Stanley Fish is at it again. He’s found an author, Steven D. Smith, who has written a book that appeals to his inner cenobite and has written another dismissal of secular reason. And once again, his problem is that his view of the universe is a millimeter deep and most marked by dumb incomprehension.
I’m not going to mess around with his lengthy apologetics, because where Fish flops is in his premises. Apparently, Smith is arguing that there are no legitimate secular arguments for anything of significance; they all work by smuggling in non-secular presuppositions, without admitting it. It’s not that secular reason doesn’t work, it’s that it fails to provide a framework for making decisions, which rely on a moral or religious disposition.
The game fails at the onset.
Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”
Exactly right!
There is nothing we are supposed to do, and there’s no one we have to obey. We’re free!
What Smith and Fish are doing is asking a stupid question — where are the Orders of the Cosmic Dictator? — and failing to note that there seems to be no evidence of a cosmic dictator, and his orders are merely pretenses put up by institutionalized frauds. And then they run about in circles, flailing their arms and screaming at the people who point out that there are no orders. The problem, they think, is secularists who explain the nonexistence of supernatural agents, not the multitude of religionists who all tell us different things we’re supposed to do and name different entities behind our instructions.
There’s a very Darwinian view of the universe that these two have failed to recognize. There is no destination. There are only local, short-term responses to the environment, and the idea of a direction is an illusion that can only be seen retroactively. There is no “ought”. There is no “should”. There is no overmind with a plan for you. Trying to ask where the rules are just tells everyone that you don’t understand the game, and worse, deciding that there must be rules and inventing them and demanding that we all follow them or we betray our cosmic purpose means that you’ve completely lost it.
No rules. No purpose. Got it?
However, that doesn’t mean that patterns won’t emerge. A Darwinian world “rewards” stable replicators with greater representation in future generations. It’s still not a purpose, it’s a consequence of a lack of overarching purpose. Procreators find their genes propagated into the next generation; it’s not because God wants it so, or because Nature says you’re supposed to do it, it’s because the process itself happens to yield more possessors of the property than individuals who lack the property.
Likewise for other complicated or abstract institutions. The cultures that will exist a century from now will be the cultures that avoid melting down or blowing up. That’s not destiny or the product of divine guidance, it’s simply a self-evident truism. There is no “should” that even says you should be a member of a culture that will persist into the next century: you are free to run off to a California commune, grow sinsemilla, and have gay or prophylactically controlled orgies until your tribe grays and dies out. Or you can join the Shakers and excel in craftsmanship and celibacy and quiet worship of a deity until your tribe grays and dies out. The universe does not freaking care.
I’ve chosen my particular lifestyle, not because I’m supposed to do what I do or because I’m obeying orders from on high, but because it makes me feel good now. My biological needs are met, I’m entertained and stimulated, and I see the people I care about being likewise fulfilled. I want to see my views propagated into the next generation because they work well for me, and I have an emotional attachment to my children and other human beings, and want to see them given the same (and better!) opportunities that I’ve had. And of course, the reason I have those feelings for other people is that I’m the product of many generations of successful procreators who have also been well-integrated into their culture. I do what I do not because I should or because I’m told to, but because it works, in the sense of producing a stable and productive line of human beings.
That’s godless thinking. It’s too bad Fish and Smith are completely incapable of grasping it.
Right-on, PZ. Why can’t these people understand something so simple & obvious?
Jeffrey Shallit was a bit more compact in his response: Stanley Fish is a Moron.
Of course, the quoted Fish passage is an egregious example of arguing from consequences — if the world were without any god(s), there would be no normative ethics, therefore god(s).
And I’ve never understood why obeying some other non-human entity is supposed to be so good, anyway.
Cripes, you’re starting to sound like a well honed christian!
Stanley needs to embrace his inner Fish.
Apologies for the off-topic post but this needs a quick Pharyngulation:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100301/vaccines_fears_1002/20100301?hub=TopStoriesV2
Every time a vaccine article gets published on CTV the anti-vaxxers come out of the woodwork and spread misinformation before the comments get locked.
Please give them a liberal dose of anti-crap before the Chicken Little Syndrome assholes have their way.
“The universe does not freaking care.”
The simplest answer possible.
:D:D:D:D
Sure… if you ignore every single other thing that preceded and followed that particular collection of words…
“Fish flops”. That’s funny.
I can see why he’s an authority–he figured out that physics isn’t a moral enterprise.
Wow, I would never have thought to have said that–mainly because I thought everyone knew that.
Here’s a thought, Fish–learn some evolution. Then you’ll understand something of morality.
Until then, of course, you’re just going to have to keep asserting that you’re right, because you’d be wrong if your circular reasoning turned out to be wrong.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
It’s amazing that Fish manages to attack secular reasoning using nothing other than… secular reasoning! Well done.
Seriously, as most people with a little background in philosophy know, you can’t use logic to attack logic, otherwise you sweep your entire argument out from under itself. That’s the simplest refutation to any argument like Fish’s.
And flounders.
yeah. again the “can not rationally derive values from facts” and “in spite of that we still have values therefore values are magical”.
I am surprised someone still believes this nonsense will persuade someone.
I can’t recall the exact quote from Sartre but he tells the story during WWII when a young man came to him with an ethical dilemma: should he join the underground to fight the Nazi’s or should he take care of his sick mother. There was no one else to care for her and he was afraid that if he joined the underground he would not be available to take care of her. Sartre points out that no ethical system could tell this man what to do. I think most of life’s REAL decisions are like this – they don’t lend themselves to any set of rules.
I’ll be off then.
And which ones will be that? A rhetorical question as I won’t be alive a century from now.
Hard to say. The fundie/Teabagger culture doesn’t seem too stable in the long run. The problem would be that they take us with them when they melt down or blow up.
I never liked Stanley Fish. He kind of elicited a “I want to punch that I-am-smarter-than-you smirk off your face” response from me.
I did not know who Stanley Fish was until the Sokal Hoax went public. Since postmodern lit crit has always identified with the political Left, I figured he had at least some brains going on, even if he was incredibly arrogant and stubborn in his inept criticisms of Sokal (courtier’s reply in spades, really). But frankly, everything I’ve heard about him since makes him look like little more than a latter-day Mortimer Adler — a potentially great intellect hobbled by an obsession with tradition and intellectual elitism.
The man really ought to stay the hell away from commenting on science… presumably he is familiar with the concept of hubris?
Reginald:
The comments thread on there is interesting. A couple of people on there are pushing many, many courtier’s replies — Derrida would be proud. But still incomprehensible.
I note in particular that one commenter keeps hammering on Shallit about how this or that isn’t derived from “pure reason” — I thought Aristotelian reasoning was considered pretty much a dead end to anyone but Randroids?
I call that the “buggering around in life trying to work out the best things to do” philosophy.
Ruh-Roh! Get ready for the attack of the quote-miners armed with the ‘if it feels good do it’ canard.
The Universe is a cold, heartless, unfeeling bitch.
Deal with it.
If you’re strong enough.
For the rest of you, there’s always religion.
Stanley Fish reminds me of a friend who was never good at math or science and therefore dismisses the value of math and science. His ignorance is vast, almost as vast as his ego.
Sadly comments were closed quite quickly on this.
Notice how Fish makes only wooly reference to “religion” generally? From which religion are we supposed to receive our “moral sense” Prof. Fish?
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_myth_gods_index.htm
How does one decide when various religions make diametrically opposed demands?
The only thing I learned form that article is that one can have a Phd from Yale and still be an idiot.
Oh, and PZ: It will take me some time to forgive you for reminding me of a certain Cher song I’ve never liked. I have a vicious earworm now.
It seems to me there’s a more basic problem with Fish’s reasoning than you have considered. Let’s suppose that a Cosmic Dictator does exist. How does that make a basis for choice, other than ,at most, amoral self-interest? You seem to be conceding, by ignoring, the Euthyphro dilemma.
I wonder when someone will post saying that Dr. Myers is a Social Darwinist…
Wait for it…
Another brilliant insight from the minds of the religious. Why next, he’ll be making the paradigm-shattering observation that non-Catholic thinking provides no way to answer normative questions like, “Who should be canonised?” and “Has this candidate performed the required number of posthumous miracles to be canonised?”
You know what? I, myself have just had a divine revelation! It occurs to me that this recipe for beef stew I just found via Google:
provides no way to answer normative questions like “How shall I bake a fucking cake?”
Brownian, I found another problem with that recipe for beef stew. It doesn’t tell me if I like beef stew.
This is the kind of opening I love for sheer entertainment value, but I think you need a NSFQ warning (Not Safe For Quaffing: it does not mix well with the intake of beverages, which might be abruptly snorted up and out the nose). Now to read the rest of the post…
Is that so different from the religious mode which is ‘if it feels good do it, and if you get caught tearfully apologise while blaming the liberal media and increasing secularism’?
The tools you need to make a fucking cake (probably not, but may be, NSFW):
http://nawtythings.com/novelties/bakeshop.html
You are exactly right, PZ. One of my favorite Eastern philosophers, Krishnamurti, views all these modes of argument as merely preambles to exerting authority. The arguments are empty of meaning, and we are free.
There is actually purpose in the universe. I invent a bunch of purposes every day; that’s a skill I possess, via evolution and training. I can also impart all manner of meaning to all manner of things, any time I want. It’s a blast! We humans are really good at making stuff up, and when we make up something like theories of evolution to explain the facts we perceive/measure, it can be very, very useful and beneficial to all beings.
We are supposed to do whatever we think we ought to do. Things will fall as they may. Why would people want to let some guys (who are actually our peers and equals) with strange, nonsensical, ritual speech lord it over us because some guys made up a hierarchy and put themselves just below their sky thingy, over everyone else? I do not understand, and yet, sadly, I do understand.
The so-called gospels of all the woo-meisters are some god-awful news. It is of the utmost importance to reject this crap aggressively; appeasers be damned.
“The universe as a whole does not have a purpose, therefore I cannot have a purpose”.
This is like saying “The universe as a whole does not have a stomach-ache, therefore I cannot have a stomach-ache”.
Alec.
Excellent, Alec.
By gum, you’re right! Another failing of recipes! If only we’d read the Good Book:
“14Oh, woe be to the recipe-writers, 15for their books and index cards taste of nothing but paper despite their glossy illustrations.”–Letter from Brownian to the Religious Twits in Hopes of Scoring Some Moolah From the Idiotically Faithful, 12:14-15
Okay, Fish is a maroon and there’s a lot of stupid in the article. But I think Dr. Myers misses the point of Smith’s article–he’s a law professor writing an article about law, and the fundamental question of law is “How should we require our society to behave?”
Note the “we.” Dr. Myers’ argument is an impassioned and well-reasoned one for explaining why an individual behaves how one would like to; it’s how I guide my own actions. But as a society, we are tasked with telling others, “You are supposed to do X?” (where X may be getting vaccinated or allow women to have abortions). And the stance of truly secular reasoning, without an external referent, boils down to “Because it would make me happy.” And that’s a tough sell to people who don’t agree with me. So I think Dr. Myers’ is arguing the wrong argument. The crucial question is not, “Well, what should _I_ do in the absence of a Creator?” because that’s easy; the question is “What should _we_ do?” In a society that shares the same presumptions about what makes a culture effective, this isn’t too difficult; in a pluralistic society, it’s much tougher.
That said, I still think we can get around the argument–John Rawls speaks to this, I think. The basic idea is that, if we take a pluralistic society as a premise, we can at least in theory figure out rules rationally that allow everyone to be reasonably happy. “Since I want to have a say in my government, and since you do too, we should have a rule to make sure we are free to speak our minds.” This way, we aren’t “smuggling” secular values in; we’re deriving them from enlightened self-interest.
The clothes have no emperor(s) is one way of saying it.
No. A stomachache is a result of something happening in the stomach. I would say that the former analogy is like saying “my stomach does not have a stomachache, therefore therefore there is no pain.” With pain taking the place of humans, the stomachache being purpose, and the stomach itself being the universe.
(That may not make sense to some, but it does to me)
AARGH! You just HAD to say cenobyte, didn’t you? Why did you have to say cenobyte?
“Ah, Stanley…so eager to play,so unwilling to admit it.”
Well, I just hope he didn’t think for a moment that he was not in danger.
Sorry. Moving on…. :)
This is perhaps the most moronic piece you’ve ever written. What Fish is saying is nothing new. Alasdair Macintyre demolished enlightenment thought some time ago in After Virtue. So has Nietzsche, pointing out that this traditions notions of morality are built on religious superstitions, teleological beliefs.
This is not a deontological view of morality as your dim-wittingly assume. You should probably stick to laboratory shit, rather than trying to throw your two cents into philosophical arena, because you sound revoltingly pubescent.
Fish, McIntyre, Nietzsche are pointing out that religious moral values are based on a belief in an inherent telos. So when the Buddha and the other Axial age thinkers propose the Golden Rule, to a society allured to greed, they are claiming that you’re failing to live in the light of the purpose we are all here to live for.
They are based on the paradoxical nature of human feelings, that can be allured to immorality and morality at the same time. It’s a question, of should I keep the wallet you left behind for my own gain, my own selfishness, or to return it to you out of empathy.
What the religious moral frameworks in archaic societies work off of, is a claim that that latter is our telos, that to cater to our selfishness is to oppose our purpose. These are even the religious beliefs of deist like Jefferson, those like Spinoza, even fucking Einstein.
This is a needed component in communal moral expressions, secular reason borrow from this religious framework, without ever realizing how incoherent their moral philosophies become without it.
You as a scientist should know, that science is not about determining values. Science, Reason, Rationality, are amoral mediums, they are tools, like hammers are.
Humanism, Enlightenment values, borrow the moral conceptions of religious superstitions, and try and claim them to be founded on these amoral mediums, places where the shoe doesn’t fit.
I can break it to you even more childlike if need be, so that even a simpleton can understand it, but don’t be so fucking ignorant and defend your stupidity by accusing Fish of being incoherent.
Go read, “After Virtue” by Alasdair Macintyre, go educate yourself, before you continue sounding like an idiot.
Myers: “That’s godless thinking. It’s too bad Fish and Smith are completely incapable of grasping it.”
Oh the fucking irony. :)
Yes, Master. I hear and obey.
Fish is smart and worth paying attention to, but not on this issue: his recent interest in secularism seems to have hamstrung his reasoning ability. And it’s a bit strange since Rorty and Charles Taylor have already laid significant groundwork in how and why secularists can and do have perfectly secular modes of thinking underwriting their values and decisions, work that Fish is clearly familiar with. Fish just mistakes the observable fact that many people who otherwise profess little religious inclination may still have vague, hazy religious ideas that they present as justifications for their actions and beliefs for proof that we all do. I can’t speak for Smith’s work; that I’ll have to look at one my own.
Oh, you’ve discovered the Is-Ought Problem. Congratulations, welcome to the 1740s.
PZ: There is nothing we are supposed to do, and there’s no one we have to obey. We’re free!
Wrong answer — or at least incomplete.
There is no Cosmic Dictator — but we are entities of time and place, with a specific form. Tradition, reason, and personal history do condition us. There are things we are supposed to and not supposed to do.
We are supposed to be decent human beings, caring for each other. Not because of a Cosmic Dictator, but because we are decent human beings. We have a tradition, we have reason, we have biological constraints that all call for decency.
No dictator told me to care for others, to avoid assaulting them or robbing them, to help others particularly those weaker than me. I don’t need Jesus, or Muhammed to sing it in lyrical poetry to convince me. My parents were decent, and so were their parents. I recognize the commonality between myself and others, our common interests and my natural biological empathy.
Yes — there are relative answers. That’s all I need — I don’t need to know what’s right for Romans, or what was right in the highlands of Niugini a century ago. I just need to know what is right here and now — and for most questions, that’s quite easy to answer.
I’ve got “rules” and a “purpose”. They don’t come from Super-Space-Stalin. They come from my own history, at every scale from the immediate through the cultural to the biological.
I sat in on a Fish lecture in the early 80s and labeled him almost immediately as a pompous ass more interested in tenure than anything else.
He’s still a pompous ass.
Why the NYTimes continues to give him space is completely beyond my comprehension.
ivankaramazov, humanists don’t claim moral conceptions are founded on anything. Some Enlightenment thinkers used to claim (in the 18th Century) that moral conceptions are based on some property of the universe, but that idea was abandoned a long time ago.
41 – I guess chimps borrow their not-all-that-unsimilar morality from religion, too.
It’s not that surprising that if you drench humanity in religion for thousands of years, then the particular morality that even the non-religious might show some markings of having been drenched in religion in the past. This does nothing to show that religion is necessary for one to decide whether to eat a baby or a slice of toast for breakfast.
All the name-dropping and dubiously-relevant appeals to authority in the world don’t change that.
Shorter ivankaramazov: “You suck because Nietzsche, deontology, fucking Einstein! Pay attention to meeeee!”
Whoopsie. Ivankaramazov veered into the Land of Atheism and blew a fucking gasket. What a mess!
I’m not aware of Einstein ever discussing morality being connected to nature.
@ ivankaramazov
What you call morality others call a “cost-benefit analysis”.
No religion required.
ivankaramazov, argue from authority much? Pomposity is not a rational argument; the one who yells the loudest does not win. See frog, Inc. @#46 and truthspeaker @#48. The point is that the philosophical edifices and commands of patriarchal, hierarchical religions may be interesting and enlightening in their own right, but in the face of the real moment, they are largely, if not totally, irrelevant. The choice is now, and the choice is mine. I do not think of Nietzsche when I steer my car into the parking lot. If religious moral thought is based on the notion of an inherent telos, so what? That basis is incorrect. It may be historically fascinating, but the arguments are a squirrel-cage.
truthspeaker: “ivankaramazov, humanists don’t claim moral conceptions are founded on anything. ”
Of course they don’t, it’s too sheltered and moronic of a worldview to know what the fuck it’s built on.
Atheistic philosopher like Nietzsche and Heidegger understands what’s wrong here, but our moronic humanist is too clueless.
Heidegger points it out here:
“Western philosophy has neglected “being” because it was considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question.”
The secular humanistic picture is built on this neglected foundation, which they are to dopey to question, to realize the superstitions they are built on.
This charge is not leveled only by believers, a number of prominent atheist have made the same observation, from John Gray, Nietzsche, to Heidegger.
But our dewey eyed devotees of the enlightenment just haven’t figured out how naked their worldview really are.
ivankaramazov,
Fish claims we ought to accept human claims about what some god wants, even though there isn’t any evidence that any gods ever wanted anything.
You seem not to understand that every moral structure has been invented by man. The only purpose of attributing the morality, no matter how venal and petty or highminded, is for those who claim to control morality to have more power over others. It’s a power trip.
When I defend an ethical precept, I don’t attempt to use God as an arbitrary trump card if I cannot think of a persuasive way to explain why the precept is valuable to society. If you had any knowledge of the history of religious ethics or morality, you wouldn’t have made such a silly post.
AJKamper–yes, because the real question isn’t really “What should I do?” it’s “How can I tell other people what they should do?” And the invisible sky father would be the PERFECT answer, except that he seems to contradict himself alot. So we get things like the Crusades and the defenestration of Prague.
ivankaramazov, I challenge you to philosophize your way out of existence.
Heidegger is an atheist? You sure about that?
Religious morality is based on telos. Humanist morality is not based on telos. It is based on what we feel.
^was
oh, criminy… we have another pheeeelospher in our midst…
hold on whilst I imagine what it would feel like to have some popcorn in my hand as I watch this unfold…
He’s on the path. Only a few more steps, and he will be trying to sell full-bore solipsism.
I’m not persuaded that he understands any of the philosophers he is invoking to support his confusing claims.
ivankaramazov: “Waahhh, waahhh, Heidegger, waahhh, moronic humanist, fuck, waahhh.”
Ivankaramazov @ 55
reminds me of the most annoying members of our philosophy department at University.
ivankarazamov #41 wrote:
If no amount of natural facts can lead to a value, then no amount of supernatural facts can lead to a value, either. A “purpose” can’t be given, like an order: it can only be chosen. Why follow God? Why do what the universe wants you to do?
Religious justifications will still ultimately reduce to the same questions — and reasons — that secular justifications do. If our spiritual purpose makes sense here on earth, then it is making secular sense.
Which means that a spiritual purpose which doesn’t make sense here on earth, is bringing in new and special facts which had to be revealed. This is dangerous. Anything can now be justified, with no test in reality.
I think Fish and friends are trying to make a case that values are necessarily “spiritual” — possibly because it’s less work. Sloppy, and lazy.
Posted by: Mike Wagner | March 1, 2010 1:47 PM
@ ivankaramazov
What you call morality others call a “cost-benefit analysis”.
And I would accuse these ‘others’ of being morons for peddling this nonsense. Anyone who believes an immoral person is one who operates on a faulty understanding of the cost and benefits of his act is vulgarly stupid.
Businesses operate on cost-benefit analysis and they are not the beacons of morality.
ivankaramazov, I do not build a worldview, I have one, but it is a moving target. If I try to identify it, it seems different every time. That is because I experience being instead of defining it. There’s another squirrel cage for you. Think on it and get back to us.
Do you mean cenobite in the monastic sense or the Hellraiser sense? Or does it really matter?
Celtic_Evolution @ 61
Hey, philosophers aren’t all bad. Philosophy is great training for critical thinking, logic, debate, ethics.
Dare I say it? Science grew out of philosophy.
AJKamper made an important point in comment #37. I think Smith’s argument is being taken out of context. Fish seems to have hijacked Smith’s book for his own purposes. I’m only writing to defend Smith from being lumped in with people’s criticisms of Fish. I’ve taken three of Smith’s classes, and he is one of the few religious people that I enjoy talking to and arguing with. He taught Religion and the Constitution in an even-handed and fair manner. Without knowing anything about him, it would have been tough to guess what his opinions on religion were. I’m a militant atheist, and can say that my arguments were examined and challenged exactly the same as pro-religion arguments were. I wrote a research paper that was as hostile to intelligent design as I could make it, and received the best grade in the class. I’ve read drafts of Smith’s book, and Fish is stretching Smith’s arguments for his own purposes. I’d hate to see Smith’s credibility ruined by being aligned with Fish.
ivankaramazov #55 wrote:
No; secular humanism provides the foundation to explain not just humanist ethics, but religious ones as well. The existence of God is really irrelevant. Even if God exists, it doesn’t ground our morals, or suddenly make them understandable or worthwhile. Could God make something we humans all thought was wrong, right — by divine fiat? No.
The only advantage theistic ethics have over secular ones is the ability to put a series of !!!!! after every moral precept, along with a stick, and a carrot, completely divorced from the specific action or its actual consequences. This advantage is, I think, more than outweighed by the impossibility of getting any sort of consensus on whether God exists, what is is like, and what it wants. There’s also the serious problem of being able to divorce any and all actions from earthly consequences, and make up your own facts.
The same God that can make us for the purpose of being kind to each other, can just as easily make us for the purpose of slaughtering the ungodly. Even if you believe in God, you don’t want to give God that kind of power.
This is backwards. It was religion that borrowed its moral conceptions from ordinary human interpersonal behaviour, and dressed them up with fancy words like “telus”. About time we borrowed them back, if you ask me.
Ok, I guess I’m going to have to engage you, because you will not shut up.
Well, it’s a good thing nobody claimed that, huh? If you’ll look at the rest of the thread (it’s all them words what is above these) you’ll see some people talking about reconciling differing ideas of cost and benefit, not about bringing people to the One True Understanding, because duh, the idea that all moral evil is a result of misunderstanding hasn’t been in vogue since forever.
Yeah, and both serial killers and bartenders use icepicks. It’s a tool.
p.s. What, did you run out of name to drop? Go hit up Wikipedia or something, man, you’ve got expectations to meet!
^^If his credibility is ruined through refutation of his arguments, so be it.
Ah… but notice I didn’t say “philosophers”, for many of whom I have a great amount of respect and do recognize their contributions as such…
I said “pheeeeelosphers” like ivankaramzov here… there’s a distinct difference that I bet you can pretty easily discern just based on his discourse here.
So what?
“If I do good, I feel good. If I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Evolutionary biology can be used as a tool for finding out why we feel good when we do certain things…
“Everything is the way it is because it got that way” (J. B. S. Haldane), and science is the tool to find out how it got that way.
Heck, Celtic_Evolution, I am a pheeeelospher; I just don’t pay it no mind, as they say in the say-uth. I do it because I like it. I also like really bad horror films, and they are very educational too. Last night I was reminded (I had seen the film a long time ago) not to use a ouija board alone.
dammit… quote fail…
I meant to quote Q.E.D. from #69 in my #75…
I must still be suffering after effects of the accident… ;^)
@ivankaramazov
Instead what you preach is carrot-and-stick religious philosophy and scream shrilly at anyone who would dare challenge your “argument from authority”.
You came to the wrong place if you expect people to be cowed by pseudo-intellectual arrogance.
@ivankaramazov
Wow, I am stunned Sparky – is it ok if I call you Sparky? – that someone of your obvious intellectual acumen and academic firepower would deign to condescend to our level and educate us mere mortals.
But if I may be so impertinent and so, how did you put it, “revoltingly pubescent”,as to take issue with your screed – not on PZ Myers’ behalf, but on behalf of all of us reasonable people – I trust you will you not use your impeccable philosophical credentials to strike me down. Now, moving on…
1.”Alasdair Macintyre demolished enlightenment thought some time ago in After Virtue.” That must come as news to a good chunk of the philosophical community (at least those not toiling in the bubble of the quasi-lit-crit postmodern academic ghetto): certainly Habermas would be interested to discover that, not to mention the legions of Rawls scholars laboring under the delusion that the Enlightenment project still has something to say to us. Indeed, all those doing work in Humean and Kantian moral theory would also be very pleased to hear an actual argument – not an unsubstantiated claim – that Macintyre had “demolished” their field.
2. Nietzsche is a critic of a certain kind of morality but not of morality as such. In fact, Nietzsche is attempting to promulgate (or re-promulgate) the noble morality he describes in GM:I. Certainly he argues that Christian morality is based on religious superstition, but this has less to do with any teleological notion of humanity than it does with the weakness inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition in the first place.
3. It seems quite a stretch to give a teleological interpretation of the Golden Rule: in fact, it seems most religious traditions argue against a teleological conception of morality insofar as they stress the difficulty of doing the right thing against our natural inclinations to selfishness. A stronger interpretation of the golden rule could easily be based on rational egoism. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” makes more sense when regarded as an expression of enlightened self-interest than it does as a teleological claim about human purpose.
4. “They are based on the paradoxical nature of human feelings, that can be allured to immorality and morality at the same time.” Wow, what an insightful comment! People can do good or bad? I had no idea! Keep it up sparky…
5. “This is a needed component in communal moral expressions, secular reason borrow from this religious framework, without ever realizing how incoherent their moral philosophies become without it.” Here you are buying into Fish (and Smith’s) question-begging: it is by no means clear that secular reason must be devoid of principles – it is only clear that secular reason must be devoid of supernatural principles. Kant formulates an a priori principle of secular reason – what he calls ‘public reason’ in ‘What is Enlightenment’? – based solely on his conception of the subject. Rawls and Habermas both in their own ways take up this principle and rework it into (for Rawls) the Original Position and (for Habermas) the theory of communicative action. We could also take a different route and deny that we have a choice in the matter – to be religious or secular – and argue that all moral expressions – whether religious or secular – are merely instantiations of what our evolutionary and early-cultural history naturally predispose us towards. In any case, it’s far from clear that what you claim – but do not argue – is obvious, even if it seems so to you.
6. “Humanism, Enlightenment values, borrow the moral conceptions of religious superstitions, and try and claim them to be founded on these amoral mediums, places where the shoe doesn’t fit.” Again, you make no argument about this besides name-dropping Macintyre and Nietzsche (who I doubt you have read very closely)
Now, in conclusion Sparky, let me give you some advice: 1) Finish up your undergraduate education, focusing on reading widely and attaining some level of argumentative rigor 2) Live in the real world a little longer, or at least long enough to gain a modicum of self-awareness, 3)Don’t tell people to “educate themselves” because that makes you sound like an uneducated and petulant child who is too pleased with their own learning to realize that they don’t know nearly as much as they think they do.
Got that Sparky?
Sorry, PZ; I’ll have to disagree slightly here.
The question is Hume’s is-ought problem. What you’re saying in part is essentially in agreement with Hume: there is no way to cross from statements of IS to statements of OUGHT. What Fish and Smith are saying is similar, but distinct from Hume: roughly that ONLY religion provides a way to cross from IS to OUGHT, and therefore any claim of what “ought” be done always relies on “smuggling” in “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design”.
Both, I think, are wrong.
What you would agree, and what Fish-n-Smith might reluctantly agree with, is that Science answers questions about how the universe IS, via competitive Testing of the hypotheses that result from Experience (of the universe), Inspiration (to conjectures of possible patterns), and Formulation (of hypotheses that describe the experienced universe via the conjectures). As a philosophical discipline, Science does not itself directly answer questions about what choices OUGHT to be made to deal with that IS is a good (or the best) way.
What you might not have noticed (despite my occasionally wandering through to harp on it) is that there is a sub-discipline which does address such choices. As philosophical discipline, Engineering relies on the former contexts, but adds the additional context of Design, which implicitly relies on a partial order of “good” versus “bad” — that is, sorting choices on the degree they OUGHT be preferred. (In anthropological practice, scientists routinely cross this line. The heart of modern science is experiment; experiments are designed, and considered “better” when they are well-designed.) With such a bridge, one can use IS statements to evaluate the probable consequences for enumerated choices, add the OUGHT desirability of those consequences, and evaluate that one IS the most OUGHT-desirable (“good”) choice.
In your particular case, “it makes me feel good” expresses an evolutionary approximation algorithm for “because it works, in the sense of producing a stable and productive line of human beings”… the latter being your current implicit bridge across the IS-OUGHT divide. This bridge, of course, may in fact not be a primary premise of “faith” but merely an inference that relies on more fundamental implicit bridge(s) as premise. This leaves the question of whether there is some ultimate bridge(s) underlying, that all other OUGHT-bridges reduce to approximations for.
Since Science can address IS questions, science can be used to study human claims of OUGHT, and try to identify what IS the set of underlying common properties when humans use OUGHT-based concepts. (EG: the five ethical flavors Haidt identifies). Based on a combination of a Cantor-style diagonalization argument and on enabling reduction of all Haidt’s flavors to instantiations of a common root, I posit that the ultimate such bridge is roughly “increases the chance of something like me being around in the future”. (Less roughly, “like me” gets defined via the information theoretic concept of Mutual Information.)
Which is still godless thinking, but godless thinking which still says there IS a bridge to the land of OUGHT.
I have to say, for me this is one of the most annoying aspects of the theism/atheism question. When theists ask to whom or what we should be accountable, I must demand of them an answer (and a logical one at that) to the question why humanity must be. I know that they’ll typically reply with the “absolute standards of morality” garbage, but they are begging the question ultimately. And for those that exclaim “I have to know!” I must demand that they also logically answer why they think the answer they’ve selected is the right one, or worth anything in a vacuum of evidence.
I just cannot understand these two positions. What tells us we are accountable to some “higher power”? Just because we can think of conceptual things greater than ourselves? The universe is greater than us. If a murderer kills someone, how does the universe demand the killer’s accountability? And why is it so unbelievably painful and life-shattering to be told we don’t know the answer to our supposed “greater meaning” for life? In an odd way, I *have* to know why they *have* to know these things, because it makes no sense to me at all. I’ve heard the answers they give, but the answers always fail because it’s, without fail, some subjective emotional BS they have no logical justification for accepting.
Anybody?
I want to see my views propagated into the next generation because they work well for me, and I have an emotional attachment to my children and other human beings, and want to see them given the same (and better!) opportunities that I’ve had.
Wonderfully said.
One minor quibble: where you say that “they work well for me” might be successfully amended to “they work well.” The behaviors and views you’re propagating stem from learned behaviors which allow you to observe and draw conclusions from physical reality, and to act on the data from such observation. That’s adaptive behavior.
People who respond to sunbeams and other natural phenomena with expressions of Ooo! The DIVINE miss what’s there because they’re interposing non-observational cognitive filters between themselves and what they’re looking at. What you’re doing is, as Wallace Steven wrote in The Blue Guitar is
“…A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
It’s a view which is clear-eyed but still sees the wonder and marvels in the world, without need for a Great Beyond or a numinous magical overlord.
