I don't think I've misstated it at all. It all goes back to something I said earlier - many (most?) scientists think that science provides the only valid path to understanding reality. If something is not allowed for within the boundaries of science, it doesn't exist. It's the same circular argument. — T Clark

Science doesn't deny the existence of minds though, nor does it deny the existence of god. It actually makes no statement about the existence or non-existence of gods whatsoever. You're confusing "is observable" with "exists". No respectable scientist goes around saying that X, Y, and Z unobserved phenomenon don't exist purely because we have not yet observed them.

I'm not sure what you mean by "defender of science". If you tell me what materialism consists in according to you, I'll tell you whether I am a materialist or not. Also, I think you are incorrect or at least exaggerating if you mean to suggest that my "reaction" was emotionally motivated. — Janus

Do you think that the "phenomena" you perceive are consistent, or otherwise correlate, with "things" that are external from your own mind?. In other words, do you believe that your perceptions relate to a certain way of things that holds true regardless of whether or not you happen to perceive them?

It's basically the assumption that there's some kind of "real" component to the things our senses perceive.

P.S. I was pointing to you as an example to show T-Clark that those who embrace science do not necessarily deny everything else in order to do so. It would not be rational to be offended by this.

Boy, your experience is different from mine. I think maybe your term "external world" is the give away. For most of the scientifically inclined, the external world is the only real world. The internal world is just an artifact of the material world and is given a dismissive wave of the hand. As the prime example, in their way of thinking, the mind is the brain. — T Clark

I can prove to you that the brain is the mind; there's no escaping that conclusion, but that's another discussion.

But just take a look at how @Janus reacted to my suggestion that science ostensibly presumes an external world of noumena. IIRC, he is a defender of science, but he won't bite the materialist hook even a little.

Well, most obviously, the scientific approach emphasizes the physical world to the exclusion of anything else. That's a decision based on a particular set of human values. It's not based on some sort of objective necessity. That emphasis is a reflection of a belief in the encompassing importance of the control of nature for the benefit of humankind. — T Clark

It's not the physical world per se (though ostensibly it appears to be), it's the observable world. Science focuses on the observable and the measurable. "Physical" normally means "of the body, as opposed to the mind", but in this case it actually means everything we can perceive through our senses, which includes other minds. (we may only be at a stage of understanding where we say "philosophy of mind" rather than "science of mind", but we seem to be getting there).

I've never been talking about the existence of god. I've always talked about the experience of a phenomenon we, some of us, call god. Human experience vs. so called objective truth. It's ridiculous to say "Based on my system of values and methods, which denies anything which is not included in the external world, I deny the existence of something which is not included in the external world." — T Clark

You've misstated the typical atheist/scientist position a little bit.

Science is not in the business of denying the existence of immeasurable phenomenon, nor are most atheists in the business of denying the existence of god. Like science, atheists typically reject the affirmation of god's existence (rejecting a positive claim), rather than asserting a positive claim of their own (that zero gods exist).

Science simply cannot comment on the immeasurable and the unobservable. It's not that science presumes we should focus on controlling nature as morally important, it's that science is the practice of modelling the observable to begin with.

Let me try using different language:

Our ability to do science, to some extent, rests on there being consistent relationships between observable phenomenon in the first place. Though our perceptions and perspectives can disagree, the more we use actual measurement as opposed to subjective feeling to assess the state of things, and relationships between things, the more we find consistency and agreement. The "external world of noumena" per my usage can be as simple as the assumption that despite variance in individual perceptions of the world, it is measurably consistent (or consistent enough) such that a practice that seeks to model consistent relationships actually works.

I was trying to characterize scientific knowledge as relatively free from subjective bias. Perhaps that's so obvious that it's trivial, but it seems to be under contention in this thread.

I don't believe science even ostensibly "presumes an external objective universe of noumena". — Janus

What about "ostensibly ostensibly presumes an external objective universe of noumena"?

so I'm not too sure what you're trying to say here. — Janus

I'm saying we need to use bias-free measurement for the hardened science. I'm rebuking your assessment that subjective values and personal bias play a significant positive role in the underpinnings of "scientific facts".

I think your claim that science "presumes an external objective universe of noumena" is questionable. — Janus

Ostensibly man! Ostensibly!

"Ostensibly": adverb: apparently or purportedly, but perhaps not actually.

I think "measuring and quantifying phenomena" is right, but that it has nothing to do with "subjective feeling and values-bias", so there is no need for extrication — Janus

My point here was that some kinds of measurement are inherently bias-laden (emotional appraisal included). Perhaps I should have said "empirical measurements, which are inherently bias free").

On the other hand, hypothesizing, which involves abductive reasoning has much to do with imagination and metaphor, if not with "subjective feeling and values-bias". It is certainly possible for individual scientists to become emotionally attached to their hypotheses, though. — Janus

There's no guide to abduction. It really doesn't matter where a hypothesis comes from, science can only harden once something is identified and put to a test. Sometimes we use whim, sometimes we take inspiration from nature, sometimes we just get lucky; but I would hardly focus on generating new hypotheses as the locus of the scientific method.

I don't think that's true. I think most scientists, and many others, believe that science provides a privileged viewpoint of the true nature of reality. They believe it is not just the best, but the only valid way of understanding the world. — T Clark

I just haven't really encountered this kind of "scientism". I'm aware there are a few zealots in every camp, but they hardly define the set. "The only way of understanding the world" is a bit strong for such a broad claim. I think on average it would go something like "the best way we have of understanding the external world". It's certainly not the only way, and "world" can be divided into many niches, some of which don't lend well to measurement and methodological inquiry.

The problem I'm getting at is science has a knack for ignoring its own, fundamentally human, value system. — T Clark

What human values has science founded itself upon? Induction itself somehow?

I'm an engineer. When I was a kid, rigid materialism seemed obvious to me. Although that's faded, I'm still comfortable with the assumptions that are built into the scientific world view, but I do recognize they are human assumptions and not universal truths.

No god-shaped wound here. — T Clark

Rigid materialism, if true, doesn't pose a threat to my happiness. I still inherently value positive emotional experiences (I just don't associate them with god or creation) and when I have "spiritual experiences" (which are basically very profound emotional/cognitive experiences) I try to saver them for how they make me feel, not for what I think they mean in the grand scheme of things. I'm not convinced that the universe is as we perceive it, but so long as our perceptions of an external world are consistent enough, it's something that pragmatically I might as well plan for.

Promoting irreligion is only as useful as religion is harmful; there's a practical limit, and at some point you would just be upsetting and confusing people.

Imagine if you could snap your fingers and change someone's belief in god. Are you prepared to impart to them your entire existential and moral framework, given that their current one is likely founded in god-belief? What if your framework fails them? Wouldn't they be left in nihilism or absurdism?

Would you tell a 90 year-old, who on their death bed is only comforted by the belief they will see their loved ones in heaven, that heaven probably doesn't exist?

Ok, but a so-called scientific world view represents an almost endless series of decisions about what to pay attention to and what questions to ask. — T Clark

Science makes presumptions about how to do science itself, not about what kind of values-decisions we should make. The "values" of science are just tools we use to help serve our primary values.

You're right. Whether or not god exists is not a question that can be answered by science. I never it was and I never said I think god exists. What I have said elsewhere is that the experience of god represents a way of experiencing the world that is more complete than the scientific view by itself. Science is incomplete and misleading in a very practical and down-to-earth way — T Clark

Science was never meant to be an existential world-view, it is strictly about the physically measurable.

The problem you're getting at is that science has had a knack for dismantling the more spiritual frameworks that once (and still) dominate our interpretations of our existential place in the world/the value of our lives.

For many people, prolonged exposure to science creates a god-shaped wound, and if "god" was previously held close to their heart, the damage to their happiness can be catastrophic. But we can still learn to mend it with other things, and we don't all weave our religious beliefs and experiences into and around our vital arteries to begin with.

It is ultimately for individuals to decide how they want to experience and interpret the world. We need not all follow the well-traveled path.

"Logical contradiction"...

Yes but then they'll just start questioning whatever axioms of logic are within reach. The point is that we should not always argue (empirically) against god claims, because we don't always need to. Deist claims depart from the observable universe, which is limit of our ability to conduct scientific inquiry on the matter. If someone does happen to cling to such a claim (rare though they may be as @old suggests), unless they're using it in a way which interferes with others why should we necessarily disabuse them? Some people believe things for purely emotional reasons, and if the harm is negligible and the emotional reward great, why not allow blissful ignorance to exist?

When someone brings up a specific god, which is invariably a requirement for any coherent existence-debate, yes, we can falsify their claims in so far as the empirical evidence is available. (for instance, we know the earth is older than 6000 years with empirical confidence sufficient to call it scientific fact, and this contradicts some branches of Christian orthodoxy.). But what if someone is just a basic deist? They believe that there is a creator of some kind out there, but they make no necessary statements about exactly who, what, how, or why it is, beyond that it exists and does not intervene in the physical world. How can we falsify such a god? This is why I call such a proposition unscientific.

I disagree. There are no facts independent of values. Values tell us how to split up the world in a way that makes sense to humans. Values are related to feelings, emotions. As has been said many times on the forum, perhaps even in this thread, humans with certain kinds of neurological damage that make it difficult to feel emotions also have trouble making decisions. — T Clark

You're missing the distinction. Science presumes an external objective universe of noumena (ostensibly), and seeks to model/approximate it. Science is a more narrow field of knowledge-making which happens to focus on extricating subjective feeling and values-bias from the way we measure and quantify phenomena.

Science doesn't "make decisions", it's purely informative in that regard. Ultimately we make decisions based on values. Religion can be at its core a presumption about what kinds of decisions we should make (or how we should make them), which science cannot. Science can help us make effective decisions per our values (which is something some religious tenets can also do), but else-wise it's an overly strained comparison.

I would like you to recognize that what you call "scientific hypotheses" do not represent some sort of special phenomena which are independent of the entity doing the hypothesizing. — T Clark

What are you trying to get at? That the assertion "god exists" is just as scientific as the assertion "force is equivalent to mass times acceleration"?

I can assure you there's a difference: one is actually testable, specifically measurable, and semantically consistent. The other is not falsifiable whatsoever, vague, immeasurable, and semantically incoherent (on its own).

If you want to juxtapose religious fruit alongside scientific fruit, then you've got to apply the same selection criteria; I would like you to recognize that what I call "scientific hypotheses" are only an epistemological affront to your possible religious beliefs in so far as you think your beliefs represent or approximate some kind of consistent external world of noumena.

That is to say, if you must insist that Jesus is real and is in Heaven, then I'll dutifully question it as not base in real-ity.

I've always hated this type of statement, what Stephen Jay Gould called "Non-Overlapping Magisteria," NOMA. Even though he is one of my favorite writers, the idea is bullshit. There is only one world. We are all trying to describe it in our own ways. — T Clark

Well I never said there is no overlap, but aren't you missing Gould's point? There's a world of facts and there's also a world of emotions; science approximates the former while religion comforts the latter; different itches.

What's objectionable about that? Do you want me to treat religious ideas as I would treat scientific hypotheses?

According to the logic of the so-called “skeptics,” spirituality and religion is craziness. — Ilya B Shambat

Crazy in what sense? That's such a loaded term.

Crazy from an empirical standpoint? Sure, most religions are downright nuts (though "spirituality" in some respects may one day find a scientific home), but religion hasn't evolved to scratch the same set of itches that science has, and vice versa.

By that definition, the bulk of humanity is mentally ill, as the bulk of humanity has one or another form of spirituality. — Ilya B Shambat

Actually, being factually mistaken is far flung from being "mentally ill", under any sensible definition... People who believed or even yet believe that the earth is flat are woefully mistaken and often under-educated, but they aren't "mentally-ill".

his leaves these people thinking that they are the only sane people out there. If there is such a thing as narcissism, I can think of no more glaring narcissism than that. — Ilya B Shambat

I'm quite skeptical of this...

Most “skeptics” are not even scientists. Real scientists are curious, and many are as curious about spirituality as they are about everything else. I am good friends with a distinguished scientist who openly talks about having had very real spiritual experiences. He has a vast body of academic knowledge, is very well-reasoned and uses scientific method to excellent standard. That has not prevented him from having a spiritual life. — Ilya B Shambat

Your scientist friend might also remind you that if you want to make generalized statements about a certain segment of the population, you need more than a single data point.

In truth most scientists are not religious type folk, though having "spiritual" experiences is not at all exclusive to religion. Some scientists believe some really empirically questionable stuff, but they tend toward believing what can be demonstrated or measured rather than making unnecessary assumptions about the immeasurable. For some scientists, the intrinsic feelings they have upon acquiring new knowledge could be construable as spiritual, for other scientists it could be experimenting with LSD.

If you care to define "spiritual" in a specific context, perhaps I could give a more caricatured rebuke,

Spiritual experiences happen all the time, at least they do in my life. I've had many experiences with less than a billionth chance of happening; and I am nowhere close to being the only one. Many people either forget the experiences that they have or deny them; but if you dig enough you will find in many cases that they have in fact had very real spiritual experiences. The problem is that they do not know how to make them parse with what they know about the world from science and mathematics. This results in many of them denying these experiences; and toward that effect any number of people have come up with any number of tricks. — Ilya B Shambat

Can you give an example?

Is science wrong? No, it isn't. Materialist fundamentalism however is completely wrong. I seek an explanation that will be consistent with both scientific fact and the facts of my and other people's spiritual experiences; and I am continuing to look for this explanation in any number of paths. — Ilya B Shambat

Maybe you've just prematurely discounted materialist fundamentalism?

