That's the argumentum ad populum fallacy, and it results in saying that it's true that it's morally permissible to have slaves (if you're in the US in the 1820s in the South),

It’s only morally permissible if you don’t take in the moral opinions of actual slaves at the time. Pretty sure they weren’t calling it morally permissible nor were their white advocates. It might have been legally permissible at the time, doesn’t mean it wasn’t morally reprehensible though.

argumentum ad populum fallacy — Terrapin Station

To clarify, I'm not saying I believe it's true, I'm saying a lot of people believe it's true. I'm with you on this, I think, that true and false don't really apply to moral claims.

:up:

It’s only morally permissible if you don’t take in the moral opinions of actual slaves at the time. Pretty sure they weren’t calling it morally permissible nor were their white advocates. It might have been legally permissible at the time, doesn’t mean it wasn’t morally reprehensible though. — Mark Dennis

No stance is going to be unanimous. You just pointed that out yourself a few posts back (well, maybe in another thread . . .I don't remember if it was this same thread or not)

But it is true that it was morally permissible to have slaves in the South of the US in the 1820's. — ChatteringMonkey

We could say that it was true that it was conventionally considered morally permissible. That's an important distinction to make.

Yeah, it’s getting to the point where even I’m getting confused as to which thread we are in and I think we have both been dancing on the line of going away from the original topic of discussion.

I think we’ve discovered a lot about the others views so far which means we might be able to broach where we have consensus.

I think one thing we will disagree on always is how we are defining truth in terms of morality. You don’t believe it is possible for moral statements or arguments to have a value of true or false. I do.

If we define that which benefits a life, as things like having enough to sustain its life until it’s natural end. Is morality useful to life? More specifically, is morality useful for you? Does it help your position to have humans who believe in morals around you or would it be better if every single one of them was a moral antirealist?

If we define that which benefits a life, as things like having enough to sustain its life until it’s natural end. Is morality useful to life? More specifically, is morality useful for you? Does it help your position to have humans who believe in morals around you or would it be better if every single one of them was a moral antirealist? — Mark Dennis

Aside from some extreme medical conditions, I don't think it's really possible to have a human who doesn't have a whole host of moral stances. It doesn't matter what they think the status of moral utterances is ontologically; they're going to think that some behavior is morally kosher and other behavior isn't. And most people aren't going to have extremely unusual moral stances--or at least they're not likely to have stances that result in extremely unusual behavior. Some will, but not that many.

I can’t believe you really just overlooked slaves moral opinions and said it was conventionally considered morally permissible when it was widely debated by slaves, freed men and white advocates of freedom.

So can we take your relativistic stance to mean that if you’d been around at the time, you wouldn’t have seen any value in even debating whether or not it was right to keep slaves? This just makes you a moral apathist in my eyes. Your apathy is probably the biggest indicator of a fundamentally immoral mind.

it’s a simple question. Here it is even more simply; Do you believe all moral debate is pointless/useless?

We could say that it was true that it was conventionally considered morally permissible. That's an important distinction to make. — Terrapin Station

Sure, though I'm not entirely sure what "it was morally permissible" could mean otherwise in the absence of an objective morality.

Nice debate guys! (I bought an extra box of popcorn... .)

Do you believe all moral debate is pointless/useless? — Mark Dennis

I'm sure Terrapin Station can answer for himself, but I do want to give you my answer too because I think it's an important question, and our meta-ethical stances seem to overlap at least to some extend.

In the absence of objective morality and moral claims not having truth-value, I think it is even more important to have moral dialogue. Because one consequence of that view is that you cannot just find or discover moral facts, we have to create or construct them. Dialogue then serves a vital role to refine, clarify and generally evolve your moral ideas.

Furthermore the only way to get to some kind of morality that transcends individual moral stances, which I think is necessary to live together somewhat successfully in groups, is to agree on certain moral ideas... and agreement necessarily implies that you debate what you want to agree on first.

