For one, they could choose to leave the situation before it gets to that point. — Terrapin Station

Not necessarily. So, I posit they can't.

Re punching someone, that's not sufficient to be immoral either. It depends on just how hard someone is punching the other person, the injury sustained if any, etc. — Terrapin Station

OK, so morality is about degree of harm then?

Not necessarily. So, I posit they can't. — Baden

What would be the reason for that?

OK, so morality is about degree of harm then? — Baden

Degree of "physical" harm in my view, yes.

So, if degree of harm intended and achieved is relevant to morality, what is your justification for bracketing out emotional harm given, apart from common sense, the scientific evidence I've provided that it often has a physical component and it clearly can in degree be a higher level of harm than a physical harm? You said:

Re justifying why we find anything in particular moral or immoral, as I've stated many times, it simply comes down to what we feel should or shouldn't be allowed re interpersonal behavior that we consider more significant than etiquette. — Terrapin Station

But this doesn't answer my question as to why you feel emotional harm should be bracketed out in terms of not being allowed re interpersonal behaviour that we consider more significant than etiquette.

If all you want to say is it's just that you feel it should be allowed and are not willing to answer why then your position has no support and no value. I thought you might want to say more than that. But, OK, fine.

But it doesn't answer my question as to why you feel emotional harm should be bracketed out in terms of not being allowed re interpersonal behaviour that we consider more significant than etiquette. So, I've read it now twice and responded to it twice.

If all you want to say is it's just that you feel it should be allowed and are not willing to answer why then your position has no support and no value. I thought you might want to say more than that. But, OK, fine. — Baden

For everyone, including you, for any moral stance they have, it's either foundational or not in this sense:

If a moral stance a la "one should/shouldn't behave in such and such way," "It is morally good to do x," etc. is a consequence of another moral stance that person holds, the first-stated moral stance isn't foundational.

If a moral stance (a la the same sorts of examples) isn't a consequence of another moral stance that person holds, then the moral stance is foundational for that person.

Moral stances can not be the consequence of non-moral stances, because of the is/ought issue. No moral stance, no value judgment (a la good/bad, better/worse, etc.) follows from any non-evaluative fact.

So ALL moral stances, if foundational, per your comment above, would have to "have no support and no value."

People can state either foundational or non-foundational moral stances initially. If they state a foundational moral stance, then there isn't going to be any sentential support or justification of the stance. If they state a non-foundational moral stance, we can work back to the foundational moral stances they've built the non-foundational stance upon, if we're interested in that, but there's nothing preferential about non-foundational stances.

Everyone gets to foundational stances rather quickly. If they don't start with them, it's almost never more than a step or two back until they get to one.

it's not just colour though, is it..there are other physical differences that tend to go along with race. — wax

Are physical differences a sound basis to establish superiority/inferiority? In what terms would you say a particular race is physically superior than another ? I'm curious.



Minds are bodies, yes, but are minds just bodies? Is mental experience not rich enough to deserve its own domain separate from mere physicality?

Are physical differences a sound basis to establish superiority/inferiority? In what terms would you say a particular race is physically superior than another ? I'm curious. — TheMadFool

I'm not talking about those aspects of how racism presents itself.

I'm talking about some of the things which lead to racism. Facial and other characteristics, can lead to some people not really getting a gestalt when they see another person.

A gestalt is an event where the brain/mind forms a whole impression of something, from the components of that thing, rather than seeing those components separately.

This isn't even confined to any specific race...the cross-race-effect itself is even a misnomer, as for example a person adopted by a family of another race, will develop to recognise more easily people of their adopted families more easily than their own. A child may get the 'cross race effect' later in life when they see people of their own race.

Ok, so if I get this right, whites a getting cucked because we can no longer be sure that when we look at our neighbour if he is from good European breeding stock? :confused: — Akanthinos

that's an odd interpretation of my post.

Prosopagnosia
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Prosopagnosia
Synonyms Face blindness
Fusiform gyrus animation.gif
Animation of the fusiform area, the area damaged in prosopagnosia
Pronunciation

/ˌprɒsəpæɡˈnoʊzɪə/[1]

Specialty Neurology

Prosopagnosia, also called face blindness,[2] is a cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognize familiar faces, including one's own face (self-recognition), is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision-making) remain intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage (acquired prosopagnosia), but a congenital or developmental form of the disorder also exists, which may affect up to 2.5% of the United States population.[3] The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus,[4] which activates specifically in response to faces. The functionality of the fusiform gyrus allows most people to recognize faces in more detail than they do similarly complex inanimate objects. For those with prosopagnosia, the new method for recognizing faces depends on the less sensitive object-recognition system. The right hemisphere fusiform gyrus is more often involved in familiar face recognition than the left. It remains unclear whether the fusiform gyrus is only specific for the recognition of human faces or if it is also involved in highly trained visual stimuli.

