Have it your way. I’m not interested in tangential nit-picking. — Mww

It's not tangential, it's fundamental to the arguments about moral realism. Holding to the idea that we use terms in a consistent and coherent way, when we in fact don't, is what leads to errors in thinking such as that there can be some universal mechanism for determining moral 'right'. If we acknowledge that the term 'morally right' is applied to different behaviours/characteristics for different reasons in different contexts, we can see that no such mechanism can possibly exist.

Morality, as a single measurable property of behaviours/characteristics is a fabrication of philosophy, it just doesn't exist among real human groups.

I’m going to ignore Isaac’s constant harping on that first criterion above and just move on to actual philosophy of language stuff. — Pfhorrest

Brilliant work of philosophical investigation "I'm going to ignore the part where there's some issue with one of my central claims and move on to discuss my conclusions assuming it to be the case"

What exactly is the point of your continued posting here if you're just going to ignore disputes? We're not your students, and this is not (as you've repeatedly been told) a platform for you to publicise your pet theories. If you want a one way conversation, write a fucking book, don't post on a public discussion forum and then complain when you get a public discussion.

There is a subject of discourse referred to by the word “game”, something like.....that formal activity in which a relative competition arbitrates a standing goal, and consequently having for its objects the conditions consistent with the particular rendition of the concept the word represents, and all according to rules. — Mww

So when a child goes outside alone to have a 'game' of playing soldiers 'relative competition arbitrates a standing goal'?, When my nephew and his friends are playing 'silly games' it's according to rules? When I wind you up about something and then admit "I'm only playing games with you", that's a 'formal activity'? No, we derive what the speaker intends the expression to do by it's context.

the subject “good”, being merely a possible human condition, or a possible integral part of human nature — Mww

Is it? People use the word 'good' to mean all sorts of things, I don't see any compelling reason to believe it always and in all places refers to a possible human condition or a possible part of human nature.

words always refer to some thing because that is the only job they have — Mww

What does 'hello' refer to?

The word is still only doing one job in each case, that being relating a conception to its representation — Mww

"Don’t ask a podiatrist to convert numbers to metric, they only are used to working with feet." Hilarious I know (I'm here all week). So which 'one job' is the word 'feet' doing in that particular use?

Appears to refer to some thing still presupposes the possibility of the thing. — Mww

So "I took my married bachelor friend out for a drink last night", because it appears to refer to a married bachelor must therefore presuppose that such a thing is possible? Is it not just nonsense?

....non b.s. psychology, and that doesn't even exist yet. — Enrique

...and you thought I was harsh!

Similar objects of the same kind are just examples of the thing in question. — Mww

What I'm asking is what your justification is for saying this. Taking Wittgenstein's 'game' example, there is no 'thing in question' with regards to the word 'game' we apply it according to some rules, but the rules do not together represent 'game' because they do not all need to be applied at any one time.

What I'm saying is that words do jobs, they don't always refer to some 'thing' even if they appear to. It may be that appearing to refer to some thing is the job they're doing. The same word might do a different job in different contexts. So with a word which appears to refer to some thing, we might be looking for one thing, several things or no things at all.

What is a moral realist? Or, what would you say a moral realist is? How would I know one as such? — Mww

I think a moral realist would have to be someone who thinks that moral 'goodness' and 'badness' are universals. But they would also need to have some sort of correspondence theory of truth. Anything less and they can't really apply 'true' to moral statements. Unfortunately both are nonsense!

Any possibility implies either an object that accords with it, or not. — Mww

What about several different objects? Like several quite different things are 'games' but my teacup here definitely isn't one of them. Could it not be that we refer to one of several things when we speak of the moral 'good', and yet it still be true that if we refer to my teacup we've made a mistake (that's definitely not one of the things)?

The question reduces to whether or not the human animal is imbued with something common to all its members. Only if there is such a thing, is it then reasonable to suppose there are differences in its manifestation. — Mww

Absolutely. I think most moral realists are misunderstanding how language works. There is not some reified concept 'the good' which we then go about finding out which thing belong in, we use the term 'good' to perform some language tasks. It's only requirement for being allowed to remain part of our language is that it continues to perform those tasks.