Doesn’t that count for something? Doesn’t the fact that the process to create a microchip being so complex yet some people can construct and engineer one mean something? All the people who can comprehend, analyze, and make new technologies, aren’t they the ones keeping society going? Aren’t the ones who make the very things we use, who can translate scientific principles into complex equations...aren’t they somehow doing the real shit? The shit that matters? The hard shit? Isn’t it the people who wheel and deal in equations and scientific complexities the real ones? Isn’t it the capitalist entrepreneur who bring the resources together..aren’t they the real ones, providing meaning with their USE and their grasp of mathematical and the complexities of scientific theory and application? — schopenhauer1

It counts toward non-subjective world-modeling (which might fairly be labeled its own broad category of knowledge and intelligence). It's only "meaningful" in so far as it serves the things that matter to us. If the scientist fulfills their own goals with science they're doing what matters. Likewise, if a poet successfully communicates their ideas with the intended perspective(s), they've achieved what matters to them.

Because survival and happiness are so often counted among our individual existential requisites, it makes sense for some people to say that science is what matters, but they're merely using science as an equivocational proxy for more a more fundamental existential platform: science gets us a kind of potent knowledge which is why we want it in the first place; subjective utility. The people who wax scientific such as you describe are overwhelmed by the world of possibility, power, (and idealized utopic delight) that scientific and technological progress can bring in blind theory.

Crises of identity and other such human problems usually don't demand (or permit) inquiry of the scientific kind. It's another realm of human knowledge and intelligence entirely, but generally it is made to serve the same human purposes: how do we reach a world that is relatively more free of our current dilemmas?

Ultimately I think the criticism you broadly apply can be launched against anything. "_____ isn't everything". If science killed the star-philosoper, did philosophy kill the master story-teller?

If you're talking about "meaning" as in "interpreting the way the world is", then yes, observation and reason are the best tools we have.

But you're clearly alluding to some kind of grander existential meaning. No, science doesn't provide that, but fortunately our neurology takes care of that for us. We have wants and desires, and to better achieve them more reliable predictive models are objectively useful.

If you don't believe me, just imagine dropping an anvil on your foot.

SR and GR should be able to predict how time dilates in very strong gravity wells. If you don't have any equations, calculations, or plausible models to actually explain and support your hypothesis, why should physicists all change their minds because you just don't agree?

In other words, what evidence do you have?

Your choice of words is interesting. "Rude" has an older connotation meaning "roughly made or done; lacking subtlety or sophistication". In the view of most physicists, it's the lay-stream theories which are the rude ones.

I'm not quite sure what you're arguing here. My point was that merely "saving lives" cannot be presumed to be a goal above all others, such that any technology or lifestyle change which brings about this goal can be given objective superiority over one's that do less well in this regard. People have goals other than staying alive for as long as possible.

Im not, in any sense suggesting that society as a whole has a duty to make everyone happy, but I think we're really straying too far from our objective common ground when we start deciding that someone's happiness is not 'good enough' type of happiness. Yes, I personally think that getting your own way shouldn't be something that always makes you happy. I personally feel that some of the things people claim to want are 'ridiculous'. But I have absolutely no grounds whatsoever to tell them that they are objectively wrong to feel that way. — Isaac

My points was just to stress that even given a specific subjective feeling (pertaining to the inherent virtue of a given action, for instance) reason and evidence might still be of some persuasive and bias-escaping use (re: internal values consistency and consistency with foreseeable outcomes). All I'm really saying is that in some cases even when people make a direct appeal to feelings, we can still sometimes persuasively call a kind of bull-shit. I'm thinking of cases of naive risk-taking or naive risk avoidance. Some extreme sports give their practitioners an incredible rush (the kind of rush that makes life more worthwhile), but some of those sports are also extremely deadly. Wing-suit gliding is one such dangerous sport, so much so that there are no established long-time professionals (their death rate is too high). At some relative level of risk for each individual it becomes statistically likely that the utility loss of their shortened lifespan outweighs the extra hedons they gain from doing the sport (average hours before death is a good way to conceptualize the overall risk and reward ratio).

I'm definitely not saying we should forbid people from practicing this sport (although we should probably regulate it for safety reasons); to forbid it would be naive risk avoidance. But in reality, for many people, they're not getting the kind of long term hedonic quality and quantity that they would otherwise get (because of the high risk of death)./ It's not an example with a clear-ish answer either way, but it helps to expose the kinds of reasonable considerations we can make against our own feelings and the feelings of others. There are probably wing-suiters out there who aren't actually aware of the statistical likelihood of accidental death (maybe not many). All it might take to persuade them is a bit of data.

The "treating them like children" comes from the archetypal scenario that comes to mind when we resign that we cannot reasonably persuade our way through specific emotional whims, which is that of a parent trying to correct the behavior of an emotional and rationally naive child. Sometimes we must inevitably differ due to strong and immovable emotions, but sometimes our emotions are downright misinformed, and can be dislodged with the right leverage.

I don't think I can point-point any remaining significant disagreement between us, if any at all. The major sources of our earlier disagreement seems to have been the result of semantic interpretation (and maybe a bit of epistemic optimism vs epistemic pessimism)

The more important point, to me, though, is that following intuition simply feels better and so automatically has a higher weight in those situations where the right course of action is being weighed merely on a preponderance of evidence.

In other cases, where the evidence is overwhelming, them yes, intuition can be cast aside. — Isaac

I'm also interested in the value of intuition, and under my meta-ethical view its place is as a kind of intelligent decision maker (Ultimately a heuristic) that serves as a functional method-in-practice to help us make complicated decisions; emotion and feeling is its compass. Intuition can be entirely persuasive on the individual level, and in cases where intuitive knowledge is fundamentally malformed or mistaken, it can keep individuals in long-term patterns of behavior that are destructive toward their own moral goals and values.

The peculiar thing about intuition is that it is more directly the result of evolution and natural selection than are our conscious thoughts (intuition largely operates subconsciously (through evolution-endowed emotions), while the conscious mind is able to learn and react in real time to our immediate environments). Intuition is well equipped to keep us safe and help us reproduce across a range of typical environments that humans happened to find themselves in, in the distant past. Modernity being so very novel (a downright freak-show from an evolutionary stand-point), we're being faced with situations containing layers of complex relationships which human intuition has never before had to contend with. More than ever our actions can ripple across time and space in surprising ways which can affect other people, and the ramifications of the actions of others are harder than ever to escape by any means (pollution is a relevant example). No longer can we go our separate ways when we come to strong disagreement (which interestingly is the primary method of resolving severe conflicts among nomadic hunter-gatherers, obviously because the environment allowed for it). Our instinct for fight or flight actually poisons our conscious thought when it becomes a factor in situations for which both fight and flight are sub-optimal options. This view is why I approach the persuasive component of methods, frameworks, and arguments as so fundamentally important. The most universally persuasive argument becomes the most true in practice, and in terms of reaching our moral goals it becomes the most morally useful. The only caveat is that the persuasive vectors we choose must somehow we based in reason, observation, and evidence, else we're just a bunch of moral sophists who run the risk of succumbing to and promoting bad moral propositions.

Different "religions" are better for different individuals and different groups of people living in different times and environments.

"Atheism", supposedly being the lack of religion in this case (irreligion), is sometimes also better for certain individuals and groups in certain environments.

Are you asking about what is more useful to the average person? To society? To technological progress? Population growth? To philanthropy? Average human welfare? Equitable universal minimum of human welfare? etc...

If you're asking what is better in terms of knowledge, since religions invariably make wild assumptions, it's probably better to make none.

I don't see how we can do this in the face of such uncertainty, without assigning an ordinal value to each option, we cannot order them, and if are admittedly unclear about the details, how can we be clear about the ordinal value we assign. Throwing out the nonsense, we agree on, the unreasoned and the insane, but all we have left after that is a pool of equally viable options. I don't se any logical reason why, in some areas, one option may not still rise slightly above the others. I see no logical reason why it might not be the case that all the options just happen to be very obviously ordinal. But I cannot see what worldy force would make this the case for all decisions. — Isaac

It's not the case for all decisions... Positive moral claims (claims pertaining to positive moral obligations) are notoriously disagreeable, and there seems to only be a few of them that we're able to coherently conclude upon. Even where we can have these kinds of conclusions, they're at best tentative (they're waiting for something better to come along). The vast majority of our applied moral knowledge takes the form of negative claims (negative moral obligations) because empirically/epistemically, they're low hanging moral fruit.

I'm not saying that we may always access the evidence required for strong induction (or are always capable of interpreting it), I'm saying that in some situations we can do so sufficiently, especially with regard to negative moral claims.

The only difference between us might be our epistemic position. We agree that objectively certain knowledge is incoherent or is a misleading misnomer, where what we're actually doing is using observation and inductive reasoning to approach or approximate truth. The basic principles of the scientific approach, such as falsification and seeking descriptive+predictive power, are the semi-formal guides of induction: when we falsify propositions through sound trials and testing, we can, with very high confidence, eliminate them as a possible truth; but when we positively demonstrate the consistency or predictive power of a given model or proposition (which might always be relative to the predictive power of our next best models), we may still gain some rational confidence for it, but it is never on the same order of magnitude as the confidence we have that "well falsified" claims are indeed false.

We could pretty much divide all human "knowledge" into two categories: things we think are true, and things we think are false. To parallel this in the realm of moral knowledge, we have things we think we should do, and things we think we should not do. With both general and moral knowledge, both our positive and negative propositions have their utility. We can really only (with high epistemic confidence) avoid bad moral outcomes by subscribing only to negative moral propositions; and where morality in practice vaguely drifts from "avoid harm" into "promote good", negative moral claims become less useful while positive moral claims become essential. In practice we cannot avoid forming positive beliefs about the world, uncertain though it we may be; planning for the future can be as much about where we do want to go as where we don't want to go, it might just depend on the risks and the stakes. We're still left with reason and observation as our main tools for treating positive moral claims, and though situational complexity can sometimes give human intuition the advantage, it is woefully under-equipped for many areas of specific decision making. The effectiveness and relative risks of vaccines are an example of something that intuition would have a very hard time accurately guesstimating; the more actual observation and evidence we gather around the subject (the better we model it), the more confidence we can have in our predictions of outcomes. All we necessarily disagree about regarding vaccines is our ability to predict its outcomes with reasonable confidence (either you have a higher bar for reasonable confidence (the intuition beating kind), or you believe that evidence pertaining to the effects of vaccines is too hard to come by, or to interpret (even for teams of preeminent experts) (or a combination of the two, along with other factors such as perverse incentives which pollute the field of knowledge).

Any disagreements with the above?

What CEO in their right mind is going to invest in a drug which only a small number of people will need, to replace a drug they currently sell to everyone? — Isaac

You will almost certainly find this controversial, but Bill and Melinda Gates are under the belief that by delivering basic medicines, including well proven and highly statistically effective vaccines, that they've turned 10 billion dollars of charitable investment into 200 billion dollars of created wealth (wealth created by the saving of lives).

When it comes to big pharma, I really am with you in the "let's not just blindly trust profit chasing corporations" boat (I would really not want to roll the dice with any psychotropic medication, especially anything with a recent patent). But not all vaccines are inherently profit driven, though in many cases we do allow the free market to produce them for us. There's a difference between a seasonal flu shot and a standard MMR vaccine. The flu is deadly in rare cases, but mostly people are just trying to avoid getting sick because of the discomfort. Comparing this to something like an MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine, the motives are completely different. One product is actually produced and marketed for profit, while the other is made cheap or free because it has been so effective at preventing deaths.

Sometimes the free-market does create philanthropic incentives. Many scientists and researchers in medical fields genuinely are trying to create things to improve life rather than improve corporate profits. Sometimes corporations, even for greedy reasons, do good things. The list of essential vaccines that have saved millions of lives since their inception are among them.

Not entirely, but it still highlights a difference between us. I don't see the point in keeping people alive if they're not going to be happy. It's people's happiness that matters to me. Why do people do risky sports? Because the increase in happiness is worth the reduced life expectancy. So psychology and sociology are important considerations. We can't just presume people want to remain alive for as long as possible at all costs, want to have as much wealth as possible at all costs. Clichéd though it sounds, this is just not the case. — Isaac

Aren't you on some level treating people like children in doing so?

I'm with you about the existential and psychological need for happiness, but what if someone is unhappy because they cannot get their own (ridiculous) way? (Or maybe more to the point, what happens when they're unhappy precisely because they've gotten their own way?). Our expectations do not always conform to reality, and in so far as we can inform our expectations (and hence the way we feel about the related action) with reason and evidence, we can tend toward more accurate and consistent feelings about actions.

We are agreed here, as I think we've now firmly established. Where we disagree is simply over the strength of evidence contradicting one's 'gut' that is required to make one change. For me it is very high, for you it seems to be merely a preponderance. — Isaac

A preponderance of good evidence! Morality is the name; cumulative induction is the game!

All we can ever do is try/continue to improve.

Not what I was saying at all. — Noah Te Stroete

I know, I'm only joshing ya!

I find it cognitively exhausting to read many consecutive complex sentences. — Noah Te Stroete

I find it cognitively underwhelming to only read or write in curt and simplistic fashion :wink: .

To be fair I think my writing style has its moments, though the volume can be off-putting to some; my downright playful overuse of the semi-colon, for instance...

