nature of being an experiencig subject. Which means a lot of blurry messiness and imperfection inevitably comes with the territory. But it also gives us that necessary foundation to derive rules of thumb for actions, and a way to progress by checking the consequences of our actions against the foundation. We can't achieve perfection, but we have a way to do better.

(I know I yap on and on about this - sorry!)

[Lagayascienza]

There's a lot there to think about, Gertie. I'd like to read it closely before responding.

[Gertie]

There's a lot there to think about, Gertie. I'd like to read it closely before responding.

No worries, I appreciate you taking the time.

I'm coming at things from a different angle, but I think if we grasp that Mattering, or having a stake in the state of affairs, is what meaningfully makes sense of the Is/Ought distinction, we can stop worrying about the dead end Objective v Subjective perspective.

Once that foundation of what the 'Concept of Morality'is established (as opposed to the physical nuts n bolts of our neurology), it follows that conscious creatures are the types of beings we can meaningfully show moral consideration to. Because it's experiencing subjects who have a stake in what happens to us.

That can be pithily expressed as something like ''To Promote the Wellbeing of Conscious Creatures''. And begin to establish rule of thumb norms. With all the problems and messiness that involves.

[Lagayascienza]

This is specifically to do with the qualiative 'what it's like' nature of being Lagayascienza, rather than being say a rock or carrot. Hence the 'conscious creatures' part. It doesn't matter to the rock if I smash it, it doesn't have Quality of Life which matters to it, so I don't need to have moral consideration for the rock. ( Hence in a universe of only robots, rocks and carrots morality would be meaningless).

Right. In that sort of universe morality would not exist. Rocks don’t experience what-it-is-likeness. Nothing matters to a rock. (As far as we can tell). They are not moral beings.

In respect of consequentialist moral systems, you say:

… [Moral systems] which see maximal perfection of wellbeing as the foundational goal have particular problems. As we agree, wellbeing can't be measured with the precision required to identify perfection. It's a fools errand which can lead to erroneous thinking. But also once you believe you have the indisputable perfect answer, it can instill an imperitive to impose it. Like the god-botherers knocking on your door to save your soul. And that can slide into authoritarianism.

Agreed. No one can prove that their idea of wellbeing is the correct one. Although when it comes to what I call “core human morality”, it is likely that most people will agree about what is likely to promote general wellbeing. Or they would be likely to agree if their minds were not poisoned by some toxic fundamentalist religious or political doctrine.

Where-as realising perfection isn't possible when it comes to idiosyncratic experiencing subjects means some freedoms need to be built into the 'moral landscape'. That means you end up with a messy balancing act, rather than crisply satisfying perfection - but that's the nature of the experiential beast.

Right. It can’t be one size fits all because humans have natural physical and psychological variations and their circumstances will always vary – for example, some are born beautiful some are born plain, some are born rich some are born poor. But even so, we will still have a lot in common in terms of our moral sentiments. Most of us share what I call “core human morality”. (About which I’ll say a bit more below)

Then you'd need to make your case for them as a more appropriate conception of morality, and if I find it more persuasive I'll agree. That's the philosophy biz.

Indeed. I can’t prove that Osama Bin Laden’s idea of wellbeing was wrong. But I think I can make a pretty good case that his idea of wellbeing is unlikely to lead people to happiness and flourishing.

My view is that we do need to establish that foundational moral bedrock which distinguishes between the Is state of affairs, and Oughts. Which Goldstein's notion of Mattering puts its finger on. Ideas like Virtue Ethics and Deontology are workarounds for not having such a foundation imo. And so are ultimately ad hoc, or ad populum based on what Hume identifies as basically a ''Yuck/Yum'' intuitive response.

I agree that virtue and duty are just work-arounds. And yes, it’s about mattering, or feelings as I would put it. In this, I think Hume was onto something - the “yum/yuk” stuff is important. He said morality was based in our sentiments and I think he is right.

To sum up my Goldstein/Harris mash up -
[[[[- Having a stake in the state of affairs, the state of affairs mattering to us, is what makes the Is/Ought difference.

I’m not understanding you here. How does mattering bridge Hume’s is/ought gap? It can only do so with Goldstein’s idea that mattering does not need justification. If this means that our moral feelings don’t need justification then I agree. Humans cannot live a coherent life without feeling that things matter.

- Only experiencing critters have this mattering stake in the state of affairs.
- Therefore the appropriate foundation for morality is trying to promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures.

Yes, things matter to us, but I’m not understanding how it follows that we should promote the WBCC. If we have decided that the WBCC is what’s most important, then yes, wellbeing would be foundational. But that still leaves us with the question of what wellbeing is. No doubt Osama Bin Laden believed he had the wellbeing business all sown up. Kill evil, infidel Americans and thereby get into heaven where it’s wall to wall wellbeing. If his mind had not been poisoned by a radical religious doctrine, I’d hazard a guess that he might have had ideas about what constitutes wellbeing in line with most people’s core moral sentiments. But it wasn’t to be. People do crazy things when they believe crazy things.