The human animal is imbued with several things common to all its members, several things common to large groups, and a few quite unique to the individual. Some varying collection of these things are referred to by the term 'moral good' at different times, in different conversations, to different effects.

Is there a meaningful distinction that we can draw and maintain between something or other being believed to be, hence sincerely called "good" and being good? I think there is. — creativesoul


I think so as well. It is the distinction between what it means for something to be good, and what it means for good to be something. Have to admit, though, drawing and maintaining the meaningfulness of it, is a lot harder than merely granting its possibility. — Mww

I think this would be highly unlikely. We can't even agree on what constitutes a 'game', or where exactly the boundaries of 'here' are. The idea that our word 'good' picks out exactly one unified and inviolable concept identical in every mind which conceives it seems ludicrous.

No, that’s what listening to others’ reasons is, which I advocated and do. — Pfhorrest

Merely listening isn't sufficient, that still makes the egotistical assumption that you understand, and have the capacity to better judge the quality of those reasons, that your assessment of them is the better one to go on. When I explain to my students some aspect of a theory they don't get, they don't (most of them) go away presuming their professor has gone mad and is expounding a theory which makes no sense, they don't assume that my collection of reasons for reaching that conclusion must be faulty or incomplete because they don't tally with their understanding. They presume they just haven't understood, they ask for clarity. Some never get clarity, they just repeat the reasons I've given to them by rote, pass their finals and never look back. They still don't (generally) assume I'm wrong and the whole subject makes no sense, they walk away thinking "well, I didn't understand a word of that".

I'm not suggesting you should take any alternative approach than go with what seems to you to be right. There's no other option. I'm saying that your personal assessment of the reason has no bearing on the objective 'rightness' of some meta-ethic when there is widespread disagreement among your epistemic peers. If they disagree, and they have no less intellectual capacity and no less data than you, then it is only reasonable to assume that your position is tentative at the very least. The more widespread the disagreement, the more fragile any position within that scope becomes.

consider the possibility of anything that might be an answer (otherwise you’ll have no choice but to give up), except those that can’t be tested against our experiences (otherwise you’ll have no choice but to take someone’s word for it). — Pfhorrest

I think this is quite a reasonable approach, but it's not the aspect I'm disputing. What I'm disputing is that moral statements are the sorts of things which can be tested against our experiences. You've merely declared that they are, and cited, in support of that declaration, the fact that you've 'taken into account' everyone else's reasons for thinking otherwise.

Most people reach moral conclusions intuitively, the same way that most people use something related to the empiricism intuitively. Otherwise, it'd be hard to explain how humans can live together in societies. — Echarmion

I agree. I'm arguing here against the opposite view, that moral decisions are (or can be) some kind of rational attempt to find what is 'right' by some pseudo-scientific method.

But if we're talking about degrees, we're not establishing some fundamental difference between the two kinds of making judgements. — Echarmion

I didn't say we were. Just s significant one. Virtually every single person in the world from 2 year-olds to senile geriatrics, from psychopaths to saints, all believe in the external reality of the table in front of them, they all believe that it will behave in the same way for you as it does for them, and they all have done since we crawled out of the caves. The only exceptions are the insane and the mystical (possibly the same category).

Any form of communication, or social endeavour relies on these shared concepts. I can communicate with, or share an activity with, almost anyone on the planet at any point in time, based on the fact that there's a stable external world whose properties are not fixed by my mind.

I cannot make even the slightest progress on any communication or joint activity based on the notion that what is morally 'good' is that which feels hedonically 'good', because there is no such shared belief in this association.

Nor can I make any progress meta-ethically assuming that my assessment of 'the reasons' for believing the above position to be best, will be shared by many others - each person's assessment of any given collection of 'reasons' seems to also be different.

So I don't see how this meta-ethical position is anything other than a statement of @Pfhorrest's state of mind. Interesting to a psychologist, but nothing more.

The statement "Sex before marriage is not morally 'bad' because it doesn't feel bad to anyone who imagines what it would feel like" is mostly useless other than as a statement of the speaker's state of mind. It's only compelling to a group of people who already believe in that meta-ethical approach.

