the complete elimination of all suffering is an 'is' we measure suffering - we might do so by questionnaire (taking people's word for it), we might do so by fMRI scan, empathy...whatever. These are only the means by which we do the measuring, what we end up with, after that measurement is taken, is a fact, an 'is'. — Isaac

And as I keep explaining, I’m not starting from the “is” that is the description of those people’s experiences, but from the “oughts” those experiences directly give rise to in those people. Every experience someone has that feels bad to them, i.e. that hurts them — not their emotional or cognitive judgement of the morality of something they perceive, but the immediate experience of a bad sensation, where the sensation itself conveys its own badness, i.e. pain etc — take that to be bad (an “ought not”), as it seems to be, and add that to the list of things that are bad (a bunch of “ought nots”), which then demarcates the boundaries of what still might be good (“maybe ought”).

This is essentially the conversation we're having. — Kenosha Kid

It’s really not though. There being something banging on the door is there being something that is actually (objectively) moral; in contrast to the door-banging, or morality, being merely some shared illusion. You’re giving an account of why we’d all partake in such a perception of something banging on the door, while at the same time denying that anything actually is banging on the door. I’m not saying there’s a monster — plenty of other people might — I’m just saying that the persistent shared experience of something banging on the door is all there is to there being something really banging on it. So there is something really banging on it. What that might be is up for debate. But to agreed that there is this persistent shared experience of something banging on the door, yet deny that anything is really banging at the door, because of a doubt that monsters exist, is to conflate any belief in SOMETHING banging at the door with a belief in monsters specifically doing so.

we have left the reasoning for what-is-to-be-done behind. And that will always be moral reasoning, when the thing to be done is primarily qualified by the goodness of it. — Mww

Yes, I feel the crux upon us. So this is the rationalist view of morality: I am presented with a situation, I rationally deduce what the good outcome will be, and I rationally deduce how to realise that outcome. But where did the quality of goodness come from? What makes that outcome "good"?

Before heading off on that dialectical tangent, does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires? In other words, does your “generic problem solving” type of reasoning distinguish itself from the type of reasoning that grounds your “compelled to behave”? — Mww

Problem-solving is already vague enough. System 1 is a problem-solver. There's all sorts of problems it solves that I have no consciousness of. The rational mind is to me an algorithmic problem-solver.

Behaviour is an outcome, physiological and neurological responses to stimuli are drives, some of which drive behaviours, some drive changes of internal state. Some of the those drives will require rational consideration to become behaviours. Basically, my impression of the rule-of-thumb is: if you have time or ambiguity, you need reason.

The last part of the OP is that, on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour because there is ambiguity. I might make a joke in all virtual social groups bar one, perhaps a NSFW joke. I have to modulate my behaviour based on what is good for work. This is precisely what arises from not existing among relatives and neighbours with the same social mores in a small social group.

If empathy boils down to mere recognition, which requires something to be observed, apparently negating being unaware. A philosopher will naturally balk at any phenomenon that does not present itself to our rationality, especially a stimuli-response example of it. — Mww

I don't think you can speak for all philosophers. After all, all scientists are just natural philosophers with a methodology. But, yes, that's what I am saying: empathy is an automatic process in which the unconscious mind mirrors the circumstances of another in order provoke emotions and insights, and it is these outputs that we are conscious of, if we are conscious of them at all.

Not to mention, if we can rationalize with it, how can we not be aware of it? Or must we now separate being aware of, from being conscious of? — Mww

Whenever you see an optical illusion, you are unaware of the things your unconscious mind has done to the image before presenting it to your consciousness for consideration. You can still use what is provided to your consciousness for consideration, you just can't get back to the original image or know what was done with it.

Jeeez, it sucks getting old. After spending all that time with a book written by him, it never even crossed my mind. Predispositions. (Sigh) If I’d been proper and used his last name with all those equivalences, I might have got it right. — Mww

Nah, my bad. I'm still impressed you read it so quickly. I've been reading the same book for months. (More in a music rut atm.)

I think this is problematical. Humans are plainly - empirically, even - different to any other animal, in terms of their capabilities, intellectual and otherwise, and certainly in terms of self-awareness. And that's both a blessing and a curse - a blessing in that self-awareness, combined with language and the ability to seek meaning, opens horizons of being that are simply not available to animals. And a curse, in that we can contemplate the meaning of our existence and our death. — Wayfarer

That is not the whole truth. As all other animals, our mental capacity is limited and it is the limits of our mental capacity that makes our morality a problem. If this is not understood we have serious problems with our moral decisions, laws, and justice.

We are limited to knowing about 600 people and when a population becomes larger than this we dehumanize those we do not know to cope with the overload of too many people. The result is being more moral with some people than others and more reliant on impersonal laws and the enforcement of laws that limit or completely take away our liberty.

Failure to accept evolution and the sciences that study our humanness is a very serious morality problem with social, economic, and political ramifications.

Every experience someone has that feels bad to them, i.e. that hurts them — not their emotional or cognitive judgement of the morality of something they perceive, but the immediate experience of a bad sensation, where the sensation itself conveys its own badness, i.e. pain etc — take that to be bad (an “ought not”), as it seems to be, and add that to the list of things that are bad (a bunch if “ought nots”), which then demarcates the boundaries of what still might be good (“maybe ought”). — Pfhorrest

But this is describing individuals. It does not describe objective "oughts" and "ought nots" but rather those arising from the experience of each person separately/

It’s really not though. There being something banging on the door is there being something that is actually (objectively) moral — Pfhorrest

Then you're making no differentiation between an empirical fact and a belief. It is an empirical fact that something is banging on the door. Objective morality is not an empirical quantity: it cannot be detected, or verified. It is only a belief, like that there is a monster at the door. What I can measure are my moral feelings: how I feel when I see a child in distress, or a person being attacked, etc. I have no access to any objective moral truths, but I do have access to scientific evidence that those feelings are explicable in terms of physiological drives. I have a window to see what it is that is banging on the door, and whether, knowing this, the belief is justified.

