Because each of these "dozens of times" the supposed dissolution of the dichotomy has been refutable. — Pfhorrest

I haven't read a single refutation of the fact the someone might choose a course of action because it makes them feel good, or because their society does it, or because their peers do it, or because the law says so, or because they've been brought up to act that way, or because it was easier, or because the alternative disgusted them, or because they thought it would reflect well on them, or...

You just blithely group all of these different motivations under objectively right or fearing punishment without any psychological evidence to justify your assertion. I have, in the course of our discussion, provided several citations, and am happy to do so again, demonstrating that moral decisions are made for a variety of reasons, they absolutely 100% do not always pass through centres of the brain responsible for either rational judgement or fear. Your assertion that these are the only two motivators for moral decisions is flat out wrong.

Either people accept the outcomes of these processes because they think they’re objectively right (or reject them because they’re wrong), or they accept them because someone will do something they don’t like to them it they don’t — Pfhorrest

Why do you persist in pretending this false dichotomy when it has been made clear a dozen times by several different people that these are not the only options? You approach is becoming disingenuous.

I’m taking that to mean what I call “fideism”: holding some opinions to be beyond question. You’re taking it to mean what I call “liberalism”: tentatively holding opinions without first conclusively justifying them from the ground up. But the latter is fine, it’s no criticism of me to say I’m doing that, and I’m not criticizing anyone else for doing that. It’s only the former that’s a problem — Pfhorrest

How is it a problem? The only problem with fideism that I can see is that one might be wrong about some belief and because one does not question it, one will persist in that falsity. Is there some other problem you're thinking of?

I would guess that 'It is raining' is about the weather, whereas 'I believe it is raining' is about one's belief. The belief may be implied by the former statement, but it is not asserted. Perhaps your views are different to Moore's. — Luke

That just seems to beg the question. If we're going to assume the object of propositions from the outset, then we're only going to get limited range of possible solutions to the paradox.

This misses the point. In the present tense, 'P' and 'I believe that P' have the same meaning, as Ramsey contends. However, Wittgenstein's example demonstrates that these two statements each have a different meaning in the past tense. Since 'P' and 'I believe that P' do not have the same meaning in the past tense, then Ramsey is incorrect to make the unqualified assertion that they both have the same meaning/use. — Luke

What I'm saying is that it has a different meaning in the past tense in any case - Wittgenstein's, Ramsey's, Moore's... "I believe that..." is not, according to Wittgenstein, intended as a third party description of one's mental state, yet "I believed that..." is so intended. See the quote...

The statement “I believe it’s going to rain” has a meaning like, that is to say a use like, “It’s going to rain”, but the meaning of “I believed then that it was going to rain”, is not like that of “It did rain then”. (PI, p.190) — Isaac

Believe has a different past tense use to it's present tense use. I don't understand what might be so problematic about this, lots of words have different uses in different contexts. "I believe that P" could well be spoken referring to one's mental state in odd circumstances. say a neuroscientist interpreting his own fMRI scans (in a future where we're better at it) - "Oh look! I believe that P". So I see it as completely unproblematic to see "I believe that P" as meaning different things in different contexts, and equally so that some of those contexts only normally arise in the past or present tenses.

I consider this a unique view of the matter. This would imply that all assertions are about beliefs rather than, e.g., about the world. — Luke

In philosophy maybe. It is the standard model in psychology and neuroscience and has been for at least thirty years. Philosophy has an unhealthy obsession with absolute truth. I've asked this in this thread before, but not to you directly, so..

If assertions are 'about' the world, then how does the world become the subject? When I form the words constituting the assertion, how does the world tell me which words to choose without first being inferred by my beliefs about it?

As far as all of neuroscience is concerned, my beliefs about the world trigger word selection from my linguistic cortices which then form sentences. The words are selected from several areas of the brain holding information on associations between words and my beliefs, which are then strung together. If you have some plausible mechanism whereby the world directly determines my word selection then I'd be interested to hear it. If not, then it seems strikingly odd to me that we should say something outside of our direct awareness is the object of a sentence we constructed. It would imply that we're not in control of the object of our sentences, that we have no choice what they're about.

When we ask "what are you talking about", people do not reply "I don't know yet, I'll just go and check"

Surely there are at least some cases in which we know for certain whether it did in fact rain, like the time I got drenched walking home without an umbrella. — Luke

Certainty has nothing to do with it. even something we have 100% confidence in is still a belief.

If Wittgenstein's aim is to show that 'I believe...' is not a description of my own mental state, or that this is not how the expression 'I believe...' is used, then how is Wittgenstein making it a psychological issue? He is trying to avoid viewing it as a psychological issue. — Luke

I think this is just a lack of clarity about what 'psychological' refers to here. See...

‘[o]ne can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief ’ (PI, p. 190).

How is that not a proposition of psychology? It is a clear assertion about what the mind can and cannot do. To mistrust one's own belief, one would have to have a belief about one's own belief (a low confidence belief). Wittgenstein is saying here (and quite rightly), that one cannot generally do this, and is supported by the evidence - we have higher level hierarchical structures which unify the dissonant output from lower level structures, it is generally impossible for us to have a belief about a belief, it simply get unified into a single belief.