I don’t even read your posts because they’re so long. I’m being lazy, though. I just read your opening few sentences, then skipped to this last part. — Noah Te Stroete

I'm well aware of contracting attention spans in the era of click bait. You would be better off having read the second to last paragraph:

It's not a perfect approach (or one that seeks perfection), but the vector of reason and evidence is hopefully a more persuasive method. If we have to redefine what we mean by some words in some contexts to expose more of that overwhelming persuasive power, that's what matters. In practical moral debate we just can't meaningfully bring the moral-epistemic implications of relativism without also neutering the persuasive power of our language; if and where we have fundamentally different starting values, to import relativism would be to give up an attempt to influence their values directly. If we don't need to influence their values because they are not in competition with our own, then we don't need relativism at all; we can focus on how our moral agreements empirically serve (or more easily: do not disservice) our mutually compatible values. — VagabondSpectre

That one paragraph doesn't fully summarize the entire post though...

I've considered making TL;DRs, but all that would really do is to encourage laziness. If we could really compact all this communication into denser language without sacrificing precision and our ability to locate meaningful differences, we would probably be doing that in the first place.

At some point additional information becomes superfluous to the point of a post, but I would rather err on the side of too long and have a better shot at meaningful exchanges than err on the side of to short and risk passing (and speak past) each other like ships in the rhetorical dark.

I get what you're saying, but I disagree. I think that, in the fields where moral decisions are made, the 'way the world is' is sufficiently complex that no single model stands out as being objectively best with the clarity you believe. Of course, there are models which are so bad they can be discarded from consideration, but that still leaves most options that normal adult humans consider, in play. — Isaac

Ultimately I agree with this, but I think you understate how much rationally persuasive wiggling room we can derive from comparing/discarding bad models alone (and remaining skeptical/waiting for evidence concerning "best" models; all we need is reasonably "better").

When we consider "what should we do next" by wondering what is the most optimal possible course of action, we run into severe problems of data gathering and computation, and there will always be possible courses of action we have yet to consider, which might be even more optimal for our given values. The most coherent way I think we can talk about these kinds of considerations is to put them on a spectrum of less morally praiseworthy to more morally praiseworthy (obligation flies out the window, because we're much more aligned about what we want to avoid than we are in our visions of a perfect future). Sometimes we can say with reasonable confidence that some positive (and complex) sets of actions are better than others, but by their very nature these positions are less certain and fundamentally tentative.

When we consider "what should we do next" by wondering first what courses of action we can rule out as sub-optimal (usually by comparing them to their absence) we can get much more rational confidence behind us given that we only need consider two courses of action and their possible outcomes (opposed to all possible courses of action). The resulting statements of negative moral obligation amount to things like "don't murder and torture people" and "don't gouge your eyes out". In practice this moral approach captures an arguably greater portion of moral conclusions at large: usually, but not always, moral arguments seek to forbid us from taking specific courses of action (a negative obligation stemming from a negative conclusion), but sometimes they seek to establish positive obligations from positive conclusions (e.g: worshiping god on Sunday is morally obligatory); the former sort of moral proposition is usually the more well founded (and testable)).

When it comes to actions like vaccines, it's fundamentally a harder argument to make (especially to say that vaccines are the best possible or morally optimal course of action), but if we focus on just comparing taking vaccines to not taking vaccines, we have a decent shot at coming to reasonable conclusions about which action is "better" in general (it was never really in contention for "best"). Strictly speaking, it would be more ideal if we had technology that could eliminate diseases in the first place; such a technology is probably possible, but we don't yet have access to it. Moving from the general case to the specific case, differing particular circumstances (such as compromised immune system and age) do change the calculus of whether or not vaccines are better than no vaccines, but here perhaps we can make an even more confident conclusion about which option is better because we can move beyond the general statistical assessment to become more precise. We will never know with absolute precision whether a given vaccination will be better or worse in the long run, but reasonable people can be convinced by reasonable evidence (maybe that's a naive mantra; I have to assume/hope that it's not). If I give you an unweighted dice with six sides, and all sides but one displays a value of 6, you would be remiss to bet on anything but 6, statistically speaking.

Moral positions relate to the effect actions have on people. Fields covering the effects on people are mainly psychology, sociology and human biology. None of these fields has the rigour of basic physics (or even chemistry) and to treat them as such is a mistake. Models can, and frequently do, come completely undone as new information emerges, and multiple models exist simultaneously. — Isaac

It's actually very interesting that psychology and sociology should rank high on your list of considerations to make. High on my list are things like economics (which is in truth a lot more sophisticated than many people realize), medical science (which admittedly has it's weak areas), game-theory, complexity science (an interdisciplinary approach to heuristically modeling complex systems), and a spat of other useful perspectives that are typically related to moral quandaries.

It really reveals the way in which your perspective of morality is more focused on the relative and subjective way people feel about moral values,and also their actions, as opposed to the more strict empirical approach I take to the way actions conform to relative values in the first place. How people feel about actions can ultimately affect their values (hence the emergence of virtue ethics, which is in my view ultimately confusing an imaginary value inherent to actions with their situational utility), so in practice I don't expect to always manage to disentangle the two, but at some point I'm willing to depart from subjective feelings pertaining to actions or their outcomes in favor of an empirical (or our best effort at empirical) attempt to quantify whether or not actions comport with reported values in an objective sense (even if I need to meta-ethically disregard their virtues as value-utility-proxies). If someone wants to go on living as a primary moral value, but they believe that the actions, or lack of actions, required to stay alive are for whatever reasons are not really required for survival, as an observer we could say they have made a mistake (a statistically bad gamble) (and in hindsight, if they die because of it, we might even say so with approximate certainty).

To unite the semantic difference between us, we can imagine that how people feel about proposed actions is actually a values-report; that the way people feel about actions actually impacts their values hierarchy, such that relativism keeps it "true for them" that their actions serve their actual moral values. While this is a sensical interpretation, I can still make room for my position in so far as a given value-hierarchy might not actually be internally consistent, and also in so far as the way perceptions of actions actually affect people's values-hierarchies is malleable to reason based persuasion. We can challenge values hierarchies directly by exploring how one of their values (or the action which serves it) forseeably subverts one of their more fundamentally important values. We can also, and mainly, mitigate the subjectivity in how proposed actions are perceived by more objectively exploring the ramifications of proposed actions. So long as people believe we can say they are neither right nor wrong from the strict relativist standpoint, but in practice, if we can get people to change their mind then the statement "morally incorrect/immoral/morally inferior" actually does have relevant and consistent meaning within relativism.

Most models are complex. This means they rapidly become quite unpredictable over long periods of time. Even your sacred cow of the success of vaccination has only been measured over a few decades. What about 100 years, 1000 years? Do you think anyone has any hope of reliably predicting the effects on societies over those timescales? — Isaac

Vaccines might be extraordinarily dis-eugenic, you're right, but these are risks of a different nature. The first vaccines took the form of crushed up scabs from people who survived the pox being snorted/blown into the nasal cavity. Back then they had no sweet clue what was going on, but the immediate benefits were apparent enough for them to assume a causal link. They indeed had no way of knowing that many generations down the line this practice might one day lead to a dependence on foreign intervention into our immune systems, but the costs of what you're describing are truly horrific. To ensure that future generations will have robust immune systems, we either need to let people die naturally from disease, or we would need to sterilize anyone deemed too weak to survive a disease without the vaccine. The price of eugenic progress (or even keeping our current eugenic health) is the hardhearted natural or artificial selection. Some people will fundamentally believe that the upward health of future generations is more important than any amount of happiness, including access to life, for ourselves and our more immediate descendants.

Most people just aren't willing to extend their sphere of moral consideration that far. Like anti-natalism, once self-consideration has been completely mitigated or removed from a moral equation, it becomes something else entirely: an incompatible set of moral values. Thankfully most people don't go that far, else we would not permit ourselves to thrive if it posed any risk to others.

Basically my feeling is that, in the face of such uncertainty, feeling good about one's decisions is more important than the extremely fragile result of some utilitarian calculus. That's not to say that these models are useless, far from it. I think it vitally important that when one's approach is overwhelmingly contradicted by the evidence, one is well advised to change it, but the key word here is 'overwhelmingly'. Not only is a preponderance of evidence not enough, but most of importantly, I personally must be overwhelmed by it, not others telling me I should be. — Isaac

I would say that in the face of relative uncertainty we're forced to go with our guts, but the results of our evolving decision-making fields do tend to be more reliable than reading the portents from sheep-guts. By "utilitarian calculus" I'm trying to point to higher quality evidence based assessments (wanna-be calculations) of the outcomes of proposed actions in the first place. I realize that people will go with their guts, but it's also apparent that more experienced and well-informed guts make more reliable decisions. Magnus Carlsen or Bobby Fischer can only be trusted when they tell you what chess move you should make, but I'm not saying we're obligated to do what they say, or even that they're always right. The crux of my point is that it is most important for us to try to become experienced and informed, like them, that we too can make more reliable decisions (that we're sometimes impelled to trust preeminent experts on specific matters is not a complication we cannot use reason to assess). No matter what your values are, relatively speaking, being able to better serve them by avoiding the bad moves and tending toward better moves is in my view the most significant way to assess the meta-ethical quality of a framework or proposed action in an of itself (relative values aside).

It's not a perfect approach (or one that seeks perfection), but the vector of reason and evidence is hopefully a more persuasive method. If we have to redefine what we mean by some words in some contexts to expose more of that overwhelming persuasive power, that's what matters. In practical moral debate we just can't meaningfully bring the moral-epistemic implications of relativism without also neutering the persuasive power of our language; if and where we have fundamentally different starting values, to import relativism would be to give up an attempt to influence their values directly. If we don't need to influence their values because they are not in competition with our own, then we don't need relativism at all; we can focus on how our moral agreements empirically serve (or more easily: do not disservice) our mutually compatible values.

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Despite my addiction to verbosity and post length, I think I'm getting a clearer picture of the differences between our views as our discussion progresses. Thanks for your patience!

Yes it dismisses a kind of hard moral guilt, but it leaves practical responsibility intact.

The killer might not have hard free will, but we still need to lock them up (for our safety) and try to rehabilitate them (if we're kind). Because we do have the capacity to make decisions, sometimes we need to be held accountable, in practice, for decisions we make without significant or abnormal coercion. (the question really is how should we intervene to reduce some kind of harm or potential harm? If a person commits a crime because they were manipulated or extorted into doing so, we might not hold them accountable; if we suspect that someone is likely to commit more crime in the future, we're morally motivated to somehow intervene.

Either: it's the same answer. Not immoral in itself, only immoral in the sense of moral relativism.

Moral relativism has a parallel in existential nihilism, so it might help to think about it in that way. There's no meaning in the world itself, the meaning stems from us. — S

If moral truth can only stem from subjective starting values (we agree on this) what purpose does the "amoral" descriptor serve beyond reaffirming our lack of objective metaphysical/existential foundation for our starting values?

Relativism only needs to rear its unfortunate head in the face of exclusive or competing values. And as we so often agree on those fundamental value, can't we carry on with an objective comparison of our proposed methods of serving those values?

So you're just being annoying by differing from me semantically? You have yet to learn that I'm always right, and that there should be a single unified meaning, namely my own meaning. One day I'll become a dictator and enforce my own unified meaning, like in 1984 — S

:grin:

I'm saying you should accept the overwhelming utility of moral pragmatism, which in order to be persuasive, must commandeer the definition of "morality" (to allow us to make evidence based moral rebukes), in a way that also redefines "amorality".

From your perspective I'm ignoring the implications of relativism, but from my perspective you're ignoring the implications of pragmatism (what is true for us in practice or useful/necessary to serve our values). IF we want an effective or pragmatic moral framework, then being rationally persuasive matters, objectively.

Meta-ethics is firstly about what's the case, then what's the best way of speaking about it. (That's actually what most if not all topics in philosophy are about, or what they should be about). So I conclude moral anti-realism, but then conclude moral relativism over error theory or emotivism. The differences between the positions I mentioned have much to do with how we should interpret moral language, but also about what is actually the case. — S

I'm not an epistemological anti-realist so maybe this is why you see my distinction as trivial; I'm interested in whether or not moral strategies conform with predictive power to an external world; that's the only coherent way I can see to compare and evaluate them in the face of subjective starting values (aside from attacking the internal consistency of given values hierarchies). Yes there is no objective truth component to our fundamental values, but what matters to us still matters to us, and this has always impelled us forward into the world of applied ethics, uncertainty or no.

I really enjoy the comparison of normative moral frameworks and moral decisions to chess strategies and tactics. Uncertainty is inherent with any strategy, and chess is a particularly good way to show how many different strategic methods and tactical options there are across a range of situations, but it is also a good way to show how some strategies and methods are better or worse than others. Chess shows how statistically superior strategic decisions converge toward some strategies and away from others. It shows that some strategies and tactics, and hence moral frameworks and moral decisions, are objectively superior/interior (or or less effective at serving given values) than others.

You're the one rephrasing my argument to make it sound as if there's some question about whether or not I condone FGM. Do you even know what moral relativism is? — Isaac

I know you don't condone FGM, and I think I know what relativism is...

The point I'm trying to make by harping on your reaction to my statement that "per our moral values, FGM is objectively immoral" is that within a given relative moral framework of starting values we can come to positions of reasonable confidence regarding the aptitude of possible actions toward values-service, and the only sensical way to communicate our reasonable conclusions is with language that reflects our epistemic confidence; relativism need not be extended to how we feel about the utility of possible actions because the kind of knowledge that results from empirical observation can be tested for objective strength. Once we've agreed upon starting values, there are no more meaningful relativist implications on moral debate/morality in practice. Again, when we forget morality as ever supposedly having to do with objective values in the first place, and just treat it as a realm of strategy pertaining to how to achieve our goals (note: there is a useful distinction between hedonism/individual utilitarian calculus and a calculus which actually considers the values of others, which is amorality vs morality, (conflict v cooperation, basically), then it is true prima facie that some moral strategies are better or worse than others, in exactly the same way that some moves in a given chess game are strategically inferior or superior toward achieving the desired outcome.

