I began my journey into "why we should" by asking work colleagues (in a museum) what is the difference between ethics & morality? Most gave the inverse to definition you give here, which was in accord with my set of terms at the time (i.e. 20% agreed with you, 80% with the inverse). Both terms were used to refer to the expected behaviour of residents of the city (mores) and polis (ethos) in Rome & Greece. Whether this is top down (formal) or personal (later individualised best practise) depends then on the city as context (and in the later Roman Christian period the down-graded of city & cult based practices/rites in favour of the Imperial Cult (established Christian church) by way of a focus on the individual conscience inorder to remove the influence of the local 'formalisation' in favour of obedience of each 'soul' to the Imperial cult. (I.E. the church is about obedience but gained its power by utilising devotional practices that focus on the individual). See my blog for more responses to "What is the ethical response to morality?"
Ethics is the defacto modern term for professional, explicitly organized, morality, so since both have been used interchangeably in the colloquial, i settled with that bifurcation.
Morality is not something we are reasoned in to. Morality is something we are socialized in to. You can’t logically convince someone to share your intuitions but we can set up our society to reinforce intuitions that we want to impart.
This feels like a long, pointless detour to ultimately arrive at the same destination. If there are objective grounds to prefer some moral systems over others, then morality is still objective, we're just disagreeing over which parts are objective and which can justifiably be left to personal preference.
I am sure that if you asked the Khmer Rouge, they would disagree with your assessment that they fail according to their own standards. No matter how obvious a conclusion this may seem to you, under your worldview you would have to concede that whether their actions are truly inconsistent with their philosophy is a matter of subjective opinion, not of objective fact (or else, again, we've just taken a really roundabout way of eventually arriving back at a variation of objective morality, which raises the question of why any of this has even been written to begin with).
Likewise, anyone can short-circuit this narrative by simply claiming that all moral systems other than their own are incoherent, because only their moral system truly maximizes well-being (with all others merely being a case of people making bad judgments instead of holding genuinely incompatible innate preferences). This is the same problem that has always existed with any form of utilitarianism.
We then have to go through the same exercise of conceding that either everything really is subjective after all (the familiar, well-worn path to nihilism) or there really is some ground for disagreement over objective truth somewhere in here (which brings us back to the starting point of admitting that morality is objective after all, rendering all of these self-contradictory schizo rants futile).
I am of the opinion that most (but not all) moral judgements are instrumental, and their truth depends on related empirical facts. The Khmer Rouge can, like anyone, deny the facts in front of their face but they are objectively mistaken that their actions are defensible according to utilitarian standards. They are like flat-earthers.
So there is plenty of room for actual substantive moral disagreement in the real world because there is lots of disagreement about how to achieve even commonly agreed on goals, and about the principles that will generally lead to commonly agreed on goals. But ultimately, if the other side really believes that Jews need to be murdered, the only option is to fight a war with them. We need some common ground on values to be able to have something to discuss rationally.
I mean, yeah, most ethical debates along these lines don’t have big impacts on how you should behave in practice. But subtle differences can be important sometimes. It would matter more if I really was a moral nihilist but I’m not.
>I am of the opinion that most (but not all) moral judgements are instrumental, and their truth depends on related empirical facts. The Khmer Rouge can, like anyone, deny the facts in front of their face but they are objectively mistaken that their actions are defensible according to utilitarian standards. They are like flat-earthers.<
Yes, this is what I am referring to when I say that someone can short-circuit this entire way of thinking by simply claiming that their worldview maximizes utility. Christians do this with their claim that ultimate salvation can be found only through faith in Jesus Christ. Nazis would claim that their genocide of the Jews will ultimately lead to the best possible world for humanity as a whole, and so forth and so on. If you understand this, then I suppose you agree with my assessment that this is a really long detour just to end up back where we started. Fair enough!
You sort of contradict your argument with the examples you used. You said "moral judgements are instrumental, and their truth depends on related empirical facts", but then went on to present the NSDAP as perfectly rational agents who just "chose" different values. But the Nazis didn't hate the Jews for funsies. They hated the Jews because they believed "the Jewish race are innately inevitably prone to being anti-social". That is the assertion of an empirical fact, and if we disprove that fact, then by your own logic the Nazis are irrational (and immoral according to their own standards).
Generally, the Nazis aren't actually that great of an example when trying to prove moral relativism. Stick with other examples you cited like psychopaths. Sadistic psychopaths, for example, do not hinge their values on empirical facts that are ostensibly false. They are truly inherently incompatible, which is different from Nazis who are only severely delusional.
I think that there are different ways to gloss Nazi views, and different Nazis probably had different underlying ethical frameworks. I was oversimplifying for rhetorical purposes in the piece. Some maybe reasoned as you suggest, in which case, yes, they could be reasoned out of it and they are more like the Khmer Rouge or other deeply misguided altruistic groups. But the philosophically more interesting Nazi position is the view that only Aryans are deserving of moral consideration for their own sake. That was the view I was considering in the piece. I think just talking about serial killers allows Moral Realists to pretend that these kind of views are so rare we can consider them ‘deviant’, when the opposite is the case.
I contend that your light-relativist analysis is still fundamentally wrong. Nevertheless, when you say that “Either objective morality is empty, or it is unmotivating”, I agree that it is necessary that objective morality must be motivating, and in order to be motivating, any immoral actions must have demonstrable and undesirable consequences. “To get any content for objective morality, one needs rules that every rational being would have to accept.” This does not follow; objective morality entails moral rules that Ought to be followed, and it also must be possibly to err morally, to break the rules, or else it would not make sense to have any rules at all (everything would just happen right… or wrong … or whatever). I believe I presented a consistent, a priori system of objective morality here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1763717224/ Perhaps one day you can tell me whether this is persuasive to you.
What group of people think that torturing babies isn’t bad? I think that there is a shared moral intuition in humans about certain principles. I believe that human morality must engage with human nature and the best impulses of human nature should be human morality.
Hurting a child, or anyone, for no benefit to anyone is evil, we all )except maybe 0.1% agree. (Weras a leader leading a conquest is doing something evil in order to benefit their people as is their duty, arguably.) It’s once we get to the benefits and trade offs that morals diverge strongly.
Most Germans in the time of the Nazi’s would not have approved of mass killing of Jewish children if it was in front of them. There was a reason they went to some trouble to provide plausible deniability.
People who say that abortion is evil are quite likely to do it anyway when they feel they need it or someone they love needs it. This is not true for murdering 1 year olds. I maintain this says something about human morality.
I have a piece I’m working on in all of this. I agree that there a multiple reasonable sets of ethics people can follow, and agree that some are outside of that acceptable set because all of the decent ones have certain fundamentally human values underlying them.
I don’t disagree with any of this, except that I think if you look historically there are lots of people who kill and torture children and do all that stuff. Look at the Rwandan genocide. Totally ordinary people, just convinced by propaganda that Tutsis were vermin. It just takes dehumanization of the outgroup, which we do pretty easily. So I don’t think it’s .1% at all. In some circumstances I think a majority of people can be on board with fundamentally genocidal moralities.
Also, I like the idea of discussing morality in a human context, but I just think we should be clear that this is not a universal morality: it is human relative. I believe my own subjectively justified morality is one that most people can be persuaded of and that it’s a good fit with most humans intuitions. But it’s not going to be persuasive to Nazis, or Genghis Khan, or serial killers, or robots (unless we program them that way). Or smart tigers or aliens.
