Well I don't see where I'm mistaken or that moral naturalists are committed to what you've said they are. If Harris is a moral naturalist, then he should agree with you here:

YanShen wrote:There are no abstract Platonic entities corresponding to "good" or "bad".

If he disagreed with that, then his view would be even more garbled than has been shown earlier in this thread.

The moral naturalist still argues that there is some objective criteria for determining good and bad and that ethical statements reflect valid truth-apt propositions. Surely this would imply embracing abstract Platonic entities. Otherwise, I don't see how one could argue that ethical statements are in fact truth apt or that they can be objectively determined.

The anti-realist would argue that ethical statements are nonsense precisely because they purport to refer to abstract entities, which in fact don't exist.

Even saying that good or goodness is what is conducive to natural well being uses the word good as an entity with a definite essence. If you deny good as a Platonic entity, it's hard to see how you can refer to "good" in any objective sense.

YanShen wrote:The moral naturalist still argues that there is some objective criteria for determining good and bad and that ethical statements reflect valid truth-apt propositions. Surely this would imply embracing abstract Platonic entities. Otherwise, I don't see how one could argue that ethical statements are in fact truth apt or that they can be objectively determined.

The anti-realist would argue that ethical statements are nonsense precisely because they purport to refer to abstract entities, which in fact don't exist.

Even saying that good is what is conducive to natural well being uses the word good as an entity with a definite essence. If you deny good as a Platonic entity, it's hard to see how you can refer to "good" in any objective sense.

The moral naturalist holds that moral facts are reducible to natural facts and are useful in our causal explanations. Are natural facts truth-apt in your view? If not, then I don't think the disagreement is so much about ethics as truth.

Your claim that moral facts reduce to natural facts is the core of the issue here. There's no way to justify that moral facts reduce to natural facts unless one implicitly posits the existence of Platonic entities.

YanShen wrote:Your claim that moral facts reduce to natural facts is the core of the issue here. There's no way to justify that moral facts reduce to natural facts unless one implicitly posits the existence of Platonic entities.

Errr, I'm not sure why.

I'm not defending moral naturalism here, so much as wondering why you think the naturalist needs to posit these abstract entities.

Well in order for moral facts to be reducible to natural facts, these moral facts would have to exist in the first place objectively. The essence of any realist position is that the are objective moral truths independent of human thought. In other words, murder would still be wrong in an absolute sense even if all of a sudden everyone decided that murder was good. This objectivity leads to mind-independence, which ultimately leads to Platonic entities.

YanShen wrote:Well in order for moral facts to be reducible to natural facts, these moral facts would have to exist in the first place objectively. The essence of any realist position is that the are objective moral truths independent of human thought. In other words, murder would still be wrong in an absolute sense even if all of a sudden everyone decided that murder was good. This objectivity leads to mind-independence, which ultimately leads to Platonic entities.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Do you think positing natural facts leads ultimately to Platonic entitites?

Edited.
The problem is that natural facts reflect an empirical reality and deal with spatio-temporal entities. Since entities such as "good" and "bad" are clearly non spatio-temporal, if you state that they are objective and therefore mind-independent, they are necessarily Platonic.

But since the anti-realistic argues that abstract non spatio-temporal entities don't in fact exist, the anti-realist would state that the entire discussion over morality results from a misuse of our everyday language, over treating abstractions as though they were ontologically real.

YanShen wrote:Edited.
The problem is that natural facts reflect an empirical reality and deal with spatio-temporal entities. Since entities such as "good" and "bad" are clearly non spatio-temporal, if you state that they are objective and therefore mind-independent, they are necessarily Platonic.

But that's just it. The moral naturalist holds that moral facts reduce to natural facts, so that they are spatio-temporal entitites. That's why the moral naturalist thinks that these factor into our causal explanations. Then comes Moore's Open Question Argument, the replies and the new formulations, etc.

The key point is that moral naturalists think moral facts do deal with spatio-temporal entities. I'm not saying they're correct to do so, but that's their position nonetheless.

Clearly I agree that the naturalist bases what is good or bad off of spatio-temporal entities. but that means that "good and "bad" need to exist in the first place. So these are Platonic non spatio-temporal entities whose essence is determined by spatio-temporal entities.

In other words, if you claim to talk about good and bad objectively, then good and bad would need to exist. But the problem is that you simply can't locate "good" or "bad' in spacetime. You can, as the naturalist does, locate instances of what is good or what is bad in spacetime, but not goodness nor badness themselves. Take for instance the problem of universals. Do only the individual objects that we refer to by the word horse exist? Or does the abstraction of horse-ness itself exist? This is the crux of the issue here.

Think of good and bad as Platonic containers, The contents of the container are determined by natural facts in the case of the moral realist. The contents could also be determined by other ways, such as for instance a fictional God's decree. The anti-realist denies that the container exists in the first place.

