Some objective moral truths?

Your 4 examples are ignoring individual perspectives / filters.
For example, in the 3rd one, different people will have completely different ideas about harm and benefits, and will weight factors affecting them / their community higher than those affecting strangers.
Alternatively, in the 1st one you’ve taken a very narrow viewpoint – a parent sending their child off to school for the first time experiences suffering, as probably does the child…but very few people would say that school is bad.
2 and 4 are arguably more universal, but I suspect a logical argument could be created that puts doubt on even their universality…

As an initial response, I would tend to disagree with your conclusion – I think humanity displays too great a range of opinions/perspectives/filters/behaviours for truly objective moral truths to exist. I’ll also note that yours display a very Caucasian-Western bias…understandably so, but a clear example of your personal filters…

a parent sending their child off to school for the first time experiences suffering, as probably does the child…but very few people would say that school is bad.

Correct. But Harry’s claim is that human suffering is bad, not that school is bad. Nor that everything associated with suffering is bad, or that the badness of suffering is never outweighed by anything good. So this isn’t a relevant counterexample.

different people will have completely different ideas about harm and benefits, and will weight factors affecting them / their community higher than those affecting strangers.

Again, this is true. But how does it show that deception that is likely to bring more harm than benefit is not bad? Or that it is not objectively true that such deception is bad?

Those “objective truths” are not objective as much as they are tautological, distilling down to “bad things are bad”. They are simply artifacts of a synonym-laden language, where “bad things” is a set containing a number of elements such as “causing suffering” and “eating babies”, whereas “good things” is a set containing elements such as “being kind to people”. Pointing out that “something we define as good” is in fact a subset of “good things” is just playing with language. And even if this proves that there are in fact “objective moral truths”, it also means that there is no such thing as objective ethics that flow naturally from these truths, because of the situational, context-dependent and downright arbitrary way various behaviors, situations and activities get placed in the “bad things” or “good things” categories. Which renders the truths themselves rather impotent.

Maybe you perceive them as tautologies because they are true.

I find it weird that the same people who use far fetched trolley experiments to suggest that objective morality doesn’t exist strongly resist obvious conclusions of their alleged views: that murder, rape, slave owning and torture are no big deal. They react almost as if those things are wrong.

@areanimater: this would make genuine moral disagreement impossible.

I took “Objective moral truth doesn’t exist” to mean not “there are no moral statements whose truth is a matter of objective fact” but “There is no objective method of assigning truth or falsity to ALL moral statements.”

JSE @ 11: That’s an interesting point, but I think it’s pretty clear that’s not the definition Harry is talking about (or that people are disagreeing with him based on).

Just intoning some things that you believe doesn’t make them moral absolutes. Take “human suffering is bad.” What do you do with that? Do you declare that since some people are starving, that it is therefore always right and proper to confiscate property from others who have more than they need to alleviate their own suffering? Do you determine that an accumulation of wealth might be used to alleviate more suffering in the future, and therefore you should allow people in the here and now to suffer?

Ultimately, you have to ask, what makes these things bad beyond that fact that you (and presumably, many others) don’t like them?

None of those statements pay rent.

One thing that lots of people seem to be missing is that the claim, “There are no objective moral truths”, is quite distinct from the claim “There are no true general moral principles”. You don’t show the former to be false by arguing against the latter (notwithstanding Harry’s examples, which I mostly actually agree with). See, e.g., moral particularism (SEP) for more.

“That fact no more calls into question the existence of moral truths than it calls into question the existence of gravity.”

That is so exactly the wrong analogy. Bravo~

Isn’t asceticism based (at least in part) on the idea that human suffering is not, after all, bad? And what about masochism?

Human suffering is bad

I wonder what a lion thinks of that.

#24 seems to me exactly right. Would you please expand that comment a bit, Patrick?

In good Trolley problem fashion:

A government (feel free to provide your own nation state) has captured a “terrorist or freedom fighter” who knows the location of a time-bomb planted somewhere in a major city that when detonated would be sure to kill a huge number of innocent people. There is, of course, limited time to act. You are the in charge of the interrogation and are presented with a variety of options including:

1) Torture him until he breaks in which case the human suffering of the terrorist might not be regarded as unequivocally bad (But human suffering is bad)
2) The terrorist has a sister with a 6 month old child. The secret police employ a sick puppy who would actually enjoy torturing both the sister and the baby until the terrorist breaks. (But torturing human babies for enjoyment is wrong)
3) Tell the terrorist that you know his organization has weapons of mass destruction and that if he doesn’t tell where the bomb is you will mobilize an invasion army at the cost of more than $1 trillion and shoot everything that moves until the weapons are found (But deception that is more likely to bring harm than good is bad).
4) Simply be kind to the terrorist and hope he will see the error of his ways in time to defuse the bomb (Being kind to people is always good)

Some like to say that morality is not relative, it is absolute, which is why we can discuss what constitutes a “Moral Truth.”

A trolley problem inherently asks the decider to make a relative judgement – i.e. 1 death or 5 deaths, one tortured baby or hundreds of deaths. For these reasons I think, at a minimum, a trolley problem is the wrong measuring device to weigh attitudes about moral truth.

Hopefully most agree that torture, murder, rape etc. are inherently bad and morally wrong even if one can find applications (as the above trolley problem) in which they may be less morally bad than alternatives (i.e. 1 murder better than 2).

In the four statements, the words “good,” “bad,” and “wrong” appear to have no content. At most, “good” appears to mean “I and other proper-thinking people are in favor of this” and “bad” and “wrong” appear to mean “I and other proper-thinking people are not in favor of this.” But how does one determine whether other people are proper-thinking or not? Why, if they don’t agree with me as to these and similar statements, they are not! Pure tautology.

It’s like saying, “The Grateful Dead suck!” And then, if someone says, “I like the Dead,” you say, “Well, you suck!” There’s nothing there other than the expression of a personal preference plus the refusal to concede that someone else might have a different preference, masquerading as a claim to objective truth.

Which is not to say that I personally don’t agree with the statements and to disagree with other, competing statements. (E.g., the suffering of our enemies is good! deception that brings harm to our enemies is good!) But I don’t know the source of knowledge that permits me to decide to agree or disagree with them. And saying things like “in fact” or “objective” doesn’t explain the source of the knowledge.

I’m pretty confident that I reject the systems I’m aware of that claim to be able to supply a source of such knowledge: various religions, Marxism, utilitarianism, etc. So I’m left with, I believe in moral truth as a matter of convention. Which is not satisfying at all. But still, I believe in it. It’s a mystery.

Kevin, I am not entirely convinced by your answer: in particular, is the statement
“X is bad” nothing more than
“most of the time and depending on the circumstances, X is bad”?

Because the latter statement seems to fall in the category of things that are not even false.

Kevin @28: simply matters of personal taste

Moral judgments are more complicated than judgments about what’s cute or delicious, but they’re subjective in the same way. That is, they all derive from dispositions, assumptions, preferences, perspectives, capacities, inclinations, memories, appetites — from our whole being — which can’t be made wholly explicit, much less fully justified. Of course we (at least some we’s) have a lot in common, so we can argue about what’s good, just as we can argue about food. But if we encounter an alien civilization, we can be sure that we’ll eventually agree about Newton’s or Maxwell’s Law, or at least fully understand one another. We can’t be equally sure that they’ll ever fully understand, much less agree with, our morality(ies). Perhaps that’s a useful way to define “objective moral truth”: something you can demonstrate to a being who shares no history, culture, or biology with you.

Even an imagined/constructed morality cannot be logically sound unless it falls back on at least one value that is held to be supreme.

Is it perhaps useful to distinguish between ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ (I’ve never studied philosophy and so apologize if this is at odds with technical meanings).

To me an action (and it seems to me only actions can have such a label) be would be moral (or immoral or neither) if one could make such a judgement absent of context. On the other hand ethics would relate to more complex (and subjective) context for an action. For instance, to kill someone is an immoral act, but to do so in self-defense might be an ethical act (or at least not an unethical one).

I’m not sure this distinction matters and I’m also not convinced there really are objectively moral or immoral actions…

Humans evolved in social groups. There are behaviors that are sufficiently destructive that they are taboo across a wide range of times and cultures – murder or incest, for example. There can be extreme circumstances – such as war, or self-defense – where one can suspend even the strongest of these (that against murder). Some can be relaxed for outsiders (again, war.) This doesn’t change the existence of some deep principles that are nearly universal.

If you want a shorter: The Golden Rule is pretty straightforward as a moral guideline.

Bourbaki@ 39
You have it right. An act such as Murder, Rape, Torture etc. is morally wrong. As an absolute, deviod of context, even a caveman or an alien would see these truths.

However, as you note, there can be situations where a spectrum of people would hold that any of these acts is “ethically” sound. Torture to avoid murder. Murder to put a suffering being out of its misery, the list goes on…these are ethical questions for which there is no ‘right’ answer, but for which society might form a weak or strong consensus opinion (think of abortion as an example where there is a range of societal opinion as to whether the act qualifies as murder before even discussing if its a justifiable murder).

This is where these absolutes differ from opinions about foods or cute babies. There is both no underpinning absolute morality nor is there any consequence from the fact that there is not.

“I, however, do have an objective trait of emotionally reacting a particular way to murder.”

But there are also human beings who legitimately enjoy committing murder, no?

I think that a statement like “murder is bad” *can* be falsified: if there is a tribe where people are supposed to kill some member of some other tribe, where such killing is considered a moral thing, wouldn’t this falsify such statement?
Now, is there someone with some expertise (at least, more expertise than me) in anthropology and/or history that can tell us if such tribe exists?
For instance, would the Spartans qualify?

“cuteness is not a property of babies. Perception of cuteness is a property of humans. ”

I’m not so sure about this: “Sweetness is not a property of sugar; Perception of sweetness is a prperty of tasters.” That’s right in one way, but quite wrong in another: if you fail to taste the sweetness of sugar that is known to be present, there’s something wrong with your tongue, not the sugar.

When we perceive the cuteness of the bay, there is presumably some objective feature of the bay that triggers the cute-response.

Patrick @43: the propensity to have that is an objective trait of the human observing the baby … an objective trait of emotionally reacting a particular way to murder

Goodness, if that’s what “objective” means, then what does “subjective” mean? It may be (objectively) true that most people will find most babies cute, or that most people will find murder wrong. But those aren’t moral truths, they’re statistical or sociological truths.

“I think that a statement like “murder is bad” *can* be falsified: if there is a tribe where people are supposed to kill some member of some other tribe, where such killing is considered a moral thing, wouldn’t this falsify such statement?”

Not all killing is murder.

geo:

Is it true that in science “objectively true (valid, demonstrable, factual)” only means “for humans”? Doesn’t the thrust to “formalize” mean eliminating all reliance on intuition, common sense, history, culture, biology — everything individual and contingent? Leaving aside the question of whether this is possible — whether “objective” or “absolute” truth exists even in science — isn’t it what we mean by “objective”?

It’s certainly true that several strains in the history of philosophy (to speak of what I know) have held out for such a conception of objectivity. But I don’t see why one should be forced to accept it. There’s a perfectly good objective/subjective distinction that we can make without somehow trying to entirely leave behind the human standpoint and human concerns, etc.—a distinction (or a set of related distinctions) that allows us make rationally grounded criticisms of individual attitudes or actions. And isn’t that why we want a usable notion of objectivity?

How would this work? Well, there’s more than one way, quite possibly, but phosphorius’ example (48) is a perfectly good one I think. Secondary qualities like taste, color, etc., can only be made sense of with reference to the human perceptual apparatus. That doesn’t at all foreclose the possibility of evaluating someone’s discriminations of taste or color as defective.

(Also, what Kevin McDonough said at 26. There’s a fair bit of arguing against straw men going on in this thread. Not intentionally, I don’t think; just that people might be missing what a claim to objectivity amounts to.)

Do all ya’ll ‘no objective moral truth’ folks also hold that there are no moral falsehoods?

js @54: And isn’t that why we want a usable notion of objectivity?

Yes, that’s what we want: a notion that will allow us to make necessary distinctions; a usable definition. We can all agree that the word “objective” does useful work in a sentence like: “Recruiting government regulators from the industry they are being hired to regulate and to which they will likely return after leaving government is not the best way to insure objective policymaking.” But I don’t see what useful work it does in the sentence: “That murder is wrong is not merely my opinion and the general — in fact near-universal — opinion among human beings; it is an objective moral truth.”

@Harry: Rank platonism. You can try to defend “human universal” if you dare.

“Human suffering is bad” strikes me as a very simplistic view. Suffering is a human condition. The easiest way to avoid sufferings would be hook everyone up to an IV with heroine. Or sedate and kill them.

Is suicide an immoral act?

But I don’t see what useful work it does in the sentence: “That murder is wrong is not merely my opinion and the general — in fact near-universal — opinion among human beings; it is an objective moral truth.”

General opinion, near-universal opinion even, can be and often has been wrong, so it doesn’t well serve as a basis for rationally grounded criticism. That’s why one needs a notion of objectivity, I’d think.

In any case, I’m not that interested in defending “That murder is wrong is an objective moral truth” (which sounds a bit like a tautology to me frankly).

Take someone who wholly insensitive to the suffering of others. Is all we can say here: well, some people, most people, even almost all people are sensitive to (at least some) suffering of (at least some) others, but this one here is not—two distinct brute psychological facts or propensities, and that’s really all there is to it. Or can we say: there’s something about human suffering itself that people ought to be sensitive to, and insofar as someone displays no such sensitivity they are open to criticism for being insensitive to morally relevant features of the world. I think we can say the latter, and it’s why we need a notion of objectivity.

I’m not seeing the tautology point that others keep making.

1. The belief that murder is wrong is (merely) a matter of cultural or social convention.

2. The belief that murder is wrong is (merely) a matter of personal taste.

3. The belief that murder is wrong is (also, in addition to being a matter of cultural convention and personal taste) an objective moral truth.