Which is (IMHO) a good way to look at the world.
Among other things. Yes, emotion is an important part of the foundation of ethical standards, but our ethics are also derived from our own experience, the experience of our family, the experience of our community (or tribe), the experience of our nation, and the experience of our world. As we expand our views from ourselves and family to the entire world, some of our ethical views that relate to protecting ourselves from ‘other’ are changed as we realize that otherness is not as simple or easily identified as we might imagine and that people from different cultures are not inherently threats who must be exterminated.
We can see the evolution of ethical conceptions from the tribe in the early Old Testament to a quasi-universalism by the last of the New. This evolution which is totally ignored by the conservatives and fundamentalists is a profound example of the problems that they have in defending their morality and their claims about its source.
How about a third alternative? The positions of both Fish and Myers are laughable. Fish’s argument was long ago refuted by Socrates in the Euthyphro. Myers’ “I do it because it feels good” would be laughed out the room in any introductory ethics course. Both Fish and Myers should stick to their own professions, and leave the ethics to the big kids!
PZ says in his original post:
“It’s not that secular reason doesn’t work, it’s that it fails to provide a framework for making decisions, which rely on a moral or religious disposition.”
This is very confusing, as the way this is written, he is agreeing that decision making must rely on moral or religious disposition.
I believe what he meant to say is the following:
“It’s not that secular reason doesn’t work, it’s that it fails to provide a framework for making decisions THAT rely on a moral or religious disposition.”
Unless I’m really missing something here, that is…
Fish is making a tired argument. “If we don’t posit a god to give us meaning and direction, then we are responsible for determining our own meaning and direction. Since there are many individuals with their own ideas on these subjects, consensus is impossible. That makes me uncomfortable, therefore god.”
Fish seems to think if a state of affairs is unpleasant or “problematic” for him, then it is false. That is simply is not the case. He writes:
Nonsense. Religion is neither a synonym of meaning nor morality. It has to impose these things as well. What is the wellspring of morality and meaning for secularists? Themselves, as they freely admit. What is the wellspring of morality and meaning for religionists? Why, also themselves, of course. Except they maintain the delusion that meaning and morality has an external source. Sure, it makes them feel more confident in their personal values, but it is an empty confidence if it isn’t true. And something doesn’t become true just because it it would make you feel better if it were. Fish is basically saying that a moral value system which hinges upon the whims of an invisible man in the sky is on firmer ground than one which makes no such pretensions. You’d have to be completely deluded or insane to accept such ridiculous premise.
Thank you, eatmykant and abb3w. I love it when philosophers are able to argue points by, well, arguing points.
But it’s true. You can admit it. :-)
See comment 76.
Central to this whole dialogue is the understanding that moral/ethical issues exist only among numbers of individuals (i.e. society). Someone who is destined to live in isolation from any other human beings has no ethical decisions to make, ever. Since all moral/ethical questions ultimately relate to interactions between individuals, where is the place for or “need” for “a purpose” or for a cosmic dictator, for that matter. The “right” decision (where one is possible) will always be dictated by what seems to the decider most likely to yield a “good” result (for him/her or for some larger group of people the decider cares about) or avoid the most “bad” outcomes. The “good vs bad” issue is actually resolved based upon instinct, upbringing and/or previous experience. None of this either requires or presupposes any greater “purpose” than to survive long enough to procreate and to nurture any offspring until they can procreate in turn. in other words, not WWJD, but what do I think will “work” to achieve the outcomes my survival requires?
“Posted by: Free Lunch | March 1, 2010 1:51 PM
ivankaramazov,
Fish claims we ought to accept human claims about what some god wants, even though there isn’t any evidence that any gods ever wanted anything.”
This is ridiculous. Fish makes no such claim. Fish, in his article, makes no claims as to what people “should do”, he doesn’t propose a solution, but just paints a problem.
Secondly our dimwitted atheist believes a fiction, that all views of morality break down to consequintianllist views and deontological views (If you don’t understand what these terms mean you can look them up). You’d be hard pressed to find any religious individuals beyond some crude fundies, that claims that their view on morality is to subscribe to a list of proposition in their religious books. Even crude apologist like William L. Craig can point this out. Even Paul notes the gentiles following the moral law, even though they never had a book.
What the religious view here is that human beings possess an inherent value. That morality stems from a recognition of our true purpose, that we are to recognize the dignity of others. And it proclaims that those that don’t are living in ignorance of this truth, are living in error, living wrongly, missing the mark. They have a view of man like a view of created objects like watches, that are designed for a purpose to fulfill, to do good, rather than evil. An immoral man is a faulty creature, in need of a fix to realize the moral life he is to pursue. They perceive those who are indifferent to the suffering of others as having something wrong with them, we wouldn’t say this to someone who is indifferent about country music.
Morality here is always about revelation, a revealing of our true nature.
Humanism adopt this sort of view as a given, believing that reason, education, and science lead us to recognize our true nature.
What they don’t realize is that claiming that human nature is like this is just closeted argument for intelligent design proposed by clueless atheist.
Uh, sure. Whatever. I guess you don’t understand nuance and implication in writing.
And then, without any valid reason, he asserted that God wrote morality into the hearts of all. You also follow up with a claim that you neither support with evidence or meaningful argument. You have said whatever you want for no particular or defensible reason.
That’s a lie. I take it lying is not immoral in your worldview.
@ivankaramazov:
“consequintianllist”?
It’s hard to look up terms when you don’t even come close to spelling them right.
The danger of calling everyone else a moron is that it holds you to a higher intellectual standard.
A standard you are laughably far from meeting.
That would be most religious individuals, I suspect. I’d wager the “crude fundies” outnumber the enlightened theologians (such as Rev. Spong) by quite a bit.
And you call the atheist “dimwitted?”
Wow. Your inability to grasp concepts slightly alien to your own subjective fantasies is breathtaking.
I think you need to do some remedial reading on the subject of humanism, for a start. Humanism, as I understand it*, does not–or at least, need not–involve any such concept as “our true nature”, for a start.
* My status as a dimwitted/clueless atheist notwithstanding.
Engineering as the source of morality????
Er,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_hypothesis
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/12/28/political-correctness-gone-mad/
Of course, using those to castigate engineering is unfair. But it’s no worse an argument than claiming that engineering is the source of morality.
Well. If the trade-off is that I have to give up my computer, mobile phone, car, insulated and waterproof apartment, medicine, comfortable furniture, a 10 hour flight between London and L.A., an abundance of clean drinking water, big screen TV and cameras, then I really couldn’t care less.
I don’t really need an answer for “what am I supposed to do”, because even if I did know the answer, and it was the universal truth, between work, hobbies, friends family and enjoying art, where would I get the time? I don’t have enough time as it is!
“Thou shalt enjoy the fuck out of life. Oh, and, be excellent to each other.”
I think that it’s an important insight that our values are molded in part by our evolution and by our emotions, and PZ is right to think that we need to keep this in mind. But our values have also been molded though by centuries of argument and debate, and though PZ is right, I think, in objecting to Fish, the position PZ then outlines not only has no room for religion, but has no room for secular reason either.
PZ is stuck in a somewhat circular “I do decent things because that’s what decent people have evolved to do” morass. He’s free to choose his values (no Stalin in the sky!) but his values are a product of evolution, somehow, at the same time.
Just chalking our values up to random (cultural?) evolution is dull, and not even wrong. What useful moral consequence follows from PZ’s view? It’s like being able to prove anything from a contradiction, in mathematics; sure, you get the Riemann hypothesis (as well as its denial) for free. But who would take such math seriously?
On a tangent, the Shakers might have been unsuccessful in the DNA department, but their artifacts seem to be replicating reasonably well, or at least as well as Mission furniture.
ivankaramazov #91 wrote:
But you still can’t get from “is,” to “ought,” without an agent who makes a choice. This is the same whether the supernatural is added, or not.
If human beings were made for the purpose of doing X, then why do x? is still a legitimate question. The response “because X is what you were made to do” is not a slam-dunk response unless the other person has made prior commitment to want to do what they were made to do — and no such commitment just follows. You might have some very good reasons for not doing the thing, which someone else created you, to do.
The underlying assumption is that, in fulfilling your purpose, you, yourself, will be fulfilled. You want to do right. You want to do good. It will make you happier, and more satisfied, than not doing so.
And this is a secular motivation. It works the same in and out of religion. There’s nothing inherently “spiritual” about it.
Teleological justifications for morality suffer from the Achilles’ heel of having to make sense in order to be accepted. But, if they make sense, then we don’t need the overarching cosmic narrative. They make sense, on the small scale of human lives.
Try something interesting: go back to the quote above, and, instead of “recognize the dignity of others,” substitute the phrase “recognize that some people have no inherent dignity or worth.” A reality-based humanist ethics would not be able to make this statement. But a theist-based ethics could. And how, now, do you argue against God?
Shorter ivankaramazov : Livonia! Pick up your trash!! In name God Jesus Christ.
consequintianllist? wtf? Just so’s you know, ivankaramazov, I’m neither dimwitted nor an atheist. I am a human being first, and a secular humanist. That means I do not grant the validity, in any factual sense beyond wordplay, of the argument about the existence of the higher power that creates and controls everything. I will not discuss seriously the existence of something for which there is ZERO evidence.
Since we are name-dropping, I point out that we can thank Aristotle and Aquinas for clarifying and isolating the teleological argument so effectively — it allows us at this late date to examine it for what it is. Aquinas, especially (though unwittingly), made it evident to anyone who thinks that arguing from linear logical causality, starting from either the beginning or the end, and arguing by definition, are nothing but god-mongering. If Aristotle lived in Kant’s time, I think he’d be right in there with the rest of them; Aquinas, not so much.
Why don’t you just say, “I want to have faith! So there!!!!!” Why are you so angry? Should I provide some links to support groups? I guess you haven’t been shown intellectual civility in your ethics courses yet, although I know with certainty that most of us did not learn civility in college. It’s one of those upbringing deals, you know.
Bullshit. Show me the data, silly person.
Ya know, I wonder what deity honey bees, ants and termites worship. They seem to have a very well defined “morality”.
Humanism is just the idea that “humans are worth your time.” It is a reflection of the non-religious fact, possibly with evolutionary roots. Religions are based upon THAT, if anything.
@97:
Being an engineer, I do think that engineering is the source of morality. So, next time you have a computer problem, BOW DOWN AND GROVEL BEFORE ME!
(Did it work?)
The answer is not that humanist ethics has illegitimately smuggled revealed morality in, it is that the old, “sacred” systems of supposedly universal morality always had unacknowledged humanist ethical premises.
A great deal of the earliest Christian literature, as well as much of the the codified “oral Torah,” represented in the Talmuds, that was the contemporaneous foundation of Rabbinical Judaism, is humanist in orientation. Throw in Buddhism and whatever other system you like that found expression in the “Axial Age.” In the ancient world, however, no such distinction could meaningfully be drawn. To speak of values and ethics was ineluctably to orient oneself to the “sacred.” The Enlightenment understanding of humanist ethics simply peeks behind the veil. Fish, and, apparently, our resident Karamozov, insist that the fuzzy, indistinct view through the veil is the clearer one.
“I think you need to do some remedial reading on the subject of humanism, for a start. Humanism, as I understand it*, does not–or at least, need not–involve any such concept as “our true nature”, for a start.”
I’ll tell you what. Let’s find one person in here who considers himself a humanist, and is familiar with secular humanistic thought. And I’d wager I dissolve his entire humanistic worldview into mush. I’ll reveal their humanism to be as stupidly composed as creationism.
All I need is one brave humanist. There has to be one person in here with such courage? Please, grant my desire for some fun.
Buddha and the other Axial age thinkers propose the Golden Rule, to a society allured to greed, they are claiming that you’re failing to live in the light of the purpose we are all here to live for.
You clearly don’t know Buddhism at all.
In Buddhist philosophy, the Golden Rule isn’t a directive handed down by an imaginary being.
According to the legend, the concept came to the Buddha after he, a human like any other, carefully meditated upon the question of suffering. It didn’t take long for him to grok that “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful” might be a good way to reduce suffering in the world.
No gods or priests whispered the answer in his ear to realize it. He merely used his very human brain to sort through the issue and reach a conclusion.
It is because he reached the idea on his own that he wasn’t known as a prophet of a god, or as a god himself (other in some later, crazier strains of Buddhism)), but as Bodhisattva, which literally means “enlightenment being.”
No gods or religion involved.
“…Why would people want to let some guys (who are actually our peers and equals) with strange, nonsensical, ritual speech lord it over us because some guys made up a hierarchy and put themselves just below their sky thingy…”
They may be my legal equals…..
rudy,
I’m not persuaded. You aren’t quite karamozovian, but your criticisms seem unfounded.
Simonator, #57:
Yep, the magic guy in the sky is a perfect moral sledgehammer. But even secular societies–even anarchic ones!–have a need for prohibitions and prescriptions. So the question becomes, “On what grounds can I tell someone else not to do something?” Or _to_ do something, for that matter, though that question’s tougher.
I’m also skeptical, incidentally, that we’re _really_ using secular reasoning in order to justify our moral stances. It’s at least possible that we _are_ smuggling… that even though we think we’re reasoning from a rational assessment of self-interest, it somehow lines up very well with some of the basic value structures around us. This would tie in better with Smith’s article–that there is an implicit borrowing of moral values from structure, which then get justified in a rational matrix.
ivankaramazov #107 wrote:
Secular humanist morality is not necessarily one easy, simple line of argument. There are different ethical princepts, different variations — though of course the basic themes are the same.
Ok, I’m curious. I’ll bite.
Several of us have already identified ourselves as humanists ivankaramazov. I have a policy of not debating anyone who can’t use proper spelling and grammar. I figure if they can’t get grade school concepts, they’re unlikely to get anything more advanced either.
First, a question: from which god do you derive this narcissistic need for attention?
Counts me out.
There can’t be a presiding meaning. The idea is incoherent. See here:
Ok, I read Fish’s commentary on Smith. The thought that kept coming to mind was that every religious moral tenet was coopted from a secular one. It may have been thousands of years ago, even tens of thousands, but it all originated in the human mind. Tribal taboos codified in religion. Smith & Fish apparently think there is some segment of the brain that gets imbued with morals by the magic touch of the finger of God. I wonder at what stage of neural development this imbuement takes place. Maybe it’s in the pharyngular stage. ;)
I was impressed with the first 4 paragraphs of Fish’s article. It described the secular approach and, to me, sounded like a nearly perfect way to run things. He should have just stopped there.
This would tie in better with Smith’s article–that there is an implicit borrowing of moral values from structure, which then get justified in a rational matrix.
It seems to me that precisely the reverse is occuring. Religion co-opts sensible rational universal rules of behaviour like “do unto others” and contaminates them with a mixture of local norms and downright nonsense. Religion is a bug, not a feature.
Eatmykant, your kung fu is strong.
AJKamper –
Is there any evidence that religious morality is somehow special, that it didn’t come from the same experiences that helped people develop secular ethics? I may agree that those who imposed their religious morality don’t admit that they were influenced by experience in the same way, but there certainly is no evidence that they were influenced by God.
Ivankaramzov: Heidegger points it out here:
“Western philosophy has neglected “being” because it was considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question.”
See, as soon as you pull out Heidegger, you lose. Heidegger was a bullshit artistes extraordinaire. He was the death-knell of “philosophy” as a meaningful pursuit. Once you’ve started invoking “the beingness in itself” as a compound, you’ve outed yourself as a con artist.
There is no problem of being. That problem is a fiction of philosophical mumbo-jumbo, as pointed out by Wittgenstein to Ecco. It’s a problem of assumption, of grammatical construction, without any inherent meaning.
In other words, a pile of gibberish from the Iron Age that caused 2000 years of religious suffering. All predicated on the structure of the cognate in Indo-European languages. No such issue in Chinese philosophy — because they don’t have the problem of the “is” of description vs. the “is” of essence, vs. the “is” of state….
Glad to see my suspicion that Sastra would step up is verified.
I’m getting the popcorn. Anyone want some?
It is sadly revealing that some people think the Golden Rule could only be developed by a divine being. Decency and logic are so alien to them, so far above their own understanding, that they cannot imagine a simple human developing such a concept as the Golden Rule. Indeed, developing anything, instead of being told what to think, is as a god to them.
Kindergarten boys, on the other hand, work out the Golden Rule on their own. They say, “he hit me, so I hit him back”, and hear another kid say that about them, and naturally progress to the understanding that if they do not want to be hit, they probably should not hit. Which is the playground version of the Golden Rule–do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.
So yeah, you cheap philosopher-oids: Are you smarter than a kindergartener?
Love the phrase;
“stable replicators with greater representation in future generations”
As a father of seven I think I have “greater representation in future generations”, but I don’t think any of my wives, past or present would call me a “stable replicator”
rudy @100
Sure it does. What it has no room for is an authoritative, ex post facto, objective justification mechanism.
As HH and others have hinted at above, the real elephant in the room is that Fish ‘n Smith et al just can’t seem to be able to abide the possibility that no one, and no thing, holds the office of Cosmic Moral Arbiter. On this view, what humans actually do, how we actually behave, and the decisions that we make for whatever reason whatsoever, are somehow fundamentally debased unless there exists a single, final, and definitive method or means of considering them in some sort of transcendent moral sense, or adjudicating those that are Right from those that are Wrong, or even the Good from the Better.
Even if they can muster the humility to admit that unambiguous knowledge of the actual details of this metaphysical judicial system might lie forever beyond our mere mortal grasp and understanding, the possibility that such a system might not exist at all is simply dismissed out of hand as a notion that is, I guess, too horrific to even contemplate.
I’m so excited right now I can hardly stand it… ;^)
Mine is against debating with someone who spews all over someone else’s world-view, but is much too cowardly to describe their own. If I want to assist someone in masturbating, I’ll go to that dodgy park two blocks away.
Anyways, Sastra has kindly volunteered.
Shall the rest of us sit back and count the jargon the Bonehead Karamazov uses in lieu of arguments?
This should be entertaining
Fish ====>there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”
PZ==>Exactly right!
Yes, it is exactly right. But in another sense it is exactly wrong.
Of course, we can look and find answers to such questions within the framework of a secular world. They simply won’t be absolute and authoritive. Ask me, or your neighbor, or PZ, or anyone, what you are supposed to due in view of the secular world and we’ll all give legitimate and valid answers (Me: “Live an examined life”, my neighbor: “Keep your yard clean and don’t park across my driveway”, PZ: “You aren’t supposed to do anything”, etc.)
(I have to admit, the question of “at the behest of who” [sic??? shouldn’t it be whom?] absolutely never occurred to me. I always figured “on the behalf of whom” was the real question.) (Well, as a kid the answer to “at the behest of who” was easy; my mom! And I guess as an adult it’s equally easy; my boss… *sigh*…) (Well, actually…. at the behest of myself. But I want to use “at the behest of my boss” as a segue to my final point.)
The things that seem to bug them are:
1) if the answers don’t come from some mystical unworldly source they don’t seem to think they are really answers. If someone were to answer “What are we supposed to do? Well, I suppose we should try to make the world a better place ’cause that’ll make things better for people” or “I dunno, I’m hungry. Let’s get some burgers” or “What are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to be processing these accounts recievable forms, ya yutz” these are somehow not real answers.
2) If the answer isn’t absolute and doesn’t allow them to tell everyone else what to do, they aren’t interested.
… oh, by the way, give living an examined life a try. I really think you should. I have faith in it. (*chuckle*)
#120:
I don’t know, but I can’t imagine so–that is, if I’m following you correctly. I think that how people understand their religion is amusingly based on their current culture–that is, people never seem to change their minds about what is moral based on their religion, they just assume the religion means whatever they personally believe, and if they can’t handle the cognitive dissonance from some of the more obvious statements, then they switch to a religion that doesn’t have quite so much.
So I don’t mean to claim that religious morality is any better than secular morality… FAAAAR from it. It’s just that all morality may well come, in the end, from culture; Dr. Myers actually seems to get this pretty well in his post.
As a more suspicious sort, me, I always sorta figure it’s not that it’s so much ‘too horrific to contemplate’ as ‘too self-evident and utterly destructive to our stale little shell game to venture anywhere near’.
ivankaramazov: Secondly our dimwitted atheist believes a fiction, that all views of morality break down to consequintianllist views and deontological views
Well, that shows how dimwitted you are. Your choices aren’t C, D or R(evelation), except in your theology/philosophy classes. There are real histories, real constraints and real consensus in the world.
I don’t need your damn abstractions. I know how to play The Game, and this ain’t no simple-minded game with explicit rules.
They really need to stop teaching freshman philosophy — actually most philosophy needs to be dumped as historical curiosities, the thoughts of flea-ridden barbarians. Empty-headed muddles, as dangerous as the revelatory paradigms of their self-anesthetizing religious brothers (and there is very little difference, since the Socratics had the tradition of the Genius revealing knowledge).
There are no philosophical problems — just problematic philosophers. The Greeks still knew the answer to that one.
*grabs tankards of grog for everyone not at work1*
1Presumes you aren’t working at home…
So when’s the game starting?
Soon, I hope. All this talk about popcorn, I actually made some.
Great, now there are commenters on this blog, like 132, making veiled death threats against philosophers?
woozy – you are correct, it should be “at the behest of whom“.
This is intense. Is this how normal people feel when there’s a boxing match?
Sastra v. some douchebag: THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY
[cue explosion]
I dunno. Frankly, I’d be happier if Mr. Second-Year-Phil-Major would respond to eatmykant’s points in comment #80, or to Sastra’s excercise in #101, but reading doesn’t seem to be his strong suit, so let’s not expect too much.
Where is he, anyway? My guess is he had to hit an instructor’s office hours to complain about a bad mid-term mark.
@Joe Bleau,
As I said, I understand PZ’s complaint about Fish. It is perfectly coherent to argue that there is no cosmic Moral Arbiter (though that isn’t my view). What I was objecting to was the crudity of the ethical view that PZ then outlines, where ethical values are just a (random) product of our evolution, like having five fingers instead of six. Whatever makes PZ feel good, and perhaps feel good about himself, is the good. Socrates would have had a lot of fun attacking that idea.
It’s a lot like saying our values are just a product of physics, since we are all just atoms bouncing around in the void (maybe swerving a bit now and then, on a good day).
AJKamper: And the stance of truly secular reasoning, without an external referent, boils down to “Because it would make me happy.”
Actually, no; that’s just an intermediate stage in the evaporation process. Since “producing a stable and productive line of human beings” underlies the evolution that gives rise to the nature of “makes me happy”, the former is more fundamental… and (although also not an ultimate bridge) is a somewhat easier sell.
Mike Wagner: What you call morality others call a “cost-benefit analysis”. No religion required.
However, “benefit” is from the Latin “bene” meaning “good”. So, even though the bridge need not be from religion, it still requires a bridge from the land of IS to where good/OUGHT is divided from bad/OUGHTN’T.
ivankaramazov: Anyone who believes an immoral person is one who operates on a faulty understanding of the cost and benefits of his act is vulgarly stupid
Anyone who believes ANY person can have a perfect understanding of the OUGHT neglects
1) how IS problems underlie OUGHT problems (whether you OUGHT to push the shiny red button is rather dependent on whether the button IS wired to electrocute a baby, or instead the button IS wired to prevent that impending electrocution once pressed)
2) the limits of resolving the nature of IS that result from Hume’s problem of induction.
3) the consequent limits on our ability to fully grasp the consequences of choices
So when’s the game starting?
Dearest Vanya Fyodorovich seems to have gone walkabout.
To be fair, PZ does then go on to explain that the evolved system of ethics is based on the simple expedience of “getting along in groups.” (My phrase, not his — I will not pretend to have his eloquence.)
This isn’t as random as having 5 fingers instead of 6. There are definite evolutionary advantages to a decent ethical system. Anything that is advantageous to group survival will increase the likelihood of propagation for the genes within the group.
I think our pseudophilosopher has buggered off.
Maybe those two sentences should not have been right next to each other.
I think it’s pretty basic to say that meaning systems all borrow in some way from religion. People are transcendent-needy, and express that through supernatural deities (religion), or the “mystery of the universe” (dawkins), or any number of things amenable to worship. It’s just what we do. Some acknowledge this to be an evolutionary thing. As you posted before, PZ, wondering if this impulse is and advantange or a by-product. But obviously while we search for naturalistic grounds, the atomization of meaning is something humans will never accept. In the conventional high schoolish way, allow me to remind you that to say “no rules, no purpose” is itself “a rule, a purpose.”
And by the way, for a person who knows that they owe no justification to the cosmos, you sure do a lot of it. Atheism is, of course, a cosmic claim – agnosticism that hates uncertainty. But notice the argument they put forth is not the soundness of secular reasoning, but it’s instability. And it secures stability only by colonizing the grounds established by our transcendent needy past.
I notice you use the word “fulfilled.” Just what exactly do you think this word expresses? Filled with what? Their argument is that atomistic science and logic are incapable of producing a livable language that confronts the nature of humanity. by saying things like “fulfilled” you aren’t really refuting this. Science isn’t enough.
You may say “well I really meant fulfilled to be shorthand for blahblahblah but I didn’t because that would be socially awkward”. exactly.
Much of this is rehashed wittgenstein anyway. So why not take up the argument by the roots rather than the leaves?
He’s probably just reading my posts, and figuring out a line of attack. Or, waiting for a more tempting target to step up.
Or, of course, something came up. It does happen.
@146: (a) not everybody is transcendence-needy, (b) religion hijacks the desire for meaning, not vice versa, (c) fulfillment is an emotion and I’m sorry you’ve never had good enough sex to experience it.
The reverse is probably true. Moral systems that evolved within the tribe developed long before any of today’s religions. So religious morals started by codifying the tribal morals.
Bored now.
Where is our wily word slinger?
Aquaria: “You clearly don’t know Buddhism at all. ……No gods or priests whispered the answer in his ear to realize it.”
No, you clearly don’t know what teleological views of the world looks like, particularly in regards to human nature. If human being posses an inherent purpose, no external voice or priest needs to whisper into his ear. It means that he would only have to come into a recognition of himself, be able truly contemplate the sort of person he is, in order to realize the sort of person he should be. Our telos is realized by inward reflection.
In this view those that don’t come into this realization are just living in willful ignorance.
This is the foundational beliefs where notions like the Golden rule in these religious tradition are arise from. If you’re trying to reformulate it differently, than it loses the meaning it originally posses, and becomes nothing more than a rule of commerce.
If human nature is as it is thought of to be in this religions picture, than we are arguing for a teleological worldview. We’re adding foresight into our creation.
This Buddhist view is outline here by the scholar and monk, Bhikkhu Bodhi:
“By assigning value and spiritual ideals to private subjectivity, the materialistic world view, threatens to undermine any secure objective foundation for morality. The result is the widespread moral degeneration that we witness today. To counter this tendency, mere moral exhortation is insufficient. If morality is to function as an efficient guide to conduct, it cannot be propounded as a self-justifying scheme but must be embedded in a more comprehensive spiritual system which grounds morality in a transpersonal order. Religion must affirm, in the clearest terms, that morality and ethical values are not mere decorative frills of personal opinion, not subjective superstructure, but intrinsic laws of the cosmos built into the heart of reality.”
If you’re a person who believes that morality and ethical values are intrinsic laws built into the heart of reality, you’re not an atheist, at best you’re a closeted believer, arguing for a world the Discovery Institute would love.
@frankosaurus:
You’re question-begging: “People are transcendent-needy, and express that through supernatural deities (religion), or the “mystery of the universe” (dawkins), or any number of things amenable to worship. It’s just what we do.”
This is a claim that is far from intuitively obvious. I for one do not think that the religious impulse comes out of a feeling of weakness, neediness or ignorance*, I think the religious impulse expresses a feeling of strength, self-fulfillment and control over the forces of nature. Scared, weak, and ignorant people do not make up religions, they cower in fear.
“The atomization of meaning” is an unclear concept – can you elaborate on this?
When PZ says “no rules, no purpose” I think he means that the universe designates no rules and no purpose, not that we cannot give ourselves rules and purpose.
Atheism need not be a cosmic claim, or a claim at all,it is merely a state of negative belief. We are all agnostics – no one knows with certainty – but some of us take that uncertainty and chose to believe and some of us do not. Atheism need make no claim whatsoever.
So, given that your initial premise is at the very least questionable, I find your conclusion – “I think it’s pretty basic to say that meaning systems all borrow in some way from religion” – is also, at the very least, questionable.
* Caveat lector: I do not think the religious impulse comes out of a *feeling* of ignorance – this is in no way to say that those who promulgate religions are not, in fact, ignorant, only that they do not feel that way.
p.s. I’m off to run errands and hit the gym – so please, Frank, do respond, but don’t despair if it takes me a few hours to get back to you.
Bhikkhu Bodhi does not speak for all of Buddhism.
Religion as based on the worship of a supernatural being, or religion as in worldview? Because a meaning system sounds pretty much equal to a worldview, except that a meaning system sorta assumes a meaning to life, which is a general trait of supernatural/worship.
(Hey! I copied Nerd’s blockquote and HTML quite easily by highlighting it and picking View Selection Source in Firefox. Thanks, Nerd.)
“If you’re a person who believes that morality and ethical values are intrinsic laws built into the heart of reality, you’re not an atheist, at best you’re a closeted believer, arguing for a world the Discovery Institute would love.”
Oh, so basically these douchebags should stop being a bunch of pussies and acknowledge the metaphysical implications of their worldview? I agree.
There. Fixed so you sound like someone whose education vaguely approximates well-rounded.
Anyway, you challenged and Sastra answered. Back to the job at hand, dilettante.
Didn’t we already go by that?
I think the last two couple of comments are misunderstanind ivankaramazov. He wasn’t saying humanists believe that morality and ethical values are intrinsic laws built into the heart of reality, he’s claiming that Buddhists do, based on the one paragraph written by one Buddhist.
@nigel the Bold,
I read over PZ’s post, and don’t really see the group selection argument there, but I guess you mean his next to last paragraph about the survival of different cultures. His last paragraph is what I was mainly addressing.
Deriving ethics from what helps a group survive might give us a first take on where ethics comes from historically, but doesn’t really address where to take ethics *next*. No doubt enslaving the next tribe over contributes to the future prospects of your own tribe, but at some point (very late in history, alas) we started worrying about whether slavery was right or wrong.
Maybe I could make an analogy with language. We can make guesses as to the evolutionary origin of language, using gestures perhaps (mirror neurons can get worked into the story, and social cohesion of groups for the hunt, etc.) but at some point we actually started using language for other things (like writing poems and reasoning about ethics, and reading the Onion).
^misunderstanding
The second you start thinking about policy in terms of “It would work best for X if Y”, rather than “We are commanded by God to Y”, progress starts being made. Specifically, knowing what “X” is informs what “Y” must be.
The second you realize there is no God, you start wondering for what people who state policy in the latter form are substituting God; that is: “What is the real ‘X’?”
The answer is always interesting – and occasionally more than a little disturbing.
Yes I admit it: “ivankaramazov” is a bot I wrote a few days ago. For those interested, here is the source code:
/* ivankaramazov.cpp */
# include “readers_digest/guide_to_philosophy.h”
# include “arrogance.h”
# include “dunning_kruger.h”
using namespace pretentious;
int main() {
do {
vapid_waffle();
namedrop_philosopher();
/* explain_how_philosopher_supports_case(); */
  insult();
} while (rage_persists);
return 0;
}
AJKamper #111
I suspect you are on to something… except I believe that both religion and rational assessment of self interest are ways in which societies/clans/troops etc try to impose a structure (or a narrative shape) on the basic unconscious instincts and motives we individually inherit from our ancestors. Our ancestors managed to mate, raise children, find food and shelter long before we would judge them to be capable of rational thought. But they needed to do those things in competition and cooperation with others in the same group. Individuals who unconsciously followed more effective competitive and cooperative behaviours within the group left more descendants, so these behaviours became more established. Becoming more conscious and rational about appropriate behaviours gave our ancestors the capability for greater flexibility to behave more appropriately (leaving more descendants) in differing circumstances.