I’m just saying that the persistent shared experience of something banging on the door is all there is to there being something really banging on it. — Pfhorrest

Right, and the beliefs we generate about it aren't the thing itself. Likewise something objective concerning morality exists, but it need not be what we believe it to be. Asking how the branch could explain the presence of a monster is like asking how natural social responses and drives can explain what we morally ought to do. They cannot, because those moral oughts are statements about beliefs that morality is essentially teleological rather than reactive.

But to agreed that there is this persistent shared experience of something banging on the door, yet deny that anything is really banging at the door, because of a doubt that monsters exist, is to conflate any belief in SOMETHING banging at the door with a belief in monsters specifically doing so. — Pfhorrest

Right, and the little girl doesn't deny that there's something banging at the door, she just denies the beliefs of what that thing is. And this is where we're at. I don't deny that we are moral beings. I deny that there is one objective set of moral values. I accept that we can do statistics with morality, which is the closest you and I come I think.

For me, the drives are the real thing, and they objectively exist, insofar as they are amenable to scientific enquiry and, as I've said before, the simplest and best explanation for the success of science is the existence of an objective reality (which scientific models are analogous to in aspects and with limited accuracy). To that extent, real morality is objectively real. What is consciously experienced is not that, but the second-hand, partial results of that, in the same way that what we consciously see in an optical illusion is not what is in front of us, nor what our minds receive, but the outputs of unconscious processes. We can but rationalise and create beliefs about that moderated, partial data. But those beliefs cannot be more accurate than what is really going on; however they can be significantly less accurate. If those beliefs assign teleology to something that is fundamentally non-teleological, those beliefs are wrong. The thesis of the OP is that everything essential is non-teleological. There are no fundamental, rational "oughts", only selected-for (genetically or memetically) responses and drives.

Not to mention, if we can rationalize with it, how can we not be aware of it? Or must we now separate being aware of, from being conscious of? — Mww

We operate in a state of illusion or delusion most of the time.

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.
‎ — Amazon

Thinking demands huge amounts of energy and to conserve energy for most of our waking time we are in fast thinking mode. That means we are operating instinctively or habitually and on very little information. It would not be possible to function if most of the time we were not in the fast thinking mode, where our minds work with very little information.

Personally I think we should be all be working with an understanding of human nature and Daniel Kahneman's explanations of our thinking and why we make bad decisions. We might be much more tolerant of each other if we more fully understood the problems with being human. I have concerns that religious explanations of being human have been a serious problem to civilization.

Failure to accept evolution and the sciences that study our humanness is a very serious morality problem with social, economic, and political ramifications. — Athena

Well said. I agree with the worry about the ramifications of non-empirical moral metaphysics. I think that understanding what we are, and why we are that way, should shed light on which ethics are consistent with human society and which aren't.

Well said. I agree with the worry about the ramifications of non-empirical moral metaphysics. I think that understanding what we are, and why we are that way, should shed light on which ethics are consistent with human society and which aren't. — Kenosha Kid

Oh yeah, it would make a huge difference! Unfortunately, especially in the US, Christianity has had a lot of control of education and has aggressively prevented the education essential to a higher morality.

There is a direct relationship between racism and Christianity and the problem with education that we have experienced, preventing our democracy from being fully realized besides having a prison system based on false beliefs and the highest number of incarcerated people in western culture. The belief system supports the military-industrial complex and the notion that our military is serving God. That is a bit of a moral problem with serious ramifications.

We operate in a state of illusion or delusion most of the time. — Athena

Kinda depends on what scale you’re talking about, doesn’t it? Even so, the lack of epistemological certainty on any scale, doesn't necessarily imply rational delusion.

There is a direct relationship between racism and Christianity and the problem with education that we have experienced, preventing our democracy from being fully realized besides having a prison system based on false beliefs and the highest number of incarcerated people in western culture. The belief system supports the military-industrial complex and the notion that our military is serving God. That is a bit of a moral problem with serious ramifications. — Athena

Yes, Anglicanism is not what Christianity once was. (Worth remembering that Christianity was the moral revolution of altruism and empathy, until it itself acquired might.) Do you believe Christianity to be the chief cause rather than just another symptom? I'm unsure. Your country was the first major secularist country in the world. You had founding fathers who were quite incredulous about the notion of God in general and of Christianity in particular. Your country was religiously diverse while remain that secular too. It seems to me that nationalism was the American illness, and Christianity one of the government's rallying points for nationalistic sentiment.

I'm still impressed you read it so quickly. — Kenosha Kid

Read, but not studied. Always been a fast reader with rather good retention. Nowadays, only one of those is still evident. (Shrug) So don’t be all that impressed.

But where did the quality of goodness come from? What makes that outcome "good"? — Kenosha Kid

Where does any human quality come from? That the human has qualities is irrefutable, so what does it matter where they come from as long as it is tacitly acknowledged they are present? There is no intrinsic contradiction is supposing the quality of good is every bit as present as the quality of altruism or empathy. If these are all present, and it is absurd to suppose they are present without objective representation....otherwise why would they be there....objective representation herein meaning simply that there is some way for them to be demonstrated, then it follows logically that they all have representations of their own.

Altruism is represented by selfless acts, empathy is represented by your “emotions and insights”, good is represented by my “moral dispositions”.

Nevertheless, I will accede to your point, in that the opening sentence of my moral bible posits an declaration even I recognize as highly tentative:

“....Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will....”. If one accepts this, the moral philosophy following from it holds. If not, then not.
——————-

System 1 is a problem-solver. There's all sorts of problems it solves that I have no consciousness of. — Kenosha Kid

Agreed, in principle. For the sake of argument, grant the validity of the faculty of sensibility. Sensibility, then, in humans, is the synthesis of sensations to intuitions, completely beyond our consciousness, synonymous with the transition from e.g., physiology of the eye to the information in the optic nerve. We are aware of none of that, from which my “understanding is the first conscious activity” arises.

on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour because there is ambiguity. — Kenosha Kid

I submit that reason must be used to determine anything of which determination is possible. Ambiguity merely regulates the certainty of the determination.

