Philosophy Discussion Forums

CIN wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 12:40 pm if the surgeon has a duty to use the body, does that mean that everyone else has a right to let him? Does that even make sense?

It doesn't. Maybe the correct inversion is to say that if you think the surgeon has the duty to commit murder to obtain organs to cure his patients then you think the patients have the right to be cured by such a means.

Isn't it precisely because rape is almost always very unpleasant for the victim that we think it is wrong? For what other reason could it be wrong?

Rape is wrong because the potential victim has the right to bestow the use of her own body. It doesn't become morally permissible if she's so drugged that it's hardly unpleasant at all. It's still a trespass.

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 4:35 am But then sometimes you seem to be advocating a conventional rules-based ethic, for consequentialist reasons.

Yes, that is in practice what I advocate.

I think we should distinguish very clearly between two questions: what is the correct moral theory? and the prescriptions of which moral theory should be followed in practice? The answer to the first will determine the answer to the second.

This bit confused me. At first I read it as saying that consequentialism as the correct theory about the basis of morality determines that we should follow a consequentialist ethic.

But in context I think maybe you mean the opposite - that the correctness of the consequentialist explanation of morality determines that we should follow a rules-based ethic in which murder is wrong and rape is wrong,. Because empirically this minimizes the amount of umpleasantness in the world.

We’re not make the world a better place: that’s not what philosophers do.

Even though making the world a better place is according to you, a moral duty. In fact, if I understand you rightly, the very source of moral duty.

Yes. But it's still not what we're doing here, is it?

Maybe it is -

Premise: the correct moral theory determines the ethic that we should follow
Premise: the correct ethic minimizes umpleasantness
Premise: we're more likely to follow the ethic that we should follow if we know what it is
Conclusion: identifying the correct moral theory makes the world a better place.

?

More generally, I worry about the sort of worldview that says that other people should follow moral rules but we enlightened philosophers are above such things and are free to break the rules whenever we think that we can bring about a better outcome thereby...

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am CIN

In outline, my thesis depends on these two statements both being true for some value of X:
1. ‘Good’ means ‘has property X’.
2. Pleasantness intrinsically has property X.

This would enable us to say that pleasantness is intrinsically good, and would be enough to bridge the supposed gap between fact and value. What exactly X is, is less of a concern to me, though I prefer not to tie X to some unreasonably narrow property which would make it easy for people to say ‘but we call this good, and it doesn’t have X’. Desirability is pretty broadly applicable, and so is pretty good, though I don’t think it gets first prize.

If you're just looking for a form of words and definitions which are logically impregnable as a theory of morality, you don't have to worry about real world consequences or the nature of experience.

You've misread what I wrote. I didn't say 'What exactly X is, is of no concern to me', I said 'What exactly X is, is less of a concern to me'. Less of a concern implies some concern, so your inference that I am 'just looking for a form of words and definitions which are logically impregnable' is unsound.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am If you want to capture what morality is really about, then that's a bigger task which involves wrangling difficult realities which don't give tidy answes the way physics problems do.

It's unsafe to infer from the fact that we currently don't have tidy answers to moral questions, that we never will.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am You ignore the messy awkwardness of dealing with the inherent private and qualiative nature of experience, in order to believe you can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure. Whereby 1 passing an exam util = 87 ice cream utils, or 1 rape = -192 unpleasant utils for the victim and +33 pleasant utils for the rapist - assuming rape ''merits a desirable attitude'' to the rapist.

I do not claim that I 'can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure.' That would be a category error, since utils are hypothetical, and you can’t publicly or objectively measure something that is hypothetical.

You are in fact conflating two separate things I am doing. One is to claim that we can measure un/pleasantness extremely roughly, which is enough to support a theory of hedonistic consequentialism, since the theory does not require any particular degree of precision in the measuring. The other is to conduct thought experiments using the hypothetical device of utils, in order to present hypothetical cases with the aim of challenging interlocutors to either accept the theory in principle, or find some cogent objection to it. You conflate these and come up with the charge of claiming to be able to precisely measure un/pleasantness, a claim I have not made and do not need.

Intensity of un/pleasantness is measurable, but in our present state of ignorance, only roughly and not always reliably. If I have £10 and I’m wondering whether to spend it on a DVD or a chocolate cake, what I’m probably wondering is which will give me experiences that are more pleasant. The experiences of watching a DVD and eating a cake are very different, but they can both have the same property of pleasantness. And if I find, having done both, that eating chocolate cake gives me more pleasure than watching DVDs, then I’ve actually been measuring the pleasantness of those experiences, albeit very roughly.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am You make the claim that units of pleasure are in principle objectively identifiable without being able to say how in principle they could be.

There are precedents. Anaxagoras knew In the 5th century BC that the moon was a rocky body some distance from earth, so he must have known that the distance from the earth to the moon was measurable in principle; but it wasn’t until Aristarchus in the 3rd century that anyone worked out a way of doing it. And the ancient Greeks presumably also knew that the earth must have a measurable weight, but no-one managed to work out how to measure it until Henry Cavendish in the 18th century.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am And when there is an in principle reason to believe that the private and qualiative nature of experience means it isn't objectively quantifiable in the way your theory requires.

Well, again, I don’t need quantification to be that accurate.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am And even if we could develop the technology to precisely measure say the C fibre firings correlated with pain in comparable ways between members of the same species, you still need to address the issues like multiple realisability (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_ ... l%20states.), of comparing different 'flavours' of experience like loving music and having a headache using the same units, and the way experience manifests as a unified field of conscious with an overall sense of wellbeing but a continually shifting focus, enveloping every interacting subsystem simultaneously affecting the other from moment to moment, and in specific different ways from individual to individual.

All you’re really saying here is that any solution to the problem of measuring subjective un/pleasantness will have to deal with a lot of complexity. Yes, obviously. That isn’t a proof that it can’t be done.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am You ignore such objections in order to pursue a tidy, formulaic theory which is only philosophically sound as a logical set of words, effectively defining morality into having objectively quantifiable attributes when it's rooted in the experiential nature of being a subject. What's the point of such wordplay as anything but a personal pet project?

And again, I think you are confusing my theory with the hypothetical thought experiments I use to bring out the differences between my approach and other, generally deontological approaches.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am Alternatively if you begin with the foundation that morality is grounded in having a stake in the state of affairs, the real life implications of having that stake, in all its messiness, should always be your guiding principle in creating a moral theory. And if that theory has to be untidy and imprecise, then that reflects the nature of morality.

I can’t make much sense of ‘morality is grounded in having a stake in the state of affairs.’ It’s very vague. What do you mean by a stake?

Gertie wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 11:20 am That doesn't mean we can't do better or worse, rather that terms like 'maximising' should be abandoned in favour of 'promoting', and viewing rule of thumb principles grounded in our foundation as something which can be contextually reviewed in light of real life consequences by referring back to our touchstone foundation in view of new info.

So ‘promoting’ means trying to do better? But then what, in your opinion, constitutes doing better, and how are we to tell whether we are doing better? You talk about reviewing rules of thumb, but that implies that there is something against which the rules of thumb are to be judged, and I’m not clear what that something is. Perhaps you could elaborate.

CIN

In outline, my thesis depends on these two statements both being true for some value of X:
1. ‘Good’ means ‘has property X’.
2. Pleasantness intrinsically has property X.

This would enable us to say that pleasantness is intrinsically good, and would be enough to bridge the supposed gap between fact and value. What exactly X is, is less of a concern to me, though I prefer not to tie X to some unreasonably narrow property which would make it easy for people to say ‘but we call this good, and it doesn’t have X’. Desirability is pretty broadly applicable, and so is pretty good, though I don’t think it gets first prize.

If you're just looking for a form of words and definitions which are logically impregnable as a theory of morality, you don't have to worry about real world consequences or the nature of experience.

You've misread what I wrote. I didn't say 'What exactly X is, is of no concern to me', I said 'What exactly X is, is less of a concern to me'. Less of a concern implies some concern, so your inference that I am 'just looking for a form of words and definitions which are logically impregnable' is unsound.

OK good. A moral theory which is isn't meaningfully relevant and applicable to the reality of the world kinda misses the point of morality. So presumably you agree that a moral theory rooted in the nature of conscious experience has to grapple with the nature of conscious experience as it is, whether that turns out to be tidy and precisely calcuable, or messy and unable to offer perfect formulae applicable to all scenarios.