So, in a nut shell: I'm trying to say that we can have strong inductive knowledge that certain practices, such as FGM, do not serve human/social welfare. If accurate, this means that if someone condones FGM because they think it does serve human.social welfare, they're "incorrect" according to our best knowledge. I suppose you can say that this falls outside the realm of morality (if we define morality by its relation to "objective values", which don't seem to exist), but in practice and common parlance it never does.

I realize that morality in practice is different from the most broad possible definition of morality, but why must we define morality in relation to whether or not moral values can be somehow metaphysically/objectively true or not in the first place (which captures the entire relevant distinction of subjective relativism). If we both think that human values are merely physical happenstance, let's just accept that and give morality an ontological definition befitting what it is: sets of emergent, strategic, human-values-serving (cooperative) frameworks. This way we get a descriptive meta-ethical framework that can adequately capture the whole gambit of moral values and frameworks that exist in the wild, while also not exposing our epistemic throats to meta-ethical truth claims which define morality in fundamentally different terms (it can be simultaneously true that god exists, has a perfect "moral" plan, and the Mormon religion faithfully serves it, and that the Mormon moral framework, and other frameworks, are human-values-serving strateges that either do or do not effectively serve the fundamental values of humans).

What do you think I've been presenting (with regards to vaccines)? Reasoning as to why one might not want to immunise a child. What bit of my responses on the subject do not come under the category of 'reasoning'? It just comes down to the fact that you don't agree with my reasoning, not that I haven't presented an — Isaac

You offered reasons as to why people might be reasonably ignorant of the merits of proven vaccines (once again using a kind of epistemic relativism, not one based on values). The desire to get into heaven can plausibly be framed as a value, but the existence of heaven (at least, our ability to have meaningful empirical indication about whether or not heaven exists) is firstly an empirical question; if I could prove or show it to be likely that heaven exists, we would also inherently desire to go there as well (it's not a values disagreement, it's a disagreement about facts in the external world).

Have you read anything about how "clinical trials' are conducted? I suggest Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma, or just just read his blog, or the Statistical Society's, or AllTrials, or just about any reputable interest group. Ben's blog has got 37 articles about the misbehaviour of the pharmaceutical industry, and given his other work against homeopathy and and the anti-vax movement, he's hardly trying to bring civilisation down. — Isaac

This is called cherry-picking. It's a kind of reasoning, it's just highly fallible. We cannot draw reliable conclusions about the amount of misbehavior in the medical industry at large by focusing only on grossest instances of negligence we can find. I know (I think) I don't need to explain this to you, but I guess my point comes out so mundane that you keep missing it.

How many though? For a parent, they want to know if the actual drug they are agreeing to inject into their child is going to be worth the risk. Their child, not the average child. So let's say I'm the parent of a five-year old. What epidemiological study should I be looking at to show the long-term benefits for a breastfed child, with a diet high in fresh vegetables, a low stress environment with only small isolated groups of children and good personal hygiene (all of which the WHO list as having significant effect on immune response). Show me a study following that specific group (or even one close to it) and I might be convinced, otherwise it's just about choosing risk categories. As I said, my chances of dying in a plane crash are zero, I don't fly, so why should I learn the safety procedure just because studies show it saves lives? — Isaac

You can start with fundamentally basic statistical analysis that tracks the correlation of reduction in disease outbreaks with their corresponding vaccine usage and spread. There are plenty of epidemiological studies that can help us understand the nature and importance of "herd immunity", which can change how people look at the risks involved to begin with. It would actually be ideal for your child to be surrounded by immunized children, because then there is a far smaller chance of disease spreading through an immunized community. As one of the only non-immunized child, they would actually pose a threat to the others, because vaccines are not 100% effective, because we cannot give some of them to children who are too young, and because some people with compromised immune systems cannot get some of them at all; lacking vaccines increases the likelihood of an individual being the vector that spreads disease to others. As the anti-vax movement expands, we've started to see outbreaks of diseases in communities that have been almost entirely eliminated for decades (google "recent measles outbreaks"). Anti-vax hot-spots are seeing outbreaks, and the communities where the un-vaccinated travel to are also being put at risk. It's a straight up fact that if our densely populated cities consisted of mostly unvaccinated people, we would be dealing with massive outbreak after massive outbreak of the same diseases that killed so many in relatively recent history. There's kind of a game-theory catch-22: if vaccines do pose some risks to individuals, and if everyone else is vaccinated, then you don't really need to get vaccinated yourself (except if the odds of contracting disease from a natural source rather than from other people is greater than the risk of taking a vaccine), but if everyone tried to get away with that then it would become safer to actually get the vaccinations (given the inevitable outbreaks of known diseases we've been successful in "eradicating" (read: mitigating through vaccines)).

The medical science community is not at all divided about the importance of wide-spread vaccinations, and any quick glance at the available data strongly supports why. If you are unvaccinated, your chances of dying from vaccine related complications are zero (as opposed to a fraction of a fraction of of one percent if you were deemed healthy enough and received it), but your chances of dying from infectious disease drastically rises. You can ask me to prove this with scientific rigor for each and every individual case, but I can't. Medical doctors do take into account the strength of given immune systems before they administer vaccines, I just don't see the opinions of parents as being reasonable or reasonably persuasive when compared to the experience based knowledge of medical doctors (backed and informed by a plethora of experimental/real world evidence).

Maybe we should start a new thread about the risks and rewards of vaccinations (I'm not sure if you actually think they're based in sufficiently strong science or not). In any case, the relativity of ignorance is of no merit in a debate over empirical facts.

I have no problem with using evidence and reason. The trouble is, you seem to. I have been presenting evidence and reason as to why a parent might reject vaccination. I've not argued they might reject vaccines without any reasons, I've given reasons and you ignored them all because they don't give you the answer you decided on before the argument even began. A basic understanding of human psychology is all that's required. — Isaac

You're trying to persuade me into thinking that reason and evidence are unpersuasive by using classically fallacious reasoning and evidence. There is some elegance to that, granted, but all you're really establishing is that reason and evidence, in practice, clash against a boundary of ignorance. My point though, is that better reasoning and better evidence (and better access to it) push back harder against that boundary. I don't know what your epistemological frameworks necessarily looks like, but mine does assume that the better our predictive models conform to existing and experimental evidence/observations, the more closely they tend to approximate reliable "truth". I'm not saying everyone needs to accept the evidence in regards to FGM and vaccines (as you say, psychological circumstance prevents it), I'm trying to make the point that better evidence leads to better predictive power, and under a meta-ethical framework of morality as predictive models pursuing relative values, founding them in better evidence also leads to better predictive power (more effective strategies; superior moral decisions, per the given values). I'm making a case for moral progress that makes sense regardless of the facts of meta-ethical relativism. We no longer tolerate lynch mobs, for instance, because we've managed to erect a more effective system of protecting and delivering what we think justice is. In our environment and given our values, lynch mobs are approximately objectively less effective, to the point of being dangerous toward the service of justice, than a well trained and publicly sanctioned police force and equitable court system. Habeus corpus is objectively a good thing relative to our values, unless social circumstances somehow change.

Under the constant application of relativism, you can say that whether or not lynch mobs are more effective is a matter of subjective perception and opinion, so how can we say they are less moral/immoral? Everything becomes amoral, and the entire pool of moral language (and anything it branches in to, such as empirical claims) is set upon the relative road to moral nihilism.

You're equivocating. You argue for the seeming uncontroversial "we should use reason and evidence to determine our actions", but what you're actually saying is that reason and evidence, once applied, provide us with a single correct answer, and that's a much more controversial claim which remains unsupported. — Isaac

Single correct answer is not quite right. "directs us toward better answers" is more the point, and it is backed up by inductive reasoning and experimental evidence. The only apparent difference between our meta-ethical frameworks is that yours focuses on denying objectivity while mine highlights the only way in which our moral decisions can be "objective", which is higher on the spectrum of predictive reliability, relative to given moral values.

P.S I'm sorry for making such lengthy responses; I try to help it. Feel free to condense your response into paragraph form sans-quotation if you prefer.

FGM is amoral except in the sense of moral relativism. So you either agree with me about moral relativism, or you're saying something false about FGM. — S

Are you talking about the practice/concept of FGM or the act of FGM? I'm not following why we need relativism to escape the amoral descriptor. I thought what is or isn't amoral was a meta-ethical distinction.

You still don't seem to realise that what you're doing is lose-lose.

You either describe something subjective, like my values, in which case we agree, even though at times you seem to act as though we don't. This would just be to preach to the choir.

Or you describe something objective, but which lacks meta-ethical relevance. Comments of the sort about brushing your teeth are not in themselves meta-ethically relevant. You only make them relevant because of your own moral evaluation, which again is subjective. It is not correct to confuse that for objectivity, and it is not correct to confuse objectivity which lacks meta-ethical relevance for objectivity which is of meta-ethical relevance. — S

It's my meta-ethical definition which describes in what way moral decisions can be objective, relative to values.

I'm eschewing subjective feelings about what morality is from a meta-ethical standpoint (by defining it as values serving strategies) so that we can have a consistent/objective discussion about how to compare and evaluate competing moral decisions or frameworks. It can't just be subjective feelings all the way up and all the way down; reality needs to be inserted somewhere.

If I've given you the impression I'm defending any sort of meta-ethical absolutism then I have miscommunicated. I am however, though not overtly, defending a kind of meta-meta-ethical distinction that I don't yet have the right language for: ethical frameworks are all in service of some sort of value, but predominantly they are arranged to serve a certain range of nearly universal human values, and they continuously adapt toward more optimal values-service. The broad "convergence" of moral decision making which is oriented toward the same ends induces us toward the idea that some ethical and meta-ethical frameworks are more universally applicable than others; it implies that there are some moral frameworks that will be more agreeable and persuasive to our moral decisions and intuitions at large. Broadly speaking, ethical frameworks which account for methods, costs, and results (empirical matters) tend to be the most widespread and communicable. Reason based moral arguments might not always persuade individual proponents of X, Y, or Z moral framework, but they have stuck around because they're objectively effective at promoting human welfare per our environments, and they transmit well because they are based in shareable empirical fact-checking behavior rather than subjective whim.

Your meta-ethical definition focuses on the very fact that there is no "objective moral 'truth'" as a starting point that defines it ontologically as a realm of relative subjective truth (where truth conforms to values and beliefs). My own meta-ethical definition focuses on what it is moral activity is attempting to do more holistically: it's not just serving values, it's trying to serve them well. Under my view also, moral "truth" doesn't necessarily point to anything meaningful beyond the existence of relative values. And like any proposition designed to navigate uncertainty (any strategy), there are no "true or false" decisions to begin with, only "statistically better and worse decisions" (though there is an objective truth to the ramifications of our decisions, even when we're lucky we can only approximate it with strong induction). Even if a decision is 100% guaranteed to be the worst decision, it could only be "false" if we went out of our way to frame it as a truth statement (it is false that X move will create the desired outcome)., Though we cannot access truth with objective certainty (as Isaac will never let me forget), we can indeed often approximate it with objectivity. (e.g:if Isaac was "objective" and gathered facts, then he would come to realize that FGM has no meaningful benefit to individuals or society.)

don't know why FGM came about, but I find it unlikely that it was a result of a cabal of child molesters, who the rest of the community had mysteriously put in charge, coming up with a new way of mindlessly injuring innocent children. So I simply presume they had a reason. By what I know it's an aboniable practice, the difference is, I'm prepared to accept that I don't know all the facts. — Isaac

How very humble of you.

If someone offered to cut off your daughters clitoris, would you be interested to know about the boons and benefits she would receive as a result?

FGM isn't unique to any one ethnicity, nor is it a culturally dominant practice in any of the major ethnic categories. I can't possibly be attacking non-westerners specifically because it's not a western/non-western distinction. It is a practice with varying prevalence across some parts of north Africa, some Middle Eastern countries, one South American country, and a few Asian countries.

As I revealed to you before, It is practiced out in the world for a myriad of confused reasons ranging from "because the elders demand it", to "it will benefit their health and correct their behavior". In some cases they literally have no record or recollection of why they ever began doing it (they might as well be doing it for aesthetic reasons alone). You don't know all the facts, but at what point do the facts you do know become sufficient? (for instance, the fact that female circumcision is painful, dangerous, performed on a child incapable of giving consent (and who usually resists), and limits their ability to have a gratifying sex life as an adult).

What more data are you waiting for? Do you think it slows the spread of STI's or something? That victims of genital mutilation are made more subservient to their future husbands, which justifies the initial harm? Is it that we have to respect a parent's right to decide how and why to raise their children, because a parent knows best?

Give me something that will help me understand why you're not willing to condemn the practice of FGM as immoral. I get the "amorality à la -S" angle, but given that we're discussing FGM in the moral context of agreed upon values (individual health and social health), from our perspective, why can you not morally condemn FGM?

No, that comes from the fact that every example you picked paints non-westerners (or detractors) as stupid and/or immoral — Isaac

The anti-vax movement is a western movement led by mostly middle aged stupid white people whose actions are immoral (their race, age, and nationality doesn't matter to me, it is merely happenstance). (I thought that went without saying). The first example I brought up was vaccines, which you rejected, so I moved on to FGM because I thought you wouldn't deign to question our ability to know whether or not is is a harmful practice. (After that I moved on to eye gouging and human sacrifice, where you finally caved).