So is there an answer to “does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires?”
—————-

Whenever you see an optical illusion, you are unaware of the things your unconscious mind has done to the image before presenting it to your consciousness for consideration. — Kenosha Kid

This suggests my unconscious mind actually does something to the picture of shaded squares. Preventing me from cognizing the correct identity of the shades is something my unconscious mind can do? By extension, then, my unconscious mind has as much power as my conscious mind. I understand you may find that entirely plausible, but I reject it out of hand, for it is quite obvious the conscious mind is responsible for understanding both correctness on the one hand, and error/ error-corrections shown to it on the other.

Why couldn’t optical illusions just be an error in judgement, given from improper understanding of that which is the cause of it? We merely judge incorrectly because we have made rationalizations inconsistent with the truth. In which case, the unconscious mind is at least redundant, or at most, irrelevant.

But this is describing individuals. It does not describe objective "oughts" and "ought nots" but rather those arising from the experience of each person separately/ — Kenosha Kid

It's a bunch of small pieces of the one big objective "ought", in the same way that individual observations are only small pieces of the one big objective "is". Being only part of the total truth doesn't make something untrue or only subjectively true, and likewise things being only part of the total good doesn't make something bad or only subjectively good.

Then you're making no differentiation between an empirical fact and a belief. It is an empirical fact that something is banging on the door. Objective morality is not an empirical quantity: it cannot be detected, or verified. It is only a belief, like that there is a monster at the door. — Kenosha Kid

You're still talking about "objective morality" as though it's a descriptive, existing thing out there somewhere, like a monster, that someone might believe in, with or without evidence. That just evidences the confusion I'm trying to clear up here. You seem to place "objective reality" in the same category: that objective reality isn't the unbiased total of all possible empirical experiences, but it's some thing out there somewhere that causes all those experiences. I reject that exactly as much as I reject what you mean by "objective morality", but that's not all those words can mean, and saying it is is precisely the conflation of objectivism with transcendentalism you deny. There doesn't have to be something transcending all experience for there to be possible an objective, unbiased accounting of all experiences together.

What I can measure are my moral feelings: how I feel when I see a child in distress, or a person being attacked, etc. I have no access to any objective moral truths, but I do have access to scientific evidence that those feelings are explicable in terms of physiological drives. I have a window to see what it is that is banging on the door, and whether, knowing this, the belief is justified. — Kenosha Kid

You have "no access to any objective reality" either by those standards. You only have the small pieces you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say is looks true, looks true). Similarly, you only have the small pieces of "objective morality" you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say feels good, goods good). In both cases, objectivity just means accounting for all of those experiences together without bias.

You can never finish accounting for all of them, and you can never eliminate all bias, but if there is any possible way of measuring progress in accounting for more of them and reducing bias, then that points the way toward the concept of objectivity: what lies at the end of that process, even if it's never reachable. Saying that objectivity is possible is just saying that such a process can be conducted; and saying it's not is just saying it can't be. You clearly think it can be, and that's all that's required for objectivity. There doesn't have to be some magical invisible thing in an abstract realm acausally causing things to be moral or something bizarre like that.

That the human has qualities is irrefutable, so what does it matter where they come from as long as it is tacitly acknowledged they are present? — Mww

I acknowledge that something is present (the banging at the door). When I see an apple, feel an apple, taste an apple, even though these are all indirect ideas of an apple, I happily acknowledge that something is present. However I don't have this sense of a priori moral knowledge or of moral objective existence. I feel pain when I see someone suffering -- that pain is present. I feel glad when I help them -- that gladness is present. And the things I suggest in the OP are consistent with that.

What I reject are beliefs about where these things come from, where they exist, what values they can have, what values they must have, what qualities they have, that proceed from no data but one person's sensations and a lot of imagination. The artefacts of moral metaphysics (and I don't just mean Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, but any metaphysical origin story for my moral values) are not present like an apple is present. My feelings are.

There is no intrinsic contradiction is supposing the quality of good is every bit as present as the quality of altruism or empathy.
...
Altruism is represented by selfless acts, empathy is represented by your “emotions and insights”, good is represented by my “moral dispositions”. — Mww

An assumption of the OP is that this is not justified. The social imperatives of each individual human (bar exceptions) explain too much of why certain broad classes of acts (those that cause suffering) cause us pain and another broad class (those that reduce suffering) cause us pleasure for a separate, independent quality of good or bad to coexist. Occam's razor again: one of these things is superfluous, and by no coincidence one of these things has no empirical evidence.

If we have this social biology and we independently have a priori notions of good and evil, then there's been some crazy double-counting. We ought to be exceptionally moral with all this moral guidance. So I feel it really is a choice: follow the evidence, or stay true to beliefs.

Also, is altruism represented by selfless acts? If I think altruistic thoughts but, say, I cannot act upon them, am I no longer an altruist? Another position of the OP is that one cannot act on all possible altruistic impulses. There are too many people in our world now. I don't feel this makes people non-altruistic, just realistic and pragmatic.

System 1 is a problem-solver. There's all sorts of problems it solves that I have no consciousness of.
— Kenosha Kid

Agreed, in principle...

on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour because there is ambiguity.
— Kenosha Kid

I submit that reason must be used to determine anything of which determination is possible. — Mww

These are contradictory. If one accepts that human decisions are sometimes made unconsciously, one cannot hold that reason must be involved in every human determination.

Ambiguity merely regulates the certainty of the determination. — Mww

Prior to a determination, the correct course is necessarily ambiguous, else no determination would be necessary. There would be no problem to solve at all. If I am a dumb machine that only has one function, there is no need to determine which function to execute. Multiplicities of possible 'whats' and 'hows' are themselves ambiguities.

So is there an answer to “does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires?” — Mww

Different to problem-solving? No, I don't think so. I've been racking my brain for a counter-example (looking at a painting? teaching a class? watching a film?) and can't think of a single thing that reason does that doesn't reduce to some kind of problem to solve. There are certainly things that reason has that aren't problems to solve in themselves but are factors of problems: the evidences of our senses, our feelings. But these are inputs. The outputs are decisions.

