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[Gertie]

Lagayscienza

Sorry about the typos and repeated words in the above. I did proof-read but some always seem to escape me somehow.

No worries, it reads fine. (And btw I drafted this before reading your latest post which shows you fully understand the probs with your position, my comments on that are kinda interwoven so hard to chop now, but you can ignore the parts pointing them out).

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 4:20 pm
''Wellbeing'' can have a type of justification which picking this or that particular trait or behaviour doesn't. It's a term which usefully captures the experiential quality of life aspect of being a subject. There is something it is like to be me or you (as opposed to a rock or tree), and that matters to us. Which gives us interests (a stake) in the 'Is' state of affairs.

But if, as I assert, our morality is based in our subjective sentiments, how would we somehow lose our interest, our stake in affairs? I can’t see how.

We wouldn't. Here I'm laying the foundations of my argument for a foundation for morality and oughts using the existence of interests. But for you, there is no argument for the concept of morality, you simply state that the 'Is' of our evolved intuitions work well enough.

This begs the question, - well enough for what? And I'd say that your answer must be limited to the 'Is' of evolutionary success - the propagation of the species. Because you're not acknowledging morality as anything other than an evolutionary mechanism, with no reference to right or wrong. So as long as the species survives, how we go about it is irrelevant, because the only form morality exists in is an evolutionary survival mechanism.

I'm trying to say there's something valuable missing in that approach, and make a case for how to establish a way of accepting the evolutionary facts, while saying the concept of right and wrong is still worth saving.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 4:20 pm So what's that got to do with morality and oughts?

We agree that we have a dilemma - if morality isn't an objective something we can potentially find the true nature of, if it's just a concept we've created as a result of the happenstance of our species' evolved social intuitions, then why care about it?

We care about it because we can’t help it. Evolution made sure of that that way.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 4:20 pm Why bother with it at all?

We bother with it because, as you said, things matter to us. That’s the sort of creature we are

Evolution doesn't make us care about morality (right or wrong) per se, morality is a concept we've created to account for what Hume describes as our yuck/yum (approval/disapproval) instinctual feelings about people and behaviours. Our actual responses might be a sense of disgust, unfairness, disloyalty, guilt, public shame, and so on. Or love, trust, debt, reputation, self-worth, familial or tribal kinship, etc. The concept of morality is an abstract construction built onto these feelings. It's this concept of right and wrong which I think you lose by relying on the ''Is'' of our evolved responses, but I want to keep.

Gertie wrote: ↑Yesterday, 4:20 pmIf morality has been explained away by evolution, if it's just our species' evolved 'yuck/yum' response, no more meaningful than us disagreeing about which flavour of ice cream is nicest - why not just dump the whole anachronistic idea of moral right and wrong...

Morality is not explained away by evolution. It is explained BY evolution which is the source of human core morality. Our evolutionary history made us care about the things we do. And our morals are never about what trivialities like what flavor ice cream we ought to prefer.

The similarity with ice cream lies in the instinctive approval/disapproval sense. We like a behaviour or we don't. I'm making a distinction between that fact of the matter, and the constructed abstract concept of right and wrong, and oughts. We agree at least that the latter requires a justification, while the former just Is.

Gertie wrote: ↑ Yesterday, 4:20 pm That's the issue the 'Wellbeing' argument can address. We're in this bind where classical metaethics feels unsatisfactory and ad hoc, but struggling to justify morality as …
… basics and consider what a justifiable non-objective morality might mean. I suggest it would be a morality which is still valuable, still has meaning and still matters - regardless of its objective status.

Yes it does still matter regardless of its non-objective status. And there is nothing wrong or diminished or second rate about a subjective morality. It is true that seeing our morality as subjective is counter intuitive but once we do so, a lot of confusion evaporates. But imagine how bizarre it would be to have an objective morality. Say there were a god who laid down unbreakable rules. And say one of those rules was that you could not wear clothes of a certain colour because the god abhors that colour. That would be an objective rule but it would also be a silly and unimportant rule that we would be right not to care less about. There would be no good argument from human subjective values for such a ridiculous prohibition and rightly so because it would be arbitrary and unimportant and silly.

Completely agree.