YanShen wrote:Well in order for moral facts to be reducible to natural facts, these moral facts would have to exist in the first place objectively. The essence of any realist position is that the are objective moral truths independent of human thought. In other words, murder would still be wrong in an absolute sense even if all of a sudden everyone decided that murder was good. This objectivity leads to mind-independence, which ultimately leads to Platonic entities.

Not necessarily. The objective moral facts can emerge as agents interact. The moral facts don't exist until the agents start to interact; these moral facts are an emergence.

The problem is that these moral facts would still reflect transcendent abstract entities. You might have resolved the fact that they did not always exist. So it seems as if your suggestion is to posit these entities as temporal, but non spatial. The anti-realist would still maintain that only spatio-temporal entities can exist.

YanShen wrote:Clearly I agree that the naturalist bases what is good or bad off of spatio-temporal entities. but that means that "good and "bad" need to exist in the first place. So these are Platonic non spatio-temporal entities whose essence is determined by spatio-temporal entities.

In other words, if you claim to talk about good and bad objectively, then good and bad would need to exist. But the problem is that you simply can't locate "good" or "bad' in spacetime. You can, as the naturalist does, locate instances of what is good or what is bad in spacetime, but not goodness nor badness themselves. Take for instance the problem of universals. Do only the individual objects that we refer to by the word horse exist? Or does the abstraction of horse-ness itself exist? This is the crux of the issue here.

Think of good and bad as Platonic containers, The contents of the container are determined by natural facts in the case of the moral realist. The contents could also be determined by other ways, such as for instance a fictional God's decree. The anti-realist denies that the container exists in the first place.

Sorry for the delay, but this is a little perplexing. I'm not aware of where moral naturalists make use of these non spatio-temporal entities (good and bad). As far as I'm aware for the naturalist good and bad are natural properties, which is why they can change as the natural facts change. I searched the web for naturalist views that rely on what you've written here and haven't found anything. Perhaps you can suggest views where this is evident, because as it is I simply don't see where this is made use of.

Have you read up on the problem of universals? I'm stating that there is a difference between specific instances of good and bad and goodness and badness in general. Specific instances of good and bad are based off of natural facts, for the moral naturalist. But I contend that in order for this to be coherent, the naturalist is implicitly positing Platonic entities.

In order to coherently state that goodness is what a conducive to well being, goodness must exist as some sort of entity in the first place. This means that the naturalist is implicitly positing Platonic entities, because goodness is not something which is located in space-time, but rather it is an abstract entity.

So goodness is like a container, which must be defined in some manner. The moral naturalist simply defines it as being that which is conducive to well being. But the container itself is Platonic.

You're right to say that naturalists define goodness as that which is naturally conducive to well being. But in order to define goodness, it must exist in the first place. It's existence is Platonic. It's essence derives from natural facts, in the view of the moral naturalist.

Here's another way to put it. You believe in moral facts right? So you must believe that there is such a thing as goodness or evilness, independent of specific instances of good or evil. What kind of entity is goodness? We're speaking of it as though it were a thing or entity of some sort. But clearly goodness isn't a physical entity located within space-time, like say the Earth. Therefore, it is an abstract Platonic entity.

Take for instance the following sentences...
The earth revolves around the sun.
Goodness is that which is conducive to human happiness.

The subject of both sentences are nouns. In particular, earth refers to a concrete spatiotemporal object. We can describe precisely where it is located within space-time. What does the noun goodness refer to? Something non spatiotemporal, if we are to treat goodness as a coherent concept at all. You would argue that it refers to this or that act of increasing well being. But those would only be specific instances. The concept of goodness itself is an abstract generality.

I'm understanding the problem, but the difficulty is that I don't currently have the vocabulary to explain my objection. I know of the problem of universals and I understand what you're arguing, but when I now try to state what I find wrong with it, I appear to be talking of the initial misunderstanding. So I don't know how I can proceed. I don't think naturalism is reliant on what you've said, but the terms I'd use to explain why would just make it more confused. If I was reading an objection to your view, then I could understand what I'm reading and agree with it, but not explain it to you myself. Hopefully that makes sense.

So I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

I have one last question, if you'd be so good. Am I correct, YanShen, in thinking that you're a nominalist?

YanShen wrote:Here's another way to put it. You believe in moral facts right? So you must believe that there is such a thing as goodness or evilness, independent of specific instances of good or evil. What kind of entity is goodness? We're speaking of it as though it were a thing or entity of some sort. But clearly goodness isn't a physical entity located within space-time, like say the Earth. Therefore, it is an abstract Platonic entity.

Take for instance the following sentences...
The earth revolves around the sun.
Goodness is that which is conducive to human happiness.