So most people think these systems are morally correct, and not just someone's opinion? That means most people are moral objectivists. — Pfhorrest

No, most people are persuaded to act in one way or another by laws, social rules, peer-pressure and upbringing, all of which are ways societies can manage individual differences in moral proclivities. Whether they see these as objectively 'right' or just pragmatically something it is in their best interests to follow is irrelevant.

Was democracy the only item on my list? — Isaac


That was an example. — Pfhorrest

Yes, but an example that only works against the current system if you exclude all others. Including all the other approaches is what makes sure each is kept in check by the others.

But being open to seeing problems with the rules you live by and revising them as needed, as often and however long as needed, is the exact opposite of following them blindly. — Pfhorrest

No it isn't. If you do not question a rule then you are following it blindly. The fact that you might theoretically be open to questioning it sometime in the future if you get time is irrelevant. It just puts a gloss of 'cold, hard calculation' on the exact same gut feeling that everyone else is using.

Your ad infinitum is impossible. You must simply accept one set of rules, you do not have infinite mental resources to devote to actually questioning everything. You might have some whimsical theoretical notion of being able to question everything, but you cannot actually do so, which means in practice you're selecting a set of rules and blindly following them. The fact that you might 'one day' question them when you get time is pragmatically irrelevant.

so long as people accept their outcomes as legitimately normative, i.e. as morally correct, as telling us what we ought to do, and not just as "what those people think, but why should I care about that? It's not like they're actually right or something. That's just, like, their opinions, man." — Pfhorrest

Well, yes, but that does indeed seem to be what people broadly think. They think it best not to break the law most of the time, they are persuaded by their peers. But you've ignored tolerance and diversity which do not require such beliefs.

except for all the times when even people who want to take them as legitimately normative still find them outputting prima facie absurd conclusions (a white majority vote to strip all black people of their rights... hey that's democracy for you!) — Pfhorrest

Was democracy the only item on my list?

Correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was that much of our brain's processing power is dedicated to mundane subconscious tasks like visual processing and motion control. Even when it comes to more conscious activity, much of it would be common to all people: language, social interactions. The more intellectually rarefied activities that we value so much don't occupy a proportionate place in the brain's architecture and power budget. — SophistiCat

That's right, but the theory is that it's enough to make a difference. It's hard to explain the importance of synaptic pruning in child development without such a model. Other theories are that we have limited bandwidth and so must compromise other mental tasks to carry out such calculations, or that such calculations are more prone to yield errors in a stable environment. I prefer the simpler energy budget approach, but the others have their merits and it may be a combination of all three.

I'm just surprised to be so misread. — Banno

Really? Happens to me all the time.

Isaac throws out reality every second day. — Banno

If he is actually getting a kick out of it (in the usual sense), and no moral aversion, then I am still not sure what language has got to do with it. — SophistiCat

Just that getting a kick out of something is a feeling we already have terms for and those terms are not 'moral duty' or anything similar. It's simply that 'moral' is not a term used to describe the feeling of 'getting a kick out of something'. It's not different to someone using the word 'pain' to describe something which they show signs of thoroughly enjoying. If they're smiling and laughing and saying "again, again!" we'd rightly just assume they're using the word 'pain' wrong, not that they had a difference of opinion about the sorts of things that were painful.

You make it sound like there is a 'correct' answer to be found, and our natural moral sense is just better at figuring it out than a rationally constructed ethical system. For that to be the case, there has to be an independently defined problem and an independent means of evaluating the fitness of the solution to the problem. — SophistiCat

I don't think so. A system performing better than some other need not be aiming at anything objective. It could simply perform better for the person, but do so in each and every case (or even just the majority of cases). I am actually a naturalist as far as moral facts are concerned, but I don't think this makes me an objectivist for two reasons - 1) I don't see it as universally correct, just mostly so - it's a rule-of-thumb. 2) I don't see it as being the answer to a question. I don't think there's a question in the first place. Most of the time there is no "What should I do?", there is only that which you are going to do and then a post hoc rationalisation of that. My naturalism describe the state of affairs as they are, not how they 'ought' to be.

If you are a naturalist about morality: no God's laws or other supernatural impositions - and many proponents of objective morality are naturalists - then why would you even suppose that for something as complex and messy as natural moral landscape appears to be, the Enlightenment-age paradigm of a simple, rational, law-driven system would be a good fit? A much better paradigm would be something equally complex and messy and organic - biology, neurology, psychology, sociology. — SophistiCat

Very close to the way I think about it, but with the caveats above, one is still only trying to find the best solution for oneself, not for all of mankind, but there are very strong biological tendencies which will mean that the best solution will be similar across populations. It would not even be unreasonable, I think, to use this similarity to suggest solutions to people who are struggling with the ones they have - just always with an acceptance of the complex and fuzzy nature of any trend one identifies.

I criticize the rules and make a great effort to be sure as I can that they really are the correct rules. — Pfhorrest

And how do you carry out this criticism and effort? By following rules.

If by “listen” it is meant to exhibit conscious attention, then by definition it is impossible to pay attention to that which is sub-conscious. — Mww

One can pay attention to the result (which are made available to the conscious), without paying attention to the process by which they're derived.