But we still need a moral basis on which to say such moral prescriptions about clothing are morally silly. By what moral metric are they irrelevant? Because we feel that way? A lot of people felt otherwise at one point. Like a lot of peope felt slavery was right at one point - including Mr Virtue Aristotle for one! If the claim is that our evolved intuitions ARE the right and wrong of morality, then morality is changeable from person to person, culture to culture, age to age. (Sometimes from moment to moment - there's a study which tested people's moral judgements on scenarios in a room which sometimes had a disgusting smell in it. The results indicated that when disgust was stimulated by the bad smell, people made harsher moral judgements).

This is a very unstable basis for judging right and wrong. So if I, Gertie, happened to be born in a different age or culture I'd be subjugated by my father then husband, maybe sold for a dowry, have no right to vote, have no bodily autonomy over having sex or reproduction, have no financial autonomy, no education, etc. Because I'm female. People felt, some still feel, that's normal and normative. **** that. We need something better.

And the fact that our values are subjective does not mean that they are arbitrary. On the contrary - we feel the way we do about certain behaviors for good reasons. We can’t just decide to feel good about seeing, say, the gratuitous torture of an infant. In the face of such abhorrent cruelty our moral sentiments rebel and cannot be quietened. Our inborn urge to protect the young was programmed into us by evolution for a good reason.

It was programmed into us because we're mammals with a long gestation of off-spring with big plastic brains designed for learning. Our largely 'unwired brains' designed for learning (a huge evolutionary advantage) means we need caring for while we learn. Turtles can lay hundreds of eggs on a beach and swim off, and enough off-spring will survive to beat the evolutionary odds. Turtle morality would have no notion of care for off-spring. It's evolutionary happenstance. Our species' evolutionary backstory of Circle of Care went from Self ---> Kin ---> Kith (tribe). And another tribe you run into is outside that circle, is The Other - a potential threat or competitor for local resources (the warm cave, firewood, water, game or the fruit tree grove). Our social predispositions aren't universaly applied.

Another thing that people seem to worry about is the fear that, if our moral values are not objective, one person’s values might be no better than anyone else’s. It’s true that we cannot rank people’s values objectively, but we can and do still rank them. Imagine a psychopath who enjoyed torturing babies. I can guarantee that the overwhelming majority of the human population would rank such behaviour as morally wrong. We feel in our bones that it is wrong. And that’s right where evolution wanted (metaphorically speaking) us to feel it. And that is why it works. We cannot prove objectively that the psychopath is wrong. But we don’t need to. And even if we could, would it matter to the psychopath? Psychopaths don’t care because they can’t care. . And that’s why we lock them up. All we have are our subjective moral sentiments to guide us. But in most circumstances, they are all we need. And we can still rank people’s values. I can say MLK was a decent human being, and that Hitler was a monster. See, it’s easy.

Cultures have left babies out to die on hilltops. The people of Germany at the time largely didn't think Hitler was a monster. He was their nationalist tribal champion. If he'd won, maybe that's how we'd see him now. We'd each like to think not, but who knows. Nationalism is certainly on the rise again as a tribal response to globalisation, territorial wars continue, and immigrants are being spoken of as sub-human and treated appallingly.

But this doesn’t seem to be enough for some people - still they ask, where is the normativity, the imperative to do the right thing? Well, there isn’t any.

No I don't think it's enough. While I agree morality is a conceptual construct, it's one I think we can justify constructing.

Except that we that we care about things and this prompts us to try to persuade others to see things our way. And we institute laws that reflect our subjective moral values. That’s all the imperative we have. It's the best we can do. And most of the time, it's all we need.

I see what you mean now about a tautologous aspect of my motivations to create a conceptual morality being rooted in my species' evolution. But... I'd say the notion of wellbeing goes beyond that. It applies to all sentient species, because the justification is ultimately about the qualiative nature of consciousness, rather than my species' evolved predispositions. I ought to care about turtles' wellbeing, even if they don't care about me (and taste scrummy apparently).

Gertie wrote: ↑ Yesterday, 4:20 pm We can note these are terms which only apply in a world of experiencing subjects, and it's only experiencing subjects who find oughts meaningful. [/b] Why? Because the of …
… interests are only found in this realm, and it's interests which distinguish an ought from an is. That this is the appropriate Foundation for morality. We now have a Foundation which can ground moral Rules.