I believe you're spot on that conscious experience is the appropriate grounding for oughts and the concepts of right and wrong. I disagree on details relating to the nature of experience. Namely that it is objectively quantifiable in principle and practice (objective here meaning third person falsifiable). I've said why, and it's not an idiosyncratic position. Rather your claim that that something which can't be third person observed or measured is the controversial claim, and the onus is on you to give a an in principle way it might be done. You still haven't. Why doesn't that worry you?

I also think that the nature of experience is more appropriately addressed holistically for moral purposes, because pleasure isn't manifested or experienced independantly of all the other interacting aspects of experience which form a unified field of consciousness and overall sense of wellbeing, from moment to moment.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am If you want to capture what morality is really about, then that's a bigger task which involves wrangling difficult realities which don't give tidy answes the way physics problems do.

It's unsafe to infer from the fact that we currently don't have tidy answers to moral questions, that we never will.

That's not my objection. There's a reason physics can give tidy answers we treat as facts and can use to make reliable predictions, because it's rooted in observations and measurements which can be checked. We've built a whole model of the universe, of what it's made of and how it works based on that. Conscious experience isn't part of that model.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am You ignore the messy awkwardness of dealing with the inherent private and qualiative nature of experience, in order to believe you can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure. Whereby 1 passing an exam util = 87 ice cream utils, or 1 rape = -192 unpleasant utils for the victim and +33 pleasant utils for the rapist - assuming rape ''merits a desirable attitude'' to the rapist.

I do not claim that I 'can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure.' That would be a category error, since utils are hypothetical, and you can’t publicly or objectively measure something that is hypothetical.

As I understand it you claim is it is in principle possible to objectively measure units of pleasure (swap 87 ice cream utils for units of pleasure then) in order to weigh moral choices (if only roughly for now). And because pleasure ''merits'' a positive attitude (pretty much a tautology) which form the basis for oughts because pleasure ''merits'' a positive attitude, moral choices should attempt to maximise pleasure. That's your moral thesis right? Can you put it more cogently than me?

You are in fact conflating two separate things I am doing. One is to claim that we can measure un/pleasantness extremely roughly, which is enough to support a theory of hedonistic consequentialism, since the theory does not require any particular degree of precision in the measuring.

No ''we'' can't do that objectively in a third person falsifiable way because experience is by its nature private and qualiative, not public and and objectively quantifiable. You claim in principle ''we'' can roughly, but in fact you have to rely on reports and analogising from what it is like to be you.

The other is to conduct thought experiments using the hypothetical device of utils, in order to present hypothetical cases with the aim of challenging interlocutors to either accept the theory in principle, or find some cogent objection to it. You conflate these and come up with the charge of claiming to be able to precisely measure un/pleasantness, a claim I have not made and do not need.

If you don't address the nature of experience, which ''merits a positive attitude'' is one manifestation of, then thought experiments can't clarify the basis of your theory.

Intensity of un/pleasantness is measurable, but in our present state of ignorance, only roughly and not always reliably.

Why do you think we can only roughly and sometimes unreliably measure un/pleasantness? And if you know why, you should have an in principle route to measuring it accurately shouldn't you?

If I have £10 and I’m wondering whether to spend it on a DVD or a chocolate cake, what I’m probably wondering is which will give me experiences that are more pleasant. The experiences of watching a DVD and eating a cake are very different, but they can both have the same property of pleasantness. And if I find, having done both, that eating chocolate cake gives me more pleasure than watching DVDs, then I’ve actually been measuring the pleasantness of those experiences, albeit very roughly.

But on another day you might feel greater pleasantness watching the dvd, because pleasantness is interwoven with all the other aspects of your unified field of consciousness. There is no in principle objectively identifiable unit of cake-pleasure. And so can't reliably extrapolate from your pleasure experience one day to the next, or to other people or sentient species. Now maybe I hate cake, but love raping, it gives me a lot of pleasure. Your theory says me raping people for fun is morally good, I ought to do it in principle. Maybe it scores + 50 pleasure units for me. But it becomes wrong in practice (consequentially) if it scores over -50 unpleasant units for the person I'm raping, which is likely. Now I'm a moral person, so I work out if I get them drunk enough, or slip them a roofie, they'll barely register any unpleasantness, say -6 if they feel a bit sore of hungover the next day. But I get + 50 pleasant units when I rape them. Raping them is then the moral thing to do right, I ought to to drug and rape people? You can't argue with maths.

Or you can take the view that people feel better overall living in a society which doesn't condone drugging and raping each other, they feel more secure going out and about, it improves the overall stability and sense of well-being of people living in that society.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am You make the claim that units of pleasure are in principle objectively identifiable without being able to say how in principle they could be.

There are precedents. Anaxagoras knew In the 5th century BC that the moon was a rocky body some distance from earth, so he must have known that the distance from the earth to the moon was measurable in principle; but it wasn’t until Aristarchus in the 3rd century that anyone worked out a way of doing it. And the ancient Greeks presumably also knew that the earth must have a measurable weight, but no-one managed to work out how to measure it until Henry Cavendish in the 18th century.

Chalmers makes a distinction between the ''easy problems'' of consciousness which are immensely difficult and complex in practice, maybe not even practically possble, and the in principle ''hard problem'' of consciousness. This in principle ''hard problem'' difficulty lies in the non-physical attributes of experience, while our scientific toolkit relies on observable and measurable physical properties to establish third person falsifiable facts about physical stuff and processes, and extrapolate testable theories from.

Finding a way to measure stuff which is in principle accessible to third person measurement is a different issue to finding a way to measure stuff which by its nature isn't accessible to third person measurement. Experience is by its nature first person and private, it isn't accessible to third person falsifiable observation and measurement like the moon.

This is part of what makes experience difficult to formulate hard and fast moral rules about which will always hold. It's why we have have to recognise individual differences because experience comes packaged in unique subjects with their own idiosyncrasies, including what they find pleasurable. It's part of why consequences come into play because subjects aren't identical and moral outcomes aren't predictable in their effects on individuals. It's why utilitariarian maximisation fails.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am And when there is an in principle reason to believe that the private and qualiative nature of experience means it isn't objectively quantifiable in the way your theory requires.

Well, again, I don’t need quantification to be that accurate.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am And even if we could develop the technology to precisely measure say the C fibre firings correlated with pain in comparable ways between members of the same species, you still need to address the issues like multiple realisability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_ ... l%20states.), of comparing different 'flavours' of experience like loving music and having a headache using the same units, and the way experience manifests as a unified field of conscious with an overall sense of wellbeing but a continually shifting focus, enveloping every interacting subsystem simultaneously affecting the other from moment to moment, and in specific different ways from individual to individual.

All you’re really saying here is that any solution to the problem of measuring subjective un/pleasantness will have to deal with a lot of complexity. Yes, obviously. That isn’t a proof that it can’t be done.

OK so what is this unit a unit of? Intensity, time limited, is ice cream pleasure equal to passing an exam pleasure, is it standard across people and species?

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am You ignore such objections in order to pursue a tidy, formulaic theory which is only philosophically sound as a logical set of words, effectively defining morality into having objectively quantifiable attributes when it's rooted in the experiential nature of being a subject. What's the point of such wordplay as anything but a personal pet project?

And again, I think you are confusing my theory with the hypothetical thought experiments I use to bring out the differences between my approach and other, generally deontological approaches.

Well I agree with you that any on point approach to morality should be consequentialist, the only moral value of deontology is as a tool to achieve morally good consequences. Same for virtue ethics. That's not my issue.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am Alternatively if you begin with the foundation that morality is grounded in having a stake in the state of affairs, the real life implications of having that stake, in all its messiness, should always be your guiding principle in creating a moral theory. And if that theory has to be untidy and imprecise, then that reflects the nature of morality.

I can’t make much sense of ‘morality is grounded in having a stake in the state of affairs.’ It’s very vague. What do you mean by a stake?

Interests. Having interests in the state of affairs is the grounding principle for oughts. If I have no interests in what happens to me, say I'm a rock or a carrot or a toaster, you have no reason to show me moral consideration, there are no Oughts in play. In a universe of rocks and gases interacting according to the laws of physics, morality is meaningless.

- There are objective facts about the state of affairs

- There are subjective opinions about the state of affairs

- There are stakes in the state of affairs (the basis for oughts).

Experiencing beings, subjects, have a qualiative ''what it's like'' quality of life, which means the state of affairs affects our quality of life in ways which are meaningful and matter to us. This is why experiencing subjects have a stake in what happens to us, but non-experiencing rocks and toasters and carrots don't (as far as we can tell).