There are two types of prosopagnosia: acquired and congenital (developmental). Acquired prosopagnosia results from occipito-temporal lobe damage and is most often found in adults. This is further subdivided into apperceptive and associative prosopagnosia. In congenital prosopagnosia, the individual never adequately develops the ability to recognize faces.[5]

Though there have been several attempts at remediation, no therapies have demonstrated lasting real-world improvements across a group of prosopagnosics. Prosopagnosics often learn to use "piecemeal" or "feature-by-feature" recognition strategies. This may involve secondary clues such as clothing, gait, hair color, skin color, body shape, and voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others. Prosopagnosia has also been associated with other disorders that are associated with nearby brain areas: left hemianopsia (loss of vision from left side of space, associated with damage to the right occipital lobe), achromatopsia (a deficit in color perception often associated with unilateral or bilateral lesions in the temporo-occipital junction) and topographical disorientation (a loss of environmental familiarity and difficulties in using landmarks, associated with lesions in the posterior part of the parahippocampal gyrus and anterior part of the lingual gyrus of the right hemisphere).[6] It is from the Greek: prosopon = "face" and agnosia = "not knowing".

The opposite of prosopagnosia is the skill of superior face recognition ability. Scotland Yard has a special criminal investigation unit composed of people, called "super-recognizers", with this skill.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

The Cross-race-effect is partly about facial recognition.

Facial recognition is an incredibly powerful part of how humans interact, and how society functions.
A lot of people take it for granted, I think.

Say you step out onto the street, and you see some guy walking down the pavement...'oh, hi Bob; how you doing?', might follow from seeing him, but if you couldn't tell Bob, from John Major or any other male in the world, that simply quite ordinary interaction would be quite different, wouldn't it?

Minds are bodies, yes, but are minds just bodies? — TheMadFool

Yes. :grin:

Is mental experience not rich enough to deserve its own domain separate from mere physicality?

Why rag on physical stuff like that?

If you say you dislike olives, but then, on trying one some years later, you find them to be delicious, at some point in the intervening years you must have been wrong about your liking olives, right?

I think you give too much credence to what you think are your foundational morals and not enough to arguments which might reveal them to be other than what you thought.

If you say you dislike olives, but then, on trying one some years later, you find them to be delicious, at some point in the intervening years you must have been wrong about your liking olives, right? — Isaac

No. That's not the sort of thing you can be wrong about. Whether you like olives is a mental state that you're in at present. (And in my view there is no reason to believe that there are unconscious mental states.)

What you could be wrong about is a prediction a la, "If I were to try an olive at future time x, I wouldn't like it."

And of course, whether you like olives can change over time--and it could change many times, in many subtle to not-so-subtle ways.

Re moral stances, sure, your feelings might not be so clear to you, and there might be various things you haven't considered that would change how you feel, or you might otherwise change how you feel over time. But moral stances can't be correct or incorrect in the first place, and you can't get wrong how you feel in terms of however you feel at time Tx being how you feel at time Tx.

Whether you like olives is a mental state that you're in at present. (And in my view there is no reason to believe that there are unconscious mental states.) — Terrapin Station

This seems like rather a controversial point of view given the advances in neural imaging, what reason do you have for persisting with it in spite of the evidence to the contrary? Add tasteless red food colouring to white wine and people who claim they don't like white wine are fooled into thinking they're drinking red. I'm not one to treat psychological evidence as if it were gospel, but the evidence of the sort above is sufficiently overwhelming for one to need a pretty good reason for ignoring it. We fairly clearly do not know our own likes and dislikes.

you can't get wrong how you feel in terms of however you feel at time Tx being how you feel at time Tx. — Terrapin Station

Again, as above many decades of psychological experiment seem to have, at least very strongly indicated, that you very much can get wrong how you think you feel. You might accurately report something simple like anger, fear etc, but claiming that you are always accurately reporting something as complex as that you feel people's expression should not be curtailed and that there is no other stance informing this position from your deeper subconscious, or even just unnoticed conscious connections...

