Cito di Pense wrote:Well, this is what I mean. You are hopelessly confused about the difference between moral statements and statements about acts that have (at least statistical) consequences. You don't really have a clue about what ethical statements are, do you? Or, you could state what you think are the ethical consequences of smoking, allowing that one is knowledgeable about the statistics. Go ahead, make an ethical argument. You're in charge, Lou. Make a decision.

No, I think you're hopelessly confused. Why should ethical statements have such spechul status?

In relation to the premise, smoking tobacco does not enhance general wellbeing, not just for the individual (who may decide for himself) but for society. Therefore, if the moral premise is wellbeing, you can easily get an ought from it. That doesn't mean other situations aren't more complicated, of course.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:Well, this is what I mean. You are hopelessly confused about the difference between moral statements and statements about acts that have (at least statistical) consequences. You don't really have a clue about what ethical statements are, do you? Or, you could state what you think are the ethical consequences of smoking, allowing that one is knowledgeable about the statistics. Go ahead, make an ethical argument. You're in charge, Lou. Make a decision.

No, I think you're hopelessly confused. Why should ethical statements have such spechul status?

Because you want to discuss ethics. You're a person of normal intelligence, Arch, and should be able to figure this one out. If you don't want to discuss ethics, what the fuck are you doing in a thread like this? Trolling?

Discussing ethics is not the same thing as offering your opinion that ethical absolutists have the wrong end of the stick.

Spinozasgalt wrote:

zoon wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:………I cut out a chunk of the philosophy links there, because they tilt into epistemology issues rather than what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about objectivity and how we know. The realist (or just the metaethicist) can be as tentative and provisional as you like, and they often are. And it's not about rejecting the scientific picture, but rather a conclusion that you draw from it.

Remember what the autonomy assumption is as it appears in Stanford:

Autonomy Assumption: people have, to greater or lesser degrees, a capacity for reasoning that follows autonomous standards appropriate to the subjects in question, rather than in slavish service to evolutionarily given instincts merely filtered through cultural forms or applied in novel environments. Such reflection, reasoning, judgment and resulting behavior seem to be autonomous in the sense that they involve exercises of thought that are not themselves significantly shaped by specific evolutionarily given tendencies, but instead follow independent norms appropriate to the pursuits in question (Nagel 1979).

(If you look at the stuff surrounding this assumption in the article, you get the necessary caveats so that we know we're not talking about some ultimate rational God-type agency thing completely cut off from evolution, either, so we can dispense with that idea. I would put it differently to Nagel, too, but you get the point of it.)

Now, if something like this assumption is at work in other domains, how do you assume against it in one without doing so in others, based on the argumentative picture you've sketched above in your original quote?

From #256 24th Sept:

Spinozasgalt wrote:…The realist can say that if truth is a thing, our evolutionary past needn't have involved guidance towards truth in order for us to track such a thing now. If anything about us evolved to do one thing (if we can put it in that language), it doesn't mean that we're not now using it to do something else.

I think our current disagreement might be resolvable, taking a hint from the question I’ve quoted above from your earlier post #256. The kind of autonomy described in your 1979 quote from Nagel might very well, it seems to me, be provided by fully causal brain mechanisms which evolved through natural selection. Since 1979, much experimental work has been done on the reasoning powers of non-human animals.

.....

No, no, stop, Zoon. We don't need to go through all of this. The origin of whatever this capacity is, or other capacities, is not what the disagreement is over. These evolutionary stories and links don't help, they just distract me from the problem I'm getting at. This is, and was, about the content of specific beliefs and judgments. You were saying that moral realism is dead in the water, yes? But the argument for this was not that our capacities for such beliefs, judgments, and reasoning, are evolved, but that the content, of our particular moral beliefs and judgments pretty much across the board, is saturated with evolutionary influences. And this is supposed to be evidenced by the fact that our capacities weren't designed or guided specifically to target and capture moral truths. So the content is, in a slightly different sense, "evolved" or "evolutionary". It's why you intimated that the opponent of this view had to provide another causal picture about brains and such to rival the unguided one.

Now, I think you're saying in this post and later on that you'll accept a mixed view, where some of our moral beliefs and judgments have the normative content they do because of biological forces influencing our output in a certain direct way, and others are the result of us learning and reasoning autonomously within a rational framework of norms and such specific to a domain, such as in science, mathematics, philosophy, etc. But the thing is, I've read you as having this mixed view for awhile. But if so, then realism won't be ruled out at the outset on your mixed view: because in this area of the discussion, all the realist needs in order to get started are these capacities to reason autonomously in much the same way as we might do in these other areas. That's why I'm suggesting you drop this particular guidance argument against realism, because it seems to require much more than a mixed view to work. And it isn't focused enough on details specific only to the moral domain so that you won't end up potentially damaging other parts of your view.