IMO this establishing of a moral foundation is the easy part. Morality without interests makes no sense. ''Promoting the well-being of conscious creatures'' is as good a way of putting morality appropriately grounded in interests in the state of affairs as any I can think of.

And without a moral foundation we're all over the place, jumping from intuitions about thought experiments, to trying to find morality 'out there' somewhere, to 'anything goes because it's just an opinion'. A foundation also gives us the touchstone we need to check in on when evaluating consequences. It helps us form rule of thumb principles, and check they work in practice the way we want them to.

The tricky and necessarily messy part comes with putting this foundation into practice, because of the nature of conscious experience.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am That doesn't mean we can't do better or worse, rather that terms like 'maximising' should be abandoned in favour of 'promoting', and viewing rule of thumb principles grounded in our foundation as something which can be contextually reviewed in light of real life consequences by referring back to our touchstone foundation in view of new info.

So ‘promoting’ means trying to do better? But then what, in your opinion, constitutes doing better, and how are we to tell whether we are doing better? You talk about reviewing rules of thumb, but that implies that there is something against which the rules of thumb are to be judged, and I’m not clear what that something is. Perhaps you could elaborate.

Promoting wellbeing is more likely to increase wellbeing in a particular scenario than decrease it. If the consequences of a rule of thumb later indicate otherwise in that particular scenario, we should review the applicability of the rule of thumb. (This is where deontology fails).

The problem is we can't formulaically calculate units of wellbeing. If the qualiative ''what it's like' nature of conscious experience is the source of interests, and interests in principle justify oughts, we also have to acknowledge the difficulties in formulating specific oughts on that basis.

If wellbeing was objectively observable and quantifiable and identical for every subject, we wouldn't have to worry about weighing goods and bads, indiviual uniqueness, commensurability/equality in application and issues like what freedoms are maximal to the common good, we'd just get our wellbeing-o-meter out and do the sums. But such a wellbeing-o-meter can't do that if wellbeing can't in principle be measured.

So we're left with making do with what evidence we have. We can generally agree based on reports from others and analogising from our own experience about obvious cases, and we can try to ensure each person has the opportunity to flourish, allow people freedoms to pursue their own goals too, and try to come up with frameworks which are a good fit with that.

Rape is often used as a metaphor for undue exercise of power not excluding labour relations when the powerful (who may be a trade union! ) exercise undue power .

The difficult bit is defining "undue" . It's safe to say we all recognise undue power must be checked. One definition I know is Karl Marx's

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" (German: Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen) is a slogan popularised by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme. The principle refers to free access to and distribution of goods, capital and services.

Another definition of "undue" is implied by The Golden Rule which is repeated again and again in all world religions since more than two centuries ago.

"Undue" etymologically includes the concept of duty. Duty seems unfeeling and a bit sterile when compared with e.g. pity, or affection and may be the watchword of cruel tyrants. Therefore in addition to duty we need to add ordinary kindness and affections. The kindnesses and affections of the everyday is probably the safest bet for what we can possibly know of eternal moral truth.

Belindi wrote: ↑March 26th, 2022, 5:31 am The kindnesses and affections of the everyday is probably the safest bet for what we can possibly know of eternal moral truth.

I agree with you - But

Should we only be kind to those who are kind to us, a kind of a business arrangement. Or should we strive to be kind to everyone, despite how they may treat us?

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 7:38 pm

CIN wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 12:40 pm if the surgeon has a duty to use the body, does that mean that everyone else has a right to let him? Does that even make sense?

It doesn't. Maybe the correct inversion is to say that if you think the surgeon has the duty to commit murder to obtain organs to cure his patients then you think the patients have the right to be cured by such a means.

But suppose one of the five, and only one, can be cured by a heart transplant. Does he have more of a right to the heart than the man whose heart it actually is? That seems unreasonable.

I'd be willing to accept that every sentient being has the right to be treated as a moral end. If we try to assign further rights, we seem to run into problems, and I'm not convinced there are any.

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 7:38 pm

Isn't it precisely because rape is almost always very unpleasant for the victim that we think it is wrong? For what other reason could it be wrong?

Rape is wrong because the potential victim has the right to bestow the use of her own body. It doesn't become morally permissible if she's so drugged that it's hardly unpleasant at all. It's still a trespass.

And what about when she recovers from her drugged state? What about the continuing unpleasantness of the knowledge that she was raped, and the possibility of psychological trauma, which could last for years? When I spoke of rape being unpleasant for the victim, I meant the total amount of unpleasantness that she experiences, not just the unpleasantness at the time.

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 7:38 pm

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 4:35 am But then sometimes you seem to be advocating a conventional rules-based ethic, for consequentialist reasons.

CIN wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 12:40 pm Yes, that is in practice what I advocate.

I think we should distinguish very clearly between two questions: what is the correct moral theory? and the prescriptions of which moral theory should be followed in practice? The answer to the first will determine the answer to the second.

This bit confused me. At first I read it as saying that consequentialism as the correct theory about the basis of morality determines that we should follow a consequentialist ethic.

But in context I think maybe you mean the opposite - that the correctness of the consequentialist explanation of morality determines that we should follow a rules-based ethic in which murder is wrong and rape is wrong,. Because empirically this minimizes the amount of umpleasantness in the world.

Yes, your latter reading is what I intended.

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 7:38 pm

We’re not make the world a better place: that’s not what philosophers do.

Even though making the world a better place is according to you, a moral duty. In fact, if I understand you rightly, the very source of moral duty.

Yes. But it's still not what we're doing here, is it?

Maybe it is -

Premise: the correct moral theory determines the ethic that we should follow
Premise: the correct ethic minimizes umpleasantness
Premise: we're more likely to follow the ethic that we should follow if we know what it is
Conclusion: identifying the correct moral theory makes the world a better place.

?

There could be a de facto benefit from consequentialism being adopted by society at large as its guiding principle, but I think philosophers do moral philosophy in order to find out the truth, whether it leads to good consequences or not.

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 23rd, 2022, 7:38 pm More generally, I worry about the sort of worldview that says that other people should follow moral rules but we enlightened philosophers are above such things and are free to break the rules whenever we think that we can bring about a better outcome thereby...

I didn't mean to imply that we philosophers can break rules where others shouldn't. Take promises, for example: I hold that one ought to keep promises except in cases where harm is done thereby, because the institution of promise-making and -keeping is beneficial, and people need to keep promises most of the time if the institution is to survive. Philosophers are not above or separate from society, they are part of it, and if obedience to a rule is good for consequentialist reasons, the duty to obey it applies to philosophers just as it does to anyone else.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 26th, 2022, 4:53 am

If I have £10 and I’m wondering whether to spend it on a DVD or a chocolate cake, what I’m probably wondering is which will give me experiences that are more pleasant. The experiences of watching a DVD and eating a cake are very different, but they can both have the same property of pleasantness. And if I find, having done both, that eating chocolate cake gives me more pleasure than watching DVDs, then I’ve actually been measuring the pleasantness of those experiences, albeit very roughly.

But on another day you might feel greater pleasantness watching the dvd, because pleasantness is interwoven with all the other aspects of your unified field of consciousness. There is no in principle objectively identifiable unit of cake-pleasure. And so can't reliably extrapolate from your pleasure experience one day to the next, or to other people or sentient species.

The argument here is that people are different, so that there is no disutility of a particular experience that applies across all subjects. (And it also carries across to individuals having different preferences at different points in their life).

So on the one hand, we can ask the individuals involved, and end up with an ethic of consent.

In such an ethic if CIN wants to sneak into your house and replace all your DVDs with chocolate cakes, it's not up to me or any third party to judge whether this constitutes an increase in your wellbeing. It's up to him to get your consent before he does it.

Seems to me that that works as long as you are giving or withholding consent for what concerns you, and any other parties are giving or witholding consent for what concerns them.

If your busybody neighbour says she doesn't approve of this act at all because chocolate is unhealthy, we can tell her that it's not her decision to make; it's yours.

Arguably if anyone can ask you whether you consented (or play back a recording of the conversation in which consent was given) then you have something like third-party falsifiability.

And on the other hand, if there are experiences - being threatened, raped or robbed, perhaps ? - which it seems that any human in their right mind would consider a negative experience, then maybe we can say that these acts are intrinsically wrong ?