This suggests my unconscious mind actually does something to the picture of shaded squares. — Mww

Indeed it does. The unconscious mind does a lot. It filters out unimportant noises like traffic. It interprets patterns in shapes. It shifts all the colours of what you see, if it can, such that the ambient colour is closer to white (which is why filmmakers can't use normal lightbulbs for interior shots: everything comes out yellower, because that's the actual ambient colour of your room... you can try this yourself). It gives images 3D depth (a common basis for optical illusions). It assesses body language and provokes emotions that your consciousness receives as feelings. It gives us proprioception. It turns impure notes into pure ones. It guides you to work based on pattern recognition so you don't need to think about how you get there. And all that and much more while regulating your entire body. It's a legend! The rational mind is an employee hired for solving certain problems that now thinks it's the boss!

Why couldn’t optical illusions just be an error in judgement, given from improper understanding of that which is the cause of it? — Mww

For one thing, the uniformity of the errors. If it were down to judgement, one would expect good judges and bad. For another, well, do you recall making such a judgement?

To my knowledge, innovation in tribes (without outside influence) is generally mimetic, not pedagogical, i.e. the innovator has no authority and, to boot, is not necessarily aware of why their innovation is successful (Dennett's boat builders again). I'll firm up on this in a subsequent post, but if you have counter-examples ready that'll save me the effort (laziness is my moral virtue). — Kenosha Kid

No examples contrary to this, no. It's perhaps just a little clumsiness of expression. The memetic, non-pedagogic sense you refer to is exactly the sense I mean when I say 'influence'. The fact that it's described as 'active' might be a point of confusion, perhaps? 'Active' here just means that the influence is directed toward an activity - person A (our influencer) thinks of some activity, and the resultant culture eventually contains that same activity, albeit my gradual adoption. There's a famous example of a chimp who put a blade of grass in her ear, within a few years, all the other chimps in her band were doing it.

'Passive' influence here does not mean non-pedagogic, it means undirected, where the resultant activity is not the thought of any individual at all, the theory is that it emerges as a result of a series of mistakes attempting to copy an 'active' influence.

Boehm's modal dominance seems reasonable to me, and he seems to think that a biological basis is the consensus. But, even though human groups have mostly been small, we may have evolved from large precursor species groups, so it's not a given that, if there is a biological basis for dominance, it is particularly for dominance of the group over the individual. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, I think it's very much still an open question. there's a ton of fascinating research on the possible origins of our moral sense. I've read stuff about pair-bonding, group size, language-use, co-operative hunting, rapid environmental change, even monogamous mating. For me the only key elements I have as my foundation are that it has to be pre-human (Frans deWaal's work on primates and Sapolsky's peaceful baboons seem compelling evidence to me that pro-social behaviour is pre-human), and it has to be largely culturally mediated - by which I mean learnt through childhood, with perhaps some limits and constraints set by evolved predispositions.

I think philosophically, as far as meta-ethics is concerned, those limits and constraints are key, because they explain the otherwise suspicious degree of homogeneity in our moral sentiments. As far as actual morality is concerned, however, I think they drop out of significance. I think we still (just like we did in small hunter-gatherer groups) don't have to discuss issues outside of those parameters, no one is even considering them (in a moral sense) in the same way as we don't have to discuss whether the bridge is 'real' before we cross it. It's just not something we doubt. The interesting bit of morality is the culturally mediated bit. That, I think, would have been less the case in pre-agricultural times, not because they relied more on the defaults, but because there was only one culture to learn from, there was a strong line of non-pedagogic influence (mixed ages), a relatively stable environment, small group sizes (minimising Chinese whisper effects), no strong advantage to selfishness, no virtual social groups (which are too easy to manipulate).

I’m not starting from the “is” that is the description of those people’s experiences, but from the “oughts” those experiences directly give rise to in those people. — Pfhorrest

Given that it is secondary information, it becomes an 'is'. You can have a feeling that something 'ought' to be the case. That someone else thinks something 'ought' to be the case is, to you, a fact about the external world. Whether that fact (about what someone else thinks/feels) should affect how you think/feel remains an open question.

Every experience someone has that feels bad to them, i.e. that hurts them — not their emotional or cognitive judgement of the morality of something they perceive, but the immediate experience of a bad sensation, where the sensation itself conveys its own badness, i.e. pain etc — take that to be bad (an “ought not”), as it seems to be, and add that to the list of things that are bad (a bunch of “ought nots”), which then demarcates the boundaries of what still might be good (“maybe ought”). — Pfhorrest

You're still conflating 'bad' (in the sense of pain, negative hedonic feelings) with 'ought not', and this is the equivalence which people are arguing is unjustified. Not all matters that people think ought not to be the case are related to immediate hedonic sensations, even of themselves, certainly not of others.

Using the approach you set out above, what you would have is a list of things which feel bad to you (things you'd rather were not done to you) and a list of things which would feel bad to you were you in the same shoes as the person you're considering. That list is a fact about the world.

Now - why ought I not cause any of the things on that list?

It's a bunch of small pieces of the one big objective "ought", in the same way that individual observations are only small pieces of the one big objective "is". — Pfhorrest

Individual observations do not speak to the efficacy of a belief in an objective reality. Is the the regularity, the predictability that suggests such a thing. There is no equivalent thing in morality.

You have "no access to any objective reality" either by those standards. You only have the small pieces you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say is looks true, looks true). Similarly, you only have the small pieces of "objective morality" you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say feels good, goods good). In both cases, objectivity just means accounting for all of those experiences together without bias. — Pfhorrest

I can learn about my ideas of an objective reality by checking (observing the same phenomenon again), by consensus (observing agreement or disagreement with others), and by generalising (observing new phenomena). Doing this iteratively reinforces the assumption of an objective reality without truly necessitating one.

To generalise this to morality, it is insufficient to simply say: "Objective reality of external phenomena has been well justified, so we're safe to apply the same assumptions to morality." You need to infer an objective moral reality in the same way. But when I check my moral values, I do not see the same consistency. I do not react the same way in similar situations each time. I do not find that I generally agree with others who have been in the same situations. And I do not find that learning not to hit people gives me an automatic knowledge of the morality of horn-tooting douchebags. It seems in all respects a subjective, irregular phenomenon, and the assumption of objectivity is not supported.