Seems to me that you're drawing a hard line in the sand without justification and in the face of a significant amount of evidence to the contrary. This suggests to me some hidden motive, but I suppose you can't be wrong about that either?

Every time you respond you bring up more topics, but I dislike doing multiple topics per post. I like focusing on one thing at a time and ideally "settling it." So with that in mind:

This seems like rather a controversial point of view given the advances in neural imaging, what reason do you have for persisting with it in spite of the evidence to the contrary? — Isaac

What would you take to be evidence to the contrary? (In other words, detail some evidence and explain what you think that evidence shows.)

Well, the evidence I gave directly below, as an example. People who claim not to like white wine can be fooled into saying they like the white wine they're drinking by the addition of a tasteless red dye. The substance they think they don't like (the taste of), they actually do like, or at least don't mind.

Now, granted you could argue that the entire experience of drinking white wine includes the colour, and so they're giving an honest account, but that's exactly the point I'm making about complexity. Should one of these people simply say "I don't like white wine" then maybe the experiment proves nothing, but should they say something more complex - "I don't like white wine, it's because of the taste which just a foundational dislike for me", then the experiment proves that they gave an incorrect account of their own tastes. It was not the taste that was the foundational dislike, it was the colour.

People who claim not to like white wine can be fooled into saying they like the white wine they're drinking by the addition of a tasteless red dye. — Isaac

(What does that have to do with neural imaging?)

At any rate:

(1) "I like/don't like F" isn't about whether they're identifying some particular x as F correctly per either convention or per how the person in question would identify x (as F) in different circumstances/given different information. It's made true or false by them liking or disliking the thing in question, whatever it really is/whatever someone calls it.

(2) If someone says "I don't like white wine," but you give them white wine and they like it, whether it's disguised to them or not, one thing that can be going on is that their tastes have changed.

(3) If someone says "I don't like white wine," but you give them white wine where it's alternately disguised and not disguised, in a kind of extended blind A/B test, where they consistently say they like the disguised stuff, whatever you call it, but they say they do not like the non-disguised stuff, then what's going on is more complex than simply liking the taste or not. That doesn't make them wrong, because it's not possible to get this sort of thing wrong.

Re your other comments, you'd have to argue that there's no way that other factors can't influence their perception of taste, but there's no way to argue that.

(Do we have any actual examples of reasonably controlled experiments a la what I described in (3), by the way?)

If you were to literally blindfold the person, say, and you were to keep giving them the same exact thing over and over, and their responses were to be apparently random re liking/disliking something--maybe where you gave them no other information other than suggesting that you'd be giving them different wines on each occasion, for example, then that can't show that they can get wrong their like/dislike reports, either--or show that they don't know their tastes. Because they can't be wrong that on each iteration, they either liked or disliked what they tasted. You can't treat the subject as if there are no changing variables, because that's not the case. Countless things change for the subject on each iteration of the taste test. People are complex "machines" with tons of ever-changing factors.

What does that have to do with neural imaging — Terrapin Station

Sorry, nothing whatsoever. There's some interesting work being done on tracking markers of taste preferences with neural imaging and I was going to give an example and then I thought of a better way.

With regards to the rest of your points. At 1) I'd agree, but I'm specifically targeting complex explanations such as - that moral principles (preferences) are foundational rather than based on other principles. I'm claiming that such a level of self-awareness is simply not justifiable. I've no problem with accepting that if someone shows/expresses an aversion to a thing, that means they genuinely don't like it. What I don't accept is that they can give an honest account of why they don't like it. They say its because of the taste but it's clearly because of the colour (or some other colour-related factor).

Do we have any actual examples of reasonably controlled experiments a la what I described in (3), by the way? — Terrapin Station

Here's quite a classic. The Pepsi Paradox. People actually prefer the taste of Pepsi in blind trials, but claim to prefer the taste of Coke when they're able to see the brand. This interesting experiment takes people with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex in an area where other influences on preference judgement get made. Those with damage did not express the normal brand bias when reporting their taste preferences.

The experiment with the red wine is also pretty famous, but I can't seem to track it down right now. It was done by Frederic Brochet at Bordeaux.

