For something to be morally valuable is for it to be being valued — Bartricks

That is the premise I think I would disagree with, for the same (or at least an analogous) reason that I disagree with Berkeley's principle that "to be is to be perceived". Yet like Berkeley I am also a radical empiricist: I don't think there is anything to reality besides the observable properties of things. Observation is a "subjective" relationship just like valuing is, but nevertheless I still hold that there is an objective reality. That's because I think there's a difference between something being observable, and something being observed; and also a difference between observation and perception.

I take an analogous approach to morality. I would break down "valuing"-like attitudes into three types -- intentions, desires, and appetites -- that are analogous to belief, perception, and sensation (or observation), and say that just as reality consists in whatever satisfies all observations (but not necessarily all perceptions or all beliefs, and it continues to be real even if no observation is actively happening), likewise morality consists in whatever satisfies all appetites (but not necessarily all desires or all intentions, and it continues to be moral even if no appetites are actively happening). That is "subjective" in the sense that you use in the OP, but still "objective" in the sense that there is single common unbiased truth that in principle everyone could agree upon following sufficient investigation via the correct methods. Just like the scientific view of reality.

I recently wrote about this view in more detail in my essay On Teleology, Purpose, and the Objects of Morality, which you will find refers back to my earlier essays Against Nihilism and Against Transcendentalism for most of its support.

Drag the mouse to highlight a section of text, and a black box will appear with the word "Quote". — Gnomon

Thanks so much, works like a charm!

I understand that that there's a tense argument that's been going on here for a while but please don't act like I'm attacking you by talking about charity. I'm talking about the principle of charity in rhetoric; I'm saying I'm interpreting you in the way that makes the most sense of what you're saying, but pointing out for clarity the ways that you could be interpreted differently. Natural language is ambiguous like that. That's why formal logic was invented, to help clear up those ambiguities.

Anyway, sidestepping all that stuff about necessity, the form of the argument you gave before soundly proves that "moral values are not the values of me". But you have a separate premise, "moral values are the values of a subject", and that's necessary for the rest of the argument to prove that moral values are the values of a subject other than me. That's where I would disagree, and what I intend to write more about when I get the chance.

If we are a bit charitable about how those "necessarily"s are meant to apply, that looks valid to me.

(That is, if we take it as meaning "It is necessarily the case that if being loved by Superman is one and the same as being loved by me, then if I love you then Superman loves you" and "It is not necessarily the case that If I love you then Superman loves you". A more literal but less charitable interpretation would have those talking about the necessity or lack thereof of Superman loving you, rather than the necessity of the if-then statement as a whole. Compare for example: "if x lives in California then x necessarily lives in California" literally means that anyone who happens in fact to live in California could not possibly have lived or come to live anywhere else, because them living in California is a necessary, immutable truth, somehow. But a more charitable interpretation of that would be the obvious statement "It is necessarily the case that anyone who lives in California lives in California", which has the trivial tautology as the thing that is necessary and immutable, not anything in particular about people in California. This might have been the point others were trying to make by talking about modal logic).

Substituting the stuff about moral valuation in there is still valid too.

But that only disproves individualist moral subjectivism (and I agree that that's false). It doesn't necessarily prove what you're trying to prove with it.

Still meaning to write more on that later but have to go for now...

I agree vehemently with the idea that free will is more related to moral issues than to metaphysical ones, but it sounds like you're also making a metaphysical issue of morality here. Correct me if I'm wrong but it sounds like you're suggesting something like that there is a nonphysical realm of moral facts, and that that moral realm is causally effective on human thought and behavior, so that human thought and behavior is not determined solely by the physical realm of ordinary natural facts.

If that's the case, then it seems that it doesn't really solve indeterminists' usual concerns about determinism undermining freedom, because everything is still completely determined, it's just determined by a combination of physical and nonphysical things. It also introduces this big thorny issue of what has been called "queerness" of moral facts, if you take a moral fact to consist in an accurate description of some kind weird nonphysical thing.

Instead, my take on free will is that determinism is entirely irrelevant; rather, being determined in the right way is what matters, and indeterminism gives you nothing of value, at best undermining the valuable kind of determination that constitutes free will. A will, on my account, is a judgement about what is the best course of action, an intention that you do something, and a will is free when it is causally effective on you actually doing that action; in contrast to when something else causes you to do something despite the fact that you judge that not to be the best thing for you to do. That process of making judgements is essentially the capacity for moral reason, which I don't hold to be any kind of perception of nonphysical moral stuff, but that's a whole big metaethical can of worms to get into there. So freedom of will is essentially the power of moral reasoning to direct your behavior, over the influence of anything else that might influence your behavior. And that power of moral reasoning can be a completely deterministic physical mechanism, just like the ordinary kind of non-moral reasoning.