That just evidences the confusion I'm trying to clear up here. You seem to place "objective reality" in the same category: that objective reality isn't the unbiased total of all possible empirical experiences, but it's some thing out there somewhere that causes all those experiences. — Pfhorrest

That is accurate, and I believe it is justified for the above reason. By "out there somewhere", I mean independent of our observations of and beliefs about it, i.e. independent of subjective experience. I think this is an uncontroversial definition of "objective" but I can see that we have meant different things by "objective reality".

If it is your belief in your objectivism that, had no conscious entities every existed in the universe then the universe would not exist, then yes we are defining "objective" and "transcendental" in opposite and incompatible ways. If you believe that the universe pre-existed conscious experience of it, then you too believe that the universe has an objective (independent of subjective experience) existence. There is an analogue here in the OP: the non-teleological natural selection of characteristics that underlie our moral conceptions also pre-existed them. They are the objective (independent of those conceptions) reality of those conceptions. To the extent that the latter are not good approximations of the former, those conceptions do not themselves have an objective existence.

I do not consider the objective universe to be defined by the sum total of our experiences of it, but rather the latter is merely our best knowledge of the former. As I have said before, models, including mental models, merely approximate aspects of reality. You cannot derive the objective thing itself from those models.

it is insufficient to simply say: "Objective reality of external phenomena has been well justified, so we're safe to apply the same assumptions to morality." You need to infer an objective moral reality in the same way. But when I check my moral values, I do not see the same consistency. I do not react the same way in similar situations each time. I do not find that I generally agree with others who have been in the same situations. And I do not find that learning not to hit people gives me an automatic knowledge of the morality of horn-tooting douchebags. It seems in all respects a subjective, irregular phenomenon, and the assumption of objectivity is not supported. — Kenosha Kid

I completely agree with your analysis here

It's important to distinguish, though, between the correct identification of a thing and the correct prediction of its function. The former is just a question of language. "Is the thing in front of me really a keyboard?", just means "Am I using the word 'keyboard' correctly?". The question "will this thing in front of me make corresponding letters appear on my computer screen?" is a question about predictable responses of the world to my interactions with it.

A lot of the confusion about objective morality seems to me to be of the former type "what is 'morally good'?". That just dissolves to a question about whether we're using the words 'morally good' correctly. When someone says that a cold-blooded murder is morally good, the appropriate response is "No, you're not using the words correctly, that's not the sort of thing we call 'morally good'". It's no different to when a child uses 'red' to refer to something 'green'. We just correct them. We don't argue about what 'red' really is.

Moral arguments of the second type are about what we expect behaviours to result in. If I cold-bloodedly murder someone, I expect a different response from the world than if I give money to the homeless. It's only in this second sense in which it even makes sense to ask if morality is objective. Your comment above shows that it almost certainly isn't, but I don't think most of the discussion about morality has even got to that point yet, I think it's still stuck at the first stage where we should be talking about language, but instead we're talking about platonic forms.

I acknowledge that something is present (the banging at the door). When I see an apple, feel an apple, taste an apple, even though these are all indirect ideas of an apple, I happily acknowledge that something is present. — Kenosha Kid

No doubt. All that is the empirical mode of perception. That altruism, empathy, and good...justice, beauty, liberty, etc., are not detected by the senses, even if objects of them are, indicates some other mode of presence must be possible.

I feel pain when I see someone suffering -- that pain is present. I feel glad when I help them -- that gladness is present. — Kenosha Kid

And there it is. A different mode of presence. In addition to the empirical mode given to your senses by the person, the person also presents to your rational mode some activity of his that elicits a feeling in you not given by the person as an object, but by what the person is doing.

However I don't have this sense of a priori moral knowledge or of moral objective existence. — Kenosha Kid

Dunno about a sense of qua feeling or emotion, but anything a priori is absent any and all matters of experience. From that, any cognition resulting from the conjoining of conceptions is thought only, hence a priori. If the conceptions represent moral ideas or notions, the cognitions have moral explication. I am certainly conscious of my own cognitions, hence my moral cognitions represent my moral knowledge. Or, if you wish, knowledge of moral consciousness.

On the other hand, if I exhibit an action, such action is a physical manifestation in the world, hence has objective existence, with myself as causality for it. Anyone can observe the object of my action. If that action has been determined by my lawfully deterministic will, it is a moral action. And indeed, possibly an immoral one.

Thus, particular moral objective existence is given, but that does not grant moral objective existence in general, as a condition found in the world independent of moral agency.
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on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour.......
— Kenosha Kid

I submit that reason must be used to determine anything.....
— Mww

These are contradictory. If one accepts that human decisions are sometimes made unconsciously, one cannot hold that reason must be involved in every human determination. — Kenosha Kid

Not a contradiction, but a confusion of source: reason used to determine moral things, reason used to determine all things........unconscious decisions. Again, determinations are judgements, of which we are always conscious, but when a decision is from the unconscious mind, it is not a proper judgement. I remember saying not too long ago, reason is not used for whatever happens unconsciously.
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So is there an answer to “does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires?”
— Mww

Different to problem-solving? No, I don't think so. — Kenosha Kid

Ok. Are there different kinds of problems?

There are certainly things that reason has that aren't problems to solve in themselves but are factors of problems — Kenosha Kid

Reason, the method, has things of a sort, yes: intuition, conception, understanding, judgement, cognition, and finally, knowledge. I wouldn’t call those factors of problems. Factored into problem solving, perhaps? Still leaves room for different kinds of problems, which hints at a different kind of reason.
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The rational mind is an employee hired for solving certain problems that now thinks it's the boss! — Kenosha Kid

Odd, isn’t it? That reasoning is absolutely necessary as causality for the idea of solving the problem of rationality? So the unconscious mind is responsible for all sorts of stuff of which our conscious selves have no clue. Ok, fine. That still leaves rationality fully in charge of that of which we are conscious. As far as I can see, the unconscious mind is a trickster, seeking to unseat the unwary. My unconscious mind is not the me I know, so if it causes errors in me, then the rational mind I know should be the boss. At least then, I’d know exactly who to blame.