There are tons more, but to be brutally honest, I'd rather you think I'm a complete charlatan who's making stuff up to suit their argument than spend my afternoon finding we links. I mean, you're totally right to ask, it's just not what I want to do with my time. So, happy to provide a couple, but if that's not enough then so be it.

they can't be wrong that on each iteration, they either liked or disliked what they tasted. You can't treat the subject as if there are no changing variables, because that's not the case. Countless things change for the subject on each iteration of the taste test. People are complex "machines" with tons of ever-changing factors. — Terrapin Station

As above, I'm not arguing that they can be wrong about their final reaction (like/dislike) but they clearly can be wrong about which of the "ever-changing factors" has influenced it.

So to bring things back to the OP, for you to claim that your 'line in the sand' re physical/emotional harms is simply a foundational moral principle (by which you mean a preference) and not influenced by some other factors is a claim that I don't think you can reliably make.

Ah, I understand. Because someone somewhere else did something you think is really bad, then it's ok for you to do whatever you want that by your standards isn't so bad, because in virtue of the comparison, your bad thing ceases to be bad at all. Is that it?

I really wish we could keep things shorter, because I'm sure a bunch of worthwhile stuff is being bypassed. At any rate, re the first point you're bringing up in this post:

but I'm specifically targeting complex explanations such as - that moral principles (preferences) are foundational rather than based on other principles. I'm claiming that such a level of self-awareness is simply not justifiable. — Isaac

They have to be because you can't derive an ought from an is. You can't derive a value statement from a factual statement.

Terrapin: what is vague about the word "hurt"?
— tim wood
But I explained this already. Someone can be hurt, especially emotionally, by any arbitrary thing. — Terrapin Station

Racist words, epithets, etc. hurt people's feelings. It's wrong to hurt people's feelings.
— NKBJ
I don't at all agree with this. And in my opinion, the person whose feelings are hurt is the person who needs to work on themselves more. — Terrapin Station

Do not you think you might pay at least some attention to agency, intent, motivation, and responsibility?
You must be very young indeed or very sheltered not to have encountered people hurt by just the things you think no one should be hurt by, to the point that there is no immorality in hurting such people with exactly those things.

And don't argue degree. What you exactly said is just above, "I don't at all agree with this." On your line of thought, I can decide what hurts you, and inform my own actions accordingly. Yes?

Do not you think you might pay at least some attention to agency, intent, motivation, and responsibility? — tim wood

Not when it comes to hurting people's feelings, because I don't think that's a moral issue.

When it comes to things that I believe are moral issues, sure. I think we should pay attention to intent, motivation, etc.

I was born in 1962. I've seen plenty of people have their feelings hurt. My feelings have been hurt. I don't think it's a moral issue.

you can't derive an ought from an is. — Terrapin Station

Why do people say this?

If it is the case that to get P you have to do Q, then, if you want P, you ought to do Q. An ought from an is, courtesy of Mortimer Adler, and doubtless not new with him.

If it is the case that to get P you have to do Q, then, if you want P, you ought to do Q. An ought from an is, courtesy of Mortimer Adler, and doubtless not new with him. — tim wood

What fact makes it true that you ought to achieve what you want?

Not when it comes to hurting people's feelings, because I don't think that's a moral issue. — Terrapin Station

Interesting. Is there something that you think hurting people is, if not immoral? Perhaps you think it's nothing at all...?

It's hurting people, for one. That's something, isn't it?

What fact makes it true that you ought to achieve what you want? — Terrapin Station

C'mon, Terrapin, have another cup of coffee. The fact that makes it true is the fact of itself. And the ought goes to the how, not the why.

it's funny I just thought the saying 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me'.

Who ever came up with that saying must have thought that words have power; and it this specific case the power to empower victims of words that can hurt...

The fact that makes it true is the fact of itself. — tim wood

You seriously just wrote that. lol.

It's not true or false that you ought to achieve what you want.

It can be the case that x is a precondition/prerequisite or requirement for y--that y can't obtain unless x obtains. That can be true or false.

It's not true or false that you ought to achieve y if you want y. Its not true or false that you ought to pursue some prerequisite first if you want something (iow, it's not true or false that you ought to achieve x if you want y). That's simply a preference that most people have because they want to achieve things they desire, they want to achieve the necessary prerequisites for that first, etc.

It's hurting people, for one. That's something, isn't it? — Terrapin Station

Hurting people is hurting people? Ok, granted. What is that something?

That something is hurting people. (The question seems predicated on not knowing how English conventionally works.)

Apparently you want some sort of other classification scheme. But I have no idea what you're looking for there. You'd have to be more explicit about your concepts.