The meaningful difference is this: He who spits at you is doing something to you. He who smokes weed is not. In the former case, he is doing it to you. In the latter case, you are doing it to yourself. — James Riley

Ok, in that case, would you also say that if someone is upset at their SO for having sex with someone else that this also doesn’t constitute victimization? If you wouldn’t say that, then what would be a meaningful difference between making your SO upset by cheating on them and making someone upset by smoking weed? After all, it seems to me that you aren’t doing anything to your SO by sleeping with another person. The main recipient of your act would be the person that you’re cheating on your SO with, wouldn’t it? If that’s the case, then I would say that it strikes me as unusual to claim that the SO made themselves upset by caring about their partner’s infidelity.

Some folks victimize themselves if they are offended by the mere existence of another. It's not the other that is victimizing them. — James Riley

I would disagree that folks who are upset about weed purely victimize themselves. For example, if someone spits at me then I could just be detached and not care that they spit on me. But, I think it would be strange to argue that I’m alone responsible for the emotional harm caused by the person spitting at me. I’m not sure what the meaningful difference is between making someone upset by spitting on them and making someone upset by smoking weed.

Well, everyone on the planet is a victim then, because everyone gets upset about something. I just don't think the rest of the world has to walk around on egg shells because of a few thin-skinned individuals. It's better to create a society that's a little tougher, and a little more respectful of the rights of others. No one is forcing anyone to smoke pot or patronize a store. Internalize your costs and "mind your own business" is a good philosophy in my book. — James Riley

I agree. This is why I think weed should be legalized. But.... It seems to me that offending someone still counts as victimization. I think Victimization can sometimes be justified though.

If any harm is derived from seeing others smoke weed, or knowing that a dispensary exists in the neighborhood, it is entirely self-inflicted. The bellyacher is both perpetrator and victim. — NOS4A2

I would disagree. If someone spits at me then I could just be detached and not care that they spit on me. But, I think it would be strange to argue that this person isn’t a perpentrator of harm. I’m not sure what the meaningful difference is between making someone upset by spitting on them and making someone upset by smoking weed is.

That's a no-go. First, that doesn't qualify as "harm." That's unreasonable. Your family may get upset if you date someone of another race or religion. So what? "Family upset" is irrelevant and I don't think it constitutes a reasonable standard. — James Riley

Well, I believe that there are many cultures that do believe that if you do something to make your family upset which may include dating someone that they don’t like that this constitutes victimizing your family. I speculate that you could only reasonably criticize those cultures from a utilitarian standpoint because it seems to me that deontological theories about what is justified or unjustified are all equally arbitrary and wrong.

That would be a zoning issue and should only be a consideration after proof that a nuisance would occur. Make a record, on evidence. Then find the least intrusive way of regulating the store(s). — James Riley

I agree. I support decriminalizing weed. I just think that it doesn’t make sense to call the act of selling or smoking weed a victimless activity if it often makes people very upset.

Asphyxiation is a ghastly way to die, but even if death were instantaneous, there is something rather chilling about an ethic that seems to say pain-ridden Darwinian humans would be better off not existing. — David Pearce

I would speculate that Asphyxiation is actually probably more peaceful than the ways that most people die today from natural causes. I would much rather have someone drown me to death when I’m around 60 than to have my body slowly get ravaged by cancer or some other common life ending illness. Though, I’ll grant you that NUs are not required to believe that you should allow children to drown. I just think that it’s not implausible for a NU to think that he would be benefiting the child by allowing her to die since life offers plenty of future opportunities for suffering and it’s not clear whether this suffering is outweighed by the suffering caused by the drowning.

but even if death were instantaneous, there is something rather chilling about an ethic that seems to say pain-ridden Darwinian humans would be better off not existing. — David Pearce

Well, it is chilling to most people but there are some people like me that don’t seem to think that these implications are problematic. Also, it seems that the idea of genetically modifying humans to be incapable of suffering is chilling and disturbing to most people as well. You probably wouldn’t think that this is much of an argument against transhumanism though.

Such calculated deceit is probably the recipe for more suffering. So it's not NU. Imagine if Gautama Buddha ("I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering”) had urged his devotees to practice deception and put vulnerable people out of their misery if the opportunity arose... — David Pearce

I agree with you that it might be best for a fairly high profile NU like yourself to teach your fans and people who might be interested in NU that they should prevent children from drowning. I think you can and kinda have created an implicit double message when describing the reasons for why they should prevent the child from drowning. The main reason that you have stated seems to be related to this being a good PR move for NU. But, I don’t think this genuinely teaches your NU fans that they really shouldn’t allow children to die. Rather, you seem to just be teaching them(in a somewhat indirect and implicit way) to not damage the reputation of NU. Your fans are not stupid though. They know that you seem have your reasons for teaching what you teach and I think they would assume that you might actually want them to let a child die even if you can’t express that sentiment without creating a negative outcome that would lead to more suffering.

In addition, people who believe in other ethical theories are often not stupid either. If you seem to openly state that your main reason for thinking that you should rescue a drowning child has to do with you wanting to appease them, then do you really think that this would work in making people who believe in other ethical theories really think that your views do not really have the anti-life implications that they might think that they have? It seems to me like you would need to come up with another reason for not being anti-life as a NU or I think you would paradoxically end up causing the proponents of other ethical theories to distrust NU even more. I think most people wouldn’t take kindly to someone accepting a particular viewpoint as a means of getting their viewpoint to become less unpopular.

And it’s precisely because I’m strict NU that I favour upholding the sanctity of human and nonhuman life in law. Humans can’t be trusted. The alternative to such legal protections would most likely be more suffering. — David Pearce

So, do you think that it should illegal to let a child drown even under circumstances where you don’t have parental duties for that child and you don’t have a particular job that requires you to prevent that child from drowning like a nanny or a lifeguard?

Imagine if people thought that NU entailed letting toddlers drown! Being an effective NU involves striking alliances with members of other ethical traditions. It involves winning hearts and minds. Winning people over to the abolitionist project is a daunting enough challenge as it is. Anything that hampers this goal should be discouraged. — David Pearce

But, what if a person is a secret NU and he decides to let the child drown? Most of the time, it seems to me that the public wouldn’t know if someone let the child drown because they were a NU since it seems that most NUs only talk about being NUs under an anonymous online identity. Given this, it seems to me that NUs do not actually need to believe that we should prevent people from dying in order to maintain alliances with other ethical theories. Rather, I think they would just need to be collectively dishonest about their willingness to let people die as long as it wouldn’t do anything to worsen the reputation of NU.

Negative utilitarianism (NU) is compassion systematised. NUs aren’t in the habit of letting small children drown any more than we’re plotting Armageddon. I’m as keen on upholding the sanctity of life in law as your average deontologist. — David Pearce

Wait, so are you like a rule utilitarian then? Also, it seems to me that you can argue that we should uphold the sanctity of life in law without thinking that we should prevent a child from drowning. For one, I think that the notion of preserving the sanctity of life that exists in law mostly has to do with the prohibition against ending lives rather than an obligation that one must prevent the ending of a life. I don’t think it’s usually illegal for someone to refuse to prevent the child from drowning. Given this, I’m not sure why you think that this scenario isn’t even an open question or a tricky judgement call for a NU. After all, aren’t NUs ultimately trying to reduce the amount of the suffering in the world as their primary goal? Wouldn’t preventing the child from drowning have a significant potential to increase the amount of suffering in the world? If the answer to the latter question is yes, then wouldn’t letting the child drown be potentially compatible with the notion that NU is compassion systematized? Also, Wouldn’t you just define compassion as the prevention or alleviation of suffering as a NU?

If a small child were drowning, you would wade into a shallow pond to rescue the child – despite your professed dislike of small children, and your weaker preference not to get your clothes wet? — David Pearce

I think there is a perfectly egoistical explanation for why I would rescue that child. If I rescue that child then it’s quite likely that I would get financially rewarded or at least given recognition that would cause me to experience pleasure. By contrast, if I allow the child to die then someone might have that on camera and I could socially shamed and stigmatized for it. In addition, I think we often feel shame when violating social expectations even if we disagree with those said expectations. I would feel ashamed about letting the child die and that would cause me to suffer. I don’t think that me feeling ashamed about it and being willing to act in order to prevent that shame from occurring necessarily means that I believe on an intellectual level that I ought have rescued the child if there was no social expectation to do so.

It also seems to me that altruistic negative utilitarianism actually implies that it might be better to allow the child to die. After all, that would alleviate the entire lifetime of suffering that the child would have to experience if he goes on to live(assuming there isn’t an afterlife). I’m not sure if that would make up for the suffering caused to the parents of that child or the suffering caused by the drowning. Of course, you would also have to consider the possibility of the child surviving and becoming disabled if you don’t rescue the child and someone else does at a later time. But, it’s also possible that you rescue a child and that condemns that child to continue living as a disabled person rather than having all his suffering alleviated by death. Though, it could also be argued that because of hedonic adaptation, being disabled doesn’t actually contribute that much suffering to your life. I think it’s an open question whether or not a negative utilitarian should rescue that child and that might get used as an argument against negative utilitarianism. Ironically enough, my egoistic hedonism seems to be much more immune to such objections because I think it’s usually a pretty closed question whether or not rescuing a child would hedonistically benefit you.

If asked, a great many people are relaxed about the prospect of less suffering in Nature so long as suffering-reduction doesn’t cause them any personal inconvenience. Hence the case for technical fixes. — David Pearce

Yes but who’s going to pay for those technical fixes? Wouldn’t it cost plenty of money to implement any sort of technical fix as a means to end the suffering of wild animals?

Maybe preference utilitarianism plus biotech could do so too if enough people were to favour a biological-genetic strategy for ending suffering: I don’t know. — David Pearce

I think there are versions of PU that are compatible with the idea of transhumanism and changing the preferences of sentient beings. For example, some proponents of PU might argue that the best way to minimize preference frustrations or maximize preference satisfactions is by altering the preferences of entities that have preferences so that those preferences become more attainable and the satisfaction of those beings would thus be more sustainable. I don’t think that PU is inherently against the idea of altering preferences with technology. In fact, I have actually argued in the past that those who subscribe to a preference satisfaction theory of welfare should be willing to plug themselves into the experience machine and then use that machine to brainwash themselves into having purely hedonistic preferences that the EM could easily satisfy. This way they would be guaranteed to have a perfect preference satisfaction to preference frustration ratio.

Either way, any theory of (dis)value or ethics that neglects the interests of nonhuman animals is arbitrarily anthropocentric. — David Pearce

I don’t think that’s true. I think that you can neglect the interests of nonhuman animals and avoid being anthropocentric if you also equally neglect the interests of human beings that are as intelligent and emotionally complex as typical non-human animals. I don’t think it’s even repugnant to most people that we should mostly neglect the interests of not only animals but all humans as well. After all, it seems that almost nobody is willing to donate a significant amount of money to help children in their own community much less wild animals. So, I’m not seeing how your comparison between animals and small children would even be that compelling when it comes to persuading people that we should care about wild animal suffering. It’s even less compelling to me because I happen to really dislike children. You probably have a better chance convincing me to care about wild animals lol.

Even if we prioritise, preference utilitarianism doesn’t work. Well-nourished tigers breed more tigers. An exploding tiger population then has more frustrated preferences. The swollen tiger population starves in consequences of the dwindling numbers of their prey. Prioritising herbivores from being predated doesn’t work either – at least, not on its own. As well as frustrating the preferences of starving predators, a population explosion of herbivores would lead to mass starvation and hence more even frustrated preferences. Insofar as humans want ethically to conserve recognisable approximations of today’s "charismatic mega-fauna", full-blown compassionate stewardship of Nature will be needed: reprogramming predators, cross-species fertility-regulation, gene drives, robotic “AI nannies” – the lot. From a utilitarian perspective (cf. https://www.utilitarianism.com), piecemeal interventions to solve the problem of wild animal suffering are hopeless. — David Pearce

Well, I don’t think it makes too much sense to criticize a theory of normative ethics by claiming that it doesn’t work. It seems to me that the point of normative ethical theories like PU is to figure out what ethical goals we should pursue rather than how we should accomplish those ethical goal. If a particular PU theory doesn’t have anything to say about wild animal suffering then the proponent of that theory probably just doesn’t think that wild animal suffering is important to resolve. I think we would need to make an argument in favor of focusing our time and energy on wild animal suffering. Otherwise, how could we know that ending the suffering of wild animals is a worthy pursuit and a wise use of our time.

