Examples like both parents usually have to work are not arguments against the nuclear family in my view. — ssu

The fragility and insufficiency of the nuclear family as a child raising strategy in the modern world aren't arguments against it because...

Usually the argument is made for the nuclear family because we have seen the problems that rise from widespread single parenting (usually by the mother). — ssu

Single parenting is bad. And:

I still view that having a family as a social net where people take care of each other is a good thing. — ssu

The nuclear family is a better child raising strategy than leaving a baby alone in the woods.

That's not a very good argument. Here's why: the alternatives to the nuclear family as the predominant child raising strategy aren't just single parenthood and leaving a baby alone in the woods (having no social net); it's having multiple parent figures who collectively raise kids and thus have a larger social safety net. You agree that having a reliable and large social safety net is a massive benefit for a kid, why stop at the nuclear family?

Nuclear families don't even stop at the nuclear family; they depend on nurseries and elderly relatives. Parents know intimately that two parents aren't enough to raise a kid; the kids don't get socialized in that structure, the parents need time off from being nuclear parents to recover, the parents can't even commit to raising the child together because they need to work. So; nurseries. Two authority figures that must remain in some kind of love aren't enough, they get bored and tired, and offload the kid to their friends and family, the state and businesses. The nuclear family requires being embedded in a larger social network to function well; IE, other people and institutions must pick up its slack.

It isn't the social safety net we're both agreeing is good; the nuclear family requires a large one to limp along like it does already.

This is only assuming that all of the relevant data is being sampled. — SophistiCat

Yees. I am assuming the things accurately described as random are random. Do any of the interpretations you referenced remove the distribution from the theory?

On the other hand, if you were sampling digits of pi, for example, then unless you already knew what you were sampling, you would never see that it is non-random from your sample, even if you were getting every digit with perfect accuracy. And if you knew what you were sampling, then the question would not arise. — SophistiCat

I don't quite understand the relevance of this. Can you elaborate? Are you saying that the real world might have a hidden number that removes all the randomness associated with quantum variables?

Yes. @MadWorld1 wants to vote Trump because he will allegedly protect the nuclear family. You never see arguments against the nuclear family, so I thought I'd provide one. If it turns into a thing, I'll split the thread.

How did you grow up, fdrake? You're a mod so you're open to more scrutiny of course. Did you enjoy it? Eitherhow, others who did, usually do. — Outlander

Not in a traditional nuclear family!

People who really defend it have a load of crossed wires in their heads, in my experience anyway. It's all mixed up with feelings of home and security, with parents it's close to their belief that they're "good parents", some people think that all those gays and queeros raising children is going to destroy society because it's "attacking" the nuclear family structure - as if daddy and mummy fucking In The Missionary Position while thinking of England is what's keeping the world afloat.

I do think the nuclear family has some horrible design problems. Parents honestly want the complete and total responsibility over the flourishing of their child - really? Two people? Are they both that confident in their blindspots? They wanna make the kid dependent on a romantic relationship that the kid's presence interacts with? Predicating a child's safety on the single point of failure of their parents' romantic relationship is a fucking huge design flaw. No redundancy in it. Things being as structurally fragile as they are, the slack of the nuclear family's childcare has to be picked up by close relatives and the state.

I mean think about it, the nuclear family is so ill adapted to the current requirements of society in the political north that (1) the kids get sent away as soon as they're able to socialize, on pain of stunting their social development (IE: mummy and daddy alone are never enough) and (2) the kid's gotta be elsewhere so much to enable the parents to work, they do not even have the luxury of deciding that one partner will be the primary care giver - both have to work otherwise the situation of providing for at least three people on one income rears itself. And that's fragile, so fragile.

I think of someone who wants to make a politics of the nuclear family as being armed with a shotgun and highly agitated. I expect everything they say is rooted in emotional attachment if not blind and unexamined prejudice, a theological noncognitivism with the nuclear family as God.

:strong:

If you're at your momma's funeral and you're not crying 'cos you're committed to the Socratic ideal of self mastery... you better put down the crack pipe — Cornel West

@praxis @MadWorld1

If you're gonna flame each other about politics, please make sure you're burning something substantive.

Anyway Madworld, why do you have preserving "the nuclear family" as a political goal? What threats is it under?

I am not sure I follow the argument from Fourier series to saying that "therefore the Planck scale is ontic." — fishfry

(A1) If something is random, it is either epistemically random or aleatorically random.
(A2) The position and momentum states of quantum particles are random.
(A3) The position and momentum states of quantum particles are either epistemically random or aleatorically random. (1,2, modus ponens)
(A4) If something is epistemically random, the uncertainty associated with that randomness can be arbitrarily reduced by sufficient sampling.
(A5) The uncertainty associated with the product of position and momentum (time and frequency) cannot be arbitrarily reduced by sufficient sampling. (If you localise in time, you disperse in frequency and vice versa)
(A6) The position and momentum states of quantum particles are not epistemically random (4,5, modus tollens).
(A7) The position and momentum states of quantum particles are aleatorically random. (1, 6, disjunctive syllogism).

Aleatoric randomness is randomness that plays a causal role in a model - it is part of the modelled dynamics, epistemic randomness is randomness that does not. I don't think this gives an interpretation of how randomness works causally here, just establishes that it is a property of the entity modelled (the wavefunction's position and momentum observables). Whether it's appropriate to say that quantum shit really does behave like this because the model says so I think is a different question (realism vs anti-realism of scientific theories).