The statement "An hedonic-based ethical systems is best because my assessment of the reasons for and against it is such that I find it the most compelling" is also mostly useless other than as a statement of the speaker's state of mind. It is only useful to the small group of people who (for whatever reason) trust that person's judgement for the modification of their own beliefs.

The statement "This bridge can only carry 8 Tons", however, is potentially useful to the entire world. Absolutely everyone would agree that if the limits of the materials tend, in tests, to break after being subjected to more than 8 Tons, that they will not magically act differently for different people, that no amount of belief on my part can make the bridge carry more, that at no point will the bridge suddenly act as if it's made of cheese...

The difference in the utility of different classes of statement may well only be one of degree, but the degree is hugely significant.

Consider the negation of that. “I care about what other people think, that matters, not just what I think.” That’s basically majoritarianism. — Pfhorrest

No it's not, it's humility. It's recognising that others might see things you don't, or in a way you don't understand.

I don’t expect anyone to take anything just at my word. I only expect them to honestly consider the reasons I share with them, like I do others’. Then in light of all those shared reasons we’ve all got to make up our own minds. Because the alternative would just be to think what someone says to think just because they say so. — Pfhorrest

Right, which is where we started. Your approach to judging what is the 'right' meta-ethical position is simply to consider all the reasons for adopting that position which seem to you to be sound.

So back to my original question. If this is a satisfactory approach to determining the right approach to moral judgement, why isn't it equally satisfactory for determining correct behaviour? Simply consider all the reasons for behaving that way which seem to you to be sound. Why suggest some alternative system?

There is also widespread agreement that killing babies for fun is wrong. — Echarmion

Indeed, but this has any bearing on what I'm saying. I was talking about the lack of widespread agreement over the method of reaching moral judgements, not the conclusions.

On a meta-ethical level, variations on the "golden rule" are also very widespread. — Echarmion

I disagree, but even if that were so, it doesn't even approach basic empiricism.

I don't think it's very convincing in the first place to argue that "as long as less than X% of people disagree with an idea, it can be considered true" — Echarmion

Neither do I, I never even mentioned 'truth'.

But of course, the goal of a moral philosophy is to convince, much like the goal of a scientific paper on some subject. — Echarmion

What scientific papers are you reading? The goal of scientific papers is to present the degree to whicha model fits the experimental data. It should have zero to do with convincing (even if it sometimes does). Morality, on the other hand, is all about convincing, it's built in.

it did take us thousands of years - until the 18th century - to really figure out how to ask the right questions. — Echarmion

I'm not talking about the scientific method (the detail of it) I'm talking about devising theories of reality based on the degree to which they conflict with experience. 6 month old babies do it. I didn't take us thousands of years, it's built into our DNA.

The idea that experience is the final arbiter for what is real is not itself real. It's an idea that cannot be tested against reality. — Echarmion

Indeed. I'm not sure how you think that impacts on what I said. Normative propositions are always dependent on agreement (otherwise they're commands "you will", not "you should"). There is widespread agreement that experience arbitrates reality, at least so far as negation is concerned (that which is contrary to all experience is not the case). So universal statements from empiricism work - "letting go of that ball will cause it to drop".

Some people disagree with experience as an arbitrator. The extremely religious might, in some circumstances, believe God will hold the ball up and their past experiences are irrelevant compared to their faith. Statements based on empiricism will be useless to these people. But they are extremely rare, so it matters very little.

With hedonism being the arbiter of morality, there's no such widespread agreement, not even close. So universal statements based on such a meta-ethic are useless, they only have any normative force for the group who already agree with the meta-ethical position.

So ultimately, all such testing requires prior reasoning to establish what does and does not count as evidence. — Echarmion

Yes, but we're not new to this. The human race has been at this for millenia. We've already very strongly landed on some form of empiricism to arbitrate everyday reality, we don't have any cause to doubt that.

@Pfhorrest is trying to argue that we can take hedonic experiences to be evidence of moral value in the same way as we take phenomenal experiences to be evidence of physical reality. I'm saying that this is not the case. The widespread agreement about the principle of taking phenomenal experiences to be evidence of physical reality actually matters, it's the reason we can just take it as read. There being no such existing agreement about the relationship between hedonic experience and moral value is what means we cannot make the same presumption.