Arguing that humanism imports structure from religion, or that religion is based on rational self interest, misses the point. Animal instinct came first, then came the icing of rational thought, then came the cherries on top (religion and/or enlightened self interest).
That religion or rational self interest add their own cultural gloss to our instincts and motives is just part of life’s rich tapestry…
ivanka sez:
Well, duh! Nobody here claims to believe that. Such a lack of comprehension from this troll.
The general understanding seems to be that morals emerge from the prevailing conditions, but are still subjectively defined.
Put it this way: I should be out canoeing, not hanging out here wasting time on a troll, but the weather is too cold. I do not believe that there is anything going on out there but physics, but I just used the term “weather” to describe a concept, and expressed my own opinion that I would be cold if I went outside, and made it sound a bit like the weather is at fault.
Similarly, if I do go canoeing, I know that there is nothing happening but water molecules banging against each other, but I will talk of waves, riffles, eddy fences and holes. All those things emerge from water molecules banging together, and us humans have words we use to label them, but only us English-speaking river-runners will understand what is meant by “hole” in this context, and know what a hole does.
Watch your words, Ivanka, and stop trolling.
I think SparrowFalls is right. Reasoning is something we usually do after the fact to try to justify what we were already thinking or doing.
@162: Don’t tempt me to write Perl poetry…
ivankaramazov: That morality stems from a recognition of our true purpose, that we are to recognize the dignity of others.
What premises and chain of inferences therefrom, praytell, did you use to conclude that IS what we OUGHT?
(The hazard of Hume’s Guillotine is cuts all necks without fear or favor.)
[@#97]: Engineering as the source of morality????
Engineering is not the philosophical source, it’s the philosophical discipline that applies it; any evaluation of choices for morality (OUGHT) is a form of engineering.
I’m well aware of the Salem Hypothesis and “The Engineers of Jihad”. I conjecture the Salem Hypothesis results in part from too much emphasis on the OUGHT end of the process, and insufficient emphasis on understanding and accepting the IS part of the process. (Some engineers accept some of the results of science, but not the process of science that obtained those results.) The “Engineers of Jihad”, similarly, with additional effects from their mistaken premise of Inerrancy in their religion’s description of the IS, combined with a cognitive cusp catastrophe interaction (involving reflective cognition and the cognitive dissonance of contrasting worldviews).
In short, it’s because you can get to be a useful engineer only working in OUGHT and without yourself being able to handle question of IS; and when someone hands such an Engineer a bogus description of IS to start from, the OUGHT decisions that result aren’t so “good”.
Free Lunch: Is there any evidence that religious morality is somehow special, that it didn’t come from the same experiences that helped people develop secular ethics?
Yes; “the Bible says so”. However, this is much the same way that Twilight is evidence for the existence of vampires. =)
The existence of “any” evidence does not change that the overall body of evidence is better described by common origin than distinct origin.
woozy: Of course, we can look and find answers to such questions within the framework of a secular world. They simply won’t be absolute and authoritive.
And, of course, the dominant framework of the secular world — science — does not give absolutely authoritative answers, even to the question of “does your skull have a brain inside, or a piece of cauliflower”. What science gives are probabilistic answers, authoritative provided you rely on assumptions that reduce to cases of those minimally necessary to construct science (predicate logic, set theory or other consistent language capable of self-description, and reality producing evidence with pattern).
AJKamper: people never seem to change their minds about what is moral based on their religion, they just assume the religion means whatever they personally believe, and if they can’t handle the cognitive dissonance from some of the more obvious statements, then they switch to a religion that doesn’t have quite so much
People do sometimes change their beliefs; however, for many it’s easier to change Churches.
rudy: What I was objecting to was the crudity of the ethical view that PZ then outlines, where ethical values are just a (random) product of our evolution, like having five fingers instead of six.
Except that evolutionary selection is not so much “random” as stochasistic.
rudy @140, a couple points (I hope I’m not nitpicking)
1) The argument here is not really that there is no Moral Arbiter (that’s asserted, but not argued) – it’s rather that, contra the Fish ‘n Smith crowd, and maybe you, the evidence for such a being or object really ought to be more substantive then “the alternative is just too awful to contemplate”. The fact that teleological arguments for morality require a teleology is neither profound (despite what our nice insane friend ivanawakkov seems to think), nor does it speak whatsoever to the actual truth of the matter.
Nor, for that matter, is the alternative really all that awful when you think about it. Speaking for myself, anyway, I’d much rather see myself as part of a community of like-minded people working together towards a reasonably optimal way of getting along peacefully, than as a rat in a maze trying to desperately figure out the path to The Cheese before the evil bastard scientist pulls the plug on the experiment and tosses me into a Lake of Fire for the sin of being a nothing but a lowly rat in a maze. YMMV, of course.
2) I think that you might be making the same sort of mistake that ID-iots make when they complain that all of this glorious pattern-rich complexity couldn’t possibly come from something as random as evolution. The answer, of course, is this – natural selection is hardly random. Likewise, as several have pointed out in this thread, normative force can come from other sources then an inscrutable metaphysical and purely objective agent.
#46 frog, inc.
Wrong answer — or at least incomplete….We are supposed to be decent human beings, caring for each other. Not because of a Cosmic Dictator, but because we are decent human beings.
Minor (or maybe not) quibble: I think P.Z. point (and I believe it is absolutely correct) is that when folks like Fish and Smith ask what “should” we do and look into the “secular world” (i.e. the mechanics that unfolded and led to this particular existance) for some spelling out of it, that … well, we aren’t “supposed” to do anything. That is to say, the laws of evolution (and at a more basic level physics) do not dictate anything about what our conscious actions “should” be. (They do dictate that I shouldn’t melt into a pool of silicone or I shouldn’t give birth to a rabbit; but now I’m just being silly.) For Fish to claim that the “secular world” cannot answer “these questions”, P.Z. claims (or so I interpret his post), is a misleading tactic.
Actually, I think this is where the “at the behest of who or what” comes in. Fish is assuming that secularists, not being beholdent to God, will have to answer “at the of the laws of random and arbitrary science”. For there, Fish would conclude (correctly, I might add) that there is no answer to what we should do or why we are here or any meaning to the world.
But it is a trap and a wrong assumption. (This is me talking now; not me interpreting PZ.) Your answer to “at the behest of who or what” is “at the behest of human decency” and that leads to a *completely* different “should” answer.
#41 Ivanawhosit:
Humanism, Enlightenment values, borrow the moral conceptions of religious superstitions, and try and claim them to be founded on these amoral mediums, places where the shoe doesn’t fit.
I don’t think PZ claimed or even addressed anything about the origins of humanism and enlightenment values (at least not in this post). I don’t see why anyone should care what the origins of the values[*] are. To my point of view the question is what the, ehrm, value of the values are.
I guess the “at the behest of who are what” is not as unimportant as I first thought. I believe I “should” treat my fellow man with respect, and I believe I shouldn’t kill. Now maybe I had these values instilled into me by the Christian origins of my culture. I don’t care. I do not follow these values “at the behest of God” (and I obviously don’t follow them “at the behest of the laws of physics”). I follow them “at the behest of humanity”.
[*] For what it’s worth, I believe “Humanism/Enlightenment” may have “borrowed” its values from claimed religious values[**] but, if so, I believe religions cultivated these values from basic human values.
[**] In thise case “borrowed” seems to mean “didn’t reject outright”. In this sense the accusation of “borrowing” seems pretty petty as “borrowing” would be pretty much unavoidable. (Imagine a person saying “I am going to question all the values of my upbringing.” Then imagine someone countering “But didn’t your up-bringing teach you to speak English! Hah! You are still speaking English! Hypocrite!”)
What happened to reducing secular humanism to mush?
Enough people volunteered already, you can’t just leave something like that hanging.
Rudy #159
*If* you accept that evolution is a blind process, there is no ‘next’ arising from natural sources. That many people want or need a meaning or purpose in life may just be a spandrel (an accidental result of evolutionary processes).
You can if you realized that you really put your foot in it and that silently running away is the best available choice.
You mean the one that contains this?
That’s actually the bit to which I referred. Specifically, the part about “many generations of successful procreators who have also been well-integrated into their culture.” Now granted, I’m making the assumption (based on my knowledge of Mr. Myers through frequent blog posts here) that I actually know he is referring to group behavior, and social contracts, and all those things we talk about when we talk about ethics.
So perhaps, for purposes of this discussion, I’m reading far more into it than I should.
Sasha: “Try something interesting: go back to the quote above, and, instead of “recognize the dignity of others,” substitute the phrase “recognize that some people have no inherent dignity or worth.” A reality-based humanist ethics would not be able to make this statement.”
Thank you Sasha, this is all I needed. Earlier I pointed out that humanist believe in some notion of a true nature. When we say something inherently posses something, it is an objective truth claim. Someone who doesn’t realize that all people posses an inherent dignity and worth, are sort of like those that don’t realize the world revolves around the sun.
I might value a coffee mug my wife gave me. Even though i could buy one just like it for 4$ at the mall, if you offered me 10$ for it I wouldn’t give it to you. I value it, but that value doesn’t inherently belong to that mug, it’s something that I subjectively give it. There’s nothing wrong with a woman at the garage sale, who is not as sentimental about the mug as I am. I don’t say she’s in error for being indifferent to something that I value.
If you claim that human being posses an inherent dignity and worth, it’s not something that other human beings give it, but rather something that human beings possess themselves. It is a part of what it means to be a human being. We wouldn’t say this for the value I give to my mug.
Notice when we say human being have an inherent dignity and worth, we have developed a true and false dichotomy. Those that recognize this dignity are living truly, and those that don’t are living falsely.
Human history makes this a bit weird. Entire societies were built on the denial of the dignity of others, human beings were tortured and killed for the sheer enjoyment of the mobs, like the spectacles of the Colosseum. French Aristocratic weddings and folk festivals used to feature torture and burnings at the stake as a part of the celebration. Casualties of war would be exposed to the most horrific forms of torture not to extract any pertinent information from them, but because of celebratory gratification. It was part of the glorious spoils of war.
This nature shouldn’t be strange. If human nature did not allow us to celebrate, to enjoy violence, we would have died off a long time ago, sort of like if man didn’t enjoy sex there probably wouldn’t be much procreation going on.
Such individuals lived in denial of the human dignity of others, in the most vile ways possible, but now we say that there is lie here, a falsity about their way of life, a refusal to acknowledge a truth, about the inherent dignity of those they so gloriously murdered, for their sheer entertainment.
But I’ll stop here for now, and give you time to say if this is the sort of picture you’re in agreement with, when you say that a reality based humanistic ethic cannot deny the inherent dignity and worth of human beings.
I want to make sure that I don’t get carried away with a caricature of your views, so I’ll cut my argument into parts, to allow you some room to clarify your position.
And you were wrong. Humanists believe nothing of the sort.
I’d even suggest it may be a cultural rather than evolutionary one. For instance, I’d be interested to know whether foraging societies with relatively little social stratification put as much stock in the question “what am I supposed to be when I grow up” as hierarchical industrial-agricultural ones.
Secular humanists, that is.
I hesitate to comment on Smith’s original without reading it, but what Fish concludes from it seems pretty simplistic. The argument seems to be:
1) In pluralistic post-Enlightenment society we claim to base our collective public ethics on secular rather than religious reasons. And in fact, we see it as wrong to do otherwise.
2) Even so, we highjack/smuggle “religious” terminology and language to speak about (allegedly) secular morality.
3) Therefore, there’s no such thing as secular reasons for ethical standards.
This is as nonsensical an argument as:
1) We have empirical evidence that the earth is a spheroid orbiting a star.
2) Even so, we highjack the language of cultures who believed in a geocentric cosmos (sunrise, sunset and so forth).
3) Therefore, the sun really does rise and set despite the evidence to the contrary.
The truth is that rationalists, if they are honest about it, know that there is no objective morality, no morality period other than what we create for ourselves. My existence or well-being or that of my neighbour matters not in the grand scheme of things. No more than the well-being of a virus or a grain of sand or a star over in the next galaxy. My suffering or enslavement, my commission of theft or murder or genocide is a neutral proposition from an objective standpoint.
However, because I am a human being and have the evolutionary past that I do, and had the upbringing I did, in the culture I did, I feel internally that there is a morality*. And that is how I act in the world and how I speak and how I think. And, luckily** for me, most of my fellow humans feel, act, speak, and think roughly the same way.
*basically to mitigate as much suffering and inequality as possible while giving people (and other living things) the opportunity to act as freely as practical
**another highjacked word, which of course doesn’t really apply to the situation.
@Joe Bleau,
1) speaks to PZ’s (and your) objection to Fish. No problem there. As I said, I think the idea of secular ethics is, umm, reasonable.
And becoming a “community of like-minded people working together…(to get) along peacefully” is a goal you (and me, and PZ) share with a lot of religious and secular folks all over the world. But I think that it takes an *argument* to say why we think that’s the right goal. We could say “well, it’s just what we want”; this would sort of put us in Foucalt country. Stanley Fish, oddly, was making just this sort of argument some years back. But (God, Nature, or Reason) demands more than that from us I think!
2) But evolution *is* random. (Or stochastic, as one poster corrected me. Isn’t that the same thing?) It isn’t “hardly” random. I’m not sure what you are getting at here. Not random as in “surreal painting” random, but definitely in the “choose one path out of a big random process” random. There are all sorts of physical constraints and feedback loops to be sure.
I am (more than) OK with evolution producing pattern rich complexity, by the way. And I didn’t argue at all (today) against normative force possibly coming from other sources than a Deity. But “group cohesion” doesn’t seem like that source.
Every major newspaper needs a Milton scholar to tell the rest of us how to think.
Even Milton gave more freedom to humans than Stanley does.
Of Adam and Eve Milton writes in Paradise Lost (book 3):
They trespass, Authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formd them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves…
I should have also pointed out that the (illusory) morality that I experience has nothing to do with any religion. Humans had it before religion and,in my experience it is rather that my morality informed my religion (when I chose to practise one).
It was, of course, the failure of “transcendent morality” to seriously improve human behavior, or to be coherent cross-culturally (obviously putting said “transcendence” in question), that brought it into question in the first place.
Those problems have not abated.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
TimC: Great, now there are commenters on this blog, like 132, making veiled death threats against philosophers?
Whereof one lacks humor, thereof one must be silent.
ivankaramazov #174 wrote:
Thank you; yes, you misunderstood. I did not say that.
When I wrote “A reality-based humanist ethics would not be able to make this statement (that some people have no inherent dignity or worth),” I meant that humanists could not do so because they reject the idea that dignity, value, and worth is intrinsic in the nature of either human beings in general, or only some human beings in particular.
Humanism does not claim that human beings have inherent dignity and worth, as a matter of an objective fact in the cosmos. Our value is contingent on the fact that we give it, and therefore possess it. Humanism universalizes this, in that it includes all people.
ivankaramazov #174
You made this claim but I haven’t seen anyone else make it. When you start with a strawman, your further arguments are unlikely to be valid.
By the way, free spell checkers are available. You might consider installing one and using it.
@Ibis3,
You want to define morality as (acting so as to)
“basically to mitigate as much suffering and inequality as possible while giving people (and other living things) the opportunity to act as freely as practical”
just because you were brought up that way? Shouldn’t reason come into it somewhere? There are plenty of people brought up to believe that, say, individual rights and individual suffering don’t matter, as long as the group is benefited (think all the people in the US who justify torture, or for that matter, the torturers, all over the world. What could you say to them?
Sorry. Didn’t have time to read all the comments. Yet. But when I was going through the article, I found it most disconcerting when I read:
I mean, really. A grade seven student would suffer the English teacher’s ruler after reading such a malformed, disconnected, multi-negating example of muddled thinking. And that is not even thinking about the the poor grammar, syntax and sentence structure.
That is why one can usually tell if someone is even half-assed thinking straight. Their writing is readable. This is an example of neither.
PZ, RD, DD & CH by comparison, show themselves always to be thinking full-assed straight. (That is meant as a compliment referring to a well ordered mind) Ninety-nine percent of the time I can follow their reasoning, the pronoun references and the point they are trying to make.
Fish ultimately flounders here on so many levels.
frankosaurus: I think it’s pretty basic to say that meaning systems all borrow in some way from religion.
Sure. See any number of fundie types pointing how the idea of monotheism gave rise to the idea of unified causation, which science has adopted. However, also note that while science accepts the idea, it does not accept the underlying premises that gave rise to that idea.
So, if you want to point to Jesus (and others) saying “do unto others…” as having been borrowed by humanists, well enough; but again, bear in mind that they aren’t accepting the idea because God said so, but accepting it because it’s a “good” idea. And they may NOT accept certain other religious ideas because those ideas are no longer considered to be “good” ideas.
frankosaurus: In the conventional high schoolish way, allow me to remind you that to say “no rules, no purpose” is itself “a rule, a purpose.”
“No rules” gets into the nature of enumerable complexity, which you probably don’t want to get into, but is in some sense a rule. But is “no purpose” a purpose, or merely a rule?
frankosaurus: Atheism is, of course, a cosmic claim – agnosticism that hates uncertainty.
Sigh. I really don’t want to drag in Fark’s gnosis/agnosis versus thesism/atheism orthogonality fight here, so I’ll just call you an ignorant idiot and have done with it.
ivankaramazov: This is the foundational beliefs where notions like the Golden rule in these religious tradition are arise from.
Again, what premises and chain of inferences therefrom, praytell, did you use to conclude that IS where OUGHT concepts come from?
ivankaramazov: If you’re a person who believes that morality and ethical values are intrinsic laws built into the heart of reality, you’re not an atheist, at best you’re a closeted believer, arguing for a world the Discovery Institute would love.
Presuming by “laws” you mean “mathematical rules regulating the pattern of what IS”… no. They would rather dislike it, because I also assert the same principles that allow inferring the existence of these laws, allow inference of the non-existence of the deity they hope to claim is behind them. (Also, as I use the terms that’s just morality; ethics are merely the approximations that have evolved.)
The key step is the assumption of Pattern. Theists pounce at this point, and say “but WHY is there a pattern”? And the answer is “Well, because we’re assuming there is a pattern. It’s equally valid to assume there is no pattern, and any appearance of a merely AH-complex pattern is a temporary local phenomenon. In that alternative case, you no longer have any possibility of resolving either Hume’s problem of Induction or even the underlying problem of Deduction… but that’s a perfectly valid alternative. So, would you prefer to work with the Assertion or Refutation?” The discussion usually degenerates to rejection of other philosophical priors until you reach where you can’t even get agreement that (P OR Q) is necessarily equivalent to (Q OR P)… and while the theist screaming still continues further from there, my interest is lost.
Essentially, you do not need Faith (assumption of primary premise without prior) in God to justify Pattern; instead, you can take Pattern itself as the primary. And worse, you can’t infer Pattern from God without ascribing enough Pattern to God to make the inference… in which case, you are implicitly assuming Pattern with the assumption of God.
eatmykant: Atheism need not be a cosmic claim, or a claim at all,it is merely a state of negative belief.
Or alternatively, while a cosmic claim, it is a (generally provisional-under-current-evidence) default claim of nonexistence. Of course, the assertion that there is a principle that “a nonexistence claim is the default” is an existence-assertion, and as such a sadist may require this to be proven. This can be accomplished from the assumptions (logic, math, pattern) I have mentioned earlier.
rudy: Deriving ethics from what helps a group survive might give us a first take on where ethics comes from historically, but doesn’t really address where to take ethics *next*.
Well, that’s an “ought” question. =)
Oversimplifying: identify the nature of morality that underlies ethics, and try to determine resource-efficient approximation algorithms.
ivan (quoting me) woozy: Of course, we can look and find answers to such questions within the framework of a secular world. They simply won’t be absolute and authoritive.
ivan: And, of course, the dominant framework of the secular world — science — does not give absolutely authoritative answers, even to the question of “does your skull have a brain inside, or a piece of cauliflower”.
So what?
I’m not trying to be flippant. I’m honestly asking so what? I really don’t get what lack of authority and absolutism has to do with anything.
Oh, I disagree with your assumption that science is the framework of the secular world. If the secular world has a framework (it seems to my the objective of secularism is to avoid frameworks), I would propose it is objectivism. Science is a discipline of objectively figuring out how things are. The “secular world” is simply viewing the world without a religious view point. But at this point we must be muddling neck-deep in meaningless semantics.
Furthurmore, to dismiss science as incapable of answering whether my brain is a piece of cauliflower is really just misleading semantics. Science is, at its core, figuring out how things are. To dismiss it is, basically, to deny that thinks are what they are which is pretty delussional. This is why science isn’t an “alternative” to religion, a framework of a secular value system, a matter of faith, or any of the things apoplectic apologists claim it is.
#169 Woozy: Minor (or maybe not) quibble: I think P.Z. point (and I believe it is absolutely correct) is that when folks like Fish and Smith ask what “should” we do and look into the “secular world” (i.e. the mechanics that unfolded and led to this particular existance) for some spelling out of it, that … well, we aren’t “supposed” to do anything. That is to say, the laws of evolution (and at a more basic level physics) do not dictate anything about what our conscious actions “should” be.
I agree. It’s just an incomplete answer. We can come up with a should — it just doesn’t materialize out of the facts of the universe. They merely constrain to some extent the possibilities — so there is no absolute answer, but there are answers relative to a time, place and person.
There do exist ethics, and I will judge myself and others on that basis — but they’re not obvious and devoid of the subjective nature of the judger and the judgee (who in the most important case are the same person).
The fact that there is no Cosmic Dictator merely means we can’t escape our time & place. Big whoop — since having a Cosmic Dictator means the same thing, given that we must “interpret” the Cosmic Dictators commands. It just means we don’t fool ourselves with fancy philosophical jargon, which is essentially empty, adds nothing to the real questions.
“It is wrong to sacrifice children”: I can give many reasons why that ethic should be followed — there is no single absolute reason, but there are many reasons, from the objective to the subjective that support that as an important principle that we, as a community, believe that and will justifiably punish severely those who transgress it. We don’t need no stinkin’ simple abstraction, even to scare the simple-minded. No Ph.D. in philosophy or theology, no Jesii or Mohammeds, no revelation or cosmic principle.
One of which is that there is no Cosmic Dictator who commands it, unlike in the ancient Levantine world where it appears to have been a common occurrence.
rudy: But evolution *is* random. (Or stochastic, as one poster corrected me. Isn’t that the same thing?)
A stochastic series means a random selection from a given (possibly changing along some dimension) probability distribution. So, stochastic refers to both the “random” (unpredictable) element, and the non-random envelope which constrains the number picking.
It’s a little pedantic — but random is less complete than stochastic, which is important because creationists ignore the non-random element and historically contingent elements in evolution.
So, you select a random number in simulating a stochastic process, in say a Brownian or Monte Carlo calculation. You can predict the final distribution, even though each selection is random from probability distribution. An equilibrium solution to a problem is a deterministic end to a stochastic process from random interactions (say, a chemical reaction).
Ivansomethingother @ “Such individuals lived in denial of the human dignity of others, in the most vile ways possible, but now we say that there is lie here, a falsity about their way of life, a refusal to acknowledge a truth, about the inherent dignity of those they so gloriously murdered, for their sheer entertainment.”
Gloriously murdered in celebratory French wedding tortures. ROTFL
Oh this has to be joke.
If not Ivan; consider this concept; would you want to volunteer to be sliced up for the next French noble’s wedding? We consider it wrong *because we don’t want it happening to us*. It don’t take a god to tell me I don’t want decedent Frenchmen with an over-hyped ancestry going around torturing people to death for the LUZ of it since one of those people might just be me.
@frog, inc.:
The point of Jesii and Mohammeds is to live life in such a way as to *show* us it is wrong to sacrifice children. We are somewhat slow about this otherwise. (One of the most moving part of Mohammed’s story, to me, is his opposition to the murder of female infants.) And of course, Jesus quotes a prophet in saying that God desires mercy, not sacrifice. Not that it is a rule from a cosmic dictator, but the desire of a friend.
I’m not saying this to argue with you, though. This is just something you made me think about.
Thanks for the explanation of the random vs. stochastic issue. I think the way you explained it pretty much fits the way I imagined evolution works. I am not sure how creationists think of “random” although I assume it has a pretty negative connotation to them.
Sasha: “Humanism does not claim that human beings have inherent dignity and worth, as a matter of an objective fact in the cosmos. Our value is contingent on the fact that we give it, and therefore possess it. Humanism universalizes this, in that it includes all people.”
Ah, so secular humanism is sort of like a community that places values around coffee mugs, and communion wafers, and that there is really nothing meaningfully wrong with those that don’t revere the mugs and wafers as they do?
People can be highly rational, reasonable, educated, and capable of thinking very scientifically, and not be led to feel so dewey eyed about human beings, for the same reason they can be all these things, and not be dewey eyed about my coffee mug?
It should be safe to say that your sense of morality arises from believing in the dignity and worth of human beings. You may use reason and science as to how you go about serving these values, but these values are not a product of thinking rationally or scientifically, right? You’re reverence for human rights, the reverence of equality of all, all arise from these values you hold so dearly, not from thinking rationally right?
Anything wrong with these assumptions? I’ll give you time to clarify again.
Yeah, I’ve heard of French (and other European) aristocrats going to insane asylums for entertainment, but I’ve never heard of a practice of torturing people at weddings.
PZ Myers comment could hardly be more off point.
Of course we feel bound by rules, and understand that there are many things we are supposed to do, and supposed to refrain from doing.
We are bound by the rule not to cause innocent people to suffer when we can easily avoid doing so. And we understand that we shouldn’t, say, engage in mass killings simply because it serves some selfish desire of our own.
Would PZ Myers argue that any of these sorts of actions would be OK? If not, on what ground not? Why on earth should we punish transgressors, if there’s no obligation for them to do otherwise?
In fact, perhaps the deepest problems with religious explanations of morality is not that they introduce rules, but that they are both unnecessary to those rules, and, worse, often strain against our independent sense of right and wrong.
Do we really need to have God tell us that killing millions of people in gas chambers is evil? What does God add to the equation? In fact, isn’t it one of the greatest problems with thinking that God exists as an all knowing, omnipotent, and good being precisely that He seems so indifferent to the suffering of human beings — suffering which he might easily prevent?
I would say that the greatest problem with religion for most of us is not at all that it proclaims that there are rules when there are none, but rather that the rules it proclaims are actually inconsistent with the rules we accept in our own consciences as morally correct.
@liberalbiorealism,
You are making two different arguments against religion there, one theodicy (God doesn’t stop evil) and the other moral (religion makes bad rules).
I have a personal answer to the first one, but I don’t expect it to convince anyone else, so I’m not sure I should bring it out. It’s basically along the lines of God making the real world, real.
The second argument, though, confuses me. Don’t we have plenty of examples of nonreligious bad rules? I mean, just look at the example of the gas chambers you just gave. Or look at Stalin and Mao. We are kind of stuck either way. How is religion any worse? (You could respond, but it’s not better. But how do we judge the rules?)
“so there is no absolute answer, but there are answers relative to a time, place and person.”
Do you mean this to be an absolute answer?
(P.S. A little training in philosophy would help you avoid elementary mistakes like this! Most courses in ethics talk about how relativism is self-refuting on the very first day.)
Ah! So you must love all people equally — strangers, your wife, murderers, rapists, and that guy who cut you off in traffic this morning.
You, Sir, are a stronger man than I.
Feeling bound by rules is not the same as being bound by them.
Tis Himself: “By the way, free spell checkers are available. You might consider installing one and using it.”
Nah, those that prefer not to engage in a dialogue because I made some spelling mistakes, are not the sort of people I care to engage in a discussion with. I take it as a sign that they have nothing to contribute that I’m interested in. They have no desire to entertain me, and I have no desire to entertain them.
It’s sort of like if I went in here and asked everybody to not use profanity around me. I’d end up with a collective “fuck you”. “If you can’t deal with profanity than go talk to somebody else, because the petty types don’t interest us”. And that’s my attitude to those that can’t deal with a few minor spelling mistakes.
Deal with it, or move on. I don’t care to coddle you.
Apparently it simply can’t be stressed often enough.
When it’s a product of evolution, it’s most likely a product of natural selection and therefore not random, but determined by the environments our ancestors lived in! To the contrary, those that lacked it have died out.
Because he wouldn’t even know how to ask the very question of why that which makes PZ feel good makes him feel good. Because he had no idea of evolution or even just game theory. Because science has progressed in the last 2500 years.
Speak for yourself.
@152 eatmykant
all this can be encapsulated in “transcendent-needy”, a crude reductive term that serves a function. I don’t think it’s a flaw if all people have it. It is intuitively obvious. Have you ever noticed anyone that has never tried to cling to something bigger than themselves?
reductive philosophies in general that invalidate the need for transcendence.
sure. but the question is whether we can give ourselves rules and purpose without colonizing religious territory. the connection between atheism and liberalism, or one of them, is the desire to be the articulators and enforcers of the rules we set. What will we base those rules upon? Most notably, in liberal societies, we rally around the intrinsic worth of the individual human life. But this is groundless unless you appeal to something outside humanity that grants it that worth. Doesn’t this sound religious? Maybe kant has a different take?
or maybe you do ground it in something, and call it a necessary fiction. But this doesn’t work. Hence the regime of human rights. What are the chances that it would emerge alongside the greatest concentration of military might the world has ever seen? Earthly values require earthly enforcement, the greater the values, the greater the enforcement.(which makes it interesting to see that many religious people are often the most gun happy. For this, I would say that, in america, such fervour is supposed to be a counter balance against the reach of a gun happy state. And for world interventionism, this is a relatively new phenomenon for the Christian right to get behind, reacting to the internationalist precedents set by the pan-global marxist experiment).
aside from saying there is no god? that’s a fine distinction to say that there are negative and positive beliefs. In practice, no difference. Different things hang on whether one accepts or rejects the premises that there is a god. “negative” is a question of coherency, not practicality.
you take aim with necessity. But I would remind you that I don’t think the author is making claims about necessity. What is the root of normative judgment? history trumps epistemology. the impossibility of expressing secular ideals without taking a dip in religion isn’t a problem of thought, it’s a problem of people. It’s not that it’s “wrong”, but that it doesn’t work.
I think the upshot is saying stop trying to make rationality the root of all collective enterprises. Didn’t someone once define insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?
However, the problem most people have with the Fish/Smith thesis is that they are prone to extrapolate it as a general claim about humanity wherever we find it spatially and temporally. To prevent getting muddled over details like necessity, then it’s worth narrowing sights to the Western Tradition. That’s really what atheism and liberalism are about – redefining the self-image of the west and, by extension, the age.
I am confused. I read Fish’s article and from what I can tell, there is no argument with PZ. At the end, Fish says “Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”
Isn’t that what PZ and all of you are saying?
liberalbiorealism @196:
Your question presumes that there is a “should” there at all. I maintain that there are no objective obligations on anyone’s part, including to “punish transgressors”. If there’s no obligation for the transgressors not to transgress, why are you assuming there’s an obligation to punish them? It’s in our interest as a society to do so, but ultimately that comes down to what people value, which is a combination of human nature and culture.
I cannot speak for most of us, but for me, the greatest problem has nothing whatsoever to do with the rules, and a lot more to do with the very strong factual claims religion makes without any evidence at all.
It’s an ideal. Failing to meet the ideal does not mean that you have rejected it. Inspired by Tevye’s rabbi, I would say that I love rapists and murderers … behind bars.
ivankaramazov #194 wrote:
No; all people place value on their own lives, and recognize that others “like themselves” would share in the same value. We are all part of the human family, as a matter of observation, and recognition. An understanding of rights and duties are derived from this foundation, which transcends parochial divisions — such as, say, religion.
Whether God exists or not, makes no difference.
It’s a combination, of fact — and a search for common values, through common goals. If you want X, then you ought to do Y; because Y, will get you X. That’s a rational process, impelled by a desire. You can’t get anywhere, without a goal. If humans are all going to end up in a similar place, ethically speaking, we will have to start from desires that are basic to all of us.
Well, in addition to the above, it would be nice if you addressed your responses to “Sastra.” Not “Sasha.” But it’s a small point.
It seems odd that anyone in the year 2010 would make such an argument. That the false certainty that comes through believing a cosmic purpose is superior to a value-driven secular approach as society has been moving towards for the last few hundred years.