The preferences of predator and prey are irreconcilable. So are trillions of preferences of social primates. The challenge isn't technological, but logical. — David Pearce

I don’t see how that’s a problem for PU though. I think they could easily respond to this concern by simply stating that we regrettably have to sacrifice the preferences of one group to fulfill the preferences of a more important group in these sorts of dilemmas. I also think this sort of thing applies to hedonism also. In this dilemma, it seems we would also have to choose between prioritizing reducing the suffering of the predator or prioritizing reducing the suffering of the prey.

Either way, a transhuman world without the biology of subjective disvalue would empirically be a better world for all sentience. — David Pearce

Well, I’m curious to know what reasons do you think that we have to care specifically about the welfare of sentient creatures and not other kinds of entities though. There are plenty of philosophers that have claimed that various non-sentient entities are legitimate intrinsic value bearers as well. For example, I’ve heard claims that there’s intrinsic value in the survival of all forms of life including non-sentient life like plants and fungi. I’ve also heard claims that AI programs could have certain achievements which are valuable for their own sake like the achievements of a chess playing neural network AI that taught itself how to play chess by playing chess with itself billions of times and that could now beat every human player in the world. I’m just wondering what makes you think that sentient life is more special than those other sorts of entities. The main reason that I can think of for thinking sentient beings are the only type of value bearers seem to appeal to the truthfulness of egoism.

You say you're "mostly an ethical egoist". Do you accept the scientific world-picture? Modern civilisation is based on science. Science says that no here-and-nows are ontologically special. Yes, one can reject the scientific world-picture in favour of solipsism-of-the-here-and-now (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#idsolipsism). But if science is true, then solipsism is a false theory of the world. — David Pearce

I agree that solipsism is likely to be false and I think it’s more likely than not that you are capable of suffering. I was just bringing up the Epistemic problem that we seem to have regarding knowing that other people are capable of suffering and that the Epistemic problem doesn’t seem to exist for egoists. I don’t think the possibility of many other people not being capable of experiencing suffering is too far fetched though. It doesn’t necessarily require you to accept solipsism. I think there are other ways to argue for that conclusion. For example, take the view held by some philosophers that we might be living in a simulation. There might be conscious minds outside of that simulation but you couldn’t do anything to reduce suffering of those other conscious minds so you might as well just reduce your own suffering. In addition, it’s possible that it is the case that most but not all people are p zombies.

I also want to point out that the possibility of these metaphysical views being true isn’t really the primary argument that I have for egoism. Rather, they are secondary consideration which should still give someone a reason to believe that we have additional reason to prioritize our own welfare in some minor way just in case those views turn out to be true. For example, say that I think there is roughly a 10% chance that those views are true. Wouldn’t this mean that I have an additional reason to prioritize my own suffering more by 10%?

Granted, from my perspective your suffering is theoretical. Its inaccessibility doesn't make it any less real. Am I mistaken to act accordingly? — David Pearce

I would say that it depends on what reasons you have for accepting hedonism. I accept hedonism primarily because of how robust that theory seems to be against various forms of value skepticism and value nihilism. Imagine that you were talking to a philosopher who says that he isn’t convinced that suffering is intrinsically bad. What would your response be in that situation? My response would probably be along the lines of asking that person to put his hand on a hot stove and see if he still thinks there’s nothing intrinsically bad about suffering. I think there is a catch with this sort of response though. This is because I’m appealing only to how he can’t help but think that his own suffering is bad. I can’t provide him with an example that involves someone else putting a hand on a hot stove because that would have no chance of eliminating his skepticism.

Of course, one might object that we shouldn’t really be that skeptical about value claims and we should lower the Epistemic threshold for reasonably holding beliefs about ethics and value. But, then I think there would have to be an additional explanation given for why hedonism would still be the most plausible theory as it not completely clear to me as to why having the intrinsic aim of minimizing suffering in the whole world is more reasonable than another kind of more abstract and speculative intrinsic aim like the intrinsic aim of minimizing instances of preference frustrations for example. In addition, even if we lower the threshold for reasonable ethical belief, it still seems that we should care more about our own suffering just in case that altruism turns out to be false. Altruism seems to encapsulate egoism in a sense that pretty much every altruist agrees that it is good to minimize your own suffering but egoists usually think that minimizing the suffering of others is just a complete waste of time.

First, the consequencialist (i.e., outcome-based) approach, wherein philosophers pay particular attention to the results of an action or a behavior in order to make a moral judgment. As you might put it, the proponents of consequentialism represent many moral philosophers who focus more on consequences when thinking about what constitutes moral behavior. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Earlier in our discussion, I believe that you have stated that you think someone has to think that rape is always wrong or rape is always not wrong. This is confusing to me because pretty much every consequentialist thinks that rape is usually bad but it can sometimes be good if it produces a good consequence. My whole point is that it’s perfectly common for moral philosophers to say that the wrongness of a particular act like rape is dependent on something else that is entirely separate from the action itself.

There is a particular mode of action, a mechanism, or a means whereby the ethical framework of each of these three normative approaches is either focused upon, or is making a fundamental connection to, actions or behaviors. For example, within a deontological framework (i.e., a duty framework), the focus is on moral duties and obligations with the ethical modality towards performing the correct action. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I want to point out that I think there is an important distinction between actions and behaviors and you asked me earlier if I agreed that morality was based on actions. Well, I think it’s a lot more plausible to think that it might be based on something more broad like behaviors. But, I don’t think that means that morality is based on actions. Also, I’m not understanding how you are able to smuggle the concept of moral duties into your understanding of morality if there are plenty of moral realist philosophers that don’t believe in the existence of moral duties. They think that an act can be morally wrong but you don’t have a duty to avoid performing that act. Rather, performing the act is bad in a supererogatory sort of way. This is kinda similar to how most people think that it is moral to donate to charity but you are not morally obligated to donate to charity.

Virtue ethics is connected to action because a moral exemplar, or virtuous person, is defined as such by practicing such acts as being honest, being just, being benevolent, being generous, being wise, etc, thereby developing the requisite behavior and moral character necessary to be a virtuous person. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I wouldn’t call being honest or being benevolent an act. Rather, I think it’s more like a behavior pattern or even something like a thought process as I think these characteristics do not always even need to manifested in behavior. For example, “being benevolent” might be understood as having compassion for others and wishing others the best. I don’t think this requires you to do anything as I think a person can be compassionate with their thoughts alone. In addition, I must ask you. Do you think that believing something or desiring something is an act also? You seem to be defining acts in a very broad way that is counterintuitive to me. Like, there are Epistemic ought claims that could be made like the claim that “you ought to believe that the Earth is round”. Believing that the Earth is round isn’t an act and yet there are actually academic philosophers out there that would go as far as saying that it’s immoral to believe that the Earth is flat. I’ve actually just looked through a collection of titles of academic essays about the topic of duties and I found quite a bit of essays that talked about the possibility of there even being Epistemic duties. Epistemic duties are basically duties that you might have to believe certain things and avoid believing other things. You actually find something like this in most mainstream religions like Christianity it seems. For example, most Christians seem to believe that you have something akin to a duty to believe that Jesus was the son of God who died for your sins. But, that seems to imply that they believe that you have a duty to hold a particular mindset rather than perform an action(at least based on my understanding of what actions are).

It is reducible to a tautology since the term 'Repugnant' can easily be defined as: "Unpleasant or disgusting" and thus to say something is repugnant is to describe something with an adjective that is synonymous to 'Bad' or similar adjectives that likewise evaluate a noun in negative or otherwise implicitly immoral terms. It is analytically equivalent to the argument "Rape is bad because rape is bad". — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I wasn’t trying to use this as a reason for thinking that rape is bad universally. Rather, it is just a psychological description of how I feel about rape. That psychological fact about me influences whether or not I experience pleasure or suffering from watching a rape take place.

On a separate note, whether or not someone prefers non-consensual sex over consensual sex has nothing to do with the issue of whether rape is good or bad. One could prefer consensual sex over non-consensual sex and still perform the act of rape. Furthermore, such a preference one way or the other doesn't provide us any information about whether rape is good or bad. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Whether or not I prefer consensual sex or non-consensual sex effects whether or not I would take pleasure watching a rape and whether or not I would take pleasure in rescuing someone from being rape. Once again, I think that whether or not a particular rape is bad is determined by a myriad of factors and it seems that we can’t just say that rape is always bad. That’s not what I was trying to say. I was trying to tell you that I would stop the average rape because I think that stopping that rape would cause a hedonistic improvement in my own life.

To make another tangential point, this is a very naive understanding of why people sometimes rape. It fails to consider the perspectives of those unfortunate individuals who are extremely unattractive in either physical appearance, social demeanor, or both. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, those people could get a prostitute or an escort it seems. That seems to be a way better option for them than trying to rape someone. Also, there’s plenty of really good pornography on the Internet and plenty of great ways to experiment with masturbation. Also, they could experiment with buying women’s dirty underwear and that could also add an important olfactory dimension which I think can greatly enhance one’s sexual satisfaction.

Also, people who suffer from pathological afflictions that prevent them from participating in otherwise normal social interactions necessary for sexual relationships, yet experience normal, or even hyperactive sexual drives. It also fails to consider rape through a psychopathic perspective or a sadistic personality or under the influence of schizophrenic delusion, etc. Please prioritize my main points over my tangential ones. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, I would just say that you ought not have any of those personality traits either. I think that sadistic and psychopathic individuals do not have a very good hedonistic welfare. Rather, I think a person with a personality similar to someone like Epicurus would likely find the best success at having a high degree of hedonistic welfare.

This commits you to a consequencialist position with regard to this scenario. It also commits you to hold the position that a rape can be justified so long as it results in an approximately more favorable outcome of at least one order of magnitude or greater. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

No, I don’t think that it does because I think that the first thing that I need to analyze before deciding whether or not I should prevent the rape of the 5 women is which decision option would be hedonistically better for me. You seemed to have asked me to set those considerations aside and because of this I chose to answer the dilemma with consideration that I ultimately consider to be of secondary importance.

We can imagine a scenario such as human organ trafficking or the forced organ harvests of humans where one human is sacrificed in order to save five or more other humans who would otherwise die without acquiring the organs of the human who is being sacrificed. Since according to such consequentialist logic, one such reductio that would be necessarily entailed would be the view that such actions are justified so long as it results in favorable results (such as sacrificing one to save five). — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, I would first want to consider how this organ harvest would effect my own hedonistic welfare but if you are asking me to set those considerations aside then I must point out that I actually don’t think that saving the lives of 5 would necessarily produce a good consequence. This is because I have a much more positive opinion of death than most other people do mainly because if I allow the 5 people to die then I might actually be preventing those individuals from having to undergo the potentially painful organ transplant and any suffering that might come afterwards. In addition, I think allowing the 5 people to die would pretty much ensure that nothing in life can make them suffer again if we assume that they wouldn’t be suffering in an afterlife or something like that. So, I think this case is quite different from the rape case because the badness of death seems to be much more speculative than the badness of the suffering that will very likely be caused by rape.

Such logic promotes the notion that some humans are worth less than others and that human life is just another commodity with a price. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I don’t think that it does. I think it actually supports the logic that all human lives are pretty equal as you wouldn’t allow the 5 people to die just because you have to keep that one person alive. I actually think it’s kinda discriminatory to value the life of this single person over the life of the 5 people.