Something needs to tell the brain what “math” to do. — Mww

Not at all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000284/

by so doing, didn’t you at the same time, think to describe all moral dilemmas in general, even if not so much “any real-life moral dilemma” in particular? — Mww

The intention was to provide a list, hence no "single" syllogism.

True enough, yet we chastise others for argumentum ab auctoritate in dialectics, and argumentum ad verecundiam in the case of actions. — Mww

We do, but note these are not necessarily fallacies, they're contextual.

Interesting article, thanks.

someone who asserts ‘It is raining’ does not thereby assert that he believes that it is raining, but his asserting it does indeed imply that he believes it. — Marie McGinn

Is it anywhere explained why? I've read the article, but not with any great depth. I can't find an explanation for this assertion. It seems on the face of it rather an odd thing to say. If the thing that someone asserts (the matter the sentence is about) can be about something which is outside of their mind, then why does saying it imply they believe it? I agree that saying it implies they believe it, but I get there via the fact that the assertion can be about nothing else but the belief (not the fact of their belief, the content of it). I'm not clear if McGinn is disagreeing with this, but the context you raised it in seems to suggest so, yet I can't see how to get to such an implicature without this content substitution.

The statement “I believe it’s going to rain” has a meaning like, that is to say a use like, “It’s going to rain”, but the meaning of “I believed then that it was going to rain”, is not like that of “It did rain then”. (PI, p.190)


If 'P' and 'I believe that P' "amount to" the same assertion, then their meanings should not change with tense. — Luke

I don't think this is the case because beliefs change, so "I believed then that it was raining" is about a past belief (where the state of one's mind becomes the object), and "It did then rain" is a current belief (about the historical fact). One doesn't, admittedly, escape from the the issue of needing to see it as impossible for one to have a belief about one's current beliefs (where one can have a belief about one's past beliefs). But this 'psychological' issue is present as an assumption in all solutions so I don't see it as a blocking point to Ramsey's. This is pretty much what Wittgenstein says later, as you quote.

Wittgenstein believes [...] the central mistake of Moore’s approach [is] it treats ‘I believe …’ as a description of my own mental state [...] His aim is to show that this is not how the expression ‘I believe’ is used. — Luke

...ie, we can't have a belief about our mental states. Consider, in this light though "I believed..." which is used exactly that way - a description of one's mental state. So either way we have the meaning changing with the tense. We don't seem to be able to escape that.

Other than that, I'm inclined to agree with much of the remaining assessment of the variations in the use of "I believe..." as it progresses over tenses.

it all boils down to the pragmatic choice: of whether to proceed as though it is, and try to reach a conclusion that accounts for all of the reasons everybody brings to the table; or else proceed as though it's not, and just throw up our hands and say there's no resolution to be had, so much for reasoning, now we just fight I guess and who ever wins "was right". — Pfhorrest

I've no idea why you keep framing it like this when you've been presented with several alternatives just in this thread. Democracy, tolerance, diversity...even persuasion need not be thrown out simply because it is not grounded in anything objective. These are all means of reaching conclusions about moral differences which are non-violent, seem to work for the most part, and do not require moral objectivism.

So I see no sense at all in which it's the pragmatic choice. The pragmatic choice is to let everyone follow their own moral decisions insofar as that is possible, try to persuade others of your preferred position where you'd rather they behaved that way, and resort to democratic institutions where a unified decision is required.

One cannot believe that "It's raining" is true when they do not believe it is raining. — creativesoul

Of course we all know that. The problem is when we try to explain why. Ramsey's solution is simple, it's because 'I believe that P', 'P is true' and 'P' all amount to the same thing in ordinary use, just asserting P.

Holding that 'P is true' means something of another class to 'I believe P' is where the problem starts.

One cannot believe it is raining when they do not believe it is raining. — creativesoul

Yes, but under traditional correspondence theory, that has no relevance. The first part has its truthmaker in the state of the world, the second in the state of my mind.

Put it like this. Is there any problem with me saying

"It's raining" is true, but "I believe it's raining " is not true

According to correspondence theory there should be nothing wrong with me saying that. The judgement of the truth value of "it's raining" depends on the state of the world, the judgement of the truth value of "I believe it's raining" depends on the state of my mind. If the state of the world can be judged independently to the state of my mind, then there should be no problem with me making the statement quoted above.

But there is a problem, or at least it seems there is. Hence correspondence theory has to go.

But that just perpetuates the claim with which Wittgenstein expressly disagrees: that the paradox is "an absurdity for psychological reasons". — Luke

Yes. Unfortunately we can only gather very little of Moore's meaning from that one letter which is why I quoted from PI. It seems clear, at least to me, that Wittgenstein's objection to merely psychological was not about moving the issue from belief to grammar, but about not limiting the issue to one of mere cognitive dissonance, which I'm guessing from the context is what Moore might have implied in his lecture. If we don't adopt that understanding of the passage in PI it make Wittgenstein's later comments in 'On Certainty' difficult to understand, no?

You appear to suggest that Moore, Wittgenstein and Ramsey were in agreement on this. However, according to Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein did not agree with Moore about this: — Luke

Yes. I didn't mean to imply they were all in agreement about the cause of the dissonance, that's why I tacked on "according to Moore" at the end of that bit. What I think they're in agreement about is that it is the beliefs themselves which are at odds.