Your attempt to portray me as racist (or what? fantastically arrogant? I think I'm better than everyone else or that I'm morally flawless?) is quite unreasonable, which makes me wonder whether or not you are arguing from emotion instead of reason. Perhaps you feel that it is too mean for me to condemn the culturally significant practice of FGM, because what does that say about the human beings who practice it? So you've convinced yourself I must be even more than arrogant... (I guess this is my fault for thinking that condemning the mutilation of a child's genitals is an "enlightened" thing to do. By using that one contentious word, I showed my entirely racist hand). It's a good thing I didn't bother condemning MGM as well, else I'd also be an anti-semite! (Did you know hundreds of male babies die every year due to circumcision related complications?)

I might be wrong about vaccines and FGM, that's true, but in so far as my detractors share my starting values, and in so far as they have no evidence/reasoning showing the utility of their moral decisions which I show (with evidence/reasoning) to be harmful (contain anti-utility), I get to carry on as if I'm right, even to the point of arrogance, until someone offers be better evidence and/or better reasoning. I'm not interested in being absolutely right, I'm interested in being usefully right. In the case of FGM all the good evidence points in one direction.

No, you picked examples where modern Western civilisation has some moral superiority to claim over non-westerners. — Isaac

This clearly factually inaccurate. My original example was against anti-vax parents. Please discontinue this disingenuous line of attack, else I'll turn up the petty psycho-analysis in kind.

Maybe you didn't even realise you were doing it, but from the middle of a culture whose everyday activities are literally damaging the future of humanity, the fact that you looked further than just out of the window for your examples of objective, scientifically proven moral wrongs is telling. — Isaac

How in the world could you ever expect me to guess that you understand (or "trust"?) climate science if you don't even trust the statistics showing the boons of proven vaccines (or if you think it's too complicated for most people to learn about)?

Something is very backwards here... Climate change is more controversial than vaccines. I avoided climate change specifically because of the enduring denial that comes out of conservative camps (which would despoil the context of my example, much as your anti-vax and pro-FGM (pseudo)rhetoric has achieved). If you want to take this particular tangent in an anti-modernity, anti-western, anti-industrial, or even anti-enlightenment direction, that's perfectly fine, but you'll have to clarify the point you wish to make. Are you saying that modernity/industry isn't worthwhile given the effects we've had, and will continue to have, on the climate?

So you have personally conducted research? Looked at the actual data set for the trials of the latest vaccine? Personally checked the records on which the epidemiological data is based? Because if not, then your trust in the people delivering you this information is faith. — Isaac

A careful read of my posts will reveal that I've only ever lauded the benefits of "proven" vaccines, which means vaccines that have undergone clinical trials. When it comes to vaccines that have been in widespread use for long periods of time, we have real world experience to go by (data gathering and statistical analysis has to be trusted on some level, but it can also be "tested" through repetition, which mitigates our need for faith based trust).

The specific science of vaccines is well beyond me, but the science of statistical analysis is not, which indicates with overwhelming strength that those well-known vaccines we use to fight once common and deadly diseases actually work.

We're dealing with much harder ones where the facts of the case or the complex social/political circumstances make the way forward difficult to see. It doesn't help to come along claiming to have the answer like it was a maths sum. — Isaac

Framing it closer to a maths sum is probably more usefully persuasive (for change) than framing it closer to a sacred cultural artifact which we would be racist to condemn. In any case, I'm saying we can use evidence and reason to rationally appeal to their existing values as a means of persuasion. I don't have any grand illusions that everyone can easily be persuaded; I'm just identifying what I believe is the most effective vector of persuasion.

And here we go again with the tiresome flag-waving for Western civilisation. Have you noticed the continued reliance on fossil fuel despite the fact that scientific consensus is that it is destructive to our society? Have you noticed that micro-plastics are now in every environment in the world and the scientific consensus is that they could be harmful? Have you noticed that careers continue to become more stressful despite the fact that the World Health Organisation consider stress to be a major factor in 80% of all disease? Any of that sound particularly rational?

We've got where we are because of a series of improvements whose short-term benefits could be directly seen and whose long-term consequences were barely given a moment's thought. That's not rational argument, that's seeing money in the minefield and going to pick it up and hang the consequences. — Isaac

I don't exactly see why I should have to defend the whole of western society. I'm happy with the goal posts at "better off now than we were before". We have new problems, but that's life; we solve one problem and it creates a new one or a new one just emerges on its own. Relatively speaking we're better off than before by almost every measurable metric (lifespan, health, comforts). Maybe the west will bring about the destruction of all humans, but until that happens we're in the utilitarian black.

No, this goes back to what I said above about certainty. I completely agree that rational arguments have greater or lesser strength (for those who have already agreed to use rationality as a thinking tool). But I strongly disagree with the granularity, the exactness, you claim is possible when such arguments become complex. My position can be summed up as;

Given the complexity of the physical and social environment in which decisions have to be made, the vast majority of calculations can only be assessed so broadly that we end up with a very large group of options for all of which the most we can say is "yes, that broadly makes sense".

Your argument is like claiming to judge which is the higher mountain to the micrometer without any measuring equipment. We can all see the difference between a mountain and a hill, but from there it's just guesswork as to which is tallest. — Isaac

I get what you're saying, but I don't agree it reasonably applies to FGM and vaccines. From where I stand, they're both clearly foothills, and I can even see/fathom why the crowds gathered at their base mistake them for a high peak.

Asking "what should we do" in the context of all possible actions is overwhelming. But in comparing just two specific actions, or even comparing one action against its negation, we can still make useful relative statements about "superior and inferior decisions". It is far easier to say (to persuade) that something is morally superior than to say it is morally obligatory, (positive moral obligation might be incoherent) because we would have to establish that one particular action has a higher utility than all other possible actions, but often times we can quite confidently say that something is immoral (morally inferior), because all we need to do is show that not doing it has higher relative utility than doing it.

It's not that i think non FGM and being pro-vaccine are of extraordinary utility; I think that FGM and intentionally avoiding vaccines are direct or sufficiently proximate sources of harm, which directly controverts our fundamental moral values.

Everyone else not doing it. Same thing as persuades most people to do most things. Have you looked at society lately? See much rational decision making going on? The largest ecomony in the world just voted in a clown for a leader because of a wave of 'popular opinion'. Since when has rational argument made any difference? — Isaac

Rational arguments very well might make zero difference, but whether or not we are able to recognize and accept them does make a difference (because the external reasons-centric "objective" worldis the way it is, not the way we want or believe it to be. Ultimately we learn this by experience.

To answer your question about when rational argument has made a difference, just look around you. Notice the absence of hay, of candle-light, of the distinct smell of manure, human shit, and body-odor. Notice the many medical institutions that surround and serve you, without which you might be a lot worse off than you are now. Notice your legal rights which we do our best to protect; maybe there is a ginger jester in the hot seat, but notice how it's just a seat and not a gilded throne that claims to own you. Notice the moral progress that the west has made in such a relatively recent period since the enlightenment era; how society is no longer fundamentally driven by superstitious religious beliefs, and how much better off we are for it all.

Collective thought turns very slowly, but it is inexorably turned by an accumulation individual arguments, and it turns more accurately when more of our arguments are rational and evidence based.

No, you're not, you're additionally telling us all which ones they are, and telling anyone who disagrees that they are 'objectively wrong'. — Isaac

To be specific, I'm saying that either FGM as a practice does benefit individual and social health, or it doesn't; that either its proponents or their antipodes are "objectively wrong". Again, I chose the example because I thought the answer was as obvious as not gouging your own eyes is useful for retaining your eyesight.

Saying that someone is morally wrong requires a high standard of certainty, in my opinion. Maybe this is our sole point of contention. You're happy to throw around accusations of immorality on the basis of a belief that your modal is 'probably' better. I'm not. — Isaac

Does it matter if I'm attacking a practice and not a person? It's not as if I'm trying to establish legal culpability by arguing that any reasonable person ought to know better (I'm well aware of how circumstance and inaccess to information can warp perspective).

Do you at least assent to the statement: "gouging our own eyes out is an objectively morally inferior course of action IF retaining our eyesight is of moral value"? (need I flesh out that specific argument?).

I don't understand this line of argument. You seem to be suggesting that I should believe something other than what seems to me to be the case, because what I currently believe is not very useful in persuading people to do what I want them to. That seems like a really weird argument. Maybe I've misunderstood so ill wait for some more clarity before going into it. — Isaac

I know it seems strange, and it is: It's essentially a part of my meta-ethical framework states that rationally persuasive arguments are more useful (and that rationally persuasive arguments are more reliably accurate). If we're after a pragmatic moral framework (one that effectively serves the values that matter to us), then being persuasive to others actually becomes a derivative measure of its overall utility (and happens to represent a major component of how moral frameworks are naturally selected in the first place).

I'm not actually asking you to change your beliefs, all you really need to do is alter the language of your moral framework. To better persuade someone to assent to your moral views (to stop promoting FGM, for instance) you cannot approach them with language like "however you feel about it defines for you what is morally right, so who am I to insinuate that FGM is an immoral action?". You should be able to tell them that FGM is a morally inferior practice per the values of human and social health even if you're not absolutely certain. Reasonable certainty is certainty enough, and when the stakes are very high we're forced to scramble for the best and most rational evidence/arguments/conclusions we can find (the nature of all dilemmas) If you do believe that FGM does not effectively serve its purported values, how little epistemic respect must you have for your own beliefs/understanding that you object to its moral condemnation on epistemic grounds? The more epistemic doubt you cast on our ability to understand that FGM is harmful to given moral values, the more room you make for it as a morally acceptable/tolerable practice, and that's the over-skeptical mistake I'm challenging. If you are trying to say that FGM isn't actually perpetuated because people believe it has utility, I would understand, but in practice it IS perpetuated because of widespread belief in its utility. Convincing a group of people to change has to start somewhere.

If your moral framework doesn't help you to realize your values in the world because it lacks the form required to act persuasively on others, then for the sake of what matters to you, learn the common moral tongue. You don't need to compromise your values or specific moral beliefs to forgo the "all moral truth is subjective" rigamarole. We already live in a world dominated by compatible or aligned fundamental values; by focusing on the ontological nature of moral values as subjective (something that is indeed not obvious to everyone), instead of trying to work directly with and on our existing compatible values or the empirical arguments concerning how to serve them, you're just subverting the overall persuasive power of your subsequent arguments. If there is moral truth out there at all to be had, relative to our subjective values though it may be, we need to have an objective discussion about which methods are better than others (and how we should order and consider our own values and the values of others). Once foolish mysticism is eliminated from our moral debates (a largely separate labor to most moral suasion), we're in fact left with a rather straightforward series of propositions. We have moral values, we have an uncertain future, and we have more and less reliable predictive models which indicate "moral" courses of action. FGM isn't your typical calculus, but supporting it does amount to a prediction, an inevitably empirical claim, about how well it serves given values. We might have limited ability to solve these kinds of questions given their complexity, but in many cases we have more than adequate predictive power (I think in the case of FGM you also agree).

Yes. That is basically the difference between the class of virtue ethics I'm talking about and utilitarian consequentialism. Virtue ethics does not require a fixed point in the future for its calculus, utilitarianism does. With virtue ethics you are comparing the way actions make you feel about yourself right now. With utilitarianism you are comparing the net utility of actions, but to do so you must use a fixed timescale, otherwise one would advise an action which made the whole population ecstatically happy, but wiped out all future generations (not far off our current attitude). The decision you make will depend on the timescale over which you wish to maintain maximum utility. — Isaac

My point was that specific virtue ethics are causally selected for their utility, over any time-span. The longer the time-span the more opportunity there is for specific "virtues" which promote long-term utility to evolve. This is following a different kind of meta-ethical viewpoint: a proponent of virtue ethics might use how they feel immediately about their actions as a guide for decision making, but because they have evolved over given periods of time, how they happen to feel actually tends to correlate with the future utility that their decisions generate. (I.E: at some point we moved away from "eye-for-an-eye" to "do unto others as they would do unto you" because as principles of virtue or deontological codes the latter is more useful). We are emotionally repulsed by death and senseless violence (especially to the innocent) because biological and cultural evolution has deemed it useful, and it has necessary ramifications on any moral framework, including virtue ethics.

"Exactly. And you think it's obvious enough that one should vaccinate their child, and you think it's obvious enough that we should brush our teeth, and you think it's obvious enough...

The trouble is, other people disagree, and they do so with perfectly rational arguments of greater or lesser strength"

Do you see the contradiction in the bolded text? Maybe I'm reading into a colloquial use of the word "perfectly", but it seems like you're undermining the idea that rational arguments can have greater and lesser strength.

The vaccination issue is exactly the reason why I so strongly disapprove of your approach. It seems to you like it fits right in with not committing FGM, or not killing each other with ice picks, but to me, it stands out a mile as being something which transfers a hell of a lot of trust to organisations which have absolutely shown themselves to be untrustworthy. — Isaac

I get that you have trust issues with government and the pharmaceutical industry, I do too, but the alleged risks of taking "proven" vaccines (vaccine formulas for which there is ample clinical trial data, real world data, and statistical analysis showing the decline of related diseases) are really quite overblown. I'm aware that it's a complicated subject, and I fully understand why people have their doubts, but it's a question that has been asked and answered by the field of medical science at large. It's like climate change due to the greenhouse effect; hard to understand because of the complex physics, and easy to doubt because of widespread misinformation and a lack of physics understanding.

