You do have a-moral or hypothetical shoulds, no? If you want healthy teeth, then you should brush your teeth.... is that a moral claim? I'd say no. And I think it's that kind of should statements he is making. If you want to stay in power as a prince etc...

From SEP:
Machiavelli criticizes at length precisely this moralistic view of authority in his best-known treatise, The Prince. For Machiavelli, there is no moral basis on which to judge the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power.

Seems he was making normative claims. — Banno

Is that a normative claim though? Seem more like a meta-normative/a-moral claim to me.

It's obvious when someone is basically cleaning his image, he would say as Shklar referred "that the sight of cruelty instantly filled him with revulsion." — ssu

Yeah ok, but I don't think Montaigne is saying that only to clean up his image, I think he means it, or at least it seems like he does to me.

If everybody is cruel, wouldn't that entail, given the idea that cruelty is a vice, that everybody is psychologically deformed. What then would be the cause of that deformity?
— ChatteringMonkey

if everyone is psychologically deformed, would that not suggest, rather than a deformation, everyone has a certain , unappealing, aspect or proclivity to cruelty? How is it a deformity if it is universal? — Book273

That's exactly what I'm asking. A deformity would suggest that something caused it other than 'nature' or evolution, if it were natural we would call it something like a proclivity, yes. Montaigne, and with him a lot people, seem to think it's a deformity though. So the question in that account is then, what caused it?

Basically, Do you believe some people require a larger effort in self reflection, meditation and self-directed positive cognitive training to maintain the same good traits/values as someone who just does it in the first place without thinking? — Benj96

Yes, because 'natural' is not really natural... nobody is expected to behave good as a baby. There's allways an education preceding the age where one is considered morally responsible. And since not everybody has had an equally good education, there will be differences.

'Without thinking', or 'natural', or 'intuitive' always also means trained to behave in that way to some extend... that's a point that virtue ethics usually makes clear, a point that is perhaps a bit forgotten in this day and age.

Yes, I think that quote is in line with what I said, usually Machiavelli is dismissed because of some moral evaluation, he is bad/immoral because of this and that. But that is usually not all that convincing because he is not really making normative claims, he sticks to a-moral description and prediction. She tries to make an argument on his terms, i.e that his description and the conclusions he draws from them are not really realistic... if she succeeds is another matter, but it's at least an argument that is aimed at the right place.

She contrast Machiavelli to Montaigne, who were not that far apart, and to Montesquieu who live a bit later, but there she does make note of differences in cultural contexts.

Also, it's not about painting Machiavelli a bad guy in some kind of moralistic sense, read the article and you'll see, it's not that long.

"European culture is unique in the assertion of political interest".[6] — GoldMane

Was it that European culture was especially unique in that regard, or that European culture just happened to be more technologically advanced at the time inter-continental assertion of political interest became possible?

Wars, domination and population displacement seem rather commonplace for most cultures in history. For instance genomics seem to indicate that Africa was much more diverse before Bantu swept across the continent and displaced a lot of the other African groups. Assertion of political interest at least doesn't seem entirely alien to Africans, or to other cultures in general, either.

To be clear, I'm not saying the claim is false, I just wonder to what extend it was European Culture in particular that was the driver behind what happened historically. I could buy that a kind of universalism born out of Christianity had something to do with it, that seemed to be relatively unique to Europe at least.

Interesting read, thanks.

I'm not sure what to make of it yet. It's seems a plausible psychological account for what "putting cruelty first" would entail, at face value.

What is interesting to me though is the idea that cruelty has to be a vice, and born out of vice... out of psychological deformities. Because in Montaignes world it's not only the zealot that is cruel, everybody is cruel... it's just that it is especially damning for Christianity because it is considered a vice there too. Hence the misanthropy.

If everybody is cruel, wouldn't that entail, given the idea that cruelty is a vice, that everybody is psychologically deformed. What then would be the cause of that deformity?

Culture could be one answer, but that seems like a difficult case to make considering that the culture was Christian and Christianity considers cruelty a vice. So it seems rather that culture is unsuccessful in rooting out something that is already there. Or maybe you would have to invoke some other opposing cultural influence as the cause, or maybe Christianity having a particularly inverse effect here?

But if not culture, then that would mean that we are cruel naturally, which would mean that we are psychologically deformed naturally. This seems problematic too, by itself. And while maybe you could make an argument for this, it would presumably have to entail some kind of supra-natural standard, from which you can evaluate that nature?

So while I definitely have the same intuition as Montaigne, I'm not sure how you would argue the point from a psychological descriptive point of view, not in the least because a certain Moustache, I will not invoke his name, gives a psychological account for cruelty at base precisely not being born out of deformity.

It has foreign policy on trade (it is, after all, a trade union first and foremost). The notion of an EU armed forces keeps getting floated. That would, I agree, be a big step toward state status. — Kenosha Kid

Yes that is true, it started as only a trade union and for that purpose it can do some foreign policy. And it has expanded a bit over the years since its conception, but trade is still the larger part of it. There no political and cultural unity, nor unity concerning social policy etc..

I'd say the most important difference is that the EU lacks foreign policy and military competences, and an executive power that can represent the EU in these matters... as such it doesn't really have agency as a state would have vis a vis the rest of the world.

Also while it does have a parliament, the main political body is still the council of the EU, consisting of the leaders of the different memberstates. That organ determines the most important issues, not the parliament.

So I don't think the EU would qualify as a state, but is rather a treaty between states... hence memberstates.

I think the apparent need for rules is an interesting point. Needing structure and rules does not mean these rules are not invented and without genuine force.
— Andrew4Handel

Try driving on the wrong side of the road and feel the genuine force.The idea that social pressure is unreal is as ridiculous as that it is unnecessary. A path is made by walking on it, something that sheep manage with no detectable entitlement. Habit and custom arise and establish themselves naturally, and entitlement is established in this way too; it is not a precondition of social organisation, nor is it anyone's invention. So far, I can see no radical distinction between the way a river course is established by a process of erosion, and the way a society is established and becomes regulated. Sometimes rivers flood and change course, and sometimes societies suffer revolutions. River courses are not fictional. — unenlightened

Good analogy!