You never think that the river will flood past the mark, even if had flooded past many other marks. That is how we think, sadly — Alejandro

It's a rather ironic example. Considering that peak rainfall and flood risk is higher than ever, and flood defense updates are needed.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

I think it's actually pretty recent that "building your house upon the sand" is seen as a necessary part of politics and human nature. It probably comes from short term forecasts of expectation being much easier than long term forecasts of exposure. Pompeii was great for farmers until the volcano erupted.

Fortunately for us, as a species we're now aware of a few volcanos we've built on - climate change is going to make the planet uninhabitable if it continues like this, resource limits on necessary goods for our economy like oil derivatives, massive vulnerability to short term supply + demand shocks (hello Covid), industrial agriculture ruining soil, constant overproduction and waste...

But such knowledge probably won't show up in quant models! They're for making good of fertile ground. Lava is an externality. The ground is fertile, forget about the future.

you have nothing to worry about. — Alejandro

But against those who warned, most were convinced that banks knew what they were doing. They believed that the financial wizards had found new and clever ways of managing risks. Indeed, some claimed to have so dispersed them through an array of novel financial instruments that they had virtually removed them. It is difficult to recall a greater example of wishful thinking combined with hubris. There was a firm belief, too, that financial markets had changed. And politicians of all types were charmed by the market. These views were abetted by financial and economic models that were good at predicting the short-term and small risks, but few were equipped to say what would happen when things went wrong as they have. People trusted the banks whose boards and senior executives were packed with globally recruited talent and their non-executive directors included those with proven track records in public life. Nobody wanted to believe that their judgement could be faulty or that they were unable competently to scrutinise the risks in the organisations that they managed. A generation of bankers and financiers deceived themselves and those who thought that they were the pace-making engineers of advanced economies...

So in summary, Your Majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole.

What the British Academy Review answered to the UK's Queen Majesty when she asked them "How did no one know the financial crisis would happen?".

This is why hytte are big business. Unfortunately solace as a consumption choice is part of the grand madness.

I wish I had suggestions for what to do to be less of a lonely atom, but that's something I'm struggling with too.

My argument is that there is a grounding to all these varieties; they all are attempts to solve the same problem. — Thomas Quine

That makes flourishing of a different character than any specific moral value or system then, no? It plays the role of condition for the possibility of morality, a teleological structure operative within it, and a source of imperatives that does not constrain their character.

Thou shalt flourish - in what way? No no you misunderstand, any way is conceived of in terms of flourishing. What does that tell us about what to do or how to be? It doesn't tell us what to do or how to be, it simply is the purpose that any moral guidance or character growth will act in accord with.

The time of plague is also the plague of time.

Proximally and for the most part Dasein's comportment falls into the world and its bodying forth is being toward death. Covid announces itself as a deficient mode of being toward death, but proximally as a infectious disease, or $\lambda \omicron \iota \mu \omicron \sigma$. We must return to the originary interpretation of this word as $\lambda \omicron \iota \mu-\omicron \sigma$, which we must understand as a predication of $\lambda \omicron \iota \mu$ to an existent. Only Dasein exists, and the predication of the disease as if the disease affected only a Cartesian body is what is uncovered in this translation. In the world-picture uncovered by enframing, $\lambda \omicron \iota \mu$ manifests proximally and for the most part in its discursive character which conceals that $\lambda \omicron \iota \mu$ is an existentiell condition of the curtailment of temporal ekstasis by its instrumental signification. The being of disease is the disease of being, only a God can save us.

Do you accept this definition, that to be equal is to be the same? Are you and I the same, just because we're equal? Oh yeah, I remember now, you have no respect for the law of identity either, and you equivocate with "the same" in your interpretation of Wittgenstein's so-called private language argument. You think that if two distinct instances of sensation are similar, they can be said to be "the same" in the way that a chair remains the same chair if no one switches it out when you're not looking. — Metaphysician Undercover

If we take jorndoe's suggestion, and say that numerals represent abstract quantities, we see very clearly that "4" represents one abstract quantity, and "2+2" represents two distinct abstract quantities with a mathematical operation of addition represented. If we replace "abstract quantity" with "object", there is no rule which dictates that "2+2" could represent one object. So this culture, which assumes that "2+2" represents an object, which is the same object that is represented by "4", just because two plus two is equal to four, is a culture of sophistry and deception. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why do you approve of market intervention when pappa Trump does it?

"let us do what nature does anyway, but more so" — SophistiCat

Let us remember that, despite the tasteless fables in the Holy Writ -- Sodom and Gomorrah, for example -- Nature does not have two voices; She does not create the appetite for buggery, then proscribe its practice. This fallacious proscription is the work of those imbeciles who seem unable to view sex as anything but an instrumentality for the multiplication of their own imbecilic kind. But I put it to you thusly: would it not be unreasonable for Nature, if she opposed buggery, to reward its practitioners with consummate pleasure at the very moment when they, by buggering, heap insults upon Her "natural" order? Furthermore, if procreation were the primary purpose of sex, would woman be created capable of conceiving during only sixteen to eighteen hours of each month -- and thus, all arithmetic being performed, during only four to six years of her total life span? No, child, let us not ascribe to Nature those prohibitions which we acquire through fear or prejudice; all things which are possible are natural; let no one ever persuade you otherwise. — Marquis de Sade

You will probably get more mileage out of arguing against or undermining the is-ought distinction explicitly, rather than trying to convince someone who strongly believes it that they secretly are in agreement with you.