The fact that at least part of this discussion is a dispute over whether claim 3 is better than claims 1 or 2 (i.e. a more accurate and/or more useful account of what we mean when we make moral claims) suggests that 3 is not a tautology, doesn’t it?

“I’m not seeing the tautology point that others keep making.”

MPAVictoria was saying that not all killing is murder, but someone else pointed out that in order to delineate good killing and bad killing you have to fall back on more assertions.

As for (1), does *some* degree of suffering “build character”?

As for (2), current politics should suggest that “baby” is tricky to define.

As for (3), how does one evaluate what is “much more likely”? Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.

As for (4), “kind” is so vague, it’s vacuous. What does a kindness imperative require me to do? Open doors for people with their arms full? Provide them three square meals a day?

If murder were “objectively” immoral, they would also have seen it as immoral.

This doesn’t follow. To use a different example, the following statement is perfectly sensible (perhaps even true):

Majorities of people in lots of human societies have failed to appreciate that it is wrong to enslave human beings and treat them like property.

Look, to say that something is “objectively true” (=true) doesn’t mean that it is self-evidently or obviously true. Imagine using that standard in science!

“Majorities of people in lots of human societies have failed to appreciate that it is wrong to enslave human beings and treat them like property.”

This leads to a lot of unhealthy assumptions. It is essentially saying that modern humans in the liberal west are the most enlightened human beings yet to walk the planet.

The science analogy is bad precisely because (and this is kind of the big point) there are no “morals” to study through a microscope. In order to assert that we have become more moral as a society, you first have to have defined a set of objective morals.

Kevin @69:

I think of “murder” as unjustified killing, so I tend to think of the idea of wrongness as built into the concept of murder (via the unjustified bit). (So, technically, I’m thinking “murder is wrong” is analytically true.) Anyway, I don’t think this affects any of the main points at issue.

“If murder were “objectively” immoral, they [the Spartans] would also have seen it as immoral.”

“If the earth ‘objectively’ revolved around the sun, they would also have etc.” Do you think so?

The whole point about objective truth is that it doesn’t depend its being known by a human being.

Harry is arguing that even if every single human being were a fully-fledged believing member of the cult of Moloch, infant sacrifice would be wrong.

And he’s right, isn’t he? I don’t think he’s made his point very effectively, but he’s right.

Why would it be wrong? Well, first, because even if every human being believed in Moloch, that wouldn’t make Moloch real. Belief in Moloch would still be delusional, and the belief that a god will look on us with favor if we put infants to death in his honor would be a false belief. We don’t have any difficulty with this, do we?

I’ve said on this blog (or maybe on LGM) that it’s not fair to judge, e.g., Thomas Jefferson, by the standards of our time, but I’ve never gone so far as to contend that the sex slavery that characterized the ante-bellum south was perhaps not evil in the context of their culture. There’s a difference between saying that within a given culture otherwise good people are blind to evil and saying that it’s not evil if they didn’t see it that way.

We shouldn’t have any difficulty saying that sex slavery, or infant sacrifice, or suttee, or the caste system, or burning heretics at the stake, or torture of prisoners, is always and everywhere morally wrong.

And we can all agree that Steven Landsburgh is at the very least a moral idiot, http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/04/03/steven_landsburg_rochester_professor_is_it_really_rape_if_the_victim_doesn.html

What we don’t know is how we know these things. I have confidence in my beliefs but I have no confidence in how I’ve come to believe them. There have been things that 30 years ago I believed to be perfectly fine that I now believe to be immoral, and vice versa. I was sure then, and I’m sure now. How can I be sure? I don’t know.

We can talk about first principles of individual equality and autonomy, etc., but at some point you get to the Euclidean problem of having simply to assume certain things because they just seem right, even if they change.

“Belief in Moloch would still be delusional, and the belief that a god will look on us with favor if we put infants to death in his honor would be a false belief.”

Okay, but I think this just points up that morality isn’t separable from one’s grasp of the facts. If it’s a fact that Moloch is a real god who will punish us for denying him infant sacrifices, then do we get a different moral truth? Maybe not, but it becomes an issue at least.

Steven Landsburg is a western guy now: his morality is (or, at lest, appear to be) in contrast with the dicta of his society, and therefore he is contemptible.

Jefferson was an American guy in 18th century: his morality was in accord with the dicta of his society, and as such he was admirable.

In this sense, we do have an objective criterion for morality: we check if our moral judgement is in accord with the one of the people around us, and adjust it accordingly.

reality is a harsh mistress: if your model does not work, you can see it.

People believed in a geocentric universe for a really long time. Or in the impossibility of action at a distance, etc. Quite specific technological innovations, conceptual breakthroughs, etc., were needed before we could discover what was objectively the case. I don’t see why it’s *so much more* problematic if the enlargement of moral capacities and sensitivities also requires quite specific conditions, or why once these capacities have been enlarged we shouldn’t think that they are responses to genuine (though previously unnoticed) aspects of reality.

Ok, you might say that we have no idea what methods we would use in moral cases. Here, I am going to outsource—of the top of my head to Charles Taylor, whose paper “Explanation and Practical Reason” is I think pretty excellent on this kind of question. (Unfortunately not available online, I’m pretty sure.)

Just realized that my 87 works better as a response to Anderson at 78. Which was sort of the comment I had in mind anyway.

Objective moral truths are those statements with which we feel disagreement cannot be made in good faith.

An alien might have a completely different morality, but if it doesn’t have something I can recognize as some variant on humanism, I’d honestly suppose it was either sociopathic (incapable of assessing moral truths) or putting me on (pretending incapacity). Or that I was misunderstanding them. Or they me.

Now, there’s a debate tactic in which you pretend to feel the other person is arguing in bad faith, which I’d like to sidestep. (Hence the ‘honestly’ part above.)

Simply put: You know a moral truth is objective when you’re incapable of believing that a moral agent could disagree with it.

(Note, that’s actually about as close as it’s possible to come to a workable definition of the adjective ‘objective,’ which means it’s not terribly profitable to navel-gazingly implore the possibility that “objectivity is subjective!” or whatever.)

David- yeah.

mdc- yeah.

geo- I’m not deeply invested in who gets to own terms like “objective.” As long as I’ve communicated the difference between existent reactions to a thing, and non existent traits of a thing, I’m happy.

For those who disagree with what I’ve set out, all they really have to do is give a fact or two about the world that is better explained by objective morality than by the objective reality of humans having similar cognitive features and similar resulting emotional reactions. Or, I guess, they could just admit that what they’re really worried about is the loss of access to emotional suasion that comes with openly admitting that the grounds on which humans reason about emotional issues like morality are deeply flawed. But as observed, most human emotional suasion occurs through things like a fervent tone of voice, widened eyes, and flared nostrils. So maybe we shouldn’t be expecting so much in terms of the rationality of that process.

93: what are you calling a “cognitive function”?

Salient, if by cognitive faculties he means the brain equipment common to homo sapiens, then a morality that is “objective” for all of ’em is objective enough. IOW I agree with you that much. Morality without moral agents is like gravity without mass.

“Most people here on Earth use “subjective” to mean “things that reasonable people can disagree about” and “objective” to mean “things that reasonable people can’t possibly disagree about.”

Then I really don’t think “most people here on Earth” should be taking part in a discussion that hinges on a distinction they are unwilling to care about.

“There is plenty of proof that Nazi leaders knew their genocide was wrong.”

There is plenty of proof that they knew that other countries would perceive their actions as a crime and prosecute them for it. Everything I have ever seen suggests that Hitler, Himmler, et al considered the Holocaust to be an act “for the greater good” so to speak.

Justice is so irretrievably bound up with morality as to belong to the same class of “things that don’t really exist outside of human perception.”

I thought I just said that it was neither just nor unjust…

Then I really don’t think “most people here on Earth” should be taking part in a discussion that hinges on a distinction they are unwilling to care about.

My point was exactly that you’re unwilling to care about the distinction on which the OP hinges despite taking part in the discussion of it.

I feel it would be profoundly dehumanizing and condescending to hold a Nazi death camp officer, a slave holder, or an Athenian ephebophile as less than moral agents for having had the bad luck not to grow up in our more “enlightened times”.

Two moments ago you were whining that for almost any proposed moral principle you envision an entire society of human beings willing to believe in it. One moment ago you shrugged off Auschwitz and got irritable when someone tried to prod you into clarifying. You don’t consider that profoundly dehumanizing and condescending? … ?

Kevin @74: we can say that murder is wrong and hold that this is an objectively true claim

But as others have pointed out, if the definition of “murder” is “unjustified killing,” then we’re speaking tautologically when we call it “wrong.”

js @79: I tend to think of the idea of wrongness as built into the concept of murder (via the unjustified bit). (So, technically, I’m thinking “murder is wrong” is analytically true.)

“Analytically true” is not fundamentally different from “tautological.” The former usually refers to an equivalence that takes a little analysis to recognize. But it takes no analysis to recognize that if “murder” means “unjustified killing,” then “murder is wrong” is a tautology.

Patrick @93: I’m not deeply invested in who gets to own terms like “objective.”

This sounds an awful like “I don’t care how people use the word ‘objective’. Any and every use of the word is fine with me.” I doubt that’s what you meant to say.

Salient @91: You know a moral truth is objective when you’re incapable of believing that a moral agent could disagree with it.

But if the definition of “moral” in “moral agent” rests on agreement that some moral truth is objective, then we have another tautology, since it’s a matter of definition that no one who disagrees could be a moral agent. The syllogism is:
A moral agent is someone I can’t imagine disagreeing that X.
No moral agent, as defined above, does disagree with X.
Ergo, X is objectively true.

Maybe we should limit “objective” to “non-partisan” and drop the other meaning: “non-contingent, absolutely, really and truly.” What is the difference between these three statements: “Bees make honey.” “It is true that bees make honey.” “It is objectively true that bees make honey”? No difference. They mean exactly the same thing. This is no less true of matters of opinion than of matters of fact: “Geo is a nice guy.” “It is true that geo is a nice guy.” “It is objectively true that geo is a nice guy.” The latter three statements mean exactly the same thing. Likewise for matters of fact: “Eating people is wrong.” “It is true that eating people is wrong.” “It is objectively true that eating people is wrong” — these are equivalent.

“Objectively true” is merely an exclamation point. That is to say, it serves a rhetorical function. Rhetoric affects meaning; in that sense the statements within each trio of statements above are not exactly equivalent. But that’s not enough for moral realists (ie, philosophers who believe in objective moral truth). They want more, and they can’t have it. In fact, they can’t even explain what it is they want. As Richard Rorty would say, it’s time to change the subject, or at least find a new vocabulary.

Sorry, two typos:

1) ” … sounds an awful lot like … ”

2) “Likewise for matters of morality.

(Did Rorty ever address whether it could be pragmatically better to argue like a metaphysician, in some contexts? Straussian pragmatists!)

things that don’t really exist outside of human perception.

If it helps calm the waters or whatever, I’ll readily grant that justice requires sentience. In the absence of sentience, no concept of justice obtains. But again, there are plenty of things that are objective which don’t obtain in the absence of sentience.

If you’re looking to specify only “things that really exist outside of human perception,” then what you’re looking for is not the word objective; it’s the word material. Objective/vs/subjective is a purely social-interpersonal distinction divided by questions like, “They can’t possibly believe that, can they?”

“Objectively true” is merely an exclamation point. That is to say, it serves a rhetorical function.

A rather specific and content-laden exclamation point! Expressing “I refuse to acknowledge the possibility that someone could disagree with this in good faith” serves a fairly specific social-interpersonal function (which is the same as ‘rhetorical function’ but without the derogatory baggage).

geo @109:

(1) RE me @79: yes, agreed.

(2) The important point: I think you’re absolutely right that content-wise, “It is objectively true that p” is exactly the same as “p“. So maybe the only function of the phrase “it is objectively true that” is a rhetorical one (and since the “objectively” is quite redundant there, I’m inclined to agree with this). But, in #67 (esp. the last para), responding to a comment of yours, I laid out why I think we do need to appeal to a notion of objectivity with regard to moral matters. And, not coincidentally, I did it without ever using the phrase, “it is objectively true that”. And that’s what really matters I think, whether to carry out the kinds of criticism we think we’re entitled to—and that we think we’re so entitled is often better seen in what we do than in what we might say on a CT thread—whether we need a notion of objectivity that takes us beyond mere psychological propensity to certain kinds of recognitional capacities, etc. I think the answer’s pretty obviously, Yes.

Salient: How does your refusal help establish the truth of your moral judgment? Doesn’t it just signify that this judgment is something you feel very sure about?

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “merely” rhetorical. It does sound sort of derogatory, whereas I, like the Sophists and their descendants the pragmatists, have a very high regard for rhetoric.

Re Geo:

I should have made more clear that I don’t think the Rorty position works—but it’s also been so long since I’ve read him, that I wouldn’t be comfortable mounting a critique just now. On the other hand, since I’d mostly entirely agree with Charles Taylor’s account of objectivity in these areas, I don’t think the position you’re defending is exactly worlds away from what I’m holding out for.

I think it’s Anderson who has been using “discover” as a verb here, and for me I’ve found “discovery” to be a good way of sorting out what I think “objective” truth entails, in a sort of simple way. I set the dichotomy between something like discovery and invention/fabrication/construction/artifice/&etc. Moral “truths” seem to me to be much more along the lines of the latter verbs than the former.

The notion of some sort of moral fabric of the universe to be uncovered, persistent across time in the same manner as the laws of physics and such, is absurd to me – as if there was some obdurate reality against which one could test ‘thou shalt not kill.’ One can test that relative to some project, but projects are fungible.

“Justice is so irretrievably bound up with morality as to belong to the same class of “things that don’t really exist outside of human perception.” #103

What has perception got to do with it? What has perception got to do with anything, for that mater?