Long story short: I'd just drop the particular argument because I don't think it works. If your view is able to stand on its own feet and compete, you don't need to block realism at the outset. And the last thing you want to do is to potentially hobble your own view to do that. Because realists and metaethicists in general don't have to accept your premises. This is me trying to be the good guy. I'm not attacking your view at this point. I'm saying, don't damage it to try to get a quick victory; it won't stick.

Yes, I was being careless in forgetting there are various kinds of moral realism. Some, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, are more opposed to naturalism than others. Quoting from the link: “Moral realists, in contrast, are standardly seen as unable to sustain their accounts without appealing, in the end, to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism”. I was mistakenly assuming that the moral realist’s argument which you were putting forward was from that “standard” viewpoint, which the quote does seem to be suggesting is something of a straw man for people arguing against moral realism.

My primary disagreement is with any version of ethics which denies that ethical thinking is compatible with our brains, and so all of our thinking, being in the end evolved and causal (including the very important areas of domain-general intelligence). More broadly, I am extremely uncomfortable with any version of metaethics which is incompatible with the scientific viewpoint, because accepting such a version would involve fracturing my beliefs about the world. I am happy to consider any version of moral realism which is compatible with evolution and causality, now that ethics no longer needs to distance itself from the older inadequate evolutionary theory which claimed wrongly that natural selection could in principle only lead to self-interested behaviour. In fact, I think archibald and I are coming round to some tentative kind of pragmatic realism. I don’t think you have said much yet about exactly what is entailed by the moral realism which you are adopting for the purposes of this discussion, but I fully expect that it’s much more thought-through than anything I’ve come up with. If it’s also not incompatible with evolutionary theory and with neuroscience, then I think it’s very probable that we have no substantive disagreement.

I’m adding, I hope, some clarification concerning whether the content of our ethical decisions is “saturated with evolutionary influences”. Taking rational behaviour as an analogy, I think it’s rational for me in the morning to dress myself, have breakfast, catch up with the news and perhaps send an email to my sister, and this behaviour is rational because it’s under the control of my domain-general intelligence which prioritises and organises the separate decisions. I don’t need to know anything whatsoever about evolution to make those decisions for rational reasons, my knowledge of evolutionary theory does not impinge on the decision-making. In that sense, my rational decisions are not influenced by evolution, they are far from being “saturated with evolutionary influences”. At the same time, though, each of those decisions is clearly shaped by evolved predispositions, we’ve evolved to want to keep warm, eat, stay informed and in contact with close kin, and our domain-general intelligence also evolved (this is about compatibility rather than the specific decisions). So in one sense of the phrase it would not be correct at all to say that my actions were “saturated with evolutionary influences”, while in another sense it would be correct. I think the same is true of our ethical behaviour. This is the kind of ambiguity which can lead to interminable arguments.

Thank you for the offer of a list of metaethicists, which I’ll take up. I should be interested to get an idea of what they are saying, but I’m unlikely to study them in depth, please don’t go to too much trouble.

archibald wrote:

zoon wrote:The author, William FitzPatrick, doesn’t stress that the “domain-general intelligence” evolved along with the more specific predispositions which he refers to as “evolutionary causal influences”, but I presume he would agree that it did evolve.

Unlike spinozasgalt, I find your citations very relevant.

The one potential ....flaw...in them (which I would like to stress does not necessarily invalidate their explanatory power, it's more of a caveat) is that they are somewhat restricted to......offering plausible explanations. Plausibility, imo, is very worthwhile, but there is an element of post-hoc storytelling about them which can be objected to (and has been here, I think, most notably by cito, who might use the phrase 'just so stories' and warn us about contingency).

Imo, neuroscience has some advantages over evolutionary biology, and is a useful companion to and bulwark for it, in that it deals in what is and what can be pointed to, rather than what processes might plausibly have occurred in the past.

Patricia Churchland gave what seems to me like an excellent example (in the first video I posted above) of how the urge to pair-bond in prairie voles was traced to the pattern and density of certain receptors (for oxytocin I think) in their brains, that isn't there in other voles who don't pair bond.

I imagine a similar analysis could be done on, for example, human emotions (and has been, I understand). They will, I think, reduce to biology, neurobiology in particular.