It's interesting that a good analogy or metaphor can be more insightful, than trying to capture it in abstract categories like subjective/objective, absolute/relative, real/fictional etc etc... Good stuff.

Plato, Hume, Nietzsche and then straight to existentialist if that is your interest... i'd skip all the rest.

Hume, "an inquiry concerning human understanding", his later book (not the big tome) is enough to get a decent understanding of his philosophy.

Nietzsche, "Genealogy of morals", and "beyond Good and Evil", are maybe the two books that I definitely would read.

Hume is missing, I'd read some of him first. And yes I'd always just start with Plato, if you haven't already.

It's not that Trump merely captures what lives among people, he actively forged it into a populist movement for his own gain.
— ChatteringMonkey
But how can this be proven? — baker

I'd think pointing at his speeches and his rethorics would be enough as proof for forging a populist movement... but that is not illegal I don't think.

What is illegal is sedition, or staging an insurrection. And I don't know US law enough to know what would count as proof in court. I'd think his speech just before the riots where he literally said that 1) the elections were fraudulent and 2) that they should walk to the capitol, would enough to start a case, but if that would be enough to legally convict him, I don't know.

I don't quite see it like that.

There is certainly discontent among a certain percentage of the population with their lives and how the political system doesn't seem to do anything about that. Without that Trump would be impossible, that is true. But this discontent is to some extend politically formless without someone organizing it in a certain direction. It's not that Trump merely captures what lives among people, he actively forged it into a populist movement for his own gain. And that is I think Trumps responsibility. A non-malicious and somewhat competent politician would presumably stop short of that and have the decency to not use racist, anti-media etc etc rethorics and the foresight to know that this would cause all kinds of trouble.... He could have gone in other directions with this.

So he already paved the way for the riots before the riots, but the riots themselves are probably even more blatantly his fault because here he actively misled his followers by creating and spreading the lie of election fraud. The rioters think they were doing the right thing... because he misled them. Maybe you can say that they should have been more skeptical of Trumps claims, or maybe they just used Trump as an excuse to unleash their frustrations.... and so also bear some responsibility there. And I would agree with that, but still, ultimately I think this is Trumps doing predominately and he should be held accountable for that.

Trump thrives on attention and adoration. He lives for it. He's a moron and a narcissist, which 100% explains his actions. He lost an election to a corpse, so he has to rationalise that both for himself and his millions of cult followers. So naturally it was a fraudulent election.

The impeachment is floating a very different version of Trump, one who is blessed with understanding of others and the cunning to use this to deliberately guide his mob into violent insurrection without ever explicitly stating that this is what he wants: Trump as master manipulator, shadowy Bond villain, astute strategist and a man of subtle means. That isn't Trump. He has none of those qualities. And yet if we wish to convict him on the impeachment charges, in the absence of an overt call to arms, we have to pretend that is what Trump is.
— Kenosha Kid
So ... I'm confused. — baker

My take on Trump is that he is kind of an exception to the rule in that he is both incompetent and malicious... which makes it hard to determine what exactly determines what actions of his.

I think he definitely knew that he was inciting them before and even during the riot (his twitter video), probably knew and wanted for things to get out of control, and saw himself as some kind of strong man taking matters into his own hands (look at the imagery with his black gloves and flags waving in the background, it doesn't get any more fascist qua imagery.)... That would be the malicious part.

But then he probably was also to blinded by his own image and narcissism to fully appreciate the gravity of the situation and the consequences. It was a half-assed attempt at insurrection and ultimately to laughably amateurish to really take seriously as an attempt at insurrection... he was living out a narcissist power fantasy.

So incompetent or malicious? Probably a bit of both.

Despite that, is it possible to distinguish between (a sufficiently advanced) cluelessness/incompetence and malice? If yes, how? — baker

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...? — Outlander

Yes, frequency would be an indicator I think. When someone makes what seems like a stupid decision, you might think it could be incompetence or ignorance... When they make what seem like stupid decisions all the time, you have to start wondering if they really had good intentions you assumed they had to begin with, and what other intentions they could have for deciding as they do. At some point incompetence and ignorance just stops being the most credible explanation.

in a constructivist metaethics you can have different societies construct different values, whereas in moral realism values would be the same over different societies.
— ChatteringMonkey

Beware to differentiate between descrfiptive and metaethical moral relativism here. Moral realists (or more broadly moral universalists, not all of whom are robustly realists) don't deny that different societies come up with different value systems, they just don't say "...therefore no value system is any more correct or incorrect than any other". It's possible for there both to be disagreement, and for the participants in that disagreement to be more or less correct or incorrect than each other because there is such a thing as universally correct despite disagreement about what it is. — Pfhorrest

Yes, agreed, I should have said, "should be the same" instead of "would be the same".

Can we just assume there has to be an essence? A lot of philosophy historically has been about trying to extract essences out of things, to its detriment I would say.

I do agree that if there is something at the heart of ethics than it would be value. But I don't think value is something unmediated, directly given like you seem to be pointing to with value-qualia, but rather something constructed socially.

I'm not sure I have much to add here, it seems i'm going the opposite direction. I think more can be learned if you look at morality from a societal and historical perspective, rather than trying to look for essences or basic principles.
— ChatteringMonkey

Then the consequence to this needs to be made clear: If value is both given in the world, not some theoretical construct or simply part of the ethical equation which subsumes valuing under a complex contingent consideration, but an actual given simplicter, that is, irreducibly "there"; as well as being the foudation of ethics (and aesthetics, says Wittgenstein) then we must conclude the unpopular view is true: moral realism. — Constance

At first I was kind of surprised that you would come to conclude that moral realism follows from what I said about values, because I would conclude from values being socially constructing that something like a constructivist metaethics would follow. But yes, from the point of view of an individual in a certain society, morality would look largely the same no matter if constructivism or moral realism were true. Where I think those metaethical theories would make a difference in practice is that in a constructivist metaethics you can have different societies construct different values, whereas in moral realism values would be the same over different societies.