There was a thread a while ago talking about Anscombe's essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" (linked in the thread) that takes one avenue of attacking is-ought. The rough picture of the argument (as I remember it):

There are two threads in it - a destructive/critical one relating to the is-ought problem, and a speculative/constructive one relating to the permeable boundaries between social facts, speech acts, norms and good conduct.

Thread 1:

(A1) Applying the is ought problem requires a framework of ethical reasoning in which "oughts" are applied to statements like divine commands or laws.
(A2) Our secular and skeptical age untethers the oughts of Gods and the oughts of laws from what we ought to do; there can be immoral laws and immoral alleged divine commands.
(A3) Because the influence of those two sources of moral authority has waned, it is not surprising that a problem that presupposes one or the other authority for its resolution finds anything it is applied to lacking.

Thread 2:
An analysis of speech acts like promising and buying stuff at a shop, if you wish to buy bread, you ought to pay for it. That sense of "ought" is entailed by institutional structure and felt intimately. Anscombe suggests that analysing the facts that institutional norms bring and our surrounding "moral psychology" will reinvigorate ethics away from the above pseudoproblem.

It's a starting point to getting around the is ought problem in a way amenable to virtue ethics anyway - focussing on "good conduct" in a socially contextualised manner, rather than trying to elevate "One ought not to kill" to the level of a divine command for its adequacy.

Thanks for all your explanation in this thread, really appreciate it.

I'd turn this around and say: isn't it simpler to postulate individual morality from common natural history and more or less arbitrary social history than worry about why and whether there are objective values for contexts that are possible but never realised? Especially given that that natural and social history is already extremely contextualised, removing the need to postulate an effective infinity of contingency-chaining variants of the same moral questions. That's the headscratcher of moral objectivity for me. — Kenosha Kid

I don't know, it might be both our confirmation biases talking. I look at the kind of evidence you posted in your OP; survivability strategies being selected on, the human body constraining the space of moral values we can have, and draw the opposite conclusion. The contingent facts of our nature constrain the generation of moral values. If we happen to share a social context, we will evaluate similarly or at least negotiably or be able to conflict over it. If that context is stable; informed by the needs and functions of human bodies relative to a shared social condition; we don't get to arbitrarily vary the context to produce a defeater. I think where you see arbitrarity, I see contingent and contextualised moral truths.

I think if I grant the "varying the context" procedure you're doing, it all gets arbitrary. I just think that we can't vary the context arbitrarily here and now. With your abortion example, we both live in the same possible world ontologically and there is political conflict between anti-abortion and pro-choice. What I believe is inappropriate is treating each of these as separate contexts of moral evaluation since there is contact between them - political conflict and "conversions" one way or the other even.

That comes down to how we're allowed to connect contexts of evaluation to eachother as a network of possible worlds; your procedure is close to logical possibility, I think mine is closer to causal contact with the addage that the moral furniture of the world comes along with its societal norms and non-moral facts (we can have disputes over food because we need food). Logical possibility lets you vary the content of the possible worlds way more than seems appropriate to me.

That plus the negotiation between cognition and affect and norm places a constraint, I think, on the kinds of connectivity we can posit between these moral evaluative contexts. Negotiation? Social structure change? Law? These can be varied arbitrarily in your framework, but we happen to share them. Commensurability vs incommensurability of conceptual schemes may be a relevant contrast, if you're aware of the debate. I'm siding with commensurability (political conflict and conversions between moral evaluative systems), I think you have to side with incommensurability to furnish the individuation of moral evaluative contexts in the production of these defeaters.

An emotional stimulus resonant enough to change my position is also likely to be associated to that emotion thereafter. It's not a moral example, but I never particularly liked pigs. Then one night I had a very emotive dream about a pet pig. Now I love pigs! Point being, I never rationally concluded that pigs were great. I didn't "change my mind", except in a literal sense. I was conscious of all of the data, but reason didn't effect or affect the outcome. Most of my recent moral epiphanies seem very similar: a strong emotional reaction to some stimulus that similar stimuli resonate, with post hoc rationalisation. But yes sometimes you just gotta work it. — Kenosha Kid

Eh, as much as emotion is disruptive of moral frameworks (eg: genitals vs God, genitals always win), reason re-stitches them - propagation of an insight is something cognitively involved.

All too often, I think, philosophy involves abstraction regarding not what we actually encounter in life, which requires deliberation and action in context, and a result, which may or may not require additional deliberation and action--but mere abstraction where context is at most of nominal concern. There's abstraction in context (in interaction with others and our environment) and abstraction without context, I think. — Ciceronianus the White

With the risk of being too abstract; this sounds about right to me. The distinction between the two flavours of abstraction; philosophical and practical; looks to me like:

(1) Practical abstractions arise in all practical activity; they inform how we act in context.
(2) Philosophical abstractions arise in in a context of the exercise of reasoning about something.

I imagine that when we're reasoning about something, in that act of reasoning taking a topic to be reasoned about circumscribes its apprehended character; some things will be immediately relevant to it, some things will be irrelevant to it, so judges the reasoner. Making too much irrelevant to whatever we are reasoning about looks like a particularly fecund site of this error. Generalizing too much comes with inappropriately fixing the contours of what is inquired about. There will always be the question of what is too much generalizing, and that depends on the context.

I think that paints philosophical abstractions as more abstract than practical abstractions; insofar as philosophical abstractions are informed by practical abstractions. The pertinent question seems to me - does that work the other way around too? In answer - presumably, when it seems relevant to the thinker. Reasoning diligently seems to me to have the power to change how we behave and form those practical abstractions.