Seriously? — Banno

Yes. Unless I've missed something in your grammar the construction of your proposition is - It seems as if claims are about X, therefore X

Where X here is some extra-personal force.

Otherwise moral relativism is completely unaffected. If all you're saying is the the subject of ethical claims is other people, then this offers no issues at all for relativism. We can all have subjective feeling about how we'd like others to behave no less than we can about his we'd like to behave.

The emotivist argument, for example, is not dented by the subject matter of the expression, unless you're also claiming, as I suggested, the the assumption within some expression reifies that subject.

If the woman has to suffocate the baby, do we call her moral, or immoral? The whateverman moralist would say, "Sure, if they think it is.". But a more discerning moral relativist would try to find a common thread between the two. Yes, there were two opposing actions of moral claim, "A baby being killed, versus we shouldn't kill babies". But surely the reasoning behind both moral claims has a common thread? — Philosophim

Well, what is it then? We've been at this for 2000 years, we've either found out what this common thread is or we must surely, on pain of pure dogmatism, concede that there very likely isn't one.

Seems as ethical claims are more than claims of personal preference. Ethical claims invoke a move such as that from "I choose not to eat meat" to "you should choose not to eat meat". The move from what I chose to what others should choose.

If that is so, it is difficult to see how moral relativism could count as a coherent ethical position. — Banno

A few hundred years ago everyone spoke freely as if there were a god. Most still do "God willing", "For God's sake", "God save us". Does that mean that atheism is incoherent, because people speak as if it were? It sounds like a very odd argument to say that simply because people speak as if there were an objective moral standard, it must be the case that there is one.

I get emotionally upset about things that impact me directly, but I could, largely, ignore everyone else's suffering. Except that I think I shouldn't. I think the correct way for people to behave generally is to act in a way that minimizes the suffering of others, and I am a person so I should behave that way too; it would be inconsistent for me to do other than what I think people in general ought to do. Whether or not I feel like it isn't relevant, except inasmuch as my feelings might interfere in my doing what I think I ought to.

I've done right by people that I hated before, even though I'd rather have watched them suffer, because I thought that I ought to and I was able to override the feelings to the contrary. People who only do what's they feel is right because they feel like it seem unlikely to do something like that; if they want to see someone suffer, they'll invent a reason why that person "ought" to suffer to justify allowing it to happen, and not care whether or not that "reasoning" is consistent with their other reasoning about other people in other circumstances. — Pfhorrest

It is frightening that you're advocating this stuff. This is Blair's description of a psychopath. Someone who follows the rules but without any feeling. That describes the psychological state of the overwhelming majority of the world's worst most horrendous mass-murderers, and you want people to use it as a basis for making moral decisions?

So... "thanks, but no thanks"?



I think there's a lot of confusion in this thread about what Moore's paradox is a paradox of. Here's Wittgenstein

Moore's paradox can be put like this: the expression "I believe that this is the case" is used like the assertion "This is the case"; and yet the hypothesis that I believe this is the case is not used like the hypothesis that this is the case...

...the statement "I believe it's going to rain" has a meaning like, that is to say a use like, "It's going to rain", but the meaning of "I believed then that it was going to rain", is not like that of "It did
rain then"...

..."But surely 'I believed' must tell of just the same thing in the past as 'I believe' in the present!" — Wiitgenstein PI p190

And Moore himself is reported to have said the sentence is "an absurdity for psychological reasons" - According to Wittgenstein's report of the lecture.

Despite the herculean efforts of most posters here to avoid any psychological talk and focus on the 'say-ability' of the sentence, this was never the object of the paradox. The object of the paradox was entirely psychological - according to Moore. It was entirely about the proper truth judgement of each part, why we are (seemingly) incapable of judging it 'true' that it's raining, but also true that 'I believe it's not raining' when those two things appear to have different subjects.

As I said earlier, Moore, Wittgenstein and (inadvertently) Ramsey had different solutions, but what they were solving was not "can we say 'It's raining, but I don't believe it's raining'?". All agree that the answer to that question is "yes we can, under some odd circumstances". Nor are they answering the question "does saying 'It's raining, but I don't believe it's raining', sound like a contradiction because it would be odd to believe both at the same time?". All agree that the answer to that question is "yes".

The question they're answering is "why can't I believe both at the same time?" Why can't I hold one belief about my state of mind and another about the state of the world?

If, however, "I believe it is so" throws light on my state, then so does the assertion "It is so". — Wiitgenstein PI p190

So all this talk about say-ability misses the point which is about why we cannot hold those two beliefs, the words we say (as I've tried to explain) merely reflect some belief, literally cannot but do otherwise.

Even if that glutinous mass is technically responsible for everything a human does, if it isn’t readily apparent as such, he should be forgiven for “listening” to that which is first, foremost and always, apparent to him. — Mww

When you go to catch a ball do you 'do the maths' or do you just put your hand where you 'feel' the ball is going to end up? I'd say people listen to what their sub-conscious is telling them all the time. The artifice, in my opinion, is pretending otherwise.