If it were a matter of what you call mundane qualia, being appeared to redly, and the like, then I would agree that what presents itself to inquiry is a blank when considered apart from (conceptual) meaning and identity, which is reducible to pragmatics, I would add. But qualia is infamously vacuous. A spear in your kidney is not. What makes a spear in your kidney "bad" at all, in any possible disputed judgment, is not mundane qualia, but value qualia.
I do share your thoughts about rape and racism. But this argument is really very different as it asks more fundamental questions. I say rape is morally bad, not to put too fine a point on it, but then, why? I say the same about many things, but the matter always turns to some pain or gratification, some discomfort or joy that is THE determining ground at the level of basic questions. No pain or pleasure, suffering or bliss in play: NO ETHICS.
I am dismissing the particulars of a given case, in the same way Kant dismissed such things, such accidents. Kant was looking into a specific dimension of experience, the rational structure of judgments. Here, I am abstracting from all the is an accident, a mere contingency, vis a vis ethics, like the conditions of a rape AS a rape: not all ethical affairs are rape affairs, nor are they stealing affairs, not this nor that, and on and on. No specific conditions are essential, and are therefore dismissible in determining what the nature of ethics is. it is the essence of ethics I am on about: what has to be the case in order for ethics to be possible. Value is this, or, metavalue. Yes, you can also look to conflicts of value acquisition: no conflict, no competing value-things, no ethics, but note: it is the value that is at the heart of what makes an entanglement what it is: all issues turn on what is at stake, and this is always value. — Constance

Can we just assume there has to be an essence? A lot of philosophy historically has been about trying to extract essences out of things, to its detriment I would say.

I do agree that if there is something at the heart of ethics than it would be value. But I don't think value is something unmediated, directly given like you seem to be pointing to with value-qualia, but rather something constructed socially.

I'm not sure I have much to add here, it seems i'm going the opposite direction. I think more can be learned if you look at morality from a societal and historical perspective, rather than trying to look for essences or basic principles.

Suffering is an interpretative event after the fact, no doubt, when it is contextualized, weighed in theory and among competing justifications, and so on. But pain as such? How can this in any way be interpretative? Interpretation requires language, consideration, a taking something up AS something. How is this there, in scorching of the live finger? One receives this instantly, not deliberatively. — Constance

If you have a persistent headache, focusing on it seems to make the pain worse. Or rather the pain is probably still there, you just don't notice it as much if your attention is elsewhere. Is that an interpretative event? Maybe not.

Morality is analyzable, and so I agree morality is NOT only about screaming pain (or intense gratification), and I would add, obviously. But the argument then asks about what this complex affair is and finds that the essential part of it is the element of the presence that carries its own measure of valuation. We cannot say what this is, and this is why Wittgenstein would never talk about it (save in the Tractatus and the Lecture on Ethics where he essentially says it should be passed over in silence), but its presence does, as with logic, "show" itself in the event. — Constance

See I don't know if I agree with this. I spoke about meaning and identity, and added the examples of rape and racism to my previous post, probably after you read it. It seems to me that meaning and identity as part of a larger social context, play a large part in why we consider certain things immoral. And those are I think underdetermined if you would view them only from a present moment. Meaning and identity precisely play out in time, over extended periods. What is the most damaging thing about racism, is not any direct physical pain or direct material consequences it may have (those are bad too to be clear), but social exclusion, imposition on identities, and the fact that it prevents people from building up a meaningful life in society.

Frankly, I don't see your position on this. Do you think there is something of the "identity and meaning we give to our lives" that intervenes between you and the screaming pain? Do you think pain is an interpretative event? — Constance

Morality is not only about screaming pain is my point. In some extreme case it might be the only thing that matters, but it usually is not.

And yes and no, I think suffering is an interpretative event, which I would argue we care more about than pain.

Edit: Here's an example, I think it would to simplistic, if not plainly incorrect, to say that racism is morally wrong only because of the physical pain it causes.

Edit 2: Another example, rape even if it would be relatively painless physically (for instance by drugging someone), would be morally wrong.

How about injuries to one's body that are intended as part of the greater good? Think, for example, of that mountainhiker who fell into a crevice, got stuck, and cut off his arm in order to free himself and get out.
— baker

Of course I know this case. And the greater good is certainly a moral priority. But the metaethical question is begged: What do you mean by "good"? For this, one has to go to the source, the primordial actuality, the "intuition" of pain or bliss and everything in between, the raw thereness, the value qualia--just take a hammer, bring it down hard on your kneecap and observe. You are not facing a fact, a caring, a negative judgment, an aversion, a denunciation, a condemnation, and so on. What is that there, in your midst, that screaming pain "itself"? — Constance

I don't think "greater good" is entirely reducible to pain, value-qualia or something like a primordial actuality... it also has to do with the identity and meaning we give to our lives. This is I'd say what is missing in most of these account, we are also beings who live in societies, have certain roles to play, identities to assume, societal goals to reach etc... all of which give our lives meaning. And this is what determines morality for the most part. Ofcourse some of this bigger story will be determined by these value-qualia to some extend, but I don't think you can skip straight past this bigger picture from value-qualia to morality and still have something that would be remotely the same.