This commits you to support forms of slavery and forms of genocide so long as the end results in a net positive gain that measures at least in a 5:1 ratio. So, it follows, then, that a majority of a society's population consisting of at least 80 percent of the society's members could justifiably enslave the remaining 20 percent of the society's members who make up a sufficient minority of the society's population, so long as there are favorable results gained by the 80 percent thereby compensating for the unfavorable results endured by the 20 percent. Moreover, it additionally follows, then, that an entire nation or ethnic group could justifiably be completely exterminated, holocausted, or genocided, so long as the unfavorable outcome endured by the single group also resulted in favorable outcomes for at least five other nations or ethnic groups with a relatively equivalent number of individuals contained within or with a relatively equivalent capacities to experience suffering or pleasure in totality. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, I don’t think there could ever realistically be a genocide that would be beneficial to a majority of people. At the very least, there would be probably be a more efficient way of benefitting a majority of people than a genocide. Which kinda brings up another problem that I have with these sorts of trolley problem scenarios. I think they leave out an important 3rd option that people have to just say “I don’t have time to resolve this moral dilemma, I need to spend my time helping a world in a more significant way”. This would basically translate to the person not committing the genocide only because that person determined that the time and effort that it would take to commit
the genocide could be spend helping the overall population in a better way.

I’m assuming that you’re going to want me to assume that the hypothetical genocide in question is the absolute best way to help the world(which is extremely unlikely I must add). If there really was some kind of a super magical genocide that is the absolute best way to help the world, then why wouldn’t I support such an amazingly supernatural genocide(assuming that it also doesn’t harm me)? This case would seem to bypass every reasonable explanation that one could give for a genocide being bad. I think you might as well talk about a hypothetical genocide that doesn’t violate a categorical imperative or talk about a hypothetical genocide that happens to be virtuous for some reason. I think every ethical theory has these cases where you can posit an extreme hypothetical to say that something like genocide is acceptable. Unless you think that genocide is bad by definition like some sort of analytic truth like the analytic truth of bachelors being unmarried men, I don’t see how being a deontologist necessitates that genocide is always wrong because it wouldn’t be wrong presumably if a hypothetical genocide is such that you don’t have a duty to avoid performing it. Such hypothetical genocides does not seem to me to be as far fetched as the hypothetical genocide that happens to produce the best consequence possible.

Putting these normative ethical dilemmas aside, I want to know what your answer is with regards to the meta-ethical question: is rape moral, immoral, or amoral—or otherwise under your evaluations considered to be good, bad, or neutral? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I guess I would say that rape is amoral because I’m not a moral realist but I think it’s almost always bad from the standpoint of general decision theory.

For context, consider the previous ethical dilemma of causing the rape of 1 woman in order to prevent the rape of 5 women—with just that information to work with. What is your decision? Why is rape, in general, moral—otherwise considered good or immoral—otherwise considered bad on your view alone? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

My first consideration is how each decision option would impact my own hedonistic welfare. If all things are completely equal by that criteria(and they probably won’t be), then I would choose to save the 5 women from being raped. Though, I suspect that if allow that one woman to get raped then I would get condemned by my loved ones and society and this would make my life hedonistically worse. Given this, I would probably realistically choose to just do nothing.

It seems to me that you are an agent neutral utilitarian because you seem to believe that there are only instrumental reasons to prioritize the welfare of others. An agent relative utilitarian thinks that the extent to which a given episode of suffering is intrinsically bad is relative to whom the suffering belongs to. I consider myself to be a pretty strong agent relative utilitarian because I’m mostly an ethical egoist. I believe that you have much more reason to focus on minimizing your own suffering instead of minimizing the suffering of others(if we set instrumental considerations aside).

The argument that I use to support this position relates to how I feel that hedonism is strongly compatible with egoism. Hedonism seems to go hand in hand with egoism because suffering seems to be bad by virtue of how it feels. Because of this, it seems to matter a lot who exactly has to endure that episode of suffering. Suffering doesn’t seem to be just some weird abstract concept that exists in some platonic realm like say the concept of preference satisfaction. It seems to be an actual felt experience. Because of this, I don’t think it makes sense to take some kind of a weird third person “perspective of the universe” when evaluating the extent to which the episode of suffering is bad. I think this sort of thing would actually take away the argumentative strength of the hedonistic viewpoint. What makes hedonism so compelling to me is how real I feel that the badness of my own suffering is and how hard it is for me to be skeptical of the badness of my own suffering. By contrast, I don’t even know if other people are capable of suffering let alone that I have some kind of weird abstract reason to care about it. It seems to me that the reasons that we might have to minimize the suffering of others are almost just as speculative as the reasons given by objective list accounts of welfare as to why you should think that something like knowledge can be intrinsically good. I’d be interested if you have a critique for this sort of reasoning or a different argument that you think helps reject egoism. I can also clarify the argument more but I’m trying to be brief.

I hope I’m not too late to the party but I’ll start by asking a question relating to the debate between what I heard get called "Agent Neutral”and “Agent Relative” forms of Utilitarianism . Do you think we have any extra non-instrumental reason to minimize our own suffering or the suffering of our loved ones relative to the reason that we have to minimize the suffering of a complete stranger? Also, do you think that we have less non-instrumental reason to minimize the suffering of our enemies and people that we despise?

The value is attached to the belief that the subject holds and thus is not dependent upon the metaphysical truth that the belief expresses. If you believe you have a guardian angel protecting you, then you likely value the comfort and ease of mind that such a belief is likely to bring. The fact that you feel comfort and ease of mind by virtue of holding this belief is an objectively true assessment of your subjective states. So, yes, it is possible to have an objectively true evaluation of a belief
that is metaphysically false. Of course everyone is right regarding their evaluations, as long as you keep in mind that their evaluations are based in subjectivity, contextually bound to a moment in time and the set of values which arose as a result of the one's totality of experiences that lead up to the moment, is not necessarily compatible with others, and is not applicable outside of the subjective state of an agent—though it may be similar enough to be compatible between any number of agents that hold similar values. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I want to point out that it seems that people would abandon many of their evaluative beliefs if they abandoned the metaphysical beliefs that are grounding those evaluative beliefs. For example, it seems to me that I don’t value having “meaningful” achievements because I think the concept of meaningful achievements is incoherent and I think believing in the existence of objectively meaningful achievements is like believing in unicorns. So, I don’t think it has anything to do with my emotional predispositions or my desires. Rather, it is because I lack the cognitive intuition that would allow me to believe in meaningful achievements that makes it impossible for me to value meaningful achievements. Also, most people who do value having meaningful achievements value having those achievements because they believe those achievements have a metaphysical existence. If they didn’t believe those achievements had a solid metaphysical basis to them then they would probably not value those achievements because they wouldn’t even understand what people are referring to when they speak of meaningful achievements.

Would you agree that the essence of morality lies in it's connection to action? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I actually wouldn’t agree with that because it seems that there are plenty of moral philosophers that focus more on consequences or personality traits when thinking about what constitutes moral behavior. For example, Jeremy Bentham was a moral philosopher and he didn’t believe that actions were universally right or wrong and he also didn’t necessarily think that we had moral duties. He instead thought that we should try to maximize happiness and that constituted moral behavior. In addition, many religious thinkers would morally judge someone based on how much their personality is characterized by virtue rather than sin. Sin would often be understood by the intentions and desires of the person rather than the actual actions performed by the person. Intuitively, it seems possible for someone to believe that they ought to act immorally. For example, imagine a scammer that scams people to make money. They believe that they ought to scam people but they also probably believe that what they are doing is immoral. Those people just don’t care about morality and they care about their financial welfare more. Their financial welfare falls under the umbrella of what academic philosophers call “prudential values”. I would recommend searching for the term “prudential” on a website called philarchive.org if you want to get a verification that this is a legit term that gets used by academic philosophers. You will find some academic essays that are written regarding things related to the concept of prudential values. Also, you can search for the term “prudential” into the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and you will see how it usually gets used in the many articles that are written with this concept in mind.

For example, what are my intentions for going on a date with Sue? What are her expectations? What kind of girl is she? What is the context of her life? And the same with the bar of philosophy forum, a broader context is needed in order to evaluate one action to another and weigh outcomes and reasons for each action, in order, and within a more cognitively accessible duration whereby this sequence of events takes place. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I agree that a broader context will be ideal and that would help us create a better analysis. My whole point is that I think that taking the time to analyze each decision option will generally lead to better decision making. Obviously, having more information about each decision option leads to a more accurate analysis and better decision making as well. I’m arguing that we can’t just reduce decision making down to people’s desires and the social influence that they receive. We also have to take into account the amount of time that they spend analyzing their decision options and how competent they are at analyzing their decision options.

What is your view on rape, in general?

If you had the ability to stop a typical rape from occurring, without risking any personal harm, would you stop it? If so, why? If not, why? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I find the idea of raping someone to be repugnant on a personal level because I don’t understand why someone would prefer non-consensual sex over consensual sex. It seems that it feels so much better to have sex with someone that is enthusiastic about having sex with you and actually tries to make you feel good. I don’t understand why some people would want to have sex with someone that doesn’t want to have sex with them if it would actually be always easier to find someone that does want to have sex with you. Also, I find the idea of forcing someone to have sex with you to be disgusting. It causes me suffering to think about such stuff.

If I could stop a typical rape then I obviously would since this would likely get me to viewed as a hero and it would be quite likely that I would get a financial reward for it as well. Though, even if I don’t get a financial reward, I would still want to stop the rape because it would give me pleasure to help someone who is being raped and I wouldn’t feel guilty about harming a rapist.

If you had an opportunity to save five women from getting raped, by taking action with no risk to yourself, but at the cost of another woman getting raped, a woman who would have otherwise not been had it been for your involvement, would you? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

It depends on what would give me the most pleasure and the least amount of suffering. Which decision option would make me look more heroic in the eyes of my family and society? What reward or punishment would I receive for choosing either decision option? I would have to know the specific scenario to answer this question most accurately. If all those other considerations were equal, then I think it would be better to prevent the 5 women from being raped at the expense of the single woman who does get raped. It seems to me that this is the prima facie better outcome.

With regards to the rest of what you said in this same post, what do you mean when you say you don't have a moral system? Are you morally indifferent to rape? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

What you do you mean by “morally” in the last sentence of your post? The way that I understand what people mean when they say that something is moral or immoral is that they are talking about the kinds of considerations that a typical moral philosopher would wish to discuss. I’m not emotionally indifferent to rape as rape makes me upset but that doesn’t mean that I like to talk about ought claims like a typical moral philosopher would want to talk about ought claims. If someone were to ask me for advice regarding whether or not they should rape someone, I would probably just call the police on them but if I wasn’t able to call the police on them for some reason then my instinct would be to persuade them not to rape like a self-help philosopher would try to persuade someone to do something rather than trying to persuade them like a moral philosopher normally tries to persuade someone.

What if a rape had a positive effect for everyone? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Then that rape would be good because it wouldn’t even have a victim. I don’t know if you could even call it rape anymore.

What if a rape had a positive effect for everyone except you? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Then, that rape would constitute a bad state of affairs for me and a good state of affairs for everyone else. I would probably have reason to prevent that rape from happening but I think there’s some probability that the positive effect that the rape has on everyone else would give me enough reason to decide to allow the rape to happen. As I have mentioned earlier, I subscribe to a probabilistic theory of truth so I tend to think that each value claim has a certain probability of being true and a certain probability of being false. My job as a decision making philosopher is to create a hierarchy of plausibility regarding a given decision making dilemma. The judgement call that I would make is that I should probably prevent this rape from occurring because I’m the one that would have to endure the suffering of that rape and I wouldn’t get to enjoy the pleasure that others receive from the rape. I think whether or not we have reason to pursue pleasure or suffering is probably dependent on who is the person that gets to experience that pleasure or suffering. I also recognize the possibility of me being wrong about that and this is why I’m at least a little tempted to think that maybe if there is enough hedonistic benefit for others then maybe it’s worth a little hedonistic harm for myself.