If there’s something inherently wrong with that kind of procedure, why haven’t we evolved out of it naturally, or, found a way to harness the supercomputer such that rhetoric and logical syllogisms and whatnot, loose their respective powers? — Mww

I'm not quite sure what power you think logical syllogisms have here. I can't think of a single syllogism that describes any real life moral dilemma accurately. If you're asking why rhetoric works, that's much more simple to offer an answer for. The brain is the most calorie rich organ, doesn't matter much now, but it did in our past. It's simply more efficient to trust someone else to have worked a thing out than it is to work it out yourself, the majority are unlikely to be wrong. so long as one or two people in a tribe don't act this way, the tribe prospers as most of them have not had to commit to the calorie intensive work of calculating everything from scratch. Skip forward a few thousand years, we no longer have any means of knowing who to trust, we scramble about for clues as to who's in 'our gang' and rhetorical expressions often provide these clues.

So, because we use sensory responses to detect rainfall, we cannot talk about that which we're detecting? — creativesoul

So if I propose "I had oysters for lunch", am I talking about oysters, or something else - perceptions, brain states, beliefs or whatever?

I say oysters.

And if that's the case, how is it that my proposition does not "access the world"? — Banno

These seem like the same issue. One thing that frustrates me about philosophy is that it seems, to my untrained impression, to be sometimes trying to bridge a divide which there is no need to bridge, where each side merely butts up to the other seamlessly. Of course, in normal language we can talk of oysters and we all know what we're talking about. No one has the slightest problem with that. But as a result of no-one having the slightest problem with that, there's nothing further to say about it. There's no issue to solve, no problem of interest.

We might then want to look a little deeper for some specific reason - maybe a problem of language intrigues us, or some pathology we want to cure - we want to know what's going on in more detail and in order to do that we have to break up a normal process we're all quite happy with into stages and processes which seem strange to us (of course they do, we don't normally think of them this way). All this is fine too - we know we're doing this just to resolve the issue, not to dictate some new way of being in the world.

But here, in the middle of this (fairly scientific) process, philosophy will step back in and say "but that's not how things seems to us!". Well, we knew that. If we wanted to leave things how they seemed to us we wouldn't have started in the first place. No one says "It's raining, but I don't believe it is". So nothing about this is going to relate to how things 'seem to us'. If you want the resolution to come out as something which sits with what already seems to you to be the case, then there's no point even looking.

If, on the other hand, we want to see if the nature of this artificial problem gives us a frame we didn't already have, a map we weren't already making use of, then we'd be foolish to judge the results by whether things look the same as they do through the frame we're already using.

That being said, the actual answer to your questions is that in normal day-to-day life we're talking about aspects of the real world. Oysters. But if we want to know why "It's raining, but I don't believe it is" sounds weird, we're going to need a different frame, because no one says that in day-to-day life.

I suggested we look at the motivating forces producing utterances to see why they'd never produce such a one. Looking at these we see that utterances cannot be produced directly by objects in the world, objects must first have some effect on our senses, then on our beliefs, then finally on our speech centres.

Once we have this model we can see that the only way the rain (as a state of the external world) could prompt us to any utterance at all is via the exact state of mind we're describing in the second half of the sentence. We cannot, therefore, assess the former without it being an assessment of the latter. We might. It's not logically impossible, but we just don't appear to when we look at what the brain actually does.

So, to clarify you seem to be saying that there's a mental activity of evaluating behaviours, and that the group we call 'moral behaviours' is a natural grouping within this, and that the values we give ('good', 'bad') are feelings toward these behaviours, themselves naturally grouped? We then put labels on these natural groups to talk about them and in doing so we may expose a little fuzziness around the edges, but there's still a core where the world dictates to us what the groupings are, not the other way around.

Is that roughly right? If so, I think I'd probably agree, but with a couple of very large caveats.

The first you've already said - "The boundaries are somewhat vague and mutable and culturally specific, and much can be made of uncertain relationships between morality and related categories like duty, social shame, etc.,". I think this is important because it's generally the boundaries where moral disputes are.

The second would be that there would have to be groups of evaluating behaviours, not one. I referred to it as such above, but I don't think you did, so I'm not sure what your thinking is here. Neurologically, it's getting increasingly difficult to make the argument that moral evaluation is a single process, it's almost certainly composed of several processes involving different parts of the brain in different contexts. This matters because if you want to argue that the groups we evaluate these behaviours into are themselves natural kinds, you have to have a different pair of natural kinds corresponding to 'good' and 'bad' for each process because the results are different in each case.

Say for example processing in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex will be the emotional response to options (patients with severe damage to this region consistently give purely utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas, no emotional content even though they might be emotional in other ways). The result, therefore will be some emotional content which we will have to sort (say feel warm and cosy about it='good', feel sickened by it='bad'). But then another dilemma might involve more some area like the superior temporal sulcus which is involved in processing social perception. That might output - will be perceived negatively by my social group='bad', will be perceived positively by my social group='good'. I won't go on, but other areas might produce paired results like disgusting/attractive, salient to me/not salient to me, affects a valued member of my group/affects an outsider, conflicts with a learnt rule/complies with a learnt rule...