I feel like you'll go part of the way with me on that, but the fact that our intuitions are explainable by evolution and mostly work brings you pause?

I have no problem with the idea that morality is only of concern to creatures to whom things can matter. And when ask the questions WHY do things matter to humans? and Which things generally DO matter to them? We are led back to evolution which provide insights into why we feel the way we do about certain issues. With those insights in place, we can then choose whether or not to accept that our feelings will generally be a good guide to how we should act. If we decide that they can provide good guidance, we can then follow our feelings and live a life we are morally comfortable with. We don’t need complicated and highly abstract deontological or consequentialist schemes. They just get int the way. Our moral sentiments evolved to matter to us because they worked better that way in promoting cooperation in small bands out on the savanna which in turn helped our ancestors survive and launch their genes into the future.
The situation has become muddied in modern times because we no longer live in small bands out on the savanna. Conditions have changed but cooperation is still important and our feelings are generally a good guide as to when and how we should cooperate – ie. don’t steal, double cross people, don’t kill, look after the kids, respect the elderly etc.

It's a fair point that our feelings will be a factor, it's part of how we see the world. But 'Mattering' in my formulation is about the qualiative nature of being an experiencing subject - full stop. That quality of life experiencing subjects have which matters to us, and gives us a stake in what happens to us.

But feelings just ARE the qualitive nature of being an experiencing subject . So, it is our feelings that give us a stake in what happens to us. If we had no feelings nothing would matter. I’ve read Goldstein and I largely agree with her but I think we can make it even simpler if we talk about our feelings rather than “having a stake” in things. Imagine someone saying this:

You stole my money!! I had a stake in that money.

Does the second sentence add anything or is it redundant?

But I think we’re saying basically the same thing here. In your terms, mattering is about the qualitative nature of our being experiencing subjects. In my terms, mattering arises by way of our moral sentiments, our feelings in respect of behaviour. Things only matter because we feel that they matter. Does it matter if I mug an old lady and take her money? Well, it would matter to me. I just “feel” it’s wrong and that wrongness matters to me. Her having a stake in that money and in not being mugged goes without saying. I, too, would feel wronged if someone mugged me and took my money. (Especially as I’m an old chap who couldn’t do much in the way of self-defence) As an experiencing subject, I would feel the pain of being punched, the indignity of not being able to defend myself, and the moral outrage at being treated that way and having my money stolen. The mattering arises by way of my feelings.
Respecting the elderly and our condemnation of stealing are part of our shared core human moral values which we see across all human cultures. It is this set of core human moral values that we feel strongly about, which gives us a stake in affairs and which I take to be moral bedrock. And it’s simple. It’s not some great abstract, complicated and unworkable edifice like Kant’s. And it is somewhat flexible. If a starving waif manages to nick a sandwich from posh sidewalk café in Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris when no one is looking, our condemnation would be less vehement than if he had been some big thug who mugged an old lady on a street at night. And the other good thing about going with our simple moral sentiments is that we don’t have to prove that our big abstract moral “system” is the right one. That’s because there is no right “system” and because most people already feel as we do. It’s a flexible, down to earth, every-day, workable sort of morality.

And your questions are valid. But we know broadly how our 'moral/social' intuitions evolved. Our evolved moral intuitions are part of Hume's IS state of affairs. My argument is a response to the challenge Hume sets us of how to derive Oughts from the the IS state of affairs, I think we still can.

Yes, our moral sentiments are an adaptation bestowed on us by evolution. That is, I believe an objective “fact”. As Goldsein says, “far from invalidating our moral intuitions, [in my terms, our moral feelings] evolutionary psychology can be put to work to help ground them”. However, that is not what Hume was arguing for. Evolution had not been thought of in his day. Hume’s contribution was in being the first philosopher to set out clearly the thesis that morality is based in our “sentiments” and not in “facts”. He was right to say that you can’t go from “is”(facts) to “ought”(feeling). Morality is not about facts, it’s about feelings. That’s why we cannot prove that, say, stealing is objectively wrong. We can only meaningfully talk about how we feel about stealing. When we ask ourselves what “ought” actually means in a sentence like “you ought not steal” (and if we forefo the circular stuff like “ought means should”) we find that “ought” actually means that someone (including perhaps ourselves) will not feel happy about it if we do steal. It’s how we feel about actions that gets us to ought and not some bunch of objective facts that someone brings the table. And we argue our case based on our feelings. Of course, we can bring reason to bear with words like “How would you feel if someone did that to you? And that, IMO, is all there is to morality.