See above. But folks still hanker after moral objectivity and want to hitch morality to some axiom such as the “wellbeing of conscious creatures”. But it doesn’t work. I can ask, why am I obliged to maximize the wellbeing of conscious creatures? And they often say something like, because it is the moral thing to do. But what does that mean? It’s a tautology. It’s saying that we should maximize the well-being of conscious creatures because it will maximize the well-being of conscious creatures. Where’s the normative force in such a tautology?

It lies in accepting interests as the source for oughts. If you don't buy that, it doesn't work. But it makes sense to me. What else could make sense of choosing this course of action as morally right, and that one wrong? If there's no stake in the outcome, they're just two different Ises with no meaningful consequences. But there ARE meaningful consequences for experiencing subjects. That's just the case too. So is that meaningfulness and mattering of the consequences of choices something we could suitably categorise as right and wrong? I say yes - mattering is enough. In fact mattering is the appropriate criterion. How couldn't it be, for the concept of oughts and right and wrong. It's just not trad philosophy-speak.

And if I reject your axiom, what can you do other than to appeal to the moral values that you subjectively hold? All you can do is try to persuade me based on the humanity of your values. When that doesn’t work, there may a law against the behaviour you abhor. But such a law will be based in our collective, subjective moral sentiments. And that’s the best we can do. But this is no cause for alarm because, again, our subjective moral sentiments work for most people most of the time.

But I've made a different type of argument...

You can disagree with it, and I can't point to objective proof. But I believe it works if we accept that value, meaning and mattering are the appropriate realm for thinking about right and wrong.

If you accept that, it follows that you accept that the qualiative nature of conscious experience is the source of those qualities, and quality of life (or wellbeing) is how they manifest.

[Lagayascienza]

Thanks for your comments. Gertie. I agree that in a now overcrowded world in which cultural evolution has outrun genetic evolution we are going to have to decide for ourselves on some sort of moral bedrock. It may well be something like the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Whatever we decide on, it will not be objective like, say, electric charge, the speed of light, acceleration due to gravity or laws handed down by a god but, then, morality has never been objective anyway. We'll manage as we always have on our subjective morality. Science cannot tell us that it is morally right to choose wellbeing, but once we have chosen it, or something like it, science can then tell us how to achieve it.

[popeye1945]

The same thing that created it in the first place, a conscious subject, this conscious subject then bestows those meanings onto a meaningless world. All meanings are the property of a conscious subject/biology. We bestow meaning upon the world, and it reflects back upon us as apparent reality, forgetting in the moment our projections.

[Belindi]

The same thing that created it in the first place, a conscious subject, this conscious subject then bestows those meanings onto a meaningless world. All meanings are the property of a conscious subject/biology. We bestow meaning upon the world, and it reflects back upon us as apparent reality, forgetting in the moment our projections.

What is a subject? Not the dictionary meaning i.e. common usage, but ontologically i.e. how a subject may be held to exist.

Does a thing have to be conscious in some sense to be a subject? Is a bacillus a subject? Is a soundly asleep dog a subject? Is a farmed salmon a subject? Is a foetus a subject? I do agree with you,and have wondered about what it is to be a subject. I concluded that subjecthood relates to degree of sentience. This places an awful responsibility on men who have so much power over everything else.

[popeye1945]

A subject in philosophy is in relation to object, and it is the experience of being altered by the object that we have experience/meanings, being biological experiences of the objective world, these meanings are the sole property of the subject and never the objects. That said, a subject is a sensing being, a biological being. This may change somewhat with the advances of science. Other things we assume are not sensing may just have the capacity, seems far stretched right now. Reality is dependent upon the relationship between subject and object, or as Schopenhauer stated, "Subject and object stand or fall together.

[Pattern-chaser]

What is a subject? Not the dictionary meaning i.e. common usage, but ontologically i.e. how a subject may be held to exist.

Does a thing have to be conscious in some sense to be a subject? Is a bacillus a subject? Is a soundly asleep dog a subject? Is a farmed salmon a subject? Is a foetus a subject? I do agree with you,and have wondered about what it is to be a subject. I concluded that subjecthood relates to degree of sentience. This places an awful responsibility on men who have so much power over everything else.

