Thanks for this. I found this paper on non-descriptive cognitivism, which I have yet to get all the way through (but will). I just need a dictionary handy while I do. :p

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/factual/papers/HorganNondescriptive.html

Does this describe your beliefs? I'd love to hear more. — Avery

Thank you for finding that. I think that is the one article on the topic that I ran across once and never had time to read more than a bit of. My own views are all home-brewed, but if this is the article I think it is I think it’s similar to mine. I’ll have to find time to read it in detail. (Meanwhile if you mean you’d like to hear more about my beliefs specifically, there is a recent thread I started on metaethics that’s all about my views, if you want to respond over there.)

Yes precisely. I actually break up normalized ethics into two separate fields, analogous to ontology and epistemological, and I call the field that’s analogous to epistemology “deontology”, partly because it has so much in common with Kantian ethics.

It's confusions like this that caused me to stop using the word "moral" altogether in most speech (unless I'm describing what I don't believe in). — Avery

I don't know - I've been trying to do just that for many years...I think communication has improved a lot as a result! — Avery

Communication is all about mutual understanding. Being able to reduce an informal concept in some chosen scientific framework is not a requirement for communication. Do you avoid using the word "chair" just because defining "chair" in chemistry or quantum physics would be hellishly difficult?

Just because the informal concept of morality is not easy to characterize in the framework of neuroscience, for example, doesn't mean it is problematic in other contexts. I think "morality" is actually one of the less problematic words: even when we don't agree on what's right and what's wrong, there is little disagreement on which questions belong in the moral category in the first place.

Ahhh....so it is a school.

Wonder what the attendance is.....

It's confusions like this that have caused me to stop using the word "moral" altogether in most speech — Avery
Yes, I can sympathise with that, but I think if one were to avoid using words whose definition consisted of loose, fuzzy collections of properties one would quickly run out of words! — Isaac

Yes and that would be a god thing; people would start discussing and thinking about what is real rather than getting lost in fantasy.

Hey, thank you for your response!

“ Do you avoid using the word "chair" just because defining "chair" in chemistry or quantum physics would be hellishly difficult?”

If it was a common point of misunderstanding, yeah totally! :p At least this is why I started doing it for other words.

If you look back through this thread, I think there are some good examples of confusions which have been avoided by asking for things to be clarified using different words.

“ even when we don't agree on what's right and what's wrong, there is little disagreement on which questions belong in the moral category in the first place.”

Would you mind saying this another way? I’d love to response, but I want to make sure I know what you mean here.

Ok. What do you call the ethical field analogous to 'ontology'?

These two points are enough to show that an exhaustive and objective analysis of all the implications of our actions is not something upon which we can based our decisions. — Olivier5

Absolutely. So what does knowing what we can’t do, tell us about what we can?

So your want to discard concepts or notions that are not based on observation, and only those ones. Seems like a good idea, like a plumber who would discard a broken tool...

I like this plumber-based philosophy! :p <3

Hey, it's just an analogy, not a basis. :-)

Like a plumber comparing tools. I like it!

So what does knowing what we can’t do, tell us about what we can? — Mww

We can try and reduce, or otherwise deal with our own ambiguities. Ambiguity is the stuff of philosophy and singularly ethics, and you find it everywhere and in me as well. But we're not obliged to wallow in it. When called upon by others we should try and be more honest and transparent with ourselves and others.

About incomplete information, we can use trial-and-error: make reversible choices, if they work you keep on, if they don't you backtrack. Sometimes you have to make an irreversible choice though, and that's when you think about it real hard.

“Teleology”, in the sense of “teleological ethics”, a synonym for “consequentialism”. Because while deontology is about just means, this is about good ends, which I think are both equally important questions. Ontology and teleology are about the “objects” of reality and morality respectively, while epistemology and deontology are about the “methods” of knowledge and justice respectively.

Okay. Pretty coherent system. Sorry to have misunderstood you. Where can I read more?

Howdy! I’d still love to hear from you about this, if you have time:

“ Which is almost (next to only nihilism) the least defensible position on morality there can be.”

I’m pretty sure moral nihilism describes what I believe. Why would you say it’s the least defensive position on morality?

In short, because moral nihilism amounts to just assuming that moral questions are unanswerable out of the gate, and merely not even trying to answer them.