I don't think there's necessarily a problem with saying there are natural kinds for each of these groupings, just that it would be some job of work demonstrating the case.

I think we're closer here than it might seem. I said at the outset that I think there are two issues 1) what we call 'moral behaviour' - an language issue, and 2) what the reason might be for any similarity/difference we see in that language. You seem to be talking here about (2) - saying that the reason for the consistency in applying the term 'morally right' to certain behaviours, is partly that the biological function underpinning the speech act is tapping into some 'natural kinds'. ( the other part being the influence of culture, upbringing etc.). As I said, I'm inclined to agree with you here. We may differ over the relative extents of these influences, but we seem to agree on the fact they, together, explain the language terms dividing up the way they do.

The conclusion I draw, might be different though. My feeling is that as soon as we introduce a large quantity of biological function into the picture, then it becomes more proper to say of the extremes (say someone thinking hitting old ladies is morally 'right') that they are either damaged, or mistaken about the language. There's either something wrong with their brain - it's not assigning behaviours to the usual 'natural kind' (ie not working properly), or there's something wrong with their understanding of the language - they're describing what they get a kick out of doing and that's not the group of things we call 'moral', we call that group something else).

All of which is an interesting aside... The most important thing here, I think, is

The language of "objective morality" is usually deployed as a kind of rhetorical cudgel, in lieu of banging the table. But thinking of this dispassionately, if I approve of something as morally right, and then someone assures me that it is not just my opinion, but the thing is objectively right, that wouldn't make it any more right in my eyes than it already is. And if someone tells me instead that it is objectively wrong - well, I would just disagree with whoever holds that opinion. — SophistiCat

This is what riles me about moral objectivism too. It takes an incredibly complex process involving an almost impossible to disentangle web of emotion, socialisation, indoctrination, theory of mind, tribalism and self-identity and claims that some simple process can deliver the 'correct' answer better than the ones we already use. It's like throwing away most of the world fastest and most complex supercomputer (the human brain) and saying "we don't need all that, we can do this just with one small section at the front that deals with predicate logic". Why would anyone want to do that?... Rhetorical gain to help push an agenda.

There is a distinction between the statement "there is a fire in the next room" and the assertion "there is a fire in the next room. — Banno

Maybe, but only in terms of what I intend each to do in the world, not in terms of the objects of reference in each case, the means by which I select the words 'fire' and 'room' out all the words I know.

This is very strange. It's oddly parallel to Stove's Gem: we only have access to our inferences about the world, and hence we do not have access to the world... — Banno

a) at no point did I say we don't have access to the world, merely that we don't access it when making propositions. I was quite clear about that. We access the world through our senses. We do not form propositions using the the signals coming from our senses.

b) that some philosopher opposed it is not itself an argument, even if he's Australian.

Unless, apparently, one is Isaac, whereupon, displaced by philosophical contemplation, one only infers or perceives that one eats oysters. — Banno

It's not philosophical contemplation. The idea comes from computational neuroscience. Not that I want to get into some 'he said, she said' mundanity, but it is philosophical contemplations that would simplify things for human convenience. It is actual investigations of how the brain works which raise the need for a more complex theory.

Yes, well, I drive a car by sitting like so, and moving my arms and legs thus. But moving my arms and legs thus is not driving a car. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but if I hit a wall and then remove the wall, I'm still hitting. What you've shown is that some activities are described including multiple components, whilst others are not. What matters here is which our speech acts are, and fortunately we now have things like magnetic imaging to help us work this out. As fdrake said...

a naive realist (among which I count myself) and representational realist (in the sense that we interact with the world only using representational processes) agree on the causal chain of eating oysters. — fdrake

We're not here arguing about the nature of a causal chain from actual world to speech acts,. Despite banno's protestations, none of us are idealists, we all agree that the external world exists and affects us via our senses. At issue is only where along that chain it is sensible to say the object of the utterance at the end of it is.

The process goes

state of reality>sensory responses>belief that it's raining>belief that I'd be best off telling someone>speech act "it's raining"

That much is pretty much indisputable.

Correspondence theory would have the truth of the final stage measured by the first, but since no one can contemplate, feel or talk about the first without it having passed through at least stages 2 and 3 it seems an unnecessary conceit to pretend it's stage 1 we're talking about. Especially as we cannot, no matter how hard we try, disentangle those stages from our embeddedness in the world (both social and physical).

We could, as I think some do, have 'truth' as being the better approximation to stage 1, which seems viable, but my concern with that is that it is reliant on yet other beliefs about the errors some faulty belief has generated. Simpler to just be honest about the actual real-world use if term 'true', which, to paraphrase Ramsey, it just that belief which would, if acted upon, bring about the expected result.

It's best, I think, to see speech as an act, that it does something. In this sense, the truth of a statement is not so relevant as it's felicity? - (@fdrake, is that the term I'm looking for?).

This resolves the paradox because in the majority of circumstances "it's raining, but I don't believe it is" is simply infelicitous.

I'm just not following this. Do we make inferences and form beliefs about the world and its state, even though we don't have access to it? — Srap Tasmaner

Inferences are formed from our perceptions (formed from our senses). Utterances are not the direct result of our senses (except in very rare cases). So they must arise from our inferences. During the construction of sentences (that being the key caveat) we are not accessing the world. We are accessing our inferences about it.