Should anyone expect philosophy to behave differently? It's an exercise in reason, if the problems of men are helped solely by practical abstractions, philosophy will not be seen as helpful most of the time - it is the wrong kind of thought. If philosophy is used in a manner that modifies the formation of those practical abstractions - it will impact the problems of men.

What is philosophy but abstraction, and what is abstraction but if not the neglect of context, the disregard of it? — Ciceronianus the White

Do you think we understand stuff on a day to day basis without abstractions? Treating something as if it is some composite of our experience and thoughts about it looks inescapable to me. If I restart a computer in the expectation that it will fix a software issue, that expectation seems rooted in an abstraction I've made about computers and software. My actions might be specified, but my beliefs which show themselves within them are often conceptual. Concepts seem a lot like abstractions to me - being generalisations from experience.

So I imagine that it's an inescapable source of error in philosophy, but simply because it's an inescapable source of error everywhere - the world won't always behave in the ways I expect it to.

A true contradiction is one which is true and false. You're not gonna get the same notion of contradiction out if you jettison the relevance of truth entirely. AFAIK paraconsistent logics don't jettison truth, they modify how it behaves in a manner that limits explosion/trivialism.

Imagine a game of chess with a rule that says that pawns can only move forward 1 square and a rule that says that pawns can only move forward 2 squares. I'd dismiss it as unplayable, not because I think that it "trivialises the truth" of the rules. — Michael

Indeed, inconsistency trivialises the rules. If you've got 1+1=3 and 1+1=2, that gives you 0=1, and the whole thing loses the meaning it had. If there is a provable contradiction (and your logic is normal), then the rules no longer matter. The idea of there being a "contradiction" requires a notion of truth to evaluate it. If you lose that, you lose the idea of inconsistency. So what if the system proves 1+1=3 and 1+1=2 at the same time?

Wittgenstein makes a couple of remarks in this area; proving a contradiction can usefully be interpreted as a formal system "jamming" with regard to what it concerns. It ceases to be a useful model of any set of axioms - and that's reflected by the collection of models a formal system has, if there's a contradiction, there are no models which satisfy it. Proving a contradiction gives you a good model of this break down of purpose (with regard to abstract systems of reasoning, rather than providing a good description like a physical model).

If we had a formal system that used the Peano axioms to define the numbers and addition but also axioms that entailed that 1 + 1 = 3 then we'd have an inconsistent formal system, and so could dismiss it on those grounds. — Michael

It having no models in the usual way requires that truth and falsity work in the usual way, I think. If you wanna dismiss a formal system for being inconsistent (a provable contradiction) - ultimately the reason you'll do that is because it trivialises truth.

It might be that "truth as provability" trivialises truth, but do we have any reason to believe that truth isn't trivial? — Michael

Ultimately? I dunno. Trivial truth makes 1+1=3. Trivial truth also makes "truth is trivial is false" true. You know, the usual stuff against trivialism.

I don't know very much at all about truth predicates in formal languages, I think you're better off consulting @Nagase.

(which is why second order arithmetic doesn't trivialise the theorem but this second system does). — Michael

It trivialises the proof of the statement, but not whether it is true. All truths are equal in terms of truth value. The only way I see to block that "there exists a system C that proves P => P is true" part of the if and only if trivialising truth (for anything which can be stated in a formal language) is to claim that a formal system can't prove its own axioms, and at that point I'm not even sure what a formal system means.

So prima facie there doesn't seem to be a problem with saying that a sentence is true iff it is provable – it's just that a second language is what proves the sentence. This would seem to fit with Tarski's claim that a metalanguage is required to make sense of an object language's truth. — Michael

I think it gets a bit dicey; if you can assume anything that doesn't trivialise proof in a system as part of the system as an axiom, and a system proves all its axioms, this trivialises truth. I think such a statement "true iff provable" has to be thought of in terms of "P is true iff there exists system C which proves P", but so long as you can conjure a C which has P as an axiom, P is true since it is by assumption provable in C. Making a statement range over all formal systems and models of them is going to do weird things to any notion of truth by design.

I don't usually write about morality, so my views on it aren't well travelled ground for me. I apologise for messiness.

This might be a good time to ask, if I haven't already: what is the difference between "x is objectively true in context A", "y is objectively true in context B" and "the truth of x and y are relative: true/false in A, false/true in B", since clearly a relationship exists between x and A and between y and B? (x, y here may be inequalities.) — Kenosha Kid

I'm gonna put on my analytic philosophy hat.

The difference is whether it's correct to say "X is better than Y" when in context C. Compare;

"X is better than Y" is true in context C.
To
"X is better than Y is true in context C"

The first thing takes statements, indexes to context, and evaluates them as true or false. Effectively asking whether "X is better than Y" evaluates to true in possible world C, where C is a possible context of evaluating a moral judgement. Corresponding to the question: "Does blah evaluate as true here?"

The second thing takes statements indexed to content with evaluations of true and false and... simply embeds it in a meta language. Corresponding to the inverse question: "Is there a world in which this evaluates as (false/true)?".

I think for you, in order for a moral claim to be objective, it has to be true in all contexts. If there is a context in which a moral claim is not true, it is not objective.