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. I think some moralities are bad by their own standards, so to speak, because they have false supplementary beliefs or counterproductive or mutually incompatible norms. But there are still incompatible moral systems that don’t suffer from those issues.
I think it’s pretty obvious why a moral system that fails by its own standards is bad. If you don’t accept that truth is preferable to falsehood we can’t have a useful conversation.
I think the issue becomes how to avoid moving from limited relativism to total moral relativism and even a total nihilism about not just morality but rationality itself.
In another comment you take it that reality is objective where morality is not because rational agents with the same facts come to the same conclusions. If we shift the question of objectivity from reality to rationality a circularity becomes apparent that you think that rational agents (meaning agents operating with a certain specific set of rational principles and powers) with the same evidence will converge on a definition of rationality is trivially true, but completely unconvincing of objectivity because it is viciously circular. Similarly moral agents (meaning agents with a certain specific set of moral principles and powers) with the same evidence will converge on the same definition of morality, but this clearly does not convince you that morality is objective. If rationality is not objective then different agents could be rational by their own lights and NOT converge with the same evidence to different realities, so reality won't be objective just like morality.
That said I harbor grave doubts about the objectivity of morality, but not the objectivity of rationality or reality etc. The reason is not that I think rational agents will converge on reality or rationality even given the same evidence. I think that flat earthers will always be with us and apologia for even that sort of radical disagreement about reality will always be providable by coherent epistemological positions that could be described as rational whether voluntarism or radical skepticism (such as solipsism) etc. The difference is that I ultimately feel the confidence that if I understand something one way (according to my reason) that's the way to understand it, understanding it a different way might be coherent but would be stupid or otherwise wrong. My moral and even prudential understanding is not so firm and that's why I'd see moral relativism as more credible than relativism about rationality, truth or states of affairs etc.
While often when I desire things I find them desirable, there are certainly things that I desire and even desires I act on I don't think are desirable (such as say procrastinating, I desire to do it but find it undesirable on any analysis). However that what I desire is even desirable (even morally desirable) seems in question by other aspects of how desire works. In some sense desire is volitional, if I voluntarily give up on some project or course of action, I not only stop desiring it I stop viewing it as desirable and yet I don't view that as requiring some change in the nature of things or my objective knowledge of them, suggesting desirability itself is inherently subjective. This holds not just for venial projects but for things usually understood as moral like say the value of medical treatment (a medical treatment that someone with full knowledge of the implication etc. voluntarily refuses is not valuable). Whereas if I stop an intellectual project I may no longer hold a truth (say remember that some particular integral of an equation is some other equation), but I would still think the truth I stopped actively believing (forgot) is credible.
So I'd say the position that morality is subjective seems good for that sort of reason. Not because we can't agree or converge on agreement about it because that seems true of things like rationality I would not thereby conclude are subjective. Rather just because how I hold morality compared to things like rationality, but not just morality but motivation in general. Personally I find all motivation of a kin with morality.
Consider the case of the smoker who one could say doesn't want to suffer things like lung cancer. One might say they are engaged in something self-defeating ("You'll regret it!"), but they might not see it that way and I'm not sure how they would be wrong. Who is to say the future version of them is really the same person as them, it seems like personal identity in that sense is if not purely a moral property at least it is a thick property both moral proposition and positive fact like cowardice (which is both a vice and a positive fact about someone's tendency to run from danger say). If morality is subjective in the way you claim then there are any number of coherent moral systems they could adopt where it would not be self-defeating to be a smoker and at the same time desire to be free of the diseases associated with it. What this means though is that motivation itself becomes so subjective as to have no implications, contrary to your position where "The fact that my principles are not rational obligations on all agents is completely irrelevant to my interest in furthering those principles." since if we could come to any singular conclusion about what further your interests means it could only be by dictating some singular objective interpretation of what it would mean to further your interest (for example for future versions of yourself), if I thought we could do that I'd think there was an objective morality (if furthering your interests is somehow binding on future versions of you, it seems to me it would have to have the same binding on at least some other individuals who are not future versions of you).
Yet if not only morality but all motivation is subjective as I feel compelled to conclude and to a radical degree then it seems hard to save rationality itself. Intellectual actions are no less actions requiring motives etc. than other actions. If all motives are subjective any intellectual action seems like it might be justified by some subjective practical or moral reason. If rationality fails to dictate any intellectual course of action it doesn't sound like rationality.
This creates a paradox I'd say moral realism is unattractive to me because it seems irrational, but that's assuming rationality is objective. If rationality is not objective then that falls away. However that does not matter because the position I'm tempted to arrive as is not that morality is subjective or rationality is subjective etc. It is merely the absence of moral system that is objective to arrive at in inquiry (and likewise prudential and rational systems). Perhaps I desire not to play the fool, but it is simply inescapable that I will. It does not sit well, but perhaps this is all we can say, my animal spirits, my humours will lead me to act certain ways, and this is ultimately divorced from strict abstract reason.
However if you are correct that your interest is in further your principles just because they are yours is suggestive of a form of moral realism. It suggests if I understood your motives and principles I would have to acknowledge their force as motivation and principles. In which case they would have to (defeasible) motivate me. If they did not I simply would have failed to grasp them as motives (assuming motives have the sort of properties you attribute them). Given my other motives. I might not take any actual action different but understanding your motives would give me some slightly different set of tendencies. This would be perhaps a sort of objective tendency that could inform and lead to some hope of convergence on moral questions and has been suggested by various philosophers (suspiciously with very different ethical and metaethical commitments otherwise), specifically see Danny Goldstick's book Reason Truth and Reality, and "!e Right and the Wren" by
Christa Peterson and Jack Samuel (Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.
Volume 7. Edited by: David Shoemaker, Oxford University Press, 2021)
It is interesting with your Tiger and Ape example. Actual tigers have very limited communication abilities so a tiger would have vary limited ability to understand another creatures motivation as motivation. Arguably this would be why it would be useless to try and make a moral argument with an actual tiger. The tiger is not the appropriate sort of agent to make such an argument lacking any serious ability to cognize motivations at all.
The analogy to reason and investigation of the world is something like this. If I understand Priestley's reasons for invoking phlogiston and judge it reasonable and not pathological, I probably won't believe in phlogiston, but I may alter how I tend to reason and how I might investigate some other phenomenon or question if it has analogous elements to one of Priestley's investigations.
I find the idea that understanding a motivation might be intrinsically motivating interesting and even suggestive, but I'm never sure I find it compelling. Reflecting on your ideas it may be because I don't think motives are intrinsically, indubitably or infallibly motivating. We desire somethings in an intellectual way such that we in addition judge them to be desirable, this can just be wrong, but if we fail to believe they are desirable we desire them less (to desire something in that intellectual way believing it desirable is to desire it more in a certain way). To believe morality is subjective or general nihilism etc. is to lack that belief and so if you consistently do it to lack that full throated desire. However you might be an inconsistent moral relativist and anyone's belief has no impact on moral relativism's truth. I just think people who think they don't desire things less because of moral relativism are committing an error. So in general I think I can understand a motive without finding it intrinsically motivating.