Would you be indifferent to a rape in every imaginable context? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

No, I never said that I was indifferent to rape.

What do you mean by an act or a consequence related to "betterness" or "worseness"? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I think decision options exist on a hierarchy by which each particular decision option is in relation with all the other possible decision options. Those relations are that of betterness and worseness. Let suppose that you are deciding whether or not you should date your friend named Sue. You have the decision option of dating Sue and you have all the other things that you might be thinking about doing instead of dating Sue. Let’s suppose that you figure that if you don’t date Sue, then you will decide to go the bar with your friends instead during the time that you would have spent dating Sue. Or, you figure maybe you would spend that time on this philosophy forum instead. So, there are 3 decision options that you are considering here.

I think that how you ought to evaluate those decision options will depend on what final aims you think are most likely to be objectively true. So, now I think it makes sense for you to create a hierarchy of plausibility regarding all the possible final aims that you can pursue. Final aims are things that you pursue for their own sake with no deeper instrumental explanation for why that thing is worth pursuing. It seems to me that the most reasonable candidate for a final aim worth pursuing is the final aim of minimizing suffering in your life. There doesn’t seem to be any deeper instrumental explanation for why minimizing suffering in your own life is good and it seems most obvious that it’s better to have less suffering than more suffering and this is obvious to most people because they know what suffering is and what it feels like so they have a kind of introspective evidence for their own suffering being something that is worth avoiding. The 2nd most plausible candidate for a final aim is pursuing pleasure in your own life and it seems to be a plausible candidate for much of the same reasons that suffering is a plausible candidate. I think it’s slightly less plausible and less important as a final aim as I think it’s easier for us to be indifferent about pleasure than it is for us to be indifferent about suffering. Then, there are myriad of other possible final aims further down the plausibility hierarchy of final aims. I don’t think we have to go any further down that hierarchy to resolve this particular decision making dilemma.

Now, it is time to evaluate how each of the decision options that we have considered will help us minimize suffering and maximize pleasure in our own life. Let’s start with how each decision option will impact the amount of suffering in our own lives. Dating Sue might cause suffering because there seems to be a decent chance that you might get rejected after a few dates and you might get heartbroken. There’s also a small but realistic chance that you might get her pregnant after having sex with her a few times after dates. Having children seems very likely to cause quite a great degree of suffering especially if it’s with a partner who you have only dated briefly(though, that might depend on your psychology). There are also other ways that dating Sue could cause you to suffer like maybe the dates will be boring or paying for those dates will require to work more in the future. There is also some suffering that could be caused by choosing to go to the bar with your friends. There’s probably a high probability that you will get hungover. There might be a small chance that you will get arrested for drunk driving or accidentally get a girl that you met at a bar pregnant. The “sit at home and go to philosophy forum” option also has some potential for suffering. You might get frustrated while trying to explain a point to someone or you might get stuck talking to a rude asshole. Also, you might feel loneliness or despair from not having a social life depending on your psychology. Then, you would do the same sort of analysis regarding what kind of pleasure you might receive from all three decision options. I personally think that avoiding suffering is quite a bit more important than getting pleasure so I would really just end my analysis here.

I would then open up a document program on my phone and assign what I call a significance factor to each consideration. This is basically meant to be an educated guess regarding how much weight you should assign each consideration. For example, let’s say you think that the probability of you getting rejected by Sue and you suffering as a result of that is something like 3% and we will assign the significance factor of 10 to the total unpleasantness of that suffering. We then follow the same process with each consideration that we have listed. We make an educated guess about the probability of each event happening and we assign a significance factor. The first significance factor that we have assigned is meant to be the comparison point that we should use to determine the significance factor for the other considerations. So, we might say that getting Sue pregnant would be roughly 10 times worse than getting rejected by Sue would be. So, the significance factor of getting Sue pregnant will be 100. After we figure out the probability of each consideration occurring and the significance factor of each consideration, we then multiply those 2 variables together to get what I call the “probability-adjusted significance factor”. We then add up all the probability-adjusted significance factor scores and we get a pretty good educated guess regarding how each decision option will contribute to suffering in our own lives. We can then put these 3 decision options in a hierarchy of betterness and worseness.

Of course, there’s still a pretty much guaranteed chance that the hierarchy that we have constructed here isn’t the best possible hierarchy regarding this decision dilemma. There are so many additional factors that we haven’t analyzed and it’s possible that some of our probabilities were way off or that the significance factors that we have assigned underestimated or overestimated the badness of certain experiences. Nonetheless, I think it’s more likely than not that we end up making better decisions if we take the time to do a thorough analysis of each decision option rather than just rely on our desires and emotions to make the decision for us. I think there is theoretically a perfect analysis of that decision dilemma that could be made and that there are different levels of plausibility to each given approach to this decision making dilemma. This is why I would consider myself to be a value realist

Some of the most well-known prudential values to be built into social structures or give rise to the social principles underpinning a society include: the prudential value of personal autonomy, built into the structure of society as the sacred concept of freedom, which gave rise to the principle of liberty; the prudential value of self preservation, built into the structure of society as the belief that life is sacred, which gave rise to the principle of the right to life; and the prudential value of fairness, built into the structure of society the sacred concept of justice, which gave rise to the principles of equality adopted by the Civil Rights Act. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I think you misunderstood what I meant when I was talking about prudential values. Prudential values are often an umbrella term that is used in philosophy to describe values regarding mundane and non-moral decisions that we make in our life. For example, there are financial decisions that we make in our life like the decision that we might make to invest into Tesla. It doesn’t seem to be a moral decision because it is outside of the scope of what is considered to be moral philosophy. For example, if I was to write an article about why you should invest into Tesla, it would very likely get rejected by a journal that deals with moral philosophy because they would tell me that it’s not moral philosophy. Rather, they would tell me that this article belongs in the personal finance journal or an investment journal. Another type of prudential and non-moral category of ethics is self-help ethics. Self-help philosophers give advice on how you should improve your life and the advice is often similar to the advice that a therapist might give. Epicurus was an Ancient Greek self-help philosopher. He made lots of ought claims and claims about how you ought to behave. Nonetheless, he wasn’t really a moral philosopher as what we might call moral philosophy seemed to have been popularized and started by medieval Christian philosophers like St Augustine. Ethicists before then were mostly just prudential and self-help kinds of ethicists.

So your basically a platonist when it comes values and morals? I get lost when you say that values exist and are objective. I can agree with you that values exist if I understand what you mean by "exist" to be the same thing as thoughts, language and mathematics, but I would not be able to use the term "exist" in the same way I would use it to describe physical objects without committing an equivocation, and this would require me to define a special kind of existence wherein such entities can be ontologically categorized. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

No, I wouldn’t say that I’m a Platonist about when it comes to value. I don’t believe that there is an actual world of concepts where all concepts are located. Rather, I think that truthfulness of concepts exists without a location because I don’t think things need to necessarily have a location in order to exist. You expressed your belief that even mathematical claims are not objectively true so I will provide you with another example that I think it will be more difficult for you to bite the bullet on. Take the Epistemic claim that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth. You seem to believe that it is objectively the case that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth. But, the truthfulness of the Epistemic claim couldn’t be found anywhere in the Universe and the universe doesn’t inform us that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth. So, if it’s objectively the case that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth then the objective truthfulness of that claim has to exist outside of space and time.

The term "pretty" implies a positive value judgement that generally refers to the pleasantness experienced by visual perceptions. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

This is the part that I disagree with. I think most people do derive positive experiences from looking at something pretty but I don’t think that it is necessarily the case and thus I wouldn’t say that prettiness implies a positive value judgement. For example, I think it makes sense to say that a particular house is too pretty and that it would be better if it had more blemishes.

An ought claim is a statement used to express that an agent has a moral obligation to perform a certain action. It is an authoritative statement for a course of action to be followed, however, this authority is based on (as you argue for) the consideration of prudential values relative, and subsequently applicable, to an individual subject. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

It seems to me that I can provide you with plenty of examples of ought claims that are not expressing authoritative statement that an agent has a moral obligation to perform a certain action. For example, suppose that someone were to tell you that you ought to invest in the company Tesla. Would you interpret that person as saying that you have a moral obligation to invest in Tesla? That seems to me like a very silly interpretation of that statement.

An ought claim captures an agent's motivations, which are influenced by the agents values as the agent reflects upon the behaviors or decisions that are consistent with them. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Once again, I think I can list several examples of ought claims that do not seem to capture an agent’s motivations. For example, if I was to say that you ought to invest in Tesla, in what way would I be capturing your motivations or my own motivations with that statement?

An ought claim is a statement that prescribes a given action either because the given action is, in itself, when considered in isolation from the actions surrounding context or the contribution the actions causal influence has towards a resulting effect, morally right to do; or, as an alternative, that a given action should be done because a particular state of affairs is morally right to exist and what gives rise to the existence of such a state of affairs, as an effect thereby produced, is causally dependent upon the influential contribution of the given action thereof. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Once again, I think there are plenty of ought claims that produce a good consequence but that consequence is good in a non-moral sort of way. I’m sorry to use the exact same example again but it really seems to apply to every kind of claim that you are making here. The example that I’m going to use is of course that of the ought claim regarding investing in Tesla. It seems that one can argue that one ought to invest in Tesla because it will produce a good consequence but it isn’t necessarily morally right to invest in Tesla. There’s actually an entire philosophical debate devoted to the question of whether or not we ought to behave morally. Just Google the phrase “Why be moral” and you will find lots of philosophy articles that try to answer the question regarding whether or not we ought to strive to do the morally good or the morally right thing. This question seems to imply that ought claims are not necessarily connected to moral claims.

An agents values are a unique manifestation that arise and develope as a result of the complex, dynamic interactions between the agents subjective states and how the agent experiences the surrounding physical and social environments. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I think that might be a good psychological explanation of how the agent comes to value what they value but I don’t think that this gives us any reason to think that the values are subjective rather than objective. In fact, I think this same psychological explanation could be given regarding why agents have any sort of beliefs that they have. For example, I could say that your belief that the Earth revolves around the sun is a unique manifestation that arose and developed as a result of the complex, dynamic interactions between your subjective states and how you experienced the surrounding physical and social environments. After all, you mostly believe that the Earth revolved around the Sun because you were taught that in school and you haven’t actually seen the empirical evidence for this view as this evidence could only be accessed by certain scientists and other such people. You believe that the testimony of those experts is reliable because you experience an intuition in your mind that you can trust those experts but your environment also played a very important role in putting that intuition into your mind. The point that I’m trying to make with this example is that we are pretty much always are influenced solely by our subjective experiences and our environment in literarily every belief that we hold. So, what you are saying about value here literally seems to apply to everything else as well.

If we imagine the sequence of experiences that uniquely unfold throughout the life of each being and consider how each experience influences the beings agency (how agency conforms to structure) which uniquely molds them in a way that gives rise to subjective variation, it becomes clear that every evaluation is dependent upon the authority of the subject. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I agree but I think evaluations are just educated guesses regarding what are actually better or worse decision options or what are better or worse state of affairs. Given this, I think someone can be wrong regarding how they evaluate a given decision option or state of affairs. For example, suppose that someone evaluated that being a professional boxer would be valuable for them because it would bring about meaningful achievement in their life which they think is valuable in a non-instrumental sort of way in the same way that a hedonist would think that pleasure is valuable. I tend to think that this person would be wrong in their evaluation because I don’t agree that there are objectively meaningful achievements that have value that go beyond the hedonistic improvement that those achievements bring. Given this, I wonder what you think about evaluations that people make which involve them making metaphysical claims about the objective existence of something weird and magical like “meaningful achievements”. It seems to me that you couldn’t believe that evaluations are completely subjective and yet also believe that they are sometimes objectively false because of the metaphysical foundation on which these evaluations rely on is false. I think you either have to claim that everyone is right regarding their evaluations or that evaluations are sometimes objectively false. If evaluations can be objectively false if they are based on a wrong metaphysical claim then it’s not clear to me why they also couldn’t be objectively true if they are based on a correct metaphysical claim.