That space of all possible contexts has to be generated in some manner; what constraints are placed upon imagining a possible context of moral evaluation of a statement? It's a very flexible notion. If the sense of possibility was logical possibility (what can be imagined without a contradiction), then it's clear that there are no objective moral truths in the above sense since imagining a world where punching babies to death is morally obligatory entails no internal contradiction. That sense of logical possibility does not reflect how we reason morally, however, since when someone evaluates whether something is right or wrong, or whether they can improve on their conduct, they don't imagine an arbitrary possible world, they imagine a world sufficiently similar to this one. Sufficiently similar insofar as the world we are changing our conduct to shares a context of facts around the claim (it will concern the same actions and people, so the ontology in the possible world has to make sense) and it is also shares sufficient similarity with the current context of moral evaluation.

So it seems to me in order to describe our moral-evaluative conduct adequately, there needs to be a constraint placed upon the sense of possibility that connects contexts of evaluation and makes us revise our conduct - revision being a transition to a near possible world.

That sense of nearness brings in ideas of connection of moral-evaluative conduct; it may be that some possible worlds (moral-evaluative conduct) are unreachable from our current one; whereas they are reachable under mere logical possibility. If some aspect of human being curtails our moral-evaluative contexts to ones sufficiently similar to our current ones, there will be the question of whether these aspects block transition to evaluative contexts in which an arbitrary moral judgement is false. Conversely, it may be that our moral contexts all evaluate some claim as true. IE, sufficiently similarity of moral evaluative contexts engenders the possibility that enough is shared to allow there to be some context invariant moral truths. Effectively true by "fiat" of our human nature.

Given that the generation of moral principles is constrained by aspects of human nature, I would not like to rule this out. If we have commonalities in the generation of moral principles, we should not forget those when connecting up contexts of evaluation of moral claims.

I need to check I follow you correctly. The perceived additional context-dependence is that just because X > Y, it doesn't follow that Y is bad, right? Because obviously X > Y itself is not more contextualised than "Y is bad" or "X is good", just more forgiving of the less preferred element of that context. The extent to which this can be any more objective, even if forgiving, still raises the same question: if culture A prefers X to Y and culture B prefers Y to X, and both cultures are self-consistently social within themselves, who is to validate that X > Y? — Kenosha Kid

I agree that talking about "X>Y is true" is much the same as talking about "X is true" when abstracting away from how we actually reason morally; they're statements which may be evaluated as true or false depending upon the context in the same way. I think comparisons highlight an aspect of moral conduct that is not well captured by a sense of modality (connection of possible worlds) that mirrors logical possibility. Comparisons include our ability to revise our conduct; do this because it's better than that, don't do this wrong thing any more. The daily contexts of moral dilemma are, in my experience, much more similar to this than "What I did was right!" and "What I did was wrong!"; aligning growth of character and moral wisdom with re-evaluating what we believe is right and wrong.

Growth paints a picture that aligns moral conduct not with the evaluation mechanism of moral claims over all possible evaluative contexts, but upon how one transitions between them.

So there are a few aspects to what I'm trying to say:

(1) Contexts of evaluation for moral claims have to be connected in a manner that reflects how they are connected IRL, and logical possibility will not do.
(2) Transitioning between contexts of evaluation is aligned with moral wisdom, and the conditions under which we transition are informed by the world's non-moral facts.
(3) (From previous posts) changing your mind about what you should do is in part a modelling exercise - it requires you know the situation you're in and what its effective/salient vectors of change are.
(4) (From previous posts) The modelling exercise component is consistent with cognitive mediation of sentiment in the production of evaluation. The causal sequence goes (affect+cognition)-> evaluation, rather than affect->cognition->evaluation.

I have intuitions that the (affect+cognition) being treated as a unit places constraints upon the sense of connection of moral evaluative contexts; they have to be "sufficiently similar", in a similar manner to people imagine a semantics for counterfactuals by imagining the "nearest possible world". We have to hold a background fixed in which we evaluate things, and most of that background is non-moral facts. The strict distinction between descriptive and normative is also quite undermined (replaced with a weighting) by undermining the distinction between cognition and affect; facts come with feelings and norms, norms come with feelings and facts and so on.

I'm not sure what was funny about that except that it's perfectly computable and doesn't require choice at all. Did I understand that and/or get the math right? And on a practical level we could input the resolution of the printer or display device, and calculate exactly how many iterations of the curve would show up as solid black. And it would of course be a finite number, so definitely computable and not needing any mathematical foundations beyond counting to a large but finite number. That's way less than the Peano axioms. An ultrafinitist, someone who doesn't believe in the infinitude of sufficiently large sets, would be able to compute the space filling curve to the point that it appeared black on the display. I'd be willing to guess you don't need that many iterations. Your eye couldn't make out the lines, it would all black pretty soon. — fishfry

You know, no one I've told the story too ever thought about it like that. The thing that I found funny about it was that the other prof didn't doubt that the eccentric prof would go in MS paint and make a black square to represent a space filling curve to some approximation, he criticised the ability to represent it exactly constructibly. You know a-priori that a sufficiently computed space filling curve in the unit square is indistinguishable from filling in the unit square in MS paint.

When it comes to metaphysics. physicists are the last people I'd listen to; and celebrity physicists the least of all :-) — fishfry

Eh, if it was someone else I wouldn't've trusted it. The guy lectured in quantum physics and philosophy of quantum physics. I'm sure that it can be doubted.

Most physicists, or at least many, actually think their theories are True in some absolute sense. — fishfry

I think they operate quite rightly, provisionally treating the theory as if it is the thing is part of how it works I think. If the discussion we'd have is "what properties of a model can be treated as standing in for a property or behaviour of the thing", that'd be quite different from "are all models merely epistemic" - the first would actually be about the uncertainty principle, the second is a much broader realism vs anti-realism of scientific content debate. If you and I have to go through the latter to get to the former, that's fine with me, both are interesting.