Now I'm a moral person, so I work out if I get them drunk enough, or slip them a roofie, they'll barely register any unpleasantness, say -6 if they feel a bit sore of hungover the next day. But I get + 50 pleasant units when I rape them. Raping them is then the moral thing to do right, I ought to to drug and rape people? You can't argue with maths.

...It's why utilitariarian maximisation fails....

...Well I agree with you that any on point approach to morality should be consequentialist,

I'm struggling to distinguish consequentialism from utilitarian maximization. If the moral weight of particular consequences cannot be measured, why give priority to consequences in judging whether an act is good or bad ? If consequentialism doesn't mean judging acts by the goodness or badness of their consequences, what does it mean ?

Are you having your chocolate cake and eating it ? Or what am I missing ?

EricPH wrote: ↑March 26th, 2022, 2:35 pm

Belindi wrote: ↑March 26th, 2022, 5:31 am The kindnesses and affections of the everyday is probably the safest bet for what we can possibly know of eternal moral truth.

I agree with you - But

Should we only be kind to those who are kind to us, a kind of a business arrangement. Or should we strive to be kind to everyone, despite how they may treat us?

At least and in the name of fairness we are duty bound to treat others as we would want to be treated. Duty is "stern daughter of the voice of God". Duty has a foot in the camps of both efficiency and kindness.

Kindness is etymologically related to kind, king , and kin. The ultimate kindness is to treat all as kin, including the non-human and non-animal worlds. So kindness trumps all other virtues.

Belindi wrote: ↑March 26th, 2022, 5:31 am It's safe to say we all recognise undue power must be checked.

Not sure that's true. If I think the moderators of this forum have too much power, to whom do I have a moral duty to do something about it ? And what exactly do I have a moral duty to do ?

Duty seems unfeeling and a bit sterile when compared with e.g. pity, or affection and may be the watchword of cruel tyrants. Therefore in addition to duty we need to add ordinary kindness and affections. The kindnesses and affections of the everyday is probably the safest bet for what we can possibly know of eternal moral truth.

Pity and affection are feelings. We do not control what we feel or who we feel it about.

It seems normal for pity and affection to be felt first for oneself, second for family and friends, and thirdly for all other sentient beings to the extent of similarity with oneself. The more we perceive others to be like us, to be of our culture, to be having experiences that we've had, the more we can identify with them and the more we feel for them.

As a way of deciding between the competing claims of other people (such as who gets the organs) feelings don't cut it.

Physical realities such as gravity are unfeeling. If moral duty is a reality it is unfeeling. Impartiality is unfeeling - feelings bias decisions.

There's nothing wrong with - having done one's duty - going further and carrying out kind acts to those we feel for. On the contrary, such acts are virtuous.

The problem comes when feeling-driven kindnesses are mistaken for or substitute for truth and duty. Mercy is a good thing; just don't mistake it for justice.

Good_Egg wrote: ↑March 27th, 2022, 6:53 pm Mercy is a good thing; just don't mistake it for justice.

Justice applies to all - victims and agressors, all of their loved ones, and all of the community as a whole. Sometimes justice is merciful, other times it can be quite brutal. Above all, justice judges each individual case on its own merits, not according to fixed and dogmatic laws or 'moral truths', whether either of them is eternal or not. IMO

good egg

If I have £10 and I’m wondering whether to spend it on a DVD or a chocolate cake, what I’m probably wondering is which will give me experiences that are more pleasant. The experiences of watching a DVD and eating a cake are very different, but they can both have the same property of pleasantness. And if I find, having done both, that eating chocolate cake gives me more pleasure than watching DVDs, then I’ve actually been measuring the pleasantness of those experiences, albeit very roughly.

But on another day you might feel greater pleasantness watching the dvd, because pleasantness is interwoven with all the other aspects of your unified field of consciousness. There is no in principle objectively identifiable unit of cake-pleasure. And so can't reliably extrapolate from your pleasure experience one day to the next, or to other people or sentient species.

The argument here is that people are different, so that there is no disutility of a particular experience that applies across all subjects. (And it also carries across to individuals having different preferences at different points in their life).

Right. There's also the point about consciousness manifesting as a unified field of interacting 'flavours' all affecting each other from moment to moment. So even something as narrowly definable as ''a unit of cake-pleasure for gertie'' isn't directly correllated to gertie's cake pleasure neurons firing at the point which gertie's unified field of consciousness is manifesting.

This is harder to explain, but we can think about obvious times when we're over-whelmed with emotion or concentrating on something else when we barely notice the taste of what we're eating, but these interactions are happening less noticeably all the time, affecting what the experience of ''what it is like to be gertie eating cake'' entails. Or sometimes it takes a question to elicit focus on whether I like the taste of the cake, want some now, and sometimes it's up front and centre. Or have you ever eaten a chocolate but not known what the flavour is? Then looked at the wrapper and and only then recognised the flavour, tasted the orangeyness as orangey? That's because, I think, our consciousness subsystems continuously interact in ways affecting each other. Which means there is no definable unit of cake-pleasure to be located.

It's not a matter of working through all the complexity, there just isn't such a singular identifiable objective thing as cake-pleasure, but rather what pleasure a particular person experiences by eating cake at a particular moment, within the context of everything else it is like to be that person at that moment.

If that's the way conscious experience works, then any morality rooted in it is necessarily imprecise in principle.

Multiple realisability is pertinent here too I think. There are many ways to experience pleasure or pain, your ways don't have to be identical to mine, because there aren't identical and identifiable cake pleasure neurons in the brain. Rather cake pleasure manifests within the field of consciousness in relation to the whole the brain's interactions, and every brain is different, from moment to moment.

So on the one hand, we can ask the individuals involved, and end up with an ethic of consent.

In one-to-one situations that makes sense, yes, we do it all the time. Because experience is private and we can't read each other's minds.

In such an ethic if CIN wants to sneak into your house and replace all your DVDs with chocolate cakes, it's not up to me or any third party to judge whether this constitutes an increase in your wellbeing. It's up to him to get your consent before he does it.

Yes in most circs. I'm a human adult of soundish mind.

Seems to me that that works as long as you are giving or withholding consent for what concerns you, and any other parties are giving or witholding consent for what concerns them.

If your busybody neighbour says she doesn't approve of this act at all because chocolate is unhealthy, we can tell her that it's not her decision to make; it's yours.

Sure.

Arguably if anyone can ask you whether you consented (or play back a recording of the conversation in which consent was given) then you have something like third-party falsifiability.

There would be objective evidence I consented, yes, reports of experience are third person accessible, can be heard by anyone. Of course I might have had a reason to say something I didn't mean, felt I had no choice, been ignorant of some key fact when I gave consent, I might be cow being asked to moo once if I consent to being your dinner, etc. What I'm actually experiencing isn't publically accessible, but generally consent is a useful workaround.

And on the other hand, if there are experiences - being threatened, raped or robbed, perhaps ? - which it seems that any human in their right mind would consider a negative experience, then maybe we can say that these acts are intrinsically wrong ?

We can formulate moral rules of thumb because it's hard to imagine circs when such things are morally justified by other consequences. But there are possible exceptions, say if a starving person robbed me to buy food. The consequences re wellbeing then could tip the scales. We'd be sensible to still have laws against those things, but with some mechanism for deciding how to enact them in cases like the starving person. Mitigating and aggravating circumstances being taken into account.

And it's because we have a moral foundation to check back with that we can make such consequentialist adjustments. Claims that it is intrinsically wrong to rob have no justification but themselves, don't have such a corrective mechanism, wrong is wrong and that's that, logically every robber is equally intrinsically immoral in every circ.

Philosophically intrinsic, eternal moral truths can't just beg the question Says Who, and Why? And they don't allow for re-evaluation in the light of particular circs or consequences, or improvement, or progress, or new knowledge. It was believed slavery of certain groups is intrinsically morally good, and gay is intrinsically bad. Why? Either it just is because that's the nature of the universe, or god says so, or most people feel that way about it. But you have to justify that premise. And if you believe you can, you're left with slavery and homophobia as eternal moral truths for ever.

So establishing a moral foundation is the appropriate place to start.

Then develop principles/rules of thumb which you reason from your moral foundation.

Then apply your principles to specific scenarios.

Then check back that your principles consequentially worked as intended in practice, by referring back to your foundation.


That's all pretty straightforward imo, and gives us a workable framework to start wrangling with an amorphous concept like morality.

I think establishing the basis for the appropriate moral foundation is straightforward too, when you stop worrying about objective v subjective and view morality appropriately in terms of a stake in the state of affairs.