Fortunately, all normal human beings have enough in common for our feelings to coincide most of the time. That doesn’t mean we always follow what we feel to be right, though. Or that doing what we feel to be right will result in the greatest amount of wellbeing. We don’t think much about the wellbeing of the mass of “humanity” in the abstract. Morality begins at home with us, which is why we are generous to family and friends and often not so generous to strangers. (That, too, has a lot to do with our evolution in small bands of hunter-gathers out on the savanna – strangers often represented competition for resources)

I think we have to take a different approach to the Objective vs Subjective one to meet that challenge. That is, to identify Mattering, or having a stake in the IS state of affairs, as what makes the Is/Ought difference.

I’d say it’s feelings that make the difference. To say that things matter is to say that we feel” we ought to pursue them. In other words, we ought to go with our moral sentiments, our moral feelings. Once we understand that, and forget about trying to make morality objective, the is/ought gap disappears. I feel stealing is bad so I don’t steal. That’s all there is to it. There are no objective facts involved in this judgement. Although, as mentioned, reason can come into it when trying to persuade others with entreaties such as, “How would you feel if someone stole your money?”

Here's my spiel -
We can agree we now know what we call human 'moral intuitions' are a result of our evolution as a social species (this is the angle Churchland addresses in her book Brain Trust, she has youtube talks too which are accessible to lay people). And The Moral Foundations Theory peeps have done research which broadly categorises how these transform into environmentally influenced broad cultural norms. We can take all that as read, with just some tinkering and the details yet to be sorted.

Agreed.

The above constitutes part of what Hume would call the 'Is' state of affairs - the 'objective' physicalist reality. Objectively speaking, that's it. No more to be said. And ''morality'' is just a concept we came up with before we understood this objective reality.

I’d disagree here. Hume was before Darwin. He knew nothing of evolution. But he was very well aware that there is no objectivity in morality, that it is based in our feelings, or our “moral sentiments” as he called them. In the presupposition that things matter to us.

So we could say this abstract concept of ''morality'' is explained, job done. We don't need to philosophise or worry about right and wrong or oughts any more, just get on with being human. I would add to that last sentence ''for better or worse'', but there is no ''better'' or ''worse'' in this 'objective' framing. It just Is what it Is. That's as far as the physicalist objective approach gets us.

But Hume’s approach to morality was not to say that our moralizing was objective. The whole point of his saying that you cannot go seamlessly from “is” to “ought” was to show that morality is NOT objective. The “is” is objective but the “ought” is subjective. At least that is my understanding of Hume. He said that in order to go from “is” to “ought” we had some explaining to do and that explaining would be about how we felt about a moral issue.
.

A way of understanding that approach would be that morality is 'subjective', as in a feeling or opinion, with no other justification than this feels 'right' to me - and if it feels 'wrong' to you, that's equally valid. There's no objective benchmark to test our different feelings against, so everything is permissible. And in the end, the most powerful will get their way. In effect, Might is Right.

I can’t agree that everything is permissible. I think we have to argue emotionally for what we think is right and, as mentioned above, bringin reason to bear where we can. And I question the “might is right” bit. It is true that the most powerful often do get their way but that does not mean most people feel the powerful are morally right. And even the strong themselves know deep down that, when they take from the weak, that they are wrong. But greed and the lust for more power (the other side of human nature) often get the better of their moral sentiments.

My approach says we lose something valuable seeing things through this lens of Objective vs Subjective. Something which matters, regardless of its Objective/Subjective status. This 'Mattering' aspect of the state of affairs is what we lose. It matters to experiencing subjects what the Is state of affairs happens to be - it matters to us what happens to us. And what we do can matter to other experiencing subjects.

As Goldstein says, the “mattering instinct is a natural consequence of natural selection”. And the mattering instinct is felt subjectively. I don’t think there is any way we can see things other than subjectively. Things matter to all normal humans – we have strong feelings about certain behaviours. Objective facts often won’t have a lot to do with how we “feel”:
“You stole my money, you scoundrel!! It’s an objective fact that I had a stake in that money!”
Does the second sentence carry any weight?

And that 'Mattering' seems to me to identify a different territory to objective facts and subjective intuitions/opinions, a territory where Oughts make sense. Oughts make sense on the basis of us having a stake in the objective 'Is' state of affairs. If I steal your stuff, that matters to you. If I'm homeless but society grants me a Right to a home, that matters to me. That's Goldstein's 'mattering map'' landscape where we can find a moral bedrock. A foundation for right and wrong as more than a mistaken concept about objective reality.

I agree with Goldstein, it’s about mattering. That’s another way of saying that we have feelings about issues, and it is these feelings that give us a stake in affairs, objectivity be damned. I feel it’s wrong to mug old ladies and I am unable to feel otherwise whatever objective facts anyone wants to put on the table.