It never matters who or how many people agree or disagree with a position, all that matters is the strength of their reasons. — Pfhorrest

The 'strength of their reasons' just means the extent to which you agree with them. So all you're saying here is "I don't care about what other people think, all that matters is what I think", which is relativism.

you’re asking is about how to sort out which particulars things are most likely to be moral given those criteria for what counts as moral. The full answer is long, but the short version is it’s the moral analogue of falsificationism. — Pfhorrest

Again, you're missing the point. If we agreed on what counts as moral then we could carry out this exercise on any competing claims. The point I'm making here is that we don't agree on what is moral beyond a vague family resemblance sufficient to use the word in day-to-day talk.

You want to say that moral decisions need not be realitivistic. You do so by presenting a moral system which has clear measures of right and wrong. But your choice of measures is relativistic. It's based entirely on reasons seeming to you to be sound, valid and accounted for.

If your meta-ethical position is relativistic, then all moral decisions arising from it are going to be relativistic too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I am unpersuaded by a philosophical argument, it’s because I think I have already accounted for all the reasons they give in support of their conclusion, and either there is just some apparent invalidity to the argument (while I account for their reasons I don’t see how those reasons entail the conclusion), or I am also taking into account other reasons that they aren’t and coming to a conclusion that accounts for all of them. I never just say “that reason doesn’t matter”; I say how I have already accounted for it, and what else I’m accounting for that they’re not. — Pfhorrest

Right, so all you've done is kicked the can down the road, now we're talking about your judgement as to whether you've 'accounted' for those reasons or not. It still comes down to your personal judgement. You're still the final arbiter, not any external test. This is what distinguishes ideas about reality from ideas about 'oughts' or metaphysics. I can't believe the wall is not solid, or that I can fly, because it will have such beliefs tested by conflict with reality. You can believe literally any meta-ethical position, literally any moral 'ought' that it is possible for you to imagine and then justify that belief by claiming to have 'taken account of' all the reasons for reaching any contrary conclusion. At no point is your claim to have 'taken account of them' tested or judged externally. You only need to look at this forum as a small example - almost everyone here disagrees with you (this thread, not the forum at large, I wouldn't know about them). The strength of this disagreement has not swayed you in the slightest bit from your position, nor has the strength of the disagreement of literally hundreds of educated and experienced moral philosophers who all disagree with you. So if you're not going to be persuaded by your epistemic peers that you've not 'taken account of' the reason which lead them to alternative conclusions, then the exercise is not remotely comparable to interrogating reality.

I try to account for all of their concerns, all of the suffering or enjoyment they’re aiming for or avoiding, but of course I can’t agree with either of their conclusions because to do so I would have to disregard the concerns of the other party like they do. — Pfhorrest

With all moral choices one is weighing some harms against some benefits. Taking account of them in this way only gives you the full measure of all the harms and benefits involved. How does it then give you any objective answer to which harms outweigh which benefits? We don't all assign them equal value.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I completely agree with your analysis here

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

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

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

On a first read it is actually very disappointing. — Banno

I'll show myself out...

I'll come back to it tomorrow. — Banno

As ever, it would be interesting to hear a philosophical take on the psychological models I use, but please don't feel obliged, anytime you feel so inclined, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

How is it that we agree? — Banno

1.
We don't. Loads of people disagree about the leaf's being green. The colour-blind, synaesthetes, those with damage to various areas of the brain involved in object recognition. There's widespread agreement, but there's widespread agreement about the rules of chess, that doesn't make chess rules any less a social convention. Being taught something from birth, and having it re-enforced with every single social interaction in your life is incredibly powerful. I'll try to give you an example. Babies have what seems to be an inbuilt understanding of certain laws of physics, they show surprise when an object passes through another, or appears to fit inside one smaller than it. They don't, however, show surprise when objects turn into other objects, even ones bigger or smaller than themselves. Imagine now, just how surprised you'd be if your phone/computer suddenly turned into a pumpkin. The impossibility seems so universal a belief that it's just obvious, impossible to doubt, just like the leaf's greeness. But a baby would be fine with it, right up to around 18 months. That objects don't just change from one thing to another has to learnt. That a leaf is green also has to be learnt. Things which are learnt in very early childhood seem unquestionably real to us.