As I have stated earlier, I’m not sure why a universe created with a purpose could change the truth status of something abstract like the truth status of moral realism. The way I see it is if creating something really big like the universe with a purpose can make moral realism true then why couldn’t creating something small with a purpose like another human being wouldn’t make moral realism true at all. Even if creating a human being isn’t as grandiose, you would think that it could make moral realism true if creating the universe with a purpose would, only that morality just wouldn’t matter as much as it would if God created the universe with a purpose. Though, I tend to think that a parent creating a child with a purpose creates zero meaning and it doesn’t make moral realism true at all. If a parent creating a child with a purpose creates zero meaning, then God creating the universe with a purpose would also give us zero meaning. This is because God creating the universe is just a much larger scale version of a parent creating a child. I don’t think it matters how much larger the scale of these sorts of acts are. Mathematically speaking, a larger number multiplied by zero is still zero. So, it’s not clear to me how you could create meaning and make moral realism true with any amount of power. — TheHedoMinimalist

Parents don't 'create you' like they directly create a tool with a purpose. They only make it possible by having sex. For the rest they don't have any agency over how you will turn out, that is largely predefined by evolution. Furthermore the purpose they have in mind wouldn't be objective to begin with, it's just an idea they have.

God not only creates us, but the whole universe with a purpose. That's what would make things objective, the fact that the outside world is not inherently meaningless, but part of the grand plan. Being moral is not only a matter of upholding a convention we created, without the rest of the universe caring if we are moral or not, God is watching you and there will be a judgment day and you will go to hell or heaven... it presumably has material consequences outside of man-made ways we invent to enforce morality.

Anyway I'm not saying I buy any of this either, but at least I can see how the idea of moral realism could make sense in such a universe.

Yes, my whole point is that the descriptive/normative distinction just seems arbitrary. The so-called “descriptive statements” in that distinction just refer to statements that describe everything besides things related to value and oughtness. Why should you only single out descriptions regarding value and oughtness from the definition of a descriptive statement? That would be like if I decided to make a distinction between descriptive statements and psychological statements where descriptive statements describe everything except things related to the human mind and psychological statements describe the human mind. I don’t understand how a claim can be non-descriptive. All claims seem to be describing something. I think it would make more sense to have sub-categories of descriptive claims rather than trying to claim that some claims are not descriptive. — TheHedoMinimalist

I'm not sure how to respond to this, it seems evident to me that a claim like "You ought to x" is different from a claim like "there's a wall over there". The wall is there no matter your particular opinion on the matter, and the world settles the issue in that no matter what you believe you cannot walk through it. People can and do have different ideas about what you ought to do. Oughtness is not something that can directly be observed in the world, which is what description means it seems to me.

Maybe you could say that it is objectively true that person X values X and person Y values Y, i.e. that person X valuing X is a description of his beliefs.... a description of an individual persons beliefs which are part of the 'objective' world. But even if we forget about distinctions like subjective/objective and normative/descriptive, it is still the case that there is a plurality of beliefs concerning what we ought to do, that cannot be settled by pointing at some state of affairs in the world. And ultimately that is the issue, no matter the labels we would want to slab on it.

Well, it seems to me like the implication of your viewpoint here is that knowledge is impossible. This is because everything is outside the realm of empirical verification. Even if you test your theories, you cannot verify that those theories are true. For example, suppose that I have a theory that water will freeze at -20 degrees Celsius. I test this theory by putting water at -20 degrees Celsius and I notice that it appears to have frozen. By doing this experiment, I have only provided additional evidence to my theory that water will freeze at -20 degrees Celsius. I haven’t verified that my theory is true. This is because there are plenty of alternative explanations for why the water appeared to have been frozen after I put it under -20 degrees Celsius temperature. For example, there could be a secret intergalactic society of wizards that are actually the ones responsible for freezing all the water in the universe that will be seen by humans once it reaches 0 degrees Celsius. In reality, water stored in much colder temperatures like -20 degrees Celsius will still remain a liquid without the interference of this wizard society. Sometimes, the wizards will decide to keep some water stored at 20 degrees Celsius unfrozen if they know that it won’t be seen by humans for sure.

You can never empirically verify that this alternative theory about the wizards that I have proposed is false and thus you can never empirically verify that water freezes at -20 degrees Celsius. If you reject the wizard theory because you believe that the wizard theory is just ridiculous, then you aren’t using empirical evidence to determine that the wizard theory is wrong. Rather, you are simply relying on your intuition. You might make some interesting non-empirical arguments against the wizard theory though. You might argue that it would strange for someone to have a motivation to elicit a false belief onto humans about the freezing of water. Why would the wizards want to do such a thing exactly? It seems like it’s more likely that water just freezes on its own because of that. The argument above is not an empirical argument though but it doesn’t strike me that this argument should just be dismissed for being non-empirical. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yeah I already regret using the word verification there. I didn't mean to refer to some sophisticated theory of knowledge. I also don't think certainty is possible or something we should aim for. What I do believe is that data about the world renders some theories more plausible than others. If you don't have any data, you don't have a way to assign probabilities... everything is possible.

The intergalactic wizard is I think actually a good example of why this doesn't really work. For you to sensibly infer something from the thought experiment, you already have to assume the wizards are a certain kind of being with certain kinds of motivations... you bring your knowledge of sentient beings motivations to the thought experiment. We don't know what kind of beings they are or what motivations they would have, unless we assume it and bring the knowledge we have of sentient beings to it.

And I'd say we don't think water freezes because of intergalactic wizards, not because it wouldn't make sense for them to have those motivations, but because we have never seen intergalactic wizards and so have no reason to assume they exist.

Yes, but some forms of speculation are better than others. For example, all financial investment is predicated on speculation. Nonetheless, some people are better investors than others because they are better at speculating about the future. Of course, it’s hard to know for sure which forms of speculation happen to be best but we can make educated guesses about that. — TheHedoMinimalist

Financial speculation is not the kind of speculation I was talking about. Even if financial investments are uncertain, we do have some data and so there is something we can use to begin sensibly assigning probabilities.