That someone else thinks something 'ought' to be the case is, to you, a fact about the external world. — Isaac

That they think it is an “is”, but the thing they think is an “ought”. I’m talking about either replicating their own experience to get your own copy of their same “ought” if you doubt their claim, or else just accepting their “ought” claim on its face if you can’t be bothered and just want to trust them. At no point are we to take a step back and talk about the “is” fact that they hold that “ought” opinion; we stick to the “ought” opinions themselves.

Not all matters that people think ought not to be the case are related to immediate hedonic sensations, even of themselves, certainly not of others. — Isaac

And not all “is” claims about reality relate to empirical observables either. I’m saying precisely that both of those are problematic kinds of opinion, because they lead to irreconcilable differences, baseless claims that nobody can reasonably interrogate, having instead to just take someone’s word for it or not. I’m saying that regarding both “is” questions and “ought” questions, we would do best to concern ourselves only with possible answers that we can test against our experiences: empirical in the former case, hedonic in the latter.

You keep conflating the moral equivalent of perception with the moral equivalent of sensation, missing the point that I’m saying precisely to disregard the former for the latter, because the former is only a fallible, subjective interpretation of the latter. What you’re saying is like arguing that someone who looks at the order of the natural world and sees it as evidence of intelligent design has “empirically observed God”. That’s not an empirical observation, it’s an interpretation of them.

Likewise, seeing some people doing some stuff and passing moral judgement on them isn’t a direct experience of something “seeming bad” the way that pain is. That’s an interpretation, a “moral perception”. It remains an open question whether that interpretation is really an accurate model of all the “moral sensations” involved, exactly like it remains an open question whether the perception of intelligent design is an accurate interpretation of all the sensations (observations) involved.

Individual observations do not speak to the efficacy of a belief in an objective reality. — Kenosha Kid

Every individual observation rules out some possibilities about what might be objectively real. An account of objective reality has to account for every single observation, otherwise it’s not actually objective.

It kind of sounds like you’re implying confirmationism here, that enough observations can prove something to be true, rather than the falsificationist view that anything might be true that has not yet been observed false. If you’re likewise thinking of objective morality that same way, thinking I’m talking about proving that certain things are always good, then maybe there’s the problem. I’m not, regarding either reality or morality.

There being an objective reality means that something can be actually false, not just disbelieved; and there being an objective morality means that something can be actually bad, not just disliked. Neither means that you can ever prove anything to be true or good in all circumstances and beyond all doubt. Just that there is some unbiased standard against which to judge and weed out things that we can tell are false, or bad.

I am afraid I did not make myself clear about why we can not trust what we believe is true. I was talking about how our brains work, not what people believe. I think it might be important to begin with how our brains work before we argue what we believe. I think in general, humans have an unrealistic belief about the power of our brains.

Yes, Anglicanism is not what Christianity once was. (Worth remembering that Christianity was the moral revolution of altruism and empathy, until it itself acquired might.) Do you believe Christianity to be the chief cause rather than just another symptom? I'm unsure. Your country was the first major secularist country in the world. You had founding fathers who were quite incredulous about the notion of God in general and of Christianity in particular. Your country was religiously diverse while remain that secular too. It seems to me that nationalism was the American illness, and Christianity one of the government's rallying points for nationalistic sentiment. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, I believe the God of Abraham religions are the chief cause of some of our most serious problems because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam mean living with false beliefs and not science. To be fair, our potential to do better is rather new to us. Not that long ago we did not have the science to do better. Unfortunately, now that we have the science to do better, we are not making the progress we could make because so many people's heads are full of false beliefs and they would rather kill than change their beliefs.

I wish our understanding of democracy was tied to the ancient Greeks and Romans, instead of talking about it as though it started with America. Then we would have a better understanding of what science has to do with our liberty and morality and the wild idea that democracy is good for humanity. Wild idea that democracy is better than religion and dependency on a king who is the human being closest to God. Our democracy in the control of Christians, and the Christian mythology about democracy coming from Christianity, prevents us from correcting our wrongs and has created us as an immoral and hated nation.

The relationship we have with Christianity now is a terrible perversion of both Christianity and democracy and this follows replacing liberal education with education for technology. You are correct about the problem. So many evils have followed the change in education. The Christianity we have now is not the same as Christianity with education in the Greek and Roman classics. When it was tied to the Greek and Roman classics it could support democracy instead of pervert it. Bottom line, it is not Christians who gave us democracy!

Read, but not studied. — Mww

That is the difference between slow thinking and fast thinking.

What I reject are beliefs about where these things come from, where they exist, what values they can have, what values they must have, what qualities they have, that proceed from no data but one person's sensations and a lot of imagination. The artefacts of moral metaphysics (and I don't just mean Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, but any metaphysical origin story for my moral values) are not present like an apple is present. My feelings are. — Kenosha Kid

My notions of our morality are based on science and the study of both animals and humans. If our morality has a metaphysical origin than that is true of animals as well. Our morals are present like an apple is present when we use science to understand them.

hedonic sensations, — Isaac

What is that? A hedonic sensation? Looks like an added on judgment call that maybe should not be there? Our sensations are the same as other animals.

I looked up hedonic and I am shooked by this Puritanical understanding of being human and the lack of historical correctness.

hedonistic. A hedonistic person is committed to seeking sensual pleasure — the type of guy you might find in a massage parlor or at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

True hedonism is about avoiding pain and feeling good, but it is also directly associated with making good moral decisions because if we make a bad moral decision, that will lead to pain. It would not be a bad moral decision if the consequence was not bad. A moral is a matter of cause and effect, and as Cicero said, no prayers, rituals, burning of candles, or animal sacrifices will change the consequences of doing the wrong thing.