More importantly...

2.
Objects and their properties are dealt with by a completely separate area of the brain from our sensorimotor interaction with them. I've cut and pasted the following from a PM conversation I had with Fdrake (if you happen to be reading this, sorry for the laziness, but it covers almost exactly the same ground as Banno's question).

Visual perception is split the moment it leaves the retina into two streams, the ventral and the dorsal. Among other things, the ventral goes to areas responsible for object recognition (faces, hands, landscapes - all have their own areas). The dorsal stream goes to the sensorimotor areas to initiate object manipulation. The key point here is that the ventral stream takes the image, the dorsal stream deals with the percept (we know this largely because its what causes differences in the types of hallucinations suffered from). The ventral stream also has a significantly larger number of cortices to traverse (it has more models to be fed through). So the aspect of this that I thought might help explain my position is that the image is what we compare to reference images to facilitate object recognition, the precept is not 'recognised' as such at all. Again, studies in monkeys with their visual streams artificially disrupted can demonstrate this effect (treating an object as one thing physically, but as another socially and emotionally). We see the same in humans in several lesion studies.

The matter which makes the leaf you and I might be looking at, is shared - there's only one copy of the stuff, and if I ask you to move it, only one set of matter is interacted with. Concepts like the number one, the leaf (as a percept), freedom as a concept...there are multiple copies of, one in each brain. A common history, language, culture etc keeps these things very similar, but it doesn't detract from the fundamental difference that there's one copy for each person.

The percept is one of things there's multiple copies of, the percept that you and I might both refer to as 'that leaf' has two copies, one in your brain and one in mine. We keep those two copies very similar by interacting with the aspect of the environment it relates to. When you say "pick that leaf" I interact with the matter that seems to constitute my ~leaf~ in a way that I think will help clarify your ~leaf~ such that our concepts remain similar. Having similar concepts is really useful so they're worth re-enforcing at every opportunity.

So the way in which my ~leaf~(percept) relates to the aspect of the environment it relates to is a social convention. It relates by my guessing what aspect of the environment your ~leaf~ relates to and trying to make them match. Hopefully you'd be trying to do the same (otherwise I'm forever playing catch-up). So it might go like this ([ ] means a single shared portion of matter ~ ~ means one which has a copy in my head and a copy in yours) -

[aspect of environment] > ~tentative percept~ > [speech or action of others in my community indicating their percept] > ~revised percept~ > [judge the response of others to my speech and action indicating my percept] > ~revised percept~ > [speech or action of others in my community indicating their percept]...and so on. As we get older percepts get more fixed and we're more reluctant to update them in the face of people seeming to have differences.

At any point on this chain I can go wrong (depending on my mental health, I could go massively wrong) and end up with a percept that's nothing like the one you get from the same aspect of the environment.

There's much psychological evidence supporting this idea, partly the visual pathways model I explained above, but also the results of surprise analysis on very young (pre-linguistic) children I mentioned. The surprise at objects 'magically' transforming comes round about when they become language users. The use of language seems to set objects as objects, prior to that they're just swirling ever-changing sections of matter which obey certain rules when interacted with. There's only a bit of work been done on monkeys which tentatively shows similar things, but it's very sketchy, my guess though is that it's not uniquely language that performs this object-setting, that's just the way humans mostly to do it.

I hope that makes some sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The OP is an account of my journey of changing my views in response to new reasons that challenged those views. — Pfhorrest

Yes, but it's still all about whether you personally find the reasons plausible. What seems to you to be the case. At no point are you taking what seems to someone else to be plausible (but not to you) and saying "well, I'll have to adjust my theory to take account of that, even though it doesn't seem to me to be plausible".

All those reasons that changed your mind did so because they seemed more plausible to you (and that's being as generous as I can to your intellect. We're you an average person, I would be invoking social norms, personal narratives, secondary goals and even mood as additional influences).

