Your discussion with @Dawnstorm is along the same lines as the one we've been having (my position being largely in line with Dawnstorm's), but I am not sure how much you have managed to converge. I'll give it a try - hopefully I won't confuse matters more.

As Dawnstorm has pointed out, there are two aspects to moral valuation. There is the moral activity: judging the rightness and wrongness of actions and situations, actual and hypothetical. And then there are moral valuations that come as a result, which we often think of as properties of the things that we evaluate: whether they are good, bad or neutral (roughly speaking). I get the impression that you are mixing up these two aspects, perhaps deliberately, because you think of them in the same key.

When I was saying that morality is a "natural kind," I was talking about the activity of moral valuation: the having of pro and con attitudes, the influence that these attitudes exert on emotions, decisions, and social dynamics. This activity is fairly recognizable and relatable, so I don't think that it is subject to Wittgenstein's private language argument. I admit that, as you say, "all rationalisation of our mental states and activities is mediated through socially defined parameters." But although the boundaries are somewhat vague and mutable and culturally specific, and much can be made of uncertain relationships between morality and related categories like duty, social shame, etc., it is not completely arbitrary what gets grouped in the category of moral valuation. Nor is this category as mutable and capricious as moral vocabulary can be. Nor is it shaped by the same processes that shape the language (although there can be mutual influence between the two).

None of this has any bearing whatsoever on what I want to get other people to do or allow me to to do. I am not dictated to by the meaning of the word (nor is anyone else). I might use it's rhetorical power to add persuasiveness to my argument, but that would be nothing but rhetoric. If the entire world got together and told me that what I wanted was called 'flurb', it wouldn't make any difference at all to whether I wanted it. — Isaac

I agree with this.

And I would say the same about so-called "objective morality." The language of "objective morality" is usually deployed as a kind of rhetorical cudgel, in lieu of banging the table. But thinking of this dispassionately, if I approve of something as morally right, and then someone assures me that it is not just my opinion, but the thing is objectively right, that wouldn't make it any more right in my eyes than it already is. And if someone tells me instead that it is objectively wrong - well, I would just disagree with whoever holds that opinion.

Natural language terms are not like taxonomic terms. — Isaac

Yes, they are. We don't just put together a random collection of things and give it a name; we group things for a reason. This isn't an exact science, but neither is defining the boundaries of biological taxa.

There is considerable diversity within moral outlooks, which results in different people using moral terms somewhat differently. This is the direction of fit, not the other way around. Moral valuation is not just a matter of labeling: it goes along with certain mental attitudes, the actions that they inspire and the social facts that they bring about. "Good" and "bad" are natural kinds, to put it crudely. Playing around with labels doesn't change what they are.

A moral assertion carries no such ontological commitments, at least not implicitly. — SophistiCat

You seem to have just restated your conclusions, I was more wondering how you got there. — Isaac

With this I was just trying to restate my position without appearing to contradict myself, i.e. without appearing to refer to some state of affairs that non-trivially validates moral beliefs.

With what is 'moral', for example. How does someone who feels differently to the rest of the population about, say, violence, learn what the term 'morally right' refers to? All they're going to see growing up is people using the term to refer to 'good' stuff (being kind to old ladies etc). I don't understand how you imagine they'd ever learn that their preferred behaviour (hitting people) is somehow the same thing in essence that everyone else in their language community is really referring to when they use the term to describes helping old ladies etc. — Isaac

I seems like you are talking about moral vocabulary, such as the meaning of the words "good" and "bad." I don't really see the connection to the present subject. We learn how to use such words by correctly matching them to the respective classes of good and bad things. But the identification of members of the class is not just a matter of learning to use words correctly, surely?

I'm a bit uneasy attaching right and wrong to arbitrary ought statements myself; I don't like ought statements to begin with. It construes "ought" as an operator on "is", and "is" contains all the truth conditions in that framing. — fdrake

Like I said, I meant only ordinary, colloquial senses of right/wrong, true/false. Formal analyses of truth, I feel, rarely touch on matters of human interest. I understand your worry about the truth conditions for moral assertions. But it is precisely this ambiguity of moral expressions (never mind whether we explicitly assert their truth; what matters is that moral talk does not much differ from empiric talk) that prompted my crackpot theory about what motivates moral realism.