The interesting bit of morality is the culturally mediated bit. That, I think, would have been less the case in pre-agricultural times, not because they relied more on the defaults, but because there was only one culture to learn from, there was a strong line of non-pedagogic influence (mixed ages), a relatively stable environment, small group sizes (minimising Chinese whisper effects), no strong advantage to selfishness, no virtual social groups (which are too easy to manipulate). — Isaac

Yes, I agree: homogenous socialisation is a necessary condition for unambiguous social behaviour, and small group sizes is a necessary condition for homogenous socialisation. Historically, since we were small tribes, it is possible for nature to select on the basis of that, even if homogenous socialisation itself were an emergent effect rather than a genetic bias in its own right.

However we do have to factor in that small social groups appears to have been preferred through our history, prior to the advent of agriculture. Unlike baboons, we did not naturally expand in group size. As with the all of these matters, the real question is: why the uniformity?

For me the only key elements I have as my foundation are that it has to be pre-human (Frans deWaal's work on primates and Sapolsky's peaceful baboons seem compelling evidence to me that pro-social behaviour is pre-human), and it has to be largely culturally mediated - by which I mean learnt through childhood, with perhaps some limits and constraints set by evolved predispositions. — Isaac

Yes, I think most of our individual social drives are pre-human. Like I said in the OP, we inherit from our social ancestors... and our presocial ones. But humans are still uniquely ultracooperative (unique among mammals). There is, either by combination, circumstance, cultural innovation, or genetic innovation, something longstanding within us that makes us more inclined to high levels of cooperation within social groups. Having a single joint goal, such as in hunting, between so many individuals is unique. Part of this is likely mental capacity, but part must come from a higher confidence that members of your group think as you do, and members who do not are identifiable on the whole -- i.e. greater empathy. This goes well beyond the social behaviours of primates for me.

The more I think about it, while I do think culture is extremely important, 100,000 years of seemingly stable, small group sizes seems too long to have a generic cultural explanation. Cultural timescales are expected to be much, much smaller. The point of Chinese whispers is that it changes, but we didn't seem to change in this respect until 12,000 years ago. It begs the question: what kept those aspects of culture constant and uniform over so much time and so many different, disparate social groups?

When someone says that a cold-blooded murder is morally good, the appropriate response is "No, you're not using the words correctly, that's not the sort of thing we call 'morally good'". — Isaac

Yes, that is a logical error. The person in question is already speaking of objective moral truths not their own feelings ("I like hurting people" -- Mary Bell). While a belief that murder is objectively bad is understandable, a belief that it is objectively good makes no sense.

I was talking about how our brains work, not what people believe. — Athena

Ok. I’ll be long past needing a brain, by the time anybody figures out how it works.
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Read, but not studied.
— Mww

That is the difference between slow thinking and fast thinking. — Athena

Ok. I rather think the difference between reading and studying isn’t the speed of the thinking, but the quality of the comprehension.

I’m talking about either replicating their own experience to get your own copy of their same “ought” if you doubt their claim, or else just accepting their “ought” claim on its face if you can’t be bothered and just want to trust them. At no point are we to take a step back and talk about the “is” fact that they hold that “ought” opinion; we stick to the “ought” opinions themselves. — Pfhorrest

But an 'ought' is a feeling that some state of affairs should be the case. It's an emotional response to an imagined state of affair (in the case of a positive 'ought'), or to a state of affairs one dislikes (in the case of a negative 'ought not'). You can't literally 'have' that feeling, it makes no sense. You have the feeling you have towards the state of affairs in question. If someone else has a different feeling the most you can do is know this as a fact. If I like vanilla ice-cream, I can know others like chocolate, but I can't just will myself to feel that way, I can only know it, as a fact about other people.

I’m saying that regarding both “is” questions and “ought” questions, we would do best to concern ourselves only with possible answers that we can test against our experiences: empirical in the former case, hedonic in the latter. — Pfhorrest

Well then you're already not talking about morality. As I've said before, morality is already a word. You can't just say it shouldn't mean what it does, it's like me saying we shouldn't use the word dog to refer to canines but instead should call them cats, it makes no sense. The topic here is morality. Morality is a word we apply to a range of behaviours, character traits and intentions. What @Kenosha Kid has given an account of is the origin and function of those cultural aspects. If you're not addressing those, but rather are addressing only that which makes us feel immediately good or bad, then you're talking about hedonism, not morality.

seeing some people doing some stuff and passing moral judgement on them isn’t a direct experience of something “seeming bad” the way that pain is. — Pfhorrest

Yes it is. 'Seeming bad' in moral terms often just is the fact that my culture disapproves of that behaviour, so observing them doing that very disapproval is as direct evidence as I'm ever going to get. The way I learnt to use the word 'tree' was by seeing people use the word in reference to the large woody plant, the fact that I learnt it by observing the behaviour of others rather than directly 'feeling' the relationship myself doesn't make the word's meaning too vague and fallible to make use of, we all get by perfectly fine using it despite the fact that we all learnt it that way.

Again, you seem to be just replacing actual morality with something else, you're not coming up with a theory of morality, you're saying "Ignore morality, I've a theory about empathetic responses to pain instead, it's a lot easier". Well, yeah. It is a lot easier, and I agree that is exactly how we identify what will hurt others - put ourselves in their shoes and imagine if it would hurt us. But that's not what morality is about.

As with the all of these matters, the real question is: why the uniformity? — Kenosha Kid

Yes. again, I'd be tempted to look to cultural reasons. We have a limited capacity to reliably remember the trust status of individuals (the infamous 150 person limit - a bit of an urban myth, but with some basis in actual psychology). Group dynamics which rely on trust - prisoner's dilemma games - cannot exceed this limit and still function. If I can't remember whether you co-operated or cheated last time I interacted with you, I can't use my 'wary trust' tactic in our interactions. For groups which don't use those tactic anyway, they don't need to worry about size limits (though they are limited by other factors).

The more I think about it, while I do think culture is extremely important, 100,000 years of seemingly stable, small group sizes seems too long to have a generic cultural explanation. Cultural timescales are expected to be much, much smaller. — Kenosha Kid

I don't think so. It's difficult to prove this without begging the question. we don't, at first, know what behaviours are culturally mediated and which are biologically inherited (limited work on feral children gives us some idea, but that, if anything, points to virtually everything pro-social being cultural). Given this difficulty, we can't point to any example cultural practices (as opposed to biological ones) and say "look, see how short-lived these are" because we don't know whether they represent all cultural practices or just some short-lived subset.