[My highlighting.]

Men used their power to act as they chose; they did it knowingly, and gave no consideration to the responsibility that is an indivisible part of power/authority. We could describe this as immaturity, but that's too much of an understatement, isn't it? Men *took* that power for themselves; it didn't just materialise.

This is surely a significant moral issue that should be considered here, in this topic?

[Gertie]

Thanks for your comments. Gertie. I agree that in a now overcrowded world in which cultural evolution has outrun genetic evolution we are going to have to decide for ourselves on some sort of moral bedrock. It may well be something like the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Whatever we decide on, it will not be objective like, say, electric charge, the speed of light, acceleration due to gravity or laws handed down by a god but, then, morality has never been objective anyway. We'll manage as we always have on our subjective morality. Science cannot tell us that it is morally right to choose wellbeing, but once we have chosen it, or something like it, science can then tell us how to achieve it.

Fair enough. It was an interesting and challenging convo.

I still maintain that ''wellbeing'' isn't an ad hoc foundation. If morality rightly belongs in the subjective realm of meaning, value and mattering, which to me it self-evidently does, then Interests in the 'Is' state of affairs are the appropriate basis for Oughts.

[popeye1945]

The proper subject of any morality is the biology it is relative to; thus, the only rational foundation for morality is the conscious subject. Moralities function is the security and wellbeing of its human subject/s.

[Good_Egg]

Science cannot tell us that it is morally right to choose wellbeing, but once we have chosen it, or something like it, science can then tell us how to achieve it.

Maybe.

Philosophy is at least half about how we use language.

When you talk about "wellbeing", do you mean something that is objectively measurable from the outside ? Or something that depends on how we feel on the inside - on what matters to us ?

If the doctor tells me that I would be healthier if I didn't drink alcohol, does that create a moral Ought that I ought not to drink alcohol ? Or only a prudential Ought that if I want to be healthier I should cut down ?

How far does a person's or an animal's wellbeing consist in getting what they want ? And how far does it consist in getting what you think is good for them ?

Or what can be measured materialistically as having in a majority of cases an outcome that some authority has determined to be positive ? Isn't that the best that science can do ?

The moral wrong of rape lies in deciding for somebody else a choice that is rightfully theirs, based on one's own desires. Where is scientifically-determined wellbeing in that ?

Do you really believe that if only our science were just a little more advanced we could determine objectively the circumstances in which permitting a rape maximizes wellbeing ?

I'm suspecting that "wellbeing" is a vague label that we can all agree with as long as it's vague enough that we can imagine that it corresponds with our own moral sense. And that as soon as you pin it down to a meaning that is well-defined enough that it sides against you on some "edge case" moral issue on which people of goodwill disagree, it will start looking less self-evidently morally right.

[Lagayascienza]

Good_Egg, several posts back I pointed out some of the problems with choosing axioms such as "wellbeing".

[Good_Egg]

Good_Egg, several posts back I pointed out some of the problems with choosing axioms such as "wellbeing".

Indeed. My perception is that you raised the right questions and didn't get an answer.

Not sure if your latest posts indicate that you've become converted to the idea....

It's also not clear to me how far some people are assuming utilitarianism is the right approach to ethics, and then looking to concepts of wellbeing to answer the hard question "why ought I to maximize utility" ?

And how far this is all a quest to justify the commonly-held but mistaken moral perception that it's morally OK to do wrong in order that good may come of it. Against the tradition that no it isn't OK.

Or whether it's the same thing from a different angle....

[Lagayascienza]

Good_Egg, several posts back I pointed out some of the problems with choosing axioms such as "wellbeing".

Indeed. My perception is that you raised the right questions and didn't get an answer.

Not sure if your latest posts indicate that you've become converted to the idea....

No, I'm just open to the idea that while our core morality can be explained in evolutionary terms, cultural evolution has outrun genetic evolution and so we are in somewhat new territory. We are no longer out on the savanna in small bands of hunter-gatherers - we live in cities of millions and command technology that can kill millions at the push of a button - and so new issues have arisen on which evolution could not have had traction. This means that in some cases our evolved core morality may no longer be exactly fit-for-purpose and so we will need to bring our intellect and reasoning to bear in moral decision making rather than rely solely on our intuition.