Lots of really interesting thoughts here and I think it will be hard for me to do them justice. I may think about things more and circle back later.
I don't know what to think about norms of rationality. Maybe I'm a 'norm'al realist, in that I believe that any creature capable of thinking logically ought to do so. There is a clear sense that a creature which must rely on beliefs in order to realize its purposes ought to form and revise its beliefs in ways that are conducive to realizing those purposes. This isn't quite the same as saying it ought to be rational, though, as there are plenty of ways it can be optimal for realizing certain purposes to have somewhat irrational belief mechanisms. Anyway, I am convinced that being rational is what we ought to be, and also that this belief is not one that irrational creatures can be persuaded of.
So in my argument against moral realists, I am willing to grant them that if it is irrational to be 'immoral', they win. The tiger, as unrealistic as that is in reality, is a rational tiger precisely for this reason (and so it can have a conversation where it discusses its motives).
With regard to the differences between rational agreement and moral agreement, I'm not deeply committed to the idea that it's diagnostic of empirical facts that rational beings with perfect information will converge to agreement. I am very aware that in the real world some humans can't be persuaded of very obvious facts. I just find the idea of ideal reasoners with ideal information clarifying, but I don't know that I have a perfect or even a very good account of what seems to me the very obvious difference between empirical and moral 'facts'. This is a discussion I am having with @bothsidesbrigade in a different thread. I think you and I are on the same page that there is something pretty different about our ability to establish 'bob was killed' versus 'bob's killing was wrong'. I'm not too troubled by the difficulty in nailing that down, but it would be convenient if I could state it more clearly.
I agree that the basis of morality is motivation. I don't think I agree with you that understanding a motivation is instrinsically motivating, and I definitely disagree that recognizing our motivations are not universally binding should be demotivating. I think if we judge ourself relevantly similar to another being, it can be motivating to understand their motivations, but the opposite can be the case if we judge ourselves to be dissimilar. I can sort of understand why Edmund Kemper killed his mother, but if anything I think contemplating the motives of serial killers pushes me away from endorsing their motives via revulsion. Ditto with Nazis. The more I understand their worldview, the more I find it repugnant.
I don't really see why the failure of our values to be universal should be demotivating. In particular, I have a special concern for my own welfare: I don't expect others to share it. I care about the welfare of others, but I can easily understand why others might not. Personally, that doesn't cause me to question my own concern; it licenses me to judge those others unfavorably. It doesn't affect that judgment that they don't share it, nor that they probably judge me by their own standards. Ultimately, I care both about the welfare of others, and also I care about being a virtuous person according to human standards. I can offer evolutionary explanations of why I have those motives, maybe, but it doesn't bother me that they have causal antecedents.
In terms of the issue that understanding often makes some positions more objectionable or repellant. I don't think that is a problem for the view that understanding may be an objective reason for compassion, because often understanding someone's position more will be understanding that it is intrinsically mistaken and the more you understand it is mistaken the more it is objectionable. Understanding a mistaken position as not a mistake would be misunderstanding it, not understanding in the relevant sense.
An example might illustrate my idea. If understanding a (sensible) motivation engenders it to a degree does that mean that understanding someone who takes joy in the suffering of others ostensibly because it is suffering. But presumably if we examine their actual psychology we'd see that they don't actual value the suffering of others as suffering rather than misattribute pleasure to it in some complicated way, they thus misattribute properties to it and such misattribution is mistaken and therefore repellant. The more you actually understand their psychology the more starkly is their error revealed to you.
A possible epistemic parallel (to the moral case): I understand why someone has a different belief than I do. It turns out their are under a post-hypnotic suggestion to hallucinate something. The more I actually understand why they believe what they do the more unconvincing and even risible the belief becomes. On the other hand what if I discover no error or pathology underlying the disagreement the more I understand the more I see the actual rational justification for the alternate belief, at some point I'd probably change my position to agree with them.
I don't think that relativism is generally demotivating because I take it most desires are not constituted intellectually in the right sort of way and even of those that are many are not held in the strong sense of being both desired and considered desirable. I don't think the desire for (and pleasure in) chocolate cake is (usually) intellectual in that way for example. As I mentioned I often desire to procrastinate, but I don't think it is desirable, so I'm not demoralized from procrastinating by knowing its not objectively desirable be in so far as I didn't think about it that way in the 1st place.
I don't think (or at least am highly skeptical) that you could understand someone's desire for chocolate cake as intellectual. In that to understand it would mean to me something like the experience I would describe when I would say "Oh yes, I can imagine it melting in my mouth right now, wow!" I think it's improbable that by normal means of understanding another person (analysis of propositions about their psychology) I could achieve understanding of their desire in that sense (although perhaps Mary from the Knowledge Argument could). So I don't think that desire is constituted even in the smallest part by intellectual acts like the belief that chocolate cake is objectively desirable, therefore the belief that nothing is objectively desirable would not remove any of the constituents of that desire and so not be as you say demoralizing.
Here is a complicated case. When being given a medical injection (an IV is inserted etc.) I look away and focus on something else. There are various things going on here, there is a base physiological reaction to getting stabbed that is painful and undesirable in a non-intellectual sense. I look away because I think medical treatment is desirable and so want to increase my desire for it by avoiding the pain of anticipating and seeing the needle get stuck in. Some of that pain of anticipation and seeing is a conditioned reflex response and not intellectual (a very basic association of seeing a wounding and the wounding), but some of it is probably intellectual, I know that if it looks like I'm about to be stabbed it is reasonable to infer I'm being stabbed and I tend to think being stabbed is objectively undesirable (at least has some gross undesirable effects even if net desirable).
So knowing that nothing is objectively desirable does nothing to my physiological pain (and aversion) or even my conditioned reflex association of certain sights and situations with pain and undesirability. However in so far as I really believe it it should blunt the aversion I have to intellectually knowing I've been stabbed and so blunt my pain with looking at myself being pricked with a needle at least a little. But it will also blunt my belief that medical treatment is objectively desirable and so blunt my motivation to look away again a little (my belief that medical treatment is desirable is not all of the type that it is an intellectually and so objectively desirable thing).
So I'd point out being demoralized by relativism is not about being actively bothered by desiring things. It is about a necessary constituent of desire (or at least desire of a certain strength) being absent and therefore that desire being absent (or less intense).
I may desire something only under very narrow conditions. For example I am doing a sewing test and must thread as many needles as possible within a time limit. During the test time I intensely desirous of threading needles, I even believe it is desirable for me to thread needles (to pass the test) and so I believe it is desirable for future versions of me that may exist within the test time interval. I do not believe it is desirable for future versions of me after the test time is over to thread needles, indeed maybe I hate threading needles unnecessarily and that may be constituted believe it is undesirable for me future versions of me after the test time to be threading needles in most cases.
The broader the conditions under which I tend to thread needles the more I desire to thread needles. The longer the test time the more desire I need to thread needles to pass the test (unless perhaps I achieve something like a Zen beginner's mind and strive without striving at threading needles). For this sort of thing believing it is desirable to thread needles will contribute to my tendency to thread needles and so my desire to thread them. If I don't think its desirable for future versions of me to thread needles (because say I think the test is over), this is often constitutive of or just another way of describing the absence of the desire to thread needles.