Regardless, Sally and Lizzy are in love, so it should be true, no? — fdrake

I don't see this as a problematic enmeshment of dispositions and states of affairs. The statement can perfectly well refer to something empirical, such as observed behavior or verbal report. And of course Sally and Lizzy having the disposition of being in love is itself a state of affairs. A statement that refers to a disposition as an existing state of affairs (e.g. "Sally and Lizzy are in love," or "fdrake believes that hitting babies is wrong") would be comprehensible and defeasible.

I take a pragmatic view of what it means to hold a disposition. A disposition has pragmatic consequences. — fdrake

Well, you go on to distance morals from their consequences by pointing out how the latter are not always true to the former (when we fail to act in accordance with our original dispositions). And of course moral attitudes are perfectly comprehensible even in the absence of any notable effects. Whether or not one's conduct is adequate to one's beliefs and attitudes (when there even is a conduct to speak of) is a separate question from whether beliefs and attitudes are right or wrong.

To me there's two things going on here. There's the question of what is/isn't morally good. For a large number of questions I think there's a right answer to that question. It's a linguistic question, no different to asking "what is the correct way to use the term 'morally good'". In proper Wittgensteinian sense the answer is not clear cut, it's fuzzy at the edges, but this fuzziness cannot be resolved ever. Likewise with social contexts. When the grocer delivers potatoes, you 'ought' to pay him because that's the meaning of the work 'ought'. It means 'that action which the social context places an imperative on you to do'. So if someone were to say "When the grocer delivers my potatoes I ought to punch him in the face" they'd be wrong. That's not what 'ought' means. — Isaac

I don't think this thread has a point as such (it's just a poll), so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. — Isaac

OK. First, rules of communication and social rules, like rules for purchasing goods, are not necessarily moral. Knowingly transgressing such rules can be a moral act, but it is the act of following or breaking rules that is moral, not the rules themselves. Second, disagreements about moral questions are not similar to disagreements about the meanings of words.

Is it that your moral attitude is not a 'thing', or is it that your moral attitude is not an 'opinion'. Absent either of those things it does seem as though you're agreeing with the latter statement. The thing which serves as the truthmaker for your moral statement would correctly be identified as your opinion. — Isaac

Yeah, I realize I was courting confusion with this talk about truthmakers. Let me put it this way: there are different kinds of assertions. Some assertions - assertions made about the world - imply a referent and at least a theoretical possibility of checking their truth against this referent. A moral assertion carries no such ontological commitments, at least not implicitly.

Continuing from above, it seems to me that often what motivates moral realism/objectivism is almost like a language confusion. When we affirm something, we must be referring to something "out there," right? So if you deny objective morality, then you deny that anything is moral - any thing is moral. For something to be moral, there has to be a moral thing out there. And if you insist that you do have moral beliefs, then the realist will say: "Oh, so you believe that what's moral is just a matter of opinion?" (Saying it in the same incredulous tone in which we talk about those "postmodernist" ditherers who think that nothing is true and everyone is entitled to their own facts.) When they say that, they still assume that there must be a thing that serves as a truthmaker for a moral statement, and they interpret you as saying that that thing is your (or anyone's) opinion.

Let me see if I can make an argument that consolidates both your points. — fdrake

I don't agree with Isaac that what is moral is

...a linguistic question, no different to asking "what is the correct way to use the term 'morally good'". — Isaac

But I probably shouldn't hijack the thread to debate the point. I don't have a problem with the rest though.

(1) In order for "moral objectivism/universalism" to be true, there would need to be true statements about moral conduct.
(2) In order for a statement to be true, it has to correspond to some (physical or external) state of affairs. — fdrake

...

(7) Therefore there are no statements concerning moral conduct which are true or false — fdrake

It should be made clear that by statements being true in this context we specifically mean truth in the sense of correspondence with some external/objective state of affairs. There is an old-standing debate in moral philosophy about whether moral statements are truth-apt (moral cognitivism/non-cognitivism). I find that much of this debate is essentially over philosophical language and coherence with this or that analytical framework. I don't get exercised over such controversies; I am happy to use "true" in its ordinary sense, so that if I am willing to make an affirmative statement, I am also willing to say that the statement is true (otherwise we would find ourselves making Moorian paradoxical pronouncements like "It's raining, but it is not true that it's raining.") But when I say "Hitting babies is wrong" I don't mean it in the same way as when I say "It's raining." There is no referent implicit in the former statement. Its truthmaker is my moral attitude.

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

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

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

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

Pace yourself, man. So much stupid at such a high rate is not good for you or for the forum.