This view is similar to those of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf, if you want to read more on them.

and everyone (but in response to this particular post; I'm still not clear how to quote-reply), If I may make a quick observation before bed: Bartricks' argument seems structurally very similar to how Berkeley's subjective idealism seemingly demands the existence of God to sustain a common reality in the face of his radical empiricism.

I am of the opinion that such radical empiricism can be sustained without resorting to God to maintain a common reality, resulting in an empirical realism or physicalist phenomenalism. I am also of the opinion that a radical hedonism (all good lies in the satisfaction of "desires", though I'd quibble about that terminology some) can be sustained without resorting to God to maintain a common morality.

And that "objectivity", contrary to the OP definitions, more typically means such commonality, an un-biased-ness, and "subjectivity" likewise means the opposite of that, bias; and that such radical empiricism and hedonism, if somehow or another held together with some common, shared, mutual sense of reality and morality (respectively), do not make the resultant views of reality and morality non-objective, in that more typical sense, despite the "subjectivity" (in the OP sense) of the radical empiricism and hedonism they contain.

Will try to elaborate more tomorrow, sleep now.

I'm not sure that that's really a problem. Compare for example commercial value. Something is commercially valuable, in an intransitive way, if there are people out there willing to pay a lot for it. It is also transitively valuable specifically to them, but it being transitively valuable to someone or another makes it in an intransitively sense valuable in general. I can see someone making the same case for morality working that way; actually, though I don't yet know how much I agree with Bartricks, off the top of my head it sounds like a lot of ethical positions I generally agree with could be characterized that way (e.g. something is morally good in an objective sense to the extent that it satisfies some people's appetites and doesn't dissatisfy others).

That is a good point, but if I may be charitable to Bartricks again, I think perhaps what they're aiming for is something along the lines of "if and only if anyone values something, it is morally valuable", and therefore that if he values something, and he is someone, then someone values it, and it is therefore morally valuable. The antecedent "moral values are my values" would have to be changed to "moral values are someone's (such as my) values", and then it would follow necessarily that "if I (or anyone) value something, it is morally valuable".

Haven't read this whole thread yet, not sure if I want to defend Batricks on the whole, just nit picking logic stuff for now.

Not to detract from your generally good post, but to add one small point: I think it's important to quantify the terms in the arguments there. When you say that the statement "If men are mortals, then if Socrates is a mortal, necessarily he is a man" is invalid in it's internal structure, that suggests you are imagining the quantification as "all men are mortals", but I take Bartricks' antecedent of "moral values are my values" to mean "all and only moral values are my values", a bi-implication, in which case the consequent "if I value something, necessarily it is morally valuable" would be a valid inference from that antecedent (although I think it would be better constructed with the necessity attached to the implication itself, rather than just the consequent: "necessarily, if all and only A are B, then if B(x) then A(x)").

If I may interrupt this argument to extend the principle of charity to the OP, I think they are aiming to espouse essentially the core of philosophies like Stoicism or Buddhism: that the proper goal in life, the way to eudaimonia, the good life, is to attain peace by freeing oneself from desires about things beyond one's control, to attend to and accept things here and now rather than worrying needlessly over distant (in space, time, or metaphorically otherwise) matters over which one has no control.

But back on the topic of this argument,
are you familiar with the principle of charity? It seems to me like you could stand to extend it a bit more to uncanni, whom I read as saying that she is employed to professionally teach a university course (on some subject matter unspecified, though I would guess philosophy from context), and in that course she has to make rules against which her students will be graded; but that, in a more casual sense of "teaching", an important principle she tries to convey to her students is the importance of questioning authority, which NB is not equivalent to disobeying authority. She is not, I'm pretty sure, saying that she grades her students on how well they follow her (hypothetical) instructions to not follow her instructions.

I feel like I might be missing some background context between you and uncanni or something, but I think "I" statements are an essential part of not coming across as unduly authoritative. When someone says just "X is the case", that comes off a lot more authoritative-sounding to me than "I think that X" would.

Free will theodicies depend entirely upon an incompatibilist conception of free will. On a compatibilist conception of free will, it's entirely possible that God (if he existed) could have created beings that would always freely choose to do good, so the existence of free will could be no excuse for the evils that are in the world. (To say nothing of the "natural evils" that are not the consequence of any human's decisions).

On my personal compatibilist conception of free will (which is very similar to those of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf), free will is actually equivalent to the efficacy of moral judgement on behavior -- your will is free when you judging something to be the best course of action causes you to do that action, in contrast to when something else causes you to do something that you don't think you should do despite you thinking that -- so God making people more moral would actually be making them more free, not less.