When confronted with either a climate change denier, an anti-vaxer, or an FGM supporter, I will try to dissuade them by introducing them to evidence and rational arguments, thereby generating positive moral ramifications. Under your approach, we linger in moral and epistemic agnosticism with the assumptions that the evidence is too hard to come by and that rationally interpreting it is too difficult.

What really bothers me is that you're advocating a system which basically gives moral weight to current scientific opinion with no consideration at all for how vulnerable some fields of science are to fashion, government influence, corporate influence, or plain human greed and bias. You're giving over decisions about what is fundamentally 'right' to a system which has proven itself to be morally questionable at times by the very standards you're using it to uphold. — Isaac

I'm not appealing to science as absolute, I'm appealing to science as better or the best we have (and not all science is equal; to know how confident we should be in a given "scientific" truth, we need to be introduced to the specific "science" that underlies it, else our faith in it amounts to black-box induction). The good news is, good science trends toward more and more reliable truth, just as better reasoning, more evidence, and more comprehensive analysis trend toward more reliable conclusions, which is why I'm so stoked to make them a part of moral discussion, debate, and frameworks.

You see, this is the problem I have with your position. You talk accurately about epistemological when pushed (I've bolded the relevant sections), but then you reveal this authoritarian undercurrent with the likes of...

Some cultural practices are, in fact, morally superior to others in the context of those nearly universal human values which we all share — VagabondSpectre


We're just going round in circles on this one so I don't see the point continuing, you've brought up vacancies again (despite not even a glancing recognition of my arguments as to why people might legitimately doubt the statistics). You keep insisting that the models held by current academic, research, and government institutions in the developed countries are absolutely beyond question. That there are no legitimate grounds to doubt that they are the best models we have. — Isaac

Setting our disagreement about specific social issues aside for a moment, you're misinterpreting the point I'm making. By "in fact" I meant that there is actually an objective truth pertaining to empirical claims, I never said we can or must always have direct access to that objective truth. What I'm trying to say is that we should, with objectivity, try our best to approximate objective truths (akin to science, not "exactly science" (which is incoherent)), because they help us make more effective decisions.

I only used the examples I did because I thought they would not garner evidence-based resistance (in other words, I thought that the superior values-serving answers to these questions are obvious enough, or, that we are able to gather sufficient data on the matter). You went out of your way to explain why parents might be ignorant of vaccine related statistics and why they might be extorted into carrying out FGM, but you did not make any good argument as to why FGM as a practice could actually net any individual benefit (beyond not suffering from extortion) or why we cannot be reasonably informed by evidence as to whether or not taking vaccines is beneficial to health, and therefore a superior decision. You explained why individuals are forced into perpetuating FGM as a practice (a utility based argument) but you did not defend the utility based argument wielded by those who actually do the extortion. You explained why anti-vax parents can be filled with doubt, but you did not enter into an evidence based debate about the empirical question (good empirical evidence is the best way to convince an anti-vax parent who believes vaccines are harmful to health to believe otherwise; this is where feelings matter less than evidence, reason, and the "truth" they seek to help us approximate). Furthermore, you are conflating my condemnation of FGM as the direct assigning of moral guilt upon individuals who are involved in its perpetuation (and unnecessarily opening up a tangential discussion about whether or not I'm morally/racially insensitive). Personally I think the idea of absolute moral guilt is incoherent (per tentative determinism/lack of hard free will), and that only pragmatic moral guilt is relevant. Pragmatic moral guilt is basically where we intervene to remedy the moral problem. Intervening in the actions of the extorted parents with arguments or force won't do anything (they will be unpersuaded or punished by the community as a result), but by intervening with arguments against the supporting empirical beliefs of the broader community (e.g: that it is healthy for women and society) we CAN actually make a difference.

Put yourself in the shoes of somebody who believes FGM is good for practical utility reasons (the person who would extort others into doing it). Are you incapable of being persuaded by empirical evidence? How can you say it's merely "subjectively true" that FGM (as a practice, not as an individually extorted act) serves the values of human and social health, when we both know that there is an objective truth to the matter? Yes people have perspective, bias, and ignorance, but if we cannot mitigate their effects through reason and evidence, this whole "philosophy" thing is a big waste of time.

In order for it to be morally 'right' given shared values about children's health, for a parent to vaccinate a child, they would have to... — Isaac

No, in order for a parent to feel confident that it is morally right, they need to have those things. It is either morally right, or wrong, per the given values, regardless of how they feel about it.

Re: my faith in scientific consensus. I'm a student of many things, and I have seen so much evidence pertaining to the issues I've mentioned that my trust doesn't spring from faith, which might better frame the point I'm trying to make with these examples. Sacrificing virgins to increase crop yields might be a better example. As a strategy to maximize utility, it absolutely sucks (unless you're performing an inconsiderate calculus, where fewer people means greater shares (which is ostensibly amoral, or more specifically, a breakdown of morality)). It's almost certainly true that sacrificing virgins doesn't have any direct causal relationship with crop yields (maybe it causes farmers to work harder to ensure that their lives aren't wasted, but any placebo could achieve that). Your objection will be that I don't know whether or not gods exist, and that's true, but the probability of a deity intervening on the basis of prayer or sacrifice is so low from an empirical stand-point that we can say with approximate certainty the proposition is false (at the very least, evidence and reason persuade the reasonable away from the proposition).

Yes, strictly speaking, in a very literal sense, everything is amoral, just like everything is meaningless. But switching back to the ordinary way of speaking, there are things which are moral and immoral, and there are things which are meaningful. A strict interpretation leads to nihilism, but that's not the end point. Nihilism is why you should interpret things pragmatically, like I do. This pragmatic interpretation is why "moral" and "meaningful" are not useless. — S

This is just semantics, but "amoral" really is not the right word. What you're saying is that there's no absolute and universal objective moral truth (the kind of objective truth that must apply in all cases), you're not saying that "there are things which are apart from morality" (which is the etymological meaning). I get how you're using the term, but it's stupendously misleading:

Rocks are "amoral", but FGM is a human practice which presumably nearly always concerns operant moral values on the part of humans. Under the definition of morality as a strategy or set of strategies, FGM would indeed fall within the realm of morality. The practice itself is amoral in the sense that it is not sentient (like rocks) but we don't usually anthropomorphize things in that way. When I frame the issue of FGM as an inherently moral question, what I'm saying is that it concerns our starting moral values, and can therefore is subject to whichever moral calculus. In every possible case of FGM I can imagine, values-considerations are a part of the decision making process, which is why the "amoral" descriptor fails in practice. If FGM didn't have anything to do with human values, then it might make sense to call it amoral (like flying kites or jogging), but in practice it always does.

Maybe I'm not a subjectivist-relativist after-all, I'm a full-blown moral pragmatist. "Ultimate moral truth" is incoherent from the get go because moral truth can only come into existence in physically realized circumstances where strategy conforms to extant moral values and the situation it is to be employed in. Just as there is no "best" strategy in Chess, different circumstances may alter the specific action required to bring about the desired outcome. "Moral truth", under this view, only exists as moral frameworks pragmatically serve human values, where more pragmatic frameworks are considered better.

I guess I'm refusing to even begin to use the language of moral objectivism (by assenting to the phrase that everything is amoral, which rebukes it). In the exact same way people misunderstand the "objectivity" of the scientific method (they equivocate scientific knowledge with objective certainty), people misunderstand the objectivity of moral strategies in general, and in specific cases of its application.

The issue is not about "moral utility", so your point misses the point. You're just saying that it's useful to brush your teeth every day if you value your dental health. Lots of people value their dental health, so generally, brushing your teeth is useful. Who cares? No one is going to disagree with that, and it doesn't effect the wider issue. — S

The example simplifies the structure of moral truth in practice. The wider question is "in what sense can moral decisions be 'true' or 'objective'". The answer is in whether or not they conform to values and circumstance; this is how we improve our existing moral decisions, and but for mutually exclusive values, this is how we actually reach moral propositions that in practice "no one is going to disagree with": the objectivity of empiricism.

If you're a subjective moral relativist, you kind of sound like you're weirdly in denial or something. Morality is subjective and relative, but... !

Cleaning your teeth is objective and matters! It's useful if you value your dental health!

(There's no need for the "but"). — S

If we agree on a specific meta-ethical definition, morality is not subjective (though in the case of our definition, moral "values" are subjective). Reason and evidence can sometimes do nothing to sway values where subjective feelings dominate, but feelings about "how best to achieve those values" can be factually inaccurate.

I've said this many times before, but humans share a set of fundamental values that are nearly universal to all of us. Most of our moral thinking is concerned with how to mutually serve these basic values in a complex environment. Take socialized healthcare for instance. It might be objectively true that it would greatly benefit the U.S (given the strength of examples set by other nations). We all want to be healthy, just like we want dental health, but there is severe disagreement about how to best achieve the desired end result. Appeals to feelings have no place in the debate about private vs public healthcare systems, which for America is one of the most important moral questions they face.

Okay, so you're a subjective relativist like me. — S

I guess so. I just happen to also think that more often than not it is the matters of fact which drive moral disagreement, not disparate or competing values.

Well it is amoral. Let's be clear. Your evaluation is just that. There's no moral value inherent in anything, and your evaluation doesn't magically make it so. There is nothing reasonable in simply saying that something or other is a moral value in any other sense than that it is so relative to a standard, which is in turn relative to feelings. If I don't feel the same way about this standard, then it simply doesn't apply to any moral judgements or evaluations that I make. All you're really telling me is how you feel about something. Good for you? — S

I get what you're saying, but I think amoral isn't the right word. Essentially you're saying that everything is amoral (right?) but that would render the term "moral" useless. I would use the term amoral to describe decisions that fall outside the realm of moral decision making entirely (which do not concern, or consider, extant moral values).

Personal dental health is not of moral value. It's either morally valuable to you or it isn't. And there's nothing meaningful or relevant in saying that something has moral utility. That's not the issue at all. — S

Brushing has sound moral utility given the moral value of dental health. This reflects a major part of the point I have been trying to make.

This is nonsense. Why would a predictive model become useless just because it is not certain? We are not 'certain' it will be sunny tomorrow, just because the weather forecast said it will be. How does that make weather forecasts "useless". The point I'm arguing against is that you seem to be saying that if the weather forecast says it's going to be sunny tomorrow, anyone carrying an umbrella just in case is morally bankrupt, they should believe wholeheartedly in what the modal tells them and act accordingly. It like talking to a religious fanatic. — Isaac

I was making the point that we have some capacity to predict whether or not FGM is beneficial to a society's subjective moral values, and you went on a tirade about how it's impossible to know whether or not FGM would make a positive or negative difference without god-like knowledge. I haven't brought up moral obligations or called people morally bankrupt, where is this coming from?. I realize you want to defend the humanity of people who carry out FGM, but this discussion isn't the place to do it (I'm attacking values, ideas, and practices, not specific people). I'm not going to back off of FGM as morally errant just because the condemnation is somehow insensitive.

I'm glad you brought up weather models, because they're frightfully uncertain predictive models, but they still have some utility. We cannot be absolutely certain that NOT cutting off a girl's clit won't harm the girl or society (harm their subjective values), but the forecast certainly indicates this (care to make a pragmatic argument for the practice of FGM? Extortion doesn't count, obviously). If the weather forecast is 99% possibility of precipitation, it would be prudent to carry an umbrella. This doesn't mean we're obligated to believe and obey weather forecasts, but it does mean that they can be useful in helping us make decisions, just like how the foreseeable and observed ramifications of FGM are useful in helping us make decisions about whether or not it effectively serves relevant human values, and hence to do it or not.

When it comes to vaccines, statistical examinations of their usage overwhelmingly indicates their safety/health-improving quality (the value they serve). You might not know it, but we're more certain of the measurable benefits of proven vaccines than the weather, which is why if health and well-being are the goals being serviced by taking or not taking vaccines, it is, statistically, (and as far as statistics can be "objective"), objectively, a superior decision to acquire the vaccinations (note: I'm not saying you should be sent to hell for not taking vaccines, I'm in effect saying you're stupid for not taking vaccines, and that you would have fewer health risks if you took vaccines. It only becomes a relevant moral condemnation if we can agree that morality should be concerned with preserving our physical health. Note*: Yes it is a moral condemnation if we agree on basic starting values, but I'm still not calling you morally bankrupt/hell-bound). You can claim ignorance on the matter, and that's fine, but your immune system and the pathogens it fights don't depend on your belief or ignorance; whether or not vaccines benefit or burden the average immune system, and the ratio of risks to rewards to our immune systems, is a question about objective fact. (we cannot access objective facts directly, but we approximate them through experience and observation; a cumulative inductive process.

The point is what could dissuade someone who promotes FGM as moral or morally obligatory because it promotes well-being?. (also, we don't need a "scientific" predictive model to have a useful predictive model, nor do we need "established science" to discriminate between the predictive power of competing models; experience alone can help sort that out). IF someone is practicing FGM because they believe it promotes individual and societal health, that amounts to a predictive model that can be questioned or falsified with reason,evidence, and sufficient experience; and while it is indeed a complex behavior nested in a complex system, we're not roundly incapable of gaining that kind of knowledge. I am interested in the strategic soundness of moral systems with given moral goals, their strategic objectivity, not the inconvenient fact that some people have ridiculous or contrary starting values (we get around this by trying to appeal to more fundamental values that are shared or non-comeptitive, which is essentially to attack the values themselves), or that we can never access "objective and absolute certainty" directly.