I agree with the epistemological stance here, but it's not just about whether or not we can reasonably predict future harm to future people. It's about what these future people are supposed to be. Moral rules concern the interactions between moral subjects. The problem I see is that future people aren't subjects at all. They're merely imaginations. Reasonable ones, sure, but that doesn't make them persons. — Echarmion

My issue is that before I can get into deliberations about how a given action might cause harm, I need to establish the moral standing of the affected subject(s). I don't worry about the effects my actions might have on various bacteria, for example, because bacteria aren't considered moral subjects (usually, anyways). — Echarmion

A moral subject is anything that can be harmed. You’re dismissive of bacteria as a moral subject, but I would argue that’s only because their value is considered to be negligible in relation to other moral subjects. This is not objective, but is an anthropocentric perspective.

When you’re trying to determine the ‘moral standing’ of subjects, you’re positioning your experience of these subjects in relation to value. And we can’t overlook the evidence that this priority we attribute to ‘personhood’ and our qualification of the term is a feature of morality that has not only contributed to much of the oppression, abuse and hatred in human history, but has also brought us to our current environmental crisis.

If an ‘objective’ moral standing is what you’re after, then you can’t restrict ‘relevant information’ only to that obtained from a person’s perspective. I recognise that this complicates our ability to establish any moral standing at all, given the lack of information we have about the perspective of future people or bacteria, for instance. But I think we need to be honest about these subjective limitations in relation to moral standing.

How do I go about doing this for potential future people? I cannot base it on some list of physical characteristics, or on some communicative act. I cannot engage in any form of reciprocal recognition process. — Echarmion

This is where we need to become reacquainted with uncertainty as a feature of reality, and recognise the limitations of a reductionist approach.

When we calculate potential energy, it’s in relation to a specific future action produced from specific causal conditions. The potential energy is an imagination - but it’s one that depends entirely on information we’ve acquired from past interactions with the system. We’re pretty confident in our calculations as long as the causal conditions are as calculated.

So the only real difference I see between being aware of the effects my actions might have on potential energy and the effects they might have on potential people, then, is the variability of causal conditions - but it’s a BIG difference. People are unpredictable (except on a macro scale), in that they have the capacity to internally create the causal conditions for their own actions.

We cannot reliably predict the effect of a specific action on our calculation of potential energy unless we can control or specify ALL other causal conditions. This is achievable in the science lab, but not often in reality. But we still have to worry about the effects of these actions outside of the control conditions of a science lab.

Just because it’s difficult and uncertain, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about it. We need to recognise first of all that we cannot expect to fully control or predict the causal conditions that contribute to effects on potential people, and then find another way to look at it.

How do we talk about how a specific action impacts on potential energy in general? We don’t, do we? And yet we can’t get away with not taking potential energy into account when determining our actions (even unconsciously), so it’s far from irrelevant. We don’t have to consciously think about or calculate potential energy as adults interacting with the world, because we’ve integrated this information about the universe into our automatic systems of operation, and we teach our children to recognise and take into account this relational aspect of reality without needing to explain what potential energy is or why it’s important.

Personally, I think we’re afraid to acknowledge the moral standing of future people, just as we’re afraid to acknowledge the moral standing of bacteria. Because to do so we would need to recognise that our own moral standing, objectively speaking, is not nearly as significant as we’ve been led to believe. And we’re just not willing to accept the discomfort of that reality. Ignorance is bliss.

A moral subject is anything that can be harmed. You’re dismissive of bacteria as a moral subject, but I would argue that’s only because their value is considered to be negligible in relation to other moral subjects. This is not objective, but is an anthropocentric perspective. — Possibility

The problem I see with this approach is that, even if we profess to care about everything, our value judgements are necessarily anthropocentric. There is no way for us to actually judge the interests of a bacteria, and hence decide what counts as harm to then. What we'd actually do if we tried is to anthropomorphise the bacteria and assume it has human interests. This results not in a relationship of moral subjects, but in a kind of paternalism, where humans decide what they feel comfortable doing.