The odd thing about such arguments is that by this stage surely we realise that even if there were a higher power, that religious morality is contingent on the place and culture. That the prescriptive rules of Hinduism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Scientology, etc. all can’t actually cosmic edicts – that these are defined aspirations of humanity that while have the feel of the Übermensch cannot logically be anything other than the expression of what is already there. In other words, they are arguing for belief in belief.
The difference seems to be in the modern secular movement that we drop any pretence of this cosmic significance. This really should be welcomed, instead of stabbing blindly based on projecting one’s personal morality as if it were divine command, it’s enables us as a society and individuals to determine actions by their outcomes. It allows for a pragmatic approach to how we ought to behave.
It’s funny that the ones who talk about ethical nihilism without God are more often than not believers. Why aren’t the “new atheists” preaching this nihilistic tune?
I’ve bolded your error.
Do you mean doe-eyed?
They come from my innate – evolved – empathy, but they might just as well have come from thinking rationally. Here goes:
I don’t want to be killed. How do I convince everyone to treat me as if I had some inalienable right to life?
By convincing them that they have it, too.
ivankaramazov, spelling and grammar errors indicate a lack of education. Using the word “fuck” does not.
Translation: I’m too much of an arrogant asshole to care about the people who read my bloviating rants.
…Me?
Absolutely cannot believe I feel this way but I have to say ivankaramazov #151 resonated with me on this (essentially paraphrased) “.. ethical values are [NOT] intrinsic laws built into the heart of reality ..”
To me they cannot be because there are no “natural laws”. There is just what works at the time.
OK what is the definition of “works”? That is the rub. What “works” to me is situational determined by testing, trial, error, collective experience, collective judgment, etc..
We evolved to have some predispositions and reactions to stimuli. Sure. Empathy for instance or protection and nurturing for our offspring. But things like that are not “intrinsic laws”.
No we kind of make up the rules as we go along. We always have. And sometimes the rules are imposed on us for good or bad by the powers that be. We are predisposed to feelings – but not locked into developing rules or actions because of them.
Life is a chess game of sorts:
house rules apply that we have little control over (we can only hope for fairness and consistency ),
we can only guess at what we have to deal with move to move,
our reactions can be many and varied,
sometimes our best reactions are not good enough to win or even to please ourselves,
sometimes there are those that really shouldn’t be playing the game
and a move’s rightness and wrongness – we try to objectively assess before impact. But no move (even a wrong move) is immoral – that is unless it bucks some rule that is in place for that game and in that venue.
Ronin –
Read that again. Yes, Fish tortures grammer, but it appears that he is saying that there is no valid distinction between secular analysis and prior metaphysical commitment. Critics of Fish are saying that the prior metaphysical commitment is malarky and is properly ignored in any discussion, that a distinction is not only valid, but that it is not possible to have a rational discussion unless the metaphysical commitment is thrown out.
As abb3w has been pointing out, “is” and “ought” are distinct. And ideals are the biggest “oughts” there are.
It seems the ideal of loving rapists and murderers (behind bars or not) is a silly ideal. ivankaramazov keeps yammering on about “intrinsic dignity,” but dignity is a subjective judgment. There is nothing that “is” about dignity other than our perception and judgment of others. This objective universal dignity that he’s talking about seems disturbingly Platonic, which indicates he merely wishes it to exist, and has no real evidence, logic, or argument to support his assertion.
TimC@198 said:
Pray tell, TimC, where did you receive your philosophy training? Did you bother returning for day 2?
Relativism may or may not be correct, but it is hardly “self-refuting” in the simplistic, naive way that you suggest.
@213
so you have no ideals? That’s pretty hard to believe considering some of your earlier posts.
Brownian, you’re batting a thousand about the jargon. We’re chest deep in the shit here.
rudy,
The point of bringing up the argument from evil against God’s existence (as He’s typically defined) is to show that not only don’t we seem to depend on religion and God’s dictates for morality, but quite the contrary, it’s our strong independent sense of what’s right and wrong, under which God seems to be at least complicit in great evils, that constitutes one of our most compelling reasons to reject the existence of God, whatever His dictates.
One doesn’t need to have a PhD in primatology to recognise good ol’ fashioned primate posturing. I used to refer to the technique exemplified by posts #41 and #55–so common among second and third year poli sci students–as ‘trying to beat someone with dead Greeks’.
You didn’t ask about ideals, you asked about transcendence and a desire to cling to something greater than oneself.
No, it hangs on the lack of physical evidence for an imaginary deity. Do you have any conclusive physical evidence for Yahweh handy? No Yahweh, Abrahamic religions are falsified, along with all the morals therein.
#190 frog inc: “I agree. It’s just an incomplete answer. We can come up with a should — it just doesn’t materialize out of the facts of the universe. They merely constrain to some extent the possibilities — so there is no absolute answer, but there are answers relative to a time, place and person.”
One of the problems with philosophical debates, I think, is that it’s really easy to fall into semantical didactic gaps and hard to get out of them. ivanwhosis is a good example of this. Language, and even thought, is imprecise and ambiguous and its very easy for neophytes (which I readily admit to being frequently) to pin their conclussions on these imprecissions. There usually are correct responses to these but even the most sophisticated of reasoners will get seduced into a misleading quagmire.
The whole “science can’t answer moral questions” is one such misleading semantic bog. It’s a bit like the Grouchoism “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a bananna”. (A)”Science can answer moral questions” means one can invoke the principles and values of science (objectivty, reason, observing consequences, empathy [which is really just speculation of alternative conditions or frames of references], etc.) to come to moral decissions. (B)But “Science can answer chemical questions” or “Religion can answer moral questions” means the Religion/Science body of knowledge contains the answers to moral/chemical questions. (C)”Science doesn’t have answers but Religion does” means a world of atoms randomly hurled and undesigned evolution doesn’t have morality built into it’s body of knowledge whereas a world created by the word of God has morality woven into its very fabric. (Gee, neat!)(D) “Science/Religion can/can’t answer moral questions” implies Science/Religion is one’s exhaustive world view. “Auto Mechanics can’t answer culinary questions” implies absolutely nothing of the sort.
Fish is stating “Science can’t answer these questions” in the sense of (C). He is using the sense of (B) to back it up and his conclussion is the impossiblity of (A) and by reinterpretting via (D) the ultimate result is a secular world view and therefore science itself is simply wrong, unfullfilling, and pointless.
I think PZ is simply avoiding the trap from the onset. If Fish states it in the sense of (C), then PZ answered it in the sense of (C). A world of atoms obeying the laws of physics and organisms obeying the laws of natural selection doesn’t tell us what we should do. We are free. You and I (and I suspect PZ too) want to point out the validity of (A) but doing so will allow the fishies and the ivanskis to jumb to (B) and (D) and give us an exhausting and frustrating chase. The card Fish dealt was (C). By answering it directly, the burden of the (A) and (D) are on them. Not us.
@217:
Not all relativism is of the same stripe, to be sure, but if you say “there are no absolute truths about ethics” and you mean it as an absolute truth about ethics, then your statement refutes itself. It’s that simple!
Fish’s argument here is even more confused than usual for him. His definition of “secular reasoning” in policy decisions as pure empiricism is a weird distortion- from the earliest period of modernity many have recognized the fact that “value” enters in to all our moral/political/economic decisions. It’s a ridiculous strawman he sets up simply in order to employ the usual lame tu quoque argument the religious have been making lately- that religion is “just as absurd/arbitrary/non-evidence based” as any other “worldview.” Funny, reminds me of the Catholic Church in the 1500s accepting the arguments of radical skeptics, just so they can turn around and say “Sure, everything is absurd and we can make no factual claims, so why not shut up and obey the Church!”
Now, I have an idea why he advances such a stupid definition of secular reasoning, as I said on my blog:
“However, I would also mention that Fish’s obviously impossible definition of secular reasons, that they are thought to somehow leap directly out of data without values playing a part, does have its precursors. Notably, in the defenders of economic privilege with their notions of the market as some sort of force-of-nature. The last two centuries, especially with the dropping of “political economy” in favor of “economics”, have seen proponents of capitalism pretend that state decisions in the areas of property law, regulation, workers’ control and political participation have been made on the basis of purely factual considerations.”
There’s been a longtime tendency in some quarters to try to justify exploitative policies as if they were functional decisions made in a value-free manner, and maybe this is what Fish is thinking of. Of course it’s foolish (and historically naïve) to think that returns to pure arguments from authority (i.e. religion) would be an improvement on this.
But ideals are something to set for yourself, not try to impose on others.
For fucks sake, people. Ethics is a simply a projection of ones value system on a specified coordinate graph. Without the proper basis, their is no real discussion on the topic, and it allows appears that the basis to choose is what people argue over.
There, I made ethics into a quantum dilemma dressed in the language of vector spaces.
TimC @225
That’s a bad caricature of moral relativism. Ethics deals with good/bad judgements, so a moral relativist doesn’t argue that “there is no absolute definition to ethics”. They argue that there is no absolute definition of good or bad. These are terms relative to the users’ perspective.
TimC: frog: “so there is no absolute answer, but there are answers relative to a time, place and person.”
Do you mean this to be an absolute answer?
(P.S. A little training in philosophy would help you avoid elementary mistakes like this! Most courses in ethics talk about how relativism is self-refuting on the very first day.)
That so misses the point, is so breath-takingly stupid, that you must have advanced training in philosophy and/or theology (that’s a joke, timmy — my best bet is you took a philosophy course at your local community college and are just using big words). My God, that’s impressive cretinage.
I don’t give a shit about the recursion — I’m not speaking abstractly, abusing words to make a philosophical point.
First of all, I was clearly speaking in the context of ethics — of course mathematics is absolute, logical relationships are absolute, you overeducated moron. Anyone who wasn’t trying to make themselves into philosopher-lites would have immediately recognized that. So one can make statements about what one cannot absolutize, kiddy.
Most “courses” in ethics are full of BS to self-justify the position of kindergarten philosophers who was their time writing ethics textbooks. You can’t sell a 20 page book for $100 to students you’re ripping off — and an ethics course generally should last only a few hours.
There are very few “hard” ethical problems in life. The process of figuring out the “right” thing to do is quite easy and requires little training. “Relativism” is not self-refuting — because it assumes that there is no escape from a subject. Non-relativistic ethics is simply absurd — because it assumes the opposite of what is universal, aka, that everything outside of logic (aka, what is of interest most of the time) must assume a subject who is interpreting the world, that there is no universal point of view for interpretation, you haughty, arrogant little pseudo-intellectual. A-universality is universal, ya idiot. It’s not recursive — you bottom out if you aren’t congenitally acephalous.
Once again, fuck most of philosophy. It’s useless. Between Heidegger acting as a reductio ad absurdum of the entire enterprise, with Nietzche clearly showing that it was mostly a political show, and Wittgenstein showing that all philosophical problems of value were solved — and all other interesting problems are not philosophical — what’s left of philosophy is mathematical or scientific problems, not philosophy at all.
(My apologies to meta-scientists, historians and mathematicians who happen to work in philosophy departments due to historical contingencies.)
@rudy #186
you said (quoting me):
First, a note: I defined my sense of morality that way. Again, there is no external standard.
Reason only comes into it to persuade others that my interpretation of and course of action in a given situation aligns with *their* internal morality (usually in a colloquial form along the lines of “A is wrong or bad because it causes unnecessary suffering or more suffering than option B or results in C which is even worse than A”).
I didn’t reason out my morality. I was partially born with it (as a member of a social species), partly raised with it (I wasn’t neglected or poorly socialised as a child, and I was brought up in the culture I was). I use reason (in a broad sense) to gather information, to figure out how the information fits with my sense of morality, and to persuade others that my way of looking at things is the “right” way. I can do this (at times successfully) because the other humans in my society have a similar internalised morality (coming from the same sources).
So, you and I both agree that torture is immoral. It’s not objectively immoral, it’s immoral to me because it causes another living thing suffering, it normalises and condones suffering of other victims (including possibly myself and those close to me), and it does not produce the desired results (if information gathering is the motive). It may be immoral to you for some of the same reasons, or for slightly different ones. If enough of us can use reason to persuade others that a society which condones torture is not desirable, we pass laws to condemn it and to punish perpetrators. One day such a law might benefit me or my offspring to survive.
Absolutely! I too strive to attain ideals. I realize these are merely pure abstractions of qualities I wish to attain, usually as a result of my understanding that I do not live up to the model of “me” I carry around in my head.
Thanks for clearing up your meaning.
woozy: One of the problems with philosophical debates, I think, is that it’s really easy to fall into semantical didactic gaps and hard to get out of them. ivanwhosis is a good example of this. Language, and even thought, is imprecise and ambiguous and its very easy for neophytes (which I readily admit to being frequently) to pin their conclussions on these imprecissions. There usually are correct responses to these but even the most sophisticated of reasoners will get seduced into a misleading quagmire.
Yes — it is a mistake to discuss the “philosophical” or more plainly theological aspects of ethics. As soon as you start, you’re looking for an excuse to act unethically.
Religion and philosophy are invented to justify unethical acts. The only real ethical problems are to what extent do I treat others as if they belong to my “tribe” — and how do I treat them distinctly, when they are “far from my tribe”.
My “tribe” is terribly easy — that you learn from your mother. The Others are a bit more difficult, because they don’t think like you do.
But these aren’t “philosophical” problems. Ethics are practical — and include “How do I not push myself on other people”. They can be formulated very simply.
We get into complex rationalization of a pretty basic human function when we’re killing that function. There are many practical discussions to be had — how do we treat animals say, or how much do we owe complete strangers, or were does the “Golden Rule” fail (and it does at large enough social distance).
But these are all questions of discussing & applying the ethical systems we already have, unless they’ve been deformed and perverted by theological propositions — universalizations that are artifacts of grammar and troublesome priests (including Socrates).
As soon as you find yourself arguing more than a bit over “semantics” — you know you’ve dropped yourself into a pile of BS (which we love to do sometimes! But never take it seriously!)
frog, Inc., #230:
Congratulations. You have summed up my distaste for most philosophy (and especially the ease with which third-rate muddle-headed students are able to substitute philosophical sophistry for actual thought).
If I may, Sir, I give you the keys to this thread, at least for the next thirty minutes. I’d give you the keys to the internet for about that long, but it exceeds my authority. In any case, it’s strictly symbolic, and so doesn’t mean a damned thing.
TimC @225,
Well, I might rephrase slightly – if you say “there are no absolute truths about ethics,” and you mean it as an absolute truth about ethics, then you have no idea what the Hell that you are talking about, you probably haven’t given the matter a whole lot of thought, you most likely have a rather sophomoric notion of the relationship between linguistic assertions of truth and actual reality, and you are additionally quite likely confused about the distinction between the concepts of ‘absolute’ truth and ‘objective’ truth.
Not that there aren’t such unfortunate souls out there, but I honestly don’t see a whole lot of that going on in this thread.
timc: Not all relativism is of the same stripe, to be sure, but if you say “there are no absolute truths about ethics” and you mean it as an absolute truth about ethics, then your statement refutes itself. It’s that simple!
If you’re simple-minded, that is.
It’s a categorical error to apply the rules of statements “about” ethics, to statements “of ethics”. That ethics exist is an absolutely true statement — while ethical statements are not.
You’re a low-ranking monkey, ain’t ya?
The very fact that you want to argue philosophical BS, rather than apply ethics shows your carnie stylings. Rather than using minimal philosophy to eliminate “philosophical” problems, but to create them is the oldest con in the book, after “pull my finger”.
Ah-HA! But you cannot pull my finger! For you to pull my finger, you first must pull my finger half-way. Then, to finish pulling my finger, you must then pull my finger half the remaining distance. And so on and so forth, ad infinitim. You will get close to pulling my finger, but you cannot completely pull my finger!
Go ahead and give it a tug, and I’ll prove my point.
woozy [@#189]: ivan:
Err, no, that was me. Sorry if my use of Fark-style post quoting conventions confused you. Ivan deserves no blame for my sins; his own are quite enough. =)
woozy: So what? I’m not trying to be flippant. I’m honestly asking so what?
Then any expectation of absolutely authoritative answers about OUGHT is foolish, when the underlying IS questions don’t have absolutely authoritative answers. That’s all.
woozy: I disagree with your assumption that science is the framework of the secular world. If the secular world has a framework (it seems to my the objective of secularism is to avoid frameworks), I would propose it is objectivism.
Eh. Science is the method for identifying the “objective” reality — that is, the pattern. I suspect it depends on find distinctions of the definition you use for “framework”.
I’ll also note you later use the phrase “framework of a secular value system”, and note a values (OUGHT) framework is a distinct question from an IS-framework. I was not suggesting that Science (as philosophy) provides a values framework, merely a framework for evaluating IS questions.
woozy: Furthurmore, to dismiss science as incapable of answering whether my brain is a piece of cauliflower is really just misleading semantics.
In dismissing the semantics, you overlooked the key weasel words: absolutely authoritative. Science doesn’t give absolute answers; it gives an assessment of probabilities of competing descriptions. There are always confidence intervals associated. Science is capable of giving answers; and, on matters about evidence (as opposed to purely abstract philosophical relationships), gives answers of more evident authority than any other because it does not commit to absolutes, but only commits so far as evidence allows.
frog, Inc.: It’s a little pedantic
It’s a lot pedantic.
On the other hand, pick a random chord.
Well put, though.
ivankaramazov: You may use reason and science as to how you go about serving these values, but these values are not a product of thinking rationally or scientifically, right?
Didn’t I mention Haidt’s identification of the ethical flavors yet? My understanding and acceptance of INGROUP, AUTHORITY, and PURITY as ethical foundations are a result of “thinking scientifically”.
Ronin: Isn’t that what PZ and all of you are saying?
No, since some prior metaphysical/philosophical commitments are universally shared, and thus universally binding. For example, would you agree with the Commutativity of Logical Inclusive Disjunction — that (P OR Q) is logically equivalent to (Q OR P) such that either disjunctive combination may be inferred from the other?
ConcernedJoe: To me they cannot be because there are no “natural laws”. There is just what works at the time.
It appears you may be confusing the “laws” that science has inferred as best approximations to the rules, and the actual rules themselves (whatever they may be).
woozy: (A)”Science can answer moral questions” means one can invoke the principles and values of science […] to come to moral decissions.
More exactly, to help inform moral decisions. EG, being able to trace the wires helps you know what the consequences of pushing the little red button in my earlier example, but does not in itself provide the answer to which consequence should be preferred.
woozy: Religion/Science body of knowledge
If you’re wading in the sematics, it’s probably worth noting that “science” is used to refer to at least three distinct things: an abstract philosophical discipline, a group of real-world anthropological practices that approximately instantiates that discipline, and a body of knowledge resulting from the anthropological practice.
Alas, there do not appear to be good terms in the English language to convey these nuances concisely.
nigelTheBold: Congratulations. You have summed up my distaste for most philosophy (and especially the ease with which third-rate muddle-headed students are able to substitute philosophical sophistry for actual thought).
Well, I find that even the first-rate guys usually make a hash of it. If the problem is of interest, usually the scientists/artists/mathematicians… who specialize in the problem do a better job. If there aren’t specialists, it ends up being muttering about “Being & Becoming” or some such nonsense that is mostly about medieval theological categories.
Take Ecco with his playtypuses & kantians. When he’s talking pure philosophy, it’s just made up shit that at best are suggestions for understanding thought (or a historical account of people’s inane ideas & revelations). When he gets into actual applications of “conceptualization” — well, I’d stick with folks who actually are thinking about what’s inside the “black box” (the brain) rather than those who are plainly ignorant of what a “black box” is (note to Ecco: no, you can’t have a black box with ill-defined inputs/outputs!)
And he’s a half-sane philosopher! His avocation is better than his day job.
You also have example’s of Austen & performative utterances — but he basically is doing anthropology, which is what saves him. There’s not much “philosophy” in that work, other than to point out the obvious with examples — sometimes you can do something with words (as if other philosophers had never heard of a contract! Or even met a lawyer!) He’s good — primarily because his work shows that most “philosophy of language” was un-empirical masturbation.
ab33w: It’s a lot pedantic.
Thank-you. I try.
[b]ivankaramazov squawked[/b]
[i]Anyone who believes an immoral person is one who operates on a faulty understanding of the cost and benefits of his act is vulgarly stupid.[/i]
You fucking moron. Go look up Evolutionary Stable Strategies and don’t come back. For a population to be in ESS requires some people to cheat and most people to be honest.
ivankaramazov squawked
Anyone who believes an immoral person is one who operates on a faulty understanding of the cost and benefits of his act is vulgarly stupid.
You fucking moron. Go look up Evolutionary Stable Strategies and don’t come back. For a population to be in ESS requires some people to cheat and most people to be honest.
Ah, the mush is starting to form.
It doesn’t follow that from valuing your own life, you value the lives of others the same. Thieves may value their possession in a way they don’t want them to be stolen, but it doesn’t follow that because of this they shouldn’t desire to steal from others as well. They’re not living in a denial of what they value about themselves.
Again even more mush. I can see that we’re a ‘family’ just by observation and recognition? What world do you live in? Are you saying that by a scientific recognition of the world, we’d conclude that we are all a huge family? That’s we’re brothers and sisters, and not just predominately strangers whose primary interest in each other is commerce?
I suggest you don’t use vague sentimental terms like ‘family’. Because I doubt PZ Myers is dumb because he doesn’t care for hobos like he does for his own brother.
Jesus proposed the idea of instead of inviting your friends and neighbors to dinner, invite the poor and the hungry. I guess we can all be led to this by sheer observation and recognition of reality?
Such reductionism. As human being we have a multitude of goals, some we share in common, some we don’t. The poor desire income redistribution more than the rich do. Many of these goals are conflicting among different groups. Think of it like the divided senate, of democrats and republicans, who all posses various goals often related to their own self-interest, and the individual values of each party, that makes it difficult to reach consensus.
Secondly, common goals are fine when we are dealing with objects all parties desiring it can obtain, common goals are problematic when there isn’t enough pieces of the pie to satisfy all parties. Archaic societies quickly diverted into violence when conflicts arose because people desired objects that not all them could obtain, and the societies would have to develop diversions like scapegoats to shift everyones focus from these goals to restore order temporarily. Social entropy is often caused by too much ‘sameness’.
Globalization may offer greater rewards, it also presents greater risks in the midst of hungry mouths, limited resources, and big guns. What saves us is a belief in infinite progress, but in reality that’s just fiction.
So all this bullshit about goals, is just that, bull shit.
But I suggest you go back, reformulate your points, and tie it back to secular humanism.
Right! Use vague sentimental terms like ‘dignity’.
“I think it’s pretty basic to say that meaning systems all borrow in some way from religion.”
And you have some special reason for not supposing this to be a two-way process?
@222
okay, how many ideals do you know of that aren’t transcendent?
“Again even more mush. I can see that we’re a ‘family’ just by observation and recognition? What world do you live in? Are you saying that by a scientific recognition of the world, we’d conclude that we are all a huge family? That’s we’re brothers and sisters, and not just predominately strangers whose primary interest in each other is commerce?”
Has this guy even read a book on Evolution?
frog, Inc.:
You’re neat!
I find myself disagreeing but probably because I’m an idealist. To me, most philosophy is a matter of ontology; what do we know and how do we know it and to this day, I still find myself drawn and attracted to it. The problem is, of course, that what we know is inevitably imprecise and ambiguous. We invent grammar to cut through and clearify the imprecission which is good, but by falsely believing in precission, we mistake the didactics for truth.
I think a big deal for me was when, in a phiolosophical dissection of myself, I realized it was simply impossible for me to be moral by my morality standards [a hint to how I arrived at this conclussion: by your ethics I believe it is not moral to value your tribe over others, so…]. (As well it’s impossible for me to feel guilty about being the immoral person it is impossible for me to not be.) I find when I tell people “It’s okay to be immoral” or “Being immoral is immoral but it’s acceptable” or even “morality is impossible”, it’s very hard for me to explain exactly what I mean. They either think I’m trying to justify immorality or that I should redefine my morality (usually to define valuing my tribe over others as, not only morally acceptable, but as actively desirable) but I figure that would just miss the point and be wallowing in semantics.
The only real ethical problems are to what extent do I treat others as if they belong to my “tribe” — and how do I treat them distinctly, when they are “far from my tribe”.
Never heard it put that way. I suppose another way of putting it is, to what practical extent should I put my convienence over others’ needs. (i.e. I belong to a micro-tribe; myself only!)
Jesus proposed the idea of instead of inviting your friends and neighbors to dinner, invite the poor and the hungry. I guess we can all be led to this by sheer observation and recognition of reality?
Huh? Of course we can! Why on earth would anyone think we couldn’t?
Haven’ gotten through it all yet, and might not any time tonight, but I just got to # 80 and I want to say
@eatmykant, I just fell in love with you. Really. I want to have your babies.
Of course I am a fat old lady with grandchildren and you would not be interested (and you might be a girl–though in this case I might be willing to give up my het-ness….)
But still.
You fucking rock. You said everything I want to say to that juvenile idiot, but you actually have studied philosophy so you could out-authority him all over the place. Good for you.
Like I said, anyone who want to associate morality with cost benefit analysis is a moron.
This is a disease of those who can’t separate the sort of relationships that develop in the process of commerce, and the sort of relationships that develop among a family. It’s the sort of thinking of those who can’t separate one understanding of morality from the re-imagining of it by crude members of our modern world.
They may appear from a superficial glance to look similar, like Jesus’ advocacy of generosity in a parable about an unjust steward mimicking generosity for his own economic interest. But it’s just a pastiche, and not the real thing.
It is a disease of those that can’t tell the difference between a relationship that takes place in a static state, and those that take place in a dynamic one; of those who can’t tell the difference between a simplistic model, and a reality with far more variables than the model takes into account.
I would imagine that has a bit to do with the amount of power you have over those others, as well as the extent to which you are responsible to those others. I think that plays into the ‘tribe’ aspect. There are some to whom you have promised something. That is your immediate ‘tribe.’ There are others with whom you share a common goal. That is another ‘tribe.’ And so on, and so forth, et cetera, et cetera, and of course, et cetera. You have more invested in these tribes than you do tribes of people with completely different goals and ideals.
This whole talk of objective morality is just plain silly. There’s no such thing as objective morality. We can come up with a list of things that are good for us to do, or bad for us to do, but they would apply to us as humans only, in this time and place, from the comfort of our position of privilege.
This is easy to demonstrate: just imagine a poor person in Dubai, say. Theft may be the only means to survival. In that case, theft may be moral, depending on circumstance.
Of course, it’s easy to come up with a million different scenarios for a million different moral dilemmas. And that’s the point — there is no one objective moral code that works for all situations. If there was, moral dilemmas would be impossible.
Big human family or not, as ivankaramazov rightly pointed out, we are of disparate groups with disparate goals. Many of these goals are mutually exclusive. Other goals are downright destructive to everyone involved. Our only hope as individuals is to adopt a goal that fulfills us, and follow them through. If enough of us choose constructive goals, humanity may survive.
If not, we won’t. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, other than the vast number of other species we’ll most likely take with us. But life will probably go on. And if we manage to sterilize the entire earth, I’m not sure that’s a great tragedy either. After all, we’re just doing what’s naturally going to happen in a couple of billion years anyway.
(That’s not to say I personally don’t abhor the thought of humanity destroying the earth. It goes back to that responsibility thing, and the fact that life in general is wondrous and amazing. I hate the senseless destruction of beauty. I’m just saying, in the big scheme of things, there is no scheme of things.)
Sorry. That’s a long way from where you started. Your comment just caused a lot of idle thoughts to crystallize. I kinda wanted to get them out there.
I do like your idea of self-absolution from straying from your own moral ideal. That has a kind of poetic symmetry to it.
“They may appear from a superficial glance to look similar, like Jesus’ advocacy of generosity in a parable about an unjust steward mimicking generosity for his own economic interest. But it’s just a pastiche, and not the real thing.”
Ah, Hay-soos! I like him bery much; but he no help me hit curve ball.
Like I said, anyone who want to associate morality with cost benefit analysis is a moron.
So I’m just supposed to take your word for it?
You know, this whole cost-benefit thing works in every single group of organisms which are capable of some form of self-awareness / recognition and live in social groups (I am excluding social insects by using this definition). Someone does something bad to you, you remember that and consider it in future dealings. Someone does something good, you remember that and consider it in future dealings. Sometimes the benefit of cooperation outweighs the costs of that cooperation if someone cheats.
I want not sophistry, but evidence that this is not the primary force behind what we call morality in humans. As far as I can see, we are remarkably similar to other primates in most of our social interactions.
As for Jesus, well, just see where all his teachings got him! If people behaved the way Jesus prescribed, there would be no healthcare debate, there would be no homeless, and no hungry. Even if Jesus existed, his ideas are far from the norm for the whole population.
Any that don’t involve imaginary deities, and are based in reality.
Do you honestly believe the “understanding of morality” as presented in the Bible is somehow superior to our current understanding of morality?
I’m sort of deeply amused by the way that Vanya here keeps insisting that we must believe in some sort of innate dignity and worth… because if not, then his entire edifice of argument against humanism would be wrong!
So when struck with the idea that morality might come about because cooperative behaviors in society generally do a better job of protecting oneself than competitive behavior, he basically claims it must not be so, without recognizing the evolutionary theory, game theory, et cetera, that underpins the entirety of this sort of enlightened self-interest.
And then he wraps it up in a lot of rhetoric to look forceful. But there ain’t much there.
bellerophon @ 124
But if you have seven kids, against my two, you are the better replicator (at least in the short term). That’s what makes it all so simple. Not a matter of opinion or interpretation. In this generation, you out-replicated me. Period.
The “stable” part, of course, is open to interpretation. 8-)
In the long run, for instance, it may be the case that all my grandkids decide to have several kids and only one or two of your kids decide to have kids at all. So, as I said, in this generation, you sent more info (DNA) into the future than I did. In the long run? We’ll see.
AJKamper
So when struck with the idea that morality might come about because cooperative behaviors in society generally do a better job of protecting oneself than competitive behavior
Ahh, but cooperation is competitive. The most judicious cooperators are the best competitors. The competition IS to cooperate.
woozy @249,
I can think of a couple of reasons:
* S/he is a cynic and/or a misanthrope, maybe one who buys into the toxic Judeo-Christian trope of fallen humanity and original sin, and thus can’t conceive of humans acting according to any principle other then naked self-interest
*S/he is an authoritarian who can’t/won’t take responsibility or ownership of her/his own ethical behavior, and thus must be told what to do and what is right by the Big Boss Mon
*S/he has finally, after nearly 250 posts, got a fucking clue and realized that s/he has directed her/his entire idiotic rant against a “secular humanist” straw-baby that never actually made an appearance in this thread, and so is now desperately flailing around and trying to divert attention to her/his own epic failure of argumentation by pretending that s/he didn’t initially brag that he was going to demonstrate that Sastra’s humanism was based on some stupid teleological foundation (which it clearly wasn’t), and instead trying to save face by whining about trivial semantic concerns and pretending that the fact that “it doesn’t follow” that rational and logical ethical impulses necessarily leads to invariably rational and logical ethical behaviors and outcomes represents some sort of devastating critique.
Really, take you pick. In fact, they aren’t at all exclusive.
Or our environment could turn from the current benign happy place to something a bit more . . . selective. If your descendants are better-adapted to this less-happy environment, your genes might still “win,” though they are contained in fewer organisms at the time the environment changes.
It’s all a matter of nature playing favorites.
I find it grating to hear news reporters talking about ‘looting’ in earthquake zones. They did it in Haiti and they are doing it again in Chile. Taking stuff that you need to survive from an unattended and badly damaged store after an earthquake is not looting in any useful sense.
YMO:
(What’s the html tag for “quote?”)
I disagree. The story of the human race is that cooperation can ensure that EVERYONE’S genes can get passed down, and obviate the necessity of cooperation.
Either way, that’s quite beside the point of where Vanya there is going.
AJKamper: try <blockquote>Quoted text for your referential pleasure.</blockquote>
I really hope you meant “. . . obviate the necessity of competition.” Otherwise, I’m completely lost.
Brownian @221
Hehe. Why stop. Some people are still doing it. Obviously.
Still making my way through this, but I can’t help wondering why, if Ivanusha was so sure of himself, he felt the need to be insulting right from the git-go.