Thanks for clarifying. I wasn't accusing you of chiding me or anything, just taking the opportunity to ask about a norm I had been wondering about anyway. Glad to see you agree, as does...



I would use the terms a little differently than you do. To my mind "thing" and "object" are synonyms, and objects are a major part of metaphysics (in either the sense I'm advocating or the conventional one), namely ontology, about being, where a being is likewise synonymous with a thing or an object. I would instead characterize the physical sciences (those reducible to physics) as being about contingent, a posteriori descriptions of reality, while metaphysics as I would like to construe it is about the necessary, a priori philosophical framework needed to go about doing such description: the semantics of what it means to make a descriptive assertion, the criteria by which we judge such assertions correct or incorrect, the nature of the minds doing that judgement, the methods by which such judgement is rightly conducted, and the social organization of the proceeds of such judgements.

In my Codex Quaerendae (I guess we're allowed to link our personal projects here?) I like to think of the last four as being about the "objects of reality" (or ontology, covering most of the traditional metaphysical topics like substances and attributes, causes and effects, space and time, etc), the "subjects of reality" (or philosophy of mind), the "methods of knowledge" (or epistemology), and the "institutes of knowledge" (or philosophy of academics); or less verbosely as about being, mind, belief, and education.

(And in parallel, I would characterize the ethical sciences I advocate for as being about contingent, a posteriori prescriptions of morality, while metaethics as I would like to construe it is about the necessary, a priori philosophical framework needed to go about doing such prescription: the semantics of what it means to make a prescriptive assertion, the criteria by which we judge such assertions correct or incorrect, the nature of the wills doing that judgement, the methods by which such judgement is rightly conducted, and the social organization of the proceeds of such judgements. I like to think of the last four as being about the "objects of morality" (or teleology in the sense synonymous with consequentialism), the "subjects of morality" (or philosophy of will), the "methods of justice" (or deontology), and the "institutes of justice" (or political philosophy); or less verbosely as about purpose, will, intention, and governance.)

A technical question aside here: how does one quote a previous post in this forum software?

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm new here (that was my first post besides in the introduction thread) so I'm a little unclear on what the norms here are. Am I expected to have read through the entirety of a thread before commenting? I've been kind of intimidated trying to find a thread to start commenting on since most of them seem to be pages and pages long already.

It's not really the standard usage of the term, so I wouldn't offer it as a descriptive definition, but I've been thinking recently that it could be usefully repurposed in a way that tracks loosely with it's history to use "metaphysics" to mean the parts of philosophy that underlie the physical sciences; so philosophy concerned with reality and knowledge, as the meaning of descriptive sentences, ontology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of education, etc. And in parallel, we could use "metaethics" to mean the parts of philosophy underlying a parallel stack of ethical sciences that I advocate for, so "metaethics" in this sense meaning philosophy concerned with morality and justice, as in not only the meaning of prescriptive sentences, but also purpose, will, duty, governance, etc (and those "ethical sciences" stacking from something like applied ethics through a variety of economics and political science topics).

Mostly I'm tempted to use it for that because there seems to be no other umbrella word for the rest of philosophy that's not related to morality and justice. Back in school they had a "core philosophy" subtrack of the major and something like a "morality and justice" subtrack (I forget the exact name), and even then it bugged me that there was no better name for the not-moral stuff as a whole.

Hi everyone. My name's Forrest and I'm looking for a place to discuss philosophical topics since my usual source for such discussion, the xkcd forums, have recently died. Also I'm getting close to finishing a diminished form of a philosophy project I've been working on since I finished my BA in philosophy just over a decade ago, and I'd like a place to get some input on it when it's done. (The work-in-progress is being posted online continually but I figure I probably shouldn't include a link in my first post).

ETA: Looking at some other introductions here I should probably say more about my philosophical views and interests.

My interests are broad and varied, ranging from language, the arts, logic and mathematics, through "core" philosophical topics like ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, education, on to ethics, free will, political philosophy, and more Continental "meaning of life" stuff like existentialism.

My views I would broadly characterize as "objective criticism", meaning anti-fideism + anti-nihilism. More specific views include universal prescriptivism, mathematicism, empirical realism / physicalism / phenomenalism / neutral monism, a weird mix of both presentism and eternalism, modal realism, functionalism, panpsychism, critical rationalism / falsificationism, freethought, hedonistic altruism, compatibilism, deontology, libertarian socialism, philosophical anarchism, pragmatism, and something akin to absurdism.