* — Kenosha Kid

Welp. There go my aspirations of being the Stalin of Political Correctness.

Yes, I think the schema I proposed in the OP could be better worded along these lines. It is much easier to state that something is objectively (contingently) immoral than it is to state that something is objectively morally. Killing gingers for fun is immoral: it is antisocial, hypocritical behaviour that causes harm for personal gratification and fails to demonstrate human social capabilities for empathy and altruism. — Kenosha Kid

I guess that's another case of the asymmetry of justification; it's much easier to falsify than verify. In another vocabulary; it's much easier to find necessary conditions for good conduct than sufficient ones (pace @180 Proof). I think there are good epistemic reasons to render an ""X is good" is true" claim necessarily suspect when X ranges over everything people do in every context, but as we seem to agree comparisons ""X is preferable to Y" is true" have better evidentiary status. I guess that this arises from contextual invariants regarding preference forming mechanisms behaving differently for each type of claim.

I think it's a bit sketchy, but it seems to me that ""X is good" is true" is more readily produced by codified systems of moral norms; they engender evaluating actions of specified types as wrong, in that context if you vary the system of moral norms you can create a defeater. A code of conduct with the pretense of covering all human conduct has no conduct left to fuel resolution/innovation of moral problems that arise within it - and if evaluation is predetermined, they can be predetermined some other way. On the other hand, comparative evaluations tend not to have that universality to them; they contrast within the context of evaluation rather than evaluate over all such contexts. This leverages the specificity of the here and now in the proposed solution ("I should do this rather than that", "I will change thusly") rather than futilely attempting to annihilate it. Contexts of evaluation can enact their revenge by showing that how we have changed our conduct in any given instance was flawed, but that flaw can be treated as another imperative to do better - another "I will change thusly".

I guess the idea that preference forming mechanisms that work on improvements are more context invariant than binning claims into right and wrong is what generates that distinction. It's harder to make a context sensitive system of knowledge arbitrary by acknowledging context sensitivity - it's a premise instead of a defeater.

My intuitions regarding moral claims is realist for the same reasons as I think knowledge is contextual; we can say something is right or wrong and be right in doing so so long as the context is appropriate.

Abstracting one level as you do, I think, with the subjective/objective distinction is what allows the anti-realism ("no moral claims are true") into your perspective, the contextual nature of (moral) knowledge becomes a mechanism for creating "moral frames of reference" that are external to the terrain we're in - like a meta ethics without an ethics. I think we agree on object level stuff (context sensitivity of moral judgement, differing codified systems of moral judgement are incompossible when universal and distinct), but I think that all this reasoning is part of the object level stuff too. Even the subjective/objective thing - emptying the context sensitivity out of moral judgement is going to make all the claims have defeaters or incompossible frames of reference and thus be false or indeterminate rather than the "true in practice, for now" we live in.

. If you're comfortable with that, I don't see anything controversial in the idea of social responses having a non-rational basis. — Kenosha Kid

Maybe if I put it like this: the situation is worse than it having a non-rational basis, rationality only comes online when called by non-rationality, non-rationality is partially constituted by cognitive interventions on sensorial flows of information around the body. So I'm not trying to make the claim that "morality is rational" in the manner that I could sit here in an armchair and come up with a correct Stone Tablet by the virtue of my "sovereign faculties", I'm coming at it from the perspective of imploding the distinction between rational and non-rational conduct - to replace it with a weighted mixture of the two whose relative weights depend on context.

"Is the moral value/conduct based on a good model?" is always a good question. An example - relationship advice from the social shut in fdrake. Base how you treat your partner on the information you have about their needs and constrain your proposed actions by your capabilities and needs. It doesn't really say very much, other than emphasise that moral values have a modelling component to them. As far as agency goes; reciprocity without modelling is blind, modelling without reciprocity is empty.

After that implosion, abstract principles of morality and a capacity to model "objective truths" are already in the territory of moral conduct; their grasping demarcates the contours of specific moral problems. Which, I think, goes some way towards what @Pfhorrest is positing; synthesize heuristics based on regularities, it's all theory ladened anyway (cognitive interventions on sensorial flows contextualise/regularise based on priors, theories all the way down man), and our bodies change slowly enough to be a fecund subject of moral inquiry. The mind can't even go fuck itself like the body can.

It's an interesting question, touching on something Mww asked earlier. If I were to stab at an answer (and you should definitely attack this with big sticks as there's a strong potential for argument ab rectum here), it would be this: reason is invoked to solve particular problems, and provided with evidence that may or may not be relevant to those problems. This seems counterintuitive because we think we're always thinking, but I suspect that's a symptom of the fact that we lack immediate problems to solve that are not reliant on cognition. — Kenosha Kid

I've reconciled that most of my mind is already sacrificed unto the Machine God on the altar of my body. I think of cognition similarly. It can dominate the generating processes of mind-body outcomes only when it's fueled with problems. Which, I'd agree with you, are of circumscribed character.

No, I don't think moral conduct is deficient because of the lack of moral objectivity. I think moral objectivity is a deficient description of moral conduct. Moral conduct seems to be taking care of itself. — Kenosha Kid

There being a black and white of right and wrong actions is a poor description of moral conduct; tagging moral actions as purely right or purely wrong is part of the game of moral conduct. I don't think trying to come up with meta principles that filter actions into WRONG and RIGHT bags is a particularly justified endeavor, given that the pretense to universality is already part of the clusterfuck of moral conduct; it stays in the territory of moral conduct.