Isn’t all about language?

I hope we can all agree that at least modern western secular middle-class objective moral truths do exist. No murder, except when someone suspected of terrorism is in the vicinity. No chattel slavery, definitely, except for those convicted of a crime. No torture, except when it helps to find the enemy leader. Meat-eating is fine; living, on a personal yacht with servants, off a dividend income is fine. And that’s as close to ‘objective’ as you’ll ever get.

Salient,
“You know a moral truth is objective when you’re incapable of believing that a moral agent could disagree with it.”

You think that Aristotle was not a moral agent when he was writing about slavery?

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?
There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

Or that you would not feel “comfortable holding individually accountable for their actions and intentions?”

I think your definition has to be amended to possibly work “a moral truth is objective when you’re incapable of believing that a moral agent, *that shares your values*, could disagree with it”.

I think you are absolutely right in your conclusion. The Trolley problem shows that people do think causing death is bad – otherwise there is no dilemma…

I’m afraid that without God it is difficult to establish objective moral truth. Indeed truth and objective get hard to maintain, if only at the margin. Perhaps that is what you’re driving at … we mostly don’t exist at the margin.

I choose God, absurd as that is.

#25 re: lions has a stronger point than many here are willing to consider … objectively … it seems to me anyways :)

Salient- the problem with defining subjective as “things reasonable people can disagree about” an objective as things they cannot, is that some disagreements have very little to do with our reasoning. If Arnold finds a baby cute but Barry does not, whatever you might say about Barry, he has not “reasoned” improperly. Probably reasoning never factored into it for either of them.

#131: I choose God, absurd as that is.

But which god do you choose, and how do you define him? Disagreements between equally sincere beliefs in different gods, or different interpretations of the same god (whatever “same” means in this context) make up a nontrivial proportion of the bloodiest parts of human history.

Or, in other words, an appeal to god is not objective, in the senses that word is being used in this thread.

It seems like 90% of the discussion has been semantics and about 10% has been actual attmepts to defend or reject the assertion of the OP that A) There are moral truths and B) people have a non-tenuous grasp of them.

Splitting hairs between when is a killing murder and when is a murder killing is a spectrum debate. Where the departure point begins is where the Moral Truth lies. Just like particle physics – the fact that it can’t be seen and is hard to measure doesn’t disprove its existence.

As mankind evolves we collectively become better able to measure these starting points (i.e. the strand of discssion about slavery) and distribute this understanding to a greater proportion of mankind in order to incrementally make a better world.

Perhaps there is just some enjoyment of the debate – but it seems hard for me to understand how certain contributors who are more than willing to defend social constructs such as wealth redistribution, taxing the rich, protecting the environment, use of drones etc…..cannot accept a first principles argument that “being kind” and “not taking the life a fellow human” – stated in some fashion – cannot be the Moral Truth which underlies the society that flows from it.

@Mao Cheng Ji 132
“your approach is too modern and western.”

I believe that my approach is a variation on epicureism, so it isn’t very modern.
Maybe it is western, but I cannot know for sure because I know almost nothing about non european philosophy.
The only modern part is the one about “ruling classes”, which is some oversimplification of Marx I suppose.

I think that the point of view I outlined is in fact quite common in terms of “common sense”. The reason that most “traditions” don’t use this materialistic approach is that traditions are a collection of what I call “secondary” values, and as such tend to take a prescriptive approach, but this only hides the roots that are the “primary values” (pain and pleasure for me and my neighbours).
The “prescriptiveness” of those traditions is the reason they always sound so selfess and ascetic, however I don’t think that my approach is in any sense more individualistic than those traditions, since I also think that in pratical terms people use “secondary values” generated by society to give moral judgments.

Lucius Torquatus explains epicureism (related by Cicero) and in particular such values as roman heroism:

http://www.epicurus.net/en/finibus.html

This being the theory I hold, why need I be afraid of not being able to reconcile it with the case of the Torquati my ancestors? Your references to them just now were historically correct, and also showed your kind and friendly feeling towards myself; but the same I am not to be bribed by your flattery of my family, and you will not find me a less resolute opponent. Tell me, pray, what explanation do you put upon their actions? Do you really believe that they charged an armed enemy, or treated their children, their own flesh and blood, so cruelly, without a thought for their own interest or advantage? Why, even wild animals do not act in that way; they do not run amok so blindly that we cannot discern any purpose in their movements and their onslaughts.

Can you then suppose that those heroic men performed their famous deeds without any motive at all? What their motive was, I will consider later on: for the present I will confidently assert, that if they had a motive for those undoubtedly glorious exploits, that motive was not a love of virtue in and for itself.—He wrested the necklet from his foe.—Yes, and saved himself from death. But he braved great danger.—Yes, before the eyes of an army.—What did he get by it?—Honor and esteem, the strongest guarantees of security in life.—He sentenced his own son to death.—If from no motive, I am sorry to be the descendant of anyone so savage and inhuman; but if his purpose was by inflicting pain upon himself to establish his authority as a commander, and to tighten the reins of discipline during a very serious war by holding over his army the fear of punishment, then his action aimed at ensuring the safety of his fellow citizens, upon which he knew his own depended.

And from Epicurus’ maxims:
http://www.epicurus.net/en/principal.html

33. There never was such a thing as absolute justice, but only agreements made in mutual dealings among men in whatever places at various times providing against the infliction or suffering of harm.
36. In general justice is the same for all, for it is something found mutually beneficial in men’s dealings, but in its application to particular places or other circumstances the same thing is not necessarily just for everyone.
37. Among the things held to be just by law, whatever is proved to be of advantage in men’s dealings has the stamp of justice, whether or not it be the same for all; but if a man makes a law and it does not prove to be mutually advantageous, then this is no longer just. And if what is mutually advantageous varies and only for a time corresponds to our concept of justice, nevertheless for that time it is just for those who do not trouble themselves about empty words, but look simply at the facts.
38. Where without any change in circumstances the things held to be just by law are seen not to correspond with the concept of justice in actual practice, such laws are not really just; but wherever the laws have ceased to be advantageous because of a change in circumstances, in that case the laws were for that time just when they were advantageous for the mutual dealings of the citizens, and subsequently ceased to be just when they were no longer advantageous.

Epicurus rocks.

‘Rank platonism’:

Oh, for me it ranks very near the top. Much higher than the later Greek schools, for sure.

” I’m referencing the problem of measurement, not the problem of multi-dimensional existence. ”

I know. My point being that even with sub-atomic particles there are things to be measured. There are no “morals” to measure.

“Moral truths, in my view, share some of those same characteristics.”

It seems to be the view of many in these sorts of discussions, but I am fairly convinced that they are wrong and cannot seem to understand why they are wrong.

TJ: The question raised upthread was, in effect, what kind of mutual understandings could you arrive at with an alien with whom you shared no history, culture, or biology? My answer was that you might be able to agree on mathematics and theoretical physics but not about morality; ergo, there are no “objective” — absolute, transcultural, universal — moral truths.

Agog: Don’t you think Plato was a swine, a kind of Allan Bloom who worshipped aristocrats, despised common people, and not only loathed democracy but dreamed up a fanciful concept of “justice” in order to discredit it?

RL: Very cool quotes from Epicurus. He doth indeed rock.

@143
So if I accelerate a particle at nearly the speed of light and smash it into its components and for 3 billionths of a second our scientific instruments detect a quark that our best measuring tools say have a mass of “X” and a charge of “Y”….you’re happy to believe in the existence of quarks even though for 999 out of 1,000 people the concept of quarks has absolutely no meaning for their daily life.

But if I I poll lets say 10 million people and simply ask “Is it wrong to kill another human – Yes or No” No context, no situation, just thumbs up, thumbs down.

Say that poll comes back and lets say, I don’t know maybe, 90% agree that its wrong to kill – I have no idea the answer – it sorta doesn’t matter – if an agreeably high percentage say “Yes” it is wrong to kill another human – you’d still have your doubts about the Truth of that statement?

Particularly in the context that the “rightness” of these polled humans cannothbe any more perfect than the “rightness” of your machine that measured the quark for 3 billionths of a second, since that machine was made, monitored and interpreted by these same fallible humans you can’t trust to understand what it means to kill another human?

I’ll make no claim to perfect insight…and really have no expectation of changing your mind…but at some point I do in fact trust the data I see before me and don’t need to conjure ever more elaborate “except fors” to call moral truth into doubt.

Say that poll comes back and lets say, I don’t know maybe, 90% agree that its wrong to kill – I have no idea the answer – it sorta doesn’t matter – if an agreeably high percentage say “Yes” it is wrong to kill another human – you’d still have your doubts about the Truth of that statement?

What if that poll was conducted 2500 years ago?

“Indeed, I acknowledge the contingency of my morals and stand for them unflinchingly. I think it’s the most honest and best thing to do.”

See, that is honest and healthy.

John Barth’s The End of the Road

That is a terrific little (!) book.

@150
If you want to use straw man arguments why should anyone believe anything? Should we believe we went to the moon or that quarks exist ? Because government controlled scientists tell me so? I’ll conceed the point that suggesting a poll was a poor debate tactic – but not the point that if you insist something is only truth if it can be measured is the wrong way to look at either science or human nature.

My point begun @137 is that people are making spectrum arguments or relative arguments – this is killing, that is murder etc.

If there is a spectrum, there is a starting point and where that starting point is – that is Truth. I may not, with polls or machines, be able to measure that starting point in a scientific way but, like in science, humans collectively can infer what that point might be from what can be know, observed, measured.

Perhaps I’m wrong – perhaps the killing of humans has no wrongness to it whatsoever and its only a theoretical construct that makes such thinking plausible.

That said, I think civilization has collectively advanced far enough to see the flaws in that line of thinking indeed most social constructs are for the preservation and betterment of humanity that tells me the direction of my thinking is toward truth not away from it.

Where does a string begin?

P.S. I enjoy Barth as well. I don’t know if that’s where I formed my views but I find myself smiling and nodding my head a lot when I read some of the stuff he comes up with.

+ Human suffering is bad

Plenty of people fundamentally disagree. They think crime should be punished, that punishment should involve suffering, and that viewing the suffering of criminals teaches valuable lessons.

+ Torturing human babies simply for personal enjoyment is wrong

And torturing human babies because you have strange beliefs? Does a Nazi get off the hook because he sincerely believes some babies are sub-human? How about the Grand Inquisitor? How about a Nazi who claims the baby is sub-human but also claims to take no enjoyment from torturing it?

+ Deception that is much more likely to bring harm than benefits is bad

How do we know how much harm or good a deception will bring? And harm to whom? We use deception in warfare to the harm of the enemy and our own benefit, so in which column do we add up the harms and goods?

+ Being kind to people is good

Really? You want me to be kind to Pol Pot, Adolph Hitler and Timothy McVey? And you call that “obviously right”?

My answer was that you might be able to agree on mathematics and theoretical physics but not about morality; ergo, there are no “objective” — absolute, transcultural, universal — moral truths.

I really think you’re giving too much credit to mathematics and theoretical physics, and not nearly enough credit to language.

We’re not talking about aliens that can travel between planets–who’s to say they could even make us aware of their presence, or vice versa? No, we’re talking about aliens that are capable of holding a conversation with us. That’s the foundation on which you need to build your case: we discover an alien species that can converse with us.

I would expect any species that is capable of communicating with me about abstract and concrete things to have a predictable baseline understanding of how to treat one another nicely, with far more certainty than my expectation that they can swap calculations with me. All I really need is one mutually understood material fact: “It is very easy to end one another’s lives, and impossible to start them again once ended.” Maybe also “It is even easier to cripple and disable one another, and very difficult to compensate for those damages.” And whatever material facts are underneath that, like, we experience the flow of time in one direction.

But from that, you can derive quite a number of objective moral truths; even if the species has no concept of pain, it will have the concepts of harm and damage, and it will understand the consequences of damage. A species that has sufficient self-awareness for individuals to understand their own mortality, will be a species that has developed a sophisticated understanding of when and how it is acceptable to compromise life. While we might disagree about specific principles, there will be a common understanding underneath those principles, and it will consist of general vague ideas like “suffering is bad.” (Or the properly qualified versions of the same. Goddamnit, don’t make me type a hundred caveats trying to crystallize the aether.)

Also…

Plenty of people fundamentally disagree. They think crime should be punished, that punishment should involve suffering,

Isn’t the material tactic of punishment, to cause something bad to happen to someone? And isn’t the goal of that punishment, to reduce overall human suffering by creating a context in which we have incentives to not impose suffering on one another?

and that viewing the suffering of criminals teaches valuable lessons.

Kinda hard to see what those lessons could even be, among people who didn’t agree that suffering is bad. “Oh look, the criminal is suffering. But since I don’t understand that the criminal is having bad things happen to them, I have no reason to avoid acting like the criminal, even if I know those actions will bring similar suffering down upon me.”

I honestly* don’t see how a person could even learn from getting punished themselves, without understanding that suffering is something that a person would ordinarily avoid, if able to do so without too much trouble. If you don’t understand that you’re experiencing something bad, how could you possibly develop whatever aversion to behavior the punishment is attempting to instill?

*another word that you are free to dismiss as ‘rhetorical’ because it has a purely social/emotive function

You (and David and others) are certainly free to extend no interpretive charity in return, and demand tome-length revisions be appended to every statement. Just don’t pretend that you’re doing that in order to get a better handle on what they really mean, when you’re really just hoping to limit their opportunity to speak their mind.

That strikes me as unkind.

“Other recent research shows similar results: stressing subjects, rushing them or reminding them of their mortality all reduce utilitarian responses, most likely by preventing them from controlling their emotions.”

That’s one explanation, a nice one if you’re inclined to believe that 1) utilitarianism is more rational because it is more transparently calculable, and that 2) the unease we feel at condoning utilitarian calculations is irrational (merely emotional) because it does not readily admit of the same transparent calculation.