The really tricky part for a foundation based in experiential, private, qualiative wellbeing, is one of putting it into practice. So we have to use what tools are available and do our best to follow our foundation, without kidding ourselves we can achieve a tidy perfection. I see ideas like intrinsic eternal truths, the golden rule (or better the platinum rule) and deontology as useful, practical workarounds, but which don't get to grips with what morality is foundationally about. There's a problem if you mistake the rule book for the mission statement, in what are the rules based on, and how do we correct rules in circs they don't work well for. Such a foundation also encompasses 'shoulds' not just 'should nots'. We collectively should try to ensure each individual has the opportunity to flourish according to this foundation.

Now I'm a moral person, so I work out if I get them drunk enough, or slip them a roofie, they'll barely register any unpleasantness, say -6 if they feel a bit sore of hungover the next day. But I get + 50 pleasant units when I rape them. Raping them is then the moral thing to do right, I ought to to drug and rape people? You can't argue with maths.

...It's why utilitariarian maximisation fails....

...Well I agree with you that any on point approach to morality should be consequentialist,

I'm struggling to distinguish consequentialism from utilitarian maximization. If the moral weight of particular consequences cannot be measured, why give priority to consequences in judging whether an act is good or bad ? If consequentialism doesn't mean judging acts by the goodness or badness of their consequences, what does it mean ?

Are you having your chocolate cake and eating it ? Or what am I missing ?

I stole your chocolate cake too, but I was starving honest.

It's CIN's claim that unpleasantness can in principle be objectively measured I'm arguing against. Did you miss me going on and on about that lol. The idea that we can in principle perform calculations which give us the correct answer and thereby create an equation for maximal utility. But I agree with CIN that consequences are what make morality meaningful. If there were no consequences to anyone's quality of life if you swapped their dvds for cakes, or robbed or raped them, if we were all mindless robots who had no stake in such actions, then where is the harm? That's my question to you?

Should a universe of mindless robots have morals and laws about such things because they are intrinsically bad? You seem to think the universe cares - but robots, rocks and toasters don't care, only experiencing beings do. So where's your argument?

Gertie ,

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

And I can understand why you would reject the notion of a "felicific calculus" by which the moral weights and likelihoods of every conceivable consequence can be weighed up to give a net positive or negative verdict on an action. Many non-utilitarians would agree with you.

What I don't get is how you believe both at the same time.

The combination seems to lead to a sort of moral agnosticism. Where the only thing that matters is the positivity or otherwise of an action's consequences, and that's something which isn't well-defined enough for us to know it ? So all the moral philosophers should give up and go home, because we cannot know right from wrong...

When you have a valid syllogism, the choices are to accept the conclusion or doubt one of the two premises. For my money, denying consequentialism is the right way out of the trilemma you pose.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 26th, 2022, 4:53 am So presumably you agree that a moral theory rooted in the nature of conscious experience has to grapple with the nature of conscious experience as it is, whether that turns out to be tidy and precisely calcuable, or messy and unable to offer perfect formulae applicable to all scenarios.

Yes.

I believe you're spot on that conscious experience is the appropriate grounding for oughts and the concepts of right and wrong. I disagree on details relating to the nature of experience. Namely that it is objectively quantifiable in principle and practice (objective here meaning third person falsifiable).

I claim that un/pleasantness is quantifiable in principle. I do not claim that it is quantifiable in practice.

'Objective' does not mean the same as 'third person falsifiable.' The proposition 'CIN is currently experiencing a four-sided silver quale in the lower part of his visual field' is objectively true, in that its truth is independent of anyone's subjective opinion, including CIN's, but we don't know whether it is third person falsifiable. It isn't currently third person falsifiable by humans, but for all we know it might be third person falsifiable by telepaths, or by God, or by future human scientists, or by aliens.

I've said why, and it's not an idiosyncratic position. Rather your claim that that something which can't be third person observed or measured is the controversial claim, and the onus is on you to give a an in principle way it might be done. You still haven't. Why doesn't that worry you?

Because I don't care. Because I don't need to care. Because discovering a way of measuring the intensity of a sentient being's experienced pleasantness is a problem for scientists, and I'm not a scientist. I'm really not interested in this. All I actually care about is working with such data as we have. As I've said before, when I talk about numbers of units of pleasure, I do it hypothetically, and merely to bring out the implications of different moral views. Maybe I've given a false impression by not using conditionals. When I say things like 'Fred experiences 100 utils', you should read that as 'Suppose we can now measure the intensity of pleasantness accurately enough to calibrate it in units we call utils, and suppose we detect that the pleasantness of Fred's experience measures 100 utils'. I omit these conditionals because it would be tedious to keep putting them in. I don't claim to know, and I don't actually care, whether scientists will ever actually find a way of measuring the intensity of pleasantness; it's enough for my theory that intensity of pleasantness varies, and must therefore in principle be measurable, even if no-one in the entire history of the universe ever manages to actually measure it, and that we can sometimes judge with reasonable accuracy that if I do X to someone, they're likely to experience a more intense pleasantness than if I do Y to them. That's all you need for a hedonistic consequentialist theory.

I also think that the nature of experience is more appropriately addressed holistically for moral purposes, because pleasure isn't manifested or experienced independantly of all the other interacting aspects of experience which form a unified field of consciousness and overall sense of wellbeing, from moment to moment.

An inference from 'pleasure isn't manifested or experienced independently of all the other interacting aspects of experience' to 'pleasure cannot be considered independently of all the other interacting aspects of experience' would be unsound. Un/pleasantness is a property of experiences, and we frequently consider,and indeed measure, properties in isolation from the objects that have them, as for example when you consider and measure your height or weight.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am If you want to capture what morality is really about, then that's a bigger task which involves wrangling difficult realities which don't give tidy answes the way physics problems do.

It's unsafe to infer from the fact that we currently don't have tidy answers to moral questions, that we never will.

That's not my objection. There's a reason physics can give tidy answers we treat as facts and can use to make reliable predictions, because it's rooted in observations and measurements which can be checked. We've built a whole model of the universe, of what it's made of and how it works based on that. Conscious experience isn't part of that model.

All the more reason to believe that the model is incomplete. Everything we think we know about the universe is filtered through our conscious experience, so a model of the universe which leaves out conscious experience is an absurdity. (And, BTW, 95% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, and scientists don't know what those are, so your 'whole model of the universe' isn't remotely whole even at the physical level.)

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am You ignore the messy awkwardness of dealing with the inherent private and qualiative nature of experience, in order to believe you can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure. Whereby 1 passing an exam util = 87 ice cream utils, or 1 rape = -192 unpleasant utils for the victim and +33 pleasant utils for the rapist - assuming rape ''merits a desirable attitude'' to the rapist.

I do not claim that I 'can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure.' That would be a category error, since utils are hypothetical, and you can’t publicly or objectively measure something that is hypothetical.

As I understand it you claim is it is in principle possible to objectively measure units of pleasure (swap 87 ice cream utils for units of pleasure then) in order to weigh moral choices (if only roughly for now).

It depends what you mean by 'possible'. If you mean that pleasure has greater and lesser intensity and that anything that can be greater or lesser must have quantitative differences which must in principle be measurable, then I agree. If you mean that it must be possible for some sentient and rational being to actually make these measurements, then that is something I don't know and don't claim.

And because pleasure ''merits'' a positive attitude (pretty much a tautology) which form the basis for oughts because pleasure ''merits'' a positive attitude, moral choices should attempt to maximise pleasure. That's your moral thesis right? Can you put it more cogently than me?

In theory, moral choices should do two things: they should aim to maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness for all sentient beings that are capable of experiencing un/pleasantness, and they should treat all such beings as equally deserving of such treatment unless there are good reasons to do otherwise. In practice, since working out what to do according to these principles is likely to be too difficult, moral choices should generally be about following rules of thumb that stand the best chance of meeting these theoretical aims.

I find it interesting that you think 'pleasure "merits" a positive attitude' is 'pretty much a tautology'.' It isn't, of course, but it's interesting that you think it 'pretty much is', because it suggests that you think, as I do, that there is a necessary connection between pleasantness and having a positive attitude. (This of course is a necessity resulting from the laws of nature, not a logical necessity; if it were a logical necessity, then it would indeed be a tautology.) If you couple that with my view that 'good' means 'merits a positive attitude', or something similar (A.C.Ewing expressed essentially the same view when he said 'good' meant 'fitting object of a pro-attitude'), then you have my version of ethical naturalism. Would you say you are an ethical naturalist?