But, I still think it is possible to cultivate moral wisdom in that territory - that we can learn to be more right or at least less wrong in how we treat others. I'd guess you'd agree? In your conceptual landscape, you've got evolutionary machinery selecting over prosocial traits. Evolution's a much cleverer engineer than any group of humans, but its search space (pro-social behaviours, long term survivability tactics, highly replicable behaviours) is also something that can be explored in thinking and living. I'm not saying we're particularly good at exploring the search space, I'm saying that we've got access and do indeed explore it, although through a glass darkly.

You'll say people dislike PC because they want to be assholes, they'll say you like PC because you're a snowflake. It's not less unsophisticated, juvenile bullshit just because the other side does it. — Judaka

That's pretty much all this is though. Political correctness as a term is not like... premium grade lean steak discourse, is it? The World Spirit didn't pay any attention to college girls with pink hair talking about the pay gap in its ascension towards the absolute. It's a whole nebula of fluff and fat around shit everyone agrees is good. People who use political correctness as a pejorative do it in a manner that makes it indistinguishable from calling anyone liberal (in the American usage) or socially progressive a whiny bitch - give or take a pinch of close mindedness, a dash of "you hate freedom of speech" and add "all I want is a reasonable discussion" to taste.

You wanna actually have a reasonable discussion? Let's talk about how the use of political correctness as a pejorative is an in group/out group signifier, and thus a rallying feature of anti-social progressive identity politics and a lowkey way of virtue signalling. We, those who hate political correctness, are much better than those whiny irrational bitches who like it. That's how it works. Use political correctness as a nebulous pejorative and you're already playing that game you allegedly hate.

. I can't really believe that you're just totally unaware of this aspect of political correctness. — Judaka

I know what people say it is. There's a whole constellation of terms.

Political correctness - PC police - social justice warriors - white knights - progressives - libtards - identity politics - pinkos - cancel culture - wokeness - snowflakes...

I generally think it's a good thing that people are antsy about saying things that are likely to make the marginalised feel bad, I just wish material benefits followed suit more often. I want people to hesitate to treat people badly, and when that concerns societal injustices that can in part be addressed by culture changes, I want people not to think and behave in ways that propagate the bad stuff.

I'm pretty sure anyone who believes anything political is going to have a similar ethos; they will strongly prefer it if you believe what they believe on substantive issues because of their expected consequences from those substantive issues.

But when I point that out, anyone who whines about political correctness is actually gonna agree with me I'd imagine. People who have political opinions have an image of society they want and an image of how they think people should act. Even people who just want everyone else to shut the fuck up and be less whiny bitches - which is all it is.

"Stop whining! I want to say what I like and not care what you think!"

If you wanna talk about whether political correctness (whatever it is) suffices as a political program for obtaining what adherents to political correctness (allegedly) want, that's a different thing.

I think for the most part anyone who dislikes "PC culture" wants to be less afraid to express their dickish tendencies, and to call anyone who dislikes 'em whiny bitches. Humans are gonna be foolish and short sighted regardless of our political opinions.

"STOP BEING A WHINY BITCH"
"STOP BEING AN ASSHOLE"

This whole thing in a nutshell. And some people get so, so irate about it. Feel they're persecuted because they can't say things they didn't even want to say in the first place. Keep on whining.

Which prefabricated and emaciated terminology?

I prefer to start from the evidence and see what makes sense. Where the evidence suggests that, in encountering another individual, we have unconscious neurological and physiological reactions to that encounter which bias us toward or away from certain behaviours on the whole, clearly that is not describing a rational process — Kenosha Kid

My perspective on that is: we do react in some way, and reason is involved somehow. Well, more accurately cognition. The qualitative distinction between the functioning styles of system 1 and system 2 in that approach doesn't preclude both functioning at the same time - it's more a question of weighting, no?

And since it's a question of weighting, reason's involved to a greater or lesser extent depending on the act. This is why I find it strange that you're focussing on moral behaviour being non-cognitive when both systems are involved. Instances of action based on moral principles or conceptually relating to norms of conduct are in part deliberative.

You seem to be characterising my position as somehow wanting to limit the role of reason and looking for evidence to support it. As a person with a background where reason was pretty crucial, that really isn't the case. — Kenosha Kid

I think I can see why you'd attribute that to me based on my response. My perspective on what you've said is you're throwing the baby (reason-cognition-deliberation-planning) out with the bathwater (reducing following moral principles to a certain homeostasis of non-cognitive sentiment). I just don't see good reasons to split cognition away from sentiment when we're talking about morality, that usually comes up in contexts when we're already trying to find out what best to do. Cognition's involved in that.

I do agree with you that if you transformed the terms of the argument to "emotion is an interaction between cognitive processes and sensorial processes", there would still be the weighting question, and I'd side with you that for the most part moral decisions are made transparently (absorbed coping-system 1 functioning-prethetically), that is they are already made by what we're already doing - but in cases where we're trying to find out what's right, cognition is way more involved and I don't think it's appropriate to call these moral problem solving behaviours non-cognitive. Always a question of weighting deliberation and reflex when exploring what to do.