Have you really so little idea about how social groups function? There's not a small group of men sat in shed working out what their culture is going to be and then laughing maniacally about how cruel they've managed to make it. Cultures evolve over millenia as a result of thousands of individual choices and the complex interplay of social contracts, there's no one group to blame for it being the way it is. FGM is a result of a long history of bad decisions made under difficult circumstances. It needs to be dismantled with care, respect for the victims (including those who feel pressured into arranging it) and understanding that it is part of an interconnected Web of history of which we too are a part. This "enlightened westerner" telling the backward natives what they're doing wrong" shit is from the 50s, I had hoped we'd moved on from that. — Isaac

Ye Gods...

Some cultural practices are, in fact, morally superior to others in the context of those nearly universal human values which we all share (the desire to go on living, free, and unmolested, etc...). Thems just the breaks. I'm not trying to insult anyone or make people feel bad, I'm just pointing out that from the perspective of basically every human that has ever lived, and will ever live, some social systems/cultural practices/moral laws are more or less desirable than others. How can we hope to make any progress unless we're willing to point out mistakes and problems? FGM is a long history of bad decisions in difficult circumstances; you said it! How can we fix it? By pointing out in what way the decision to do FGM is "bad" and by changing the difficult circumstances that perpetuate it (which happens to be sufficiently wide group belief that FGM is good, for whichever reason, which creates pressure on individuals and families to carry it out).

I used a single word "enlightened", and it colored your perception of me as racist from the get go. So let's go back and look at my actual usage:

"Female genital mutilation (FGM) is practiced for a myriad of confused reasons, and among them is the belief that it will improve the quality of life of victims. Ostensibly it is performed because it is believed to be good, and they don't happen to trust medical authorities who insist otherwise. From our enlightened ad-vantage point, it's clear to us that FGM does not actually improve the lives of victims (hence: "victim".)"

I said that the reasons for FGM are "confused" (is that so objectionable?), and I said "from our enlightened ad-vantage point". I did a kind of pun, you see, our enlightened vantage point (concerning FGM) is the result of circumstantial advantage. I was in-fact trying to be sensitive and nuanced, but I guess it wooshed right over your head... Only because you weren't expecting nuance from a racist of course!

"Enlightened westerner" are your words, not mine...

In any case, "sensitivity" in practical approach to dealing with the moral problem of FGM is neither here nor there, we're supposed to be debating the moral and meta-ethical implications of what it means to say "FGM as a practice is objectively morally inferior to not practicing FGM".

This (and that above it) is patronising bullshit. You started this off with the 'scientific facts' and even then, there's reasonable cause to doubt, but look how quickly it's descended into judgement masquerading as fact. They lack the data about the effects of sexual liberty in society? Are you seriously suggesting that what information we have about the effects of sexual liberty in society amounts to objective fact, like gravity, or the earth being round? — Isaac

Now you're just being obtuse. I remember saying that all or nearly all predictive models are assailable, according to their merit, by science, logic, and evidence, I never said we needed lab-work to make well informed decisions. You're trying to hold me to some ridiculously high standard of certainty where all I'm after are relatively strong inductive arguments.

P.S Applied statistics is a science (or at least highly objective when done well).

We don't like their cultural practices, they think they're for the best. That's all there is to it. I'm more than happy to use whatever rhetorical device works to actually get FGM to stop, including presenting cultural preferences as if they were objective fact. If it works, I'm on board with it. But this is a philosophy forum. We're discussing moral truths, not trying to convince anyone to abandon FGM. — Isaac

But if your beliefs don't make for effective moral suasion, what use is your moral framework? If you have to say things you don't believe are true to get people to behave in ways you believe are moral, what makes you think your moral position is any better than theirs? If it's not any better than theirs, then why try to persuade them to stop in the first place?

I posit that persuasive moral arguments correlate with strong predictive models, and that assuming our starting values are nearly or sufficiently aligned, more persuasive and effective predictive models should eventually bridge any remaining gap of moral disagreement. I don't need to persuade a group practicing FGM using cutting edge science, I just need to make a better argument than their current one which appeals to their fundamental values (while obviously confronting the circumstantial and complex social forces which keep them converged around the practice of FGM).

Really. Had much luck with that? You still haven't answered my first question. What scientific evidence do you intend to present that heaven does not exist? — Isaac

Yes I have had luck with that actually.

To answer your question, I don't need to present any "scientific" evidence because that which is presented without evidence can often be dismissed with only ridicule (it doesn't have to be hurtful ridicule). Using hypothetical analysis alone, and given the right subject, I can do a fine job indeed of making the idea of "god" seem absurd and even detestable (to the point where their doubt exceeds their belief), but unless they're also given some kind of existential (and perhaps moral) replacement framework, it won't stick (happiness and welfare, for instance). Some people are so emotionally dependent on their religious beliefs that they cannot be persuaded by reasonable methods, and to do so would deprive them of too great a part of their identity, possibly leading to depression, and so I don't attempt to disabuse them of their delusions. If this is the kind of person I am confronted with, I'll have to weight my options. What is the moral cost of manipulating or otherwise intervening in the behavior of others versus the cost of not doing so? If a religious person attempted to perform FGM in a country where it is is not culturally enforced, I would physically try to stop them if I could not dissuade or otherwise manipulate them to stop. The point here, I guess, is that we can actually use reason and evidence to engage in moral suasion; it's not one big values craps shoot.

The key word there being 'ultimately' in the case of atheist virtue ethics, that means at the very least several generations away, if not, the end of time. For theist virtue ethicists, 'ultimately' includes the afterlife, so the fact that both systems 'ultimately' are about consequences, is trivial, and meaningless to this discussion. — Isaac

I don't understand what you mean with this end of time stuff. Specific virtues (or even entire virtue frameworks) can be naturally selected over a finite time-span. I realize that if heaven is real then pascal was right, but I don't see how this colors my statement that extant virtue ethics have been selected over long histories for their utility? We're having several discussions, so please be more specific, is this not relevant to my meta-ethical point about what moral frameworks ought to do, based on what they overwhelmingly do? (they are strategies in service of human values, and they tend to serve those nearly universal human values which my use of "utility" approximates).

No, you're not. You're adding a third C) that we in modern Western society actually have that data and anyone who doesn't believe we do, in whatever field we claim to have it, is morally 'wrong'. You missed that. Without this last claim I entirely agree with you. There is a fact of the matter about whether vaccination is in the best long term interests of societal health. There is a fact of the matter about whether FGM is in the best interests of the victims within their current culture. There is a fact of the matter about whether attacking each other with ice picks is the best way to maintain a peaceful society. I'm not disputing that, I'm disputing your fanatical belief that 21st century wester society is in possession of all of those facts with such certainty that anyone who disagrees is just objectively wrong. — Isaac

I think it's obvious enough that the widespread practice of FGM is not beneficial even to the values it purportedly serves. I didn't exactly make this about the "west", I tried to make it about the advantage of being able to learn about many cultures and ways of life, and to compare them, that is afforded individuals in contemporary western society. FGM is the unique result of, as you say, a series of bad decisions and unfortunate circumstances. We don't even know where it originated or why, exactly, with the best guessed being potentially ancient Roman and Egyptian sources where it was likely used to control female slaves.

I don't know why you're demanding a rigorous study of why FGM is not beneficial as a practice. If I were to condemn slavery as objectively immoral per that set of nearly universal human values, would you wonder if sometimes people are or were better off as slaves? Would you say that we cannot possibly know the factual matter of whether slavery is beneficial or harmful as a practice because [insert appeal here]?

Question: if it is indeed true that FGM is detrimental to the victims and the society, or that vaccinations are beneficial to individual and group health, and we happened to know with certainty, would you then feel comfortable stating that FGM and not vaccinating is morally inferior to doing otherwise?

What you don't seem to be getting is that 'reasonable confidence' does not translate to 'objectively right', and that the "soundness" of much scientific enquiry in the less physical sciences (like medicine, sociology, psychology) is justifiably moot. — Isaac

From our perspective, we can never be certain. I've never proposed "objective moral certainty". The kind of objectivity we can have from our perspective is not unlike when a sound preponderance of sufficient evidence strongly indicates one conclusion over another, it would be "objective" to say that one conclusion is much more likely to be true than the other. Hence, from our perspective, all we can do is weigh the options and make the moral decisions we think are superior, more reliable (more likely to be true). This is why we can say with high confidence (highly reasonable confidence), that stabbing each-other with ice-picks as a matter of course is objectively morally inferior to not doing so. In practice it would be so detrimental to our shared values that we would say the ice-pick-stabbing practice is immoral.

Maybe the only miscommunication between us is that you assumed I'm proposing we can have "objective certainty" in the classically slippery sense. I'm not proposing that. Soundness and inductive strength (which is the kind of truth science deals in) is the more usefully persuasive of the two.

He's got you there, VagabondSpectre. I think your biggest problem is in not recognising the amoral as amoral, because your feelings get in the way of impartial judgement. That's why you seem to be misjudging others as condoning FGM. But they're not, they're just recognising that there's FGM, and there's relative standards of "correct" and "incorrect", there are related factual and statistical matters, and then there's our moral feelings and judgement. There's no necessary connection linking them all together. There's no inherent moral quality in FGM, or relative standards of "correct" and "incorrect", or in related factual or statistical matters. You seem trapped into thinking that it's somehow more than what it is, without realising that you're projecting. — S

In societies where FGM is broadly enforced for reasons pertaining to well-being, I wouldn't consider it amoral because it's motivated by the moral value of human well-being (Yes, this may only hold true under a meta-ethical definition of morality as a strategy in service of human moral values, and an ethical definition of human well-being as a fundamental human moral value).

I think that you're making this much more complicated than it needs to be. It seems obvious to me that you're just making the same sort of classic mistake which is more apparent in saying that it's objectively immoral not to brush your teeth every day, because not brushing your teeth every day increases the risk to your dental health. There's nothing objective in the morality of that. — S

It's objectively true that brushing your teeth has moral utility if personal dental health is of moral value, and it's also true that not brushing your teeth has less moral utility. What is morally obligatory might be a different question from what is more or less moral. What people will choose ultimately has to do with how they are persuaded by the perceived risks and rewards. If we can say that not brushing our teeth is objectively immoral per our values, we can also say that it is not severely immoral because the relative costs are not necessarily that high.

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The reason why I try to frame morality in this way is because in practice, various moral frameworks are almost always oriented toward serving basic human values (exceptions like divine commands themselves are often proxies for actually useful values. E.G: charity is useful for society not because it gets people into heaven, but because it strengthens the ability of individuals to contribute to society). What is persuasive is what matters most, and any objectivity we can get in the game of moral suasion is extremely useful.

That's irrelevant to morality. Whether it's immoral is what's relevant. You'd have to connect the two, but there's no necessary connection, and to say that this is an example where something is immoral because it is erroneous (according to some standard) is just to make a moral judgement founded in moral feeling. That we share the same judgement is not that we're correct in any kind of transcendent sense.

You've said a lot, but it isn't really doing anything. The same basic problems remain. — S

My point is that FGM is indeed morally erroneous per the fundamental moral values of the concerned victims and perpetrators. Shared or un-shared, FGM disservices their extant values (one could say that practicing FGM is itself a value, but in reality (usually) it is (erroneously) thought to serve more fundamental values that ultimately relate to well-being). If FGM is taken as a value unto itself (eg: by divine command), it can still be pitted against fundamental well-being related values, although we would be limited by our ability to undermine their faith.

FGM is not a maths sum, it cannot be erroneous. A person committing it could be in error in thinking that doing so will lead to an outcome they desire/value, but the only way to check that would be to wait until the end of their life (including any afterlife, if they believe in such a thing) and tot up the total effect of the action. We can, and do, of course make predictions about the likely result of this calculus, but as with all predictions in complex systems they will vary depending on the model used. (and just pre-emting a possible "but some models are better than others" retort, just re-read this paragraph, my response would be the same. We can't possibly tell until the end of all time when we do the final count). — Isaac

Every prediction we make is within a complex system, and we have no absolute certainty. According to this argument humans cannot know anything whatsoever about the future, so any predictive model, including science, is useless. That renders science kind of incoherent.

There you go undoing exactly what you just said. So if removing clitorises "doesn't have any reasonably foreseeable positive ramifications which could sufficiently outweigh the pain (and deprivation) that it entails.", then which is true of the actual people who do it - are they stupid, immoral, or unenlightened? They must be one of those three because they are carrying out a practice where the damage does not outweigh the gain. They must either be cruel and want to damage their own children, or they are stupid and can't work out that the damage does not outweigh the gain. Yet you just said that you are not calling the people extorted into carrying it out stupid or immoral. — Isaac

There's a difference between a parent who is extorted into carrying out FGM and a parent who extorts their child to undergo FGM. As you said, society ostracizes them, so we can apply or diffuse the pragmatic moral guilt upon those agents in society who wantonly contribute to its perpetuation.

When a parent does carry out FGM because they believe it is best for their child, they've either made a factual error (and in this case a moral error, because it subverts their own primary values), OR, they're victims of an environment (an environment which includes pragmatically blameable others) which needlessly forced FGM upon them, which then becomes the pragmatically blameable party(s)).

We can call the perpetrators stupid or immoral (in this case it's stupidity leading to moral error/immorality), and we can call the entire practice of FGM unenlightened.