I object to all nihilism on the pragmatic grounds that if such nihilism is true, then by its nature it cannot be known to be true, because to know it to be true we would need some means of objectively evaluating claims, so as to justifiably rule all such claims to be false. But the inability to make such objective evaluations is precisely what such a nihilistic position claims; at most, the nihilist can express their opinion that nihilism is true, but to be consistent, must agree to disagree with anyone whose opinion differs about that. In the absence of such a means of objective evaluation, it nevertheless remains an open possibility that nothing is moral. But we could only ever assume such an opinion as baselessly as nihilism would hold every other opinion to be held.

In the strictest sense, I agree that there might not be anything moral at all. But all we could do in that case is one of two things. We could either baselessly assume that there is nothing moral at all, and stop there, simply giving up any hope of ever finding out if we were wrong in that baseless assumption. Or else, instead, we could baselessly assume that there is something moral — as there certainly inevitably seems to be, since even if you deny their objectivity some things will still seem good or bad to you — and then proceed with the long hard work of figuring out what seems most likely to be moral, by attending closely and thoroughly to those seemings, those experiences.

But note that I am not saying to take any particular answer on faith. I am saying only to trust that there are some answers or others to be found to all such questions, even if we haven't found them yet. I am not even saying that any such answers definitely will ever be found. I'm not saying that success in the endeavor of inquiry is guaranteed, just to always assume that it is possible rather than (just as baselessly) assuming that it is impossible. I am only saying that we stand a much better chance of getting closer to finding answers, if anything like that should turn out to be possible, if we try to find them, proceeding as though we assume that there is something to be found, than if we just assume that there is not, and don't even try.

Ambiguity is the stuff of philosophy and singularly ethics..... — Olivier5

Ok. Thanks.

Thank you for responding!

Some responses to what you wrote:

I object to all nihilism on the pragmatic grounds that if such nihilism is true, then by its nature it cannot be known to be true, because to know it to be true we would need some means of objectively evaluating claims, so as to justifiably rule all such claims to be false. — Pfhorrest

I understand what you are saying here - I really do, and it's a very interesting way of framing the problem.

But I believe it may be based on a flawed assumption, which is that a moral nihilist would claim to know for a fact that objective morals aren't real.

If, instead, someone were to just say that they "believe" that moral facts don't exist, then it side-steps the issue. A means of objective evaluation is not necessary for it to be true that someone believes something.

In short, because moral nihilism amounts to just assuming that moral questions are unanswerable out of the gate, and merely not even trying to answer them. — Pfhorrest

I don't think this...makes sense...Let me rephrase it to illustrate what I mean:

"In short, because moral nihilism amounts to just assuming that floopblorp questions are unanswerable out of the gate, and merely not even trying to answer them."

if I'm walking along, and someone walks up and tells me that floopblorp is the key to understanding the universe, I'm going to be super interested! And I'm also going to need some evidence that floopblorp is real.

And similarly, I'm going to need some evidence that objective morals are real. Moral nihilism is just the position of the person saying "Wait - No one's shown good evidence that they are real yet."

We could either baselessly assume that there is nothing moral at all, and stop there, simply giving up any hope of ever finding out if we were wrong in that baseless assumption. Or else, instead, we could baselessly assume that there is something moral — as there certainly inevitably seems to be, since even if you deny their objectivity some things will still seem good or bad to you — and then proceed with the long hard work of figuring out what seems most likely to be moral, by attending closely and thoroughly to those seemings, those experiences. — Pfhorrest

Let me edit this to substitute floopblorp again:

"We could either baselessly assume that there is nothing floopblorp at all, and stop there, simply giving up any hope of ever finding out if we were wrong in that baseless assumption. Or else, instead, we could baselessly assume that there is something floopblorp — as there certainly inevitably seems to be, since even if you deny their objectivity some things will still seem floop or blorp to me — and then proceed with the long hard work of figuring out what seems most likely to be floopblorp, by attending closely and thoroughly to those seemings, those experiences."

Wait wait wait. No one has given evidence that floopblorp even exists yet!

It's not baseless to say that an unevidenced argument is unevidenced. So this:

"We could either baselessly assume that there is nothing floopblorp at all"

...is a straw man. It purports that moral nihilists are making one unproven claim, and moral realists are making another unproven claim. But that's not true. Realists are making one claim, and nihilists are saying that claim is unsubstantiated.

And if you disagree, then I await your thesis on the existence or nonexistence of floopblorp. Because it seems obvious that some things seem floop while other things seem blorp. So we could either not try to answer floopblorp questions at all, or we could get to work!