Here is the step I think one is most likely to disagree with. I think that believing X is desirable for a set of future versions of me, is the same belief as believing X is desirable for the set of all rational creatures sufficiently like that set of future versions of me. And being alike probably means in terms of rational faculties, capacities of feeling, financial situation etc. and is probably independent of things like given name, who parents are etc.
So the broader the set of future versions of me I think X is desirable for the more I desire X (remember not all my desires are of this intellectual kind). I think there are things I desire so strongly in this way that I desire them basically for all conceivable future versions of me. But I conceive of a vastly broad set of future versions of me, I might suffer amnesia, change my name, be transported to a mysterious foreign land, be recruited by space aliens to fight an intergalactic war etc. The set of all future versions of me in that sense seems like it probably covers if not all rational beings at least a very big swath.
What does it mean for something to be an objective moral. Well non-exhaustively to me it seems like one such thing is a thing that is desirable (or believed to be desirable) for a sufficiently large swathe of all rational beings (it is certainly not required to be desirable for all being, rocks don't desire things, paramecium probably don't etc.).
So if I believe as I tend to that there are no objective moral truths I must foreswear desiring things in the intellectual way where I consider them desirable for all future versions of me on pain of actually believing in an objective moral truth if I persist in these over broad desires. I may desire them for a smaller subset of future versions of me (and their equivalents) perhaps, but that is just to say I may desire them less than the maximal amount I could (on this scale for this kind of desire).
This is the sort of thought process that leads me to think that moral relativism tends inevitably to more general relativism about motives (the subset of motives that are amenable to intellectual analysis).
Gah "If rationality is not objective then different agents could be rational by their own lights and NOT converge with the same evidence to different realities, so reality won't be objective just like morality." I added the "NOT" by mistake. Obviously different rationalities may converge on the same evidence to Different realities.
I'm not an expert on this topic, but is it your view that there are objective reasons to be rational, just not to be moral? That seems surprising to me.
also reality doesn't care so it is up to us to be honest about stuff, foisting reason onto anything other than ourselves (deontology) removes our responsibility for well anything and everything, (objective reasons are no reasons at all). in a sense responsibility is more important than rationality, (most moralities don't start from either place it seems but I might be too harsh here) (Stich says the moral domain does not exist and I have come to a similar conclusion by a different path https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/a-stich-in-time ).
if it does we do not have access to it.... panpsychism or pantheism aside most positions assume reality does not care, or has no capacity to do so (that's my strong version, my weak version is if it cares, it does not do so within any of our frameworks).
Reality _objectively_ does not care. Maybe that is the point of it?
It's a bigger lift than that to show that reality doesn't care, or that we don't have access to it. Unfounded premises aren't necessarily bad, but you ought to know if you have them.
might be more of a lift to say it does care i suspect, might have the Razor on my side here,
in any case, we exist because we have 'premises', or biases or instincts, so have to 'unfounded' premises is nearly impossible, or rather, that they confound us, i.e. when we are 'founded' they compose with us into life, or at least in our forebears, which we inherit and gain some benefit from, and sadly we often know nothing about that series of events, but we do become aware as we live and learn that these premises, these strengths are also weaknesses, as we have both observed
additionally, my premises may appear unfounded with in you framework of learning, but perfectly founded in mine
reality does not care about that distinction, I regard that as a possibly point in my favour
I agree with most of this except for the bit about how your arguments raise a problem for objective morality in particular. You could replace "morality" with "reality" throughout and your arguments would be just as compelling. You could even run a tiger/ape story where their disagreement isn't moral but modal, mereological, or otherwise entirely descriptive. With the same result.
I dunno, I don’t think the paper with ‘morality’ replaced with ‘reality’ is convincing at all. Reality isn’t social, and reality isn’t subjective. There is an important asymmetry between ‘John was killed’ and ‘John’s killing was wrong’, because I am comfortable asserting that rational agents with access to the same facts will converge to agreeing about whether John was killed. I don’t think they must converge on an agreement about the wrongness of the killing.
Is an apple red to a blind person? Just because for humans a shared reality is converged upon much easier than shared values, doesn't mean both aren't still constructed based off of the general/average perceptions of everyone involved.
Typically you'd wave this away by gesturing to how aliens would still understand the electromagnetic spectrum even if they don't share our values, but they might conceive of the spectrum in radically different terms than we do. If they see the color black where we see red, we really do construct reality in meaningfully different ways. It seems silly then to say the color of apples is objective, despite this being an empirical claim. Just imagine explaining 3D to a bunch of blobs from flatland.
You say we could give them sci-fi-tech-glasses to expand their perception of color, but why wouldn't you consider it relevant if we could give them pills to value the same things we humans do?
I wouldn’t call reality social. We perceive it in a subjective way. Things like colours are subjective perceptions: reality is different. I believe in a shared and objective reality that is intersubjectively accessible. We gain knowledge about reality that, while unavoidably subjectively structured, is warranted by our causal connection to the world. Physical reality is objective and outside us, and our subjective experience of it is created and constrained by it. We rely on our social relations to help us understand that reality, but I don’t think they’re constitutive of it. By contrast, it seems to me that our subjective evaluations ARE constitutive of morality. There’s nothing in nature constraining them.
There's nothing in nature constraining our values? You yourself said values must be consistent. There's nothing in nature constraining what we BELIEVE about epistemic reality either. I can believe the world is flat. I CAN--I won't get smited for doing so--and yet you think reality is still objective. Because irrespective of what you perceive, reality still is something, supposedly. Well, that too you just perceive. Hmm... is there any part of reality that isn't ultimately just a perception... and thus necessarily subjective? I suppose due to the nature of any claim you make about reality, it must come from your subjective mind, and thus could only ever be the subjective perceiving the objective, albeit inescapably.
But for every group of entities with compatible goals, who benefit at least theoretically from mutual cooperation, there WILL be definite behaviors that are and aren't accepted, there WILL be definite ways to go about achieving these goals, and there WILL be the perception of certain behaviors as correct independent of what one thinks. Perceived as objective... inescapably.
Quite the conundrum for both the realist and the non-realist alike it would seem. Both are felled by phenomenology, which in hindsight should've been obvious due to the very existence of both "camps" in a formal academic subject.
If you believe in a flat earth, you will be smitten quite spectacularly when you act on that belief in the wrong circumstances. Empirical reality has a way of imposing itself on people.
I think you can’t probably run an argument using game theory or whatever that gets a stable state that is fairly moral. I think that’s pretty much the basis for real-life human morality. It is just not universal, since different social structures and different arrangements of power will have different and less ‘moral’ stable states, and running game theory also presupposes the evaluative attitudes of the population (as in, usually we assume they are ethical egoists).
Well, you have to understand individuation, conceptual schemes, and that observation is theory-laden. Imagine the ape sees himself as a whole organism but the tiger sees the ape as just a proper part. And then their dispute would be just as intractable.
Morality is a personal understanding of best practices when dealing with other creatures. Ethics is formalized, usually shared, morality.