Well, I wouldn’t say that “harm to myself is bad” is the most evident normative principle. Rather, I would say that the most evident normative claim is the claim about the existence of hedonic reactions. These hedonic reactions are typically provoked by stimuli from the outside world and they feel unambiguously and undeniably good or bad. Hedonic reactions that feel unambiguously and undeniably good are what we usually call pleasure while hedonic reactions that are the opposite of that are what we usually call suffering. If suffering can be said to exist objectively then reactions to stimuli from the outside world that feel unambiguously and undeniably bad can be said exist objectively. Otherwise, it’s not clear what we are talking about when we speak of suffering. How else would you define suffering? It’s seems to me that the existence of suffering itself implies the existence of objective value judgements about the way that you might be feeling at times. If you are suffering then you are compelled to make a value judgement that the stimuli that caused the suffering contains a bad aspect to it. Though, this doesn’t mean that the stimuli is bad overall as that stimuli may cause pleasure in the future or the prevention or alleviation of future suffering. This is why you can think that playing sports is usually good overall. Nonetheless, if playing a sport cause some suffering then it’s pretty intuitive to think that the sport in question has some bad aspect to it as well. As an analogy, you can think about a dress that is mostly green but contains a red outline as well. We would normally just say that this is a green dress because that’s the primary color of the dress but technically the dress also has some red in it. Similarly, we would normally say that playing sports is good because we think it’s mostly good but it does have some objectively bad aspects to it nonetheless. — TheHedoMinimalist

Subjective or objective is a matter of perspective. We would call the same thing subjective from a first person perspective and objective from a third person perspective. It's a bit of a flawed distinction.

But again, what we are really after is whether there is one and the same morality for everybody, like there is that wall for everybody. And that doesn't seem to be the case for suffering (from which we would derive that morality) because it very much depends on the person and what they individually believe. One person may for instance suffer because he wanted to be a successful musician and failed, because he identified so much with it. While another person may not care at all because he didn't identify with it. I don't agree suffering directly and unambiguously flows from hedonic reactions or pain, there definitely seem to be a mental and belief components to it. Pain and suffering are not the same, nor directly reducible to/derivable from each other it seems to me.

That is also why we don't particularly care about mild pain from sports or think that kind of damage to muscles is bad. In fact, it is precisely because your muscles get damaged that they get stronger. If we were to say that sport is good overall, but that particular part is objectively bad, we would want to avoid that particular part because it is bad... but we can't because it is that supposedly objectively bad part that is directly related to what makes it good.

Yes and religious people also disagree about what God thinks is morally right and wrong as well. 2 Christians might disagree about whether or not the Christian God condemns suicide or abortion. 2 Muslims might disagree about whether or not the Muslim God condemns women driving or walking the streets without their husbands and so on. Unless God could come from the sky and settle all the moral disagreements among religious people, it seems like they have the same problem when it comes to settling moral disagreements in any meaningful way. — TheHedoMinimalist

I forgot this one...

I mostly agree with you here, that in practice it does have some of the same problems... but you do have revelation, and popes and imams. Disagreements are more a matter of difference in interpretation of an objective morality, an imperfect understanding, than a lack of objective morality.

Well, I don’t think that God’s power would be relevant here as being powerful has nothing to do with holding the objectively correct moral opinions. I also don’t think that omniscience is possible as I don’t see how God could know for sure that he really knows everything or what it would actually mean for God to know that he knows everything for sure. Nonetheless, God can be pretty smart and knowledgeable. The fact that God may be much smarter than us does seem to matter as that would make it more likely that he holds the correct moral opinions. Though, he wouldn’t really be responsible for making moral realism true through his power then. Rather, he would just happen to have a very well-educated belief that moral realism is true and moral realism would actually be grounded in something abstract. One might think that God could use his omnipotence to make moral realism true but I think that would be as absurd as God being able to create a stone so big that he cannot lift it. Presumably, God’s omnipotence is still bound by logic and he cannot do what is logically impossible. Given that moral realism is an abstract theory, it’s not clear how having more power could alter its truth status. It seems to me that moral realism is either necessarily true or necessarily false and it cannot be contingent on the existence of God just like a simple mathematical claim like “2+2=5” cannot have its truth status altered with omnipotence. — TheHedoMinimalist

It seems rather strange to me that you would make a distinction between Gods idea of morality and objectively correct moral opinions. God having created the universe with a purpose is the reason we would have moral realism in the first place. Wouldn't Gods idea just be what is objectively correct then? To what other objective standard would we be evaluating Gods idea of morality then?

Do we really need to discover something for it to be a kind of understanding? It seems like we have plenty of things that we understand that no one has discovered per se. For example, I can have an understanding of various philosophical theories and philosophical movements even if these things were constructed rather than discovered. I can also have an understanding of characteristics and motives of fictional characters. I can also have an understanding of how to read sheet music and so on.

Also, why not think that ought statements are just another type of descriptive statements? Are they not describing something like the nature of oughtness? If it just seems weird to think that harming people is bad can be descriptive then it’s worth pointing out that there are a lot of weird types of descriptive statements that do not seem to predicated on anything obviously concrete. For example, in music theory, you will likely be taught that the key of C Major doesn’t have any sharp or flat notes. This seems to be a descriptive statement but it’s obviously predicated on a purely abstract understanding. If that statement about music theory can be descriptive then it’s not clear why normative statements can’t just be considered as another type of a descriptive statement. — TheHedoMinimalist

I didn't want to imply that you need to discover something to be able to understand it. My point was just that I think there needs to be some value-judgement at base of moral judgments which isn't found or discovered, but that we bring to it or create... because of certain affects we have. Understanding is certainly possible in that you can derive all kinds of logical ramifications from these value judgments. Even the value judgement themselves can be subject to logical analysis and empirical testing, but there is still some affect we have to bring to it that isn't found or discovered i'd say.