Supposing that you can get aboutness here, how do you pick which cause in your chain is the one the utterance was about? — Srap Tasmaner

Well, on pain of being unable ourselves to say what our own utterances are about, it had better be something we have access to during the construction of those utterances, and that isn't the state of the world, only our inferences of it.

Either way, it would seem odd if we ourselves were not responsible for picking out what our own utterances were 'about'. And again, if we're to do that, from what selection do we have to choose? Not states of the world. Those are not in our minds, and we wish to be able to say for ourselves what our sentences are about. All we have then to select from are the inferences about those states, our beliefs.

Couldn't we also say the tutor's job is to ensure that Williams gives the correct answer when asked a direct question? I can just hear Wittgenstein describing this scenario as "training". — Srap Tasmaner

Indeed. I could get a dog to bark 'sausages' everytime he's asked 'what's for dinner' but that wouldn't make the dog's utterances any more about my dinner. We'd like to be able to deny that the dog's talking about my dinner, but on what grounds? I'd say on the grounds that he's not thinking of my dinner when answering, but if we're to somehow bypass mental states as gateways to the objects of sentences, then I'm not sure what defence is left us. Apparently, my dog must indeed be talking about my dinner!

The "aboutness" of a sentence is not always a simple matter. What one can and can't say is almost never a simple matter. Why then should we expect to reach simple conclusions about what one can and can't say about what? — Srap Tasmaner

At the risk of inducing apoplexy in banno et al, one element I do consider fairly simple about sentences is that their cause is either autonomic, or arising from models in our brain constituting our beliefs. The rain cannot cause me directly to form the words "it's raining". Barring some form of conditioning, whatever the weather is doing, it's effects must first travel through those parts of my brain responsible for forming beliefs prior to prompting me to utter the words. Given that, it's difficult, despite the complexity, to see how any proposition could be about anything other than some belief of mine. That is unless, as I suspect banno might like us to believe, those cortices have no effect whatsoever and simply pass the unadulterated effects from the world to our speech. Given the enormous effort we go to to make and maintain them, this seems unlikely.

That's just a restatement of your position, not an answer to my critique.

If 'you' is a sort of personhood waiting in limbo for a body to become available then your argument is wrong. Your position relies entirely on us not conceiving of 'you' in this way, but you've given no reason at all why we shouldn't, only that you personally don't.

When I convince you that hitting old ladies is morally good, that's still wrong, but not in the same way. The entire system has just shifted a little to it being right. (Of course, it's very, very hard to convince people to begin with, and because of that it's unlikely to ever gain "critical mass", even in a subculure.) It's very likely always going to be wrong. But the dynamics involved make change possible in principle. — Dawnstorm

Yes. That's it. Just like the word 'bully' (which used to mean something more like 'lover'). It would have been wrong to use it to mean 'someone who beats up weaker people' back then, but it's right to now. Things have to reach, as you say, a critical mass. That's where I think basic biological functions come in. There's certain positions which are unlikely to reach the required critical mass. At least not for any length of time. Although, looking at the world today l'm becoming more doubtful.

The key thing is we're talking about convincing people to do X, and to call it 'moral' despite that being wrong. Just like the first person to sincerely use 'bully' to mean more like our current negative connotation was actually using the word wrongly. They didn't just have a difference of opinion about what it meant, they knew exactly what it meant and were deliberately using it wrongly for some effect. Over time they'd have a small language group in which their idiosyncratic meaning would be 'right', though still 'wrong' elsewhere. Eventually the whole community of language users adopts the new meaning.

This may happen with hitting old ladies, but it hasn't yet, and so our violent geriophobe is 'wrong' to interpret his urges as 'moral'.

I don't necessarily think that argument is inconsistent, it just doesn't say anything compelling. You're contriving thus entity 'you' as something that comes into being at the moment of conception, then you're saying that this thing could not have been any other because it did not exist (even in some proto-identifiable state) prior to that moment.

That's all very internally consistent, but you,ve not tied this entity 'you' to anything which we already agree exists, so there's no compulsion to see what you see.

Once you are conceived, you could not have been conceived as something else — schopenhauer1

This doesn't even make sense. If you can't define 'you' by a consistent collection of matter, nor by a consistent collection of ideas, then how can you go on to make any assertions at all about what is and is not possible of this entity? You've just failed in any attempt to define what the entity is and yet you're proceeding to tells us what physical or logical parameters it must constrain itself to.

his predilection for psychology — Banno

It's no mere predilection, the pay's better.

It's not the truth of a statement that is a judgement; the judgement is whether one accepts the statement. Issac doesn't accept this, and hence finds himself in all sorts of bother. — Banno

The sum total of which thus far seems to consist only of the scorn of internet philosophers. If there's some other bother you suspect I might actually be forewarned of...

The root source seems to be

The strange thing is that philosophers should have been able to hold sincerely, as part of their philosophical creed, propositions inconsistent with what they themselves knew to be true; and yet, so far as I can make out, this has really frequency happened

from A Defence of Common Sense — Banno

I thought it was Wittgenstein's letters. His letter to Moore gives a better account I think.