I would offer as a counter-explanation that utilitarian responses are reduced by rushing, stressing and confronting subjects with their own mortality because these factors inhibit our ability to rationalize ourselves into ignoring anti-utilitarian moral sentiments. Not saying this counter-explanation is clearly right and the explanation in the article clearly wrong, just that the “most-likely” status of the “uncontrolled emotions = rejection of utilitarianism” explanation needs more justification.

But from that, you can derive quite a number of objective moral truths; even if the species has no concept of pain, it will have the concepts of harm and damage, and it will understand the consequences of damage.

Salient, I don’t understand why you want these things to be objective. They might be desirable and important to us, but where does their objectivity reside? This is the problem that this type of discussion always runs into: if you ask me for an objective demonstration of the behavior of physical models, I can provide them, but no one has ever yet provided anything like a demonstration of an objective moral truth.

Perhaps the objectivity of moral truths is unlike the objectivity of physical facts, but then you actually have to show me your ontology and explain why I should take it to represent something objective, rather than, say, some contingent fact about what we both prefer. Of course one may be objectively able to claim “we mostly agree on X” where X = suffering is bad/killing babies is bad/etc., but that’s different from claiming that “suffering is objectively bad.” I would go so far as to say that the latter claim doesn’t even make much sense to me, philosophically speaking.

It’s not that I disagree with your evaluations of what’s good and bad (judging from your other posts I’d imagine we agree quite a bit). It’s just that I’m not sure we’re going to get anywhere trying to ground those evaluations in some fact about the world, rather than some facts about ourselves (e.g. we feel pain and desire not to feel pain, we are empathic and therefore don’t want to inflict pain on others, etc.). I agree with Bruce Wilder above that this doesn’t really matter too much in terms of cashing out the beliefs for actual effect, and if that’s true, I don’t see what’s to be gained by insisting on objectivity.

If you discovered that no actually I see no reason whatsoever for kindness or lack thereof, independent of context, then it wouldn’t be possible for us to meaningfully converse about the topic anymore.

I’m getting shades of Rorty’s “The Priority of Democracy To Philosophy” here (PDF)…

I wasn’t aware that this thread was being refereed, or indeed that it was possible to “win” or “lose” it. But you learn something new every day, I guess.

Contra Kevin, I thought Jerry @169 and 171 was right on the mark. I don’t see what’s to be gained by insisting on objectivity, either. And the Rorty essay he links to is a gem.

I don’t see what’s to be gained by insisting on objectivity, either.

The problem (as I see it) is that you’re grafting your definition of the word onto a discussion that isn’t attending to that definition. I’m not insisting on geo-objectivity, I’m insisting on Sal-Harry-Hutson-objectivity. We are using the word to mean something different. I feel really frustrated that something so basic is proving to be such a fucking sticking point. We are using the word to mean something different. We are using the word to mean something different. We are not trying to say that these things are ‘objective’ according to your use of the word.

I’m not asking for you to abandon your definition of what ‘objective’ ought to mean, I’m just asking you to respect places and discourse events in which people are using the word in a different way — a well-understood colloquial way — and allowing them to talk about what they would like to talk about without demanding that they honor your definition by abandoning theirs.

Seriously, look at comment 167, which turns an eye back to the OP. We could be talking about stuff like that. Instead that comment sticks out like an oasis in a desert, and we’re stuck grinding our heads against a really really simple and frankly really really stupid sticking point.

I tried to help by describing the colloquial meaning in an understandable way. I feel like I totally failed. But look, srsly, if you comprehend, but refuse to accept, the definition that I offered, please, just say so. If you would like for us to stop talking about the original topic — or to never start talking about it — just because you refuse to accept the offered definition, please, just say so.

And in fact, whenever you’re out in public and here someone say “but let’s be objective about this,” please, exercise the same restraint I’ve been pushing for here — don’t step in and push that person to demonstrate that their forthcoming observations are independent of sentience or the existence of observers. It’s just not what they mean, and the act of stepping in to enforce the definition is completely lacking the interpretive charity that allows meaningful and enlightening conversations to flow in the first place.

(On the other hand, if it means Jerry Vinokurov loses, I don’t wanna win.)

it’s really Rorty who loses

Come off it, Kevin. Rorty rocks even more than Epicurus!

David @ 156: ” . . . it matters very much whether it is a true fact that I should not kill, or whether it is simply a convention that all humans generally agree to. One is binding and one is not.”

I think it is useful to recognize that there are three separate domains of knowledge, each resting on its own epistemology. There’s the logical or analytic, whose truth value is logical validity, and which is a priori in relation to the facts of the world. There’s the experiential or empirical, which is concerned directly with the facts of the world, and with constructing synthetic statements about the world, and whose truth value is, factual truth. And, then, there’s the moral, which is about values and ethics in a social context, the truth-value of which is, good.

Asking whether a moral imperative is a true “fact” is nonsensical. In its way, it is just as wrong-headed as Kant seeking out a categorical imperative. Moral imperatives are not logical propositions or factual statements, grammatically or functionally.

When someone asserts that morality is “objective”, that person is either seriously confused, or they are using “objective” in a somewhat metaphorical way, as Salient
@ 177 has suggested, outside of its application denoting the use of measurement in the social construction of facts. Like Salient, I tend to think it is not a difficult metaphor to grasp in outline, if you are not being obdurate, resting on it does, on the social construction of morality and ethics.

No purely logical exercise can establish any fact, and no set of facts can settle any question of values or ethics. Since the pragmatists have been invoked, let’s also admit that no actual and genuine expression can be purely logical or factual. In interacting with the world, humans mix the logical, the factual, and the moral all together, inextricably.

We can move on, now.

Olive branch to Jerry (probably not necessary): I am also very sympathetic to this: “I guess my issue is that yes, I understand the “colloquial” meaning, but all that meaning says, to me, is that we more or less agree on it; there’s that second, technical meaning, which I guess you don’t want to see used, but I suspect there won’t be any good way of getting people to not elide the two. So it’s not that I don’t want to work with your definition so much as that I don’t know how to separate it from the other one, and the other definition is something I find really unsatisfactory. Maybe “objective” is just a bad word all around in this case, since it seems to lead to a discursive breakdown.”

This thought may be tangential to the discussion, but with respect to whether or not people have an inbuilt moral sense, I wonder if what I detect as a sort of adolescent belligerence in the pronunciamentos of right-wing and libertarian gasbags doesn’t have something to do with their half-repressed consciousness of doing something transgressive and in fact wrong in the moral sense. O’Reilly, Gingrich, Limbaugh — all seem unable to look anyone in the eye, at least in a figurative sense, when holding forth on why it’s in the interest of liberty to let widows and orphans perish in the snow, etc. Ayn Rand herself, being an order of magnitude smarter than her acolytes most of the time, disguised it better, but I sense it in her as well. We often say that they have no shame, but I suspect that in fact they do. A terrible thing to be them, in any event.

By the way, insofar as the difficulty of perceiving moral truths is concerned, I would like to point out that this difficulty is not limited to moral truths, but to actual ones. Pose the Monty Hall problem to someone and see how they react; there exists an objectively correct answer to the problem (I just wrote a short script to simulate this) but it’s very hard for people to grasp. And the Monty Hall problem is childishly straightforward in comparison with many problems of practical reasoning.

In other words, thinking is hard. Thinking consistently about things is even harder, and really thinking through the consequences of your premises is harder still, even when the problem is well-defined and you know an objective answer exists. We shouldn’t be surprised that people mess this up in experimental settings.

“Nobody believes that suffering is bad absolutely always. Everybody believes that suffering is bad.”

It seems that the glorious “objective moral truth” has now been reduced to a triviality: “suffering is unpleasant to the one who suffers”. Except, I suppose, for those who enjoy burning their skin with cigarettes.

If this was an objective moral truth, or, for that matter, even a personal moral truth, then “bad” wouldn’t mean “unpleasant”, but “wrong, always”. And then making criminals suffer would’ve been out of the question. The same way you feel about slavery, or rape.

But as it happens, even these days almost no one believes that suffering and killing is wrong. Except maybe for a few crazy Buddhist fundamentalists.

Salient:
as I said above @144, I took “objective” to mean “universal to all (reasonable? good?) men”: and I am still disagreeing with the statement “there exist universal moral truths”, for the reasons I and others explained many times already.

On unkindness: we value kindness in comment threads because we want to have a discussion: in this context, kindness it’s not a moral value, but a mean to an end.

192. I don’t think we need to go to our conceptions of the Aztecs, I don’t think most people believe it now.

That said I’m basically on Salients side, I think in these conversations people tend to want to reify the word objective until it doesn’t mean anything that exists, rather than take it on the terms that most people use it.

I’m interested in the Monty Hall script…

@194

The following might be of help:

“. . . values are as objective as beliefs, since interpreting another requires a common framework of belief, desire, and valuation, within which, and only within which, disagreement about values becomes possible. The denial that values are objective should not be confused with relativism: of course what is valuable or right is relative to time, place, local custom, and so on. This is not in itself a denial of the objectivity of values; rather, it spells out what the interpreter must come to understand about the other in order to know whether to they disagree or not. Nor should objectivism about values be confused with realism, the ontological position that one or another sort of object — in this case, values — exist.”

From Introduction (p. xvi) to Donald Davidson’s Problems of Rationality Clarendon Press, 2004

“How this discussion could bog down through over a hundred comments on such indefensible propositions as the notion that a moral imperative has to be absolute or objective to be true on its own terms, defies my understanding.”

Because the answers being pushed by you and Salient do not make sense and are not satisfying, and frankly you do not seem to understand why.

So David, is your question about whether “ought” can be derived from “is”?

“So David, is your question about whether “ought” can be derived from “is”?”

I am not “asking” because I am certain that it cannot.

“Well, we used to think that, but now, people like Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foot and Iris Murdoch have since been able to present quite cogent arguments to the contrary.”

So, I guess all moral non-realists and moral nihilists have hung up their coats and joined the moral realist camp?

Sigh. This again.

The point is not that moral rules aren’t objective, the point is that you cannot have acontextual moral rules. The sentence “torture is wrong” is an incomplete sentence. It must be “If you value , which makes you desire a state of affairs , then torture is the wrong way to accomplish or conflicts with other value .” That statement CAN be objectively true. You can then either change your behavior, change your valuations, or admit that those weren’t your real valuations in the first place.

To put it in CS terms, the function is GoodBad(action, specificDesire, otherValues[]);

I’m going to go of on a limb and say that no one outside the philosophic community cares about their internal debates.

roger nowosielski : “So David, is your question about whether “ought” can be derived from “is”?”

David: “I am not “asking” because I am certain that it cannot.”

Just to be clear, I agree that just as “is” cannot be derived by deduction from axioms or any other form of logical analysis, just so, the “prescriptive” cannot be derived directly and solely from the “descriptive”. Knowing what logically could be, doesn’t tell us what is, and knowing what is, does not tell us what ought to be. These are different domains of knowledge, with their own epistemic truth-values. Just because we do not know the truth of Darwinian evolution by the same criteria that we know the truth of 2+2=4 or some Aristotelian syllogism does not make Darwinian evolution any less true. Descartes seeking after an undoubtable proposition of fact, or Kant seeking after a categorical imperative, were simply wrong-headed.

What I understand Quine or Rorty (pragmatists) as saying about this distinction between domains of knowledge is that it is an analytic distinction, and these things cannot be neatly teased apart. Real and practical interaction with the world will entangle all of our statements across domains. It isn’t just that descriptions have to be logically consistent or that prescriptions must be consistent with verified facts; there cannot be pure statements belonging to only one domain. Even mathematicians manipulating imaginary numbers are not entirely detached from the digits on their hands or the practical value of theory to understanding.

The demand that an expression of moral sentiment, however, be evaluated as a description of fact, and rejected as knowledge, because it does not satisfy criteria of empirical verification, can nevertheless be recognized as wrong-headed. A moral judgment might be rejected because its reasoning conflicts with verified fact, just as a factual proposition can be rejected as illogical, but that’s not what David appears to me to be contending. He seems to think there can be no moral knowledge which is not factual knowledge. Or, that an assertion that there can be moral knowledge, which takes a form making use of a metaphoric “objective” in implied analogy to factual knowledge, can be disproved by denying the metaphor.

It seems to me that we need to accept the metaphor as a metaphor, and approach the subject of moral knowledge and its peculiar epistemology more gingerly and with a greater allowance of goodwill for those attempting to discuss it.

Bruce: “Judgments of moral meaning depend by their nature on context. Meaning depends on context. That we could sit on a jury and hear arguments and evidence about whether a particular killing constitutes a murder, and arrive at a consensus of opinion on the case indicates to me that we have common notions of what is right and wrong conduct, and what justifies attaching moral force to the actions of the state.”

This idea, that we, in fact, can’t reach a consensus is exactly what led Matthew Hutson (up in the OP) to conclude that there is no “objective moral truths”. Apparently even we – you and I – will not necessarily arrive at a consensus, as our intuitions are affected not just by the context, but by the wording, framing. And good luck with arriving at a consensus with an average caveman, or a person from the 12th century, or someone from an uncontacted Amazon tribe.

Aside from that, I just don’t get it, that killing is wrong, or bad. There are circumstances, even today, when they will send you to jail for refusing to kill. If you’ve been ordered to kill. Only an unsanctioned killing is wrong. So, perhaps the single objective moral truth is: “obey the authorities”. Like in that old Carpenter’s movie.

Roger, seems like that’s not the right link.

Landsburg stated that the hypothetical was not about whether something is moral, but whether it should be legal since he opposes the prohibition of certain acts he also opposes (Nazi propaganda being his example). He also seemed to be arguing that it was hard to articulate why our intuitions differ in these cases, when there is an obvious answer: rule utilitarianism. It’s actually quite surprising he got so many comments, none of which contained that phrase.