I began my journey into "why we should" by asking work colleagues (in a museum) what is the difference between ethics & morality? Most gave the inverse to definition you give here, which was in accord with my set of terms at the time (i.e. 20% agreed with you, 80% with the inverse). Both terms were used to refer to the expected behaviour of residents of the city (mores) and polis (ethos) in Rome & Greece. Whether this is top down (formal) or personal (later individualised best practise) depends then on the city as context (and in the later Roman Christian period the down-graded of city & cult based practices/rites in favour of the Imperial Cult (established Christian church) by way of a focus on the individual conscience inorder to remove the influence of the local 'formalisation' in favour of obedience of each 'soul' to the Imperial cult. (I.E. the church is about obedience but gained its power by utilising devotional practices that focus on the individual). See my blog for more responses to "What is the ethical response to morality?"
Ethics is the defacto modern term for professional, explicitly organized, morality, so since both have been used interchangeably in the colloquial, i settled with that bifurcation.
well, why go down _every_ rabbit hole!
Morality is not something we are reasoned in to. Morality is something we are socialized in to. You can’t logically convince someone to share your intuitions but we can set up our society to reinforce intuitions that we want to impart.
This feels like a long, pointless detour to ultimately arrive at the same destination. If there are objective grounds to prefer some moral systems over others, then morality is still objective, we're just disagreeing over which parts are objective and which can justifiably be left to personal preference.
I am sure that if you asked the Khmer Rouge, they would disagree with your assessment that they fail according to their own standards. No matter how obvious a conclusion this may seem to you, under your worldview you would have to concede that whether their actions are truly inconsistent with their philosophy is a matter of subjective opinion, not of objective fact (or else, again, we've just taken a really roundabout way of eventually arriving back at a variation of objective morality, which raises the question of why any of this has even been written to begin with).
Likewise, anyone can short-circuit this narrative by simply claiming that all moral systems other than their own are incoherent, because only their moral system truly maximizes well-being (with all others merely being a case of people making bad judgments instead of holding genuinely incompatible innate preferences). This is the same problem that has always existed with any form of utilitarianism.
We then have to go through the same exercise of conceding that either everything really is subjective after all (the familiar, well-worn path to nihilism) or there really is some ground for disagreement over objective truth somewhere in here (which brings us back to the starting point of admitting that morality is objective after all, rendering all of these self-contradictory schizo rants futile).
I am of the opinion that most (but not all) moral judgements are instrumental, and their truth depends on related empirical facts. The Khmer Rouge can, like anyone, deny the facts in front of their face but they are objectively mistaken that their actions are defensible according to utilitarian standards. They are like flat-earthers.
So there is plenty of room for actual substantive moral disagreement in the real world because there is lots of disagreement about how to achieve even commonly agreed on goals, and about the principles that will generally lead to commonly agreed on goals. But ultimately, if the other side really believes that Jews need to be murdered, the only option is to fight a war with them. We need some common ground on values to be able to have something to discuss rationally.
I mean, yeah, most ethical debates along these lines don’t have big impacts on how you should behave in practice. But subtle differences can be important sometimes. It would matter more if I really was a moral nihilist but I’m not.
>I am of the opinion that most (but not all) moral judgements are instrumental, and their truth depends on related empirical facts. The Khmer Rouge can, like anyone, deny the facts in front of their face but they are objectively mistaken that their actions are defensible according to utilitarian standards. They are like flat-earthers.<
Yes, this is what I am referring to when I say that someone can short-circuit this entire way of thinking by simply claiming that their worldview maximizes utility. Christians do this with their claim that ultimate salvation can be found only through faith in Jesus Christ. Nazis would claim that their genocide of the Jews will ultimately lead to the best possible world for humanity as a whole, and so forth and so on. If you understand this, then I suppose you agree with my assessment that this is a really long detour just to end up back where we started. Fair enough!
You sort of contradict your argument with the examples you used. You said "moral judgements are instrumental, and their truth depends on related empirical facts", but then went on to present the NSDAP as perfectly rational agents who just "chose" different values. But the Nazis didn't hate the Jews for funsies. They hated the Jews because they believed "the Jewish race are innately inevitably prone to being anti-social". That is the assertion of an empirical fact, and if we disprove that fact, then by your own logic the Nazis are irrational (and immoral according to their own standards).
Generally, the Nazis aren't actually that great of an example when trying to prove moral relativism. Stick with other examples you cited like psychopaths. Sadistic psychopaths, for example, do not hinge their values on empirical facts that are ostensibly false. They are truly inherently incompatible, which is different from Nazis who are only severely delusional.
I think that there are different ways to gloss Nazi views, and different Nazis probably had different underlying ethical frameworks. I was oversimplifying for rhetorical purposes in the piece. Some maybe reasoned as you suggest, in which case, yes, they could be reasoned out of it and they are more like the Khmer Rouge or other deeply misguided altruistic groups. But the philosophically more interesting Nazi position is the view that only Aryans are deserving of moral consideration for their own sake. That was the view I was considering in the piece. I think just talking about serial killers allows Moral Realists to pretend that these kind of views are so rare we can consider them ‘deviant’, when the opposite is the case.
Morality is subjective. Ethics are objective. But the psychopaths in control long ago conflated those two. I go into it here:
Morality and Ethics: The Difference (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/morality-and-ethics-the-difference
I contend that your light-relativist analysis is still fundamentally wrong. Nevertheless, when you say that “Either objective morality is empty, or it is unmotivating”, I agree that it is necessary that objective morality must be motivating, and in order to be motivating, any immoral actions must have demonstrable and undesirable consequences. “To get any content for objective morality, one needs rules that every rational being would have to accept.” This does not follow; objective morality entails moral rules that Ought to be followed, and it also must be possibly to err morally, to break the rules, or else it would not make sense to have any rules at all (everything would just happen right… or wrong … or whatever). I believe I presented a consistent, a priori system of objective morality here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1763717224/ Perhaps one day you can tell me whether this is persuasive to you.
What group of people think that torturing babies isn’t bad? I think that there is a shared moral intuition in humans about certain principles. I believe that human morality must engage with human nature and the best impulses of human nature should be human morality.
Hurting a child, or anyone, for no benefit to anyone is evil, we all )except maybe 0.1% agree. (Weras a leader leading a conquest is doing something evil in order to benefit their people as is their duty, arguably.) It’s once we get to the benefits and trade offs that morals diverge strongly.
Most Germans in the time of the Nazi’s would not have approved of mass killing of Jewish children if it was in front of them. There was a reason they went to some trouble to provide plausible deniability.
People who say that abortion is evil are quite likely to do it anyway when they feel they need it or someone they love needs it. This is not true for murdering 1 year olds. I maintain this says something about human morality.
I have a piece I’m working on in all of this. I agree that there a multiple reasonable sets of ethics people can follow, and agree that some are outside of that acceptable set because all of the decent ones have certain fundamentally human values underlying them.
I don’t disagree with any of this, except that I think if you look historically there are lots of people who kill and torture children and do all that stuff. Look at the Rwandan genocide. Totally ordinary people, just convinced by propaganda that Tutsis were vermin. It just takes dehumanization of the outgroup, which we do pretty easily. So I don’t think it’s .1% at all. In some circumstances I think a majority of people can be on board with fundamentally genocidal moralities.
Also, I like the idea of discussing morality in a human context, but I just think we should be clear that this is not a universal morality: it is human relative. I believe my own subjectively justified morality is one that most people can be persuaded of and that it’s a good fit with most humans intuitions. But it’s not going to be persuasive to Nazis, or Genghis Khan, or serial killers, or robots (unless we program them that way). Or smart tigers or aliens.