One wonders, what fundamental is left to ponder or explain after such things have been demonstrated (allowing of course that more work needs to be done)? Questions about how or why they came to be operating (in other words, evolutionary biological explanations of what happened in the past) are to some extent a side issue, and we can deal with 'what is' as the basis for understanding behaviours. With evolutionary biology adding possible corroborations.

And of course, morality is, at the end of the day, about behaviour. I dare anyone to suggest that neurobiological activity can't directly account for what we call moral judgements, be they reasoned, emotional or what have you. Who could argue that there's any 'whys' left to explain when we know the whats and hows? I'm almost tempted to say, 'you wanna know why infidelity is considered either right or wrong? Look at the pattern of neuron receptors.'

To that extent, it's possible to argue that traditional philosophy is and was just asking the wrong, old, questions, or questions to which there are no meaningful answers and possibly never were, at least not from philosophy. I have a half-theory that traditional philosophy hasn't shaken off nearly as much woo-thinking as it arguably needs to, with all the attendant ideals and absolutes that woo often involves. Use of the word 'victory' might also qualify. It's certainly a quaint notion when applied to philosophy.

And if moral realists, for example, or their sponsors, remain 'unconvinced' by this or that alternative explanation that they feel thay are 'unconvinced by' then I suspect that all that will happen is that they will go away and do a survey of metaehtical 'viewpoints' or something, or write about it, copiously, in academic articles that only other armchair philosophers are going to find any good reason to bother spending their otherwise valuable time reading.

Sheesh. 5 posts in a row. I think I might be a worse rambler than you are! LOL.

I’m always happy to read your posts, I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything in them, though I'm concentrating on the discussion with Spinozasgalt. My feeling about evolution as a background for ethics is, I think, rather like the question of abiogenesis when discussing creationism. All that we are likely to get, so long after the events, is plausible scenarios, and that’s all that’s needed for the argument, though it would be nice to have something more definite. If there was no plausible scientific mechanism whatsoever for abiogenesis, then the theists would have a much stronger point. In the days 50 or 100 years ago when evolution was taken to be all about helping self and possibly offspring, then there was a strong case that evolution could not possibly account for ethics, because so much of ethics is based on concern for people outside the immediate family. If we evolved not to care about non-family, why would people all over the world say that it’s wrong to push the fat man off the bridge, or that fairness matters, why don’t they just shrug their shoulders? Modern evolutionary theory is compatible with that kind of ethical predisposition (inclusive fitness, evolution as group-living animals etc), and this compatibility matters a lot to me because it means I no longer have a fractured world view, with science underlying everything but ethics. But I think compatibility is as far as I can argue for evolution in ethics, I’m agreeing with Spinozasgalt that the actual content of ethical behaviour is very much as it was, for much the same reasons. For example, I think you and I agree that we can say for practical purposes that there is just and unjust behaviour, and that the unjust behaviour is wrong and to be disapproved or punished, and we are both happy that all this behaviour (both the unjust and the retributively just) is compatible with evolutionary theory, but nobody is deriving either the specific sense of justice or the content of particular decisions from what we know of evolutionary theory.

?

Cito di Pense wrote:Because you want to discuss ethics. You're a person of normal intelligence, Arch, and should be able to figure this one out. If you don't want to discuss ethics, what the fuck are you doing in a thread like this? Trolling?

Right ho. Assume ethical statements are spechul without giving any sort of justification. Good one.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:Because you want to discuss ethics. You're a person of normal intelligence, Arch, and should be able to figure this one out. If you don't want to discuss ethics, what the fuck are you doing in a thread like this? Trolling?

Right ho. Assume ethical statements are spechul without telling us why. Good one.

I didn't say they were special. I suggested that the discussion is topical. It's not as if you lack the necessary domain knowledge. Is it? You can read what philosophers write as easily (I hope) as I can. If your reading comprehension skills or metaphysical a priori principles are in the way, it's not my fucking fault.

Cito di Pense wrote:

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:Because you want to discuss ethics. You're a person of normal intelligence, Arch, and should be able to figure this one out. If you don't want to discuss ethics, what the fuck are you doing in a thread like this? Trolling?

Right ho. Assume ethical statements are spechul without telling us why. Good one.

I didn't say they were special. I suggested that the discussion is topical. It's not as if you lack the necessary domain knowledge. Is it? You can read what philosophers write as easily (I hope) as I can. If your reading comprehension skills or metaphysical a priori principles are in the way, it's not my fucking fault.