My stance is consequentialist in that if we don’t act as we feel we morally ought to act then the consequence will be that we, and probably others, won’t be happy about it. We may experience guilt and we could be punished. Especially if it goes against a core moral value. So I’m a consequentialist in the sense that I believe that following our moral sentiments will generally deliver he best consequences. Doing so will foster cooperation and social cohesion and the benefits that flow therefrom.

[Samana Johann]

Just finished The Moral Landscape (Sam Harris) and wanted to debate the central thesis of his book.

Do you believe that we can scientifically quantify what it means to be moral? Harris believes so, and says that we can find a way to maximize human well-being through scientific measures. His claim rests on the idea that increasing human well being should be the goal of morality. He defends this by stating that anything that we should care about related to morality is something that actually effects our well being. In other words, while some moral systems reference abstract values, he believes that the only thing we should really define as moral is something that increases human well being.

I imagine a counter example.

What if scientists could invent a machine where users would be given unlimited pleasure and their well being would be taken care of to the utmost. This machine has no drawbacks in that there is no "hangover" from leaving, and it can faithfully simulate the utmost pleasures of real life. This would not be a matrix-like machine, rather we would all be conscious of our participation, and the effects would be just as good as any other source of pleasure/wellbeing. A thin layer of professionals might be required to keep these machines running, but in their off hours they too would be hooked up to the machine. It seems that under Harris's framework, it would be moral to hook us all up to this machine.

Of course, I am writing this because I have an intuition that this is incorrect. There must be some other factor at play other than simply an increase to all human wellbeing. Is it our freedom to actually create worse consequences, to actually lower human wellbeing that in a roundabout way is really what we mean when we think of morality? I hope discussion leads to more ideas here, as I cant carry this train of thought forwards at this time without further reflection and discussion.

Science is based on immoral since it would/does limit it. So it's a total nonsensical approach. If one applies moral an virtue, harmlessness to any scientifically progress it would lead it to end. Since that's not the aim of science, but the opposite, it will never find together.

[LuckyR]

Science is based on immoral since it would/does limit it. So it's a total nonsensical approach. If one applies moral an virtue, harmlessness to any scientifically progress it would lead it to end. Since that's not the aim of science, but the opposite, it will never find together.

There may something of interest in this posting. In it's current syntax impossible for me to say.

[Gertie]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply lagaascienza - sorry about the delay replying.

This is specifically to do with the qualiative 'what it's like' nature of being Lagayascienza, rather than being say a rock or carrot. Hence the 'conscious creatures' part. It doesn't matter to the rock if I smash it, it doesn't have Quality of Life which matters to it, so I don't need to have moral consideration for the rock. ( Hence in a universe of only robots, rocks and carrots morality would be meaningless).

Right. In that sort of universe morality would not exist. Rocks don’t experience what-it-is-likeness. Nothing matters to a rock. (As far as we can tell). They are not moral beings.

In respect of consequentialist moral systems, you say:

… [Moral systems] which see maximal perfection of wellbeing as the foundational goal have particular problems. As we agree, wellbeing can't be measured with the precision required to identify perfection. It's a fools errand which can lead to erroneous thinking. But also once you believe you have the indisputable perfect answer, it can instill an imperitive to impose it. Like the god-botherers knocking on your door to save your soul. And that can slide into authoritarianism.

Agreed. No one can prove that their idea of wellbeing is the correct one. Although when it comes to what I call “core human morality”, it is likely that most people will agree about what is likely to promote general wellbeing. Or they would be likely to agree if their minds were not poisoned by some toxic fundamentalist religious or political doctrine.

Where-as realising perfection isn't possible when it comes to idiosyncratic experiencing subjects means some freedoms need to be built into the 'moral landscape'. That means you end up with a messy balancing act, rather than crisply satisfying perfection - but that's the nature of the experiential beast.

Right. It can’t be one size fits all because humans have natural physical and psychological variations and their circumstances will always vary – for example, some are born beautiful some are born plain, some are born rich some are born poor. But even so, we will still have a lot in common in terms of our moral sentiments. Most of us share what I call “core human morality”. (About which I’ll say a bit more below)

Then you'd need to make your case for them as a more appropriate conception of morality, and if I find it more persuasive I'll agree. That's the philosophy biz.

Indeed. I can’t prove that Osama Bin Laden’s idea of wellbeing was wrong. But I think I can make a pretty good case that his idea of wellbeing is unlikely to lead people to happiness and flourishing.

My view is that we do need to establish that foundational moral bedrock which distinguishes between the Is state of affairs, and Oughts. Which Goldstein's notion of Mattering puts its finger on. Ideas like Virtue Ethics and Deontology are workarounds for not having such a foundation imo. And so are ultimately ad hoc, or ad populum based on what Hume identifies as basically a ''Yuck/Yum'' intuitive response.