Sure, call me sparky. Whatever floats your boat there buddy.
First you accused me of not understanding the philosophers whom I mentioned, then you weirdly run to Habermas for defense. How fucking bizarre?
You mean the same Jurgen Habermas who claimed this:
Please, if anyone here doesn’t have a clue it’s more likely to be you than me.
Oh God, now you’ve moved on to lecture me about Nietzsche, sounding no less clueless than you did earlier. Please, this should be fun. Tell me what Nietzsche found to be the weakness of Christian morality, and how it relates to his critique of the Enlightenment. I would also love to hear how he managed to criticize christian morality in a way that separates it from its teleological foundations? Nietzsche does show some admiration for Christ, the embodiment of the Christian telos, but not to christians themselves. Why the divide?
Nietzsche identified the moral imperatives of his time as arbitrary and incoherent. This is a controversial point for you? If not, what’s the incoherency of them?
Entertain Sparky. I’m looking forward to hearing you tell us about Nietzsche’s critique of enlightenment morality and christianity. But I’d wager you know you don’t have a clue, but prove me wrong. This should be fun.
Right on PZ!! See, that’s why I read this blog!
AJKamper
[buzzer sounds] Nope! That’s group selectionism. Think about it in economic terms. People are members of cooperative societies because it benefits them. Bosses run companies for profit – not to pay their workers the highest wage possible, without regard for profit.
For quotes, I think it is < blockquote >
I’ve found this a common trait among self-styled philosophers. The worse they are, the more arrogant and condescending they become.
I think something about half-assed philosophy attracts self-absorbed pricks.
Nigel:
Er, yes, I did mean “cooperation.” I suck.
And lemme test your plan.
It seems to me that you’re confusing “competition” with “self-interest.” You might be familiar with Pareto-efficiency–the idea that the range of possible outcomes for two parties might be on a curve, not a straight line, and that there are a range of outcomes that provide better results for both parties than if they had been competing.
So I can be part of a cooperative society because it benefits me, but I think it could only be called “competing” if the fact that I benefit means that someone else is losing out, and I don’t think that’s the case.
AJK
It should be open bracket blockquote close bracket.
Using my meager knowledge of game theory, you are saying that competition/cooperation is a false dichotomy, as it is not a zero-sum game?
(Sorry — I normally do not wave my ignorance about like a flasher in Disneyland, but I just want to be clear here.)
ebo137 said:
Ah, Hay-soos! I like him bery much; but he no help me hit curve ball.
One of my VERY FAVORITE movies of all time. And a big reason for that is what Pedro said later:
“Jo-boo, I fight for you, I stick up for you. But if you no help me now, then I say fuck you, Jo-boo. I do it myself.”
A person breaking free and taking responsibility is a beautiful thing.
Besides, I always liked “Wild Thing”.
PZ
The journey is the reward! (One doesn’t need this idea dictated to them; one can simply experience it for oneself.)
bobh #15
Indeed. Objective morals are for comfortable, armchair, middle-class apologists.
John #26
God’s existence is less important than whether or not there are rules it/he wants us to follow. Religion seems hung-up on doctrines more than God himself!
ereador #33
I hear you! I need to read Krishnamurti. Osho (Rajneesh) made a good point: purpose is for mere machines. Also, like you said, meaning must be created. It doesn’t exist without us bringing it to be.
ivan #41
Why, then, must PZ just stick to ‘lab shit?’ Why can Einstein go further than mere ‘lab shit’ but PZ can’t? PZ, being human, can’t be right on everything. But neither can Einstein.
abb3w
Richard Carrier (I think he and PZ are friends) made a good point in a talk last year: you can, actually, get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. I forgot the exact reasoning but it made sense to me. But I think you get this anyway, judging from your post #141, point 1.
ivan #91
ereador #103
Stephen Fry made a good point that morality is about discovery, not dogma. I think he’s right, in that we don’t know what anguish is (for example) until we experience it.
ty.franck #119
Shouldn’t that be philoso-fu?
Aquaria #122
If it’s fresh, yes please! Convection-heated only, though. ;-)
AJKamper #130
True – Hitchens, in a debate, responded to the idea that morality comes from religion: no, morality comes from society. You can prove this by seeing how society – and its associated morality – changes. Hundreds of years ago, gentlemen wore long wigs. In the 20thC, some men would get punished for having anything but a haircut that you could “set your watch to.”
frankosaurus #146
abb3w already answered. I’ll add that people like PZ, who are scientists, are very comfortable with uncertainty, thanks to their education. It’s persons with zero education who can’t handle uncertainty.
hyperdeath #162, good job! Is that an iPhone app?
liberalbiorealism #196
Ah, but apologists will say that God is right there suffering with us! Rhetoric, of course.
TimC #225
If I say ‘never say never’ you know what I mean. It’s self-refuting, but so what?
frog #230, I disagree with you about the worth of philosophy. It’s what you make it, surely?
frog #233
By some people, of course. Hitchens points out that there’s nothing you cannot do if God gives you permission.
But your view is only one-sided, because some people see injustice, or sees a better way to do a given thing, and try to find some way of arranging their thoughts about it, which you can call philosophy. Some philosophies, sadly, get “fossilized” (Hitchens, again), which becomes religion.
Your Mighty Overload #241
Careful. This is how the worst tabloid newspapers gently manipulate readers.
This would be true if everyone was cooperating with everyone else. However, that isn’t true. We cooperate within small groups, against other groups. These groups may be companies, or they may be social teams, but we do not cooperate completely freely. Trust has to be built up through time. When it really comes down to it, we [pretty much] always choose ourselves and our families even over the best cooperator.
Of course, there is another way that your statement could be true, which would be if the pay-off for cooperating was even higher than the one for succeeding in the endeavour by oneself. I can’t imagine many circumstances where that’s be true, however.
I would imagine that has a bit to do with the amount of power you have over those others, as well as the extent to which you are responsible to those others.
Well, the thing I believe if you can help a person you should. Responsibility doesn’t really matter. (Well, it matters in the the sense that you should never hurt so if you are responsible than you have already “done wrong” whereas if you are not responsible you are merely at a point where you must decide whether to “do good” or to conciously refrain from “doing good”. I believe it is wrong to not “do good” when you can.)
I do like your idea of self-absolution from straying from your own moral ideal. That has a kind of poetic symmetry to it.
Wellllll… I wasn’t exactly advocating absolution. It was more being aware that being absolutely moral is practically impossible.
An example of my morality is that I can utter the statement “It is immoral to kill in self-defense” in honesty. The usual response is “What?!?!?!!”, but I believe A) It’s immoral to kill and B) it’s immoral to deem oneself of more value than another ergo, modus ponens, it is immoral to take another life in protection of one’s own. To which the responses are invariable either “He’s a murdering scumbag; I am of more value than him” or “You can’t possible expect anyone to live up to your ridiculous lofty standards”. The latter actually illustrates my point. I don’t expect anyone to live up to my standards. I don’t think anyone should live up to my standards. In fact, I think letting the guy kill you is the “wrong” thing to do. But that doesn’t mean killing in self-defense is moral. Just that absolute morality is impossible.
A better example is that I truly to believe it is immoral not to alleviate suffering when you can, or, equivalently in my view, to allow wrong things to occur through passive inaction. Obviously, this means I should spend every waking momment of my life helping others and giving all my possessions to people more needy. Obviously I can’t (and more to the point, I won’t) do that. … Hmmm, says the philosopher in me, how can I resolve that … I suppose, I could lower my ridiculous standards (although it’s not that I actually have standards, I just think if you can eliviate suffering you should) or I could establish a hierarchy of distance. But, really, what exactly needs resolving? Basically, the only reason my morality needs resolving is so that I can call myself (and others can tell me that they are) moral. It actually makes more sense to admit I have selfish moments when I’m not moral. It’s impossible not to.
Is it immoral for the kid in abject poverty to steal to survive (in my day it was stealling a loaf of bread to feed his family). I’d say yes, but only if he steals from someone who needs it less than he does. But by my logic, it’d be equally immoral for the person with more to not allow the thief to steal from him… which makes the question of theft unimportant as it’s now immoral for the person with more to not give his stuff away or for the baker to charge for his bread. (I recently realized I had always missed an assumption in the stealing bread to feed one’s family; namely the assumption that the thief a has a moral *responsibility* to support *his family* and that by *not* stealing he’d be remiss. …perhaps, that does make a different but, honestly, I find the idea that a thief might have the idea that he is *obligated* to feed *his* family at the cost of another equally poor family repugnant. Seriously, I *do* believe it is wrong to support one’s own tribe at the cost of another’s.)
… whoo boy…. where was I? Oh yes. So when it comes to *practical* or to “should”, I guess that is a different matter. I suppose that’s ethics.
Pikemann at 247
True, but he did squawk it, at least in my mind.
@Otrame:
I was hoping someone would remember that line. Thanks for saving me.
@Ivan the terrible in an annoying sense:
You sound a bit like an Xian troll with a really cool book collection, No?
All this talk of power and no one has invoked Foucault in the name-drop game? well Foucault you all!!!
@ The Pompos ass
You’re actually the prefect example of practical social morality. Right now you’ve made yourself so unlikeable with your “IM THE SMARTEST FUCKER IN THE ROOM!” dance that were you to burst into flames no one would piss on ya.
Before I respond to Frankosaurus, let me just say that those of you shitting on philosophy are doing so because of prior philosophical commitments. You should try thinking about that before you start spouting off and looking foolish. If I started talking about alloploidy and neotany and all that jazz, I’d sound like an idiot too. So I don’t. Most philosophers should stay out of biology and, dare I say it, most biologists should stay out of philosophy. Let’s all agree to stick with what we’re good at it, m’kay?
Anyway, on to Tyrannosaurus Frank:
1. Again, I refer you to the meaning of the phrase “begging the question” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question). You are assuming that “cling[ing] to something bigger than themselves” is the same as clinging to some sort of transcendence. This is palpably false, unless you confuse that which transcends an individual human life with that which transcends the natural world. For example: I am a philosopher, and I enjoy losing myself in the millennia-long conservation that is the philosophical tradition, not to mention the ideas which animate that conservation: the fact that that conversation, and those ideas, are “bigger than me” does not mean that they transcend nature. Likewise, ideas and ideals – insofar as they are thinkable – do not transcend nature because they do not transcend the human psychology capable of cognizing them. Thus, even if people do “cling” to things bigger than themselves that does not mean, eo ipso, that they are “transcendent-needy”, unless you want to fudge the definition of transcendent.
2. You write “the atomization of meaning is something humans will never accept” then define ‘the atomization of meaning’ as “reductive philosophies in general that invalidate the need for transcendence”. Again, begging the question: your argument essentially amounts to saying that human beings will never accept philosophies that invalidate the need for transcendence. But this is precisely the point at issue.
2a. Beyond your argument (or lack thereof, really), let us – for the sake of argument – assume that human beings will never accept a philosophy that invalidates the need for transcendence – that does not mean that that philosophy is untrue! Perhaps human beings will never accept the meaninglessness of existence, but that doesn’t mean that existence has a meaning.
3. You write: “sure. but the question is whether we can give ourselves rules and purpose without colonizing religious territory. the connection between atheism and liberalism, or one of them, is the desire to be the articulators and enforcers of the rules we set. What will we base those rules upon? Most notably, in liberal societies, we rally around the intrinsic worth of the individual human life. But this is groundless unless you appeal to something outside humanity that grants it that worth. Doesn’t this sound religious? Maybe kant has a different take?”
Speaking just for myself (and not for Kant, yet), I don’t base my ethical vision on the inherent dignity or worth of human beings, but rather on their lack of inherent dignity or worth: dignity and worth are relative terms that only emerge in the relations between human beings and fluctuate with those relations. Human beings give worth to one another, so there is no extra-human source of normative ethics. Beyond that, of course we are those who articulate and enforce the rules we set – we are the ones who set the damn rules!
Now, Kant argues that we have a duty to others because of something that is naturally inherent in human beings: reason. We have a duty to treat other reasonable creatures as ends rather than as means because the maxim (i.e, the subjective principle of volition) we accept – if we are Kantians –is the categorical imperative, a universal dictate of reason. Taking this as our maxim – that principle which allows us to choose our actions – guarantees that all of our actions are free, which is to moral, which is to say, based on reason. Now, although Kant’s conception of reason does tend toward a kind of universalizing hypostatization of subjectivity, it is not by that token transcendent (though it is transcendental, i.e., based on a consideration of those conditions which make xyz (cognition, morality, judgments of taste) possible.
4. Your next paragraph beyond the “necessary fiction” is a total non-sequitur, so I’ll not even respond to it beyond saying that I do not believe in universal human rights, only natural rights. (A natural right is a natural power that cannot be taken away, thus human rights hardly qualify insofar as people’s human rights are violated all the time).
5. You write “aside from saying there is no god? that’s a fine distinction to say that there are negative and positive beliefs. In practice, no difference. Different things hang on whether one accepts or rejects the premises that there is a god. “negative” is a question of coherency, not practicality.”
Now granted, your tortured syntax makes it a little difficult to tell what exactly you’re trying to say, but I’ll restate what I think should be pretty obvious: we are all agnostics, no one knows with any degree of certainty whether or not there exists a deity. With that said, atheism is in all cases (that is, in both positive and negative atheisms) a lack of belief in god or gods, not a truth claim. Atheists often do make truth-claims about the non-existence of the deity, but such claims are not essential to atheism per se. Now, in practice, there is all the difference in the world between saying that “I don’t believe in unicorns because I see no evidence for unicorns” and “unicorns do not exist, therefore I do not believe in unicorns” – why can you not see this?
6. You write “you take aim with necessity”. Besides the fact that this is a semantically empty statement (“take aim with necessity”? what the hell does that mean!?), I will try to answer the rest of your post. “What is the root of normative judgment”: I am a non-cognitivist, i.e. I don’t think ethically normative propositions are truth-apt, they merely express emotions, imperatives, cultural standards or a combination of all three. So what is the root of ethical statements with a normative form? People, obviously. But I further disagree: ethically normative propositions are “wrong”, but they do work. Further, you write that “history trumps epistemology. the impossibility of expressing secular ideals without taking a dip in religion isn’t a problem of thought, it’s a problem of people.”, which is basically saying that Fish’s argument holds no water beyond the contingencies of what people are willing to accept. I refer you to my point, 2a, above.
7. You write “I think the upshot is saying stop trying to make rationality the root of all collective enterprises. Didn’t someone once define insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?” I invite you to disinvest yourself of all the advances of science: a collective enterprise rooted in rationality. I’d say that I will be awaiting your reply, but since you won’t be using the internet anymore, I know none will be forthcoming…unless, of course, you agree that this statement is preposterous garbage and decide to avail yourself of a rational collective enterprise.
7a. I’ll be charitable and assume you meant that politics and culture should stop trying to base itself on rationality – I take a different tack, and would rather love to see those collective enterprises actually try to base themselves on reason: it would be a nice change of pace!
8. “However, the problem most people have with the Fish/Smith thesis is that they are prone to extrapolate it as a general claim about humanity wherever we find it spatially and temporally.” Where else can you find humanity?
9. “That’s really what atheism and liberalism are about – redefining the self-image of the west and, by extension, the age.” They sure are, and dare I say, god speed to them!
@279
Sorry to say, but Rudy dropped the F-bomb exactly 100 posts ago from yours…
@woozy,
So what’s the practical distinction? It seems that the instant you understand that absolute morality is an impossible ideal, straying from that ideal requires some response. One response might be to feel guilty, or suffer other negative emotional consequences. That, however, is itself immoral: you are being emotionally destructive to yourself, and though not as immoral as being emotionally destructive to another, is still not moral.
Instead, it seems the better path is recognition of the moral mis-step, perhaps a touch of beating yourself up about it, maybe a little introspection to help avoid repeating the mis-step in the future, and then . . . absolution. The letting go, the understanding that you will have moral slip-ups.
That wouldn’t work for major transgressions, of course. If I were to cause an accident that resulted in a fatality, I don’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself. Hell, I feel guilty about mean things I’ve said to people over twenty years ago.
For the little things: I can see self-absolution based on the concept of moral imperfection.
But that’s just me, I reckon.
All this assumes I interpreted you correctly to begin with, of course.
That is an interesting distinction. I guess that means that ethics isn’t so much the pure methodology of morality, but a practical methodology of morality? (Just perception-checking here. I want to make sure I understand you.)
I wish I could reply to your whole post. That was quite a lot, and a lot more coherent than the grab-bag of consciousness I dumped out. You have given me much to consider.
Word.
Ivanusha seems fairly bright* but he/she has swallowed an awful lot of theistic philosophy whole. This is bound to cause some major cognitive dissonance in a bright person and we are being subjected to the virtual equivalent of a large belch as he/she attempts to equalize the internal pressures. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if he/she wasn’t given to such childish insults.
Philosophy is just too easy to do badly. It’s a little like walking on a high wire over the Grand Canyon. Only the very best actually accomplish anything. The rest land at the bottom like a jar of strawberry jam, and end up just stinking up the place.
*though he/she has not yet figured out that repeated gross misspelling when one is being condescending and saying things like “get an education” is just handing ammunition to your enemies. He/she is obviously very young–either literally or emotionally (the former is fixable, the latter, unfortunately, probably isn’t). Unless Ivanusha is a Fish sock puppet, in which case, dude, how fucking pathetic can you get?
@282
Dang! I must have missed it in the semantic shit-storm going on all around it.
While an amusing analogy, it does miss one important facet: the high-wire artist is certain when she fails. The philosopher wanna-be will rarely (if ever) recognize their failure. They are just as annoyingly, self-importantly sure of themselves at the end as they were at the beginning.
Like my dad used to say, “Son,” he said, “don’t bother trying to teach a pig to sing. It’ll just drag you down into the mud, and annoy the fuck out of the pig.”
I never figured out why you’d want to teach a pig to sing. Horses have much better voices.
I concede the point.
ivankaramazov #243 wrote:
Thieves generally recognize that they’re being unfair, however — or else they rationalize that the other person somehow deserves it, because something else has been unfair to them. They’re starting out from the same place as their victims.
The common ground assumption is that “if you want to be fair, treat others like you, as you yourself would want to be treated.” Do not cause unnecessary harm. I think that’s bottom-line basic to the entire concept of fair relationships.
Motivation is a different issue.
There is no moral system that will appeal to the person who doesn’t want to be fair, and doesn’t care about fulfilling basic obligations and duties. Psychopaths are outliers, all around. Forcing them to obedience with the threat of an unavoidable stick isn’t turning them into moral agents.
A family of humans, yes. Or, perhaps, persons – if you want to include a hypothetical God. I don’t think PZ would mind the bit of poetry.
Yes, if we find that it fulfills a goal that is valuable to us. Does it?
And is it valuable for its own sake, or only for the sake of a future reward?
Yes; and we start from the ones we have in common, and try to work from there. Humanism isn’t a set of rules: it’s an approach based on reason, and love. It doesn’t try to transcend this world, but work from it, with the best information we have, and a recognition that perfection isn’t possible. Improvement is.
I don’t think you can formulate any moral theory, or system of ethics, which doesn’t ultimately rest on finding and fulfilling goals. Ethics always begin with human needs and interests. Asking “why be good?” is the same as asking “why love God?”
And vice versa.
You can’t claim that humanist morality is “incoherent,” without pulling the rug out from theistic morality as well. At least, you’d lose the parts of theistic morality which make sense.
:)
Because it’s fun. And I love the conflict.
It stirs the pot, and gets everyone interested, and provokes more individuals to take apart my argument the best they can. I’m confident in my views, but I always feel the need to argue them among my opposition, to see if my confidence is just built on a pile of naive assumptions.
I’m here for my own intellectual curiosity and entertainment. And I find being aggressive to serve these purposes best. The arrogant and insulting douche is all part of the performance .
And also I wouldn’t have behaved the way I did, if this place was a haven for calm discourse. We like to swing at our opposition. I just choose to come in here and swing first.
I hope you don’t take it personally. I don’t.
Nigel:
(Watch my kickass blockquoting skills NOW!)
No, not exactly. I’m saying that over large populations, competition is only more effective than cooperation in zero-sum situations (which do exist). However, over large populations, cooperation is a more effective strategy in many instances, because the end results are not zero-sum. (The point of this was to show Vanya how cooperative behavior can arise from self-interest.)
YMO:
That’s a good point (I’m big into the ingroup-outgroup stuff), but I’m not sure it’s an absolute one. There are two different spheres, right? The first one, yours, is how we can compete to make our group better than that other group (be it another company or the pack of smilodons trying to keep us away from the mammoth population). In that sense, you’re right, we do cooperate to compete. But when dividing the mammoth spoils within the group, I cooperate with others not to make the group stronger, but to benefit myself alone. That’s not a competitive act at all, but pure cooperation out of pure self-interest.
So, in short, I think we’re both right, but in different aspects of our social interactions.
AJKamper
I think we are about 96.2% in agreement. However, I could never resist the last 3.8% – who can?!
I think my point is that yes, we are cooperating for our own interest. However, we are competing with other cooperators in other groups to be the best cooperator with our own respective groups. Of course, our cooperation has to be judicious, and cooperating at the expense of our own fitness does us no good.
@sparky
Oh Sparky, Sparky, Sparky… Do you willfully misread others, or can you just not help it? In any case, I suggest you re-read my post, because you’ve only proved my point. You wrote that “Alasdair Macintyre demolished enlightenment thought some time ago in After Virtue.” I retorted that Habermas would beg to differ and that he sees himself as the heir to Enlightenment thought. I refer you to his lectures in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. You might be particularly interested in his remarks on Heidegger. In any case, you seem to agree and the passage you quote proves my point. I’m glad you’re big enough to admit it. You’ve already come so far!
Do I really need to tell you that Nietzsche is most ruthlessly critical of the weakness of Christianity? Really? I suppose if you were reared on Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche then you must need some exegetical correctives: fair enough. Ok, here’s the short and dirty version for you: the weakness of Christian morality grows out of the slave morality exemplified by the Jews – i.e., a morality that directly negates the goodness of the nobles who terrorize them and thus indirectly gives rise to their own sense of sense of well-being. As Nietzsche writes in GM I:8: “But you fail to understand that? You have no eye for something that needed two millennia to emerge victorious? . . . That’s nothing to wonder at: all lengthy things are hard to see, to assess. However, that’s what took place: out of the trunk of that tree of vengeance and hatred, Jewish hatred—the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values, something whose like has never existed on earth—from that grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all the forms of love: —from what other trunk could it have grown? . . . However, one should not assume that this love arose essentially as the denial of that thirst for vengeance, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No. The reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred, as its crown, as the victorious crown unfolding itself wider and wider in the purest brightness and sunshine, which, so to speak, was seeking for the kingdom of light and height, the goal of that hate, aiming for victory, trophies, seduction, with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were sinking down ever deeper and more greedily into everything that was evil and possessed depth. This Jesus of Nazareth, the living evangelist of love, the “Saviour” bringing holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the sinners—was he not that very seduction in its most terrible and most irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Judaic values and innovations in ideals? Didn’t Israel attain, precisely with the detour of this “Saviour,” of this apparent enemy to and dissolver of Israel, the final goal of its sublime thirst for vengeance? Isn’t it part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of vengeance, a farsighted, underground, slowly expropriating, and premeditated revenge, that Israel itself had to disown and nail to the cross, like some mortal enemy, the tool essential to its revenge before all the world, so that “all the world,” that is, all Israel’s enemies, could then swallow this particular bait without a second thought? On the other hand, could anyone, using the full subtlety of his mind, even imagine in general a more dangerous bait? Something to match the enticing, intoxicating, narcotizing, corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross,” that ghastly paradox of a “god on the cross,” that mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate final cruelty and self-crucifixion of god for the salvation of mankind? . . . At least it is certain that sub hoc signo [under this sign] Israel, with its vengeance and revaluation of the worth of all other previous values, has triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.”
Now, Nietzsche’s critique of Enlightenment is related to Christianity because of the Christian insistence on the equality of men – which the Enlightenment (as Habermas says) reconfigures into equality before the law. The Enlightenment project of equality before the law is transmuted into the scientific discourse of laws of nature (which he criticizes in Beyond Good and Evil, book I, section 22: 22. “Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but “Nature’s conformity to law,” of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though–why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad “philology.” It is no matter of fact, no “text,” but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! “Everywhere equality before the law–Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we”: a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic–likewise a second and more refined atheism–is once more disguised.”
It really shouldn’t be hard to see, even for you, why equality before the law would be an outgrowth of the slavish mode of evaluation, predicated as it is on the negation of master-morality and the predations to which it gives rise. Again, it shouldn’t be too hard to see that Judeo-Christian morality, in Nietzsche’s conception, does not depend on a telos but rather on a human, all too human, antagonism to competing forms of morality.
We do agree that Nietzsche shows some admiration for Christ – sometimes in mocking parody and sometimes genuine – but if you think that means Nietzsche must admire Christians I’d say you were a worse interpreter of Christianity than you are of Nietzsche. What’s that supposed Gandhi quote? “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are not much like your Christ.” In other words, not being like Christ (though aspiring to be) is one of the bases of Christianity. Hence the divide.
You write “Nietzsche identified the moral imperatives of his time as arbitrary and incoherent.” I disagree: Nietzsche offers a natural history of morality (the name of a chapter in BGE and obviously related to the concept of a genealogy of morals). Nietzsche remarks on the consistency of Christian morality [“(Incidentally, we must not underestimate the deep consistency of the Christian instinct” GM I: 16] that doesn’t mean that it is right or that it promotes human flourishing.
Now, Sparky – I take it that I’ve proved my mettle (and if I haven’t, well, I guess I’ll always have my advanced degree in philosophy!), but let me suggest you spend less time seeking entertainment – especially when that entertainment ends up eating you alive – and more time trying to become a responsible and well-educated young adult. Instead of, you know, an arrogant prick.
“…Nature says your supposed to do it…”
Why is it everyone on the internet gets this wrong?
The word is “YOU’RE”!
Though I’m sure PZ just made a typo.
But to everyone else: the Grammar Nazi is watching!
At a very young age, I remember suggesting to my parents the proposition that “should” and “think” never belong together in a properly formed sentence.
From that (to me) formative event, I recall mainly my parents speechlessness, and that I took away their lack of a substantive rejoinder as an affirmation that gave me confidence in my nascent reasoning skills.
YMO:
Oh, that darn 3.8%! And yet… yet, we gotta try to resolve it.
I see.
Makes you feel good, doesn’t actually accomplish anything else, but doesn’t hurt anything either. Got it. You know, most people prefer to do that in private, but what the hell, go ahead. Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one. There are others who like blowing up inflatables (so they can pretend it’s real). I try not to judge, though I do think there is a certain lack of imagination…
But hey, we all have our little kinks. Not interested in watching, though. Hope you won’t take that personally.
Just a small point. You know, for future sessions with your inflatable “humanist”. I know this is hard to understand when you don’t spend much time in the real world, but making a flat statement about something does not make it true. No, it doesn’t. Nope. Not then, either. No, not even when it’s you stating it. No. Sorry, not even if you mom thinks it does.
Upon re-reading ivankaramazov just to figure out what the fuck he’s saying, this comment struck me as really odd.
“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” – Albert “fucking” Einstein [emphasis added]
#283 NigelTheBold So what’s the practical distinction? It seems that the instant you understand that absolute morality is an impossible ideal, straying from that ideal requires some response.
Well, I guess my point is you can’t expect easy absolute answers. There’s no sense in beating yourself up over it, but it also doesn’t really let you off the hook either.
I guess all this is a meandering but I guess I was trying to point out the fallacy of trying to use semantic didactics to pinpoint morality. Seems like what ivan and Fish are doing is trying use use semantics to show that one can’t pin-point morality within the physicical laws and therefore, modus nolens, morality can only exist through religion. I just wanted to show examples how didactically pin-pinpointing single aspects of an ambigious concept really doesn’t do anything.
That is an interesting distinction. I guess that means that ethics isn’t so much the pure methodology of morality, but a practical methodology of morality? (Just perception-checking here. I want to make sure I understand you.)
Mmmmm…. I dunno. I’ve always being interested in morality but dismissive of “ethics” while Frog, Inc. seems to be the exact opposite. Likewise I’ve always been drawn to ruminating over philosophy about “what we know and how we know it” while Frog, Inc. believes philosophy is false deviced used only to justify unethical acts. (I probably totally mangled Frog Inc’s actual intent. Sorry.) The frog’s given me a lot to think about and I’m mulling it over.
I kind of don’t buy into “tribes” or even “self” (logically Joe Blow’s tribe is every bit as valid as my tribe and logically your needs are every bit as valid as mine) so it isn’t moral for me to rob you but also isn’t moral of me to step over your dying body and not call an ambulence. But I also know simply by living my life for a day I have to do just that to millions all over the world. Hence I need personal gauage of what is or isn’t acceptable.
I hadn’t really considered that thet’d be an issue of what is and isn’t “practical” nor had I considered “ethics” as a question of extent to which extent I feel I should treat “others” as my “tribe”. It’s intriguing.
By the way, Ivan hasn’t responded to my surprise that anyone would assume “inviting beggers and the hungry to dine” couldn’t come about through “observation”.
For what it’s worth I think this is a very natural and expected outcome of observation. We see a stranger suffering. We recognize the stranger is suffering because we have all suffered ourselves. We know the the stranger dislikes his suffering because we disliked our suffering.
Then we feel sorry for the stranger.
This, of course, is the sticking point. Why on earth in our self-interest should we care what a stranger likes or doesn’t. If you asked me when I was seven years old, I’d have answered “I wouldn’t want the suffering to happen to me, so I shouldn’t want it happening to someone else” and I’d assume that was utterly obvious and completely answered the question. Of course, it doesn’t answer the question because, arguably, another persons suffering had nothing whatsoever to do with my suffering. Ask the seven year-old me again, and I’d answer “If I don’t feel sorry for him, then I can’t feel sorry for myself”. Of course, that doesn’t answer the question either. Of course, I can. Ask the twenty-eight year old me and I’d have answered “It’d be terrible to live in a world where people were indifferent to my suffering, so by caring about another’s suffering I am ensuring others will care about mine.” Of course, my caring about others in absolutely no way makes others care about me. Now, I think it *is* a matter of observation. We observe that what happens to one thing can and will occur in another. It is a fundimental recognision of observation that two of one thing are sympathetically likely to experience the same. In seeing the suffering of another it evokes sympathetic rememberance or imagining of potential suffering in us. Thus a feeling of sorrow for the sufferer is a sympathetic resonance of a remembered or recognized potential sorrow for our own suffering. It’s actually a far more abstract and developed and un-natural sense to realize that just because some-one else is suffering doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with any suffering we might ever have had or will have. No religion involved at all.
It’s not that I don’t buy any of the evolutionary or other explanations because I do. They just don’t resonate immediately with the personal *feelings* I have when I feel sorry for someone.
At any rate, I don’t see how religion can possibly be any better an explanation. If we do it because we know God wants us to is Ivan saying we don’t actually feel sorry for the suffering of others? Does he actually believe people *don’t* feel sorry? Or is he saying God made us to feel sorry for others and there is no way we’d ever empathize with each other? Does he really believe *that*? We *have* to empathize with others. We can’t learn anything except from others. Without a sense of empathy, we can’t grasp that what the others teach us apply to us.
Actually, I’m really unclear as to what ivankaramazov is advocating. What is he arguing for – that humanism is inadqeuate or that religious morality makes it adequate? Or something else entirely, I can’t really follow him.
This seems to be nothing more than the usual “nothing without God” apologia. Got a secular theory of any kind ? No, you haven’t, because even though you don’t know it, you’ve imported some deity into your thinking!
Like some kind of insane ad campaign, they insert deities where none are, and where none are necessary.
AJ
“Should I work together with my group because I’ll benefit from it,” and “Should I work together with my group because if we set up a system where we will all benefit, we will be superior economic machines and whomp the other group?”
Oh, I don’t disagree. “I’ll benefit” is individually adaptive. Where you started was with
The story of the human race is that cooperation can ensure that EVERYONE’S genes can get passed down.
Your starting point wasn’t even just group selectionist, it was species selectionist! I’ll work to directly benefit your genes. Rather, our position now is, “I’ll work for me (even through reciprocal altruistic behaviours), and if it benefits your genes, that’s fine because we’ll collaborate again in the future”.