If you don't address the nature of experience, which ''merits a positive attitude'' is one manifestation of, then thought experiments can't clarify the basis of your theory.

They weren't intended to clarify its basis, they were intended to highlight its different implications from those of other theories. All I'm doing by using utils is bringing out the fact that there are quantitative differences in un/pleasantness, and that these quantitative differences have implications for morality.

If I have £10 and I’m wondering whether to spend it on a DVD or a chocolate cake, what I’m probably wondering is which will give me experiences that are more pleasant. The experiences of watching a DVD and eating a cake are very different, but they can both have the same property of pleasantness. And if I find, having done both, that eating chocolate cake gives me more pleasure than watching DVDs, then I’ve actually been measuring the pleasantness of those experiences, albeit very roughly.

But on another day you might feel greater pleasantness watching the dvd, because pleasantness is interwoven with all the other aspects of your unified field of consciousness.

Of course, but that doesn't refute my theory, it just makes doing the calculations more complicated.

There is no in principle objectively identifiable unit of cake-pleasure.

You're muddying the waters. I've never claimed there was such a thing as cake-pleasure. Pleasantness is pleasantness, it does not come in different types for different experiences.

And so can't reliably extrapolate from your pleasure experience one day to the next, or to other people or sentient species.

But I don't extrapolate to other people or sentient species from the pleasure (or, as I prefer to say, pleasantness) alone; I extrapolate on the basis of the pleasantness I experience, plus other evidence, such as similarities in behaviour, in physiology, and in evolutionary history.

Now maybe I hate cake, but love raping, it gives me a lot of pleasure. Your theory says me raping people for fun is morally good, I ought to do it in principle. Maybe it scores + 50 pleasure units for me. But it becomes wrong in practice (consequentially) if it scores over -50 unpleasant units for the person I'm raping, which is likely. Now I'm a moral person, so I work out if I get them drunk enough, or slip them a roofie, they'll barely register any unpleasantness, say -6 if they feel a bit sore of hungover the next day. But I get + 50 pleasant units when I rape them. Raping them is then the moral thing to do right, I ought to to drug and rape people? You can't argue with maths.

Have you been sexually assaulted? I have. I'm male, not female, and it wasn't rape, it was a minor sexual assault; but I can tell you that your story about someone feeling no more than a bit sore or hungover afterwards is fantasy. You feel violated. You feel a violent emotional reaction. In my case, it was anger. I wanted to kill the bastard. Luckily, I didn't get the chance.

But let's suppose that your fantasy is possible. Hell, let's fantasise properly - let's suppose that the drug you give your victim is so powerful that it makes them find the rape enjoyable. Not only that, it also prevents any subsequent negative feelings and psychological or physical trauma. It also prevents the victim, if it's a woman, getting pregnant. So: your victim enjoyed the rape. Afterwards, s/he felt on top the world. Was the rapist wrong to rape?

The reason we think rape is bad is not that something has been done to someone without their consent; it's because rape causes extreme unpleasantness for the victim, not just at the time, but long afterwards. If you do something for someone without their consent that they find pleasant - for example, throwing them a surprise birthday party - then we don't think that's wrong, and we're right not to think so.

Morality is about how we treat beings to whom it matters how we treat them. Such beings are to be treated as moral ends. If we treat sentient beings as moral ends, we try to do things for them (or even to them) that will increase the pleasantness they experience. If we do things to them that increase the unpleasantness they experience, that can only be for one of two reasons: either we are not treating them as moral ends, or we are treating them as moral ends but we hold an incorrect view about what is right and wrong - as, for example, the Catholic Church did in earlier centuries when it tortured people on the theory that they would then be more likely to go to heaven.

Utilitarians think that unpleasantness experienced by one person can be paid for by pleasantness experienced by another. They're wrong, because that would mean that the person who is experiencing the unpleasantness is not being treated as a moral end.

So in your example, the rapist is doing the wrong thing, even if the unpleasantness he causes his victim is less than the pleasantness he experiences himself, because he is treating himself as a moral end, but not his victim.

Or you can take the view that people feel better overall living in a society which doesn't condone drugging and raping each other, they feel more secure going out and about, it improves the overall stability and sense of well-being of people living in that society.

Well, yes. That's another good reason to discourage rape.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am You make the claim that units of pleasure are in principle objectively identifiable without being able to say how in principle they could be.

There are precedents. Anaxagoras knew In the 5th century BC that the moon was a rocky body some distance from earth, so he must have known that the distance from the earth to the moon was measurable in principle; but it wasn’t until Aristarchus in the 3rd century that anyone worked out a way of doing it. And the ancient Greeks presumably also knew that the earth must have a measurable weight, but no-one managed to work out how to measure it until Henry Cavendish in the 18th century.

Chalmers makes a distinction between the ''easy problems'' of consciousness which are immensely difficult and complex in practice, maybe not even practically possble, and the in principle ''hard problem'' of consciousness. This in principle ''hard problem'' difficulty lies in the non-physical attributes of experience, while our scientific toolkit relies on observable and measurable physical properties to establish third person falsifiable facts about physical stuff and processes, and extrapolate testable theories from.

This is a misrepresentation. The difficulty of the hard problem does not lie in the non-physical attributes of experience, it lies in the disconnect between these non-physical attributes and the physical stuff and processes that science understands. This difficulty is unique to the hard problem, because it is a difficulty affecting explanation and no other activity. It is not a feature of the problem of measurement, because all we need for reliable measurement of mental phenomena is correlation between these phenomena and physical processes, not explanation.

Finding a way to measure stuff which is in principle accessible to third person measurement is a different issue to finding a way to measure stuff which by its nature isn't accessible to third person measurement. Experience is by its nature first person and private, it isn't accessible to third person falsifiable observation and measurement like the moon.

You're setting the bar too high. We're not doing science here, we're doing moral judgments. We can make good relative estimates of the short-term consequences of actions - for example, I know that if I break my dog's leg, he will suffer more unpleasantness than I will if I go without my dinner - and this kind of rough estimation or measurement, coupled with some experience-based generalisations about the likely longer-term consequences of certain type of action, is a sufficient evidence base to support hedonistic consequentialism.

This is part of what makes experience difficult to formulate hard and fast moral rules about which will always hold. It's why we have have to recognise individual differences because experience comes packaged in unique subjects with their own idiosyncrasies, including what they find pleasurable. It's part of why consequences come into play because subjects aren't identical and moral outcomes aren't predictable in their effects on individuals. It's why utilitariarian maximisation fails.

I'm not a utilitarian, for the reason I gave above.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am And when there is an in principle reason to believe that the private and qualiative nature of experience means it isn't objectively quantifiable in the way your theory requires.

Well, again, I don’t need quantification to be that accurate.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am And even if we could develop the technology to precisely measure say the C fibre firings correlated with pain in comparable ways between members of the same species, you still need to address the issues like multiple realisability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_ ... l%20states.), of comparing different 'flavours' of experience like loving music and having a headache using the same units, and the way experience manifests as a unified field of conscious with an overall sense of wellbeing but a continually shifting focus, enveloping every interacting subsystem simultaneously affecting the other from moment to moment, and in specific different ways from individual to individual.

All you’re really saying here is that any solution to the problem of measuring subjective un/pleasantness will have to deal with a lot of complexity. Yes, obviously. That isn’t a proof that it can’t be done.

OK so what is this unit a unit of? Intensity, time limited, is ice cream pleasure equal to passing an exam pleasure, is it standard across people and species?

Yes, to all of those.

Having interests in the state of affairs is the grounding principle for oughts. If I have no interests in what happens to me, say I'm a rock or a carrot or a toaster, you have no reason to show me moral consideration, there are no Oughts in play. In a universe of rocks and gases interacting according to the laws of physics, morality is meaningless.

- There are objective facts about the state of affairs

- There are subjective opinions about the state of affairs

- There are stakes in the state of affairs (the basis for oughts).

Experiencing beings, subjects, have a qualiative ''what it's like'' quality of life, which means the state of affairs affects our quality of life in ways which are meaningful and matter to us. This is why experiencing subjects have a stake in what happens to us, but non-experiencing rocks and toasters and carrots don't (as far as we can tell).

IMO this establishing of a moral foundation is the easy part. Morality without interests makes no sense.

I agree with all of this.

''Promoting the well-being of conscious creatures'' is as good a way of putting morality appropriately grounded in interests in the state of affairs as any I can think of.