I agree that virtue and duty are just work-arounds. And yes, it’s about mattering, or feelings as I would put it. In this, I think Hume was onto something - the “yum/yuk” stuff is important. He said morality was based in our sentiments and I think he is right.

To sum up my Goldstein/Harris mash up -
[[[[- Having a stake in the state of affairs, the state of affairs mattering to us, is what makes the Is/Ought difference.

I’m not understanding you here. How does mattering bridge Hume’s is/ought gap? It can only do so with Goldstein’s idea that mattering does not need justification. If this means that our moral feelings don’t need justification then I agree. Humans cannot live a coherent life without feeling that things matter.

This is a key point. I'm using Goldstein's Mattering as a way of describing that Subjects like humans have this qualiative experience which can be wonderful, terrible and all things in between. (Unlike rocks). Hence it matters to us what happens to us (unlike rocks). No matter what our beliefs, opinions, moral intuitions or values are, it matters to us what happens to us - what the Is state of affairs is.

So in the world there exists the Is state of affairs. And also this other thing of it Mattering to Subjects what the Is state of affairs actually is. This having a stake (Interests) in what the Is state of affairs is. So there's The Stuff of the World, and Interests in how that state of affairs is playing out.

I posit this Interest, or Mattering, is the appropriate grounding for Oughts.

That simple.

The fact that it matters to you if I harm you (unlike a rock), is the reason I ought not harm you.

Regardless of your or my moral intuitions. Likewise harming a pet dog, who can't even conceive of morality, is still something I Ought not do.

Pretty much everybody but psychopaths get this in practice. For philosophers it simply means we have to put aside worrying about objective v subjective, and agree Mattering is the appropriate grounding for Oughts. Harris can't do that, he has to come up with some 'objective scientific' framing - which is the root of his problems. Rather than just saying Mattering is enough.

- Only experiencing critters have this mattering stake in the state of affairs.
- Therefore the appropriate foundation for morality is trying to promote the wellbeing of conscious creatures.

Yes, things matter to us, but I’m not understanding how it follows that we should promote the WBCC. If we have decided that the WBCC is what’s most important, then yes, wellbeing would be foundational. But that still leaves us with the question of what wellbeing is. No doubt Osama Bin Laden believed he had the wellbeing business all sown up. Kill evil, infidel Americans and thereby get into heaven where it’s wall to wall wellbeing. If his mind had not been poisoned by a radical religious doctrine, I’d hazard a guess that he might have had ideas about what constitutes wellbeing in line with most people’s core moral sentiments. But it wasn’t to be. People do crazy things when they believe crazy things.

Bin Laden wasn't considering the wellbeing of conscious creatures when he inspired mass murder, I'd guess he was thinking about being in a holy war and the wrongs committed by his enemies.

WBCC imo follows from realising the qualiative nature of being an experiencing conscious nature gives you a stake in what happens to you, in your wellbeing. You and other conscious creatures. It's as good a catchphrase as anything imo.

But you're right it's hard to define and not a precise thing, and people will define their own wellbeing differently. So some freedom has to be part of wellbeing. And attempts to balance competing interests which can't be quantified. But we not helpless, we can use tools like common sense, and I think I mentioned Maslowe's heirarchy and the Veil of Ignorance. And Democracy lays out hard lines on blurry issues all the time.

I feel like you'll go part of the way with me on that, but the fact that our intuitions are explainable by evolution and mostly work brings you pause?

I have no problem with the idea that morality is only of concern to creatures to whom things can matter. And when ask the questions WHY do things matter to humans? and Which things generally DO matter to them? We are led back to evolution which provide insights into why we feel the way we do about certain issues. With those insights in place, we can then choose whether or not to accept that our feelings will generally be a good guide to how we should act. If we decide that they can provide good guidance, we can then follow our feelings and live a life we are morally comfortable with. We don’t need complicated and highly abstract deontological or consequentialist schemes. They just get int the way. Our moral sentiments evolved to matter to us because they worked better that way in promoting cooperation in small bands out on the savanna which in turn helped our ancestors survive and launch their genes into the future.
The situation has become muddied in modern times because we no longer live in small bands out on the savanna. Conditions have changed but cooperation is still important and our feelings are generally a good guide as to when and how we should cooperate – ie. don’t steal, double cross people, don’t kill, look after the kids, respect the elderly etc.

You're right that our evolved social intuitions have helped us thrive as a species, as did our older self-preservation intuitions, and that they were 'designed' to work in small tribal groups. That's not the world we live in any more though, and our challenges are different. Even in societies we now need spelt out and enforcable rules and laws to help population groups thrive, along with policies, institutions, education, etc. A moral foundation gives guidance and a basis for testing such laws and policies against. Rather than ad hoc chasing tomorrow's headlines, creating hate groups to rail against and distract us, and personal popularity contests as much of politics seems to be, leaving many of us feeling alienated and often disgusted with the whole system. Thus opening the door to other worse factional interests.