Screw it, AJ, we’re agreeing quite enough. I wanna see what evidence Ivan the terribly stupid has that our moral behaviours cannot be explained by probabilistic cost – benefit type analysis.
@raven #17
Wait wut?! They promised I’d get Left Behind. I’ve been counting on it.
This does sound rather simplistic. I was listening to a podcast today that was talking about the role of fairness that is innate when it comes to social issues. Cost / benefit is overthrown when the perceived outcome is unfair. Say if someone is given $100 and is asked to share with another, if the amount is agreed they keep the money, if not they lose it. So if person A offers person B $10, instead of thinking it’s a gain of $10 as opposed to nothing, the brain perceives such actions as unfair as person A is getting $90 out of it.
Cost / benefit doesn’t cut it. Not agreeing with ivan at all (not even sure what the fuck he’s arguing for) but I don’t think that one can even pretend that morality boils down to cost / benefit except in a handful of scenarios.
Kel @ 304
I’m not an expert in the field, but I would have thought that what is termed ‘perceived fairness’ could be regarded as the cost of a weak negotiating position – assuming both parties are negotiating and neither gets anything if the amount is not agreed. So person A stands to lose 9x more than person B in the case outlined, person B could reasonably regard acceptance of a lower figure as expensive in terms of the total transaction.
Especially taken out of the context of an individual transaction, viewed in terms of long term reputation it may indeed be more beneficial to lose $10 to gain reputation as a tough negotiator?
Not sure about cost/benefit as an explanation for morality, but sure its not as simple as your example would superficially suggest.
That’s the problem of providing an example. It was an example of a well known phenomenon, yet because I didn’t give an elaborate account the example is shot to pieces in order to maintain the failed hypothesis. Like a creationist who tries to explain away Archaeopteryx – well it really is a bird, it has feathers after all.
The experiment I was listening to recently was looking at how the brain reacted in terms of perceived fairness, but of course it’s easy to just dismiss the one example as if it’s the only thing standing in the way of a simplistic statement.
Reading this brings to mind a news item I saw this morning: Altruism surfaces only on slow-sinking ships.
By ABC Science’s Branwen Morgan
I suspect that Fish & Smith have stolen their idea from anti-Darwinist, Lord Balfour’s The Foundations of Belief in 1895. The book includes tis as part of his argument against “naturalism” being all:
Roger @308,
It [science] knows it happened. It’s working on ways to make it happen. It knows a fair bit about chemistry. Hence, it knows more than nothing.
Vile? That’s a moral judgement, which can hardly be applied to nature.
You and I will die, humanity as we know it may pass away, but future time is long.
Not via humans, but it’s a big universe of which we know only the most infinitesimal part — besides, humanity may yet provide its legacy to other intelligences on this planet.
In the indefinite long-term, no. In human timescales, yes.
What is this “Moral Law”?
There is no “we” between you and I. I give my service to no capitalised, reified abstractions.
This existential angst you refer to is unknown to me, as is this “Moral Law” and desire of service to abstractions.
Nothing lasts forever, but a long time is a long time; The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.
Kel,
Thanks for your comment. It is well thought out. However, I have to agree with Usagi-sama that we do have long term memory, and we deal with others over long periods. Our brains have been moulded by evolution to take that into consideration when we are making deals. It pays in the longer term to “be fair”, if we assume that our payoff is transitory, but the potential benefits are long term. When the pay off is not considered transitory, as in the example of the rapidly sinking ship, then it pays to be unfair.
That was a great read, Professor Myers.
You certainly have a talent with words. Beautiful, flowing prose… and the truth, too?
What a bonus!
Perhaps, though that may explain why we evolved a sense of fairness – but I doubt that fairness is purely an emergent property of repeated interaction. After all, jealous dogs don’t play ball.
To use another example, there was an experiment done involving getting strangers to help a man who dropped all his papers. They had two sets of subjects: one set who just saw the event, and another set who found some money before witnessing the event. In the first instance 10% of people helped out, in the second instance it was 90%. The amount the second group came across? 10 cents! 10 cents was the difference for 80% of people to help out a stranger.
Explaining such things in terms of cost / benefit makes little sense. Not saying that there’s no cost / benefit analysis involved, just that it ain’t the whole story.
What is this “Moral Law”?
You might find this enlightening, John:
http://home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/korthof83.htm
scroll down the the subject heading:
“The Moral Law Argument”
yeah, it’s that bad.
All of them. Ideals are concepts in our brains. There’s nothing transcendent about them.
Ah, thanks, Ichthyic.
What sort of biologist separates humans and animals?
What sort of biologist separates humans and animals?
is that a trick question?
;)
short answer:
a dualist.
abb3w #238
ConcernedJoe: To me they cannot be because there are no “natural laws”. There is just what works at the time.
It appears you may be confusing the “laws” that science has inferred as best approximations to the rules, and the actual rules themselves (whatever they may be).
—
abb3w I probably am too dense to recognize my confusion – but am curious – and also admit I cannot clearly express these things.
I was meaning like there is no imprint – nothing hard and fast and unambiguous – nothing that is not easily falsifiable – that biology or philosophy offers in the way of “aahhh this is the universal rule you must abide!”
We have a common sense of right and wrong in the very general sense – statistically consistent – because as a species we mostly evolved consistently. But these inclinations do not translate to “higher laws”. We live in context. Every such “law” proposed by religion or philosophy or biology has a waffle served with it.
As societies evolve they (if not under forces that absolutely dictate direction – if they are somewhat free) develop rules (laws and protocols) that seem to work well overall for them.
And our species inclinations have a play in guiding the formulation thus some consistency among tribes. But it is all fluid and differing environmental pressures make for different rules or emphasis.
And morally is defined by man-made rules – it is a societal thing. Right and wrong is defined more individually – but as I said life is a chess game – many options – and often we can only hope we are “right” when we make a move.
Sorry for being long-winded – again I am curious.
Kel @ 312
The ‘jealous dogs’ seems to suggest some innate CBA – the initial reward of affection is re-evaluated when a more substantial benefit is observed – the dogs’ actions could be interpreted as bargaining by withholding obedience for the higher reward (the ‘cost’ of disapproval is outweighed by the perceived potential ‘benefit’ of a snack reward)
As for your other example, I’m not sure what that has to do with a concept of fairness – it could be interpreted that a small amount of perceived good fortune increases the inclination to undertake altruistic behaviour, a kind of spreading the good luck throughout the social sphere. It could also be argued that the cost of altruistic behaviour is only affordable when the immediate needs of the individual have been met, and the finding of a small amount of money triggers a positive ‘self-evaluation’.
I am not saying these arguments necessarily represent the totality of the situation, merely that none of the examples you gave seem to me to indicate a clear pattern of behaviour that can’t be explained by CBA.
Kel @299 wrote:
Near as I can tell, all he is doing is frothing about people who profess secular humanist or atheist values who nonetheless assert or follow a teleological worldview with respect to ethics and morality (either explicitly, or because Ivan has super magic 3D specs and can see past the lies and into their soul). This pisses him off mightily, because, erm, well, I’m not sure exactly why it pisses him off – my best guess is that he is reaching for a slightly disguised version of the “I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I-poopyhead” gambit, where he triumphantly demonstrates that YOU DO TOO BELIEVE IN GOD, YOU JUST WON’T ADMIT IT AND HOW DAAAARE YOU JUDGE ME ATHEIST SCUM – but I’m not sure that he has reached that reveal yet. He seems to want to claim that deontological ethics are either incoherent, inferior to teleological ethics, or don’t really exist, but thus far he hasn’t been man enough to actually present that argument, relying instead on bluster and incredulous snark, which Sastra had no problem utterly dismantling.
Sadly for our boy Ivan, he hasn’t actually encountered a secular humanist teleologist in either the original post or in this thread, which has completely neutered any actual argument that he might think that he has, and instead reduced him to verbal ejaculations and frontin’ like he be all gangsta wit the Nietzsche ‘n the Heidegger ‘n the Philosophizin’ Shizzle.
One suspects that this is the first time that he has actually encountered and confronted folks with a well thought out and coherent set of values, based on a set of relativist deontological principles that don’t rely on magic or woo for their normative power and justification. The very concept seems to be rather beyond his ability to grasp at this point.
This puts me in mind of an ancient TV ad I vaguely remember (I think it was for AOL):
Man on couch shouting at TV: “It’s a CHICKEN!”
TV contestant: “A pterodactyl?”
TV quizmaster: “Correct.”
Man on couch: *screams* “IT’S A CHIIICKEEEEN!”
I have no idea what the point of this was.
*giggles insanely*
(Sleep deprivation is a terrible thing…)
Sorry for bringing down the average intellectual tone of this thread. :-)
Re #317:
Quite. Hammer. Nail. Head. And see also #300 for a slightly shorter version of the same.
It’s a very common thing, too. So today’s question for the audience (from me, at least) is: does the dimestore philosopher type who tries on this schtick genuinely put the horse before their cart as is generally required for proper locomotion and honestly find genuinely significant problems with such secular explanations of ethics, or does s/he rather assume at the outset that everyone really must be basing their thinking on some absolute authority somewhere, and thereafter, rather than genuinely arguing with what is presented them, argues instead with that assumed error–finding it everywhere regardless of whether it is actually present?
I tend to find the latter, natch. But y’know. Rhetorical question, in that sense, honestly…
(/I also find it incredibly a propos, given this take on it, that this particular salvo began with a mention of Nietzsche. Can’t honestly claim exhaustive knowledge of that writer, but what I have seen has generally lead me tentatively to suspect, whatever merit his thinking might have had in its time, it’s incredibly out of place as a commentary on Myers’ or Sastra’s views, for unsurprisingly similar reasons.)
(/Erm, #317 in the above should read #319. But I’m gonna blame it on some weird ScienceBlogs s/w weirdness. Yeeeeahhh… that’s the ticket…)
It is to the advantage of the individual to associate themselves with and integrate themselves into the group. It is to the advantage of the group to demand ethics and actions from its members that perpetuate the group.
Ta-da.
Society can proselytize its members to take actions that are individually against those peoples’ interests. And the individuals will still go along with it because being a member of the group in good standing is vastly preferable to being a lone hermit hunting for food. The individual doesn’t even stop to consider the relative cost/benefits to themselves of every little thing they do, nor should they have to. A major part of sustaining the group is sustaining members of the group, so a stable society will have – if not your best interests, at least many of your interests – at heart.
AJ@322,
Yep – I certainly have encountered cogent and good-faith arguments attacking secular and relativistic ethics, but they are surely few and far between. Most folks just seem to instinctively shrivel from the very thought that our morals might not be objectively justified, without bothering to actually consider what that really means (and what it doesn’t mean).
I’ve also noticed that a variant of Godwin’s law seems to apply in these types of discussions, except instead of Nazis it’s Ted Bundy (or, less frequently, Jeffrey Dahmer) that eventually makes an appearance. The idea seems to be that unless we have something or someone external to humanity to enforce our morality, we somehow lose the normative license that grants us justification to capture and imprison violent predatory sociopaths. An odd notion, to be sure, but it certainly does seem to be a very common moral insight.
@325
Er, I meant that last phrase to be moral intuition, not insight.
Re #325/326, ‘n the Ted Bundy thing, we are amused… Ah yes: Seein’ as ya’ll got no absolute ethics, you cannot jail Ted Bundy…
(Shortest response: oh yeah? Just watch us.)
… somewhat more seriously, it is amusingly revealing, again, of certain deep assumption often found in religious thinking: that any differences between us and Ted Bundy must also be divinely sanctioned to be worth anything–that without those, they just aren’t real enough for them. That without a bearded patriarch pointing a finger with appropriate gravitas, there’s no real difference between the court system of a modern democracy and a lynch mob.
The irony here is: their anxiety about finding stealthy gods hiding ‘neath every secular rock is in this sense ultimately projection. It is not so much that the target of their criticism so relies upon authority: it is rather that said critic would actually feel more comfortable doing so themselves. Between being told the laws they must obey are what they are actually because a long and motley rabble of troublemakers and smooth-talking charlatans and other uncouth types that make up our species have argued eloquently and shouted ineloquently and sat down in the street and thrown cobblestones through windows and fought and died for them, and being told a bearded patriarch handed them down from on high, the latter just makes them feel a whole lot better.
Hey ivankaramazov,
A succinct summary of your thesis (rather than just bashing everything else) would help get the discussion moving towards something useful.
Show you have something of substance of your own to say rather than exhibiting mental constipation (relying on quotes to somehow prove your points) coupled with verbal diarrhea.
ivankaramazov: I suggest you don’t use vague sentimental terms like ‘family’.
You’re an imbecile on the level of Kant, which is truly impressive. Of course, morality and ethics are “sentimental”. They are about sentiments and human feelings. And of course the principles are “vague” — morality doesn’t produce automatic answers.
Ethics and morality are not formal systems, ya idjit. They may be described to some extent in a semi-formal way to describe some matters — but you’re even more wrong than the folks who try to reduce morality to cost-benefit analysis.
Morality is morality. It’s not “something else”. It’s not a mathematics, or a science. It’s closest to an aesthetic pursuit — like most of life.
This is why I hate philosophy. So fucking totalitarian, trying to own the damn universe. Science if for figuring out the facts — math is for relating the facts. Most of life is only based on the facts and their relationships. Philosophy is a bunch of authoritarian nitwits.
AJ@327,
There’s that, absolutely. I actually think that there’s something quite a bit darker going on in a lot of cases as well – it’s not just that people are terrified of losing the big Authoritative Sky Judge, but they are reluctant to give up that oh-so-sexy feeling of getting to be His proxy here on earth in matters relating to Judgment, Crime and Punishment.
Also, I think that for a lot of people, Objective Morality Justification Man represents a sort of a tacit exception to those parts of the Golden Rule and their intuitions about the Universality of Morality (and the teleological underpinnings that they want to cling to) that they find difficult to follow and apply. As some have pointed out upthread, it’s hard to deal with the fact that we can’t really escape a certain amount of tribalism and in-group preference when we want to be good, and our logic + empathy tells us e.g. that there really is no good ethical reason to value the life of an American Soldier more that of an Afghan child, but we have competing moral intuitions telling us to protect our own kin/kind above all else.
Objective Morality Justification Man can make us feel better about ourselves in this sort of case, by conferring not just a sense of Rightness, but a sense of Righteousness, which in turn allows us to look away at our own moral failings as they apply to folks who are more distant and/or of different economic strata or melanin levels than us. After all, even that DFH Jesus talked as much about who gets let in/kicked out of Heaven as he did about the Peace Love and Happiness stuff…
Geez, this place stinks of rampant bloviation. As far as I see it, the argument can be simplified as such:
Fish’s stated premise: Humanism borrows morality from religion while actively denying the borrowing occurs.
Fish’s unstated MAJOR premise: Religion invented morality. For humanists to borrow it, religion must have originated it.
Given that communal morality predates and in no demonstrable way correlates to societal adoption of religions, and especially any specific religion, this premise is patently false, no?
The more logical conclusion seems to be that humans have some innate sense of morality that derives from being social animals, that morality is not always rational (in other words, humans have developed instinctual shortcuts), but that our morality can often be largely justified rationally because evolution is a largely rational system.
Furthermore it was religion that borrowed these natural morals and redefined them, ADDING irrationally derived morality (when we’re allowed to eat meat, how long our beards can be, how many farm animals to slaughter when the weather sucks, etc). This means that humanists have not borrowed from religion, rather they have selectively rejected religious morality (a baby/bathwater scenario).
I would posit that an understanding of our evolution allows for an acceptable amount of irrationality in rational humanism (things like “love” and “dignity” as instinctual shortcuts) without resorting to divinity or being hypocritical.
woozy: Mmmmm…. I dunno. I’ve always being interested in morality but dismissive of “ethics” while Frog, Inc. seems to be the exact opposite. Likewise I’ve always been drawn to ruminating over philosophy about “what we know and how we know it” while Frog, Inc. believes philosophy is false deviced used only to justify unethical acts. (I probably totally mangled Frog Inc’s actual intent. Sorry.) The frog’s given me a lot to think about and I’m mulling it over.
Well, I’ve always used ethics to mean a local codification — a field has a code of “ethics”, not a code of “morality”. Ethics is almost a law — what you should do within a field or discipline, while morality is more general and basic.
But then again, we’re slicing semantics, and that only matters when it matters.
Re philosophy — I’m a little more nuanced than that, but in substance, you’ve got me. Nigel’s joke about Zeno was spot on — philosophy got itself tangled in a mathematical problem, that was only untangled via mathematics.
In other words, it was only by discovering that Zeno’s paradox wasn’t a philosophical problem at all that a resolution was found. I think most philosophical problems are like that — either primitive recognitions of problems in other fields (in which case it was useful as a glimmering of the nature of a problem), or a non-problem invented by philosophers by abusing language.
In the latter case, yeah, I see it basically as political. Just look at Kant’s “morality” — no sane human being would recognize it at anything of the kind. It’s just simple bullshit that justifies atrocities to think that moral quandaries should be decontextualized. It’s monstrous, morally. And in practice, Kantian type universalism is what drives all the 20th century totalitarianisms — that a universal code must be created, that considers only universals outside of human sentiment and local conditions.
Of course, he thought of himself as a “liberal” who believed in “freedom”. But he was full of fetid crap. Once we forget about our essential locality — our essential point of view — the “universal” fact that all our judgments depend deeply and essentially on the one fact that we can never escape, that we are a local phenomenon that can never escape our particularity, we turn into monsters, pretending a Spock-like disengagement and mathematical precision that is impossible.
We’re animals. We can be kind and decent animals — but we are a colony of goopy cells trying to make our way through an essentially incomprehensible universe. To pretend otherwise is the fatal flaw of thought from Ireland to India.
We can work out consensus using observation and formal systems. But that’s our limit. There is no place for anything “transcendental” in that reality. (And no, once again to the freshmen philosophers — that is not recursive. The negative isn’t the same as the positive, this isn’t a philosophical game, and some things really are just implicit in the entire system of thought.)
Re #330, yeah, there’s definitely that, too. In why they feel better about that authority being around, I do also suspect there lurks all manner of motivations–some of them downright unpleasant, absolutely.
It’s one of the things I find most repellent about religious views on ethics: not just that they’re wrong, but so self-servingly so. A secular view of ethics must at least explicitly take upon itself the responsibility it really has: when we write laws, whatever they do to real people in the real world, that’s what we did. If the state executes a man, we executed him, for we are the state. We acknowledge this, at least.
Whereas in religious systems, this is so relatively muddled, and so (it seems to me) obviously deliberately so. The responsibility of the earthly actors is reduced to getting the message from the deity right, and if it seems to many present that what is done in the deity’s name is brutal and unreasonable, well, it could be those executing the instructions heard them wrong, or it could be the judgments of those finding themselves so discomfited and that of the deity simply don’t align, and in the latter case, who are they to oppose it?
Ultimately, then, this is what this view offers the authoritarian: avoidance of their own responsibility. The laws may accord with what those subject to them would have written for themselves anyway (in part because much that in reality is bottom-up and consultative in nature may lurk within those notions of ‘getting the deity’s message right, in part simply because political realities may impose this anyway), and they may find them acceptable, or they may be brutally far from this–but either way, so much responsibility can slip through this loophole. And that one more line of bullshit can slip into the argumentation for the same reason: for no, it’s not that I wish to murder men of another colour than myself, it’s that my god wishes me to do so…
It’s not just that it’s so dishonest. It’s also that it’s infantilizingly so. And furthermore, just so convenient to some of the most dangerous among us: those who wish to have power, but not to bear the responsibility that comes with it.
Pikemann Urge: Richard Carrier (I think he and PZ are friends) made a good point in a talk last year: you can, actually, get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. I forgot the exact reasoning but it made sense to me.
Poking the web, I found some remarks on those lines apparently by him here, wherein he makes (I believe) a subtle mistake:
What science demonstrates in these fields are the IS consequences of choices; that is, “if you replace the alternator in this car, then the car is likely to work again.” However, to conclude one OUGHT to replace the alternator, one must first have decided that one OUGHT to try and get the car to work. Where he’s correct is that once you do have some bridge across the is-ought divide, the combination of science with the particular bridge allows inferences to bridge some other is-ought questions — that is, the “consequent ought” statements. However, the consequent ought (in this case, the Golden Rule) rests on the prior existence of an antecedent OUGHT (in this case, we ought to choose to be as happy as we can be), which is neither itself a purely IS statement nor justified by purely IS statements. You still need a prior bridge; Carrier doesn’t seem to realize that he’s relying on one.
I think I have identified THE primary bridge, that all other OUGHT cases seem to reduce to approximating. Of course, this means I’m probably a kook. =)
woozy: Why on earth in our self-interest should we care what a stranger likes or doesn’t.
Because to the extent that the stranger has a high degree of mutual information with you, the continued existence of the stranger generally increases the probability of something like you being around in the future.
(Of course, this only considers FAIR. A more subtle approach considers the level of mutual information by INGROUP – he is different in some ways, so past some threshold dissimilarity need not be treated exactly as well as you treat yourself. Thus, PETA aside, most liberals do not worry overmuch about animal testing nor eating chicken. A more nuanced approach still might evaluate the degree of INGROUP/OUTGROUP, and moderate weighting of FAIR accordingly; thus, even some who are “vegetarians” for ethical reasons will eat eggs, fish, or dairy.)
woozy: They just don’t resonate immediately with the personal *feelings* I have when I feel sorry for someone.
The feelings are an evolved approximation algorithm. You should bear in mind that they evolved that way because they were more useful than other easy alternatives; you should also bear in mind that they are only approximations.
ConcernedJoe: I was meaning like there is no imprint – nothing hard and fast and unambiguous – nothing that is not easily falsifiable – that biology or philosophy offers in the way of “aahhh this is the universal rule you must abide!”
That would be an “OUGHT” statement; you first need a primary bridge from IS too OUGHT. Once you have a primary bridge defining the nature of OUGHT, science allows evaluation of additional OUGHTs by inference.
“Easily falsifiable” involves two errors, one unsubtle, the other subtle. The subtle error involves the exact nature of falsification; without getting into the mathematics, falsification and falsifiability are only part of the algorithm. There is also testing for Simplicity (and Popper’s conjecture for the reason for this may be anthropologically correct, but is philosophically incorrect). And, if you get into the formality, much of what is commonly thought of as “falsification” tests is actually tests for simplicity.
The unsubtle error: no-one said testing would be easy.
ConcernedJoe: We have a common sense of right and wrong in the very general sense – statistically consistent – because as a species we mostly evolved consistently. But these inclinations do not translate to “higher laws”.
Actually, they do, in so far as they reduce to particular approximations for more general expressions. Of course, that they DO so reduce to the case I have in mind is not generally accepted.
ConcernedJoe: And morally is defined by man-made rules – it is a societal thing.
No, the man-made rules are not morality; I use the term “ethics”, to indicate a finite set of finite rules that approximates morality. Morality is the fundamental nature of OUGHT/OUGHTN’T that the rules approximate.
The distinction is akin to that which I alluded to. Ethics are approximations to morality as the “laws of nature” that science derives are approximations to the actual laws of the universe. Our understanding changes; the rules that our understanding approximates are invariant (since any change over time/space/whatnot is part of the rule, there’s nothing to vary with).
FrankT: It is to the advantage of the individual to associate themselves with and integrate themselves into the group.
Usually… but it depends on the group. Sometimes it is more advantageous to strike out on your own and form a new group.
And I can give a simple example of what kind of monster Kant was. He held that it was categorically wrong to lie (it would contradict some principle of language, blah-blah-blah).
Therefore, it would be wrong to lie to keep a child from being murdered, or any of the umpteen other cases that one can come up with. Now, anyone with a moral sense above that of a kindergartner would immediately recognize that lying is often morally correct. Only a real SOB intellectual totalitarian would fail to recognize that — someone so vastly full of himself that he can see “beyond” reality to some Platonic fantasy land in his head.
Now, I can give Kant the benefit that he was a pestilent savage — he tried his best in an intellectual atmosphere which was barren. But why should we study him except as a historical curiosity?
abb3w: The feelings are an evolved approximation algorithm. You should bear in mind that they evolved that way because they were more useful than other easy alternatives; you should also bear in mind that they are only approximations.
That’s where I think you get it wrong. It’s the “approximations” that are morality — not some abstract principle that is “approximated”. A moral sense is a historical and evolved sense — it can be informed by such things as cost-benefit, common interest, etc — but it’s not an approximation of them, but an extension of the natural feelings of kindness and decency in human beings.
That’s what we care about, not the driving forces that led to it’s development, when we speak of morality.
FYI, the Metaethics sequence on Less Wrong goes into this subject in much more depth. In particular, it explains what the words “should” and “ought” actually mean, in terms of cognitive algorithms.
@frog, Inc.
I truly hope you are calling me, and not the real Kant, an imbecile. My imbecility is still an open question, the real Kant’s is not.
The neat – and for you, obviously frustrating – thing about philosophy is that it’s inescapable. Every claim you make is animated by a set of prior philosophical commitments, whether you realize it or not.
You write: “Of course, morality and ethics are “sentimental”. They are about sentiments and human feelings. And of course the principles are “vague” — morality doesn’t produce automatic answers.”
The first part of your sentence is basically a restatement of Hume’s thesis in a Treatise on Human Nature, book 3. This is contra Kant’s moral rationalism. Is it so obvious to you? If it is, you must be a philosopher!
Also, you are misusing the term vague, which has a more technical philosophical meaning – related to sorites paradoxes – I think you mean ‘indeterminate’. But beyond that, many people would disagree with your claim – that morality doesn’t produce automatic answers – for example, “should I push that old lady in front of the bus?”. Get back to me when your sentiments return a moral intuition.
You also say that ethics and morality are not formal systems, which I generally agree with, but then again, someone like Kant could come around and say – no, they are a formal system because they are based on laws of reason. This is a point you – crypto-philosopher – must argue and not simply claim.
“Morality is morality”. No arguing that!
You write: “This is why I hate philosophy. So fucking totalitarian, trying to own the damn universe. Science if for figuring out the facts — math is for relating the facts. Most of life is only based on the facts and their relationships. Philosophy is a bunch of authoritarian nitwits.”
Do I detect a whiff of Popper in your statement? But I do agree – though not all philosophers, such as Levinas, would – that philosophy ought to be a totalizing (if not totalitarian) endeavor, for the same reason I call you a crypto-philosopher: you can’t escape metaphysics or epistemology and any attempt to do so ends up in…metaphysics and epistemology! But I must ask – don’t math and science also “own the damn universe”? And isn’t the way we conceive of the universe – as a collection of facts and their relations in the metaphysics you are articulating – not itself dependent on prior philosophical commitments?
Finally, “philosophy is a bunch of authoritarian nitwits”. This statement carries the same universal authority you are decrying. Philosophers do argue in a necessary mode carrying universal authority…but so do you! Are you also a nitwit?
It depends. Is the old lady threatening someone with a weapon?
man, philosophy is so fucking boring.
@frog,Inc.
You clearly do not understand Kant at all. So, before you continue to sound like an ignorant yahoo – pontificating on matters that, while not beyond you, have thus far eluded your comprehension – let me try to explain a few things so that, next time, you’ll be ready to play with the big kids.
1. “Transcendental” does not mean “transcendent”. You write “We can work out consensus using observation and formal systems. There is no place for anything “transcendental” in that reality.” You then go on to say – this is too rich! – that “some things really are just implicit in the entire system of thought.” But that’s exactly what transcendental means! Transcendental means “the condition for the possibility of”, thus the condition for the possibility of morality, say, is the principle of reason that allows us to deduce the moral law. The condition for the possibility of “observation” is the synthetic unity of apperception, contained in the a priori principles of the understanding. In other words, transcendental claims are about what is implicit in our structures and systems of thought.
2. You write “Just look at Kant’s “morality” — no sane human being would recognize it at anything of the kind. It’s just simple bullshit that justifies atrocities to think that moral quandaries should be decontextualized.” First of all, any moral realist will claim that moral facts are universal and objective, and thus subject to decontextualization – this is not just Kant here. Now, besides your utter lack of argument (why shouldn’t moral quandaries be decontextualized? Couldn’t contextualizing every moral quandary lead to just the same atrocities?) and your argumentum ad hitlerum (Kant is the efficient cause of 20th century totalitarianisms? You really do love Popper, huh?), you simply get Kant wrong. Of course, you can just say, “he is full of fetid crap” or “he’s a pestilent savage” etc, and boy does that make you sound smart! But if you care to actually engage with his arguments, I will kindly present them to you. For my services, I request that you donate a small sum of money to your local literacy campaign. (Oh, and don’t worry, I’ll come back for your own moral claims later!)
3. You write (with such flair!) “And I can give a simple example of what kind of monster Kant was. He held that it was categorically wrong to lie (it would contradict some principle of language, blah-blah-blah). Therefore, it would be wrong to lie to keep a child from being murdered, or any of the umpteen other cases that one can come up with.”
Oh, well, “principle of language blah-blah-blah”, were did you pick up such precise descriptors? Now, first of all, you are absolutely wrong to say that Kant’s categorical rejection of the morality of lying is based on any principle of language. It is based on a principle of reason, and, for that matter, he doesn’t say it’s necessarily wrong to lie (to, say, the Nazi’s looking for Jews in your attic), he only says that it is, at best amoral. Now, why would it be amoral? Because, for Kant, morality is about acting freely and to act freely is to act rationally, i.e., to act in accordance with the rational principle contained in the categorical imperative. So, when we violate the categorical imperative because of a contingency of context, we are being motivated by something other than our reason: namely, our appetites or desires. Thus, we desire that the Jews living in our attic to keep living and we let that desire – and not our reason – dictate our actions, thus we are not acting freely and are not therefore acting morally. Kant doesn’t say you are wrong to lie in such a circumstance, only that you are not rationally justified by consequences.
You also write: “Now, anyone with a moral sense above that of a kindergartner would immediately recognize that lying is often morally correct.” Is this really the case? I am not a Kantian (it was either eatmykant, hegelskegels or hobbesnob and eatmykant sounded dirtiest) but I don’t think lying is often morally correct: even a kindergartner knows that! Perhaps you are an immoral, lying pig, but I wouldn’t go around advertising it.
4. You also write (what’s with these ad hominem attacks, can you not muster a single rational argument!?): “Only a real SOB intellectual totalitarian would fail to recognize that — someone so vastly full of himself that he can see “beyond” reality to some Platonic fantasy land in his head.” Again, wrong, wrong, wrong. Kant’s project in the Critique of Pure Reason is to place strict limits on metaphysics, thus making true metaphysics possible. To that end, Kant is interested in critiquing (the German kritik means something more like ‘systematic investigation’ as opposed to the sense of the English or French “critique”) the structure of human thought. Now this “Platonic fantasy land in his head” business also shows me that you don’t understand the doctrinaire interpretations of Platonic realism (wherein the eidei are not ‘in our heads’ but exist in a topos ouranos beyond space and time), but beyond that, Kant never claims to “see beyond reality” (the noumenal sphere is strictly off-limits to human cognition), he only argues from observation to what must be the conditions for the possibility of such cognition. Remember “implicit in the entire system of thought”?)
5. Now, on to your own claims. You write “Once we forget about our essential locality — our essential point of view — the “universal” fact that all our judgments depend deeply and essentially on the one fact that we can never escape, that we are a local phenomenon that can never escape our particularity, we turn into monsters, pretending a Spock-like disengagement and mathematical precision that is impossible.”
Now, you insincerely put “universal” in scare quotes because you realize – perhaps at only an implicit level – that you are contradicting yourself. The claim that “all [key word here] our judgments depend deeply and essentially on the one fact that we can never escape” is itself an escape-attempt because this claim is, of course, a universal one. But once we try to make universal claims we “turn into monsters”. Right? Try making your statements coherent before you accuse others of being incoherent: it just reeks of projection.
Also, do you think we pretend to mathematical precision? And if not, why not? And if so, then why can we not attain such precision in other rational pursuits? Or is reason only universal when it flatters your naïve preconceptions?