So in essence, I don't think you're minimising the role of reasoning, I think you're collapsing a lot of distinctions into being much the same distinction. subjective/objective = system 1/system 2 = normative/descriptive = territory/map (in this context) = value/fact - when how we make maps from territories, investigate, deliberate, is already part of the territory of moral conduct since it is in part cognitive. It's like moral conduct is deficient since it's not objective (merely subjective), but it's actually both if you propagate all those distinctions through each other using an assumed structural symmetry.

We are substantially limited in how we can know the world, trapped by our own subjectivities if you will, and it is therefore important for claims to objectivity to be well justified.

The subject/object distinction is doing most of the work, rather than the scientific stuff you've carefully interpreted. How would you draw the conclusions you have without your framing of the subject/object distinction? You've given a bird's eye view from the perch of the objective, I'm not sure you can perch there when talking about human conduct - it always varies with human conduct, since it is human conduct. It's always subjective in that framing. It's like rigging the discussion.

Same question to you as to Nos, what do you want to say that you cannot?

I don't think your circumlocution is society's fault. What do you want to say that you cannot?

Exactly. People who dislike political correctness will say it's not about that. But when you ask them what it's actually about, it's just vague progressive blah they dislike. Absolutely devoid of content, except expressing a general distaste for socially progressive ideas. It's about as good as "SJW".

but the only moral subjects are minds — Kenosha Kid

There are two maps in my view: a map between potentially unknowable genetic and cultural is-statements and subjective ought-statements, and a map between subjective ought-statements and objective ought-statements. The first is characterised by a severe loss of information, as the rational mind builds conceptions about itself as a moral agent in the world to answer non-moral ought-statements and, latterly, moral ones — Kenosha Kid

The second map is where description gives way to imposition. It is pragmatic to agree a set of objective laws to limit edge case behaviour within a group, but these laws impose, rather than describe, moral truth values. Moral objectivity goes a step further and generalises individual or popular subjective conceptions to everyone ever according to some mysterious out-there law. There is no descriptive aspect to this. It might be advised by some descriptions about the person arguing for the rightness or wrongness of an act; it might be advised by some descriptions of consensus witnessed by that person, but the outputs are still proposals of imposition, not description. — Kenosha Kid

Three questions:

Would you agree that when you're saying "genetic is statements", you have in mind a broader category concerning body and mind functions? Or do you actually want to do the reduction of non-cultural is-statements - which I take are is statements that do not concern cultural stuff but do still concern humans - to statements about genetics?

but the outputs are still proposals of imposition, not description.

I don't think you've constrained the ultimate output space enough to ensure that all true hypotheticals of this form are lost:

(If human is in configuration X) then (human should do Y)

IE, despite the losses of information there are still true imperatives of that form.

EG: "If a human wants to avoid losing the functioning of their hands then said human should not hold their hands in a fire for 15 minutes"

And humans want to avoid losing the functioning of their hands. So humans should not hold their hands in a fire for 15 minutes.

And if in principle there are very generic configurations of human bodies and minds that are also X, then (human should do Y).

"do humans want to avoid losing the functioning of their hands"? is a question you could answer with a survey. It might also turn out that there are contextual defeaters, like a would you rather game: "would you rather lose functioning of your hands or kill everybody else on the planet?" - that still facilitates the imperative being true so long as the context isn't a defeating context. So it's not necessarily true, it's contingently true for all plausible scenarios, and if you're gonna base moral principles on human behaviour and wants, it's going to output contingently true statements at best anyway.

We rationally answer them, but we do not rationally decide that such questions are asked, rather we are compelled physiologically and neurologically on the basis of natures and nurtures that we are not typically knowledgeable about. The OP largely concerns this, and descriptions here are relevant at both ends. — Kenosha Kid

The last question is about where rationality - deliberative thinking here I guess - fits in. You've made a reduction of the territory of human values to psychological drives and cultural norms, but in that reduction you've also got our capacity to plan and deliberate. In my experience, deliberation and planning often plays a pretty big role in evaluating how best to treat people. You've already got reason in analysed territory, and it already links to emotions and sensations. Seems strange to me to make such a reduction away from reasoning when you've thrown reasoning in there - presumably justified by it being "subjective" when it concerns human norms (more later).

Well, I guess I have another question; you're using the words "subjective" and "objective" a lot when talking about this, how do you understand them in this context? I ask because so many arguments on the forum that lead to a qualified sense of moral nihilism ultimately turn on their interlocutor having this distinction in the background:

What's objective is invariant of human belief.
What's subjective varies with human belief.

And with that framing in mind, it becomes impossible for anything normative to be objective, because it depends on human action to sustain it. If humans believed brutal violence was a great conflict resolution strategy, then it would be a great conflict resolution mechanism. Just as justified as do no unnecessary harm, because both lack the pre-requisite objectivity to be admitted into the big boy's club of representational knowledge.

Despite that any representation knowledge varies in a trivial way with human belief (it's knowledge! It's normative!), and even the content depends upon language for its articulation even if it's true - or a great approximation to the truth. But subjective stuff has that property too, it depends upon articulation and human behaviour for its production... Any facts about human behaviour have to vary with human behaviour, so that would make them subjective - whereas more precisely they're contingent and about humans.

Something can be contingent and still universally applicable to its domain; like it just so happens that everyone who lives in Scotland lives in the UK. It seems to me you don't think moral principles can be like that because they're not objective; I'd suggest that Pforrest's approach seeks to generate something much more similar to that kind of statement than anything carved in stone tablets. And I think you're expecting any moral realist to bottom out in stone tablets, when moral realism is generally more focussed on the enmeshment of bodies, practicalities, norms, cognition and wants.