It's also not clear to me how far some people are assuming utilitarianism is the right approach to ethics, and then looking to concepts of wellbeing to answer the hard question "why ought I to maximize utility" ?

And how far this is all a quest to justify the commonly-held but mistaken moral perception that it's morally OK to do wrong in order that good may come of it. Against the tradition that no it isn't OK.

Or whether it's the same thing from a different angle....

Yes, Utilitarianism is a form of Consequentialism that does not work because who decides on what "utility ' means and how do we aggregate "utility"? And that is precisely the problem with saying we "ought" to maximize the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Why am I obliged to do that? And who gets to decide what "wellbeing" consists in? But, if we could agree on what wellbeing consists in and that we wanted to maximize it, then we can use science to help us achieve it. But science cannot tell us that it is morally right to do so. That would have to be a moral judgment based in our subjective moral sentiments.

[Mercury]

"God-shaped hole"..But the monogod was a later concept than gods of place, gods of natural processes, and ancestor gods. Creator god seems to have coincided with agriculture and land ownership in the fertile crescent and for a long time coexisted with the older gods of place and others who required sacrifices and prayers of supplication.
Burial of the dead and afterlife don't necessarily coincide with a creator god. or any other god.

I can only describe how I came to this view. I was reading 'The Neanderthal Enigma' by James Shreeve - where he describes the sudden occurrence of artefacts in the archaeological record 50,000 years ago, that imply a truly human mode of thought. Before then, he says - nothing but stone hand axes, unchanged for two million years. After, suddenly, cave paintings, jewellery, improved tools, burial of the dead - evidence of thinking. Shreeve says, there's no great climate upheaval, or change in cranial capacity associated with this dramatic - and momentous change in behaviour. So how do we explain it?

I speculated that it was conceptual evolution; that humans who made hand axes, made a conceptual leap by asking: 'Who made me?' - 'Who made the world?' and began making things as a means to rehearse and explore this idea. I think the archetypal god is a Creator God, and that other concepts of god are developments from this original archetype. Because, when one considers the Watchmaker Argument - it's an implication inherent to any designed thing; even things like flattened grass, or broken reeds, or an animal carcass that shows evidence of other hunters in the area, they are pressing up against the concept of a relation between artefact and an implied artificer all the time. I do not see how we get to ancestor gods, or gods of natural process, before we get to Creator - because making things, and artefacts as evidence of intent, and apparent design in nature all force this particular conceptual development.

[Good_Egg]

..while our core morality can be explained in evolutionary terms, cultural evolution has outrun genetic evolution...

You're right to distinguish what is genetic - hard-wired within us - from what is cultural. And right to say that both evolve, with cultural evolution happening much faster.

Seems to me that what we are genetically evolved to do can be expressed in terms of cultural norms - shared expectations of behaviour within a community.
We perceive such norms. We desire to fit in with others, to be recognised by others as part of the community, and to achieve that we both conform our own behaviour to these norms and punish others who publicly deviate from them. (And punish those who fail to punish deviations). And this hardwired behaviour is how cultural norms exist and are maintained.

Noting that cultural norms can change over time. How does that happen ? Someone comes up with an idea that it would be good if the community added to or subtracted from the set of norms. And over time either that idea is taken on by the community or it isn't.

For cultural evolution to happen, such changes must be possible. Evolutionary theory calls them "random", meaning that the content of these new or altered norms is not determined by the process.

You may well think that the taboo against murder, for example, has evolved culturally. What that means is that the idea arose "randomly", some cultures caught it from other cultures, and it proved to have survival value - those cultures which had it out-competed the others so that those sets of norms that didn't include it died out.

This is the evolutionary process.

Conversely, you may think that including a prohibition on murder within our cultural norms is somehow hardwired. I'd be interested to hear what you think the evidence for that is.

But the thing I'm asking you to notice is that the process of cultural evolution requires "early adopters". Those who will seize on a new idea, think it should be part of the community's cultural norms and use their power within the community to get it adopted. By arguing for it, and by peer-pressure punishment of those who don't agree.