And globally - well just read the papers...

Things aren't going well.

It's a fair point that our feelings will be a factor, it's part of how we see the world. But 'Mattering' in my formulation is about the qualiative nature of being an experiencing subject - full stop. That quality of life experiencing subjects have which matters to us, and gives us a stake in what happens to us.

But feelings just ARE the qualitive nature of being an experiencing subject . So, it is our feelings that give us a stake in what happens to us. If we had no feelings nothing would matter. I’ve read Goldstein and I largely agree with her but I think we can make it even simpler if we talk about our feelings rather than “having a stake” in things. Imagine someone saying this:

You stole my money!! I had a stake in that money.

Does the second sentence add anything or is it redundant?

I'll try to clearer. The 'having a stake in things' of Mattering is specifically my contender for what differentiates the Is state of Affairs from this aspect which gives rise to Oughts. Think of it this way - In a world of only rocks, or robots, nothing matters. Morality is meaningless. And without God to tell us what's right and wrong in this world of subjects, we either abandon Morality as Concept, and just follow our evolved/environmentally created inclinations, OR we find a different way to justify the Concept of Right and Wrong and Oughts. . I'm saying this thing of Mattering makes sense of Oughts and Right and Wrong, gives it meaning. And not in an ad hoc way, in a way which simply acknowledges that the nature of being an experiencing subject brings a paradigmatically different aspect to the state of affairs, which rocks acting according to physics doesn't have. And this shifts the Is state of affairs paradigm to something where Oughts are meaningful. Morality is a meaningful Concept.

But I think we’re saying basically the same thing here. In your terms, mattering is about the qualitative nature of our being experiencing subjects. In my terms, mattering arises by way of our moral sentiments, our feelings in respect of behaviour.

Hopefully it's clearer that I'm not talking about our moral sentiments when I use Mattering as a basis for Oughts? Just the Mattering that I steal your stuff from you is enough. Whatever your feelings, even if you're a baby or have a severe menta disability.

Things only matter because we feel that they matter. Does it matter if I mug an old lady and take her money? Well, it would matter to me. I just “feel” it’s wrong and that wrongness matters to me. Her having a stake in that money and in not being mugged goes without saying. I, too, would feel wronged if someone mugged me and took my money. (Especially as I’m an old chap who couldn’t do much in the way of self-defence) As an experiencing subject, I would feel the pain of being punched, the indignity of not being able to defend myself, and the moral outrage at being treated that way and having my money stolen. The mattering arises by way of my feelings.

As above, I'm saying something a little different. What matters is the harm to your wellbeing. A child or dog might not understand what's going on, and we often 'discipline' them for their own good, the old lady might have dementia and happily be fooled by someone she trusts nicking her savings. Our feelings aren't always in sync with our wellbeing.

Respecting the elderly and our condemnation of stealing are part of our shared core human moral values which we see across all human cultures. It is this set of core human moral values that we feel strongly about, which gives us a stake in affairs and which I take to be moral bedrock. And it’s simple. It’s not some great abstract, complicated and unworkable edifice like Kant’s. And it is somewhat flexible. If a starving waif manages to nick a sandwich from posh sidewalk café in Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris when no one is looking, our condemnation would be less vehement than if he had been some big thug who mugged an old lady on a street at night. And the other good thing about going with our simple moral sentiments is that we don’t have to prove that our big abstract moral “system” is the right one. That’s because there is no right “system” and because most people already feel as we do. It’s a flexible, down to earth, every-day, workable sort of morality.

Well in effect what you're saying our pro-social instincts are Good, and our antisocial/selfish instincts are Bad. But they just are what they are, without a Concept of Right and Wrong. If I happen to think the opposite, then you have no argument. If enough people agree with me on some issue where being selfish and uncaring about others who suffer arises, as it often does, then there's no Right or Wrong to be argued about it. Or if a big corporation can bribe a government minister to kibosh an anti-pollution measure which means they'll poison your water, that's just people following their instincts too.

And your questions are valid. But we know broadly how our 'moral/social' intuitions evolved. Our evolved moral intuitions are part of Hume's IS state of affairs. My argument is a response to the challenge Hume sets us of how to derive Oughts from the the IS state of affairs, I think we still can.