Blah blah blah. Referring me to philosophers now? Lol.

I've told you why not smoking is a moral issue in the light of what follws from a particular moral premise.

Now it's your turn to tell me how it's not a moral issue.

archibald wrote:
I've told you why not smoking is a moral issue in the light of what follws from a particular moral premise.

Yes, you have:

archibald wrote:
In relation to the premise, smoking tobacco does not enhance general wellbeing, not just for the individual (who may decide for himself) but for society. Therefore, if the moral premise is wellbeing, you can easily get an ought from it. That doesn't mean other situations aren't more complicated, of course.

But now you're stuck with an objective 'general wellbeing' as dictating the content of ethical principles. And I thought you declined moral realism. I don't just mean that general wellbeing is something that can be inspected in this way or that, but that you want to make ethical principles themselves subject to examination. That's as close as you've come to ethical realism yet. If you don't accept it as a moral principle, then that's a private codicil on an objective moral principle.

Cito di Pense wrote:But now you're stuck with an objective 'general wellbeing' as dictating the content of ethical principles. And I thought you declined moral realism.

I expressly said, several times, that it was an arbitrary and non-objective premise. And it doesn't dictate either.

Regarding moral realism, I've already agreed that some sort of non-absolute moral realism might have legs, and it's the sort that I'm now talking about. Bear in mind also that nobody has bothered to define moral realism yet, of course.

How you can get so much wrong in so short a post is impressive.

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:But now you're stuck with an objective 'general wellbeing' as dictating the content of ethical principles. And I thought you declined moral realism.

I expressly said, several times, that it was an arbitrary and non-objective premise. And it doesn't dictate either.

Do try to keep up.

Why do you say it's arbitrary? Other than the sense you'd say anything observable is arbitrary. Welcome to Arch's version of solipsism. You can say that anything you don't bother to define is arbitrary. You mean, not everybody will agree that general wellbeing is an ethical goal. But that's not what realism is about. You're back to complaining that not everybody agrees. If you want everyone to agree, join a church congregation, and best of fucking luck to ye.

Cito di Pense wrote:

archibald wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:But now you're stuck with an objective 'general wellbeing' as dictating the content of ethical principles. And I thought you declined moral realism.

I expressly said, several times, that it was an arbitrary and non-objective premise. And it doesn't dictate either.

Do try to keep up.

Why do you say it's arbitrary? Other than the sense you'd say anything observable is arbitrary. Welcome to Arch's version of solipsism.

Words, eh? What do we mean by 'arbitrary'? Perhaps there is a better word. Whatever. I mean that it's species-subjective and represents only the interests of that species, it's not actually objective. That sort of actually objective moral realism is the sort I'm thinking is dead in the soup.

Cito di Pense wrote:But that's not what realism is about.

Is it not? Well then, what exactly is it that moral realism is about, cito? I've been all ears for about 20 pages on that one.

Please don't lazily refer me to 'a survey of current thinking in metaethics'. If you can find two philosophers who completely agree I'll give you a spechul banana. Just tell me what it is to you.

archibald wrote:What do we mean by 'arbitrary'? Perhaps there is a better word. Whatever. I mean that it's species-subjective and represents only the interests of that species, it's not actually objective. That sort of moral realism is the sort I'm thinking is dead in the soup.

Oh, FFS, Arch. You used the word 'arbitrary', and now you're using the word 'species'. Are you sure you have the definition right?

Well then, what exactly is it that moral realism is all about, cito? I've been all ears for about 20 pages on that one.

No, you fucking haven't, because if you have been listening, you haven't taken it in. For a person of normal intelligence, you've got an overweening confidence about just what it is you're taking in.

Cito di Pense wrote:

archibald wrote:What do we mean by 'arbitrary'? Perhaps there is a better word. Whatever. I mean that it's species-subjective and represents only the interests of that species, it's not actually objective. That sort of moral realism is the sort I'm thinking is dead in the soup.

Oh, FFS, Arch. You used the word 'arbitrary', and now you're using the word 'species'. Are you sure you have the definition right?

Well then, what exactly is it that moral realism is all about, cito? I've been all ears for about 20 pages on that one.

No, you fucking haven't, because if you have been listening, you haven't taken it in. For a person of normal intelligence, you've got an overweening confidence about just what it is you're taking in.

Boring endless whining is boring.

Laters. Consider not evading questions put to you, old chap. Then maybe I'll have some reason to take you more seriously.