Thoughts? — Bert Newton

Meh, this is basically epiphenomenalism.

I meant our biology in the widest sense, including what general kind of psychology that comes with that. — ChatteringMonkey

- we know the virus has certain adverse and lethal effects on us
- we generally agree that those effects are bad and should be prevented as much as possible
=> Therefor we should have a moral norm that people should stay indoors as much as possible and otherwise keep their distance if they can't. — ChatteringMonkey

Then why single out biology? Why not geology, for example?

- we know that building in a seismically active zone has certain adverse and lethal effects on us
- we generally agree that those effects are bad and should be prevented as much as possible
=> Therefore we should have a moral norm that people should build earthquake-resistant houses in seismic zones.

All moral norms are entangled with non-moral facts, otherwise they would have no relevance, like those Jewish laws about sacrifice in the Temple.

And you find it unpersuasive that the event corresponding to "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" entails that I ought to try and satisfy the agreement? — fdrake

Logically entails (or implies), yes.

I don't think that what you are talking about here is the same as what the OP and the rest are talking about. I like to think of "objective morality," or moral realism, as a kind of correspondence theory. Just as with the non-moral correspondence theory, where the truth of a proposition is judged by its degree of correspondence to a putative true (physical) state of the world, a moral proposition is supposed to be true to the extent of its correspondence with some true normative state - this "objective morality." And this correspondence cannot be trivial; it cannot simply be implied by what the words mean - otherwise, of course, seeking moral truths would have been a trivial matter.

For your moral attitudes to be really, truly, objectively right it would not be sufficient for you to have them, nor would it be sufficient for them to be consistent with other moral attitudes that you might have, such as acceptance of social commitments. They have to be true to this third thing that is independent of what you or anyone else thinks about it (the reality that doesn't go away when you stop believing it).

To take a stock example, in a Nazi world where everyone believes that it is right to kill Jews (which beliefs would of course manifest in social facts, i.e. people committing to act together on their beliefs - guard concentration camps, manufacture poison gas...) it would still be objectively wrong to do so.

It is also worth lingering a minute on the impersonal character of social facts. The existence of Amazon the company existentially depends upon the collective action of humans, but it does not depend existentially upon the individual action of individual humans. It does not disappear if an individual ceases to have it in mind, it does not cease to exist when unwatched. It only ceases to exist if it ceases to function as an institution. That old Philip K. Dick quote about reality applies to institutions as much as it applies to nature; "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.". Emphasis on the "you". — fdrake

There is a difference between accepting the reality of other people's beliefs (and the social facts, such as institutions, that depend on those beliefs) and being a participant in those beliefs. An anarchist is well aware of the existence of the state as an actual institution, even though she doesn't believe in states. A psychopath is usually aware of the existence of moral forces that act on other people, even if he is not subject to them himself. He still has to contend with how those moral forces impinge on his life through the social facts that they create, and the most socially adept psychopaths can live quite comfortably in this world (just look at Trump).

Arguments can be made, for instance by appealing to our biology, to try to change the moral rules — ChatteringMonkey

Hm? I wonder how such an argument would go?

Broad agreement with those things. — fdrake

I think you are conflating facts about moral evaluations, moral conduct, and all that which influences them - with moral facts:

[1] It is a fact that moral conduct depends on social facts.
[2] It is a fact that such and such conduct is right.

Of these only [2] would be a moral fact (if it were fact).

Psychopaths can be quite competent with factual knowledge about moral agency, but that doesn't make them competent moral agents themselves. As with other empirical knowledge, knowing facts about the way people make moral evaluations can help you anticipate moral attitudes and predict moral conduct in other people and even in yourself, but that knowledge cannot tell you what you ought to do - not without some bridge principles or intuitions.

Of course, if we view "objective" as only a process or a quality that can be said of objects, measurable things, then we avoid all such confusions. If we're not using "objective" in anyway apart from saying "it's true" then it's just a confusing extra emblem that contains no meaning, as it then takes time to determine that nothing is meant more than "it's true"; but then, of course, everyone will claim to be objective in this way, including moral relativist (they are just "being objective" that no moral truths are universally true; i.e. everyone is objectivist). — boethius

"Objective morality" is often used interchangeably with "moral realism," but that doesn't clarify things much. As Crispin Wright quipped, "a philosopher who asserts that she is a realist about theoretical science, for example, or ethics, has probably, for most philosophical audiences, accomplished little more than to clear her throat." (But the same can be said about many philosophical terms of art.)