If, instead, someone were to just say that they "believe" that moral facts don't exist, then it side-steps the issue. A means of objective evaluation is not necessary for it to be true that someone believes something. — Avery

That's why right after that I wrote "at most, the nihilist can express their opinion that nihilism is true, but to be consistent, must agree to disagree with anyone whose opinion differs about that".

That's why it's tantamount to just bowing out of moral discourse entirely. Other people are talking about moral issues and trying to figure out what is or isn't moral in this or that context, and you say you don't think anything is or isn't moral in any context. They ask why not, and you admit that you can't prove it, that it's just your opinion. So they shrug, state that it's not their opinion, and go about as they were.

And I'm also going to need some evidence that floopblorp is real. — Avery

Moral questions aren't necessarily about what is or isn't real. Some people think that moral answers have to be grounded in some kind of facts about reality, but you and I both already disagree with them. That doesn't make the questions meaningless. It makes that kind of justification for answers a poor justification.

Do some people murder other people? I'm betting you'll say yes, 'cause they do.

Ought those people murder other people? I'm betting, as you say you're not a psychopath, that you'll say something to the effect of "no", except you'll try some circuitous way of rephrasing the "ought" question into an "is" question.

But there's no getting around that this is a fundamentally different kind of question than the first. They're both about the same state of affairs: people murdering people. So why aren't they exactly the same question? Because one is asking whether that state of affairs is real, whether it is the case that some people murder other people, and the other is asking whether that state of affairs is moral, whether it ought to be the case that some people murder other people.

Asking whether something or another ought to be the case isn't asking anything at all about whether or not anything is the case; so likewise, a claim that something ought (or oughtn't) be the case, has no implications about what is (or isn't) the case. Saying "things ought to be this way" isn't making any claim at all about the way things are, so asking for proof that something "is real" is a complete non-sequitur, because nobody was claiming anything was or wasn't real. They're not even trying to describe reality at all. People can do other things with words than describe the world.

If you just refuse to answer that kind of question, by always twisting every attempt to ask it into a different kind of question entirely, then you're... just refusing to answer that kind of question.

...is a straw man. It purports that moral nihilists are making one unprovable claim, and moral realists are making another unprovable claim. But that's not true. Realists are making one claim, and nihilists are saying that claim is unsubstantiated. — Avery

Saying it's unsubstantiated isn't nihilism, that's just skepticism. A particularly overzealous kind of skepticism that can't help but lead to nihilism, but still.

But also bear in mind that the same kind of overzealous skepticism could be applied to claims about reality. You just assume, like most normal mentally healthy people do, that something is objectively real, and you're not just dreaming the whole thing up. There's no way of proving one way or another that anything actually is or isn't objectively real, but you can't help but act as though you assume either one way or another. The same is true of claims about morality.

If you act as though your perceptions and beliefs might not be the correct ones, as though what seem to you to be other people have other perspectives on what is real, their own perceptions and beliefs, and that you could do to check your perspective against theirs and work out some description of what is the case that accounts for all of those perspectives without bias, then you're acting as though you think something is objectively real, in comparison to which it's possible for people's opinions to be wrong. If instead you walk about like your perception just is reality (or equivalently, that nothing is real and your perception is all there is), and those who (seems to you to) disagree are just a meaningless figments of your own imagination, then you're acting like you don't think anything is objectively real. Would you do that, just because nobody can prove conclusively that anything is objectively real?

If you act as though your desires and intentions might not be the correct ones, as though what seem to you to be other people have other perspectives on what is moral, their own desires and intentions, and that you could do to check your perspective against theirs and work out some prescription of what ought to be the case that accounts for all of those perspectives without bias, then you're acting as though you think something is objectively moral, in comparison to which it's possible for people's opinions to be wrong. If instead you walk about like your desire just is morality (or equivalently, that nothing is moral and your desire is all there is), and those who (seems to you to) disagree are just a meaningless figments of your own imagination, then you're acting like you don't think anything is objectively moral. Should you do that, just because nobody can prove conclusively that anything is objectively moral?

There is a healthier kind of skepticism about both reality and morality than this rejection of everything until it's proven from the ground up. Be skeptical of each particular claim, others' and your own; hold every opinion you hold only tentatively, being open to evidence to the contrary, and ready to change your mind if you should come across it. But in the mean time, hold some opinion, whichever seems most plausible to you. And if you and someone else have different opinions -- about what is real or about what is moral -- try to gather all of your respective reasons for holding those opinions together and see if you can't figure out what possible opinion accounts for all of those reasons. You know, like reasonable people do.