Have just finished watching the video archibald and here are some of my thoughts

Sam Harris claims that values reduce to facts but values are subjective while facts are objective. Knowledge may inform
value judgements but those judgements are not themselves as true as the facts they are based upon. One can over time
change a value judgement without any new facts so the relationship between the two must be correlative not causative

Patricia Churchland thought that do goodery was a problem where those who take the normative moral high ground feel
it necessary to tell others how they should live their lives. I agree with that. So long as no one is breaking any law and is
not in any way imposing upon anyone else they are free to do whatever they want. Though if do goodery is no more than
one exercising their freedom of speech then they obviously must be free to do so

Peter Singer made reference to moral behaviour in other primates reminding us that morality is not an exclusively human
concept. A chimpanzee who does not engage in reciprocity can make the intended recipient angry because the favour has
not been returned. Exactly like how some humans would behave [ thought not all ]

Lawrence Krauss like Sam Harris tried to reference causation between scientific knowledge and morality. Again think there
is a link but it is not as defined as he thinks it is. Morality is a concept so it is not something one can examine scientifically

Simon Blackburn thinks there are different mental states. The objective one that deals with facts about the observed world
and the desire one that deals with how we wish to interpret that world. And values fall into the latter category. And I agree
with this because it separates knowledge from values and treats them as entirely different domains. Which is what they are

Steven Pinker argues that morality can be derived partly from science but then goes on to say that it is reasoning rather than
science that determines morality and I agree with that distinction. Since reasoning explains why but science does not do why

Cito  wrote:
It is simply not enough to say that right and wrong cannot be objectively and collectively true. You have to start saying which acts are not objectively right or wrong and make a definition of objective to contrast with absolute. Objective means we can examine the content of ethical beliefs

I sometimes treat objective and absolute synonymously but obviously this does not apply
in every situation and so thank you for highlighting the error in my reasoning there Cito

archibald wrote:
Laters. Consider not evading questions put to you, old chap. Then maybe I'll have some reason to take you more seriously.

What? You mean this...

archibald wrote:
It's in the definition of Moral Realism I posted.

Do recall what you posted:

archibald wrote:
http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_ ... alism.html

This is what I understand to be the basis for moral realism.

And here's what I found on that website:

http://www.philosophybasics.com/general_faq.html

This website was created as a personal project by Luke Mastin. He has no official training in philosophy and this site is intended as an entry level resource by a laymen for the layman.

So what it looks like to me is that you hunted around on the webZ unitl you found a definition you thought you could use (in your layman-like innocence) to prosecute your dimwitted straw man attack on "ethical realism".

Next time you want to complain that somebody isn't answering a question you put to them, consider that the reason might be that your question was based on so much fucking idiotic legalistic wrangling and manipulation that it were best to leave it until you threw your inevitable tantrum over its having been ignored. Still want to take part in the conversation, Arch? Any time you think you're ready. I love the smell of your shit-stained rhetorical wrangling in the morning. It smells like... desperation.

surreptitious57 wrote:

Cito  wrote:
It is simply not enough to say that right and wrong cannot be objectively and collectively true. You have to start saying which acts are not objectively right or wrong and make a definition of objective to contrast with absolute. Objective means we can examine the content of ethical beliefs

I sometimes treat objective and absolute synonymously but obviously this does not apply
in every situation and so thank you for highlighting the error in my reasoning there Cito

Well, it looks to me as if it might actually be necessary to read some of the literature instead of debating the definition of "objective"; we've no doubt learned from our debates about the meaning of the word 'atheist' how some people insist that the definition of a word is in its usage. In some sense, being stuck in these sorts of debates is like relying on the training wheels for riding a bike. In no small way this is because of the habit some people have of relying on the dictionary when they've grabbed the short end of the argument stick. I've come to mock the vernacular use of the term 'rational skepticism' around here. For more on constructing arguments based on the way we'd like the world to be, read stuff like "the world according to tuco". If ethical judgements cannot be interrogated, then they're absolute. Department of tautology department...

Spinozasgalt can comment on whether I've gotten anything right in trying to glean something from those posts. I've tried in what I've written to make statements that somebody knowledgeable about ethics can comment meaningfully upon, so that I won't have to be told "No, no. Just stop. We don't have to go through all that again..."

I think problems arise when words have either multiple meanings or multiple interpretations. The solution to such ambiguity
is an easy one. When one is using any such word they must define it as rigorously as possible and then stick to the definition
equally as rigorously even if everyone else is using a totally different definition. Dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive
and deviation is inevitable. This is why clarity of definition is so important in serious discourse and even discourse in general