Yes, our moral sentiments are an adaptation bestowed on us by evolution. That is, I believe an objective “fact”. As Goldsein says, “far from invalidating our moral intuitions, [in my terms, our moral feelings] evolutionary psychology can be put to work to help ground them”. However, that is not what Hume was arguing for. Evolution had not been thought of in his day. Hume’s contribution was in being the first philosopher to set out clearly the thesis that morality is based in our “sentiments” and not in “facts”. He was right to say that you can’t go from “is”(facts) to “ought”(feeling).

Well the sentiments Hume noted are what we now know to be rooted in the happenstance of our evolved neurobiology (and honed by environment). That's what I meant there.

As I've argued, I think that having a stake in the state of affairs is what makes any particular actuality of the state of affairs have this other context of Mattering. Then it's not just about what Is, it's also about what that means to you. Conscious experience brings a radically different set of stuff into the world, to do with meaning, purpose, value, feelings, sensations, a 'sense of self', etc - to do with Mattering. And this makes sense of the Concept of Oughts.

Morality is not about facts, it’s about feelings. That’s why we cannot prove that, say, stealing is objectively wrong. We can only meaningfully talk about how we feel about stealing. When we ask ourselves what “ought” actually means in a sentence like “you ought not steal” (and if we forefo the circular stuff like “ought means should”) we find that “ought” actually means that someone (including perhaps ourselves) will not feel happy about it if we do steal. It’s how we feel about actions that gets us to ought and not some bunch of objective facts that someone brings the table. And we argue our case based on our feelings. Of course, we can bring reason to bear with words like “How would you feel if someone did that to you? And that, IMO, is all there is to morality.

OK. But again I might feel great about stealing from you. There's no concept of a moral difference between the theif and victim - it's an amoral position isn't it?

Fortunately, all normal human beings have enough in common for our feelings to coincide most of the time. That doesn’t mean we always follow what we feel to be right, though. Or that doing what we feel to be right will result in the greatest amount of wellbeing. We don’t think much about the wellbeing of the mass of “humanity” in the abstract. Morality begins at home with us, which is why we are generous to family and friends and often not so generous to strangers. (That, too, has a lot to do with our evolution in small bands of hunter-gathers out on the savanna – strangers often represented competition for resources)

True.

I think we have to take a different approach to the Objective vs Subjective one to meet that challenge. That is, to identify Mattering, or having a stake in the IS state of affairs, as what makes the Is/Ought difference.

I’d say it’s feelings that make the difference. To say that things matter is to say that we feel” we ought to pursue them. In other words, we ought to go with our moral sentiments, our moral feelings. Once we understand that, and forget about trying to make morality objective, the is/ought gap disappears. I feel stealing is bad so I don’t steal. That’s all there is to it. There are no objective facts involved in this judgement. Although, as mentioned, reason can come into it when trying to persuade others with entreaties such as, “How would you feel if someone stole your money?”

I think this worked well enough in evolutionary terms in tribal times where our 'up close and personal' neurobiology works well, and factors like reciprocal altruism was an everyday thing. But when we aggregated into larger social groups, we needed repacement social and other types of ties like religion and a shared objective moral law giver like God. And government and institutions to make and enforce policies, new archetypes and narratives. We've lost many of those 'natural' ties in a globalised world, and tribalism and religion are some of the most dangerous causes of conflict.

Here's my spiel -
We can agree we now know what we call human 'moral intuitions' are a result of our evolution as a social species (this is the angle Churchland addresses in her book Brain Trust, she has youtube talks too which are accessible to lay people). And The Moral Foundations Theory peeps have done research which broadly categorises how these transform into environmentally influenced broad cultural norms. We can take all that as read, with just some tinkering and the details yet to be sorted.

Agreed.

The above constitutes part of what Hume would call the 'Is' state of affairs - the 'objective' physicalist reality. Objectively speaking, that's it. No more to be said. And ''morality'' is just a concept we came up with before we understood this objective reality.

I’d disagree here. Hume was before Darwin. He knew nothing of evolution. But he was very well aware that there is no objectivity in morality, that it is based in our feelings, or our “moral sentiments” as he called them. In the presupposition that things matter to us.

So we could say this abstract concept of ''morality'' is explained, job done. We don't need to philosophise or worry about right and wrong or oughts any more, just get on with being human. I would add to that last sentence ''for better or worse'', but there is no ''better'' or ''worse'' in this 'objective' framing. It just Is what it Is. That's as far as the physicalist objective approach gets us.

But Hume’s approach to morality was not to say that our moralizing was objective. The whole point of his saying that you cannot go seamlessly from “is” to “ought” was to show that morality is NOT objective. The “is” is objective but the “ought” is subjective. At least that is my understanding of Hume. He said that in order to go from “is” to “ought” we had some explaining to do and that explaining would be about how we felt about a moral issue.

Covered above I think.
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A way of understanding that approach would be that morality is 'subjective', as in a feeling or opinion, with no other justification than this feels 'right' to me - and if it feels 'wrong' to you, that's equally valid. There's no objective benchmark to test our different feelings against, so everything is permissible. And in the end, the most powerful will get their way. In effect, Might is Right.