I don't quite understand how it can make sense to say that normative statements are another type of descriptive statements, considering that distinction presumably was made precisely to separate those different kinds of statements. Wouldn't that then just collapse the whole distinction, and we'd left with just 'statements'... if normative statements are another type of descriptive statements then there would be no need for the distinction, right? I mean, sure, I'm open to the idea that there is some fundamental problem with the distinction from the start, but I'm not sure where that would lead us.

If there’s nothing that can shed light about the existence of God then why are there so many arguments made by theists in favor of God’s existence like The Kalam Cosmological Argument and The Fine Tuning argument? Those arguments seem to provide evidence for God’s existence even if they don’t prove it outright. I would still call that shedding a light on the issue of God’s existence. It seems to me like a lot of theists believe in God because they think it’s the most plausible worldview. At least that would be the most charitable way of thinking about theism. I also have come up with some arguments against the existence of a God that is eternal, omnipresent, and omniscient as I think those aforementioned features seem to be logically impossible. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yeah I think all those efforts are misguided, my maybe too simple take on it is that concerning God you either have faith or you don't.... because it's outside of the realm of empirical verification. And I think empirical verification is the only way to knowledge. Logic on its own cannot yield new knowledge, you need some data to test your theories to.

Take the fine tuning argument for instance. We have no access to another set of universes to compare our universe to, and so we just don't know what a typical universe would look like or what the likelihood of certain parameters being a certain value would be. It all seems purely speculative if you lack any data.

People did and do try to prove or provide evidence for it, but that is mostly for rhetorical purposes it seems to me.... to convince people or post hoc rationalization of something already believed.

Regarding the issue of hell, that would only give me prudential reasons to obey God but it wouldn’t entail that moral realism is true because God exists. I do think that I have normative reasons to improve my own welfare but I wouldn’t go as far as calling myself a moral realist because I’m not convinced that I have reason to avoid harming others if there’s no conceivable way that harming others would make me worse off. I don’t think I would consider my ethical egoism as a moral theory per se. I think only prudential normative reasons seems to exist objectively. Though, realistically I do think that being a kind person and having a good moral reputation is beneficial to you like 99% of the time. — TheHedoMinimalist

Normative reasons are not objective I'd say. Even the most apparently evident and basic principles, like say "harm to myself is bad", already implies some value judgement. Take sports as an example, you literally damage the cells in your muscles in the process of sporting and you feel pain, yet most people would say that sport is good for you. So either you would have to conclude that not all harm is bad for you, or you would have to define harm in such a way that it doesn't include physical damage and pain from sports. And if you do define it in such a way, you have to already make the value-judgement in deciding what constitutes harm and what doesn't. I don't see how you get around this.

Modbot!

I guess you need context for this not to make you laugh out loud. :lol:

I mean, to be fair there's not many views to hold and styles to express them.. but if you know you know I guess. — Outlander

Yes, if you would have had a discussion with him, you'd think it was pretty evident... Knowledge is bad, nuclear missiles are very bad!

Well, let me ask you another question. Why does the whole universe have to be created for a particular purpose in order for us to have meaning from the start? After all, if one’s biological parents have created them for a particular purpose such as the purpose of making the aforementioned parents happier, then why wouldn’t this kind of purpose give the same sort of meaning as the meaning that would be granted by a purpose that started from the beginning of the universe? How is a meaning-granting purpose that occurs on a cosmological level more important than a purpose that might occur at a more local level like the level of the purpose that your parents had for creating you? Of course, just as one might reasonably reject the purpose that one’s parents had for creating them, couldn’t one reasonably reject the purpose that a divine entity had for them? Does a belief in a divine entity actually strongly imply that you should just go along with any purpose that they might have for you regardless of how arbitrary that purpose might seem to be? — TheHedoMinimalist

On a macro level, that may be the case but your parents might have had very clear teleological reasons for deciding to conceive you nonetheless. For example, they might have wanted to conceive you in order to have an heir to an antique shop that they worked hard to establish. Nonetheless, the fact that one might have been conceived for the purpose of becoming a future antique shop owner does not imply that one has any reason to actually take over one’s family’s antique business once they pass away much less have a moral obligation to do so. So, why does one have more moral reason to follow a purpose given to them by a divine entity than a purpose given to them by their biological parents if your biological parents are also responsible for your creation and they also may have teleological reasons for creating you. — TheHedoMinimalist

First let me say, I'm not a theist and not necessarily committed to the idea that it is all that convincing. I can see some reasons though why it would be convincing, and this is not a matter of black or white either, but more a matter of degree to which it would be convincing.

Your parents may have a purpose in mind, but as a matter of fact they don't have that much agency in how the creation will go, other than making it possible. Parents are also essentially equal to you when you grow up and when the question of meaning starts to become relevant. God is different in that he, having attributes like ominipotence and omniscience, has a lot more agency over his creation... and probably more important, he is on an entirely different level compared to human beings. It's easier to accept something from a being infinitely more powerful than you than from a being that is equally flawed as you. And then you also have heaven and hell if all of this wouldn't be enough...

Couldn’t you have descriptive statements about abstract concepts as well though. For example, I think one could reasonably argue that “it is” the case that suffering is harms people and “it is” the case that we have moral reasons to avoid causing harm to people unless it would prevent more harm or provide enough benefit to justify the harm. It’s still not clear to me why morality has to be grounded in something that is concrete when it seems like the abstract can be just as factual and just as descriptive and “real” as concrete phenomena. — TheHedoMinimalist

That seems to be the key assumption made by most existentialist philosophers and I tend to disagree with that assumption. One could also believe that meaning is derived from a certain kind of abstract understanding like the understanding that suffering harms people and the understanding that harming people is bad. One could also believe that meaning is derived from the intentions that their parents had for conceiving them. This view is pretty unpopular in Western cultures but it has a decent acceptance in Asian Neo-Confucian cultures like China, Japan, and Korea. Ancestor worship is still a pretty big thing in many cultures and many people say that they derive meaning from that as well even though their ancestor worship does not require them to believe that their ancestors were actually supernatural in any way or were responsible for creating the universe. — TheHedoMinimalist

The idea that harming people is bad is not an understanding or something we 'discover', but a valuation is the problem. There is no basis for the ought in the descriptive. And people do disagree about this, not necessarily avout harming people being bad by itself, but more whether that should be the only criterium for morality.... I don't see how you could objectively settle such a disagreement.