I will respond to more of your comment later.

What is the argument that the consequence is bad? Let's say prison time is the consequence: what makes a prison bad? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I think that going to prison is bad for the same sort of reason that you think that it would be bad for every woman in the world to get raped. Both outcomes seem to be outcomes that lead to lots of suffering. The only difference is that I think we have more reason to avoid things that would cause us to suffer while you seem to think that the suffering of others is often just as relevant to decision making. I do actually think that we should give some credence to the suffering of others as well because I technically hold a more complicated and probabilistic view of ethics and decision making(I try to simplify my views on this in the beginning of the discussion as I don’t want to be too off putting). The most specific description of my view is that I think any sort of final aim in ethics has some probability of being worth pursuing but the job of an ethicist is to create a hierarchy of final aims based on the plausibility of those aims. I can go into more detail about my theories about good decision making if you want me to do that but it will be quite long so I want to respect your time.

Besides, you are naming the consequences of an act that you say is morally bad. This would imply that it is bad even if there are no consequences involved at all. Is rape bad even in the absence of any such consequences one would worry about? If so, how is it bad? What property of badness can we find of it? Because an act has negative consequences does not mean that the act is necessarily bad. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I never said that rape is morally bad. I just said it was usually a bad action but more precisely I think it is a bad decision option. I don’t think that rape is bad outside of a particular context but rape can be objectively bad in a context dependent sort of way. Also, trying to look for the property of badness in rape is as silly as trying to look for the property of truthfulness in the Epistemic theory of empiricism. Both of these are conceptual truths that don’t exist in space and time. Nonetheless, if it makes sense to say that the Epistemic theory of empiricism is objectively true then I don’t see why it doesn’t make sense to say that rape is sometimes objectively bad.

Because an act has negative consequences does not mean that the act is necessarily bad. For example, is falling in love bad? It can result in very negative consequences. Or, as another example, is driving a car bad? Plenty of negative consequences result from such an action. We must separate the consequences of an act from the moral status of the act itself. If rape is only bad when it results in negative consequences, then we are utilitarian on the matter. If rape is bad in itself no matter what the context may be, then we are deontologically entrenched and would act in accordance with such a rule no matter what the costs may be. If rape is always bad, but certain exceptions can be made in order to avoid results that are far worse, then we are taking the view from threshold deontology. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Falling in love or driving a car can actually be objectively bad within certain contexts. For example, I think it would be bad for me to fall in love because I think it will make my life more difficult and that would lead to me having more suffering and less pleasure. Of course, I could be wrong about my hedonistic evaluation of the scenario under which I fall in love but I think I’m making a reasonable educated guess. Of course, I should clarify also that what I mean by objectively bad is that anything that is objectively worse than choosing the opposite decision option. This only applies to decisions where you either choose to do something or choose not to do something. It doesn’t apply to more complex decision-making dilemmas where you are choosing between a myriad of options.

To you, an action should always be avoided because, to you, it always causes, what you see as, negative consequence in your life. It is completely coherent and easy to defend from the view that considers such evaluative statements to be relative,
thus only be applicable to, the individual subject in which it is indexed beside within the structure of the proposition. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I think there is a difference between relativism about value and anti-realism about value. Everybody could be called a relativist in some sense. Even a philosopher like Kant thought that whether or not an act is bad is relative to whether or not it violates a categorical imperative. Oftentimes, he seemed to define something like murder as “the bad kind of killing” which implies that he didn’t think it was always wrong to kill but he just chose to call any kind of killing that he thought was bad as murder which gave the illusion that he thought some action was universally wrong. I could do the same sort of thing technically. I could say that forced intercourse is not always bad but rape is always bad. I could then clarify that what I call rape is any kind of forced intercourse that produces a negative consequence for the agent that commits the act. This would be a pretty silly way in avoiding being a relativist though.

I would say that it is objectively true that I hold a subjective preference towards one thing or another, but not that I should act in accordance with my preferences. It is true that I hold the belief that my pleasure is good, however this does not mean that I can justify an act based on my pleasure, or that my pleasure is necessarily good. I would say that it is a psychological fact that I desire my own pleasure and that I helplessly act towards that goal because my actions are so determined by them and not by my own free will. I may seem to act in accordance with my preferences but such preferences stem from my desires and I am never free to choose that which I desire. Even if I resist my desire to eat a lot of sweets, it is not a product of my free will, but rather the pull of a stronger will, perhaps one of health or fitness, that moves me from a weaker desire—none of which am I the author of. I never choose what I will desire. It emerges seemingly at random and to be undergoing constant fluctuations that I am unconscious of. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Ok, so it seems to me that you don’t really think that you have any more reason to not rape any particular person than you do to rape that person. You are just not motivated to rape anyone. This is why I think you are biting a much bigger bullet with your anti-realism about ought claims than the bullet that I’m biting with my egoistic hedonism. Ultimately, you don’t seem to think that you have any reason to act on your preferences. You just think that you are psychologically compelled to do so. I do think that you have reason to not rape someone though because I believe the felt quality of your everyday experience is something that has objective value to you and it objectively determines the betterness or worseness of the decisions that you make in your life.

First of all, your question is loaded with a false premise, as I do not hold that view. I hold the view that moral or aesthetic evaluations are dependent upon the individual subject who is reflecting upon them. I think that raping is almost always considered worse by many and since there is such a majority view, then the act of rape has been institutionalized as a bad thing and this is usually a dogmatically held belief indoctrinated upon us through society (which I think at least brings favorable consequences). — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I was referring to your view of ought claims rather than your view on moral and aesthetic evaluations. I’m arguing that it is prudential considerations rather moral or aesthetic considerations that are most relevant to the question regarding whether or not you should rape.

I think that in order to maintain a consistent philosophical view of ethics you must ground moral principles in subjectivity rather than objectivity. I think it is silly to say that something out in the universe informs us as to how we should behave. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I agree, it’s silly to say that the universe informs us as to how we should behave. Rather, I think there are conceptual truths about how we should behave that go beyond the universe and do not exist in space or time. I think those conceptual truths are objective in the same way that mathematical truths are objective.

I don't think you are appreciating the context of my example. The statement is "Plants are pretty" with the noun "Plants" being the subject of the sentence and "are pretty" being the predicate verb attaching the subject of the sentence to the adjective describing the noun. The statement is talking about plants. (What about plants?) That they are pretty. Now, if you want to express the fact that plants have prettiness attributed to them by others from a third party perspective, then we could say something like "Plants have been considered pretty by many" since otherwise we are describing the plant through our perspective. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I think that the statement “Plants are pretty” is similar to the statement “Cookies are sweet”. The adjective “sweet” doesn’t imply a value judgement and thus the statement
“Cookies are sweet” is value neutral. I also think that the adjective “pretty” doesn’t imply a value judgement in the same sort of way. Thus, just like the phrase “Cookies are sweet” is value neutral, I think the phrase “Plants are pretty” is as well.

The contradiction would form when the principles with which we construct a framework for our moral system contains both of the following propositions. 1) Rape is wrong; and 2) Rape is not wrong. You either must (a) concede that your moral system produces a contradiction when it comes to evaluating rape; or that (b) it contains some level of arbitrariness by viewing rape as deontologically wrong, even if it produces positive consequences, but nonetheless can be morally justified if the positive consequences it produces surpass a given threshold; or that (c) a rape is justified so long as the rape results in a positive net gain in hedonic utility. I bite the bullet with arbitrariness. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Umm.... I don’t think that rape is wrong or “not wrong” in a moral or universalist sort of way. I think it’s incoherent to classify actions is being morally right or wrong because I think moral realism is false. Given this, I don’t have a “moral” system. I consider myself to be a value realist and a realist about ought claims because I think that for any given individual decision that one makes to rape or not to rape, the decision that the person chooses is either objectively right or objectively wrong(but not in a moral sense). The only reason it can be considered right or wrong is because we are dealing with a decision with only 2 possible decision options. I wouldn’t classify decisions as right or wrong if we were talking about a decision making dilemma with more than 2 decision options. Rather, I would say that the decision options have relationships of betterness or worseness towards one another.

Also, I don’t think that you can evaluate the goodness or badness of an action outside of the specific scenario under which the action is performed. For example, it would be silly for me to suggest that either everyone should learn to dance or nobody should learn to dance. Nobody would ever be a deontologist about the act of learning how to dance and you wouldn’t think that it’s contradictory for me to suggest that some people should learn to dance and some people shouldn’t. So, why do you think that it’s contradictory for me to say that some people should rape and some people shouldn’t? Note that I’m not thinking about rape in moral terms here. I’m thinking about rape like I would think about mundane actions like washing the dishes or learning how to dance.

We aren't talking about the evaluations of other people, we are talking about your position on rape. You said, "I would say that almost nobody should ever rape..." then went on to list the reasons why as both because nobody derives pleasure from rape and nobody could get away with it. Also, as a tangential point, a persons belief that they will get away with something must necessarily mean that they, at least on their rationality, think they have overcome the barrier which prevents most people from raping on your view. People are not omniscient, but they do become certain of things no matter how false they actually are. People are limited by their beliefs and cannot avoid acting on said beliefs while still holding to them. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I never said that "nobody derives pleasure from rape and nobody could get away with it”. There are some rare cases where people derive pleasure from rape and some rare cases where they get away with it. It’s true that people are limited by their beliefs regarding how they act but I don’t think that means that people ought to act on their beliefs. Sometimes the decision that you ought to make is the decision that you will psychologically never be compelled to make. For example, suppose that someone is planning on raping someone else. He believes that his victim will be by herself in a secluded cabin on a deserted island with no government or police to protect her. But, you know that her house has an underground police station and he is guaranteed to be arrested. Wouldn’t it make sense to say that he made a mistake and that he should have acted against his beliefs here?

I will respond to more of your comments tomorrow.

I believe that accurately captures what your saying. If so, then I would challenge premise 1, because it is not clear to me how the derivation of pleasure combined with the belief that one can escape any negative consequences necessarily entails that one should rape. When you say that almost no one should ever rape, it is as if you are saying that the act of rape is sometimes just and sometimes not just, which is contradictory. Is there some kind of deontological threshold that makes some rapes justified and others not? That was my critique of hedonic utilitarianism. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I don’t see anything contradictory about it. In fact, when it comes to the normal and mundane decisions that we make in our life, we pretty much always think that it is conditional whether or not we should do something. For example, I believe that sometimes someone should invest in the stock market and sometimes they shouldn’t. I think deciding whether or not you should rape someone is like deciding whether or not you should invest in the stock market(except choosing to rape isn’t nearly as reasonable of a decision option under the overwhelmingly vast majority of circumstances). I also want to point out that I think it’s not enough for someone to believe that they will get away with rape in order for a rape to be the wiser decision option. People can be highly irrational at evaluating their own odds regarding what they can get away with. Also, getting away with rape isn’t limited to avoiding getting arrested. The consequences of rape extend far beyond that. You can get punished by the victim of rape or the family of the victim as well. In addition, most people would feel guilty or ashamed about raping someone even if they think they are the kinds of people who wouldn’t be guilty or ashamed. This causes suffering and that is hedonistically bad. Also, even a mere accusation of rape could completely destroy your social reputation and future career prospects. Finally, I believe that people who would derive pleasure from rape would only do so if they value having power over another person for its own sake. I think the vast majority of hedonists would probably be really confused about why someone would choose to rape if they could have sex with a partner in relationship or a friends with benefits or a prostitute. Rape just doesn’t make sense if someone is looking for the most efficient way to receive sexual pleasure.