I can’t agree that everything is permissible. I think we have to argue emotionally for what we think is right and, as mentioned above, bringin reason to bear where we can. And I question the “might is right” bit. It is true that the most powerful often do get their way but that does not mean most people feel the powerful are morally right. And even the strong themselves know deep down that, when they take from the weak, that they are wrong. But greed and the lust for more power (the other side of human nature) often get the better of their moral sentiments.

As I say, if our moral sentiments are the result of the happenstance of our evolved social neurobiology, then that's just part of the Is State of Affairs we're born into as I see it. And we came up with this Concept of Right and Wrong to explain how we feel this or that way before we knew about evolution. That Concept of Morality is what Hume de-bunked.

I'm saying that there is something about that Concept which can still be justified, still have meaning. And I've made my argument.

Without the Concept of Right and Wrong, you're right our actions and decisions just flow from our feelings or opinions. If that happens to result in Israel slaughtering thousands of helpless civilians in a deliberate genocidal land grab, it's just each person's opinion whether that's Right or Wrong, and the most powerful group will win the day. It's not a Moral issue, any more than liking ice cream.

If it serves energy corporations to continue climate changing pollution, that's not wrong, because there's no concept of Right or Wrong to test it against. If they can get away with it, it will just be another state of affairs we have opinions and feelings about.

I think we need to do better.

My approach says we lose something valuable seeing things through this lens of Objective vs Subjective. Something which matters, regardless of its Objective/Subjective status. This 'Mattering' aspect of the state of affairs is what we lose. It matters to experiencing subjects what the Is state of affairs happens to be - it matters to us what happens to us. And what we do can matter to other experiencing subjects.

As Goldstein says, the “mattering instinct is a natural consequence of natural selection”. And the mattering instinct is felt subjectively. I don’t think there is any way we can see things other than subjectively. Things matter to all normal humans – we have strong feelings about certain behaviours. Objective facts often won’t have a lot to do with how we “feel”:
“You stole my money, you scoundrel!! It’s an objective fact that I had a stake in that money!”
Does the second sentence carry any weight?

I nicked the idea of Mattering from Goldstein (like I nicked WBCC from Harris), but have come up with my own justification re morality. They are key ingredients, but where I end up is different. My position is really super simple. It matters to experiencing critters what happens to us (the state of affairs). This mattering aspect of the state of affairs is what makes Oughts meaningful. This is an appropriate foundation for a secular Morality.

And that 'Mattering' seems to me to identify a different territory to objective facts and subjective intuitions/opinions, a territory where Oughts make sense. Oughts make sense on the basis of us having a stake in the objective 'Is' state of affairs. If I steal your stuff, that matters to you. If I'm homeless but society grants me a Right to a home, that matters to me. That's Goldstein's 'mattering map'' landscape where we can find a moral bedrock. A foundation for right and wrong as more than a mistaken concept about objective reality.

I agree with Goldstein, it’s about mattering. That’s another way of saying that we have feelings about issues, and it is these feelings that give us a stake in affairs, objectivity be damned. I feel it’s wrong to mug old ladies and I am unable to feel otherwise whatever objective facts anyone wants to put on the table.

Agree - the objective status is irrelevant.

Kinda agree - I'd go further than 'feelings' being relevant, I think 'wellbeing' captures the notions of thriving in the long term, which can sometimes mean ignoring your feelings.

Disagree with the gist the of the italicised bit. By your thinking, it would be right to mug the old lady if you felt it was right. My position is that the wrongness lies in it mattering to the old lady that she was mugged. That her wellbeing was harmed.

My stance is consequentialist in that if we don’t act as we feel we morally ought to act then the consequence will be that we, and probably others, won’t be happy about it. We may experience guilt and we could be punished. Especially if it goes against a core moral value. So I’m a consequentialist in the sense that I believe that following our moral sentiments will generally deliver he best consequences. Doing so will foster cooperation and social cohesion and the benefits that flow therefrom.

Then there's nothing Good about pro-social consequences, just the Yum feeling which results from your evolutionary and environmental conditions. You could just as well call your responses ''Yuck'' and ''Yum'', yes? Like ice cream flavours.

Do you feel there's something meaningful missing in that view of right and wrong?

And if you think the Concept of Right and Wrong is more meaningful than ''Yuck''/''Yum'', do you think we can potentially do better than relying on neurological mechanisms which evolved to work in very different conditions, and now regularly fail us?

[Gertie]

Feel free to cut to the chase!

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks, Gertie.
There's a lot there and I need time to read it and think about it.
When I've done that, I'll take your advice and cut to the chase, so that my reply is not unmanageably long.