But to be clear I don't have a particular problem with it not being grounded either, so maybe i'm not the best person to answer that question.

The idea of ancestor worship is interesting, haven't put much thought into it, but the general consensus among historians is that this was the basis for most religions, right? I wouldn't know exactly why it wasn't enough anymore at some point...

Well, it’s impossible to verify and prove anything even well established scientific theories cannot be proven. It’s also impossible to prove that we can ground morality in a god or a spiritual force(even if such entities exist.). I can always just question why I should care what some god thinks or why I should care about what purpose the universe has or why I should regard the purpose that the universe has for my species as more important than the purpose I have created for myself. So, I don’t understand how this shows that morality predicated on abstract principles is less plausible. — TheHedoMinimalist

The epistemic difference is that God is per definition outside of the universe and so unprovable and unverifiable. There is nothing that can even in principle shed light on it, so it's a matter of believing in him or not... faith. For other things we typically would expect some kind of evidence because they are within the empirical realm.

And you should care because God is awesome and powerful, and you go to hell suffering for all eternity if you don't... Other than that I agree with you.

Well, let me ask you a question. Why do theist always seem to think that the existence of a god or a supernatural force gives them reason to think that moral realism is true? I personally don’t understand how grounding morality in a concrete entity is necessarily more intuitive than grounding morality in some abstract concept. I actually believe that some forms of theism are pretty plausible but I’m not a moral realist so I just don’t understand how theistic moral realism is any more plausible than atheistic moral realism. — TheHedoMinimalist

Because theism allows for a purposeful being having created the universe. And if you have that, you have meaning from the start, fused into the descriptive, because a purposeful being presumably creates something with a purpose. An objective, a 'true' morality can directly flow from what 'is'. And that is the important part for moral realism, not the label or idea, but the fact that it can be derived from the descriptive, that it can be true (and the same for everybody).

The problem for the atheist moral realist is that we came to be by non-teleological processes, physical mechanical processes and evolution. If no meaning can be found in the universe itself, we are the ones that bring it into the world, that create it. Grounding it in some abstract concept just pushes the problem one step further, there's no way of verifying or proving whether we should accept that abstract principle as a basis for morality.

Well, I don’t think one should necessarily think of this as holding contradictory beliefs but rather as temporarily suspending judgement and pretending to believe something for an instrumental benefit. For example, when there’s music playing inside of a movie, you don’t think about where the music is coming from or how the music is made. You just let the music move you as you watch the movie scene. Similarly, maybe people can just stop thinking about where morality comes from or how morality came about and just enjoy moral pursuits simply because it gives psychological satisfaction like the movie soundtrack does. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yeah I'm not saying it can't be done, just that we tend to want to avoid cognitive dissonance. Forgetting about the whole idea of grounding morality, would be another way of avoiding it. I will say that pretending to believe something for instrumental benefit, is maybe easier said than done, because typically moral ideas hang together in a complex of ideas about identity, meaning and the like. Hanging your whole raison d'etre on suspension of disbelief seems rather fragile... then again a lot of people seem to do exactly that, so maybe it works.

Sounds interesting. Can you point me to it? I have read a bit about common cognitive biases on Eliezer Yudkowsky's blog. The fact that there are biases that pretty much everyone has points to a significant amount of shared mental machinery. Yudkowsky also argues that from an evoltionary perspective, you would expect all brains to be very much alike in terms of hard-wired logic, since it's more or less impossible that a mutation would lead to a different but viable system. — Echarmion

Sure, it was the mindscape podcast, with guess Joseph Henrich. He has written a few books on the topic I saw.

The question then presumably is how much is hard-wired and how much is left to culture? One of the interesting things about us humans is that we do have that ability to transmit idea's that are not hard-wired in our genes, which could in turn have played a role in our evolution by replacing some of the traits that were hard-wired.... making us generally more adaptable. From what I've gathered it's quite common in evolution that new developed traits can make older traits obsolete and disappear, because they are not selected for anymore if the new traits fulfills a certain function better.

Well, it's true that we can never be actually sure whether or not what we think is reason is not just a rationalisation of myth or tradition. It probably often is. But this seems to be one of those dilemmas that you can only get out of by asserting a solution. And morality is a practical field. So it makes sense to me to say that, insofar as we are all capable of reason, we should try to find universal principles to base our actions on. This will have the highest likelyhood of giving us true - if no necessarily objective - results. — Echarmion

Yes ok, I agree with this insofar reason definitely plays and should play a role, but that role is I think ultimately only instrumental and not the bases of our valuations. So if you value X, then by way of correct reasoning you would get an objective answer to the question of how to act. But that value X is not objectively derivable from the world or reason alone, but comes from our affects. I'll try to explain what I mean with value below...

To be honest, after writing my first reply I noticed I was confused about the concept of value in the first place. What are examples of the kind of values we talk about here? Something like a specific religious creed, or something more abstract? — Echarmion

I do tend to throw that word around semi-consciously.... but they are indeed something more general and abstract. Examples would be something like freedom, security, quality of life etc. These are general ideas that capture the things we find the most important, and we use them as standards to measure other things by... and we also weight them against eachother to order them in some kind of hierarchy. That's where people typically will have different opinions, one person will value security over freedom, and another the other way around.