When you’re trying to determine the ‘moral standing’ of subjects, you’re positioning your experience of these subjects in relation to value. And we can’t overlook the evidence that this priority we attribute to ‘personhood’ and our qualification of the term is a feature of morality that has not only contributed to much of the oppression, abuse and hatred in human history, but has also brought us to our current environmental crisis. — Possibility

As a historical fact, this is true, but I don't think a different grounding of morality would have changed the outcome significantly. It's always possible to draw arbitrary lines if you really want to.

If an ‘objective’ moral standing is what you’re after, then you can’t restrict ‘relevant information’ only to that obtained from a person’s perspective. I recognise that this complicates our ability to establish any moral standing at all, given the lack of information we have about the perspective of future people or bacteria, for instance. But I think we need to be honest about these subjective limitations in relation to moral standing. — Possibility

I am not really sure what you're proposing here. Obviously all my information is restricted to my perspective. How could it be any other way?

Personally, I think we’re afraid to acknowledge the moral standing of future people, just as we’re afraid to acknowledge the moral standing of bacteria. Because to do so we would need to recognise that our own moral standing, objectively speaking, is not nearly as significant as we’ve been led to believe. And we’re just not willing to accept the discomfort of that reality. Ignorance is bliss. — Possibility

Well, to me, this is the problem. If we are willing to give all potential future people some moral standing, even if the standing is relative to the certainty we have regarding their existence, this potentially makes the interests of current people fairly insignificant. Without a clear grounding of the moral significance of the future, this could be used to justify all manner of measures, including fairly draconian restrictions. This seems to reduce everyone to cogs in a machine, forced by posterity to provide a more of less specific outcome.

I am not really sure what you're proposing here. Obviously all my information is restricted to my perspective. How could it be any other way? — Echarmion

It’s not as obvious as you seem to think. A good deal of what we learn about the world as human beings is from the perspective of others - even something as simple as a child being told ‘don’t touch that oven because it’s hot’. These words provide new information about the system based on their relationship to the person speaking and the words they’re using, rather than to the oven itself or any direct experience of touching the oven. An actual experience of touching the oven that would directly provide such information may have been from the perspective of the person speaking, or from their parents, or the information may have been a result of inductive reasoning on the part of the person speaking (or their parents), based on their observations. The point is that the experiential source of the information obtained is not the child’s direct perspective.

The same thing occurs, for example, in the use of sentinel species such as canaries in coalmines, or when we observe from someone’s facial expression that a particular person has just walked into the room. We don’t need to directly interact with something in order to obtain relevant information about it. We just need to understand and value/trust the relational structures that provide that information.

The point is that we can and do obtain information from other perspectives, from interacting with someone or something that interacts with something else (and so on) - when we have sufficient information from the result of past interactions to confidently rely on how we’ve mapped the causal structures. So when I suggest that a microbiologist, for example, has the capacity to understand the universe from the ‘perspective’ of a bacteria - at least to some small extent in their imagination (based on information obtained as a result of many past interactions with the same or similar bacteria) - that’s not as ridiculous as it might sound initially. They may even come to admire the behaviour of bacteria, or to align their value structures in some respects.

It’s not as obvious as you seem to think. A good deal of what we learn about the world as human beings is from the perspective of others - even something as simple as a child being told ‘don’t touch that oven because it’s hot’. These words provide new information about the system based on their relationship to the person speaking and the words they’re using, rather than to the oven itself or any direct experience of touching the oven. An actual experience of touching the oven that would directly provide such information may have been from the perspective of the person speaking, or from their parents, or the information may have been a result of inductive reasoning on the part of the person speaking (or their parents), based on their observations. The point is that the experiential source of the information obtained is not the child’s direct perspective. — Possibility

I would simply call that a form of indirect evidence for states of affairs. I base a lot of my knowledge/predictions on things people have said, because a report of an event is evidence the event happened. But all that evidence, and my notion of the event, happens in my perspective. If someone tells me they touched a hot oven and it hurt, I'll treat that as evidence that touching hot ovens hurts, among other things. I can also use my capacity for empathy to imagine the pain, but I can never actually feel their pain, nor experience the hot oven from their perspective.