I'm going to stop responding to you about this, because I don't think you're open to my viewpoint. You're assuming a lot of incorrect things about what I believe, and then arguing against those imagined arguments. I feel like I'm reading an argument between you and an imaginary third party.

I don't want to spend the next several hours pointing how how what I believe is different from what your imaginary opponent believes. That's not what I was hoping for.

It also makes me think you don't really want to know what I believe. And you can clearly continue this pattern fine without my involvement.

That's fine, but FWIW, I'm arguing against nihilism generally, not you specifically, since you asked why I think nihilism is so indefensible. If what I'm arguing against isn't what you're for, then maybe you're not actually a nihilist. (Which is fine, either way).

Maybe not...but...I do believe that objective moral truths don't exist. Doesn't that make me a moral nihilist? Maybe I'm just not the kind you were arguing against.

Maybe it's more correct to call myself a moral skeptic, since I:

• don't believe that objective moral facts exist, because I haven't seen any compelling evidence that they do exist.
• believe that objective morals are not required for a logical model to explain the universe.
• things start to make a lot more sense when you remove objective morals from a model of the universe.

So if there's no evidence for something, and it's not required for things to make sense, then I don't have a reason to believe in it.

But that's different from saying that I know for sure that something doesn't exist. I just believe that it doesn't because of the absence of evidence. Similar to bigfoot, or humours.

And like bigfoot and humours, I don't feel a need to spend much time exploring what-if questions about what a world might look like if they do exist (beyond a sci-fi curiosity, like stories about time travel).

So I'm not sure where on the spectrum that puts me. But it's somewhere in those categories...probably...

— Avery

• don't believe that objective moral facts exist, because I haven't seen any compelling evidence that they do exist.
• believe that objective morals are not required for a logical model to explain the world.
• things start to make a lot more sense when you remove objective morals from a model of the reality.

Have you tried out social relativism?

A social relativist would say there are "objective moral facts", but they're probably not what you think of when you say the above. A social relativist would say that moral facts are a form of social structure. For example, when you walk down the street and notice an open door, you're unlikely to walk in. There's a range of likely reactions, but you're only going to make an overt moral decision if your situational curiosity comes into conflict with "this is not my house; I have no business entering". But even if you're just walking by, maybe without much curiosity, there's a habitual moral layer to your behaviour.

An accidentally time-travelling cavement would have a very different reaction, because he'd been socialised in a very, very different moral environment.

Wanting moralist right/wrong rules I think is very common in humans, because we use abstraction to navigate our enviroment. The problem with fixing moral rights and wrongs is, though, that our theories about what's right and wrong are a crucial part of our moral upbringing, and to the extent that they influence our behaviour, gaining new moral insight keeps the moral environment changing. Moral decisions are only perceived as such when they're problematic, and if a particular group of people solidify a typical problematic situation into a norm, then there's a change in the moral environment for these people. And that change causes new unforseen problems. There can be no universal right/wrong rules for this reason, but some constellations of rules can be more stable than others.

So I think there are objective moral facts, but they're not about what's "really" right or wrong; they're about complex moral behaviour.

and sometimes when we make moral-type decisions areas of the brain responsible for things like dopamine response are not even involved. — Isaac


Citation needed. — Avery

I'm not quite sure how to fulfil this request, I've quite a lot of papers on file covering this (more than 50) as it's a sort of 'proof by exception'. I've linked to a couple below which I know are readable online for free. They just show an example of experiments showing different brain regions involved in moral decision-making. The concept that different brain regions correspond to different types of thinking is taken for granted. If you want evidence of that you'll definitely be going back to papers which aren't available online, so you'll have to get a neuroscience textbook or something.

That being said, here's a couple to get you started. If you want more, just ask...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6758288/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2569820/

Thanks for this. I found this paper on non-descriptive cognitivism, which I have yet to get all the way through (but will). I just need a dictionary handy while I do. :p

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/factual/papers/HorganNondescriptive.html

Does this describe your beliefs? I'd love to hear more. — Avery


Thank you for finding that. I think that is the one article on the topic that I ran across once and never had time to read more than a bit of. My own views are all home-brewed, but if this is the article I think it is I think it’s similar to mine. I’ll have to find time to read it in detail. — Pfhorrest

Found time to read like a quarter to a third of that tonight and so far it sounds almost exactly like my own model, modulo a few insignificant terminological differences. Thanks again for digging this up! I knew I had run across one paper with a view similar to my own long ago, and then lost it before I could read much of it, and I'm pretty sure this was it.