Conclusion:

Equating "objective" with "reasonable" is a Randian invention — boethius

I don't know why you make so much of this. I am obviously not well-read in this area, but even a cursory search shows that the word "objective" and its forms are routinely used in relation to ethics in philosophy and psychology literature, with no reference to Rand, e.g.

Moral realism and the foundations of ethics
Moral realism: A defence (36 uses of 'objectivist,' 'objective,' etc. in just the first two chapters)
Ethical intuitionism

AFAIK the Schrodinger equation's time evolution is deterministic, but that doesn't make the states deterministic. The states are samples from probability distributions (generalisations of probability distributions I guess? I vaguely recall that they break a few rules). It might be that someone can declare some aspect of the randomness "unphysical" and salvage a global determinism (if only we had (blah) we'd determine the output states!). I don't really know enough about it. — fdrake

The more traditional interpretations treat the equation as only one component that is needed to determine the actual physical state - position, momentum. Everett just reads it literally as the equation of state, sacrificing some of our traditional notions of what a physical state is.

I'm reading this as a claim that there's some source that determines the observed quantum states deterministically, it's simply that we don't (or cannot) know the behaviour of the source? Analogously, Pi's digits pass tests for statistical randomness, but they're determined given a way to arbitrarily accurately evaluate Pi. — fdrake

With some effort we could interpret, for example, the spigot algorithm for calculating the digits of pi as some exotic physical process. Looking at it from the other end, if we were performing physical measurements, would we be able to figure out the underlying mechanism? Not without more context; taken on their own, measurements would appear quite random. Or take a chaotic Newtonian system: an observation that is limited to setting up the system, letting it run and then performing a measurement would lead us to conclude that it is aleatory. My point is that we need to probe nature not just many times, but in many different ways, in order to establish the causal mechanism with reasonable confidence (and always with the assumption that nature is not much trickier than we think it is, but that assumption is part of what goes into "reasonable confidence").

Thanks for the context and clarification.

I would also like to emphasize what other's have pointed out, that we have "universalism" and "absolutism" to refer to ideas of the "true-true" about ethical principles, and that using the word "objectivism" is simply associating oneself with Randianism — boethius

I was leery about going along with "objectivist," but I thought Randianism was obscure and disreputable enough that there would be little chance of confusion. But yes, if there are well-established terms, it's better to use those.

No philosopher posits that moral truths, if they exist, are the same kind of thing as physical objects of which it makes sense to be "objective" about (that we can simply go and measure a moral truth as 5kg, 50cm tall and 40cm wide); indeed, the whole point of the word "objective" is in the context that we have different values, goals, and experience but can still agree on some physical facts about the real world (if we both make a good faith attempt at "being objective" and collaborate on at least this issue to start as common ground); so, as it is normally used it's simply a self contradiction to be "objective" about said values and goals (which remain, in essentially any philosophy, subjective things that we cannot observe in the same way as a chair, regardless of what justifications we have for said values and goals). — boethius

I think @Pfhorrest is apt to treat moral propositions much like a physicalist would treat propositions about the physical world, and he believes that we can use something like a scientific method for discovering moral truths. In any case "objective morality" is a term of art, though I wouldn't have a use for it.

Yees. I am assuming the things accurately described as random are random. Do any of the interpretations you referenced remove the distribution from the theory? — fdrake

Well, I have a mostly pop-sci "knowledge" of QM, my college physics being too rusty to be of much use, but as far as I know the "pilot wave" of Bohmian mechanics would make measurements deterministic - except, of course, being hidden, it is not part of the measurement. And MWI says that the full wavefunction evolution is deterministic (as the Schrodinger equation shows), but we can only measure one of its eigenvalues at a time, since our subjective state in which the measurement outcome is recorded doesn't encompass the full quantum state. If you perform successive measurements on identically prepared systems, the branching wavefunction will leave a trail of random results in each individual branch, even though across all of the branches every set of measurement outcomes will be the same.