You also write: “We’re animals. We can be kind and decent animals — but we are a colony of goopy cells trying to make our way through an essentially incomprehensible universe. To pretend otherwise is the fatal flaw of thought from Ireland to India.” This is a red herring and you contradict yourself again. First of all, where does Kant claim that we are not animals? Even good old Aristotle says that we are rational animals: I fail to see the point of this remark (unless you mean to say that a colony of goopy cells couldn’t comprehend the universe, in which case you have committed the fallacy of composition). Also, you contradict yourself by saying that this is “an essentially incomprehensible universe”. Well, if you have insight into the essence of the universe it’s not all that incomprehensible, is it? And even if this weren’t an obvious contradiction, I think there are quite a few scientists, mathematicians and, yes, even philosophers, who would take issue with the factual veracity of this statement.
Now, I know all of this must have been hard for you to hear – there is no bruised ego like that of the pseudo-intellectual blowhard – but I hope you will take my advice and try to think a little more carefully about what you know, and what you think you know, before you get your ass handed to you again. Also, don’t forget about that donation.
To get an echo-location on Stanley Fish, it may help to know that he is a Jew who earned his academic chops through the study of John Milton, especially “Paradise Lost.”
@vilganish:
Did you see his most recent op-ed in the times? it’s about why he likes short, tough, jewish actors.
It’s pretty sad.
(and I say this as a tall, not so tough, jew!)
@281 eatmykant
yes, that’s about it. I’m not trying to be overly strict about terms here, but rather pull things toward the obvious as the source of fruitful discussion. An obvious explanation of secularism’s incapability of removing itself of religious language and metaphors is because religion has set the historical scene wherein people express and define themselves (and keep in mind the Western-ness of their discussion). If you are a philosopher, I will not dump on your turf, though I would say that you should feel greater liberty to expound and nuance the general points rather than exposing fallacies in reasoning. I say start with the presumption that one isn’t intending to be fallacious, and move to extract what is reasonable from what is unreasonable. I won’t even bother examining the merits of your claim of question begging.
No, i never said that human beings WILL NEVER accept philosophies that invalidate the need for transcendence. As I said before, it’s not that they can’t, but that they won’t, on the whole. If you notice the Fish/Smith thesis, and correct me if my quick read is wrong, they aren’t saying this either. Look at the conclusion of the article:
“Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”
this is a critique of modern liberal discourse. This isn’t an epistemological claim, but more of a functional one regarding a prevailing view.
sure. what does this have at all to do with the article or their claims? They are saying such realizations hamper our ability to answer questions like “what are we to do?” The best way to refute this, I imagine, is to just say, “we are to do x.” But you won’t. And if you do, my guess is you’ll be fairly tentative about it. That’s how modern liberal discourse is framed. Do whatever you want, it’s all the same, just don’t do xyz. I’m guessing more than a few people find that pretty shaky stuff.
sounds like another one of those “smuggled” answers. How do humans “give worth.” How is it that they were vested of “worth” to give?
And you say some other nonsense along the way that I won’t address, aside from saying I think you are quick to apply vocabulary, take issue with irrelevancies, and become like the youth plato disdains in the republic who rip philosophy to shreds. I think your analytical skills are just fine, but I’d work on the practical judgment a bit more. See what you can do to meet the argument more along its own terms, rather than convert a book review into a philosophy seminar. I, for example, have not seen you try to take up the fish/smith stuff at its strongest. I would expect that from a philosophical dilettante but not from someone who professes to be a philosopher.
frog, Inc.: We can work out consensus using observation and formal systems. But that’s our limit. There is no place for anything “transcendental” in that reality. (And no, once again to the freshmen philosophers — that is not recursive. The negative isn’t the same as the positive, this isn’t a philosophical game, and some things really are just implicit in the entire system of thought.)
More precisely, while there may “be” transcendent/transcendental entities, they necessarily have no component impacting immanence. So, while you may choose Assertion or Refutation of the Axiom of Choice, neither position has impact on theorems only working in the enumerably infinite.
frog, Inc.: It’s the “approximations” that are morality — not some abstract principle that is “approximated”.
I reserve use of the term “ethics” to refer to the approximations. I use the term morality to refer only to the “is it OUGHT or OUGHTN’T” (poset ordering) relationship underlying.
What you appear to be asserting is that there is no “morality” as I describe, only “ethics”.
I claim these ethics reduce to a universal principle, which in turn can be taken to result from a diagonalization-like consequent of IS.
frog, Inc.: A moral sense is a historical and evolved sense — it can be informed by such things as cost-benefit, common interest, etc — but it’s not an approximation of them, but an extension of the natural feelings of kindness and decency in human beings.
Essentially, I would say “moral sense” is an incorrect terminology, and that this should be correctly termed an “ethical sense”.
I would consider that the abstract universal moral OUGHT principle exists as a philosophical prior to “the natural feelings of kindness and decency in human beings” as OUGHT principles. (The feelings may be asserted to exist as an IS statement; this, however, does not justify them as a primary OUGHT.) I’ll also note that “decency” isn’t very well defined, and cases can be constructed where acting on feeling of “kindness” may result in long-term immoral harm (for recent example, PZ mentioned last month Scientologists in Haiti giving food to patients scheduled for surgery) — indicating it is an imperfect approximation to the absolute OUGHT.
eatmykant Every claim you make is animated by a set of prior philosophical commitments, whether you realize it or not.
Using “you” to refer to Froggy in particular, or “you” in general? Some claims may be asserted simply as absolute philosophical priors, “on Faith” in essence. In my case, this is how I take the Commutativity of Logical Inclusive Disjunction. (No, I do not take Boolean logic as a prior; it is a consequent, resulting from said Commutativity together with the similar Associativity and with the Robbins Axiom.)
eatmykant Also, do you think we pretend to mathematical precision?
Actually, “mathematical precision” is a philosophical misnomer, almost an oxymoron. Mathematics can also be imprecise; EG, Arthur-Merlin probabilistic “proofs”.
eatmykant Also, you contradict yourself by saying that this is “an essentially incomprehensible universe”. Well, if you have insight into the essence of the universe it’s not all that incomprehensible, is it?
There’s a sloppiness in the word “incomprehensible”. To say “essentially incomprehensible universe” may refer to no prospect of complete finite-string complete descriptions with unary probability; this does not rule out finite-string partial descriptions of non-zero probability.
Not that I think Froggy is that subtle.
frankosaurus: And if you do, my guess is you’ll be fairly tentative about it.
Well, yes. That OUGHT statements are made tentatively should be unsurprising. Even answers to IS questions rely on a resolution to Hume’s problem of induction, which necessarily requires a probabilistic result subject to revision on further evidence (or even presenting a novel conjecture allowing improved description). By their very nature, absolute IS statements regarding evidence (as opposed to purely abstract relationships, such as mathematics) tend to be eventually found counterfactual. Since OUGHT assessments are dependent on IS assessments, and involve a further inductive step, a tentative assessment is only reasonable.
It may not be satisfying to those who want ethical absolutes, but the inherent limits of finite evidence preclude unary probability definitive answers.
abb3w #334 thanks for your time and input
I am probably way out of my sandbox here – so my ignorance and lack of sophistication may be showing but I am not convinced (assuming I read you right). To put a different way I don’t think I agree completely as I read you.
You say “science allows evaluation of additional OUGHTs by inference” – I agree. What I am saying though is science (nor anything) cannot practically speaking know in advance every ought because they cannot know every IS nor every weight associated with every value. Maybe we agree? I agree that we make approximations in advance of complete knowledge. I stand by my feeling none of it is cast in stone as decision-making values and weights vary in time and space.
As to falsifiable – I was referring to the Truth or in different terms “the absolute oughts”. Cannot think of one “absolute rule for morality” that cannot be shown lacking (falsified in my terminology) as THE rule given some test case eventually. I sense from reading you that you incline toward an absolute morality. Something that exists and we inch our way toward it (hopefully). I agree that overall we inch to some notion we have of ideal states. I do not think we inch our way to some absolute rule – nor do I believe all people view my ideal states as their ideal states. That’s why politics was invented.
You say “[inclinations in our species] reduce to particular approximations for more general expressions.” and I agree. But I am saying these inclinations do not make “natural law” in and by themselves. They are most often in violent conflict with each other to begin with. My point was (sorry for my phrasing originally) that these inclinations are not the “natural law” some people disparately seek. Some people mistake these feelings for “moral laws” – I think that is wrong to do because often they lead to wrong – not right – action. Perhaps you agree?
You say “No, the man-made rules are not morality” – and I say they are. They are the rules for the game we are playing in context. I am NOT saying they are right or wrong – nor I am saying they will be the same across time. They will not. But at a particular instant in a particular context they are our rules for the game – violate them (commit immoral acts) at your peril.
We could be agreeing – or not – sometimes the poetry of these discussions requires several readings. I haven’t yet. Again thanks for your input.
344 – correction
“As I said before, it’s not that they can’t, but that they won’t, on the whole”
pretty dumb statement to make. But what i want to express is
a) ridding language of religious or transcendent foundations isn’t strictly speaking impossible, though fairly unattractive.
b) the emphasis of the article is a critique of modern liberal discourse, not the impossibility to overhaul values and beliefs. For example, I think it’s very possible for a person to scrap religious foundations entirely, and come to grips with the premises that the universe doe not dictate meaning, there is no cosmic purpose to life, etc. That’s quite possible to do. But any coherent polity set up along those principles, no matter that they be true in the highest most verifiable sense, will not be liberal.
eatmykant wrote:
First of all, any moral realist will claim that moral facts are universal and objective, and thus subject to decontextualization – this is not just Kant here.
Uh… no.
While Moral Realism makes claim that moral facts are universal and objective, that in no way means that they are subject to decontextualization. Look at Kant’s own differentiation of murder and execution as being different moral acts, despite sharing the identity of one man killing another – sometimes with identical methodology.
Moral Realism is a pretty shaky platform to try to balance anything on precisely because decontextualization is such a failure. Killing cannot be decontextualized, and Kant’s claim that murder can be is essentially just him admitting defeat: murder being “killing” in the sum total of contexts in which it is not OK and the various sundry contexts where killing a man is OK get various other names (such as battle, execution, and so on).
The more rigorous the attempt at moral realism, the more distinct moral actions are recognized, which are often just the same actions – in different contexts. The failure to allow for specific contexts creates holes in individual schema of moral realism (such as the Inquiring Murderer), that can only really be addressed by recognizing those distinct contexts as different actions with different objective worth.
By the time you realize that indeed no two acts are actually exactly the same or of truly equivalent moral character, just as no two apples are the same exact mass or size, your “realism” has begun to look a whole lot like a muddy relativism. And until you get to that point, the realist is forced to accept the fact that a contradiction or a failure of the paradigm can be found. Because actions and events are not neatly categorizable and instead run smoothly from one to another like grains of sand eventually adding up to a heap.
now see the context of the article, what the concern is. Is smith really concerned about the erosion of definitive answers? no. He’s taking aim with liberal conceit. A person trots out hume if they want to be defenders of tradition, not for the project of certainty. The whole piece is a cultural argument.
@Frankosaurus
I appreciate your thoughtful response, but there are a few remarks I feel I should I make.
1. “An obvious explanation of secularism’s incapability of removing itself of religious language and metaphors…” But I dispute the claim that secularism is unable to remove itself from religious language. My major contention with Fish’s piece (and Smith’s assuming Fish gets Smith right) is that Fish fudges ‘secular’ for ‘scientific’ and ‘scientific’ is used in a very narrow sense. There is no reason secularism cannot avail itself of a metaphysical program – just as science is committed to the a posteriori program of doing what is shown to work, i.e., methodological naturalism. So I still think you are begging the question by assuming that secularism is incapable of divorcing itself from the discursive resources available to religions. This is, of course, something that honorable people can disagree about, I just think it’s important to recognize that this *is* a disagreement.
2.In response to – what seemed to me anyway – a pretty straightforward reconstruction of what your two statements mean, you write: “No, i never said that human beings WILL NEVER accept philosophies that invalidate the need for transcendence. As I said before, it’s not that they can’t, but that they won’t, on the whole.” Either humans, as a whole, will not, or will never, accept the meaninglessness of existence – this seems like a distinction without a difference.
3. As I said above, I take issue with Fish/Smith’s claim, particularly that secular reasons must be ‘disinterested’. I have a vested interest in how our society conducts itself and I think a sensible answer to the question: “how are we to live in a society” must begin from just such an imbrication in the fabric of society. Fish seems to be strawmanning secular reason by claiming that it must attempt to answer such questions from the universalizing perspective of the natural sciences.
4.Fish and Smith may say that the recognition of the meaninglessness of existence hampers our ability to answer the question “what are we to do” but I can just as easily turn around and say, “no, the only way to begin answering that question is through such a recognition.”. So what are we to do? Well, we should probably try to be good and kind to one another, as much as possible. Why? because it better satisfies the conditions of life (conditions we can discover through science) that we as human beings must meet in order to flourish. Why ought we to flourish? There’s really no good answer to that question, beyond, I suppose, saying that we would probably enjoy flourishing more than not flourishing. I may be wrong, or I may be right but only temporarily, and I am fully prepared to accept the consequences of such contingencies.
5.You ask: “How do humans “give worth.” How is it that they were vested of “worth” to give?” And it’s a good question. Fortunately, I have an answer. Worth or value is something we give to things – whether they are coffee mugs or human beings – by virtue of our actions. A value, in my axiology, is merely a practical norm, that is, a standard for acting. And this allows values to be relative. So, for example, let’s say that I can either open one door and find a basket full of money or I can open another door and find a nice juicy steak. Now, since I’m well-enough fed and foresee no scarcity in the future, I’ll chose the money because it is of greater relative value at the moment. If, on the other hand, I have been starving for weeks and couldn’t go another day without eating, then I would chose the steak, because – at the moment – it holds greater value for me. Neither steak nor money have intrinsic value, only relative value, a value I “give” by virtue of my actions. Humans, like all other animals, value things in this way.
6. I’m not sure what youth in the Republic you are referring to (Thrasymachus? I don’t think he’s a youth. The only youths in the dialogue – Polemarchus, Adeimantus and Glaucon – pretty much fawn over Socrates) but I don’t think I am quibbling with irrelevancies by pointing out flaws in an argument. In philosophy we do not just argue conclusions, we argue the path that gets us to conclusions, and in that spirit, I took issue with some of your premises and inferences.
7. And finally, you’re right, I’ve not attacked the Fish/Smith article because I am frankly not all that interested in what seems to me to be a pretty weak argument. As I pointed out above, there are some question-begging issues with Fish’s premises, and I think I’ve addressed them here, if only obliquely. But, in my defense, no one has asked my opinion of Fish and Smith: I have only gone after arguments in the comments I either respected but disagree with (yours) or that I disagree with and have no respect for whatsoever (karamazov and frog,inc).
@FrankT:
I never said that moral realism was a coherent philosophical program, only that the claim “moral facts are universal and objective” allows for the decontextualization of our moral intuitions. And while I appreciate the strength of your reductio argument against moral realism, it is nonetheless the case that we – if we are moral realists – are not required to make a distinction between killing in battle, murder, and execution: we could say they are all equally wrong. This seems to show that a rigorous moral realism is possible if and only if it truly does allow for absolute decontextualization. So I suppose I disagree with your claim that “The more rigorous the attempt at moral realism, the more distinct moral actions are recognized, which are often just the same actions – in different contexts.” To the contrary, I think a rigorous moral realism would resist all attempts to contextualize actions for precisely the reasons you give below. Thus, we might say “killing is always wrong, no matter what” and it would be perfectly consistent with our more basic claims, namely, that moral facts (like the prohibition against killing) are objective, universal, immutable and invariant.
@Frankosaurus,
I didn’t see your correction before I posted my comment, so consider my point in that regard moot. I’ve gotta run, but let me try to speak to your two points quickly:
a) Is ridding religious/transcendent language from politics unattractive? I suppose it might be linguistically unattractive – we like our soaring rhetoric and all that – but I think it is nonetheless necessary. Perhaps we just need better stylists?
b) While I agree that much modern liberal discourse does borrow from religious discourse – who could dispute that? – I don’t think that such borrowing is a necessary condition for liberal discourse. I suppose it depends on how we define liberalism. On the one hand, if we take liberalism to be that which recognizes the inherent (key word) dignity of the individual, then yes, I agree such discursive does colonize religious concepts. But we could also conceive of liberalism as a system wherein the potential for individual growth and self-expression is not unduly hindered, and in that sense, I don’t see a conflict (insofar as we predicate that duty to the individual on suitably secular [in my sense, not Fish’s] grounds.)
3 remarks, first the sneaky one. Secularism is defined against religiosity, so by definition it will never be completely detached from religious discourse.
second, i observe your sentence includes the terms “assume” and “divorce” – whose religious resonance still ring through. This is just a point of irony that, I’m sure under better sentence construction, could be avoided.
third, i think it is culturally impossible for the foreseeable future for secularism not to continue hijacking religious territory in the west. Pick up some legal cases sometime and take a look at what you’re up against. And not just constitutional law, look at property law, tort law, criminal law. A novel idea in science or philosophy, like reforming the idea of personal autonomy (originating in religious arguments about what vests the individual with a nature worthy of non-interference) to fit in with our eagerly anticipated secular metaphysics is going to be quite the slog to be reflected in the books.
there is no reason communism can’t work…in theory. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
well, you can see that the big problem with secular metaphysics is that it doesn’t have any fixed roots. Not like God. Nice and tidy for many problems. But if secularism needs to work overtime to find a system that is completely justifiable and irreligious on every ground, then yeah, chances are most people are going to lose interest because of the pure complexity of thought required. As I said, a functional problem. You can’t, for example, tell me why people have “worth” without getting into a fairly lengthy set of reasons. but agree to disagree if you wish.
your point #2. I caught that, and just in the nick of time, I hope, to have saved myself some embarrassment. my answer is listed above.
Fish seems to be strawmanning…
well, is he, or isn’t he?
I would just keep in context the cultural argument. The virtue of normative questions isn’t to be analyzed purely on the possibility of answers we can provide, but the answers we have provided. Fish/Smith aren’t trying to tear down secularism only to be replaced by religious dictatorship, but they try to put the breaks on its conceit by asking it to justify itself. If secularism’s response is “you go first” then all of a sudden things get unproductive. This is where reason breaks down and judgment enters.
what does flourish even mean? Seems pretty empty. And it’s not something, for example, that is absent in Christianity. THe whole “be fruitful and multiply” thing. Weren’t you the one talking about distinctions without differences? Or do you want your definition of flourish to mean what you said it all boils down to anyway, “accepting contingencies”. Some flourishing.
this is called a rationalization. it is not how we have seen humans value others historically, or across all cultures. So its not descriptive at all about how we go about things in all instances. But don’t think I didn’t notice in this chess game of ours that “worth” became “value” very quickly in your depiction of how things work. Perhaps you prefer to erase the word “human worth” from the dictionary as it is such a nuisance? And notice that your depiction isn’t the foundation of modern liberal discourse, which is the heart of the matter. It retains the concept of instrinsic worth.
i’m surprised, though, that a person who earlier cited After Virtue with approval would be trying to thump Intrinsic worth with a theory of marginal returns.
—
Re plato – it’s been a while since I read it. I just have a dim memory that socrates was rebuking someone for being like the youthful philosophers
who love nothing more to tear apart ideas like dogs. I’m sure it’s in there, somewhere.
impossible, say Fish/Smith. You will either require God, or need to create another one. individual growth and self-expression are empty concepts. Growing where? Expressing what? Just because they are possibly non-religious in the Christian sense doesn’t mean that they are somehow meaningful.
in addition, some scientists would raise eyebrows at the dualism you more than likely employ to justify your values, especially “self-expression.”
in any case my concerns about liberalism are partly shared with Fish/Smith, but extend to other liberal premises anyway. I much prefer the republican ideal of “lacking the capacity to dominate” rather the liberal one of “non-interference.” So if one wants to extoll the potential of liberalism, I think all its premises need to be addressed.
@Usagichan (#318)
I think this shows we are arguing two different things.
It doesn’t, it was meant to show that again CBA is inadequate to explain such behaviours – but again I think we’re arguing two different things. If you’re going to put innate capacities in the brain as being CBAs then there’s no point to me giving any examples that don’t fit CBA behaviour in terms of agency.
You could argue anything that way – altruism can be explained in cost / benefit because the emotional pay-off is given in exchange for the costs of helping another.
Perhaps not, though I think it’s misleading to talk about it in that way. It’s clear from experiments in ethical behaviour that there are innate capacities in the brain that make us behave the way we do. And when you say such things as “morality is cost / benefit”, you’re not capturing the essence of the way the idea is being framed. I’d say you’re engaging in greedy reductionism.
One more example, it was recently found that altruistic behaviour emerges on slow-sinking ships as opposed to fast-sinking ships. “The shortened disaster time favoured instinctive fight-or-flight behaviour, whereas the lengthier disaster led to the appearance of social norms. We know the first is driven by the rush of adrenaline to the brain, but we don’t know exactly when the altruistic behaviour takes over,”
Now this is where the cost / benefit analysis to me falls over. Almost the same situation, very different outcomes. And I’m sure you or anyone else can weave a CBA story into why the brain would behave differently depending on the threat at hand. But in doing so it demonstrates the reason why its wrong to talk about morality in such simplistic terms. It needs to be distinguished between what is innate, what is instinctual and what is reasoned – and there may be CBA reasons underlying all of it but it doesn’t capture the essence of the situation to explain it in terms of CBA.
#353 etc.
My view – ToE and Ecology tells me a lot more about “morality” than any religion ever has or will and indeed most of our objectively best morality is a consequence of genetic algorithms of sorts not revelation I would hazard to say.
Terminology – well religion shares a language with all disciplines. No surprise there. But I’d say out best morality exudes the notions of ecology and not religion – and indeed it is this higher power stuff that unwittingly stole the language and forms of nature.
The “west” has religion that has emphasis on god centric revelation – others now and through time (quantitatively many more people) got/get their inspiration from nature.
I am sure you all can nuance all this better than I can and also rip my crude attempts to explain apart. But putting aside high falutin language answer these:
what rational decision do we make without considering context and reality?
what rule “accounts for” all contexts and priorities in advance?
what has ever been laid down in the realm of absolute morality that has not seen its legit challenges and contradictions rock it significantly?
Maybe it is just me but “states of being” (the 10000 feet level) seem more amenable to idealizations but even there for example (in argumentation) one can make a “moral” case for the state of peace and a “moral” case for the state of turmoil. How can rules that are flying at ground level be more certain.
Ah moon of my delight – will she not find me when she casts her light on me. The only truth – the only certainty – is change.
eatmykant: Do I detect a whiff of Popper in your statement? But I do agree – though not all philosophers, such as Levinas, would – that philosophy ought to be a totalizing (if not totalitarian) endeavor, for the same reason I call you a crypto-philosopher: you can’t escape metaphysics or epistemology and any attempt to do so ends up in…metaphysics and epistemology! But I must ask – don’t math and science also “own the damn universe”? And isn’t the way we conceive of the universe – as a collection of facts and their relations in the metaphysics you are articulating – not itself dependent on prior philosophical commitments?
I’m not calling you an imbecile — in actual fact I’m not even calling Kant an imbecile, that’s a rhetorical flourish, a metonymy.
I’m calling philosophy imbecilic. The entire tradition, from the Greeks onward.
Levinas made me simply gag. A perfect example of empty-headed abstraction. And all your arguments of “dependent metaphysics” go exactly in that trash heap.
It all assumes that a “metaphysics” is even a meaningful statement. It’s nonsense. There is mathematics (formal and therefore universal), there is science (observational and consensual), and there is everything else — and I refuse to accept that this is a metaphysics beyond a simple categorization that can be done by a well-educated child.
You try to trap others in your language — an old rhetorical game. Epistemology is simple — there are few disagreements in fact, as opposed to in philosophical games. Folks who aren’t hanging out in an agora agree that you know things by either observing them, by revelation, or by tradition. There’s nothing there to make a philosophical argument — you listen to the voices in your head or you don’t, you make up long lists of “begats” or you don’t, and everyone’s central “epistemology” is that you look at things to learn things.
It’s too damn easy. Once you cut out the jargon — you see that it’s all pretty empty. The only “universals” that are trivially universal are mathematics, and a few “facts” — you have a point of view, you exist, there’s an external world. And we know these things by observing how we act in the world. We don’t need no stinkin’ philosophy to determine this.
No conversation makes sense unless we agree on those basic principles — so we can’t argue them, except by assuming nonsense. That’s what makes philosophy a pale shadow of theology.
There are no philosophical problems, only problematic philosophers. As soon as you assume that there are, you’ve taken an incredibly wrong term. I can see nothing of value that philosophers have produced, other than codifying what was already practice behind some absurd abstract principle. That even goes to Popper.
There’s no totally to totalize. There’s no axiomatic truths of fact, other than the few we need to make sense of communication. There’s a few common bad habits and a few good habits.
I reject the entire language of philosophy as based on lies, stupidities and grammatical oddities. It’s a mere formalization of “revelation” — and I don’t need that. I keep the voices in my head on a tight leash — call that a metaphysics if you will. That an $2.50 will buy you a doppio espresso at Starbucks.
The idea seems to be that unless we have something or someone external to humanity to enforce our morality, we somehow lose the normative license that grants us justification to capture and imprison violent predatory sociopaths. An odd notion, to be sure, but it certainly does seem to be a very common moral insight. – Joe Bleau
Exactly: it’s so common because ethically, many theists have never matured beyond “It’s wrong because Daddy says so”. They literally cannot imagine that a secular morality is possible: a morality which recognises that it neither has nor could have nor needs any “ultimate justification”, but is a work in progress, arising out of our biology as intelligent social animals, shaped by our specific cultural inheritance and historical accident, but subject to rational criticism and improvement. (Very like science in those respects, of course.) I say “many theists” because in practice, though not in theory (as Dawkins notes in Ch.7 of TGD), a large number do in fact take part in the ongoing construction of that secular morality – like Catholics ignoring the stupid and wicked nonsense the hierarchy teaches about sex, Muslims horrified at the idea of living under sharia law, etc.
Oh, and per math being totalizing:
Math says nothing. It’s just a consistent pattern of marks on a paper. So it’s not totalizing — it’s just a fact that we can make mechanical transformations of marks on paper that don’t clash.
Philosophy on the other hand, is all thinking from before we understood that. It’s barbarian squawking from the ancient days (pre-1900s).
abb3w: I would consider that the abstract universal moral OUGHT principle exists as a philosophical prior to “the natural feelings of kindness and decency in human beings” as OUGHT principles.
Well, that’s where we disagree. I don’t agree that there are almost any “philosophical priors”. The only things necessary to talk are a few principles of existence, external reality, etc. That all talk of philosophical priors assume an impossible external point of view — aka, they are nicely phrased gibberish.
It’s really hard to discuss with folks you think are muttering gibberish, though! As I said, I think reasonable people dropped all concept of philosophy after Nietzche, Wittgenstein and Godel. They killed for me anything that could reasonable called “philosophy”.
abb3w: There’s a sloppiness in the word “incomprehensible”. To say “essentially incomprehensible universe” may refer to no prospect of complete finite-string complete descriptions with unary probability; this does not rule out finite-string partial descriptions of non-zero probability.
Not that I think Froggy is that subtle.
No — I happen to be a bit subtler, since your description is, errrm, incomplete. I prefer a less technical approach to questions that are not mere science. Incomprehensibility encompasses both the lack of a TOE in your sense, with the subjective reality that for any given individual, the totality of their knowledge is necessarily not even a finite-string partial description (formally self-consistent) but is actually inconsistent and composed of shards of insight.
That’s the reality of a human mind, whether or not in theory fuzzy partial self-consistent descriptions are possible. We don’t, ever, in practice reach there — we are as real, living entities, full of shit. So, reducing our issues to formal systems can sometimes be useful — but is often just high falutin’ nonsense, particularly where the system is under-determined (i.e., almost everything).
Don’t get me wrong — I luvs the maths. It’s a beautiful tool, as long as you don’t take it too seriously. I think it’s even a necessary tool to really call what you’re doing science.
I just don’t think the be all and end all is either the maths or the science, given that the reality of what we are (temporally and spatially limited to such an extent that almost every problem is woefully under-determined). There’s practically nothing we can derive from math in terms of what our universe is like, and there’s awfully little of science we use in 99% of what we do, which is figuring out how to get an apple in our mouth, avoid embarrassing ourselves with load farting noises, and keeping our children from running in front of a car.
@eatmykant #341:
1. “Transcendental” does not mean “transcendent”. You write “We can work out consensus using observation and formal systems. There is no place for anything “transcendental” in that reality.” You then go on to say – this is too rich! – that “some things really are just implicit in the entire system of thought.” But that’s exactly what transcendental means!
— Wow, to go from a some really minimal “assumptions” to 5 cent words is really impressive. I’m not assuming “conditions of knowledge” — but conditions of communication. If you want to call that “transcendental”, have at it, but it would blow your precision.
2. You write “Just look at Kant’s “morality” — no sane human being would recognize it at anything of the kind. It’s just simple bullshit that justifies atrocities to think that moral quandaries should be decontextualized.” First of all, any moral realist will claim that moral facts are universal and objective, and thus subject to decontextualization – this is not just Kant here. Now, besides your utter lack of argument (why shouldn’t moral quandaries be decontextualized? Couldn’t contextualizing every moral quandary lead to just the same atrocities?) and your argumentum ad hitlerum (Kant is the efficient cause of 20th century totalitarianisms? You really do love Popper, huh?), you simply get Kant wrong. Of course, you can just say, “he is full of fetid crap” or “he’s a pestilent savage” etc, and boy does that make you sound smart! But if you care to actually engage with his arguments, I will kindly present them to you. For my services, I request that you donate a small sum of money to your local literacy campaign. (Oh, and don’t worry, I’ll come back for your own moral claims later!)
— I don’t care to engage with him at all. That’s what you’re missing here. The entire body of philosophy is crap — so your “Courtier’s reply” here is pointless. I reject all metaphysical speculation, all questions of necessity beyond what we need to talk to each other. “Mathematical necessity” is a different can of worms — since the necessity is part of the very structure of that construction.
3. You write (with such flair!) “And I can give a simple example of what kind of monster Kant was. He held that it was categorically wrong to lie (it would contradict some principle of language, blah-blah-blah). Therefore, it would be wrong to lie to keep a child from being murdered, or any of the umpteen other cases that one can come up with.”
Oh, well, “principle of language blah-blah-blah”, were did you pick up such precise descriptors? Now, first of all, you are absolutely wrong to say that Kant’s categorical rejection of the morality of lying is based on any principle of language. It is based on a principle of reason, and, for that matter, he doesn’t say it’s necessarily wrong to lie (to, say, the Nazi’s looking for Jews in your attic), he only says that it is, at best amoral. Now, why would it be amoral? Because, for Kant, morality is about acting freely and to act freely is to act rationally, i.e., to act in accordance with the rational principle contained in the categorical imperative. So, when we violate the categorical imperative because of a contingency of context, we are being motivated by something other than our reason: namely, our appetites or desires. Thus, we desire that the Jews living in our attic to keep living and we let that desire – and not our reason – dictate our actions, thus we are not acting freely and are not therefore acting morally. Kant doesn’t say you are wrong to lie in such a circumstance, only that you are not rationally justified by consequences.
— That’s just crap. It in no way goes to my argument — to say you are not morally justified to lie to save our neighbors from the Nazis is exactly monstrous. The fact that Kantian morality disagrees just shows that Kantian morality in no way matches human intuition about morality — aka, it’s an abuse of language to even call it morality. And your fancy use of “efficient cause” is once again, just empty jargonizing. Kant isn’t the “cause” of the Nazis — Kant is part of a cultural tradition, a mind-set that lead to a number of atrocities; the inclination to think that there was a universal reason free of context is the assumptions of all totalitarian regimes.
You also write: “Now, anyone with a moral sense above that of a kindergartner would immediately recognize that lying is often morally correct.” Is this really the case? I am not a Kantian (it was either eatmykant, hegelskegels or hobbesnob and eatmykant sounded dirtiest) but I don’t think lying is often morally correct: even a kindergartner knows that! Perhaps you are an immoral, lying pig, but I wouldn’t go around advertising it.