The same thing occurs, for example, in the use of sentinel species such as canaries in coalmines, or when we observe from someone’s facial expression that a particular person has just walked into the room. We don’t need to directly interact with something in order to obtain relevant information about it. We just need to understand and value/trust the relational structures that provide that information.

The point is that we can and do obtain information from other perspectives, from interacting with someone or something that interacts with something else (and so on) - when we have sufficient information from the result of past interactions to confidently rely on how we’ve mapped the causal structures. So when I suggest that a microbiologist, for example, has the capacity to understand the universe from the ‘perspective’ of a bacteria - at least to some small extent in their imagination (based on information obtained as a result of many past interactions with the same or similar bacteria) - that’s not as ridiculous as it might sound initially. They may even come to admire the behaviour of bacteria, or to align their value structures in some respects. — Possibility

But knowledge about the outside appearance of a (supposed) subject doesn't tell us anything about their internal perspective. Only with other humans can we confidently make conclusions about their internal perspective based on their external behaviour, and even that is fraught with errors (like the fundamental attribution error).

And technically, our understanding of other human's internal perspective is fake, too, since what we're actually doing is imagining ourselves in their shoes. This works well enough for people we share a lot of common cultural ground with, and with very basic emotions. But Modeling the internal perspective of a chimpanzee is going to be a lot less accurate, to say nothing of housecats, fish or bacteria.

Without a clear grounding of the moral significance of the future, this could be used to justify all manner of measures, including fairly draconian restrictions. This seems to reduce everyone to cogs in a machine, forced by posterity to provide a more of less specific outcome. — Echarmion

I understand these reservations. But I’m not advocating authoritative measures. I don’t see ethics as something dictated or enforced from above, nor from the future. We can’t control the actions of others - we can only have an effect on the world by increasing our own awareness, connection and collaboration.

I base a lot of my knowledge/predictions on things people have said, because a report of an event is evidence the event happened. — Echarmion

Like the bible? Like Trump’s tweets?

A report of an event is an expression of subjective experience.

I can’t believe you really just overlooked slaves moral opinions and said it was conventionally considered morally permissible when it was widely debated by slaves, freed men and white advocates of freedom.

So can we take your relativistic stance to mean that if you’d been around at the time, you wouldn’t have seen any value in even debating whether or not it was right to keep slaves? This just makes you a moral apathist in my eyes. Your apathy is probably the biggest indicator of a fundamentally immoral mind. — Mark Dennis

So, in a post in another thread that was a response to Artemis, I responded that a view he brought up wasn't a view that I agreed with, after he'd said "anywhere in the world you find the same underlying principles to ethics."

You responded with "the majority would agree," as if that fact were significant, and minority dissent wasn't worth mentioning.

Now, in this thread, I brought up the fact that in the southern US in, say 1820 (or whatever similar date I used), the majority would say that it's ethically permissible to have slaves.

But now, you don't care that the majority would agree. You're bringing up minority dissent as if it's suddenly worth mentioning.

I'm certainly not in any way advocating that there's any significance to consensuses about this stuff. In fact, I asked you what you believed the significance of it was, and I didn't see you answer that (though you might have and I just didn't see that post yet--I've been busy; I'm just checking out responses to posts now). At any rate, the reason that I'm bringing up consensuses, majorities, etc. is because other people, including you, brought them up in a normative context.

Sure, though I'm not entirely sure what "it was morally permissible" could mean otherwise in the absence of an objective morality. — ChatteringMonkey

"It's morally permissible to do x" is an opinion that someone can have, a way that they can feel about interpersonal behavior.

I understand these reservations. But I’m not advocating authoritative measures. I don’t see ethics as something dictated or enforced from above, nor from the future. We can’t control the actions of others - we can only have an effect on the world by increasing our own awareness, connection and collaboration. — Possibility

I'd still have an issue with personally adopting a moral system that is entirely outcome oriented like that though.

Like the bible? Like Trump’s tweets?