I quite don't understand the relevance of this. Can you elaborate? Are you saying that the real world might have a hidden number that removes all the randomness associated with quantum variables? — fdrake

I am saying that if it did, we wouldn't know it just from this one sampling. We might guess that it looks suspiciously like the digits of pi, for example (if we were lucky to sample from the already calculated range), but such numerology is perilous. For example, in the past there were a number of attempts to "derive" the empirically measured fine structure constant of particle physics from the ratios of integers and important transcendent numbers like e and pi. Nothing came out of it, as more accurate measurements successively falsified all such hypotheses. (Perhaps we shouldn't retrospectively dismiss these exercises as unscientific numerology, but instead look at them as failed heuristics that once in a blue moon do lead to discoveries.) But the moral is that we usually require more context to establish a causal mechanism behind a phenomenon than a single sampling, which may not reveal a regularity behind it, or conversely may trick us with an appearance of regularity that is not actually there (like in the case of the fine structure constant). Quantum mechanics is, of course, an example of a theory that was developed, first of all, on the shoulders of previous successful theories, and second, with the help of numerous independent lines of evidence, so we should feel pretty safe here.

More like subjectivist. — SophistiCat

Is that not a kind of relativist? — Pfhorrest

Relativism is most commonly associated with the view that what is moral is defined by the moral standards of one's culture. In that sense it still has an objective component - it just makes morality more granular and more entangled with human subjectivity than a thoroughgoing objectivist like Kant or Mill might like.

In a more general sense, relativism can collapse into subjectivism when the granularity of the group that is setting the moral standards is increased to the limit of a single individual. But there is a qualitative jump that occurs at that point, in that much of moral metaphysics becomes redundant. It is no longer necessary to ask oneself whether X is actually right, as opposed to just right, because there is no contrast to be drawn here. An extreme relativist might say that there are as many moral truths as there are people. I would just find it odd and unnecessary to qualify a moral attitude as "true" when all I want to say is that I regard X as right and Smith regards X as wrong (which means that Smith is wrong by my lights - but that is redundant to say).

Then are you a nihilist? — Pfhorrest

More like subjectivist.

I mean only what's also called "moral universalism", which is just the claim that, for any particular event, in its full context, there is some moral evaluation of that event in that context that it is correct for everyone to make, i.e. that the correct moral evaluation doesn't change depending on who is making it.

Are you a moral objectivist? (see above for clarification) — Pfhorrest

I don't much care for forum polls, but I thought that this was pretty clear formulation of the question.

No, I don't think I am a moral objectivist (which does not make me a "relativist" in the usual sense - see Pfhorrest's explanations).

I certainly hope there are more moral objectivists than relativists here, since moral relativism effectively means the belief there is no morality. — Congau

Way to beg the question!

The way to defeat this argument is not by changing my constant into a variable. It would be by proving that the intention of Divine Command Theory is not actually to serve human flourishing. — Thomas Quine

Of course the intention of Divine Command Theory is not to serve human flourishing. You might instead try to argue that the intension of DCT includes human flourishing. But your methodology is so flaky that the whole exercise is pretty meaningless.

Here is the question: "Is there a universal grounding for morality?"

I look at the things that most people consider immoral:

Theft; murder; sexual abuse; pedophilia; breaking contracts; lying; corruption; slavery; you name it.

I ask, "What do all these have in common?" My answer is, they all are detrimental to human flourishing. Who am I to say? How do I know this? I consult the evidence from the available science. — Thomas Quine

Here you are asking the question: "What is common to all moral imperatives?" If there were such a common feature, I would not call it grounding, much less the grounding of morality, just on that basis. (All cats have claws... you get the point.)

Anyway, this is an empirical question about the practice morality - an is question. Your answer is not a good one, and the way you go about establishing it is not scientific (which probably explains the result). For one thing, you haven't actually done or referred to any science to support your main thesis (as far as I can see).

Of course people disagree about what best serves human flourishing, and therefore different cultures and subcultures have different moral standards. Some cultures and subcultures have believed or do believe things like racism, human sacrifice, killing infidels, acts of terror against innocent civilians, praying to your favorite God, etc are moral because they are in the best interests of human flourishing.

How can we tell who is right? Consult the available science. — Thomas Quine

So when you approve of a moral precept, you count it as evidence for your thesis (never mind how you figured out that it does in fact promote human flourishing). Otherwise you just flip the argument around and say that the precept does not promote human flourishing (never mind how you you figured that out) because people have a different idea of flourishing, or they just go about it in an unscientific way. Heads - I win, tails - you lose. (Which @Janus says is OK, but I don't think he agrees with you that you are doing science. I am not sure what he thinks you are doing though.)