— You do know the difference between “often” and “usually” don’t you? Often means not rarely. If you have a spouse, you know that often, maybe once a week or more, a lie of omission is the moral act — to avoid the “Am I fat” question — or a lie of commission — to shake your head that yes, your boss/co-worker/professor etc, is a jerk.
— I mean, anyone who’s not a complete jerk doesn’t go around spouting everything thing they think is true on the slightest pretext. And I’d argue further, that anyone who claims otherwise is either a hermit or a liar — and a liar on something important, where moral opprobium should stand.
4. You also write (what’s with these ad hominem attacks, can you not muster a single rational argument!?): “Only a real SOB intellectual totalitarian would fail to recognize that — someone so vastly full of himself that he can see “beyond” reality to some Platonic fantasy land in his head.” Again, wrong, wrong, wrong. Kant’s project in the Critique of Pure Reason is to place strict limits on metaphysics, thus making true metaphysics possible. To that end, Kant is interested in critiquing (the German kritik means something more like ‘systematic investigation’ as opposed to the sense of the English or French “critique”) the structure of human thought. Now this “Platonic fantasy land in his head” business also shows me that you don’t understand the doctrinaire interpretations of Platonic realism (wherein the eidei are not ‘in our heads’ but exist in a topos ouranos beyond space and time), but beyond that, Kant never claims to “see beyond reality” (the noumenal sphere is strictly off-limits to human cognition), he only argues from observation to what must be the conditions for the possibility of such cognition. Remember “implicit in the entire system of thought”?)
— You’re claiming not to understand that Platonic was used loosely there? To fail to understand that since I think philosophy is crap, I care about the precise boundaries of one club or another? Whether your church believes in the “other universe” or “a magical thought universe”. It’s like complaining that I don’t appropriately distinguish between Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox theology. It’s laughable Courtier’s Reply again.
5. Now, on to your own claims. You write “Once we forget about our essential locality — our essential point of view — the “universal” fact that all our judgments depend deeply and essentially on the one fact that we can never escape, that we are a local phenomenon that can never escape our particularity, we turn into monsters, pretending a Spock-like disengagement and mathematical precision that is impossible.”
Now, you insincerely put “universal” in scare quotes because you realize – perhaps at only an implicit level – that you are contradicting yourself. The claim that “all [key word here] our judgments depend deeply and essentially on the one fact that we can never escape” is itself an escape-attempt because this claim is, of course, a universal one. But once we try to make universal claims we “turn into monsters”. Right? Try making your statements coherent before you accuse others of being incoherent: it just reeks of projection.
— No, I put universal in scare quotes to say that their was an elision their that was easy to figure out. By universal principles, as I’ve used it over and over again, I merely mean the basic assumptions of communications or the universality of transforming figures on a paper (math) — which should be obvious from context.
Also, do you think we pretend to mathematical precision? And if not, why not? And if so, then why can we not attain such precision in other rational pursuits? Or is reason only universal when it flatters your naïve preconceptions?
— Because mathematical precision is only possible in highly determined contexts. Most semi-rational pursuits are not conducive to mathematical precision, because we lack the data to make them mathematical. Philosophy lacks both data and math — it’s just blow-hardin’
You also write: “We’re animals. We can be kind and decent animals — but we are a colony of goopy cells trying to make our way through an essentially incomprehensible universe. To pretend otherwise is the fatal flaw of thought from Ireland to India.” This is a red herring and you contradict yourself again. First of all, where does Kant claim that we are not animals? Even good old Aristotle says that we are rational animals: I fail to see the point of this remark (unless you mean to say that a colony of goopy cells couldn’t comprehend the universe, in which case you have committed the fallacy of composition). Also, you contradict yourself by saying that this is “an essentially incomprehensible universe”. Well, if you have insight into the essence of the universe it’s not all that incomprehensible, is it? And even if this weren’t an obvious contradiction, I think there are quite a few scientists, mathematicians and, yes, even philosophers, who would take issue with the factual veracity of this statement.
— answered elsewhere.
— finally, please learn to properly use ad-hominem. It’s one of my pet peeves. An insult in general is not an ad-hominem. It’s only an ad-hominem when it’s the basis of the argument — not either a rhetorical flourish (a metonymy, an element of tone, etc) or a consequence of the argument. Really, it’s annoying coming from someone claiming precision in language, a lying insult.
— How do you distinguish a philosopher from a theologian? The former is too cowardly to just come out and say it’s all coming out of revelation. Any field that considers the thoughts of flea-ridden, syphilitic cave-men (and yes, that is an ad-hom at credibility) as references and not historical artifacts shows it’s own emptiness. Biology doesn’t cite Darwin. Mathematicians use Euclid as a training exercise for children. But somehow philosophy considers the thoughts of ancient slavers and barely-out-of-the-middle-ages 16th century bullshit artists as relevant.
Of course, I meant 18th century and not 16th to avoid the sidetrack on dates.
kel @356
I think I got the wrong end of the stick from your previous arguments/ examples (and indeed we were talking about two different things). My intent was not to say that there are no innate capacities in the brain (as you say, there is much experimental evidence to suggest there are), but to suggest that just because there are innate capacities, doesn’t mean they emerged from nothing (or were somehow inserted by supernatural agency).
I meant to use CBA as a simple tool to provide potential explanations for these innate behaviours. In practice I have no doubt that the more sophisticated reactions come down to more than a simple CBA (and indeed CBA itself is probably far more complex than the simplistic models my limited understanding can propose).
Where I think I diverge from you is where you say
because I don’t see any of the innate behaviours as either moral or amoral, they are simply a part of the animal in question. Morality seems to me to be a separate framework that intellectually evaluates conscious behaviour against a given model (of course the source of the given model seems to be the main point of many of the other posts here). For me innate/ instinctual behaviours are simply not part of the same discussion.
Despite ivankaramazov’s promises, the Enlightenment remains undemolished. How diappointing.
^disappointing
“The neat – and for you, obviously frustrating – thing about philosophy is that it’s inescapable. Every claim you make is animated by a set of prior philosophical commitments, whether you realize it or not.”
Pot? Kettle. Kettle? Pot.
Indeed. I keep forgetting that this argument actually needs to be made. The whole question should have been resolved ~138 years ago, it’s amazing that in 2010 that the case still needs to be made.
Perhaps this is the case, though again I think this is a different argument. That we can look at, say, the innate sense of fairness and see how it factors into our thinking, or looking at the role of emotion in moral decision making; it is these that to me show that “morality is cost benefit analysis” is what Dan Dennett would call a deepity.
But our innate behaviours often form part of our moral core. How can you reconcile this but to exclude much of what is part of our ethics as merely instinctual?
eatmyKant wrote:
Thus, we might say “killing is always wrong, no matter what” and it would be perfectly consistent with our more basic claims, namely, that moral facts (like the prohibition against killing) are objective, universal, immutable and invariant.
Yeah, but then we get into the problem that inaction is no less of a choice than action is. If making the choice that kills a man is always wrong regardless of contexts, then you’re always wrong, all the time. There are seven billion people on Earth and every one of them will die. And your choices, your actions and inactions, could prolong the lives of any of them, and by extension your failure to do so is shortening the lives (and thus “killing”) all of them.
The fact that you aren’t getting off a plane in Santiago to go rebuild sanitation systems in Chile means that people are going to die. Your choices killed those people as surely as if you had pulled the trigger yourself.
Now, bring context into the equation and you can make a pretty cogent argument that whatever else you are doing is also fairly important and that you aren’t the only person failing to depose the junta in Rangoon that is purposefully starving Naga tribes people in the western provinces of Myanmar – and it’s not like you’re one of the people who is giving the dictatorship money and guns. And thus your guilt over those particular deaths is small enough that there is no reason to feel any shame.
But bereft of context you can’t escape guilt for the killings of every single man, woman, and child on Earth. You make series of choices, and seven billion people die before they would have had you made different choices. Sufficiently reductionist and decontextualized moral realism explodes like a Star Trek robot talking to Kirk. Without contextualizing choices and events, you hit a contradiction and a divide by zero error right away.
Sorry for the delay. On the off chance anyone is still paying attention….
ConcernedJoe: What I am saying though is science (nor anything) cannot practically speaking know in advance every ought because they cannot know every IS nor every weight associated with every value. Maybe we agree?
Mostly agree, but with a difference in emphasis.
Not only can science not know every IS, Science also cannot know ANY IS with absolute reliability. This limitation, however, is not a practical obstacle; science can make inferences about the probabilities of IS. Similarly, one may use those probabilities of what IS to make assessments about OUGHT — presuming, of course, that you have some IS-OUGHT bridge at hand.
The core of Science is the testing of INDUCTIVE hypotheses. (Highly technical digression: the assumption of AH-complexity bound allows Hume’s problem of Induction to be resolved in limited sense on a probabilistic greedy-search basis, via competitive testing for minimum description length induction. Science results as an expression of the resulting greedy search algorithm.) The methodology of science already presumes you don’t know everything, so why should not knowing everything be any more a problem for “engineering” questions of OUGHT than “science” questions of IS?
ConcernedJoe: But I am saying these inclinations do not make “natural law” in and by themselves.
Of course not; that is putting the cart before the horse. The underlying natural law is what produces these inclinations.
ConcernedJoe: They are most often in violent conflict with each other to begin with.
Yes; this is because they are both finite and approximate. Usually, there are further rules for resolving conflict. For example, Judaic tradition forbids eating pork; however, in a situation where the choices are “eat pork” or “starve”, Rabbinic tradition says (as IAmNotJewish understand) that the rule of survival trumps the rule against pork. Thus, once may reconcile the two by composing a more complicated compound rule on the lines of “thou shalt not starve; and thou shalt not eat pork, save when the alternative is starvation”. (See also FrankT @#349 on “killing” versus “murder”.)
ConcernedJoe: Some people mistake these feelings for “moral laws” – I think that is wrong to do because often they lead to wrong – not right – action. Perhaps you agree?
Certainly. Any human rule — even “it feels right/wrong” — is necessarily only a finite approximation. However, the rules are subject to evolutionary variant-reproduction-and-competitive-selection pressures. People or societies with really “bad” variant rules like “kill absolutely everyone” tend to die out quickly– and the rules they instantiate with them; those with “good” rules tend to prosper; and in between there’s random-walk drift at the neutral equilibrium.
ConcernedJoe: You say “No, the man-made rules are not morality” – and I say they are.
When I say “the man-made rules are not morality”, I’m making the assertion in a definitional sense; when I say “morality”, the object referred to is not given the same definition as “the man-made rules”. The object referred to as “man-made rules” is trivially an instance of the object defined when I refer to as “ethics”.
It’s not clear whether you’re objecting to the particular symbol combinations, or to the underlying concepts. If the former, I’ll note that many philosophers and anthropologists point them the other way around, using the word “ethics” for the concept where I use the word “morality” (and vice-versa). If the latter, and you seek to claim that “the man-made rules” are in fact not merely approximation, but identical to the principle I identify as “morality”… that is a highly non-trivial assertion. If you think you can show this, I would be mildly interested.
ConcernedJoe: I am NOT saying they are right or wrong – nor I am saying they will be the same across time.
I am saying that the degree of approximation — and thus, the extent they are “right or wrong” — can (philosophically, if not always practically) be determined by probabilistic inference; and I assert that morality is invariant over time, because the particular time is an input variable to the function. By analogy: suppose in a C12 diamond crystal (of some fixed number of atoms and shape, at some fixed temperature, in a vacuum…), the density varies over time. This does not mean “the laws of physics vary over time”. Rather, it means that the universal law that describes the relationship includes “what time is it” as an input variable (along with temperature, pressure, et cetera).
Ethics vary from time to time, individual to individual, culture to culture. Morality is an invariant relationship, because anything that would vary is an input to the relationship.
ConcernedJoe: But at a particular instant in a particular context they are our rules for the game – violate them (commit immoral acts) at your peril.
Your ethical rules are your rules. My rules are likely very similar, but are not identical. Morality is the rule governing both; and the real peril is not if my ethics lead me to violate your ethics, but if my ethics leads me to violate morality.
FrankT: While Moral Realism makes claim that moral facts are universal and objective, that in no way means that they are subject to decontextualization.
Depends what you mean by “decontextualization”. While morality is universal and objective, the particular context is one of the functional inputs. (Which leads to interesting cases, where in some hypothetical it may be the most moral available option for me that I choose trying to stab you, it may still be the most moral available option for you that you choose trying to prevent me from doing so.) Contrariwise, morality is a pattern relationship, abstracted from any particular contexts that are input. As the context inputs vary, so does the output poset-ordering function for the choices.
FrankT: And until you get to that point, the realist is forced to accept the fact that a contradiction or a failure of the paradigm can be found.
…for any particular finite paradigm set-of-rules. A higher cardinality set-of-rule may fully describe the lower cardinality set-of-situations. On the other hand, this higher cardinality is impossible to fully represent in lower cardinality. On the gripping hand, this does not preclude making finite approximations to the higher cardinality expression using the lower cardinality case; it just means all expressions will be imperfect.
(“Cardinality” is actually the wrong word, but more likely to be familiar. The actual relationship is “of complexity higher in the arithmetical hierarchy” — able to solve the halting problem for all cases in the lower set.)
frankosaurus: A person trots out hume if they want to be defenders of tradition, not for the project of certainty
Errr… no. I trot out Hume because he was the one who is best noted for that question. I trot out the Vitanyi-Li paper on minimum description length induction (doi:10.1109/18.825807) for giving an answer to the question.
ConcernedJoe: ToE and Ecology tells me a lot more about “morality” than any religion ever has or will and indeed most of our objectively best morality is a consequence of genetic algorithms of sorts not revelation I would hazard to say.
Substitute “best ethics” for “best morality” in that sentence, and I would agree.
ConcernedJoe: The “west” has religion that has emphasis on god centric revelation – others now and through time (quantitatively many more people) got/get their inspiration from nature.
As philosophical discipline, Science still does not care whether your conjecture is inspired by an apple falling by moonlight, dreams of cannibal snakes, drinking too much coffee, or a choir of seraphim delivering it inscribed in platinum on tablets of gold. (As anthropological practice, science may care about co-authorship for publication in the last instance.) What Science most cares about is how the hypothesis tests in competition to alternative hypotheses.
ConcernedJoe: what rational decision do we make without considering context and reality?
Mathematics and propositional logic; the language we use for describing that context, and the defining of relationships between language expressions. ZF-set-theoretic and Boolean dominate, but there are alternatives. (Note Boolean is not necessarily binary.) One might also include the assumption of pattern, which allows identification of correspondence between that language and reality.
Essentially, if you consider the decision of how to consider context as having the potential to be “rational” or “irrational”, that decision must be a philosophical prior to the considering of context.
frog, Inc.: There is mathematics (formal and therefore universal), there is science (observational and consensual), and there is everything else
I would subdivide mathematics into propositional logic and the rest of mathematics. The axioms of propositional logic define how the premises of mathematics interconnect.
frog, Inc.: There’s no axiomatic truths of fact
I suspect you are trying to say there are no axiomatic unary probability statements about the elements of reality.
frog, Inc.: I reject the entire language of philosophy as based on lies, stupidities and grammatical oddities.
I prefer a set-theoretic approach for formalizing the language into a more rigorous form.
frog, Inc.: Math says nothing. It’s just a consistent pattern of marks on a paper. So it’s not totalizing — it’s just a fact that we can make mechanical transformations of marks on paper that don’t clash.
Math does not say anything about the particular correspondences of reality and symbol. However, it is totalizing, in that it has components with correspondence to any self-consistent externality of entities with rules of interrelationship.
This gets into some subtleties of Godel’s core paper, and common misunderstandings of what it says. Yes, any self-consistent system must be incomplete. However, to show this the paper as a precursor step ALSO shows that a sufficiently powerful self-consistent system A can represent any self-consistent system B, even if B allows resolving questions that A cannot.
frog, Inc.: I don’t agree that there are almost any “philosophical priors”.
Any philosophical statement that allows inference to a consquent is a prior to the consequent. Any philosophical assertion is thus either a prior to others or a dead end; any philosophical assertion similarly either has priors itself (taken as inference), or is an ultimate prior (taken on faith). I presume you are not trying to reject inference categorically (since among other difficulties that requires rejection of the construction of premise [P AND P] from premise P), but trying to indicate there are very few ultimate priors. (Sorry if I misunderstand.)
I would agree that there are very few philosophical ultimate priors. At present, there appear four categories; in three, a single prior suffices.
1) Propositional logic. Wolfram’s Axiom is sufficient for construction; personally, I prefer the Robbins Algebra construction, as I find the axioms more comprehensible. Either way, the result is Boolean equivalent.
2) Mathematics. I currently consider core what might be termed ZF-minus-P: the Axioms of Extensionality, Unordered Pair, Subsets, Sum Set, Infinity, Replacement, and Foundation. (Axioms of Choice and Power Set I don’t care about; assert or refute as you prefer.) There’s probably a better alternative, but it’s conventional enough.
3) Pattern. If you want the formalities, I take as prior that reality produces evidence with a pattern that is of complexity recognizable by some ordinal degree of hypercomputation.
4) The nature of OUGHT, as a particular form of pattern; already discussed above.
For the first two categories, there are a number of equivalent alternatives, where A reduces to B and B reduces to A.
frog, Inc.: As I said, I think reasonable people dropped all concept of philosophy after Nietzche, Wittgenstein and Godel.
I would agree most philosophers wandered off into la-la land after Godel; largely because the math has gotten too hard for a pack of handwaving English majors. Most “Reasonable” people also gave up, similarly because even Godel uses math harder than they can easily handle, and the benefits of learning that much math are limited.
frog, Inc.: That’s the reality of a human mind, whether or not in theory fuzzy partial self-consistent descriptions are possible.
Oh, that. That just means human conceptions may just be approximations that aren’t even self consistent.
frog, Inc.: We don’t, ever, in practice reach there — we are as real, living entities, full of shit.
Ah, you’re a “full-bowel” eyes-hard-shut pessimist. This is as wrong as an “empty-bowel” wide-eyed optimist.
I’m a pragmatist; yeah, there’s shit, but that’s not the same as completely full of shit.
frog, Inc.: There’s practically nothing we can derive from math in terms of what our universe is like
“Practically nothing” looks pessimist again. It’s trivially easy to derive an enumerably infinite set of descriptions, and equally trivial to any of this set corresponds to our universe– although also trivial to show most are, in some way, wrong. It’s NON-trivial to identify which descriptions actually correspond in what ways to experience… but mathematics provides tools (greedy search algorithm on minimum description length induction) for that as well. As a practical matter, there are resource limits for the computations; but again, mathematics provides tools for getting practical approximations within resource limits.
abb3w:
Here’s the crux — I don’t see it as “optimistic” or “pessimistic” to define the limits of our knowledge. And that’s what I care about — not about what may be computable, but what we can actually compute.
That depends on the limits of our hardware — born and extended — and on the problem at hand. That latter depends primarily on whether the data we have under-determines the system or not. These are just questions of fact, with no hope or dream.
I don’t see it as a “better world” if psychology could be reduced to a mathematical abstraction — just an impossible world. I don’t want a god (a universal Truth) — even if one is possible.
And I ultimately don’t see how many of the most important features of our world — which is features about us — can be reduced to math. In theory — sure. But other than some rough limits (which is good to know), we are congenitally incapable of producing a fine-grain approximation of ourselves. You get back into that recursive problem there — the only kind of entity who could really understand us, would have to be an entity with far more computational capability than we ourselves have.
Well, I’ll welcome our quantum-computer overlords when they arrive — I won’t have much of a choice, will I? But that won’t change that the essential problems of human life will never be answered this way for human beings. We will always be reduced to a few coarse-grain approximations, and a hell of a lot of literature as we discuss it non-formally among ourselves.
So yes — you are very good at putting my words to higher precision. I just don’t see that as terribly useful, other than as a technical way of expressing the limitations of knowledge. I’m very skeptical of many fields, precisely because of this — that the underdetermination of the data, and the extent of the computations make them inherently non-scientific. I find it worse to be “science-y” when there can be no science, than recognizing that some things are simply unknowable (for us, as we are currently constructed).
And if we extend ourselves to answer these questions mathematically — that will only pose new questions that we simply can’t imagine now. There is no “improvement” of the condition — just a moving barrier that may be interesting intellectually (I am a scientist, after all), but are irrelevant in terms of living.
Frank T says, “The fact that you aren’t getting off a plane in Santiago to go rebuild sanitation systems in Chile means that people are going to die. Your choices killed those people as surely as if you had pulled the trigger yourself.”
Well, actually, no. The infrastructure in Chile is so badly damaged that within hours, you’d be among those needing help and placing a strain on the rescuers. Donating $$$, yup! However, the fact is that while you could help someone, you simply don’t have the resources to help everyone. So do you help no one? Select one–and how do you select. There are simply some situations where there is no right action–every action is at some level wrong. Right and wrong…that’s easy. Wrong and wronger, that’s where ew run into trouble.
No. 341
You say:
So let me get this straight according to Kant lying to save innocent people from wrongful, horrible death is not rational and not acting morally?!That is simply evil on the part of Kant.
Kant was faced with this dilemma being presented to him by a German writer who asked if this was an exception to his categorical imperative. Kant said no. You have an obligation to tell the truth. Kant then engaged a whole series of evasions to deal with the possible consequences of telling the possible muderer the truth, which included fantasizing that the person might have moved from wherre you saw him etc. Also Kant talked about how if you tell the truth, that by definition you were not responsible for the consequences. Various other fantasies then occurred to Kant. But the bottom line is that Kant considered lying to a murderer about the location of a potential victim, to save him / her from death to be immoral. That is both profoundly shocking and profoundly immoral.
I am further fascinated about a philosophical system that can deem cooperating with a system of torture and mass murder of the innocent to be “reasonable”. So saving innocent people from death by lying means we are not using our reason and we are not acting freely, but cooperating with these authorities and telling them the truth is acting freely and using our reason!?
I am further fascuinated about how wanting the innocents hiding in our attic to go on living is not reasonable and by doing so we are not acting on the dictates of reason. Also that by wanting them to live and lying in order for them to do so is not exercising our freedom. So what would be reasonable and free? Turning them over to the SS to be murdered?
As for not rationally justified by the consequences. If Kant wanted to utter stupidities that certainly is one. After the war there was all over Europe there were people who by lying, deception etc., saved many thousands of lives. The consequences of their lying was lives saved.
I find it amusing that Kant does not take into account that by lying to the potential murderer, the liar is helping the potential murderer avoid becoming a muderer.
I love the conceit that only by acting reasonably at all times are we free of course the bottom line is that if we act reasonably at all times we will be less free. It appears that to Kant Freedom does not consist of being able to make choice but the ability to make the “right” choice. That is not freedom in my opinion. Further any reason that does not take into account our appetites and desires is fundamentaly flawed and results in absurdities like the catagorical imperative.
To reduce the sheer courage to hide innocent people from wrongful death in a situation like Nazi occupied Europe to letting desire and appetite dictate what we do, debases the moral courage and sheer brave determination to save those innocents. If reason dictates that we not do those things or they are unreasonable than it is abundantly obvious that Kant’s reason is a very poor guide in some circumstances to ethical / moral behavior.
Kant of course seems to have been largely oblvious to the idea that by telling the truth to the murderer that person becomes an accomplice to murder. I would think the mere duty to avoid becoming an accomplice to murder would dictate lying.
abb3w #371 et al
Thank you for your thoughtful responses. Whether I understand them, agree with them, or disagree with them I appreciate what you put into them.
I will bottom line my take. Where I remain on the subject – for what it is worth:
–* I sense you have a notion of some higher law that defines right and wrong (e.g., “Morality is the rule governing …”). Obviously I disagree with your main premise (if I am right in my perception of what you say) underneath all the words. Here is where we butt heads and even when we are in some technical agreement we eventually circle back to fundamental disagreement.
I think morals are man made rules/judgments. I think all man made rules are arbitrary and amorphous. Some resonate with our feelings and some don’t; some make sense in context, some don’t in any context, etc. On the contrary I feel you feel there are “THE rules” out there.
So I ask to those in the “higher laws” camps: How do you know this practically speaking? What are they actually in their full glory? What/who defined them? How have they been shown to be invariant? Who owns these rules and interpretation of them? Who/what enforces them and in what way?
Without repeating all I said in other posts – I believe we are wired to try to find that best fit over much time and many “tests” in action, so I do believe we refine our algorithms, values and weights in our decision-making so we do get better at it in some sense as the pressures favor algorithms etc. that work to elevate physical and mental states of the species (a form of right).
And obviously societies make laws to promote behaviors they want and discourage those they do not want. But also so called “morality” (and attended laws) are formulated to maintain the ruling class and control the subjects.
Morality is what the political and/or ruling process deem it is at a point in time in a context.
Why would one society say polygamy is immoral and another say it is not? Why do some tribes call homosexuality expressions deeply immoral and others say essentially let love and satisfaction in all its forms reign? Why was it morally imperative to honor the king – perhaps losing a head for minor infractions of “disrespect”?
–** What I call morals you call ethics because I think you elevate morals to a plane untouchable by humans. To me it is all one continuum – all man made laws and rules – sometimes for our good sometimes that act to our detriment.
For example some circles before and now think whistle-blowing is unethical if it disrupts the powers that be and some significant constant in society – I think the opposite. Like in this example such issues are not settled at a society level outside of political processes. Each side thinks they have the truth and the morality nailed. But if the “whistle-blowing is wrong” faction wins it will not be too long before whistle-blowers are deemed “immoral” by larger and larger swaths of society. And (fortunately in my book) the opposite holds true.
You have more fluency in the form and fit than I do. And I see areas of violent agreement. But we are at an impasse I think. To me there is not any definitive “higher law”; there is no definitive higher morality. At best there is what we find SEEMS to work – what seems to be the right valuations of variables in decision-making algorithms and what seems to be the right algorithms (maybe in part your philosophical meta-models) – and all only has place IF some political processes sanctions it.
To me you think some other truth exists.
Have a good and morally satisfying day.
*
Oh sorry one more thing – you say this “If the latter, and you seek to claim that “the man-made rules” are in fact not merely approximation, but identical to the principle I identify as “morality”… that is a highly non-trivial assertion. If you think you can show this, I would be mildly interested.”
I think ALL is approximation – all is a try for fit – sometimes rationally done – sometimes not. But always in a another context subject to change.
I am saying the rules (the morals) dictated at point in time by the powers that be is THE morality that counts. Those define the rules we have to abide at risk of punishment in some form.
Try being an out polygamist in this USA. Try being an out gay in Saudi Arabia.
It is not too hard to see I am NOT in any way saying there is a “higher morality” let alone a man-made one. There are only man-made rules and views that define societal morality for good or bad at point in time and place. Often morality is enforced to an extent that make bucking such the rules very perilous.
mikerattlesnake:
frog, Inc.
Yes. A lot of people who aren’t philosophers seem to have a weirds idea about distinctions between the subjects of “morality” and “ethics.”
As I understand it, philosophers often use the terms interchangeably, with a preference for “morality” when talking about more basic principles, and “ethics” when talking about more concrete applications of basic principles.
So, for example, if you’re talking about the basic differences between Kant’s deontological scheme and Bentham’s straight consequentialist Utilitarianism, you’d call that moral theory.
If you’ve taken some basic agreed-upon aspects moral theory for granted and are talking specific moral rules about, say, plagiarism, you’d call that “ethics.”
In between, it could go either way.
(Any philosophers present should feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)
One misconception I’ve come across in the atheist blogosphere is people who think that “morality” is especially connected with typically religious and bogus rules about things like sexual morality. (E.g., that you shouldn’t do certain things with certain people’s genitalia because God doesn’t like that.) Laboring under that misconception, some people abandon the term “morality,” and just talk about “ethics.”
I think that’s a big mistake. The proper term for serious and basic stuff like Divine Command Theory vs. Humanism is morality.
We shouldn’t give up the weighter and more basic term just because the religous folks systematically try to coopt it. They shouldn’t be allowed to own the term “morality” and abuse it—and make it sound like we only care about superficial “ethics” while they care about important morality.
We should make it clear we’re talking about the important stuff—morality—and they’re profoundly wrong about both the basic nature of morality and the truth of various moral beliefs.
(E.g., it’s factually false that homosexuality is wrong, at least for the reasons religious homophobes typically say it is. And it’s true that gratuitously inflicting suffering just for the fun of it is morally wrong; there may be valid differences in particular moral systems, but there are basic deep universals, too. You might be a sociopath and not care that it’s wrong, but it’s still wrong.)
Another issue that came up in the recent Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini thread was a distinction between something being moral and immoral vs. Right or Wrong. I didn’t really understand that distinction, but I think that beyond a certain point, all the terms are ambiguous. (E.g., something may be a “moral” action in the sense that it comports with somebody’s moral system, and they’re sincerely trying to do the right thing, but nonethless immmoral in a very important sense if it’s based on a moral mistake, e.g., believing God Hates Fags and that homosexuality will destroy society to everyone’s detriment.)
P.S. Frog, Inc.—are you the same commenter who used to post simply as “frog,” e.g., back in the Crackergate days? I’m guessing not, but I thought I’d check.
Peter H
No, AFAICT. eatmykant was not criticising Frog, Inc. for having prior philosophical commitments while pretending to have none.
eatmykant was saying that Frog, Inc. should admit to doing philosophy, and having prior philosophical commitments, as eatmykant does.
Seems like a fair point to me. Crudely bashing “philosophy” is doing philosophy—badly. The fact that some philosophers you’re bashing may be doing philosophy badly doesn’t mean you aren’t when you try to bash philosophy as if you have the non-philosophical high ground to do it from.
PaulW: P.S. Frog, Inc.—are you the same commenter who used to post simply as “frog,” e.g., back in the Crackergate days? I’m guessing not, but I thought I’d check.
Yes — it’s the same obnoxious asshole, now incorporated.
eatmykant was saying that Frog, Inc. should admit to doing philosophy, and having prior philosophical commitments, as eatmykant does.
That assumes that philosophy is a source and not a consequence. It’s a kind of tricky point, and I do admit to explaining it poorly. Philosophy is what happens when you abuse language — when you’ve formed your questions poorly.
You can always claim that it’s the “philosophical commitments” — the abstractions — that are driving the discussion. My view is that they’re merely secondary phenomena — errors, in short.
This entire thread is mostly about errors. The “prior commitments” aren’t philosophical — those are the abstract implications of concrete social and physical realities. How much do I pay attention to tradition? How much do I pay attention to what I see? How much do I pay attention to the voices in my head? Those aren’t really “philosophical” — those are prior cultural commitments, from which we derive philosophy and then try to pretend that the philosophical conventions are more than mere rationalizations of irrational, historically contingent orientations.
Is anyone every really “converted” by metaphysics? I haven’t seen it. Can you predict peoples metaphysical positions from the previous-to-philosophy histories? Almost 100% of the time, in my experience. It’s like theology — philosophy is just apologia in my view.
Which means we are discussing at cross purposes — those with a commitment to a priori abstraction will never be converted by discussion, or visa-versa, but only by life events. But still it’s fun.
Look at Kant — he’s essentially the logical end of Protestantism, a post-reformation Christian trying to justify a protestant morality and world-view, without having to reference revelation. You could have predicted his findings just by knowing his time & place — it’s in no way surprising that he finds a rigid, abstract and individualistic system of meaning. It’s Luther without Jesus! So what’s the value of the philosophizin’? What do we gain? How does it differ from theology?
I just don’t see it. You can try to assume what you’re trying to show, and pigeon-hole me as crude, just as I assume what I’m trying to show and pigeon-hole the philosophers. But that’s not a problem for me — since I see the whole enterprise as tautological anyhow, while being empty of referents other than subjectivity of the “philosopher”. But for the philosopher, it’s a huge problem.
Shorter Frog Inc: “Philosophy is boring and the wikipedia page on Wittgenstein tells me that it’s all mostly language nonsense anyway.”
shorter frankosaurus:
“I’m too slow and lazy to actually argue any points, so I’ll just throw out random insults”.
Try at least to hit ad-hominem! I mean, you don’t even try an irrelevant argument about me — but just random insults without any basis.
Lazy, lazy, lazy — with a suggestion of stupidity. Why would anyone listen to anything that such a cretin has to say? (See, that’s a proper ad-hominem).
give lazy posts, get lazy responses.