213, the military. If they order to kill, and you refuse, I’m sure something unpleasant (bad) will happen to you. Court-martial? And conversely, people who kill willingly and professionally are celebrities and objects of admiration. So, “killing is bad” is really not a true statement, and never has been.

Bruce @210: moral knowledge, which takes a form making use of a metaphoric “objective” in implied analogy to factual knowledge, can be disproved by denying the metaphor

What is the metaphor or analogy you’re referring to here? What do you take to be the meaning of “objective” as applied to factual knowledge? According to your (rather good, I think) summary of Quine and Rorty, there is no point using the word “objective” — which generally means “absolute,” “non-contingent,” “not context-dependent” (though it sometimes, and more usefully, means “fair-minded” or “non-partisan”) — in connection with any kind of knowledge. That’s all we anti-objectivists are contending. Are you with us?

geo @ 219: “there is no point using the word “objective” … in connection with any kind of knowledge. That’s all we anti-objectivists are contending.”

geo @ 27: “#24 seems to me exactly right.” (Patrick @ 24: “There are no objective moral truths for the same reason, and to the same extent, that there are no objectively delicious foods, or objectively cute babies.”)

Geo, would you have said that it was exactly right to claim that “There are no objective scientific truths for the same reason, and to the same extent, that there are no objectively delicious foods, or objectively cute babies”? If so, why not say (way earlier!) “There are no objective moral truths for the same reason, and to the same extent, that there are no objective scientific truths”?

That’s a philosophical position; but it seems to me many folks here are arguing for scientific and mathematical realism but against moral realism. (Personally I’m wishy-washy about all of these realisms.)

All I know is that I am one of a species of large-brained primates and that, as such, I have certain needs, wants, and feelings, which I want, as far as possible, to satisfy. I know that most of my fellow large-brained primates have similar needs, wants, and feelings, and that we’re stuck living together, so a “natural” code of “eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, fight when you have to, and fuck when you can” is going to require some adjustments.
It shouldn’t be surprising that there would be widespread agreement on at least some basic rules for a flourishing life together. Details will vary with the circumstances: just about every culture expresses respect and affection for the elders, but some nomadic tribes leave them to die. Not really a moral disagreement — they respect and love their elders and probably aren’t happy about what they have to do — but it’s the best way they have figured out in their harsh environment to get on; if they don’t leave the elder behind to die, everyone starves. We’d probably do something similar in their circumstances; and if they were in ours, they’d have nursing homes.
Now someone might think it’s a good idea if everyone else followed whatever rules we’ve agreed on while he preys on everyone else. That takes a lot of nerve, skill, and luck. I don’t have it, and, on the odds, neither do you,or, eventually, many of the people who wrongly think they do.
And even widely-accepted practices can be criticized, and our views of whether they fit in a flourishing life can change. Nobody ever wanted to be a slave, but some people merely accepted it as a fact of life — winners own slaves, losers become slaves, them’s the breaks — and there was no damn moral issue about it. I sometimes think that was a saner attitude than the various efforts by people with nagging consciences to explain why it was right that some class of persons be slaves and others not. But sometime in the 18th century, it became possible to think that maybe nobody ought to be a slave. Maybe because it was only then becoming possible to envision a world where it wasn’t necessary or at least extremely convenient that there be slaves.
I don’t know any more “objetive” basis for morality than the deepest needs and desires and feelings of humankind, and you can make reasonable arguments for why certain rules, in certain circumstances, best satisfy them. It’s hard, but it’s a largely factual inquiry at that step. How much more objective does it have to be than that?

Yarrow @220: Yes, that’s a fair question. I suppose I didn’t think it necessary to take a maximalist position at that early point in the discussion. Since the question on the table then was moral realism, and I thought Patrick had offered a good argument against moral realism, I thought I’d just second him rather than raise the further issue of scientific/mathematical realism.

“Murder is a killing, which is morally wrong and reprehensible, in some particular(ly, and legally cognizant) way.”

That’s right, but where is The Moral Truth? I certainly do realize that being human includes – uniquely, as far as we know, and non-trivially – to be able to distinguish good from evil. What I claim is that the contents of each of these two categories are not constant, not universal, determined by the environment. Do we agree on this or not?

In answer to your question, may I suggests Iris Murdoch’s essay, “The Sovereignty of Good.”

I think the debate has become hopelessly confused in relation to the point of the OP (not to say that there isn’t much of interest in it). I was hoping Harry might weigh in at some point to offer some clarification as to his own points. But absent that, I guess as my last contribution will just be to say that, although I can’t provide a complete or even adequate account of it here, I believe the following 5 claims. I also believe that these 5 claims are compossible:

1. There are some objective truths. For example: Human suffering is bad and killing babies for personal enjoyment is wrong, etc. etc..

2. In general are circumstances in which justified moral judgments involve causing morally bad or wrong things to happen or doing morally bad or wrong things. Sometimes moral badness or wrongness can’t be avoided and sometimes it shouldn’t be avoided. For example, parents discipline their children in morally justified ways all the time. This often causes human suffering, which is bad. But (sometimes) not as bad as avoiding discipline or punishment. (However, I cannot imagine any circumstances in which killing for personal enjoyment is morally justified).

3. Moral realism is false. (Or, more weakly, the belief in objective moral truth does not depend on a commitment to moral realism).

4. Morality is a human social institution and thus is fundamentally different from the natural world.

5. As per 4, to say ‘there are objective moral truths is to use the term ‘objective’ analagously to the use of the term in sentences like ‘there are objective scientific truths’.

Kevin, in sciences and maths people from different backgrounds can reach an agreement about what is true (for math) and what describe reality more accurately.
The methods do not always work in practice: proofs can be difficult to understand or have mistakes, scientist can refuse to be convinced by evidence: but at least in principle we have a method.

I don’t see any such method in morality: I don’t see how a modern person could convince Dante that homosexuality was OK, or how Aristotle could convince a modern person that slavery is OK.

Manta, Aristotle describes a ‘method’ in the Nichomachean Ethics (a pretty good one I think). But it’s not a method like the one used in science (as I say the terms are analagous not precisely the same in different domains). For one thing the method, as Aristotle says, is not designed to achieve same sort of precision as we would expect in the natural sciences – but that is due to the point related to my 4. above. Morality and the natural world are different, and thus (to paraphrase Aristotle) in making judgments in one area we should not employ the same standards or expect the same precision as we would expect in others. Doesn’t mean that Slavery is not wrong.

@233

“I don’t see any such method in morality: I don’t see how a modern person could convince Dante that homosexuality was OK, or how Aristotle could convince a modern person that slavery is OK.”

Isn’t this more of an argument to the effect that morality is evolving? Anything wrong with that proposition, and how would impact (in any negative way) a contention that there may be certain moral truths?

And apropos of Aristotle, don’t we have Euripides, for example, to reach a different conclusion?

@235

only the kind of precision the subject matter would allow . . .

David @ 227: “. . . the question of morality cannot be looked at as simply one of constructing metaphors, because in the real world there are power imbalances that hopelessly complicate everything.”

Metaphors, or trolley problems, for that matter. I wouldn’t concede “hopelessly”, because I think moral inquiry and construction are necessary and hopeful. But, yes, morality is about power in social organization and cooperation.

Moral dilemmas, in practice, are more likely to be about the difficulty of doing the right thing, despite temptation or threat, and not about the limits of individual cognition.

Emergencies, by contrast, are fascinating to us, partly because they simplify moral choice, by liberating us from imponderable conflicts and complex calculation of cost, to pursue expedience. Using a hypothetical emergency, as in a trolley problem, to confuse people about costs and conflicts is really unfair, because, in real emergencies, we act expediently with little consideration of cost or conflict. The expedience of emergency can be experienced as a great, dramatic release, a catharsis. I mention this in digression, as a way of pointing out things we might have discussed.

David: “I don’t think any form of morality I have ever seen provides a reason that the Spartans SHOULD have abandoned this arrangement.”

I guess you didn’t hear from the Helots, then; they might have had a view critical of their Spartan overlords. Social contract theory might take a dim view of the political constitution of Sparta, and question, for example, whether a social order, which so handicapped its own capacity to reproduce itself, was wisely chosen, as well as what obligations the Helots might properly be said to have in this arrangement.

There was a time, historically, when astrologers looked to the heavens for meaning, projected myths on to constellations, and attempted to divine portends from the movements of heavenly bodies. In the loss of enchantment, which was the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent Enlightenment, we took back our projections of morality onto the nightsky, and let mathematics model the movements of the planets and guide the measurement of our astronomical observations. We also stopped, in time, accepting the claims of kings to rule by divine right, and the execution of criminals by drawing out their entrails.

Moral reasoning in our disenchanted age may not be as baroque or mystical as it once was. Such is mundane progress.

Yes, Victoria, our sensibilities are changing, more correctly perhaps, we’re forced to adjust our sensibilities by real-life circumstances or things we never fathomed before (because we’re usually thoughtless and uncaring); and yes, the world is better off for it.

MPAVictoria 235, if defying your society (liberal, democratic, the constitution, blah, blah, blah) is, as far as you’re concerned, the right thing to do, that’s fine with me. But you are in a small minority, anomaly. Very recently masses of people, tens of millions, rejoiced when bin Laden was killed, cried from happiness. At this point, the straight statement “‘killing is bad’ is an objective moral truth” seems absurd.

@242

Jerry, what precisely rides on the (scientific?) “fact” that “the world doesn’t seem to go away when we stop paying attention.”? What difference would it make one way or another what we happen to believe (other than, of course, our cherished epistemological position)? Aren’t all our truths and findings mediated by language, be it a natural language or the language of mathematics or physics?

To the best of my knowledge, none of us has privileged access.

“Very recently masses of people, tens of millions, rejoiced when bin Laden was killed, cried from happiness.At this point, the straight statement “‘killing is bad’ is an objective moral truth” seems absurd.”

And most in this thread seem to want to treat this obvious point as tedious spoil-sportery.

Roger,

Jerry, what precisely rides on the (scientific?) “fact” that “the world doesn’t seem to go away when we stop paying attention.”? What difference would it make one way or another what we happen to believe (other than, of course, our cherished epistemological position)? Aren’t all our truths and findings mediated by language, be it a natural language or the language of mathematics or physics?

I’m not sure anything at all rides on it. Or, well, not much rides on your belief in it. If the world were really as capricious as all that, then my strong suspicion is that nothing that looks like the scientific project could ever even get started or make any sort of progress. The very fact that we have made progress by anchoring ourselves in that baseline assumption suggests that the assumption was a good one.

As I said, scientific realism of a sort is a view that I hold, and I think I have good reason to hold it, but if were doing a project together, I wouldn’t care whether or not you hold it too as long as we accepted enough common premises to make progress. Of course, if you were to start denying the notion that measurements were useful or that one could make causal inferences based on physical theory and on those grounds refused to work with me, then we’d get nothing done. While it’s true that our findings are mediated by language, the language of mathematics is highly formalized in the way that natural language is not. Once you accept certain premises, certain conclusions deductively follow, in a way that they just don’t in other scenarios. If you don’t accept those things, if for example you think derivatives are a tool of the devil (I think I recall Berkeley making an argument not unlike that), then I literally don’t know what to say to you.

Of course I do believe, Jerry, that there a world independent of us. My only point is, what’s the cash value of saying anything beyond that, or even making that claim (since it’s not going to make any difference in either my personal or professional life).

In that vein, I may as well be saying “I know I’m in pain.”

Jerry Vinokurov @ 241: “The most audacious [moral realists] claim that the moral realm is real, but all evidence marshaled in favor of that argument are inextricably tied to human experience.”

Isn’t human experience the subject matter of morality? It seems to me that “Torturing human babies simply for personal enjoyment is wrong” is about a brute a fact as “There’s a mountain over there”. The wrongness of torturing babies is inextricably tied to human experience — just as the solidity of the mountain is inextricably tied to the existence of matter.

P.S. (Are there really scientific realist philosophers who claim that “the ontology of scientific language is isomorphic to the ontology of real things”?)

“the relative success of the last hundred years of science in coupling human theory to a human-independent world is really impressive and has no analogue that I can locate in moral theory.” Granted. Easy problems get solved sooner than hard problems.

Isn’t human experience the subject matter of morality? It seems to me that “Torturing human babies simply for personal enjoyment is wrong” is about a brute a fact as “There’s a mountain over there”. The wrongness of torturing babies is inextricably tied to human experience — just as the solidity of the mountain is inextricably tied to the existence of matter.

Actually, “there’s a mountain over there” is only a “fact” if you accept that there are such things as mountains. What is a mountain? Well, it’s a…. and now we’re playing the Wittgenstein family resemblances game.

There isn’t any such thing as “mountains.” “Mountains” are simply a kind of ordering that human experience imposes on the world. There’s something out there, but it’s not like you can get at that thing by naming it. Many times, that’s not necessary; it’s good enough that both you and I know what we mean by “mountain” and that provides a workable theory for us to operate in the world.

As for torturing babies, I just don’t believe I can offer up the same kind of demonstration of the wrongness of that act, however much I believe that it is wrong, that I can of the existence of something like mountains. Ultimately of course one can never convince the skeptic; they could make up stories about their senses deceiving them, evil demons, and so on. I could only mass a preponderance of evidence on my side, buttressed with Occam’s razor (itself an unprovable assumption). Like I said: if it turns out that I’m dealing with Gorgias, the game ends. But I don’t know what sorts of evidence or facts I can collect that would show that torturing babies is wrong. Unless we’ve really solved the is-ought problem (I haven’t made my way through the Putnam link above, but I’m skeptical that he’s done any better than the rest of us), there’s no fact of the matter I could present that would lead one to accept my conclusion. And any a priori arguments would just lead to infinite regress of “why should I accept this premise?”