Your claim is that it objectively causes more harm than good, even if we share values about what 'harm' and 'good' are. I'm saying that such calculations are not so simple in complex societies where a lot of things would have to change all at once to make that true for any given individual. — Isaac

Whether I establish an individual act of FGM as objectively bad per our shared values, or whether I establish the entire practice of FGM as objectively bad, it matters not. I chose it as an example because it isolates a practice that does not comport with the ultimate outcomes it is meant to bring about (this means the cultural-moral reasons for FGM as a practice, not the fact that individuals are being extorted into doing it).

What exactly do you think our 'vantage point' is? What data have we found out that we could provide to women who want their daughters to undergo fgm, that they, in their less advantageous position, are lacking? That it hurts? I suspect they already know that. That it's risky? Do you think they just hadn't noticed the infections and deaths? That it interferes will a woman's sex life? I think in many cases, that's the point. So, what bit of data do you think they're lacking that our enlightened culture has discovered? — Isaac

The data comes from experience/observation in and with FGM-free societies. To persuade someone, first we isolate the underlying reasons that FGM is practiced, where they are known, and we challenge them. Depending on the reasons there is plenty of insight we could offer. FGM certainly interferes with sex life, and if someone morally values controlling the sex lives of others there may be nothing immediate we can do to sway them, but I suspect that controlling the sex lives of others is itself an errant proxy for more fundamental values or beliefs (e.g: the belief that too much sex is detrimental to well-being). If we can convince them that women are capable of sexual restraint despite an intact clit, or that sex isn't actually so harmful (i.e: the well being that FGM creates does not outweigh the well-being that it destroys), then we would have a good shot. If someone believes that clitorides should be removed for religious reasons, then we have to attack the religious beliefs directly.

They lack data which gives them perspective on the factual inaccuracy of superstition, or data concerning the effects of sexual liberty in society.

Not even going to give this any credence. How on earth would science test the theory that you will not get into heaven if you've been vaccinated? — Isaac

By examining the evidence that reportedly indicates god or heaven or god's stance on vaccines and heaven. People tend to think they have good evidence for these kinds of things even when it's quite obvious they do not.

How can you possibly measure useful when some people's idea of use extends to future generations and even the afterlife? How on earth do you intend to measure that? Are you going to just pop to the end of the world and see how it all worked out? Don't forget to drop in to heaven, valhalla, the spirit world and Mount olympus on your way back. — Isaac

We attack those beliefs (beliefs which concern matters of fact, and can be well supported, or not supported at all, by evidence) by examining the evidence supporting them.

If someone believes that heaven exists, hence the utility of not picking up sticks on Sunday, but it can be shown that their portrayal of heaven or god is unlikely or incoherent (if they can be persuaded that heaven or god might not or probably does not exist, or is entirely unknowable to us), then their perception of utility would change accordingly.

Yes. You've just answered your own question. Intuitive guesswork. I explained it perfectly clearly olin my last post. The consequences of any action are so complex to work out for anything but the immediate future that it is more important to feel right about your actions than it is to have calculated their consequences. It's not rocket science. — Isaac

But you tried to distinguish between virtue ethics and utilitarianism as the latter being consequentialist, while the former not necessarily so. My point was that ultimately virtue ethics is subject to utilitarian selection by evolutionary forces.

Firstly, I haven't leapt to the defense of anyone or anything. I'm saying that data is not sufficient to produce a moral duty even in a situation of shared moral values because data is inevitably limited. One cannot simply present the 'scientifically approved way' of getting x from y and then demand that everyone who wants to get x from y follow it. — Isaac

There are some courses of action that are so clearly counter-productive to their purpose that in practice they cannot be reasonably justified. I'm not saying people should be blamed for not knowing better (though in practice we ought rebuke them), I'm saying that A) in a specific situation or context and specific goals, some actions are actually more/less productive than others, and that B) more data can help us better approximate which actions are more or less productive than others.

Let's go to my last resort example: imagine you and I are strangers in an elevator. We both want to go on living, and we're both carrying ice-picks. It would, for us, objectively, be "better" if we did not violently stab-each-other with our ice-picks. Alternatively, you are alone in an elevator with an ice-pick, and you want retain 20-20 vision. For you, objectively, gouging your own eyes out would be a worse course of action than not gouging your eyes out. Do you have any qualms related to data-insufficiency in either of these scenarios?

You're treating really complex social and psychological issues as if they were maths equations. If a company wanted to build a bridge, they'd consult an engineer, but even in such a simple situation as bridge-building, they wouldn't necessarily just take the engineer's advice. They might need to think about the cost effectiveness, their business model, the advertising, whether the materials meet their sustainability policy, whether there's uncertainty about the design, whether their insurance will cover the risk. And that's just a bridge. You're suggesting the whole complex of social interaction and individual choice can be handed over to a few experts. — Isaac

As far as our nearly universal human values are concerned, FGM is the Tacoma Narrows of bridges.

What you don't seem to be getting is that when we make moral decisions from a consequentialist perspective (decisions based on our ability to predict outcomes) sometimes we can actually do so with reasonable confidence. When we don't ground our predictions in sound empirical inquiry, we get useless bridges.

That I don't at all agree with. They reach a different "conclusion" than most people. That doesn't mean that they're not reaching moral stances. — Terrapin Station

You can call them moral stances in so far as they are stances that impact others, but we can also say that such individuals are not "practicing morality" because they do not value or consider the needs of others.

Can you imagine a world without morality? Where nobody has the care or foresight to account for how their behavior impacts others? The way you frame morality, a world of psychopaths/sociopaths would still contain morality, but there would be no shareable or useful moral meaning; if how we affect others doesn't matter, then morality doesn't matter.

Wouldn't that be obvious? — Terrapin Station

Because consideration in this case means more than just being aware of. A serial killer carefully considers the ramifications of their preferred interpersonal behavior, but they do not extend "moral consideration".

A hard moral relativist might conceptualize raw preferences (any behavior) as encompassing the moral sphere, but there's more to the equation: the way our preferences relate to others, the preferences of others, and our circumstantially available courses of action.

Behavior which extends no moral consideration toward others is not moral behavior.

Because moral truth (for you) can depend on more than what is in your own mind, it must also consider what is in the minds of others.

To not consider others at all differs from the common fundamental conception of what morality is supposed to do (otherwise it's just regular greedy planning). It's not just what I believe is best for me, it's what I believe is best for me while considering what is best for others.

The intra classification was just an over-fancy way of saying that we must also negotiate our own competing internal values in addition to negotiating the values of others.

So again, the actual single individual carrying out this violence is not 'mistakenly' doing so for the woman's well-being, they very likely actually are doing so for the woman's well-being. They basically have a choice between complete social ostracisation and being mutilated. A brutal choice, but not one we 'enlightened' westerners can just sweep in and point out how the idiot natives are getting it wrong as if they'd made a mistake in their maths. — Isaac

Oh but we can. FGM is indeed erroneous...

There's no good reason for anyone to ostracize a woman who had her clitoris forcibly removed at puberty. Basically, we get to call the people who do the ostracization "stupid" because their relevant beliefs are based in nothing but the dogma of tradition. A practice that is useful only when nested within anti-utility and stupidity isn't necessarily useful per se.

What if a society society expected mothers to sacrifice their first born children to Quetzalcoatl? Their well-being would be affected if they refuse, so who are we to scoff at such necessity?

The whole practice is based in ignorance, and your argument relies on the ignorant making the boons of FGM into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Inter-generational extortion isn't an adequate moral justification for the practice of FGM, me thinks.

If a drug addict believes a certain dose of drugs is the best amount they should take, but you know that to be a fatal dose, do you have no grounds upon which to convince them it is not a good decision?

The individuals being unwillingly extorted into carrying out FGM aren't who I'm calling stupid/immoral/unenlightened...

It is arrogant beyond belief to suggest that the calculus that those in cultures practicing FGM can be mistaken, but our knowledge is so exhaustive and accurate that we can have this level of certainty about whether certain actions will achieve our goals in the long term. We can't even predict our own ecomony, let alone the long term consequences of every cultural and personal change in behaviour. — Isaac

I think we can safely say that removing clitorides doesn't have any reasonably foreseeable positive ramifications which could sufficiently outweigh the pain (and deprivation) that it entails.

Frankly I'm flabbergasted that you would try to put up any defense of FGM whatsoever. Sure, indigenous knowledge and all that; "spirits" too while we're at it, but genital mutilation? Really? You are aware that human stupidity has existed prior to western civilization right? That not every action humans have taken was in their own interest or the interest of others? That even hunter-gatherers, with all their ancient wisdom, didn't know some of the things that we now know? (That, for instance, deities aren't sitting around making good/bad things happen based on whether or not we pray at the right rock, or whatever; that superstition only works as a morale-boosting placebo because humans are so fallible).

You're basically saying that it is very possible for ethnic cultures to have made a clear mistake in their calculus (which, just for the record, I agree they have, in case that's not clear), but that we in the 'enlightened' West are so unlikely to make a mistake in ours that we can claim our choices are practically 'objective fact'. You realise how that sounds? — Isaac

It's not clear at all that you agree FGM is morally errant. Why else would you object so profusely when I condemn the practice?

When did I say that the west is perfect? The west is "enlightened" in that we know better than to practice or tolerate FGM. From our vantage point, we can see why FGM is not good. Do you disagree? If not, what is your point? That I'm arrogant or racist? (If that is your point, why bother making it? It doesn't make my point wrong, and if you're right about my arrogance or racism, then it won't matter because I won't give a shit).

The Amish believe in God and that certain practices here on earth (which may include the refusal vaccines) are necessary to ensure a good afterlife for the rest of eternity. How exactly do you propose to assail that belief with "science, logic, and an appeal to their human values."? Have scientists recently visited the afterlife and I missed the story? Has CETI just picked up some communication from God saying its OK? — Isaac

The idea that god exists and has some intentions about how we ought behave is an empirical claim, and it can be tested with empirical science and evidence based reasoning (science isn't in the business of proving negatives with objective certainty, it's in the business of making what amount to statistically strong (inductive) predictive models. It turns out that with sufficient education people tend to abandon superstition. Not always, but it is observable that exposing people to evidence based reasoning and science tends to persuade them toward not possessing hard theological beliefs. I bet if I could catch an Amish person out for Rumspringa, in the right setting, I would have a very good chance of persuading them away from theology and toward a more secular set of beliefs (although, the Amish are so tight-knit that I think many children stick around due to familial ties alone).

In any case, I feel no qualms about telling Amish people that their beliefs are factually incorrect, just as I have no qualms telling a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim or Mormon or Jew or Rasta or any other religious person. They certainly can't all be right, so statistically I'm in a strong position.

Your move Abraham.

There's a massive difference between virtue ethics and utilitarian generalisations. It's just not one you can see because of your blind faith in the 'truth' of modern Western culture. — Isaac

You've gone off the deep end... You just can't see it because of your blind resentment of western culture... (Does this ever work?)

The difference is in how they deal with uncertainty. Utilitarian calculus (or more properly consequensialist), no matter how complex, takes all the 'known' facts about a matter and uses them to work out the best strategy to achieve a goal. — Isaac

If you could do less grand-standing against your humble racist interlocutor, perhaps you would be able to address his point:

Virtue ethics is really only good so far as it is useful to the people who wield it. Yes, people have all sorts of highfalutin beliefs about where good comes from, but overtime, people with non-useful beliefs have tended to die off, and their beliefs forgotten, while people with useful beliefs (such as the "jesus said: do unto others" virtue) have tended to stay alive and pass on their useful ideas. Beliefs and practices which are useful to human well-being tend to perpetuate themselves while useless beliefs do not; harmful beliefs tend to destroy themselves. But beliefs that perpetuate are not always conducive to well-being. Sometimes beliefs that once had utility cease to be useful when the environment changes; sometimes a belief or behavior is harmful to some and beneficial to others; sometimes people do things for inexplicable and stupid reasons.

I don't respect magical, supernatural, or superstitious beliefs, even when they're useful; I like my utility without any junk in it.

Virtue ethics, by contrast, presumes (in some manifestations at least), that such calculations are so fraught with error, that it makes more sense to focus on doing what feels right, given that we will never fully establish whether it actually was right in the long term. — Isaac

Ah Ah Ah, you said virtue ethics wasn't utilitarian! Where's the contrast? You've just described utilitarianism by intuitive guesswork.

Personally, I think of morality as that particular collection of subjective feelings about one's actions which relate to a potential negative effect on others. I'm not a moral relativist though, because I don't believe the subjective mental realm is a mystical, or supernatural place. It is amenable to science, it is subject to natural selection, sexual selection (and all manner of other selection pressures) and it responds in an (at least theoretically) predictable manner to environmental stimuli. All this put together makes these subjective feelings very homogeneous in large part and practically universal in some cases. These I take to be moral facts — Isaac

By defining morality as only a collection of subjective feelings about hurting others, you've gone into the relativist deep-end (where facts don't matter). Deep-end-relativists don't realize that when they broadly question and rhetorically undermine our general ability to gather facts about the external world and make objective predictions about the future (e.g: we can't even predict the eCoMoNy!!!), they simultaneously undermine their own ability to perform moral suasion. Consider how instinctively you leapt to the defense of genital mutilators and anti-vax parents (although the latter might be a bad example if you're ignorant of the science). You know FGM is wrong, but you won't allow yourself to cast judgment upon the practice because it's not universally "true" that FGM is immoral, 'cause subjective preference. Wouldn't it be better (morally, even) if you had an argument that could persuade the perpetrators of FGM that it is wrong? (Let's say, a utility-inclusive argument?)

Once you've undermined "morality" to such a degree, there's nothing useful left-over. Functionally, it's anarchic nihilism; if it's all subjective feelings, why not attempt moral suasion through interpretive dance?