I might start a thread about it if someone else doesn't first.

Maybe not...but...I do believe that objective moral truths don't exist. Doesn't that make me a moral nihilist? Maybe I'm just not the kind you were arguing against. — Avery

Don't take any notice of the "everyone not an objectivist is a moral nihilist" rhetoric. It's just a lazy way of poisoning the alternative arguments like this kind of nonsense

You wouldn't believe the number of times people hear something like "Morals don't exist." and come back with "Well then why not just kill people then??" — Avery


Well why not, if someone feels like it, and can get away with it, and no moral reasons count? — Pfhorrest

I'm not quite sure where it comes from - I strongly suspect a certain authoritarianism - but staunch moral realists always seem to assume that the only alternative is a world of anarchic moral reprobates.

The problem seems to be that relativism (despite never being presented this way) is assumed to mean that the first thing springing into someone's mind as being 'the right thing' to do is taken as such without any further thought, that we all start acting without considering things like society's moral codes, the behaviour of others, our own conflicting motives and feelings... Of course this is nonsense. We take all these things into consideration, this 'accounting for other people's seemings', which @Pfhorrest seems to think he's just come up with, is something we do all the time, sometimes even subconsciously. All moral relativism says is that after this accounting process, we're all going to come up with different answers because the 'accounting' process is itself not agreed on. When the 'accounting process' for physical reality was widely disputed, theories about physical reality were relativist too (Gods, creation myths, animism...), we only have such widespread agreement now because we also agree about the accounting method (science). We no longer just 'have a bit of think about' the opinions of everyone we happen to have spoken to about physical reality. We consult experts in the field using a (largely) agreed on method of trials, controls, statistical analysis and peer review. This 'method' is based on the prior belief that there is an external cause for the similarity in our observations. Absent of such a belief about objective morals, I can't see us ever agreeing on a method for accounting for everyone's 'seemings' on the matter, nor checking that such a method has been followed. Absent of such an agreement, any conclusions drawn will be based on the individual's own subjective choice of accounting method and so will be entirely subjective - moral relativism.

You're most welcome. You may find my answer banal and you'd be right: it is just plain, banal common sense to not trust oneself too much, and to think harder about irreversible choices than about reversible ones.

I'm neither into grand metaphysical systems nor into tedious analytical bean counting. Life is complicated enough as it is, no need to make the matter worse through inoperative philosophy.

We take all these things into consideration, this 'accounting for other people's seemings', which Pfhorrest seems to think he's just come up with, is something we do all the time, sometimes even subconsciously — Isaac

I don't think I just came up with it, I think my views are an elaboration of common-sense views shored up to defend against bad philosophy.

When the 'accounting process' for physical reality was widely disputed, theories about physical reality were relativist too (Gods, creation myths, animism...), we only have such widespread agreement now because we also agree about the accounting method (science). We no longer just 'have a bit of think about' the opinions of everyone we happen to have spoken to about physical reality. We consult experts in the field using a (largely) agreed on method of trials, controls, statistical analysis and peer review. This — Isaac

I'm pretty sure I've made exactly this analogy, even in discussions with you directly. I agree with what you say here completely. And then I advocate doing the same thing for moral discourse as you describe here for factual discourse.

This 'method' is based on the prior belief that there is an external cause for the similarity in our observations. Absent of such a belief about objective morals, I can't see us ever agreeing on a method for accounting for everyone's 'seemings' on the matter, nor checking that such a method has been followed. Absent of such an agreement, any conclusions drawn will be based on the individual's own subjective choice of accounting method and so will be entirely subjective - moral relativism. — Isaac

And how do you think such an agreement on such a priori methodological principles could ever be reached? How do you think it was reached in the matter of factual discourse?

I say it was reached in the matter of factual discourse because it proved itself pragmatically useful -- it got results, it resolved disagreements, it built consensus, it didn't leave people in an intractable mire of unresolvable disputes about what is or isn't real. And I give exactly that reason for why we should adopt a similar practice for moral discourse: because doing otherwise leaves us in an intractable mire of unresolvable disputes about what is or isn't moral. Either because "nothing's actually moral, that's all just, like, your opinion, man", or because "God has handed down his unquestionable moral decrees and anyone who disagrees is a heathen who will burn in hell!" To put it dramatically. My whole approach boils down to: don't do either of those things.