Rather, I think that the problem with baby torturers is exactly that you can’t convince them of any such thing. The best you can do is appeal to some kind of empathic capacity, but if you’re dealing with people who just don’t give a shit, then what can you tell them? People who are truly skeptics about the reality of the external world might quickly change their minds if they found themselves falling out of a high-rise window or in the path of a bullet; ultimately, I’m not sure any better arguments exist against people who like torture babies.

geo: If “objective” means “measurable,” then what on earth can Harry have meant by applying the term, even by some sort of analogy (which I still don’t quite understand), to those four propositions?

Good questions, and better questions than some posed in this thread. I’m not Harry, so you’ll have to ask him. I can only speak to why I was willing to give him the benefit.

I presume that the metaphoric “objective” was invoked to suggest several possible parallels, including social construction and socially-mediated common consent, derived, perhaps, from a common moral sensibility.

As atomistic individuals, we have some sort of ground in somatic pain and pleasure, giving us some basic foundation of narcissistic “good for me” or “bad for me”. But, I think we mean something a bit more strategic and social than that, when we speak of morality and ethics, something that operates in the ordering of society apart from ourselves and our personal, idiosyncratic perceptions, and which demands something behaviorally from us beyond a purely narcissistic self-governance, and which allows us, in society, to formulate demands on others.

Does society exist even when some economists devoted to methodological individualism deny it? I, personally, would be willing to go so far as to claim that social animals are individually “designed” to be social, and so humans may have a moral sense, with which to perceive moral questions, and emotions to motivate and discipline moral behavior. It might not be easy to qualify in the form of a logical analysis when it is morally permissible to lie and deceive, but humans may be equipped with a range of socially-adapted emotions, which make it relatively difficult to tell lies and be undetected in telling those lies.

So, morality has an “objective” existence in several possible senses. One is the biology of human social life and emotions, which may extend to a kind of moral linguistics, which makes it possible for us to tell each other morally meaningful stories, which help us to govern ourselves and our societies.

I don’t have any difficulty in accepting the plausibility of the moral sentiments Harry sketched out. I saw them as sketches. But, I also think I see their broad acceptance in outline, provided, of course, that one can maintain a distinction, say, between (factual) killing and (morally reprehensible) murder, while also walking and chewing gum.

I see most of everyone is mighty impressed with the drama of “torturing babies”? But that’s the most common thing in the world. C’mon, give him that sugar he craves, as much as he can swallow. And now he’s crying, you won’t let him play with that shiny razor – why are you torturing him? What about the circumcision? But I see that this (obvious) comment was anticipated, and so “for personal enjoyment” part is there. But “torturing for personal enjoyment” (of anybody, baby or not, even an animal) implies a complete lack of empathy, and therefore some sort of mental disorder. A moral truth can’t be simply a confirmation of normal biological behavior. We don’t torture babies for our personal enjoyment, simply because it’s not enjoyable to us. We torture them for their own good.

@263

Superfluous indeed, only appearing to do any kind of work but, in the final analysis, only derailing the discussion and sabotaging the meaning.

For some reason, I can’t help but think that those who are most keen on employing the term (intent as, in their own minds, they may well be on clarifying the discussion or making a real contribution), suffer from some kind of (linguistic?) confusion.

Is there any other?

“The difference between this and the realm of “moral fact” is that the world doesn’t seem to go away when we stop paying attention. It persists whether we think about it or not; carbon dioxide was trapped in ancient ice cores despite the fact that no one knew anything about carbon dioxide. On the other hand, moral realists have consistently failed to exhibit anything like the same tight coupling between theory and “reality.” The most audacious among them claim that the moral realm is real, but all evidence marshaled in favor of that argument are inextricably tied to human experience.”

I’m not sure what you are trying to accomplish with this point. It seems to be that moral phenomenon are only observed between moral agents, therefore they aren’t real. But gravitation is only observed between two objects with mass. Electrical phenomena are only observed between objects with charge. Furthermore the definitions are circular–we say that a thing has charge when it causes the regular electrical phenomena. We say a thing has a particular mass when it interacts gravitationally with other masses.

Why is it so weird to say that we observe moral phenomena in the interactions between moral agents?

But “torturing for personal enjoyment” (of anybody, baby or not, even an animal) implies a complete lack of empathy, and therefore some sort of mental disorder.

This is pretty much what I have been saying, yes. Or rather: there is a reason you are inclined to say this, and that reason is, because “torturing for personal enjoyment is bad” is a foundational moral truth.

If you encounter such a person, you don’t just assume they are hideously immoral, the way you’d assume a Nazi is hideously immoral. You go on to diagnose that their ability to ascertain moral truth is broken. Your assessment is immediately comprehensive — not just one truth out of place, but a general mental disorder. You abandon any notion that you’ll even be able to have a coherent and meaningful conversation about morals with the person. That one fact — that one disbelief — is enough to categorize the person as someone acting without the faculties necessary for moral agency.

You presumably wouldn’t say that of, say, a Nazi prison guard — we intuitively recognize a boundary between heinous contextual frameworks and actually broken framework-supporting machinery.

In the latter case, if you were somehow able to verify that in fact they’re not suffering from any mental disorder type thing, you’d go on to assess something like, “they must be putting me on or making fun of me.” If you intended to be cautious and accurate, you might still feel a little uncertain or uncomfortable about just saying “their morals are worse than mine” because the person doesn’t seem to even comprehend what morals are in the first place. That’s the dividing line.

And all of that could be true with the person never actually doing something heinous. They might understand the criminal consequences. But they’d be indifferent to the social component of their (hypothetical potential) interaction with the baby. They wouldn’t intuit “suffering is bad.” And it’s the kind of thing you can only grok by intuiting, through lessons learned at a very early stage of development, before you have become an autonomous moral agent.

A moral truth can’t be simply a confirmation of normal biological behavior

This might be a little off — ‘confirmation’ doesn’t really work. But I would think a moral truth should at the very least have some close and intuitively clear association with biological behavior, sentient biological behavior. Or at least I think, a priori, there’s got to be some strong and inextricable associations between ‘moral fact’ and ‘sentient biological fact’.

(For those ready to pipe up with BUT THAT MEANS IT’S NOT OBJECTIVE BECAUSE OBJECTIVE MEANS ABS–: Fucking hell. Did you notice I completely avoided the word? I even changed “That’s the dividing line between subjective and objective” to just say “That’s the dividing line.” You win! Objective always in all discourse events means ‘absolute and context-independent and non-contingent’ and no one ever legitimately uses it in a conflicting different way; indeed, apparent evidence to the contrary is really just instances of a writer trying to trick or swindle people. Never mind that I completely conceded the technical definition is perfectly legitimate, and limited my complaint to frustration that people were butting in here in this particular instance, to either demand their definition take precedence or argue consciously pretending as if their definition were common ground when it wasn’t. In fact, let me concede that all of social-emotive language is ‘rhetoric’ intended to mislead, divert or obfuscate, rather than impart social information about the speaker’s sense of their interpersonal relationships to others and world surrounding. I’ll never use ‘objective’ in its colloquial sense again, I won’t ever make noises standing up for anyone else who happened to intend that sense of the word, and I’ll never attempt to be helpful by offering a definition more closely aligned to what the original speaker seems to have intended. Now. You won. Comprehensively. Give it a fuckin’ fuckin’ rest. Or go talk at Matthew Hudson about it. He’s the one who started the devilish swindletricking misuse in the first place. The rest of us were just following his lead. Seriously, if you need some evidence for that, consider that Hudson’s original statement — about what we can conclude from trolley-type problems research — makes no sense at all under your definition. The existence or non-existence of ‘objective’ truths using your definition would not depend whatsoever at all on what people thought of trolley problems. So you’re left arguing that Hudson didn’t say anything coherent or meaningful. So go complain to him about it directly, since had he used the word in accordance with your definition, none of this awful stuff would have happened.)

@roger gathman, I will point out that “If Harry is contending the latter” is pretty low blow thrown at someone who was merely acceding to the word usage of the original article they were responding . Seriously, why is this not “If Hudson is contending the latter” ? Really? You trace back as far as the OP but not to the article it’s responding to? People responding to Hudson are now the ones principally responsible for ‘contending’ the definition Hudson has assumed and used? Really? Trying to offer you a reasonable attempt at nailing down what Hudson meant was not enough? Now we have to assume the additional responsibility of recasting his article in language more acceptable to you?

and @Roger Nowosielski, I think “derailing the discussion and sabotaging the meaning” runs two ways; there were several people trying to inhibit acceptance of the obviously-intended ordinary colloquial meaning of a fairly ordinary colloquial word, without reflecting on the fact that this would render the entire original article and original post completely unscannable and meaningless (and thus unworthy of discussion, shooing us all away). Which is fine, except that some folks did this in a way that obfuscated the actual disagreement over definition, earlier by pretending everyone involved had already agreed to their definition, and then later by insisting that nobody could possibly be demanding acceptance of an alternate definition for reasons other than deceit or malice or overreach.

Jesus David you waltzed in here like a bat out of hell, and then.. (actually I can’t finish that sentence but ..

….I think a bat out of hell *waltzing* in here is what threw me..

Salient, I don’t get the low blow remark. I’m saying that you shouldn’t accede to using objective. Once Harry does so, it is his argument. It is not a low blow, but a form of respect, to argue with Harry in the terms he has put his argument. I don’t really care about Hudson’s argument, frankly. Or at least, care enough to respond to it.

Salient, it seems to me by “objective” you mean “I lack enough imagination to conceive somebody could disagree about it”.

Context is difficult, abstraction seductive, I know it when I see it misleading. This is one of those CT threads that are great fun to read, but daunting to contribute to. Anyway, thanks to all who’ve entangled themselves here so that I might learn something.

I don’t really care about Hudson’s argument, frankly. Or at least, care enough to respond to it.

…but…then why would you engage in a comments thread devoted to Hudson’s argument? To shut down the discussion unless it happens on terms you’re happy with, at a level of rigor you find satisfactory?

The problem with speaking up in response to this sort of thing (besides boring lots of people) is that I’ve pretty quickly devolved into contentless/repetitive whining. Once someone goes ahead and admits “I decided to step in and help shut down the conversation because you shouldn’t accede to using objective” there’s not much left to do but shut up and wander off and I guess thank the person for being honest.

But “foundational,” like “objective,” has another meaning in moral philosophy, a metaphysical meaning.

*wince*

How can this be foundational in any sense of the word? The fact you disagree with the practice or think it despicable doesn’t make it foundational by any stretch of the term. To do what you want to do. you have to make a grammatical remark. You’re nowhere near that.

At the moment, I don’t trust you to have any genuine interest in comprehending what I want to do, much less helping me to do it. Should I?

For what little it’s worth, foundational was redsquiggled, so I thought it was safe. I had contemplated inserting an extra l at the end. Is there really no way for us to talk about this, using a word, without getting shut down? Is philosophical language really so comprehensively hostile to social language?

Salient, it seems to me by “objective” you mean “I lack enough imagination to conceive somebody could disagree about it”.

YES, almost perfect. Very very close. (I am letting you substitute “lack enough imagination to” for “can’t” because it’s close enough to work. If you want to get your digs in, but nonetheless retain the meaning of the sentence, that’s the way to go about it.)

You get a lot of credit for genuinely trying to grasp the flavor and content of social language, and while you’re obviously trying to insert some derogatory self-abasement into the phrase, that’s actually a pretty common feature (“I might be bullshitting here, but what I think is, …”).

However, to fix the statement up, it should read more like “I can imagine the existence of somebody genuinely disagreeing about it, but that somebody would have to be a person that does not understand what morality is.” (Not to mention, can imagine the existence of a person disingenuously disagreeing about pretty much anything.)

And, again, the question isn’t whatever I personally want objective to mean, the question is how we go about trying to understand other people. The fact that colloquial ‘objective’ can be used deceptively does not mean that its usage is inherently indicative of deception. I only offered the alternate definition in an attempt to capture something closer to what Hudson probably meant, not to argue for broader acceptance (so long as you leave me ‘objective’ as ‘goal whose accomplishment will require a major project,’ I’ll be fine…).

Yes, “torturing other people is bad” is a foundational moral truth, if by “foundational moral truth” we mean “I can’t imagine having normal social or civic relations with someone who denies it” or “it’s presupposed in every society I know of or can imagine, except for a few which ended notably badly” or something equivalent. And yes, Harry’s four original propositions are foundational moral truths in that sense.

Sorry geo, but you have been so lucid in this thread and then this? A majority of Americans think that torture and killing is justified, some relish the idea. And generally speaking people don’t care about other people’s suffering (and especially when they’re living in far away lands with different cultural mores), they tend to be indifferent or cruel.

So I don’t see at all how these things are “presupposed in every society” – granted I wouldn’t want to have close personal relations with such people, but they are the majority.

I totally agree with you on an abstract philosophical level, I just think that you were granting too much to your opponents since they seem to ignore empirical realities as well.

“You are REALLY REALLY REALLY stretching the definition of the word torture here Mao.”

Well, they really-really hate having to eat those veggies. Or maybe it’s the humiliation of having to submit to our stupid unreasonable demands. They protest, they cry, they scream, hysterically. They beg. They roll on the floor, they visibly suffer, and suffer terribly. If that is not torture, what the hell is it?

And if you’re still unsatisfied, there are also things like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Rotenberg_Educational_Center

“it seems to me many folks here are arguing for scientific and mathematical realism but against moral realism.”