The subject of both sentences are nouns. In particular, earth refers to a concrete spatiotemporal object. We can describe precisely where it is located within space-time. What does the noun goodness refer to? Something non spatiotemporal, if we are to treat goodness as a coherent concept at all. You would argue that it refers to this or that act of increasing well being. But those would only be specific instances. The concept of goodness itself is an abstract generality.

Degree of freedom of action is closer to a "natural fact" than anything else people discuss regarding "moral" questions. Using the word "happiness" is really pissing down the wrong well, because it has nothing to do with natural facts, given that degree of freedom to act does not necessarily lead to people reporting that they are "happy".

What people like Harris may be trying to get at is a reduction of activity specifically aimed at limiting people's freedom of action when those actions can only be said to impact on other people's (subjective) happiness rather than upon their freedom of action. Lots of people don't much care for freedom of thought, too, and they do what they can to limit it in others. This is why libertarianism, at least in some forms, is so enthusiastically defended by some people. If you want to face down the libertarians, or if you are yourself a libertarian, you're may wish to argue these points.

What I am saying is that it's too late for pure philosophy on this one, and you're going to have to entertain economics. If you scratch Harris deeply enough, you may find that he bleeds libertarianism.

Saying that there are natural facts associated with the ideas of "good" and "bad" obliges one to give the correspondence. Harris, as a public figure, is somewhat wishy-washy about giving his version, although increasingly tending towards demagoguery, but it seems to be along these lines. Talking about "happiness" is pointless unless you somehow relate it to the potential actions people are permitted without having "morality" intrude itself. Early in this discussion, it was pointed out that keeping that shit to a minimum is what some of us are after. Until we find a way to place limits on the amount of power that an individual person can wield in society, these issues will trouble us. If somebody cannot be happy unless he does not feel limited in the amount of power he or she can potentially wield, I leave it to you to decide the remedy.

Demonstrating the vast powers of philosophical wibbling is definitely not what I'm after, mainly having to do with establishing what kind of label ending in "-ist" we can slap on another person. That kind of labeling sucks. Absolutely.

Harris responds to his critics in a post at Huffington:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harri ... 67185.html

He's a fucking troll, that's what he is. I mean passages like this:

Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of "good" and "evil" are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don't think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the "contextual" legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place.

...and this...

I might claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a wide range of cognitive/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-being entails always having a terrified person locked in one's basement, waiting to be sacrificed.

...or this...

"What about all the people who don't share your goal of avoiding disease and early death? Who is to say that living a long life free of pain and debilitating illness is 'healthy'? What makes you think that you could convince a person suffering from fatal gangrene that he is not as healthy you are?"

...really pisses me off for the trollish and strawmmanian cherry picking caricature, but fortunately we have this shenanigan of a paragraph to amuse us with intelectual shadenfreude:

Of course, goals and conceptual definitions matter. But this holds for all phenomena and for every method we use to study them. My father, for instance, has been dead for 25 years. What do I mean by "dead"? Do I mean "dead" with reference to specific goals? Well, if you must, yes -- goals like respiration, energy metabolism, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. The definition of "life" remains, to this day, difficult to pin down.

Yeah, it's so fucking hard to understand that someone's DEAD. I mean, he could be in a coma, despite the fact that his HEAD JUST EXPLODED.

This is where Carroll and I begin to diverge. He also seems to be conflating two separate issues: (1) He is asking how we can determine who is worth listening to. This is a reasonable question, but there is no way Carroll could answer it "precisely" and "in terms of measurable quantities" for his own field, much less for a nascent science of morality. How flakey can a Nobel laureate in physics become before he is no longer worth listening to -- indeed, how many crazy things could he say about matter and space-time before he would no longer even count as a "physicist"? Hard question.

This guy doesn't understand one IOTA of science... I mean WTF?

Clearly, we want our conscious states to track the reality of our lives. We want to be happy, but we want to be happy for the right reasons.

(my emphasis)

These are all good questions: Some admit of straightforward answers; others plunge us into moral paradox; none, however, proves that there are no right or wrong answers to questions of human and animal wellbeing.

"You can't prove me I'm wrong, thus I'm right!!"

It has also given faith-based religion -- that great engine of ignorance and bigotry -- a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary -- because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

After having said that moral skepticism is equal to scientific skepticism and basically saying that the whole of science is also based upon unproven a prioris, I think it's high time to show some fucking work. Let's see predictable theories about this. How they might come up, how are they going to be tested, and if they can be completely wretched by statistical fraudulence or not.

Talk is cheap, Harris. The big enlightenment adventure of science got really kickstarted when someone proposed the empirical method and started to experiment, log, observe and validate theories. This is how the vacuum pump was first invented and tried out. This is how science came to be what it is today. Let's shut up for a while and see your vacuum pump, Harris. Wibbling is easy.