I should like to tell you how glad I am that you read us a paper yesterday. It seems to the that the most important point was the absurdity of the assertion "There is a fire in this room and I don't believe there is".

His criticism is equally pertinent here.

If I ask someone "Is there a fire in the next room?", and he answers " I believe there is", I can't say "Don't be irrelevant, I asked you about the fire, not about your state of mind!"

The absurdity of suggesting that "there's a fire in the next room" is about one thing and "I believe there's a fire in the next room" is about another.

(The reference in PI seems to just assume we know the paradox already.)

So is your question about if ownership and responsibility would divided too in a stock company? — ssu

It's not a question, I'm rebutting your suggestion that it's ludicrous for a non-human to own anything (particularly in relation to the fact that companies own things). I'm no economist, so I'll quote Wikipedia.

In law, a legal person is any person or 'thing' (less ambiguously, any legal entity) that can do the things an everyday person can usually do in law – such as enter into contracts, sue and be sued, own property, and so on

It's pretty clear that any legal entity can own property, it could be a company, a cat or a sofa (though not according to current law). The point is, there's no 'natural law' on the matter.

The reason this was brought up (if I recall) was to counter Friedman's idea the the shareholders 'owned' the company and so the CEO would be just 'doing their job' maximising profits.

Ownership and responsibility are already divided in a stock company. The company as a legal entity owns its assets, either the shareholders or no-one owns the company (depending on which legal scholars you agree with, the matter is in dispute), and the various tiers of management are responsible for various aspects of the company.

The point is that absolutely nowhere in either the legal constitution, the articles of association, or the management structure is is decreed that the CEOs sole responsibility must be to the shareholders. It is therefore not true, even if we take Friedman's assumption that they mostly want more money, that providing them with that money is, or should be, the sole aim of the company.

all these legal persons are basically contracts made by actual physical people, for some reason or another. Associations, trusts, companies, corporations are all basically vessels for people to organize various kinds of activities. — ssu

OK.

Yet if we assume that there isn't any physical person behind a legal person like a corporation, trust or association, then we have a problem. — ssu

And who's assuming that?

If you assume a sofa can be the owner of a corporation, then there is no link of the responsibility to any human being. — ssu

Why not? Ownership of, and responsibilty for, a thing are two different legal states. In a trust, the benefactor owns it, the trustees are responsible for it.

You do understand the difference between an association and a stock company. — ssu

I hope so, but rather than patronise me by playing the exasperated teacher perhaps you could just explain what error you think I've made and what difference it makes to the issue at hand.

Okay, after around 1 1/2 hours of trying to puzzle out this paragraph — Dawnstorm

Well. Most people have given up on my paragraphs in the time it takes them to read the words (if not before), so I'm charmed by your persistence...

Is you take on this issue derived from or at least compatible with Skinner's Behaviourism? How public events teach us to tease apart a holistic private experience into lingistic concepts. — Dawnstorm

In the sense of your last sentence, yes. I don't agree with Skinner's behaviourism in general, but the idea here is that all rationalisation of our mental states and activities is mediated through socially defined parameters. There was an excellent thread a while back on Lisa Feldman Barrett's way of looking at emotions as socially mediated categories for raw affects. My view is more closely aligned with hers.

I just don't think it's possible to privately interpret one's mental states to an extent where one can form propositions about them without recourse to social modes of interpretation. So for me to say that my hitting old ladies is moral would require that I am first fluent in the social activity of interpreting some behaviours as 'moral' ones. This is an activity like any other, they do not arrive pre-labelled. The act of labelling (and this goes for any of our thoughts) is a piece of socially learnt behaviour. If I know how to ride a bike, I cannot claim falling off is doing so, even if it's what I intended to do. Labelling the sort of desire which motivates people to hit old ladies a 'moral' one is just doing the labelling wrong. No different to moving the bishop perpendicularly. Nothing stopping you, but it's just not chess anymore if you do.

The way I use "moral" it's more akin to "colour" than to "blue". "moral" =/= "morally good". — Dawnstorm

I've sometimes used 'moral' as shorthand for 'morally good' so hopefully this shouldn't get in the way too much.

That's fine. I shouldn't have got back involved. There are some issues it's interesting to play around with, see what people think, there's others where it's just the same rehearsed script over again. I've had this conversation here a dozen times and it always ends the same way, it's like a zombie, you think you've killed it then up it comes a week later completely unaffected by the previous encounter. I'll leave you to it.

Cat's don't own anything in any country! — ssu

You didn't ask me where it happened, you asked me where it was possible.

Finally you get my point. — ssu

The association owns the car. People have the responsibility for it. — Isaac

Correct — ssu

That's my point, not yours. That a legal fiction (an association) can own something. You were disputing that.

In what country is you think that possible? — ssu

Any country.

An association may own a car, but the responsibility lies on the administration and if the members of the association decide to terminate the association, they decide what do with the car. — ssu

Firstly, they don't just get to freely decide what to do with the car. They can't, for example, just keep it for personal use, that's embezzlement. Secondly, what you've described (with the above caveat), is a trust. Exactly as I described it. The association owns the car. People have the responsibility for it.