Yarrow:

I tend to lean towards accepting scientific realism, but not moral realism. There’re two aspects of scientific realism that (to me) seem to distinguish it pretty sharply from moral realism: firstly, that terms fundamental to scientific propositions will have real-world referents, and secondly, that you can conceptualise of the truth of scientific statements in probabilistic terms. Put differently, this means that you can believe in scientific propositions with a particular degree of confidence (or epistemic certainty) and use your real world experiences to update your degree of confidence in that proposition, AND that this is built into scientific propositions – because their main terms are supposed to have real-world referents, you should always be able to figure out testable implications. While all this is pretty fundamental to scientific realism, it doesn’t seem to be true of moral realism. The way people like Dworkin portrayed it, you either believe the truth of a moral statement completely or not at all. There’s no room for probabilities – it’s a matter of certitude. Adding to this, moral properties like ‘wrong’ or ‘immoral’ don’t seem to need or have real-world referents in moral realism.

I’ll give you an example. If I say, “My bedroom wall is impermeable to the human body”, the property ‘impermeable’ that I attribute to my wall has a number of real-world referents that I can use to assess its veracity. It includes, for instance, this prediction: “If you attempt to walk through my bedroom wall, you will fail.” When I make the statement, I can’t know with absolute certainty that this is true – there may be some as-yet undiscovered property of the human body or of brick that makes this possible – but I can hold the belief with a fairly high degree of epistemic certainty, always leaving room for the possibility that I’ll be proven wrong. And, in addition, ‘impermeability’ is simply a convenient way of aggregating a set of related predictions as to the likely outcome of various attempts to interact with the wall. I could easily dispense with the concept and category altogether and just work with the predicted outcomes that are its referents, all of which I recognise to have some degree of episemic uncertainty. Both these, taken together, are what make scientific realism’s claims so powerful.

I don’t see how either of these hold for moral properties – ‘wrong’, ‘unjust’, ‘immoral’, etc. They would hold if one were to adopt an emotivist account of morality (which would be compatible with scientific realism), but moral realists seem to be saying ‘wrongness’ or ‘immoral’ mean something more fundamental than “If you were to torture a child, most people would react with contempt, outrage and revulsion, and many would seek to ensure that you were subjected to mental and physical discomfort.” i.e., it would be wrong or immoral even if nobody would react so, because everyone should to react so. Professor Bridghouse’s original post certainly seemed to be making the latter claim, not the former. You can’t, in other words, dispense with fundamental terms and replace them with real-world objects or predictions as to real world happenings, and you can’t believe in moral propositions with degrees of epistemic certainty. These, to me, makes scientific realism and moral realism completely different animals, so that it is perfectly consistent to hold by the one but not the other.

I’m not a philosopher, and I apologise for straying into territory that’s pretty far from my own, but I thought this might in any event give a sense of how scientific and moral realism come across to people who aren’t philosophers and why quite a few of us are comfortable with scientific realism while being more reluctant to concede the claims of moral realism.

Except that, why do we need to call it “foundational”? What’s the payoff?

I haven’t been able to follow the discussion closely for awhile (I’m actually pretty amazed it’s still going!); but wasn’t it you, Patrick, who originally equated judgmetns about human suffering with the cuteness of babies, etc.? If so, in what sense of ‘foundational’ is it OK to say that there are ‘foundational moral judgments’ that doesn’t simply mean — I have no taste for human suffering; but if you do then there’s really not much I can say in order to show that my judgments is wiser or more morally sensitive or better in some sense?

As I reflect on my own contributions to the earlier stages of this discussion, it seems to me that the really important point is not so much to insist on the ‘objectivity’ or ‘truthfulness’ of moral judgments (though I do happen to think that there are senses in which these sorts f terms can be meaningfully used). Rather, the important point is to insist that moral judgments are more than simply simple expressions of taste or individual preference; and that to say something like ‘human suffering is bad’ is not simply to utter a tautology. For example, I think one can say that moral judgments are fundamentally different from expressions of taste in food or beauty to the extent that morality is a very different kind of (Wittgensteinian) language game or ‘form of life’ than is the language game aesthetics. This doesn’t seem to entail any sort of metaphysically mysterious assumptions, but it provides a basis for something *like* a non-metaphysical, non-subjectivist view of morality.

I guess my question for skeptics like Patrick is — does the concession that there are ‘foundational moral judgments’ represent a change of mind from the earier claims about cute babies, etc. ? Or are you suggesting that your latest claims are compatible with earlier ones? If the latter, I don’t see how the compability is possible.

@ 296

Of course it would be, Kevin, except that, in my thinking, this kind of argument has got to be made in a different context. Political theory would be one context where some such argument would not only be out of place but, I judge, necessary as well. But in the moral/ethical context, where the presumed object is the rightness or wrongness of human action, don’t we already have Kan’t categorical imperative, or Christ’s teachings, as a sufficient guide to thought and action? What more is necessary?

Of course, if this thread is about the validity of the categorical imperative, then by all means I stand corrected.

Maybe I’ve missed too much of the discussion to participate usefully at this point – and I don’t have time to go back and re-read everything carefully — but on its face the thought that the CI or Christ’s teachings provide an adequate basis for morally satisfactory thought and action seems obviously unsatisfactory. CI is far too general to be a sufficient guide for thought and action; And Christ’s teachings far too controversial in a context where people from diverse moral backgrounds have to interact. But this seems too obvious and I think I must be missing something. Maybe your comment about political theory is a clue — but the kind of political theory we would need to provide a foundation for political deliberation would have to be one for which the political/moral distinction involves quite a bit of overlap a law RAwls’s Political Liberalism. So I’m not sure how far that gets you.

Roger, I think a lot is getting lost in the translation so maybe it’s not worth pursuing this much further, but I don’t see how anything I’ve said has much at all to with the claim that Logical argument ‘proves’ anything about justice. You asked earlier what the usefulness of foundations for moral judgment was. I said that if we can say that there are foundations (in the metaphysically uncontroversial sense outlined in my comment 297, which seems to me consistent with the general thrust of lots of the thread) then they provide a basis for communication about ethics (deliberation, criticism, disagreement, etc.) that is not simply ‘subjective’. I thought the sense in which I was suggesting foundations are both possible and useful was nothing at all like a simple very general principle such as the CI. So I didn’t see how your response really addressed my point.

Aside from that there was some stuff about political theory and justice that I’m not sure is really getting us anywhere.

First off, Kevin, I really don’t see how you can separate the object political theory from justice. Isn’t that what a political theory, any political theory, is supposed to be all about?

And yes, perhaps I did not address your point directly. Yes, perhaps I’m guilty of trying to steer the discussion in order to consider the concept of justice. All I can say at this point, my gambit didn’t produce the kind of results I was hoping for.

There;s no point in nitpicking the “absolute moral principles”. The statements all amount to: “I value what most people who read this value.” That’s what passes for absolute.

#295: Except that, why do we need to call it “foundational”? What’s the payoff?

Because if I have a moral judgment and you disagree, we can discuss it, whereas if I have a *foundational* moral judgment, I am unwilling to discuss it with anyone who doesn’t already agree with it. It clarifies the limitations of what moral discourse is acceptable to the person labeling their judgment “foundational”. If you’re willing to have a polite discussion with someone who sincerely believes that homosexuals should not be legally allowed to marry each other, but not willing to have a similarly polite discussion with a Nazi or a slaveowner, then that says something about you, that might be useful to someone contemplating having a discussion with you.

I happen to believe that at least some Nazis and possibly an outright majority of slaveowners believed in the rightness of what they were doing every bit as sincerely as I believe my own beliefs and probably with equal or greater confidence, which goes a long way to explaining the low value I place on sincerity and confidence as indicators of truth.

If someone considers *all* their moral judgments foundational in this sense, it’s useless to discuss morality with him at all, and you might apply a label like “fanatic” to him.

But I think it’s important to bear in mind that the foundational-ness of a particular judgment is a property ascribed to it by the person who holds it; some people may have the same judgment but be willing to discuss it with people who disagree, and some other people may have the contrary judgment (and be accordingly declared beyond normal discourse by the first guy) or be undecided on the issue. Indeed, de-foundationalizing a judgment someone else holds as foundational can make that person uncomfortable even if you don’t actually disagree with them about the judgment itself — perhaps because the mere fact that you’re willing to discuss it suggests that you might be open to persuasion.

I’m starting to think that we need some kind of modal logic here — not only do you consider it wrong to do X, you also consider it wrong to not consider it wrong to do X.

At this point I think we’ve gone about as far from *any* meaning of “objective” as it is possible to go, but maybe we learned something from the journey.

I used to think that quandaries about objective moral truth could be resolved if someone could construct an instrument capable of measuring evil, but now I think that was too simplistic. Whatever it was the instrument actually measured, people would always be capable of disputing whether that was really evil, or whether the instrument produced false positives or negatives under certain conditions. If I had such an instrument and got a reading from a murderer, a rapist, and a Nazi, but no reading from a slaveowner, I doubt if I would actually reevaluate my views on slavery (even with the full knowledge that many people and even entire societies have actually held the contrary view); rather, I would conclude that there was something wrong with the meter, or that what it measured wasn’t quite the same thing as evil.

#292: “Judgment” or “moral judgment” are perfectly ordinary, natural language terms, found deficient only by those who, for some perverted reason, happen to think that natural language terms are vague and ambiguous.

Experience? It’s very common for natural language terms to be vague and ambiguous. That’s why jargons are contrived to permit greater precision and lower ambiguity. Sorry, I mean “decrease” ambiguity — “lower” is another of those vague and ambiguous natural-language terms.

The ambiguity of natural language is the basis for innumerable jokes in the vein of “Hit the books? Why don’t you just read them?” which would be impossible in a language that genuinely had no ambiguity (and are notoriously difficult to translate into a language that has *different* ambiguities). But in discussions like this, ambiguity can become no laughing matter.

Hence the compulsion to keep on reinventing ordinary language in the interest of what . . . greater clarity?

Yes, exactly. I don’t get why you seem to think this is some kind of joke. For example, “normal” has lots of meanings in ordinary language. In vector mathematics it has one precise, unambiguous meaning (which happens to not have much to do with any of the colloquial meanings, but that happens sometimes). This is useful to vector mathematicians, although I suppose you could argue they could have made up a different term rather than adding even more polysemy to one that already had too much.

“Polysemy” is another example — linguists invented it because “ambiguity” was too ambiguous. No, really.

“It isn’t torture and you know it. You are just being intentionally obtuse. Why?”

Because in order to be able to analyze the scope of morality, you have to step, if for a moment, outside of your personal little box. It may not be easy, but otherwise, as other noted above, you’ll just be repeating again and again: whatever I feel, that is the objective truth. And that makes this discussion impossible.

“But three hundred comments in, we still have people wondering out loud what the “payoff” of trying to extend interpretive charity to people is. Gee. Maybe a few folks could have been a little patient with other people’s unfortunate word choices, and we’d have discovered the “payoff” by now.”

Probably not, honestly. If you start a conversation on the nature of morality by using the phrase “objective moral fact” to mean something roughly like “subjective value judgment which I hold strongly enough that I feel justified in totally discounting the value judgments of those who disagree,” (paraphrase, not direct quote) then given the subject matter and the approach you’ve selected, the conversation is probably doomed until someone remedies that word choice.

As always, you can use whatever words you like as long as you’re clear. But that’s not clear. And its particularly unclear given that there are loads of people out there who believe in moral realism such that “oughtness” in their view is just as real, objective, and binding as gravity.

Arvind@293,:

The nice features of scientific realism, like testability of propositions, depend on massive, unprovable assumptions. First, the fundamental principles of deductive logical reasoning must hold. Second, you must accept the validity of inductive reasoning, which cannot be derived from deductive logic. Third, in any given experiment, there are always additional unprovable assumptions. Consider your proposition “My bedroom wall is impermeable to the human body.” Suppose you see a human body permeating your bedroom wall. Do you discard your proposition, or do you doubt your senses? Perhaps you are dreaming? Any test is always a test of a large number of propositions, so any given proposition is only testable under a specific set of assumptions that enable us to declare that a test has bearing on the single proposition we are interested in.

Moreover, this isn’t just a matter of abstract philosophy. The assumptions in scientific testing are usually violated. We build and test models that we know are not true because they are convenient. Measurement error always exists and often is unknowable, because it depends on the specific experimental conditions. The idea that we can assign a number to represent our precise degree of confidence in a scientific proposition, updated as we get more data, is simply not correct; no such concept exists in scientific practice. A confidence interval is not a statement of objective fact, but an assumption that comes out of our model, which, again, we usually know to be false before we even begin the experiment.

Nevertheless, I am a scientific realist. I’m a scientific realist because I can’t help myself. I have absolute faith in science, and so believe, with no good justification, that the experiments I conduct actually do generate knowledge about the world. It is the same with morality. My faith that inductive reasoning works is equal to my faith that murder is wrong. I can’t justify either, but I am both moral realist and scientific realist all the same.

“we also don’t learn ethics by building on first principles”

Perhaps not. But, you don’t think ethics builds up from infantile empathy and the primitives established by parental care and training? The seed of unconditional love that grows into a tree of self-esteem. Basic respect for others and politeness. Or, instinctual primitives, like the ones governing cursing and profanity. (Weird to think of profanity as being, foundationally, instinctual, but it is; language just fills in the blanks, with culturally appropriate curse words and euphemisms.)

It seems to me that the ability to reason at all builds on infantile experiences and discoveries, applied as metaphors and extended to make sense of things, as, for example, basic mechanical intuition, thru Piaget’s propositions, etc. And, just so, we can have a moral sense, that builds up in a similar fashion, founded in the processes of psychological and social development.

And, I’m not so sure analytic theory and simulation modeling do not provide insight into morality. Isn’t that what game theory does? Provides insight into the primitive memes of socialization, embedded, with logical necessity in systems of social cooperation between competing/cooperating strategic agents. Granted that game theory does go beyond the apologetics of scholastic theologians and timid Enlightenment philosophes by, for example, showing the possibility of a diversity of “ethical” “strategies” in a sustainable social “equilibrium”, it does not require of us relativism. Equipped with that kind of meta-insight into strategic “ethics”, we might still judge some social equilibria more desirable than others, and not just more desirable from idiosyncratic preference, but beyond the Rawlsian veil, for example.