If there are objective grounds for preferring one morality over another, what do you call those?
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. I think some moralities are bad by their own standards, so to speak, because they have false supplementary beliefs or counterproductive or mutually incompatible norms. But there are still incompatible moral systems that don’t suffer from those issues.
I'm suggesting if some moralities are preferable to others, they must be closer to an objective morality.
You haven't shown why inconsistency makes a lesser morality. Or falsehood, for that matter.
I think it’s pretty obvious why a moral system that fails by its own standards is bad. If you don’t accept that truth is preferable to falsehood we can’t have a useful conversation.
I do accept that truth is preferable to falsehood, but you're borrowing from objective morality to state that.
I think the issue becomes how to avoid moving from limited relativism to total moral relativism and even a total nihilism about not just morality but rationality itself.
In another comment you take it that reality is objective where morality is not because rational agents with the same facts come to the same conclusions. If we shift the question of objectivity from reality to rationality a circularity becomes apparent that you think that rational agents (meaning agents operating with a certain specific set of rational principles and powers) with the same evidence will converge on a definition of rationality is trivially true, but completely unconvincing of objectivity because it is viciously circular. Similarly moral agents (meaning agents with a certain specific set of moral principles and powers) with the same evidence will converge on the same definition of morality, but this clearly does not convince you that morality is objective. If rationality is not objective then different agents could be rational by their own lights and NOT converge with the same evidence to different realities, so reality won't be objective just like morality.
That said I harbor grave doubts about the objectivity of morality, but not the objectivity of rationality or reality etc. The reason is not that I think rational agents will converge on reality or rationality even given the same evidence. I think that flat earthers will always be with us and apologia for even that sort of radical disagreement about reality will always be providable by coherent epistemological positions that could be described as rational whether voluntarism or radical skepticism (such as solipsism) etc. The difference is that I ultimately feel the confidence that if I understand something one way (according to my reason) that's the way to understand it, understanding it a different way might be coherent but would be stupid or otherwise wrong. My moral and even prudential understanding is not so firm and that's why I'd see moral relativism as more credible than relativism about rationality, truth or states of affairs etc.
While often when I desire things I find them desirable, there are certainly things that I desire and even desires I act on I don't think are desirable (such as say procrastinating, I desire to do it but find it undesirable on any analysis). However that what I desire is even desirable (even morally desirable) seems in question by other aspects of how desire works. In some sense desire is volitional, if I voluntarily give up on some project or course of action, I not only stop desiring it I stop viewing it as desirable and yet I don't view that as requiring some change in the nature of things or my objective knowledge of them, suggesting desirability itself is inherently subjective. This holds not just for venial projects but for things usually understood as moral like say the value of medical treatment (a medical treatment that someone with full knowledge of the implication etc. voluntarily refuses is not valuable). Whereas if I stop an intellectual project I may no longer hold a truth (say remember that some particular integral of an equation is some other equation), but I would still think the truth I stopped actively believing (forgot) is credible.
So I'd say the position that morality is subjective seems good for that sort of reason. Not because we can't agree or converge on agreement about it because that seems true of things like rationality I would not thereby conclude are subjective. Rather just because how I hold morality compared to things like rationality, but not just morality but motivation in general. Personally I find all motivation of a kin with morality.
Consider the case of the smoker who one could say doesn't want to suffer things like lung cancer. One might say they are engaged in something self-defeating ("You'll regret it!"), but they might not see it that way and I'm not sure how they would be wrong. Who is to say the future version of them is really the same person as them, it seems like personal identity in that sense is if not purely a moral property at least it is a thick property both moral proposition and positive fact like cowardice (which is both a vice and a positive fact about someone's tendency to run from danger say). If morality is subjective in the way you claim then there are any number of coherent moral systems they could adopt where it would not be self-defeating to be a smoker and at the same time desire to be free of the diseases associated with it. What this means though is that motivation itself becomes so subjective as to have no implications, contrary to your position where "The fact that my principles are not rational obligations on all agents is completely irrelevant to my interest in furthering those principles." since if we could come to any singular conclusion about what further your interests means it could only be by dictating some singular objective interpretation of what it would mean to further your interest (for example for future versions of yourself), if I thought we could do that I'd think there was an objective morality (if furthering your interests is somehow binding on future versions of you, it seems to me it would have to have the same binding on at least some other individuals who are not future versions of you).
Yet if not only morality but all motivation is subjective as I feel compelled to conclude and to a radical degree then it seems hard to save rationality itself. Intellectual actions are no less actions requiring motives etc. than other actions. If all motives are subjective any intellectual action seems like it might be justified by some subjective practical or moral reason. If rationality fails to dictate any intellectual course of action it doesn't sound like rationality.
This creates a paradox I'd say moral realism is unattractive to me because it seems irrational, but that's assuming rationality is objective. If rationality is not objective then that falls away. However that does not matter because the position I'm tempted to arrive as is not that morality is subjective or rationality is subjective etc. It is merely the absence of moral system that is objective to arrive at in inquiry (and likewise prudential and rational systems). Perhaps I desire not to play the fool, but it is simply inescapable that I will. It does not sit well, but perhaps this is all we can say, my animal spirits, my humours will lead me to act certain ways, and this is ultimately divorced from strict abstract reason.
However if you are correct that your interest is in further your principles just because they are yours is suggestive of a form of moral realism. It suggests if I understood your motives and principles I would have to acknowledge their force as motivation and principles. In which case they would have to (defeasible) motivate me. If they did not I simply would have failed to grasp them as motives (assuming motives have the sort of properties you attribute them). Given my other motives. I might not take any actual action different but understanding your motives would give me some slightly different set of tendencies. This would be perhaps a sort of objective tendency that could inform and lead to some hope of convergence on moral questions and has been suggested by various philosophers (suspiciously with very different ethical and metaethical commitments otherwise), specifically see Danny Goldstick's book Reason Truth and Reality, and "!e Right and the Wren" by
Christa Peterson and Jack Samuel (Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.
Volume 7. Edited by: David Shoemaker, Oxford University Press, 2021)
It is interesting with your Tiger and Ape example. Actual tigers have very limited communication abilities so a tiger would have vary limited ability to understand another creatures motivation as motivation. Arguably this would be why it would be useless to try and make a moral argument with an actual tiger. The tiger is not the appropriate sort of agent to make such an argument lacking any serious ability to cognize motivations at all.
The analogy to reason and investigation of the world is something like this. If I understand Priestley's reasons for invoking phlogiston and judge it reasonable and not pathological, I probably won't believe in phlogiston, but I may alter how I tend to reason and how I might investigate some other phenomenon or question if it has analogous elements to one of Priestley's investigations.
I find the idea that understanding a motivation might be intrinsically motivating interesting and even suggestive, but I'm never sure I find it compelling. Reflecting on your ideas it may be because I don't think motives are intrinsically, indubitably or infallibly motivating. We desire somethings in an intellectual way such that we in addition judge them to be desirable, this can just be wrong, but if we fail to believe they are desirable we desire them less (to desire something in that intellectual way believing it desirable is to desire it more in a certain way). To believe morality is subjective or general nihilism etc. is to lack that belief and so if you consistently do it to lack that full throated desire. However you might be an inconsistent moral relativist and anyone's belief has no impact on moral relativism's truth. I just think people who think they don't desire things less because of moral relativism are committing an error. So in general I think I can understand a motive without finding it intrinsically motivating.