What you're suggesting creates an objectively moral 'right' (the right answer to a moral question) is some sort of joint account of what seems to be the case for everyone.

What I'm asking is why you distinguish moral rights for this treatment. It's clearly not the way you handle philosophical rights (the right answer to a philosophical question). Here your judgement is based solely on whether it seems to you to be the case. Others may present their ideas and reasons, but the arbiter of whether you'll consider them objectively 'right' is whether they seem to you to be right.

Extending that approach to morality would indeed lead to normal moral relativism. What's morally right is what seems to you to be right. Others may present reasons for their moral beliefs, but ultimately your sense of credulity is the arbiter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

we can in principle empathize with everyone's suffering and make progress toward eliminating it all, and that total elimination of all suffering would be the complete triumph of good, no? — Pfhorrest

No.

I think this is what a lot of the disagreement comes down to with your meta-ethical position. Only some people believe that the complete elimination of suffering would be the complete triumph of good. Others believe otherwise. As I believe @SophistiCat has been trying to show - the complete elimination of all suffering is an 'is' we measure suffering - we might do so by questionnaire (taking people's word for it), we might do so by fMRI scan, empathy...whatever. These are only the means by which we do the measuring, what we end up with, after that measurement is taken, is a fact, an 'is'.

You have then taken a step to say that this is the the state of affairs we 'ought' to aim for. Again, you further seem to qualify that with something about taking into account everyone's meta-ethical positions and coming to some 'more right' meta-ethical position, but a) I've yet to establish how this actually happens, and b) even then, the sum total of everyone's meta-ethical positions is still an 'is', there's nothing to say we 'ought' to take that to be our meta-ethical position.

The question was simple who are the "most people" in the context of which you've made that comment? — Anaxagoras

Most people=the majority of the current population of the planet earth ( I suppose we could also make assumptions about past populations, but then we'd have to disentangle cultural and biological influences, though it seems from DeWaal's work that justice might well be a shared notion even among primates)

It seems to me that the difference between our positions has to do with the directness of our realism (possibly exactly the same problem we had with regards to beliefs in another thread). For me, there is no such thing as 'the leaf', or 'greeness' outside of people's beliefs in these things. So when you say "It also has to be green", this has no meaning for me because being green just is all those preceding things, nothing more, (c is d) just is "[people] believes that (c is d)", nothing more.

Language that is just convention is an engine with the gears disengaged. It has to be implemented. — Banno

I agree, but the implementation of language, for me, is about doing, not naming. It's not about 'getting stuff right' it's about 'getting stuff done'. Hence 'truth' really is useless other than as a persuasive tool to rhetorically add the the end of proposition you really, really want people to act as if believe.

I'm sorry that you've had to come such a long route to get here, but I really appreciate your effort to explain your position, it's fascinating, even if I don't hold to it myself.

While it is obvious why low-ranking baboons had an easier time of it, one thing I haven't really gotten my head around yet is why the loss of all of the most aggressive males led to increased aggression between similar-ranking males. One would have thought that, if anything, the high female-to-male ratio would make competition between males rather slight. — Kenosha Kid

The idea is that the loss of the alpha males leads to an opportunity which was not present before and so the stress and aggression is ramped up to try and capitalise on that opportunity. Again, encultured responses to a situation outweigh rational considerations. One of the things I like about Sapolsky is that he never seems to be trying to prove some theory, he'll regularly throw in the anomalous evidence, just to remind us that we don't have it all worked out yet. The main take-away is that much of social structure is the result of learnt behaviours and so is culturally mediated. It's parameters are set by the tools we use (the hard-wiring), but within those parameters, there's considerable scope and modifications to the environment or social structures reveal those other options. In essence, human could be pro-social simply because we're pro-social - no other reason. Our children grow up in pro-social environments observing pro-social behaviours and so they become the next generation of pro-social actors to act as an example for their children. If this is true, it's really worrying because it means that changes to the social interactions children are exposed to could genuinely alter pro-social behaviour and potentially become 'sticky' in cultural terms.