Also, getting away from the legal consequences seems to imply that rape is not bad, but just happens to entail the risk of some negative impact on ones life. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Ok, so how would you classify an action that should pretty much always be avoided because it pretty much always causes a negative consequence in your life? Bad seems like a pretty good word to describe it to me.

Quite the contrary, there are many reasons, but they are dependent upon the agents current preference and attitude toward a thing. Many of us have empathy towards one another and can relate to the suffering others feel. On my view, there is no external reference whereby the moral status of an act can be determined objectively right or wrong. We can, however, reason internally based on how we feel towards an act. In fact, many do and reach similar enough conclusions to legislate against such things as rape. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, I would say that you do believe in at least one objective ought claim then. You seem to think that you have objective reasons to act in accordance to your own preferences. I personally do not understand why I have any more reason to act in accordance to my own preferences than I do to act on the preferences of other people(aside from the fact that acting on my preferences would be more likely to produce hedonistic improvement.). I think a true anti-realist wouldn’t even grant that we have reason to act based on our preferences or attitudes. So, I must ask you, do you believe that we have objective reasons to act on our own preferences or do you think that’s just subjective as well?

I will respond to the rest of your comment sometime later this week .

The problem entailed by such logic is that it suggests that we have a justified reason to act so long as the act is of the Good, and that which makes an act an act of the Good is an overall increase of relative pleasure that the act derives; or, to quote you, that we have reason to act on opportunities for hedonistic improvement, is that it provides a justification for acts that, im sure, you would not find just. For example, if a rapist derives a sufficient amount of pleasure from the act of rapping a victim, that it offsets the overall suffering the victim endured, thereby resulting in an overall net gain in hedonic utility, then, on this view, the rape is justified. That is quite a reduction to absurdity, and a bullet that im not willing to bite in order to hold that view consistently. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I want to point out that I’m egoistic hedonistic utilitarian which means that I’m not even sure if the suffering of the rape victim would actually give you any reason not to rape that person. Rather, I would say that almost nobody should ever rape because almost nobody derives pleasure from rape and almost nobody could get away with rape in the long term. You might think this implication is unacceptable but I don’t see why you aren’t more bothered by the bullets that you have to bite as an anti-realist about ought claims. Under your view, it seems that nobody ever has more reason to choose not to rape someone over choosing to rape someone. This is because you don’t seem to think that anything gives people reason to choose any decision option(even a decision option to avoid raping someone). By contrast, I think the vast majority of people have very good reason to avoid raping someone and almost nobody has reason to rape someone. In addition, I can provide a deeper explanation for why raping is bad which seems like a pretty good upside to my view as well. Given this, I must ask you a question. Why do you find your own opinion that raping is not better or worse than not raping more acceptable than my view that raping is almost always worse than not raping.

My point was that the statement "Plants are pretty" is subjective and is a value claim because it is to say of a thing that it is pretty (sensually appealing relative to other things), which implies that its prettiness is a thing of value. It may, nevertheless, have other properties of which we evaluate as unappealing to us that makes us feel that the thing is, overall, unenjoyable. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Ok, I don’t have an issue with your view here. I’m still kinda inclined of thinking of prettiness as a value free description of something but I can understand that maybe some people can’t think of prettiness in that kind of value neutral way.

whereas an ought statement contains a prescriptive component that suggests a course of action, which makes it deontological. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I don’t think it makes it deontological because that seems to imply that all ought statements are duties(at least I have always thought that deontological refers duty oriented stuff.). It seems like ought statements as colloquially understood do not imply a duty to do something. Rather, it is just a recommendation for the selection of a particular decision option. I think that those Recommendations are basically just normal value judgements though.

We can objectively state that you hold a particular subjective belief insofar as the content of the belief is a property of you, the thinking subject, and not a property of the object of thought. The problem with grounding such statements still remains though. For example, I can make a hedonistic argument for my desire of pleasure "I desire pleasure" (an objectively true subjective statement), "Acting in accordance with x results in the satisfaction of my desire for pleasure" and then a conditional "If I wish to satisfy my desire for pleasure, then I ought to act in accordance with x" then affirm the antecedent "I do wish to satisfy my desire for pleasure" and, finally, the conclusion "Therefore, I ought to act in accordance with x". Everything seems valid and deductively sound, right? Well, there is a problem. Just because we desire something doesn't mean that we ought to act in accordance with our desires. Perhaps we could eliminate the component of free will to support the premises "We have no control over our desires" and "What we desire is pleasure" but the problem remains with how to generate a prescriptive "ought" from all of this. Just because something is out of our control does not mean that it is morally right or ought to happen. We cannot avoid our death. So, does this mean that our death is a morally good thing? Is it a moral obligation to die? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

The reason that I think that pleasure is valuable actually has nothing to do with people desiring pleasure. I just think that it’s simply the case that it is better for one to have more pleasure in their lives(all other things being equal.). I agree with you that we have no reason to act on our desires but I do think that we have reason to act on opportunities for hedonistic improvement in our own lives. I think that pleasure and suffering go beyond mere desire in this way. As I have stated earlier, I think that ought statements are indistinguishable from normal value statements. Given this, I don’t think there needs to be this extra step of deriving ought claims from value claims because I think ought claims are value claims. I can reiterate the argument that I gave for that earlier if you want me to but I will assume that you understood the reason that I have for believing this but I can state those reasons in a different way and try to explain them again if you wish me to do that.

What I mean by 'proven' is that a claim is demonstrable or verifiable through empirical evidence or logical necessity. Absolute, 100% knowledge is something only the most naive of people would consider possible. We have systems of knowledge built through rigorous methodologies that get pretty close to certain—that is, insofar as they predict future phenomena and overlap with multiple fields of research. If you can provide me with testable evidence or a logical entailment, that would suffice for me. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, I’m not as much of an empiricist as you are. I think that empirical evidence is only slightly better than other forms of evidence. I think this because of the mad scientist dilemma that I had mentioned previously. I don’t think it’s that crazy to think that our sensory capacities might not be as reliable at arriving at truth as we may think that they are. Another problem that I have with radical empiricism is that it seems to be self-defeating in a way since it seems that you can’t defend the Epistemic doctrine of empiricism with empirical evidence. Thus, I think you would have to use other types of evidence to argue that empirical evidence is the only credible form of evidence.

No. There are people who see beauty in what to them is beautiful, notwithstanding the popular appeal to the contrary. They don't approve of something because of the disapproval they have of it, but rather they have developed an appreciation for something that commonly is not appreciated. It feels as if you are appealing to some external property that objectively has value, which would make you a Realist. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

No, I’m trying to point out that there are some people who say that they subjectively feel as though something is ugly and yet they enjoy that thing because of its ugliness. For example, someone can think that death metal sounds ugly but say that they enjoy the music because it sounds ugly. Given this, I would say that prettiness is kinda similar to something like sweetness. It’s completely subjective and phenomenal and yet it doesn’t necessarily imply a value judgement. I think it’s also kinda hard to define what prettiness is kinda how it’s hard to define what sweetness is.

The cultural components that have been evolving, at least, since the emergence of the genus Homo has been the influential force that molds us from our natural, savage proclivities. These forces are learned mostly through empathy and are universal as they appeal to basic instincts such as self-preservation and both fosters and facilitates our desires for well-being in a way that is now functionally dependant upon the social dynamics of the group. In order to enjoy the benefits of society we must participate in the effort to maximize the prevailing values of the society; which means sacrificing a portion of ourselves toward whatever ends are most socially desired. Although, given the random nature in which our environment shapes us, both physiologically and psychologically, and that this process has continued across generations for billions of year's, even the most ubiquitous of human values could easily have evolved quite differently from what they are now. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, that seems to be a description of how the currently popular moral values have come about. I agree with you that objective moral values probably do not exist but I think that are probably objective prudential values. I’m talking about things like the value of making yourself have experiences that feel better in the long run by doing things like saving money, eating healthy, brushing your teeth, and shutting toxic people out of your life. I don’t see how your point about human evolution influencing human values can help explain why my kind of values are just a by-product of evolution. They seem to be values that even an intelligent savage can have and I don’t see how humans could have evolved without the proclivity to value making themselves feel better in the long run. Even if the human race evolves for a billion generations, I doubt that people will stop caring about their own pleasure and suffering(assuming that they would still be capable of experiencing pleasure and suffering.).

Values exist in the same way that phenomenal experiences do but by no means do they have the same existence as something empirically accessible or conceptually tethered to physical reality—and that is the meaningful difference that distinguishes language that is concrete and empirically-based from language that is abstract and phenomenologically-based. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I mostly agree with you there. I do think there is a distinction between the concrete and the abstract. Though, I don’t think that abstract understanding is always phenomenological in nature. The issue that I have with the fact value distinction is that it seemed to single out value claims as though they are especially dubious compared to many other kinds of non-value claims. This is why I like the way you framed a more relevant distinction here because there are plenty of non-value claims that are also abstract and non-empirical like mathematical claims for example. There are also non-value claims that are phenomenological and non-empirical like most claims about the dreams that a particular person might be having at night. I was never trying to suggest that value claims are usually just as reliable as empirical claims. I was just trying to suggest that value claims can sometimes be objectively true just like claims about the dreams that someone had at night can sometimes be objectively true.

With this in mind, would you consider your position to affirm or deny the proposition "Values cannot be empirically proven true or false"? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, my understanding of the word “proven” is that something must be true with 100% certainty in order to be proven. This is why I always try to avoid using that word because it seems to set the bar too high for what I consider to be enough evidence for a belief to be reasonable. You have instructed me not to understand the word “proven” as something shown to be definitely true. So, I think I’d have to ask you how you understand the word “proven” and what would suffice as enough evidence to prove something.

On a final note, I should mention that I think empirical evidence can only support certain kinds of value claims.
For example, the claim that brushing your teeth is good at avoiding cavities is empirical in nature and it’s also something I would call a value claim. In addition, a claim that one singer is better than another singer at belting notes in the 5th octave is kinda empirical as you would have to listen to the singer before you can adequately judge her abilities to belt in the 5th octave. Sometimes these sorts of claims about the competence of a singer can actually be objectively true or false. For example, I think it’s objectively true that Celine Dion is better at belting 5th octave notes than Frank Sinatra is. Why? Because Sinatra can’t belt 5th octave notes while Dion obviously can. It’s still kinda like a value claim though as if I was comparing the 5th octave belting abilities of 2 singers that can belt 5th octave notes roughly to an equal degree then the value judgement wouldn’t be so obvious to make anymore.

But the courts do, in fact, treat evaluative claims differently from non-evaluative claims, right? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I’m not sure if they do actually. There is a point that I forgot to make about the alleged facts of value that you mentioned in an earlier post. That point is that it seems to me that many of the facts of value that you mentioned as facts of value are not actually evaluative claims. For example, the claim that the suspect says that he didn’t commit the murder doesn’t claim that anything is better or worse. Rather, it’s just testimonial evidence. You can have testimonial evidence that doesn’t make a value claim and I don’t think value claims are always predicated on testimonial evidence. So, I’m not actually sure how much our legal system treats evaluative claims differently as it is perfectly ok with placing a heavy emphasis on subject matter that is just riddled with value claims like the subject matter regarding what is an appropriate punishment for a particular crime.