But this is all beside the point, because even if you produced a good empirical theory that describes common patterns in moral behavior, it would not tell you what you should do - not without a bridge principle: something like "Thou shall do as most people do." That would be the real meat of your ethical system, and it would not be derived from science.

(A4) If something is epistemically random, the uncertainty associated with that randomness can be arbitrarily reduced by sufficient sampling. — fdrake

This is only assuming that all of the relevant data is being sampled. Assuming Bohm's interpretation, for example, you can never sample the value of the hidden variable, no matter how good your sample is. In the Everett interpretation, your sample does not include all branches of the wavefunction. Both interpretations are metaphysically deterministic, but both predict epistemically random measurement outcomes.

On the other hand, if you were sampling digits of pi, for example, then unless you already knew what you were sampling, you would never see that it is non-random from your sample, even if you were getting every digit with perfect accuracy. And if you knew what you were sampling, then the question would not arise.

Kant's ideas are not obscure. Or not as dark as they seem at first glance. The proof is that they have not provoked great disputes about their primary meaning — David Mo

You can't be serious!

Although to say that Kant scholars dispute the meaning of what he wrote isn't saying much. Even Hume scholars advocate radically different interpretations (there is a revisionist strain known as The New Hume), and Hume is supposed to be one of the clearest writers among famous philosophers.

I dislike the current state of ethical theory and I want to kick over the whole gameboard. — Thomas Quine

But the implications are huge, because they mean science can tell us what is moral and what is not. — Thomas Quine

You are kind of all over the place in terms of posing the question, which is the single most important thing in philosophy.

At times you seem to be arguing that morality - in the minds and actions of all people, as well as in all moral theories - comes down to the imperative of flourishing. This addresses the question of what moral behavior and moral thought looks like to an observer. (As I have pointed out, it takes only a minimal attention to contemporary and historical moral attitudes and moral theories to see that this is not the case; it is at best only one facet.)

You also put forward a more plausible thesis, which sees that same imperative as an emergent feature of our evolved psychology. This is still an empirical question, but this time concerning the origins and the natural explanation of morality. (I think there is some truth to it, but this is still an oversimplified, one-sided and overconfident narrative.)

Through all this you also seem to be advancing a normative thesis, which is that morality should serve the purpose of human flourishing. And the justification for this thesis somehow relies on the claim that that is what moral attitudes amount to anyway, and/or that this is what has in fact emerged from the biological evolution of human psychology. (The logic of this justification escapes me.)

Finally, when it comes to the concrete solutions, you give us astonishingly banal pronouncements:
- If we want something, we should make our best effort to achieve it!
- Oh! Oh! I know! Let's use Science!
- What a wonderfully refreshing thought!

Really?

“If someone tells me there is a horse in the field behind their house, I won’t need any more evidence to believe them than their word… but, if they tell me there is a unicorn, I wouldn’t believe it even if they showed me photographs”. — Ed Davis

I had to read this a couple of times: at first I thought that your colleague was responding to a different question. I can kind of see some connection to what you were asking, but only by a loose association.

If the work was poorly done, what does it matter whether what it sought to establish was plausible or not? If it doesn't meet the standards for publication, it shouldn't be published. If you think it's a borderline case, and perhaps there were objective limitations that accounted for its methodological weakness, then look at other factors.

Ordinary claims are ordinary because they fit in with things that are already backed by strong evidence. If the study confirms something that is already well-established (as your colleague seemed to imply), then what's the point of adding a poor quality study to the mix? (Unless perhaps it develops an original, independent line of evidence.) But if it is something rare or unexpected, meaning that there probably hasn't been any better evidence, that might actually actually make even a weak study more valuable, especially if the conclusion would be significant, if true.

From your title I assumed you meant 'gloomy' or even 'malevolent' philosophers, rather than simply obscure.

Anyway, as someone wisely noted, "unclear writing is a sign of unclear thinking."

The IS-OUGHT distinction is important, we want to avoid the naturalistic fallacy, but it is also important to keep in mind that all moral claims ultimately derive their "ought" from an "is". — Thomas Quine

It almost seems like you've heard about the "naturalistic fallacy" and about the "is-ought gap," and that the former is to be avoided and the latter is to be mindful of, but you don't really understand what those words mean. Because you manage to contradict yourself about the is-ought gap in the same sentence, and then (and throughout this discussion) wade neck-deep into the naturalistic fallacy.