This is where we disagree. The problem I have with wellbeing is that it's too vague and ambiguous an idea to be of much use. When I Google 'wellbeing definition', I get 'the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.' But being healthy and being happy are two quite different things. Being happy I would see as being an intrinsic good, while being healthy I see as a merely instrumental good.

I don't see how any useful philosophical analysis can be done on the basis of such a vague and ambiguous idea.

Gertie wrote: ↑March 28th, 2022, 8:20 pm Such a foundation also encompasses 'shoulds' not just 'should nots'. We collectively should try to ensure each individual has the opportunity to flourish according to this foundation.

The difficulty with positive shoulds is knowing who the duty falls upon. That one should not murder and should not rape is universal - nobody should do these things to anyone. As soon as you posit positive duties - that the world at large has a duty to feed a starving man or satisfy the sexual desires of an incel, then you need a reason why that duty falls upon person A and not person B. It isn't the case that both need to do it. You end up saying that B doesn't have to if A is doing it , and vice versa. That's not an ethic, it's just wishful thinking - "somebody should do this".

I agree with CIN that consequences are what make morality meaningful. If there were no consequences to anyone's quality of life if you swapped their dvds for cakes, or robbed or raped them, if we were all mindless robots who had no stake in such actions, then where is the harm? That's my question to you?

You talked about having a stake as the basis for morality. I'd say that a robot that is sentient enough to be able to consent has a stake in its own existence, and in what happens to its robot body, regardless of whether it experiences pleasure as such.

Every normal adult human has a stake in what happens to their body. So nobody should rape that body or apply medical treatment to that body without their consent. Regardless of whether anybody else considers the consequences of treatment to be positive or negative.

Having a stake seems a natural justification for a right of veto over whatever one has a stake in.

If you bake a cake, you've a stake in who eats it. Merely desiring someone else's cake more than they do does not give you a stake in what happens to that cake. You have a stake in your appetite for it, meaning that you may decline a slice if offered.

The owner of the cake may of course have mercy on your hunger. And that would be a virtuous act. But that's not quite the same as there being an imperative to do it.

CIN wrote: ↑March 29th, 2022, 6:59 pm

Gertie wrote: ↑March 26th, 2022, 4:53 am So presumably you agree that a moral theory rooted in the nature of conscious experience has to grapple with the nature of conscious experience as it is, whether that turns out to be tidy and precisely calcuable, or messy and unable to offer perfect formulae applicable to all scenarios.

Yes.

I believe you're spot on that conscious experience is the appropriate grounding for oughts and the concepts of right and wrong. I disagree on details relating to the nature of experience. Namely that it is objectively quantifiable in principle and practice (objective here meaning third person falsifiable).

I claim that un/pleasantness is quantifiable in principle. I do not claim that it is quantifiable in practice.

'Objective' does not mean the same as 'third person falsifiable.' The proposition 'CIN is currently experiencing a four-sided silver quale in the lower part of his visual field' is objectively true, in that its truth is independent of anyone's subjective opinion, including CIN's, but we don't know whether it is third person falsifiable. It isn't currently third person falsifiable by humans, but for all we know it might be third person falsifiable by telepaths, or by God, or by future human scientists, or by aliens.

I've said why, and it's not an idiosyncratic position. Rather your claim that that something which can't be third person observed or measured is the controversial claim, and the onus is on you to give a an in principle way it might be done. You still haven't. Why doesn't that worry you?

Because I don't care. Because I don't need to care. Because discovering a way of measuring the intensity of a sentient being's experienced pleasantness is a problem for scientists, and I'm not a scientist. I'm really not interested in this. All I actually care about is working with such data as we have. As I've said before, when I talk about numbers of units of pleasure, I do it hypothetically, and merely to bring out the implications of different moral views. Maybe I've given a false impression by not using conditionals. When I say things like 'Fred experiences 100 utils', you should read that as 'Suppose we can now measure the intensity of pleasantness accurately enough to calibrate it in units we call utils, and suppose we detect that the pleasantness of Fred's experience measures 100 utils'. I omit these conditionals because it would be tedious to keep putting them in. I don't claim to know, and I don't actually care, whether scientists will ever actually find a way of measuring the intensity of pleasantness; it's enough for my theory that intensity of pleasantness varies, and must therefore in principle be measurable, even if no-one in the entire history of the universe ever manages to actually measure it, and that we can sometimes judge with reasonable accuracy that if I do X to someone, they're likely to experience a more intense pleasantness than if I do Y to them. That's all you need for a hedonistic consequentialist theory.

I also think that the nature of experience is more appropriately addressed holistically for moral purposes, because pleasure isn't manifested or experienced independantly of all the other interacting aspects of experience which form a unified field of consciousness and overall sense of wellbeing, from moment to moment.

An inference from 'pleasure isn't manifested or experienced independently of all the other interacting aspects of experience' to 'pleasure cannot be considered independently of all the other interacting aspects of experience' would be unsound. Un/pleasantness is a property of experiences, and we frequently consider,and indeed measure, properties in isolation from the objects that have them, as for example when you consider and measure your height or weight.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am If you want to capture what morality is really about, then that's a bigger task which involves wrangling difficult realities which don't give tidy answes the way physics problems do.

It's unsafe to infer from the fact that we currently don't have tidy answers to moral questions, that we never will.

That's not my objection. There's a reason physics can give tidy answers we treat as facts and can use to make reliable predictions, because it's rooted in observations and measurements which can be checked. We've built a whole model of the universe, of what it's made of and how it works based on that. Conscious experience isn't part of that model.

All the more reason to believe that the model is incomplete. Everything we think we know about the universe is filtered through our conscious experience, so a model of the universe which leaves out conscious experience is an absurdity. (And, BTW, 95% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, and scientists don't know what those are, so your 'whole model of the universe' isn't remotely whole even at the physical level.)

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am You ignore the messy awkwardness of dealing with the inherent private and qualiative nature of experience, in order to believe you can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure. Whereby 1 passing an exam util = 87 ice cream utils, or 1 rape = -192 unpleasant utils for the victim and +33 pleasant utils for the rapist - assuming rape ''merits a desirable attitude'' to the rapist.

I do not claim that I 'can publically/objectively quantify 'utils' as standardised units of pleasure.' That would be a category error, since utils are hypothetical, and you can’t publicly or objectively measure something that is hypothetical.

As I understand it you claim is it is in principle possible to objectively measure units of pleasure (swap 87 ice cream utils for units of pleasure then) in order to weigh moral choices (if only roughly for now).

It depends what you mean by 'possible'. If you mean that pleasure has greater and lesser intensity and that anything that can be greater or lesser must have quantitative differences which must in principle be measurable, then I agree. If you mean that it must be possible for some sentient and rational being to actually make these measurements, then that is something I don't know and don't claim.

And because pleasure ''merits'' a positive attitude (pretty much a tautology) which form the basis for oughts because pleasure ''merits'' a positive attitude, moral choices should attempt to maximise pleasure. That's your moral thesis right? Can you put it more cogently than me?

In theory, moral choices should do two things: they should aim to maximise pleasantness and minimise unpleasantness for all sentient beings that are capable of experiencing un/pleasantness, and they should treat all such beings as equally deserving of such treatment unless there are good reasons to do otherwise. In practice, since working out what to do according to these principles is likely to be too difficult, moral choices should generally be about following rules of thumb that stand the best chance of meeting these theoretical aims.

I find it interesting that you think 'pleasure "merits" a positive attitude' is 'pretty much a tautology'.' It isn't, of course, but it's interesting that you think it 'pretty much is', because it suggests that you think, as I do, that there is a necessary connection between pleasantness and having a positive attitude. (This of course is a necessity resulting from the laws of nature, not a logical necessity; if it were a logical necessity, then it would indeed be a tautology.) If you couple that with my view that 'good' means 'merits a positive attitude', or something similar (A.C.Ewing expressed essentially the same view when he said 'good' meant 'fitting object of a pro-attitude'), then you have my version of ethical naturalism. Would you say you are an ethical naturalist?

If you don't address the nature of experience, which ''merits a positive attitude'' is one manifestation of, then thought experiments can't clarify the basis of your theory.

They weren't intended to clarify its basis, they were intended to highlight its different implications from those of other theories. All I'm doing by using utils is bringing out the fact that there are quantitative differences in un/pleasantness, and that these quantitative differences have implications for morality.