On another note, the atheist could also just believe for emotional reasons that P1 of the moral argument is false and so there’s no reason to prefer accepting P2 and the conclusion of the argument for emotional reasons over accepting P2 and then rejecting P1 of the argument and thus also rejecting the conclusion of the argument. — TheHedoMinimalist

That's what I think a lot of atheist do to some extend, i.e. P1 is false because there is some other nebulous non-specified reason why moral realism is true. And that probably works ok until you actively try to find that reason, and find out that it isn't that easy. It think it would be harder to knowingly hold contradicting beliefs, because generally we dislike cognitive dissonance.

Edit: That's what Kant tried to do, if not God then morality flows straight out of pure reason.

It may be more reasonable to reject moral realism, but I don't think it's about reason for most people. They feel like and assume moral realism must be true.... and so presumably if they already hold that belief, they are susceptible to P1.
— ChatteringMonkey

I agree that the argument can be persuasive to some people. But, my point is that no atheist would be persuaded by this argument for the right reasons. Atheists should realize that if they have no good reason to accept moral realism then they shouldn’t be too devoted to defending this position as they can only justify believing that moral realism is slightly more likely to be true on raw intuition alone. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes, I agree that it would be more reasonable, but I don't think there is a moral obligation that they should. Because it's not merely about defending an abstract philosophical position, it is their whole way of relating to the world that is at stake here. One shouldn't underestimate the importance moral convictions play in the human psyche, in the words of Nietzsche :

"It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown."

You derive the universality from a shared biology then?
— ChatteringMonkey

Yes, you could say that. Though my metaphysics skew constructivist, so I'd say shared mental faculties. — Echarmion

I'd call myself a moral constructivist, and I'd say the 'local universalism' comes from shared culture and shared values, more than any shared attributes we may have, although those are probably a prerequisite for having a shared culture to begin with, sure.

While I would agree that we have many more similarities than differences because of our shared biology, there are differences too... so it seems to me that could only make for a tentative universalism at best.
— ChatteringMonkey

I think our shared reasoning is pretty fundamental. Pretty much everyone agrees with the scientific method, for example, even those who completely disagree with some of it's commonly accepted findings. The concepts we represent by basic propositional logic or algebra are accessible to anyone who we ordinarily consider sane. — Echarmion

Yeah I'm not so sure about that, I think history would beg to differ. I came to this thread having just listened to a podcast about WEIRD-biases. And if we put some belief in that research, it seems like a lot of our reliance on reason and our moral way of looking at things is historically contingent. Myth and tradition were for the largest part of history what determined morality, not reason... although reason played a role there too, no doubt.

So you think differences in moral evaluation can only be a matter of flawed reasoning?
— ChatteringMonkey

Yes. Though I would qualify this by saying that no-one has flawless reasoning all the time, so I'd nevertheless expect there to always be different moral evaluations.

To me it does seem like there are also differences in moral evaluations not because of flawed reasoning, but because of genuine different values.
— ChatteringMonkey

People have genuinely different values, but I consider the aim of a moral philosophy to moderate the expression of these values so that they can coexist. — Echarmion

Ok but then you don't have one morality, right? Unless you think different values need not imply different moral evaluations.

I mostly agree with your analysis but...

In that case, the atheist shouldn’t really change his stance on the theism/atheism debate because his arguments against theism are probably more convincing to him than his arguments in favor of moral realism. Thus, it would be more reasonable for him to just reject moral realism to maintain a consistent belief system as he really wasn’t strongly convinced about the truthfulness of moral realism in the first place. — TheHedoMinimalist

It may be more reasonable to reject moral realism, but I don't think it's about reason for most people. They feel like and assume moral realism must be true.... and so presumably if they already hold that belief, they are susceptible to P1.

I mostly wanted to distance myself from the idea of a "divine logos" or similar. I only have access to my own reasoning. The best I can do is vet my reasoning by having other look for flaws. But even if all humans agreed to a principle, we could not technically be sure that it's universal in the ontological sense.

Some alien might come along with entirely alien reasoning. Our principles wouldn't be universal to them. — Echarmion

You derive the universality from a shared biology then? While I would agree that we have many more similarities than differences because of our shared biology, there are differences too... so it seems to me that could only make for a tentative universalism at best.

The best I can do is vet my reasoning by having other look for flaws. — Echarmion

Universal among the moral subjects, yes. But since it's unlikely we'll ever all agree on just what that universal morality is, we'll always have to hope we're not mistaken. — Echarmion

So you think differences in moral evaluation can only be a matter of flawed reasoning? To me it does seem like there are also differences in moral evaluations not because of flawed reasoning, but because of genuine different values.

I take it that you mean that, even though we choose individually, the principle according to which we choose is the same for everybody, universal?
— ChatteringMonkey

Well we assume it is. We cannot really know, since we only have access to our own reasoning. So the principle would have to be something universal according to our own reasoning. — Echarmion

Ok, I expected you to make a stronger claim to universality because of the next sentences you wrote :

Rules we make - for games or in the form of laws, should conform to morality insofar as they do make provisions, but they do not need to (and arguably shouldn't) require fully moral actions. I.e. not everything that's immoral should be illegal, but by and large everything that is moral should also be legal. — Echarmion

The idea that the rules we make and laws we vote should to be in accordance with morality, only really makes sense if there is one universal morality, right?

Evidence of something causing something, is no proof of everything being caused always.
— ChatteringMonkey

Well, at least Hume wasn't correct that causation is "out of habit". — TheMadFool

Yeah I think he was, as far as we can be certain, but I don't know if I can do his argument justice here, it has been a while. I'd have to read it again...

So, the coronavirus that cause the ongoing pandemic is "out of habit"? That we can treat tuberculosis with the specific drugs that kill the causative bacterium is just an illusion? — TheMadFool

Evidence of something causing something, is no proof of everything being caused always.