The point of Chinese whispers is that it changes, but we didn't seem to change in this respect until 12,000 years ago. — Kenosha Kid

But we did. cultural practices varied enormously according the what little evidence we have from archaeology. If you take modern tribes to be a proxy for our past (a very tentative exercise, but useful her I think) cultural practices vary widely. It's just that certain key practices are constant - egalitarianism, autonomy, mutuality. I don't think the mere length of time is sufficient to say these common practices must have some other source, only that some practices are vulnerable to rapid divergence, whereas other converge. Where I do agree with you is that this convergence needs to explained, and it needs to be explained in a way which tallies with its demise over the previous ten thousand years. I just think that environmental changes (agriculture, settlement, globalisation) are reasonable contenders, which means that environmental stability could equally be an explanation for the stability we see over the previous 100,000 years. It need not be that some practices are hard-wired, it might be that some practices are more vulnerable to environmental changes than others.

I don't want any of this to undermine the broad level of agreement we have though, because I think your point about the biological origins of moral feeling is very important. The fact that I see them more as parameters or tools, where you see them perhaps more as urges, I think is actually less important here than acknowledging that they are the biological source of our feelings, but that they are insufficient alone to maintain an egalitarian, autonomous and mutual culture.

No doubt. All that is the empirical mode of perception. That altruism, empathy, and good...justice, beauty, liberty, etc., are not detected by the senses, even if objects of them are, indicates some other mode of presence must be possible. — Mww

But my point was that something is present to my consciousness, just not anything like a priori knowledge. It is not a rational thing present, but emotions and attention biases. I am presented with a vision of a child in danger, and senses of panic, distress, focus, and urgency. I am not presented with some voice or inter-title: "One ought to help the child."

And there it is. A different mode of presence. In addition to the empirical mode given to your senses by the person, the person also presents to your rational mode some activity of his that elicits a feeling in you not given by the person as an object, but by what the person is doing. — Mww

Of course! As per the OP, we are in an environment in which moral actions must be rationalised. But my consciousness being presented with moral drives is not the same thing as my reason having their essence.

Dunno about a sense of qua feeling or emotion, but anything a priori is absent any and all matters of experience. From that, any cognition resulting from the conjoining of conceptions is thought only, hence a priori. — Mww

This is the old-fashioned rationalism I reject. There is a very real analogue to this in our physiological responses that can bias us in a given direction, and the empirically-verified existence of these negates the need for other sources of moral knowledge. But this is not "knowledge" in itself.

Anyone can observe the object of my action. If that action has been determined by my lawfully deterministic will, it is a moral action. And indeed, possibly an immoral one. — Mww

I just knew you had a dark side :rofl: For sure, moral actions are objective. I either did it, or I didn't: that is a matter of fact rather than pathological. But those rational decisions are still based on not a priori knowledge but unconscious reactions to stimuli (whose results are inputs to our rational decisions). Good is pre-determined for the conscious mind: it is left with the question of whether to act on it, what the desired outcome is, and how that desired outcome is best realised. These are all issues of ambiguity based on an already-provided notion of good, or a real, social analogue to it.

Not a contradiction, but a confusion of source: reason used to determine moral things, reason used to determine all things........unconscious decisions. — Mww

My first quote was wrong. Never mind. Point being if you accept that some decisions are not made rationally (and I think the current consensus is this is all but a few percent of human decisions), it cannot follow that a moral decision has to be rational. It may be, and is for most of us today, but needn't have been in the past.

Are there different kinds of problems? — Mww

Sure.

I wouldn’t call those factors of problems. Factored into problem solving, perhaps? — Mww

Yeah, 'twas what I meant.

That still leaves rationality fully in charge of that of which we are conscious. — Mww

Yes, except the conscious mind is also a very bad quality-checker of unconscious decisions, as per the (typical reaction to the) bat & ball problem. So not everything the rational mind thinks it is in charge of either.

My unconscious mind is not the me I know, so if it causes errors in me, then the rational mind I know should be the boss. — Mww

According to the conscious mind, which does think it's the boss. It's a scary thought, isn't it: we are mostly not the thing we think of as 'I'. This is why psychology is illuminating: we learn things about ourselves, otherwise no one would bother with psychologists.

And that's just the brain. Don't even start thinking about how we are colonies of bacteria in an awesome self-aware organic landcraft. :joke:

Every individual observation rules out some possibilities about what might be objectively real. An account of objective reality has to account for every single observation, otherwise it’s not actually objective. — Pfhorrest

And that's the point. Objective nature is inferred from generalisation, not a single data point.

It kind of sounds like you’re implying confirmationism here, that enough observations can prove something to be true, rather than the falsificationist view that anything might be true that has not yet been observed false. — Pfhorrest

I have repeatedly said quite the opposite of this, that the existence of an objective reality is the best and simplest explanation for empirical facts, but it is by no means proven, rather than a better or simpler explanation is not forthcoming. This is not the case for morality, where the existence of objective moral truths is an neither accurate of our experiences nor the simplest explanation for them.

There being an objective reality means that something can be actually false, not just disbelieved; and there being an objective morality means that something can be actually bad, not just disliked. — Pfhorrest

Indeed, not just true or false for each person individually but "out there". And what is compelling about science is that laws hold as if they were true, not just believed ("The great thing about facts is...") That is, you can present empirical evidence to someone with a belief and show them that that belief is credible or not. You cannot do this with morality. If someone disagrees with me, there's no means by which I can refer to a fact that makes one of our beliefs incredible.

If I believe it is better to give to charities in Africa than in Britain, and my friend believes that it is wrong to ignore misery on one's own doorstep in favour of classier 'TV' charities abroad, I might refer to facts of efficacy (my charity has achieved more change than his) or statistics, but I have no recourse to a piece of evidence that says one of us has a more compelling case. Assuming the existence of such inaccessible source of truth cannot be justified. Assuming the existence of, say, gravity can be, even if the objective truth about gravity is very different from our theories.