Those early adopters are self-evidently not motivated solely by the cultural norms that they are trying to change.

And therefore the notion that "morality is nothing but cultural norms" doesn't stand up.

[Lagayascienza]

..while our core morality can be explained in evolutionary terms, cultural evolution has outrun genetic evolution...

You're right to distinguish what is genetic - hard-wired within us - from what is cultural. And right to say that both evolve, with cultural evolution happening much faster.

Yes, much faster.

Seems to me that what we are genetically evolved to do can be expressed in terms of cultural norms - shared expectations of behaviour within a community.
We perceive such norms. We desire to fit in with others, to be recognized by others as part of the community, and to achieve that we both conform our own behaviour to these norms and punish others who publicly deviate from them. (And punish those who fail to punish deviations). And this hardwired behaviour is how cultural norms exist and are maintained.

I think hardwired norms are reinforced culturally. For example, the aversion to unjustified killing, to having our stuff stolen, to incest, and the predisposition to care for the young and elderly and to help members of our group… these all go back to our life as small bands of hunter gatherers out on the savanna. Evolution had hundreds of thousands of years to instill these predispositions into us. It did so because they aided our survival and the propagation of our genes. And that is why we still see them across cultures everywhere. And they were certainly, and still are, reinforced culturally.

Cultural evolution on the other hand, which is about social change, can happen much more quickly. Someone comes up with a better tool, or a way of recording numbers by making notches on a stick, or pictograms to record images of animals that were important, the idea of planting seeds for crops… This process starts slowly, are copied and then rapidly progress and are refined so that picograms became symbols and soon written language was born. With settled agriculture, the division of labor and cities became possible, as did organized religions, ruling and priestly classes, social stratification, the invention of money... All these cultural changes happened quickly one after another in the last 10,000 years or so – much too short a time for genetic evolution to have had time to hardwire such changes genetically.

Noting that cultural norms can change over time. How does that happen ? Someone comes up with an idea that it would be good if the community added to or subtracted from the set of norms. And over time either that idea is taken on by the community or it isn't.

Yes, I think that cultural norms can and do change over time and often very quickly.

For cultural evolution to happen, such changes must be possible. Evolutionary theory calls them "random", meaning that the content of these new or altered norms is not determined by the process.

You may well think that the taboo against murder, for example, has evolved culturally. What that means is that the idea arose "randomly", some cultures caught it from other cultures, and it proved to have survival value - those cultures which had it out-competed the others so that those sets of norms that didn't include it died out.

This is the evolutionary process.

Conversely, you may think that including a prohibition on murder within our cultural norms is somehow hardwired. I'd be interested to hear what you think the evidence for that is.

I think the aversion to unjustified killing (especially within our groups) is hardwired. Again, evidence for this is the pretty much universal prohibition of murder across all cultures everywhere, especially within our group. Other hardwired norms would include the prohibition of stealing, an aversion of incest, a wariness of outsiders, and the predisposition to care for the young and elderly and to help members of our group. We see these across cultures worldwide.

But the thing I'm asking you to notice is that the process of cultural evolution requires "early adopters". Those who will seize on a new idea, think it should be part of the community's cultural norms and use their power within the community to get it adopted. By arguing for it, and by peer-pressure punishment of those who don't agree.

Those early adopters are self-evidently not motivated solely by the cultural norms that they are trying to change.

And therefore the notion that "morality is nothing but cultural norms" doesn't stand up.

I agree that morality is not just about cultural norms which can change in the blink of an eye. Human core morality, on the other hand, which is due to genetic evolution, seems to be hard-wired and much less changeable. And aversion to theft and killing within our group, to incest, etc these were hardwired by evolution over many hundreds of thousands of years. But changes that depended on cultural evolution, as opposed to genetic evolution, do change and this can happen fast. Religion, for example, is culturally acquired and we just need to count how many religions have come and gone in the last few thousand years to see how quickly things can change. Writing, the invention of money, machines… these were all due to cultural evolution. And once cultural change gets underway the pace quickens. Just in my lifetime the world has been transformed. I no longer use cash or write stuff on paper. And yet I retain an aversion to stealing, killing etc, these things don’t change.