Lots of really interesting thoughts here and I think it will be hard for me to do them justice. I may think about things more and circle back later.
I don't know what to think about norms of rationality. Maybe I'm a 'norm'al realist, in that I believe that any creature capable of thinking logically ought to do so. There is a clear sense that a creature which must rely on beliefs in order to realize its purposes ought to form and revise its beliefs in ways that are conducive to realizing those purposes. This isn't quite the same as saying it ought to be rational, though, as there are plenty of ways it can be optimal for realizing certain purposes to have somewhat irrational belief mechanisms. Anyway, I am convinced that being rational is what we ought to be, and also that this belief is not one that irrational creatures can be persuaded of.
So in my argument against moral realists, I am willing to grant them that if it is irrational to be 'immoral', they win. The tiger, as unrealistic as that is in reality, is a rational tiger precisely for this reason (and so it can have a conversation where it discusses its motives).
With regard to the differences between rational agreement and moral agreement, I'm not deeply committed to the idea that it's diagnostic of empirical facts that rational beings with perfect information will converge to agreement. I am very aware that in the real world some humans can't be persuaded of very obvious facts. I just find the idea of ideal reasoners with ideal information clarifying, but I don't know that I have a perfect or even a very good account of what seems to me the very obvious difference between empirical and moral 'facts'. This is a discussion I am having with @bothsidesbrigade in a different thread. I think you and I are on the same page that there is something pretty different about our ability to establish 'bob was killed' versus 'bob's killing was wrong'. I'm not too troubled by the difficulty in nailing that down, but it would be convenient if I could state it more clearly.
I agree that the basis of morality is motivation. I don't think I agree with you that understanding a motivation is instrinsically motivating, and I definitely disagree that recognizing our motivations are not universally binding should be demotivating. I think if we judge ourself relevantly similar to another being, it can be motivating to understand their motivations, but the opposite can be the case if we judge ourselves to be dissimilar. I can sort of understand why Edmund Kemper killed his mother, but if anything I think contemplating the motives of serial killers pushes me away from endorsing their motives via revulsion. Ditto with Nazis. The more I understand their worldview, the more I find it repugnant.
I don't really see why the failure of our values to be universal should be demotivating. In particular, I have a special concern for my own welfare: I don't expect others to share it. I care about the welfare of others, but I can easily understand why others might not. Personally, that doesn't cause me to question my own concern; it licenses me to judge those others unfavorably. It doesn't affect that judgment that they don't share it, nor that they probably judge me by their own standards. Ultimately, I care both about the welfare of others, and also I care about being a virtuous person according to human standards. I can offer evolutionary explanations of why I have those motives, maybe, but it doesn't bother me that they have causal antecedents.
In terms of the issue that understanding often makes some positions more objectionable or repellant. I don't think that is a problem for the view that understanding may be an objective reason for compassion, because often understanding someone's position more will be understanding that it is intrinsically mistaken and the more you understand it is mistaken the more it is objectionable. Understanding a mistaken position as not a mistake would be misunderstanding it, not understanding in the relevant sense.
An example might illustrate my idea. If understanding a (sensible) motivation engenders it to a degree does that mean that understanding someone who takes joy in the suffering of others ostensibly because it is suffering. But presumably if we examine their actual psychology we'd see that they don't actual value the suffering of others as suffering rather than misattribute pleasure to it in some complicated way, they thus misattribute properties to it and such misattribution is mistaken and therefore repellant. The more you actually understand their psychology the more starkly is their error revealed to you.
A possible epistemic parallel (to the moral case): I understand why someone has a different belief than I do. It turns out their are under a post-hypnotic suggestion to hallucinate something. The more I actually understand why they believe what they do the more unconvincing and even risible the belief becomes. On the other hand what if I discover no error or pathology underlying the disagreement the more I understand the more I see the actual rational justification for the alternate belief, at some point I'd probably change my position to agree with them.
I don't think that relativism is generally demotivating because I take it most desires are not constituted intellectually in the right sort of way and even of those that are many are not held in the strong sense of being both desired and considered desirable. I don't think the desire for (and pleasure in) chocolate cake is (usually) intellectual in that way for example. As I mentioned I often desire to procrastinate, but I don't think it is desirable, so I'm not demoralized from procrastinating by knowing its not objectively desirable be in so far as I didn't think about it that way in the 1st place.
I don't think (or at least am highly skeptical) that you could understand someone's desire for chocolate cake as intellectual. In that to understand it would mean to me something like the experience I would describe when I would say "Oh yes, I can imagine it melting in my mouth right now, wow!" I think it's improbable that by normal means of understanding another person (analysis of propositions about their psychology) I could achieve understanding of their desire in that sense (although perhaps Mary from the Knowledge Argument could). So I don't think that desire is constituted even in the smallest part by intellectual acts like the belief that chocolate cake is objectively desirable, therefore the belief that nothing is objectively desirable would not remove any of the constituents of that desire and so not be as you say demoralizing.
Here is a complicated case. When being given a medical injection (an IV is inserted etc.) I look away and focus on something else. There are various things going on here, there is a base physiological reaction to getting stabbed that is painful and undesirable in a non-intellectual sense. I look away because I think medical treatment is desirable and so want to increase my desire for it by avoiding the pain of anticipating and seeing the needle get stuck in. Some of that pain of anticipation and seeing is a conditioned reflex response and not intellectual (a very basic association of seeing a wounding and the wounding), but some of it is probably intellectual, I know that if it looks like I'm about to be stabbed it is reasonable to infer I'm being stabbed and I tend to think being stabbed is objectively undesirable (at least has some gross undesirable effects even if net desirable).
So knowing that nothing is objectively desirable does nothing to my physiological pain (and aversion) or even my conditioned reflex association of certain sights and situations with pain and undesirability. However in so far as I really believe it it should blunt the aversion I have to intellectually knowing I've been stabbed and so blunt my pain with looking at myself being pricked with a needle at least a little. But it will also blunt my belief that medical treatment is objectively desirable and so blunt my motivation to look away again a little (my belief that medical treatment is desirable is not all of the type that it is an intellectually and so objectively desirable thing).
So I'd point out being demoralized by relativism is not about being actively bothered by desiring things. It is about a necessary constituent of desire (or at least desire of a certain strength) being absent and therefore that desire being absent (or less intense).
I may desire something only under very narrow conditions. For example I am doing a sewing test and must thread as many needles as possible within a time limit. During the test time I intensely desirous of threading needles, I even believe it is desirable for me to thread needles (to pass the test) and so I believe it is desirable for future versions of me that may exist within the test time interval. I do not believe it is desirable for future versions of me after the test time is over to thread needles, indeed maybe I hate threading needles unnecessarily and that may be constituted believe it is undesirable for me future versions of me after the test time to be threading needles in most cases.
The broader the conditions under which I tend to thread needles the more I desire to thread needles. The longer the test time the more desire I need to thread needles to pass the test (unless perhaps I achieve something like a Zen beginner's mind and strive without striving at threading needles). For this sort of thing believing it is desirable to thread needles will contribute to my tendency to thread needles and so my desire to thread them. If I don't think its desirable for future versions of me to thread needles (because say I think the test is over), this is often constitutive of or just another way of describing the absence of the desire to thread needles.