Which of the following statements would rank highest among your various epistemic states? Statement a) "Plants release oxygen" or, statement b) "Plants are pretty"...do you hold a belief, do you know, are you unsure, or do possess a complete understanding that the latter claim is true or false—and, what is the justification to hold such an epistemic state? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, I agree with you that Statement A is about as reliable as any kind of statement that a person can make and I think that Statement B is probably completely subjective. I never said that I was a realist about aesthetics after all. Also, I think it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think that Statement B is a value claim. This is because I think you can believe that plants are pretty without believing that this makes them better or worse than other things in any way. There are some people that seem to hold a somewhat unusual opinion that certain kinds of ugly things are better than certain kinds of pretty things. For example, many people who enjoy listening to death metal say that it is the ugliness of death metal that gives the genre it’s emotional significance. I personally have a hard time understanding how ugly music can be better than pretty music but I kinda take their word for it.

he problem with having evaluative facts is that there is no method to substantiate them or evidence to support and confirm them. They necessarily depend upon the agent to express them, either directly or indirectly, for substantiation and the only evidence there is that suggests they are true is contained within the privacy of the agents subjective mental states. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, it seems to me that there is public evidence to support various value claims. For example, when I try to argue for a value claim, I usually make an argument using something like an analogy or a thought experiment or just provide an example. This is why I’m constantly writing “For example” on every response that I give in a philosophy forum. It’s my way of illuminating my intuitions and showing my interlocutor the merits of my philosophical beliefs and theories. I would consider that to be a kind of evidence. It’s a more speculative kind of evidence but we are talking about more speculative philosophical topics here. I think all philosophical opinions are going to have this feature of only being able to be supported by evidence that not everyone will appreciate or take seriously. For example, take the debate around the possibility of an existence of an afterlife. I can provide you a philosophical argument that could be used to support the existence of an afterlife and I can provide you a philosophical argument against the existence of an afterlife. While we can never truly know who’s right, it would quite silly nonetheless for me to say that nobody is objectively right regarding this issue just because the evidence for both sides is highly speculative. I think philosophers shouldn’t be afraid to provide speculative reasons or speculative arguments in an attempt to resolve a philosophical issue because a philosophical issue wouldn’t be much of a philosophical issue if all philosophers just thought that the correct answer was obvious. So, in conclusion, I don’t see how value philosophy is any more speculative than other topics in philosophy as philosophical issues can rarely be resolved with any sort of obvious empirical evidence.

The court would appreciate the statements regarding a fingerprint, eyewitness, and footprint because these statements correspond with how we experience reality. If what is stated has the semantic content that most members of a language associate with a concept which corresponds to the way we experience the world, even with varying degrees of accuracy, arbitrarily defined by human standards such as limited sense perception and inconsistent cognitive processing, it is what we call a fact. The type of fact that is most compelling and that most pressure us to adopt a new belief. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, I think there are other reasons why courts would find fingerprint evidence more reliable; the evidence is meant to support a non-evaluative claim that a person performed a particular action like murder. After the non-evaluative evidence gets collected, it then gets evaluated and that’s when the courtroom does start making lots of evaluative claims. The first thing that the court needs to determine is that the suspect is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But, what exactly counts as reasonable doubt? You can’t exactly answer those kinds of questions with empirical evidence it seems. Rather, I think the court has to make a value judgement about the evidence and make an educated guess about the likelihood that the client is innocent. It seems to me that there are objectively better and worse ways to evaluate the empirical evidence that is presented to the court and it seems to me that there are objectively better and worse ways to draw conclusions from the available evidence. Thus, I think it does make sense to think that value judgements can be factual and objective. Otherwise, we can’t reasonably be angry if a seemingly biased jury decided to convict a man of a crime with evidence that we intuit as being weak. We would have to just say that the value judgement of the court here was just an expression of their attitude or something silly like that.

Finally, I want to mention that the value judgements that are present in the courtroom do not end there. Someone also has to determine how a particular convicted person should get punished as well.

The premise is simple; if something can be empirically verified, then it is factual and thus descriptive. For example, if I make the statement that "My right hand has 4 fingers with 1 thumb," it provides a description for the way things are. A statement such as this can be checked and verified through empirical observation. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I don’t think that the fact that your right hand has 4 fingers can be empirically verified though. This is because there are many alternative explanations that can be offered for why your hand appears to have 4 fingers when you look at it other than the explanation that you really do have 4 fingers. One such alternative explanation is that you might be living in simulation created by a mad scientist that programs the simulation to make you believe that you have 4 fingers but you only actually have 2 fingers on your real hand that exists outside of the simulation. You would probably find that alternative explanation implausible but this belief would not be based on empirical evidence. Rather, you just have an intuition that the mad scientist theory is a bit kooky. Similarly, I think my intuitions about value can provide me with objectively true answers on questions of value for the same reason you would likely think that you can rely on your intuitions to arrive at objectively true answers about the falsehood of my mad scientist hypothesis. After all, you can’t empirically verify that the mad scientist hypothesis is false because you have no way of observing the mad scientist. Yet, things that we have never observed can still potentially exist.

Prescriptive statements are a subset of evaluative statements, which is the only distinction between the two that I am aware of. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I don’t think that it’s the only distinction. According to the first dictionary definition of prescriptions that I could find, prescriptions are actions of laying down authoritative rules or directions. I don’t think a statement like “you ought to brush your teeth” is laying down authoritative rules or directions. I think it is just expressing a value judgment. So, the statement you ought to brush your teeth is kinda like other evaluative statements like the statement “John is better at math than Mark”. Just as I think John can possibly be objectively better at math than Mark: I also think that it can be objectively better to brush your teeth than not brushing your teeth.

Are you making a case against the general consensus amongst analytic philosophers who differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive statements based on the reasons I have thus far offered? Most people understand that there is a very different kind of thing being described when it comes to value judgements. Something that extends beyond merely describing that which corresponds with empirical observation. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I’m not aware of there being any general consensus on this issue among analytic philosophers. The fact/value distinction and the distinction between descriptive and evaluative statements has been challenged by plenty of very famous and high profile analytic philosophers such as the philosophers mentioned by @Joshs. If you want to get a brief summary of their reasons for rejecting the fact/value distinction, I would recommend watching a 12 minute video on YouTube called “Fact-Value Entanglement” which is on the Philosophy Overdose YouTube channel. Though, I should warn you that Hilary Putnam who is speaking in this video is expressing his points in somewhat smug and condescending manner which I didn’t appreciate particularly.

Even so, you seem to be aware that there is a distinction between statements that describe stuff and ones that describe stuff and stuff related to value. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, that’s what makes your definition of a descriptive statement confusing to me as that you seem to think that descriptive statements describe everything except values. I don’t understand why values and only values are singled out of the definition of the word.

First, that it is not entailed that every agent will classify the experience within the same category. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I agree, I don’t think that experiences are objectively better or worse than other experiences. Rather, there are facts about how a particular person would subjectively evaluate the felt quality of a particular experience and from those facts we can objectively conclude that particular decision options are better than other decision options.

Second, the category itself is based on an arbitrary measurement that is phenomenally dependent. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

There seems to be lots of factual non-evaluative statements that are also based on arbitrary measurements that are phenomenally dependent. For example, think about the following statement:

S1: There is a sufficient amount of scientific evidence for the theory of evolution.

Is S1 factual? Seems like it to me. Is S1 based on arbitrary measurements? I would say so because we can’t empirically measure the amount of evidence that a given theory has and the word sufficient always seems to be necessarily vague as well. Is S1 phenomenally dependent? This one is a little more controversial but it seems that whether or not a given theory has a sufficient amount of evidence is predicted on our intuitions which do not seem to be necessarily different than the intuitions that we use to make value judgements. Though, it could also be argued that S1 is actually also an evaluative statement but that would pretty much make any kind of belief an evaluative statement and I doubt that this is a conclusion that you are willing to accept.

Because they do not report something that is observable or falsifiable, and that is what facts are supposed to do. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I don’t think that facts are necessarily supposed to report something that is observable or falsifiable and you will find plenty of academic analytical philosophers who also don’t think about facts in those terms. This way of thinking about facts has largely fallen out of style since the decline of the logical positivist movement in the mid 20th century.

so you must do one of a few things: you must suppress the memory of your shameful thoughts or actions deep enough that they barely ever touch your consciousness (and conscience); or you must explain them to yourself (and, perhaps, to others) in a light that makes them look less reprehensible... — Todd Martin

Well, my deepest and darkest secrets aren’t actually things that I’m ashamed of. They are just things that would be most damaging to my reputation and my welfare if discovered. I tend to experience the greatest amount of shame from really mundane things like remembering times when I said something stupid or acted awkwardly. It would make more sense for me to be ashamed of the most reprehensible things about me from a social perspective but that’s just not how my emotions work for some reason. For some strange reason, I’m very obsessive compulsively embarrassed about mostly inconsequential matters that would do little to cause anyone to change their opinions about me and yet I just don’t feel bothered by facts about me that other people would find reprehensible. At the same time, I tend to think that the actual most reprehensible facts about me are things that I share with the vast majority of people like the fact that I eat meat products that are produced in factory farms and the fact that many products that I use have been produced by slave labor in 3rd world countries. At the same time, I don’t feel guilty or ashamed about that stuff either and sharing that I do those things does not hurt my reputation or welfare.

So, I’m kinda not sure what category you want to put me in but I’m kinda skeptical of your categories here because you really would need to analyze this on a secret to secret basis as not all dark secrets are the same and I kinda feel that you are bringing up things that seem to appeal to the existence of some kind of weird unconscious phenomena like repression and self-deceit. I’m skeptical of these phenomena because I think these so-called phenomena are at best examples of well understood cognitive biases like the confirmation bias and the tendency to believe things that we want to believe(which isn’t necessarily self-deceit or repression in my humble opinion as defining it as such would imply that people experience repression and self-deceit about things like their political opinions as well. Rather, I think it’s just ignorance caused by a cognitive bias.)

Though, I think the sinister part about psychoanalytic concepts like that of repression and self-deceit is that it’s often invented and confabulated by the psychoanalyst himself as he wants to portray all humans through the lenses of his ideological worldview. For example, with someone like Sigmund Freud, human behavior was mostly explained by weird sexual/animalistic stuff like penis envy, anal retention, and the Oedipus Complex. For someone like Carl Jung, it was religious and spiritual stuff. I think both of these fathers of psychoanalysis and of concepts like repression and self-deceit, made the same sort of mistake and they had the same kind of bias. They wanted to take their interests and their way of looking at the world and they wanted to explain away people that didn’t think like them as being repressed and as people who truly are interested in their interests who just can’t acknowledge that they are interested in those interests because of their self-deception. For example, imagine if I believed in psychoanalysis and I was a psychoanalyst. I would probably be trying to argue that the physical pain that you have experienced in your life was the worst kind of suffering in your life and you are just repressing your memories about all the terrible pain that you have experienced from your physical injuries in the past. You would likely call me out on my bullshit if I tried to say something like this about you. Yet, how is my hypothetical psychoanalytic narratives about you any less credible than the psychoanalytic narratives that you seem to have about me or the psychoanalytic narratives of the so-called psychoanalytic masters like Freud and Jung. I personally don’t see how someone could reasonably distinguish good psychoanalysis from bad psychoanalysis in a way that doesn’t just seem blatantly biased on some philosophical worldview or a set of interests.

This is, of course, trivially true and tangential to any point that I have made. The is—ought divide expresses skepticism that an inference can be made between a descriptive "is" statement and a normative/evaluative "ought" statement. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

The is/ought divide is not the same thing as the fact/value distinction. The first distinction was briefly mentioned by Hume in literarily just a paragraph or so. It’s probably a distinction that Hume wouldn’t even remember making if he read back his own work. I think it is a trivial distinction at best. The fact/value distinction is a more serious distinction that was made by another group of philosophers called the logical positivists. I think those philosophers sometimes had a tendency to misread Hume and assume that the is/ought distinction somehow provides an argument for the fact/value distinction. I don’t see how it does provide any argument for the existence of a fact/value distinction and Hume himself never said that it does.

The statement that "the road ought to be visible now because the fog has cleared" is not the kind of ought statement we care about here. We don't care about inferences deriving an "is" from a descriptive "ought", but rather we are concerned with inferences deriving an "is" from a prescriptive "ought". — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Yes, but a statement like “you ought to brush your teeth” is not a prescriptive ought statement either. It is an evaluative ought and I’m claiming that value realists can argue that evaluative claims are factual and that the fact/value distinction is an illegitimate distinction.