Let's explore the implications of your position a bit. You say that biological evolution promotes flourishing (from which you conclude that promotion of human flourishing must be the foundation of morality - classic naturalistic fallacy; but I'll hold my nose for a while). Generally speaking, evolution by natural selection just tends to propagate and multiply our genes, which is a far cry from what we usually understand by flourishing.

Now, you say that in our particular situation (as opposed to, say, yeast) actual flourishing is generally conducive to successful replication. But how are you so sure? makes a good point about us having a very limited and biased perspective on which cultural attitudes promote flourishing on a large scale. Even if you could make an accurate universal observation about our moral attitudes, it is not a given that they are adaptive now, much less in the long term. Being innate is no guarantee of being adaptive either, because not every innate feature is adaptive. And even if it was adaptive for much of our existence as small bands of hunter-gatherers, that doesn't imply that it is still adaptive now that we have radically transformed our lifestyle and our environment. And even if it was and is adaptive, that doesn't mean that it's the best adaptation there can be. Evolution, powerful as it is, is a blind satisficing process, not an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator.

Just how well-adapted are we, anyway? Our Homo genus is pretty young, and almost entirely extinct. Our species is younger still, very nearly went extinct at some point not long ago, and has been going through rapid lifestyle changes since then. That doesn't exactly instill confidence that it will end up being as plentiful and long-lived as even a typical mouse species from the fossil record (a few million years). And keep in mind that the fossil record mostly yields species that "flourished" (in the technical sense), not those that went extinct before leaving much of a trace, like our Homo cousins.

Which brings me to the next point. Wind back the evolutionary clock ten minutes or so (i.e. a few tens of million years) and you will find that pretty much all animal species that existed up to that point have since gone the way of the dinosaurs. If you are going to derive an imperative from that fact, shouldn't it be that we are destined to go extinct and make room for whatever comes next? And while we are at it, why should we even be one of the long-lived, "flourishing" species, as opposed to evolution's many little blind alleys? Perhaps we are "meant" to drive ourselves (literally) into the ground, or let some plucky germ or a fortuitous geological calamity wipe us out?

I hope that the point that emerges from the foregoing exploration is that the maxim "let us do what nature does anyway, but more so" makes no sense. The way that you actually derive your oughts from your ises (including the examples in the post to which I am responding) is by smuggling in normativity and then ladling it out. It's the ultimate stone soup.

Are you arguing that "it is nowhere in evidence" that human beings and the societies they create do not seek to flourish and prosper? As a human motivation, it hardly seems "hidden"... — Thomas Quine

No. First, let's make a distinction between human beings and societies: the former are moral agents, the latter are not. Second, let's make a distinction between what one may wish for oneself or for people one cares about and what one may wish for "humanity." Third, the desire for flourishing does not analytically entail the adoption of certain moral norms (not without begging the question), and what I was pointing out was that you have not made a convincing argument that links the two.

Genes propagate when the carriers survive, merely. — praxis

Or more precisely, when the carriers produce viable offspring. Quality of life, which is what we usually associate with "flourishing," does not enter the equation.

most people in most cultures, without being familiar with the philosophical arguments, know that it's the right thing to do, period, but the grounding for this claim is that love and respect for others is essential to human flourishing. — Thomas Quine

See, you are doing precisely what I suspected you of doing: you are working backwards from your thesis (that the foundation of morality is 'human flourishing') to retrospectively rationalize people's moral attitudes. But you also hold up people's moral attitudes as evidence for your thesis! This is a perfectly circular reasoning. (Alleging Confucius's justification as support is neither here nor there, because most people who believe they ought to honor their parents do not adopt that attitude for that reason, as you yourself admit.)

That's my next step but don't want to get ahead of myself... — Thomas Quine

Don't worry, you are telegraphing the standard is-ought move loud and clear.

My next point is that we can actually determine what best serves human flourishing through science and reason. This means if we can agree on the common goal, we have an objective starting point for ethical considerations. — Thomas Quine

Yup...

I don’t mean to present any ethical norm, but to offer what seems to me to be a simple description of human reality: all moral precepts are an attempt to answer the question, “What best serves human flourishing?” — Thomas Quine

Note that I am not of course arguing that all morals past and present actually did serve human flourishing, only that those who adhered to them believed them to do so. — Thomas Quine

That's just manifestly not true. I think you would be hard-pressed to come up with more than a few and recent literary or documentary examples of such reasoning behind moral attitudes. No one thinks about "human flourishing" when they demonstrate a proper filial attitude towards their parents, for example - they do it because it's the right thing to do, period.