Just as the infant and child learns basic primitives of, say, mechanical or spatial reasoning as well as social and moral reasoning, and builds, at a later stage of cognitive development, with sophisticated theories (Euclid’s geometry, which is definitely deduction from first principles, builds on basic spatial reasoning), it seems to me that fairly sophisticated theories of social and moral, applied in law, economics or organizational and institutional policy design, build on primitives, extended by story-telling and literature. The novel, in its way, is a Euclid’s geometry of social and moral behaviors.

I’ve been one of those, who felt that some commenters were too quick to be doctrinaire about terms, particularly epistemological terms they clearly do not understand to begin with, and too quick to dogmatically insist on a conformity, where none is justified. Morality and ethics can be grounded in “objective” social psychology, and informed by analytic theory and modeling. It is a rich and curious set of topics, about which we could learn a great deal more than we know, and establishing a better human ethics may by the summa of public policy goals. I don’t think this comment thread did much credit to CT.

I agree that moral systems can be studied, and I agree that our awareness of our ethical beliefs is enriched and expanded by the social sciences, by philosophy, and by logic and mathematics. I also agree that moral claims can have logical implications for other moral beliefs, and that to some extent we learn by elucidating the implications of our existing moral beliefs.

Everyone in the thread above would agree (yes, any claim beginning with those words, in connection with a 300+ comment CT thread, should be viewed suspiciously) with that, I hope.

The pragmatists would agree, but caution that when we say:

p is wrong

we’re more precisely saying:

p is wrong according to (our lights) or (neothomism as described by) or etc.

When someone says:

p is wrong, and that is objectively true

that person seems to be saying that we need not add the “according to X’s lights” qualifier. p is wrong. Period. Torturing babies is wrong. Full stop.

For the pragmatist, the question of the objectivity of moral truths is not all that relevant to our conduct. It doesn’t bear on whether one should use coercion to enforce a given moral claim. It doesn’t commit us to an empty moral relativism which prevents us from judging anything done in a different culture. It doesn’t stop us from studying moral claims, the structure of ethics, the sources of ethics, etc.

But it can be relevant in that the rejection of the question clarifies what we’re doing when we think about morality, and it clears away some confusing metaphysical claims. The latter can be especially important if the metaphysical claims are being used to assess ethical or meta-ethical arguments.

It’s the clarity brought by rejecting the objectivity question which spurs the eagerness of pragmatists to avoid the use of phrases like “objectively true” in ethical discussions. The question is an incoherent swamp, into which enormous amounts of philosophical effort have sunk, that can be escaped only by seeing that it exists in muddled maps, and not in the terrain we actually travel.

BW: I don’t think this comment thread did much credit to CT.

I think, on the contrary, that any comment thread which culminates in ## 317 and 319 is well worth the slog.

Ethics concerns actions and material and symbolic exchanges with respect to relations with others qua other, (i.e. entirely separate beings). But the other is there from the outset, “prior”, a fundamental implication of the condition of language by which we are and become at all “human”, as that which is invoked and addressed by any utterance. The self related interiority of a self and the intentional agency that sustains its identity are formed only through the prior exteriority of the relation to the other. Which is what makes an ethical dimension to our existences compelling, unavoidable, inexpungeable.

But that’s also why talk of the “objectivity” of moral values or ethics is misplaced, even though interactions do take place as events and have real and material consequences. The other is not a cognitive object, something that can be objectified and reduced to the cognitive or psychological identifications of the ego, but rather, as a separate source of intentionality that withdraws from the products or manifestations of that intentionality, the other qua other is unobjectifiable, can only be a “space” held open as something related to responsively, communicated with. The ethical “exists” on a different “plane” of sociality than what can be captured in terms of an opposition between an objective world and a subjective intentionality. A “plane” wherein the opposition between inner and outer doesn’t make sense, since the ethical can be no more contained within a given order of the objective world than it can be reduced to individual intentions. And, as responsive openness to the other, the ethics is without “foundations”, an-archic, since it must always be open to the disruptions and innovations of the relation to the other. Nor can it be derived from “first principles”, which abstract from actual ethical “perception” and responsiveness, and attempt to impose as systematic logical order upon the contingency of responsible actions, as if to deny the possibility of conflicts between equally valid, but incommensurable values.

“Thou shalt not kill” is the first commandment, even though in some situations killing might be “necessary”. And even though, as embedded participants in a world of mortal beings and institutional orders, we might, at least potentially, be implicated in or complicit with the deaths and degradations of others.

“We don’t ordinarily debate whether sexuality *itself* is objective because nobody can ordinarily be found to take the pro side of the argument.”

And rightly so but for a different reason entirely. Because to take either position on the subject wouldn’t amount to saying one thing or another, a waste of breath.

Even the stupidest among us would like to think that whatever we say or do makes a difference.

Jerry Vinokurov from way back when!

It’s just that I’m not sure we’re going to get anywhere trying to ground those evaluations in some fact about the world, rather than some facts about ourselves

But, umm, aren’t we ourselves parts of the world, so that “some facts about ourselves” are “some fact[s] about the world”? You don’t really need much more than that for objectivity. The point is that moral claims are more than expressions of subjective preference. That’s what the claim to objectivity means. (Sorry if this has been covered already.)

The truth about what people think is moral and moral truth are not the same thing.

And something being more than just a preference does not mean that it is “objective.” There is probably room for more than a simple binary subjective and objective, especially if subjective is simply mean to mean, “those things which are generally a matter of indifference to everyone other than the individual (e.g, favorite color or pasta dish)” and objective is meant to mean “everything else.”

““Thou shalt not kill” is the first commandment, even though in some situations killing might be “necessary”.”

“I am your God, and doncha dare worshiping any other gods” is the First Commandment. Everything else follows from here.

Thirding Kevin’s seconding of js’s 327: “The point is that moral claims are more than expressions of subjective preference. That’s what the claim to objectivity means.”

Yes! “Fire is hotter than ice” is a fact. “Torturing human babies simply for personal enjoyment is wrong” is a fact. I can live with a philosophical position that works out to “These so-called ‘facts’ are just heuristics”, as long as it doesn’t prevent us from treating them as facts in our daily lives — doesn’t prevent us from using the heuristic.

I do have some sympathy for the folks who are more skeptical about the existence of moral facts than about physical facts. Almost everyone acts as if they believe that fire is hotter than ice, and almost everyone acts as if they believe that torturing human babies simply for personal enjoyment is wrong; but the tiny percentage who act as if they disbelieve the moral fact is probably larger than the even tinier percentage who act as if they disbelieve the physical fact.

And clearly our skill with the physical has advanced much further since, say, the pre-Socratics, than has our skill with the moral. Perhaps we’ll do better in a few thousand years; and perhaps we won’t.

So there are puzzles about what kind of fact moral facts are; and why we’re so much better at physics than we are at ethics: but none of that makes a philosophy that says “Torturing human babies simply for personal enjoyment might be OK” less silly than a philosophy that says “Fire might be colder than ice.”

Damn, I could never imagine that so many people around here would fancy torturing babies, and they only restrain themselves because they know that it’s morally wrong. This is quite shocking.

I do have some sympathy for the folks who are more skeptical about the existence of moral facts than about physical facts. Almost everyone acts as if they believe that fire is hotter than ice, and almost everyone acts as if they believe that torturing human babies simply for personal enjoyment is wrong; but the tiny percentage who act as if they disbelieve the moral fact is probably larger than the even tinier percentage who act as if they disbelieve the physical fact.

I guess I’m one of these people? Like I said before: I can’t figure out what sorts of evidence I could possibly marshall to construct a moral fact about torture. Where is the facticity of the statement “Torture is wrong?” Can you show me where it resides, other than in our collective moral understanding? “Fire is hotter than ice” is a bit off (you must add qualifiers like “at standard temperature and pressure,” and so on), but the gist of such a statement is that it has a corresponding measurement in the real world which can act as confirmatory or disconfirmatory evidence for it. There just isn’t any such thing as far as moral facts are concerned.

I’m not going to construct a full-fledged argument for scientific realism, but I will say that I believe in a fully materialistic universe. In such a universe there really isn’t any room for moral facts as facts; where would they come from and how would I get at them? Given that we’re the product of a long and complicated evolutionary history, that whole morality thing is, like language, almost certainly “layered up” on top of earlier developments. So there are a whole host of possible evolutionary reasons why altruism might be good or torture might be bad or whatever (it’s easy to tell just-so-stories about these things, which I’m not doing; all I’m saying is that all of this had to be an evolutionary byproduct one way or the other, definitionally) and what we’re working with today is contingent on that history. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to us, and certainly my feelings about, say, torture constitute an objective fact about what I personally feel, but I have no idea how to translate that into any notion of universalizable moral fact that doesn’t depend on the notion that I’m interacting with people who already recognize the wrongness of the act. All I know how to do is to appeal to people’s already-existing sense that torture is bad; that sense itself is an objective phenomenon (which probably explains why people can be appealed to in this way), but there’s just no “moral fact of the matter” about it the way that there is a fact of the matter about the flow of electricity or the concept of temperature.

What’s wrong with it as a moral convention? Why the insistence on calling things that look like mutable agreements and constructions facts?

You’re making everything so complicated. There-ness, thou, language games. Meanwhile, today, yesterday, and every other day, somewhere out there, thousands of young people, their brains still plastic, repeat, over and over: “without my rifle I am nothing … without my rifle I am nothing.” And sure enough, after a few months this becomes their moral truth. And this is how they become United States Marines, useful members of the society, well-conditioned for the tasks they will be assigned to do. And when shit happens, they’ll turn on the radio, and ask the sergeant for instructions. I know, this is an extreme case, but how much more complicated does it have to be in the real world, with its parents, teachers, fairytales, TVs, songs, pledges of allegiance?

Just briefly, batting clean up here, since this thread must be about to end:

There are no “moral facts”; there can only be morally relevant facts, as framed in one ethical perspective or another.

And norms are not themselves facts: they are shown forth as much by their violations as by their observances or enactments. That’s part of the meaning of being a norm: something not determined by material or causal conditions. (The expression “inalienable rights” gets at part of this: such “rights” can be all too readily violated, but that doesn’t diminish their normative status, nor authorize their transfer).

Cognitive norms and ethical norms are not reducible to one another. Cognitive norms concern “ontological” or epistemic issues about truth with respect to states-of-affairs or processes in the world. Ethical norms, with respect to rightness, justice, or goodness, refer to human relations, potentials and responsibilities within the world, but are not derived from its prior conditions. There is no “super-truth” which would subsume ethical norms to cognitive norms, which is an Hegelian myth. “Truth” and “justice” can be and often are opposed, if cross-implicated, criteria.

I don’t think it’s readily appreciated by many here and elsewhere how difficult it is to cast ethical intuitions, impulses and injunctions into the “logical form” of propositions. (Wittgenstein is concerned about that, but, as usual, sotto voce). It’s not that ethical propositions can’t be formed, nor that deliberative inferences adduced to form judgments. It’s that the “force” of such judgments, (which is not the same as motivation), can’t be captured in terms of formal logical inferences. There are always “loose screws” involved there. Hence the emphasis on the “pre-logical” source of ethics.

“Judge not, lest ye be judged”. Ethical judgment always redounds on one’s own head. Which is as it should be.

Haven’t had a chance to look through all the thread (grading!) but wanted to pick up on a point or two of Jerry Vinokurov’s (also, geo, etc.)—and picking on these people because I think there’s very much a point to what they’re saying.

JV:

Like I said before: I can’t figure out what sorts of evidence I could possibly marshall to construct a moral fact about torture.

Right, I agree one would find oneself at a loss to find evidence! for the claim, Torture is wrong. Given what we normally conceive of as evidence. But, what about evidence for the claim, “John [for some value of “John”] is unkind”. You could present straightforward facts in support of this, no? Ways that John has behaved, say, etc. But, in doing this, wouldn’t you also be making a value judgment about John? Could you prevent yourself from making this value judgment while you cite the behavioral evidence that speaks to John’s unkindness? (Do you really want to go with R.M. Hare on this?)

In any case, this, and lots of other “thick terms” of moral evaluation, present fairly straightforward cases, I think, where you can in fact cite evidence for moral claims (evidence for the claim that John is unkind, or that it was cruel of Margaret to treat little Johnny the way she did, etc.) And if you want to say something like, such value judgments are fine, it’s Objective Moral Truth I’m concerned about, then as far as I’m concerned you’ve conceded the point—for you’ve conceded that you can have factive (objective!) criteria for predicating kindness, cruelty, etc., of persons and actions.

More generally: of course, there’s an implausibly demanding sense of “objective” that’s attracted many , many, philosophers through the ages (Parfit keeps good company!). But at the same time, there’s a ton of stuff on the objectivity of values, or of morality, etc., and there are several more attractive ways of making out the claims to objectivity. If you want to ignore all of those, and insist that, well, Parfit’s view is insane (though also intuitively compelling way), then, well yes, all of that is true, but why ignore the other stuff. (Also, Parfit or Rorty is the worst false dichotomy I’ve seen in a long time.)

Anyway, finally: why objectivity? Because, as I suggested way up ahead, if you want any sort of ground for reasoned disagreement, argument, or critique, you’re going to have to appeal to something preference. And actually existing consensus would be a disastrous standard as well, for reasons I hope are too obvious for me to spell out. Given that most of us do (in our practice if not on CT threads) do think there are grounds for reasoned disagreement, etc., we must already be thinking that there’s something objective about values. No?

Kevin @328:

Thanks! You did make exactly the same point I did. Also, don’t get either why this is so hard.

How does it work, then? When it tells you that some action “is wrong”? Explain, please, but keep obscurantism to the minimum.