It is, in fact, not a descriptive statement because the term "best" here is evaluative and prescriptive which makes the statement loaded. Try forming an is—ought inference with your examples and see the issue reveal itself. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, who exactly gets the authority to define what a descriptive statement is? It could be argued that evaluative statements are descriptive statements because they describe things related to value. After all, doesn’t it make more sense to say that descriptive statements are statements that describe stuff even stuff related to value? I’m also not sure what you mean when you say that value claims are “loaded” claims. Loaded in what way exactly?

P1. If you have options, then you ought to choose the option that is best; — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I think this premise is meaningless because I think it’s basically just saying If you have options, then it is better to choose the best option. It’s kinda obvious that it’s better to pick the best option and I don’t how that’s different than saying that you ought to pick the best option.

Just because we have options doesn't mean we should choose any of them. For example, if I had the options to burn my hand, cut my hand, or freeze my hand—I would choose none of these options. This makes the premise false. It is not necessarily entailed that we must choose any option at all. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Well, isn’t choosing no option an option itself? If you have an option to choose not to have anything bad happen to your hand then isn’t this the best available option in that case?

Why should we brush our teeth? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Because brushing your teeth causes cavities and the sensations caused by these cavities produce experiences that have a felt quality that you are psychologically compelled to regard as being worse than the felt qualities of most normal experiences that you have in life. An additional consideration is that there doesn’t seem to be any downsides to brushing your teeth.

How is it morally obligatory? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

It’s not morally obligatory, I just think that it’s objectively better or objectively more wise to brush your teeth under nearly any circumstance imaginable.

P1. Brushing your teeth makes them clean

Therefore, C. You ought to brush your teeth.

This is deductively invalid. The conclusion is not entailed by the premise. It is possible for the premise to be true and the conclusion be false. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Yes, that’s the is/ought divide but I don’t see how it implies the fact/value distinction. Why think that value statements are not factual statements and why think that they have to be derived from non-evaluative statements?

But what does being close to someone mean if you hold something far away from them? If you say,”I am very close with my” mom, or sister or brother or best friend, but withhold secrets that would enable them to understand the character of your soul in its fullness, how close can you be? How can you be close to someone who knows the least about you? — Todd Martin

I would say that you are close to people that you care about the most and would be willing to prioritize their interests over the interests of other people. This kind of closeness doesn’t seem to require to share secrets. In fact, you may wish to not share some of your secrets because you care about them and you don’t want to upset them. You also don’t want to share secrets with them because preserving a relationship with them matters to you.

with whom would you be willing to share your innermost secrets? — Todd Martin

Well, there’s some secrets that I have that I wouldn’t want to share with anyone. Simply because it wouldn’t have conversational value and there’s no other reason to share it.

Is there someone in your life that you trust that much? — Todd Martin

I wouldn’t share my secrets with anyone who has any power to produce negative outcomes in my life if they knew a particular secret of mine. So, I have a tendency to share the least about myself with people that I’m closest to.

Wouldn’t anyone long to have such a one? If anyone would want to have such a person in their lives, wouldn’t there be a general term we use to describe him, to characterize him (or her)? — Todd Martin

I don’t think everyone wants to have a person like that. I personally don’t see the value in sharing secrets for their own sake. I also don’t know of any term to refer to a person that you would share secrets with.

Are you willing to answer it or not? — Todd Martin

I don’t understand the question or how it pertains to our discussion.

But whether you should tell your mom about your girlfriend depends on several things, doesn’t it? What if it would upset her? Surely you wouldn’t want that to happen just because of some abstract ideal of an “increased level of honesty” b/w you two? But maybe, though it would upset her, by telling her, you would be sending the subtle message that this is YOUR life, and you’re gonna live it the way you want to, regardless of what she wants. — Todd Martin

I agree that telling secrets is often quite bad and I believe that people shouldn’t be excessively honest. As you have mentioned earlier, just because a particular word has a positive connotation doesn’t necessarily mean that it is always positive. My notion of honesty is actually an Aristotelian one where Aristotle argued that people should be fairly honest and not tell lies but they should not be excessively honest and they should at least keep secrets about their friends.

And “concern for your welfare” might extend to concern for the sort of women you might be getting involved with? — Todd Martin

Well, the key word here is “might”. Can I reasonably be expected to immediately interpret my mom’s possibly complex motive when she’s asking me a quick question about my location. The truth is that I hadn’t thought about her motive and I just answer the question immediately. If she was interested to know what I was doing then she would have been more clear in asking that question instead. I don’t think that mind reading abilities are a reasonable requirement for avoiding dishonesty.

As far as curiosity goes, I attempted to argue in my previous post that no one is just curious: there is always a motive, however subtle or hidden, for one asking or exploring. — Todd Martin

I would disagree. I sometimes just ask my mom where she’s going out of curiosity too it seems. It seems that people just like to know things about others sometimes.

You know your mom a lot better than we do: When she asked where you were, did you immediately think, “Mom suspects I’m up to no good”, or did you think rather, “Mom’s just concerned about my well-being, as any mom would be”?

Which is it, O Hedomenos? Doesn’t the honesty of the answer you gave, that you were at the library, depend upon this question? — Todd Martin

I think that my mom’s motive was either that of curiosity or that of concern for my welfare. She didn’t ask me this question over the phone. Rather, she would ask me this question any time I’m about to leave to go somewhere or after I returned from the library if she wasn’t home when I left. Of course, it’s always possible that she might have been concerned about me being up to no good but I had no good reason to think that was definitely her motivation. It’s not as obvious as determining that if someone asks you to sweep the floor that they want you to perform that chore properly as that’s usually just seen as a given.

Nonetheless, I still think it would be more honest for me to tell her about my girlfriend because I think sharing secrets increases one’s level of honesty. My refusal to share secrets isn’t dishonest though. It’s kinda how it’s usually considered really honest of someone to share their personal desires and insecurities with others but one is not being dishonest by refusing to share those things with others.

For example, if your mom asks you, as she’s leaving the house, to sweep the floors, and while she’s gone you sweep all the dirt under the rugs, you have already been dishonest without ever saying, “I swept the floors”. Indeed, she would have no reason to ask you whether you swept them: she can see whether they are clean or not...unless she fears you may have acted dishonestly. In which case she might suspect you might have swept the dirt under the rugs, and therefore surreptitiously check underneath them.

On the other hand, if you collect the dirt you have swept from the floors and throw it in the trash, then you have acted honestly... without saying a word. — Todd Martin

I agree that this actually would be a case of dishonesty but I don’t think this case is quite analogous to the Sally case or my library case. I think this case does give us reason to modify the definition of dishonesty that I initially given but that was just meant to be a quick definition to begin with. The reason why it would be dishonest for me to tell my mom I swept the floor in this case is because I understood what my mom meant by the phrase “swept the floor”. By “swept the floor”, she meant completed the chore to a reasonable standard. If I “swept the floor” by some other sense then this doesn’t mean I swept the floor by her definition of the phrase. But, the case involving Sally isn’t like that it seems. Sally didn’t ask your mom if she was in the shower. Rather, she just stated that she was in the shower. Though, your mom might have been dishonest if she said that she couldn’t talk because she was in the shower. Similarly, when my mom asked if I was at the library, she was just asking about my location and so I don’t think it would be dishonest not to mention other things that she didn’t ask about.

surely dishonesty is the antonym, that is, the opposite, of honesty. Why, it is so by definition, My Child, is it not? — Todd Martin

The dictionary might call it an antonym but it’s worth noting that the writers of the dictionary often just assume that the prefix “dis” in front of the word automatically implies that the word is the antonym of the root word. Most philosophers don’t understand the meaning of words just purely on grammar though. Also, these grammatical rules don’t apply in most other languages as I know these sorts of prefixes do not exist in the Russian language. Given this, we can’t necessarily make assumptions about the “antonymity relationship” between 2 words from grammar alone.

Now let’s consider this scenario: your mom calls you and asks where you are and, instead of answering, “I’m at the library”, you instead answer, “Why are you asking me that question, Mama? Do you think I would frequent a disreputable establishment, as well as you raised me to discern wholesome from unwholesome places? Do you fear I am heading down the road to perfidy despite the excellent upbringing you gave me to avoid it?” Do you think this answer would have been more or less honest than the one you actually gave? — Todd Martin

I agree with you that the answer that you gave here is more honest than the answer that I gave but I don’t think that this necessarily implies that my answer was dishonest. In fact, it seems that it could reasonably be argued that the answer that you have provided doesn’t tell the whole truth either because it isn’t the most truthful answer that you could possibly give. It would be even more honest of me to say that I’m going to the library to mess around with my 40 year girlfriend. Though, I don’t think even this would be the most honest answer. It would be even more honest of me to say that I’m going to mess around with my 40 year old girlfriend who still lives with her mom. After all, my mom might also be interested to learn about that. It seems to me like we can pretty much always give a more honest answer than the answer that we give to any question.

I think that honesty is not necessarily an antonym of dishonesty. Honesty is mostly about telling the truth as you understand it. I also think this provides a good explanation of why most people wouldn’t think it makes sense to describe a person that can’t communicate such as a comatose person as an honest person. You have to share true information with others in order to have honesty. Though, a lack of honesty doesn’t necessarily imply dishonesty in my humble opinion.

No one is ever justified in believing any moral claim that uses an argument which includes the same moral claim in its conclusion as the moral claim in its premises. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Moral claims are not ought claims though. You can make a moral claim without using the word “ought” or even implying an ought claim. For example, you can make an argument for a moral claim that goes something like this:

P1: Everything that violates a categorical imperative is morally wrong.

P2: Murder violates a categorical imperative.

C: Therefore, murder is wrong.

More radically, one can even suggest that one sometimes ought to do things that are morally wrong. For example, someone might say that they believe that stealing is morally wrong in an objective sense but they might also think that they ought to steal in order to become wealthy. Being wealthy might be seen as more important to them than being moral in an objective sense. There is an entire philosophical literature devoted to the question of why should we be moral which kinda implies that moral realism doesn’t necessarily presuppose any ought claims.

If the entire chain of justification is not present for us to form a belief, then we can never know if we can be justified in believing it. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

We can never know anything to sure. Even something as uncontroversial as the claim that Earth is round requires you to make certain assumptions in order for you to reasonably accept the theory. I don’t see why moral realists couldn’t claim that we are justified in making educated guesses about which kind of moral claims are most likely to be objectively true. To use an analogy, I can’t ever be justified in thinking that a particular company will go up in value on the stock market. Anything could happen at the end of the day. But, that doesn’t mean that I’m not justified in choosing to invest in companies that I think are the most likely to go in value on the basis on the research that I’ve done on the companies and some speculation.

Descriptive claims attempt to state the facts and give an account of how the world is through non-evaluative observations. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Why do you think that only descriptive claims can be factual and not evaluative claims? Many philosophers like myself think that evaluative claims are factual claims. It’s also worth noting that there are plenty of scientific claims that seem to contain a value claim. For example, take the claim that Pluto is the 9th planet in the solar system. The word “planet” is used to designate celestial objects that are special and more worthy of study and exploration. So, there seem to be value claims that are nested within many descriptive claims. Given this, I think the fact/value distinction is kinda muddy.

Objectivity describes a feature of the world that is independent from the specificities of a mind, whereas subjectivity describes a feature of the world that is conditional on the specificities of a mind. Therefore, for a claim to be objective, it must be empirically falsifiable and describe mind-independent features of the world. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Wait, couldn’t there be mind independent truths that are not empirically falsifiable? For example, isn’t the claim that 2+2=4 true in a mind independent manner and yet it isn’t empirically falsifiable?

Why even presuppose an objective moral ontology in the first place? I mean, given the subjective nature of human psychology, it seems that our cognitive and evaluative capacities do not require a philosophically objective foundation. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I agree with you on moral anti-realism but I think it’s kinda important for ought claims to be objective or otherwise I’m not sure how we can say that we have reason to do anything as I’m not sure if we can talk about subjective reasons or what subjective reasons are even supposed to be.