Of course, in the absence of firm criteria of how such beliefs should manifest, you could interpret just about any moral attitude to be a confirmation of your thesis. You could assert that human flourishing is the hidden motive, even when it is nowhere in evidence. (I think I see you already engaging in such creative interpretation in this discussion.) But then if anything fits your thesis, your thesis is vacuous.

Does this observation apply exclusively to TheMadFool or does it also range over others? — TheMadFool

Does it matter? Do you hold your intelligence contintgent on the intelligence of people you are arguing with?

Also, proof of a proposition is necessary to claim that that proposition is true. — TheMadFool

You keep saying this as if it was self-evident. Now, if you'd never before encountered this problematic, never had anyone contradict you, it wouldn't be unreasonable to say this. But after ten months and four pages of discussion a thinking person would begin to suspect that the question might not be so straightforward...

So it avoids retorts of the sort "but we just prove [whatever] in a higher system". — Nagase

It's not an interesting retort anyway, because if a formula is true but not provable, we can just make it an axiom in a higher system, so it would be trivially provable.

I don't think you can accurately construe a soul-based theory as reductionism about the self. In what I've read, these types of theories don't say that the self is "reducible to" the soul, rather, it just IS the soul. — Tarrasque

Well, that would mean that the self is a hidden essence. But what we are inquiring about and trying to explain is the manifest self as it is perceived by us via self-reflection. We don't perceive hidden metaphysical essences as such (that is why they are hidden and "metaphysical"). But some would say that they manifest themselves as our sense of self, the integrity of our experiences, the continuity of our memories, the coherence of our thoughts and volitions. (Similarly, God is said to be manifest in his creation, and therefore being in general and some of its specific features are said to be explained by a divine creation "theory.")

I agree with you to some extent. Our society places a lot of importance on personal identity, and this leads us to form the conceptions about it that we do. I believe many people hold false beliefs about the nature of themselves, due in large part to this sort of conditioning. — Tarrasque

It's not just a social construct; I think that much of our sense of self is an innate psychological mechanism. But culture and socialization shape it as well.

I would disagree about social conditioning producing false beliefs about self though. If self just is (partly) a result of conditioning, then how can it be false? I suppose our innate psychology and social conditioning can come into tension, but how is one to say which one of these is truer? How is it even possible to discover the fact of the matter?

And since there is neither a prevailing philosophy nor a prevailing intuition or convention that would apply to such cases, answers vary. — SophistiCat

Which is why it is so interesting to ask the questions! — Tarrasque

It would be interesting if there was a possibility of finding the correct answer. But I don't think that there is one. On my metaphysically thin concept of self, the self just is what we perceive as our personal identity. There isn't any true self lurking behind its outward manifestations. And therefore if you are not sure whether your personal identity would survive teleportation, for example, then there is no fact of the matter to be discovered. At least not at this time; I suppose if teleportation were to become as common as air travel, or at least as common as space flight, we would develop intuitions about it.

I don't think there is a significant difference, as I am a reductionist about personal identity. Many people are not, and would believe that there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the "real them" and a copy of them. They might account for this difference as:

1. The real me is the body that contains my soul, essence, or ego, while the copy does not.
2. The real me is that body from which an unbroken spatio-temporal line can be drawn from it to my origin(in a copy's case, one cannot).
3. In the case of a copy and an original, there is some special property that is only attributable to the original. This special property is what we should be concerned with in preserving our consciousness. — Tarrasque

All of these positions can be seen as reductionist, in that they treat personal identity as a product or manifestation of something more real or fundamental:

• Psychological continuity
• Physical (worldline) continuity
• Structural similarity
• Hidden essence (soul, etc.)

I rather think that personal identity is a psychosocial construct. Consequently, it doesn't have a strict definition and delineation, but rather relies on intuitions and conventions that are to some degree fluid and diverse. This is why even those people who don't already have a favorite philosophical theory of self never seem to have a common opinion on such esoteric thought experiments as Davidson's Swampman, teleportation, duplication, etc. Our intuitions and conventions range over common experiences, which do not cover such imaginary scenarios. When answering these hypothetical questions, people either work out the answer from a prior philosophical commitment, or else answer intuitively/conventionally. And since there is neither a prevailing philosophy nor a prevailing intuition or convention that would apply to such cases, answers vary.