Here is the step I think one is most likely to disagree with. I think that believing X is desirable for a set of future versions of me, is the same belief as believing X is desirable for the set of all rational creatures sufficiently like that set of future versions of me. And being alike probably means in terms of rational faculties, capacities of feeling, financial situation etc. and is probably independent of things like given name, who parents are etc.
So the broader the set of future versions of me I think X is desirable for the more I desire X (remember not all my desires are of this intellectual kind). I think there are things I desire so strongly in this way that I desire them basically for all conceivable future versions of me. But I conceive of a vastly broad set of future versions of me, I might suffer amnesia, change my name, be transported to a mysterious foreign land, be recruited by space aliens to fight an intergalactic war etc. The set of all future versions of me in that sense seems like it probably covers if not all rational beings at least a very big swath.
What does it mean for something to be an objective moral. Well non-exhaustively to me it seems like one such thing is a thing that is desirable (or believed to be desirable) for a sufficiently large swathe of all rational beings (it is certainly not required to be desirable for all being, rocks don't desire things, paramecium probably don't etc.).
So if I believe as I tend to that there are no objective moral truths I must foreswear desiring things in the intellectual way where I consider them desirable for all future versions of me on pain of actually believing in an objective moral truth if I persist in these over broad desires. I may desire them for a smaller subset of future versions of me (and their equivalents) perhaps, but that is just to say I may desire them less than the maximal amount I could (on this scale for this kind of desire).
This is the sort of thought process that leads me to think that moral relativism tends inevitably to more general relativism about motives (the subset of motives that are amenable to intellectual analysis).
Gah "If rationality is not objective then different agents could be rational by their own lights and NOT converge with the same evidence to different realities, so reality won't be objective just like morality." I added the "NOT" by mistake. Obviously different rationalities may converge on the same evidence to Different realities.
I'm not an expert on this topic, but is it your view that there are objective reasons to be rational, just not to be moral? That seems surprising to me.
I’m not sure I’d say there are objective reasons to be rational, because if you aren’t rational reasons are irrelevant anyway.
also reality doesn't care so it is up to us to be honest about stuff, foisting reason onto anything other than ourselves (deontology) removes our responsibility for well anything and everything, (objective reasons are no reasons at all). in a sense responsibility is more important than rationality, (most moralities don't start from either place it seems but I might be too harsh here) (Stich says the moral domain does not exist and I have come to a similar conclusion by a different path https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/a-stich-in-time ).
What makes you think reality doesn't care?
if it does we do not have access to it.... panpsychism or pantheism aside most positions assume reality does not care, or has no capacity to do so (that's my strong version, my weak version is if it cares, it does not do so within any of our frameworks).
Reality _objectively_ does not care. Maybe that is the point of it?
It's a bigger lift than that to show that reality doesn't care, or that we don't have access to it. Unfounded premises aren't necessarily bad, but you ought to know if you have them.
might be more of a lift to say it does care i suspect, might have the Razor on my side here,
in any case, we exist because we have 'premises', or biases or instincts, so have to 'unfounded' premises is nearly impossible, or rather, that they confound us, i.e. when we are 'founded' they compose with us into life, or at least in our forebears, which we inherit and gain some benefit from, and sadly we often know nothing about that series of events, but we do become aware as we live and learn that these premises, these strengths are also weaknesses, as we have both observed
additionally, my premises may appear unfounded with in you framework of learning, but perfectly founded in mine
reality does not care about that distinction, I regard that as a possibly point in my favour
I agree with most of this except for the bit about how your arguments raise a problem for objective morality in particular. You could replace "morality" with "reality" throughout and your arguments would be just as compelling. You could even run a tiger/ape story where their disagreement isn't moral but modal, mereological, or otherwise entirely descriptive. With the same result.
I dunno, I don’t think the paper with ‘morality’ replaced with ‘reality’ is convincing at all. Reality isn’t social, and reality isn’t subjective. There is an important asymmetry between ‘John was killed’ and ‘John’s killing was wrong’, because I am comfortable asserting that rational agents with access to the same facts will converge to agreeing about whether John was killed. I don’t think they must converge on an agreement about the wrongness of the killing.
Isn't reality social though?
Is an apple red to a blind person? Just because for humans a shared reality is converged upon much easier than shared values, doesn't mean both aren't still constructed based off of the general/average perceptions of everyone involved.
Typically you'd wave this away by gesturing to how aliens would still understand the electromagnetic spectrum even if they don't share our values, but they might conceive of the spectrum in radically different terms than we do. If they see the color black where we see red, we really do construct reality in meaningfully different ways. It seems silly then to say the color of apples is objective, despite this being an empirical claim. Just imagine explaining 3D to a bunch of blobs from flatland.
You say we could give them sci-fi-tech-glasses to expand their perception of color, but why wouldn't you consider it relevant if we could give them pills to value the same things we humans do?
I wouldn’t call reality social. We perceive it in a subjective way. Things like colours are subjective perceptions: reality is different. I believe in a shared and objective reality that is intersubjectively accessible. We gain knowledge about reality that, while unavoidably subjectively structured, is warranted by our causal connection to the world. Physical reality is objective and outside us, and our subjective experience of it is created and constrained by it. We rely on our social relations to help us understand that reality, but I don’t think they’re constitutive of it. By contrast, it seems to me that our subjective evaluations ARE constitutive of morality. There’s nothing in nature constraining them.
There's nothing in nature constraining our values? You yourself said values must be consistent. There's nothing in nature constraining what we BELIEVE about epistemic reality either. I can believe the world is flat. I CAN--I won't get smited for doing so--and yet you think reality is still objective. Because irrespective of what you perceive, reality still is something, supposedly. Well, that too you just perceive. Hmm... is there any part of reality that isn't ultimately just a perception... and thus necessarily subjective? I suppose due to the nature of any claim you make about reality, it must come from your subjective mind, and thus could only ever be the subjective perceiving the objective, albeit inescapably.
But for every group of entities with compatible goals, who benefit at least theoretically from mutual cooperation, there WILL be definite behaviors that are and aren't accepted, there WILL be definite ways to go about achieving these goals, and there WILL be the perception of certain behaviors as correct independent of what one thinks. Perceived as objective... inescapably.
Quite the conundrum for both the realist and the non-realist alike it would seem. Both are felled by phenomenology, which in hindsight should've been obvious due to the very existence of both "camps" in a formal academic subject.
If you believe in a flat earth, you will be smitten quite spectacularly when you act on that belief in the wrong circumstances. Empirical reality has a way of imposing itself on people.
I think you can’t probably run an argument using game theory or whatever that gets a stable state that is fairly moral. I think that’s pretty much the basis for real-life human morality. It is just not universal, since different social structures and different arrangements of power will have different and less ‘moral’ stable states, and running game theory also presupposes the evaluative attitudes of the population (as in, usually we assume they are ethical egoists).
Well, you have to understand individuation, conceptual schemes, and that observation is theory-laden. Imagine the ape sees himself as a whole organism but the tiger sees the ape as just a proper part. And then their dispute would be just as intractable.
I think you’d have to say a lot more to make the comparison comprehensible, let alone convincing.