A report of an event is an expression of subjective experience. — Possibility

Sure, Trump's tweets and the bible are evidence. Not good evidence, but evidence nonetheless. We can say that a report is an expression of subjective experience. But subjective experience does indicate objective events, on average.

It's morally permissible to do x" is an opinion that someone can have, a way that they can feel about interpersonal behavior. — Terrapin Station

Right, 'It's morally permissible to do x' in the mouth of someone, is then the expression of the moral feelings of that someone.

'It was morally permissible' (past tense) however, can't be an expression of a moral attitude a person wants to voice (because it's the past), but only really makes sense as a description, of a group of people having had those moral feelings. If it only was one person then it seems like you would specify that, right (person x had that moral feeling)?

Maybe you think it doesn't makes a whole lot of sense to make those 'it was'- statements about moral feelings because not all people had the same feelings etc.... but I think it's a meaningful statement one can make. There's a sense in which the overal moral feelings concerning slavery have changed over the years, across the board... so that you can make meaningful descriptive 'it was'-statements about it.

Likewise, present-tense 'it is morally acceptable'-statements can also be descriptive if enough people agree, and so they need not be allways expressive.

I'd still have an issue with personally adopting a moral system that is entirely outcome oriented like that though. — Echarmion

Okay - how is it entirely outcome oriented, and what is the issue?

The way I see it, the common issue is fear, but most people are loathe to admit this about themselves - that they’re afraid and overwhelmed at the responsibility. And the ‘outcome’ is entirely open-ended, as far as I can see.

Sure, Trump's tweets and the bible are evidence. Not good evidence, but evidence nonetheless. We can say that a report is an expression of subjective experience. But subjective experience does indicate objective events, on average. — Echarmion

Not evidence of an event (certainly not of an objective event), but of an experience. ‘On average’ is hardly reliable as evidence.

'It was morally permissible' (past tense) however, can't be an expression of a moral attitude a person wants to voice (because it's the past), but only really makes sense as a description, of a group of people having had those moral feelings. — ChatteringMonkey

What I wrote was "We could say that it was true that it was conventionally considered morally permissible."

"Conventionally considered" is another way of saying that most individuals thought such and such.

Yeah I got that, but you wanted to add "conventionally considered" because you seemed to think that was necessary to make some kind of distinction there, whereas I think it is redundant because it can really only be interpreted that way, in the past tense anyway... which is why i wrote what I wrote.

I think we agree, ultimately.

Well, it can be morally permissible to just an individual and to no one else, or to a small sub population, say. And of course objectivists will read it so that it's not about anyone's views.

it’s a simple question. Here it is even more simply; Do you believe all moral debate is pointless/useless? — Mark Dennis

I'm very behind in responding. I don't know if I responded to this.

No, I don't think that it's useless. I think that it's pragmatically useful for helping to clarify views as well as for trying to influence others.

It’s interesting that you say that, after our debates and seeing your replies to others I’m sort of noticing that the line between pragmatist and relativist is actually pretty small. After thinking it over you realise that the only real conflict there is that Relativists don’t believe there is a objective moral absolute to be found whereas pragmatists do, they just don’t think it can be known by an individual and only the society we create can be judged by whatever absolute we think may exist. At least, that’s the difference between mine and your practice of the stances it seems.

After thinking it over you realise that the only real conflict there is that Relativists don’t believe their is a objective moral absolute to be found whereas pragmatists do, — Mark Dennis

Pragmatism in no way implies a belief in objective morality (absolutes or not), but sure, it wouldn't preclude them.

Relativism precludes a belief in an absolute objective morality, but not belief in objective morality that's not absolute but relative.

I don't buy any objectivity for moral stances, however.

“Pragmatism in no way implies a belief in objective morality (absolutes or not), but sure, it wouldn't preclude them.”

This is just plain wrong. For example a pragmatist can still be religious and a moral realist. A pragmatist can believe in the concept of pragmatic moral truth and pure yet unknowable moral truth. He just resigns himself to using pragmatic truth in place of pure truth but understands that the drive to find pure truth is what leads to improving pragmatic truth.