If I have £10 and I’m wondering whether to spend it on a DVD or a chocolate cake, what I’m probably wondering is which will give me experiences that are more pleasant. The experiences of watching a DVD and eating a cake are very different, but they can both have the same property of pleasantness. And if I find, having done both, that eating chocolate cake gives me more pleasure than watching DVDs, then I’ve actually been measuring the pleasantness of those experiences, albeit very roughly.

But on another day you might feel greater pleasantness watching the dvd, because pleasantness is interwoven with all the other aspects of your unified field of consciousness.

Of course, but that doesn't refute my theory, it just makes doing the calculations more complicated.

There is no in principle objectively identifiable unit of cake-pleasure.

You're muddying the waters. I've never claimed there was such a thing as cake-pleasure. Pleasantness is pleasantness, it does not come in different types for different experiences.

And so can't reliably extrapolate from your pleasure experience one day to the next, or to other people or sentient species.

But I don't extrapolate to other people or sentient species from the pleasure (or, as I prefer to say, pleasantness) alone; I extrapolate on the basis of the pleasantness I experience, plus other evidence, such as similarities in behaviour, in physiology, and in evolutionary history.

Now maybe I hate cake, but love raping, it gives me a lot of pleasure. Your theory says me raping people for fun is morally good, I ought to do it in principle. Maybe it scores + 50 pleasure units for me. But it becomes wrong in practice (consequentially) if it scores over -50 unpleasant units for the person I'm raping, which is likely. Now I'm a moral person, so I work out if I get them drunk enough, or slip them a roofie, they'll barely register any unpleasantness, say -6 if they feel a bit sore of hungover the next day. But I get + 50 pleasant units when I rape them. Raping them is then the moral thing to do right, I ought to to drug and rape people? You can't argue with maths.

Have you been sexually assaulted? I have. I'm male, not female, and it wasn't rape, it was a minor sexual assault; but I can tell you that your story about someone feeling no more than a bit sore or hungover afterwards is fantasy. You feel violated. You feel a violent emotional reaction. In my case, it was anger. I wanted to kill the bastard. Luckily, I didn't get the chance.

But let's suppose that your fantasy is possible. Hell, let's fantasise properly - let's suppose that the drug you give your victim is so powerful that it makes them find the rape enjoyable. Not only that, it also prevents any subsequent negative feelings and psychological or physical trauma. It also prevents the victim, if it's a woman, getting pregnant. So: your victim enjoyed the rape. Afterwards, s/he felt on top the world. Was the rapist wrong to rape?

The reason we think rape is bad is not that something has been done to someone without their consent; it's because rape causes extreme unpleasantness for the victim, not just at the time, but long afterwards. If you do something for someone without their consent that they find pleasant - for example, throwing them a surprise birthday party - then we don't think that's wrong, and we're right not to think so.

Morality is about how we treat beings to whom it matters how we treat them. Such beings are to be treated as moral ends. If we treat sentient beings as moral ends, we try to do things for them (or even to them) that will increase the pleasantness they experience. If we do things to them that increase the unpleasantness they experience, that can only be for one of two reasons: either we are not treating them as moral ends, or we are treating them as moral ends but we hold an incorrect view about what is right and wrong - as, for example, the Catholic Church did in earlier centuries when it tortured people on the theory that they would then be more likely to go to heaven.

Utilitarians think that unpleasantness experienced by one person can be paid for by pleasantness experienced by another. They're wrong, because that would mean that the person who is experiencing the unpleasantness is not being treated as a moral end.

So in your example, the rapist is doing the wrong thing, even if the unpleasantness he causes his victim is less than the pleasantness he experiences himself, because he is treating himself as a moral end, but not his victim.

Or you can take the view that people feel better overall living in a society which doesn't condone drugging and raping each other, they feel more secure going out and about, it improves the overall stability and sense of well-being of people living in that society.

Well, yes. That's another good reason to discourage rape.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am You make the claim that units of pleasure are in principle objectively identifiable without being able to say how in principle they could be.

There are precedents. Anaxagoras knew In the 5th century BC that the moon was a rocky body some distance from earth, so he must have known that the distance from the earth to the moon was measurable in principle; but it wasn’t until Aristarchus in the 3rd century that anyone worked out a way of doing it. And the ancient Greeks presumably also knew that the earth must have a measurable weight, but no-one managed to work out how to measure it until Henry Cavendish in the 18th century.

Chalmers makes a distinction between the ''easy problems'' of consciousness which are immensely difficult and complex in practice, maybe not even practically possble, and the in principle ''hard problem'' of consciousness. This in principle ''hard problem'' difficulty lies in the non-physical attributes of experience, while our scientific toolkit relies on observable and measurable physical properties to establish third person falsifiable facts about physical stuff and processes, and extrapolate testable theories from.

This is a misrepresentation. The difficulty of the hard problem does not lie in the non-physical attributes of experience, it lies in the disconnect between these non-physical attributes and the physical stuff and processes that science understands. This difficulty is unique to the hard problem, because it is a difficulty affecting explanation and no other activity. It is not a feature of the problem of measurement, because all we need for reliable measurement of mental phenomena is correlation between these phenomena and physical processes, not explanation.

Finding a way to measure stuff which is in principle accessible to third person measurement is a different issue to finding a way to measure stuff which by its nature isn't accessible to third person measurement. Experience is by its nature first person and private, it isn't accessible to third person falsifiable observation and measurement like the moon.

You're setting the bar too high. We're not doing science here, we're doing moral judgments. We can make good relative estimates of the short-term consequences of actions - for example, I know that if I break my dog's leg, he will suffer more unpleasantness than I will if I go without my dinner - and this kind of rough estimation or measurement, coupled with some experience-based generalisations about the likely longer-term consequences of certain type of action, is a sufficient evidence base to support hedonistic consequentialism.

This is part of what makes experience difficult to formulate hard and fast moral rules about which will always hold. It's why we have have to recognise individual differences because experience comes packaged in unique subjects with their own idiosyncrasies, including what they find pleasurable. It's part of why consequences come into play because subjects aren't identical and moral outcomes aren't predictable in their effects on individuals. It's why utilitariarian maximisation fails.

I'm not a utilitarian, for the reason I gave above.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am And when there is an in principle reason to believe that the private and qualiative nature of experience means it isn't objectively quantifiable in the way your theory requires.

Well, again, I don’t need quantification to be that accurate.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 11:20 am And even if we could develop the technology to precisely measure say the C fibre firings correlated with pain in comparable ways between members of the same species, you still need to address the issues like multiple realisability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_ ... l%20states.), of comparing different 'flavours' of experience like loving music and having a headache using the same units, and the way experience manifests as a unified field of conscious with an overall sense of wellbeing but a continually shifting focus, enveloping every interacting subsystem simultaneously affecting the other from moment to moment, and in specific different ways from individual to individual.

All you’re really saying here is that any solution to the problem of measuring subjective un/pleasantness will have to deal with a lot of complexity. Yes, obviously. That isn’t a proof that it can’t be done.

OK so what is this unit a unit of? Intensity, time limited, is ice cream pleasure equal to passing an exam pleasure, is it standard across people and species?

Yes, to all of those.

Having interests in the state of affairs is the grounding principle for oughts. If I have no interests in what happens to me, say I'm a rock or a carrot or a toaster, you have no reason to show me moral consideration, there are no Oughts in play. In a universe of rocks and gases interacting according to the laws of physics, morality is meaningless.

- There are objective facts about the state of affairs

- There are subjective opinions about the state of affairs

- There are stakes in the state of affairs (the basis for oughts).

Experiencing beings, subjects, have a qualiative ''what it's like'' quality of life, which means the state of affairs affects our quality of life in ways which are meaningful and matter to us. This is why experiencing subjects have a stake in what happens to us, but non-experiencing rocks and toasters and carrots don't (as far as we can tell).

IMO this establishing of a moral foundation is the easy part. Morality without interests makes no sense.

I agree with all of this.

''Promoting the well-being of conscious creatures'' is as good a way of putting morality appropriately grounded in interests in the state of affairs as any I can think of.

This is where we disagree. The problem I have with wellbeing is that it's too vague and ambiguous an idea to be of much use. When I Google 'wellbeing definition', I get 'the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.' But being healthy and being happy are two quite different things. Being happy I would see as being an intrinsic good, while being healthy I see as a merely instrumental good.

I don't see how any useful philosophical analysis can be done on the basis of such a vague and ambiguous idea.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on the issues of quantifiability and wellbeing vs pleasure. In practice I don't think it leaves us that far apart. Until telepathic martians turn up anyway.