One of the consequences of the 'Chinese whispers' theory of social norm development is that the larger the group becomes the more scope there is for error. Usually with innovators (the active development of social norms), a smaller group size leads to greater diversity as there's less of a tendency to revert to the mean (we see this in some of the seemingly bizarre cultural practices in isolated tribes). What the Chinese whispers idea of social norm development is show how the same can happen in large groups via a different mechanism.

In hunter-gatherer groups, reverse domination acted specifically to stop an individual standing out and becoming dominant. This was one of the means by which social groups ensured egalitarianism. It seems more likely that individuals were able to become influential once homogeneous socialisation was weakened by having larger, more intermingling groups. — Kenosha Kid

I think I've perhaps been unclear. The process I was talking about was innovation rather than dominance. The two are actually quite different in terms of social status. A dominant person can instruct others by virtue of some form of positive or negative reward system (what we call operant conditioning), an innovator, however, is typically an outcast without means of instructing others, they only become relevant at a time of environmental or social upheaval where conservatism fails.

Outside of that misunderstanding, I tend to agree with your analysis fo fierce egalitarianism, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say social dominance was therefore selected for. I think it's sufficient that it remain a threat. If you see social behaviours as the result of culturally propagated norms, then it only need be the case that anti-social behaviours be possible for there to be an advantage to fierce egalitarianism. It need not be the default position. Like a handrail on scaffolding, it's sufficient that someone could fall to justify it's presence, it's not necessary to say that they will fall by default without it.

Sticks do not bend in water, Santa Clause is not real, and we do live in a world that can be physicalist, idealist, or other but not all at the same time and in the same respect. — javra

Yes, this is the part that I found to be unsupported. Sticks do not bend in water (this can be verified by inconsistency), Santa Clause is not real (we can search for him, talk to those who knowingly made him up etc)...but what does it mean to say that we do live in a world which can be physicalist or idealist but not both? This can't ever - even in theory - be checked. I can't make sense of what it would even mean to live in a world which was one or the other. Both would be absolutely identical in every way. They seem therefore to be only ideas, nothing to do with reality.

Are there such things as upheld beliefs that have no psychological impact on the being that upholds them? — javra

I wasn't talking about psychological impact - sorry, my wording was very clumsy. I meant pretty much what I've just said above. Worlds where different metaphysical positions are 'true' would be absolutely identical in every way, it would make no difference whatsoever to each possible world to have one metaphysical theory be true or another. The possible world in which physicalism is 'true' is identical to the one in which idealism is 'true'. The possible world in which platonic forms exist is identical in every way to the one in which they don't. The moment a metaphysical theory would create some difference, we can (at least theoretically) detect that difference and so the theory is scientific, not metaphysical.

The OP of this very thread is full of them. A chain of reasons to abandon one position and then a new position adopted to account for those reasons and then more reasons that rule that out so some other position adopted to account for those etc. The main point of that OP is “look how there are reasons against all of these conventional meta-ethical views. Let’s discuss what a view that accounts for all of those could be like.” — Pfhorrest

But these are all your reasons. You seemed to imply that you undertook some process of incorporating and unifying everyone's reasons. What I'm asking about is how you might take a reason you disagree with and nonetheless incorporate it into a meta-ethical theory which 'takes account of' that reason. At the moment, all I have is that your conclusion as to the right meta-ethical theory is the result of a collection of reason which you personally find compelling. You've not suspended your personal feeling about any of the reasons in order to 'take account of' reasons which other people find compelling, you've rejected all reasons which you do not find to be so.

This sounds like no less complex a position than saying that you strongly (almost 100% it seems) believe what seems to you to be the case, and equally strongly disbelieve what it seems to anyone else to be the case.

If that's a reasonable position to hold about meta-ethics, I'm wondering what you find to be different about normative ethics that makes "what's right is what seems to me to be right" unacceptable.

We share our reasons and then together try to come up with something that takes into account all of those reasons. — Pfhorrest

How? What does 'taking into account' a reason actually consist in? Perhaps you could give me an example of someone else's reason (maybe presented in your recent discussions of meta-ethics) and explain what you did to 'take account of it', how has doing so contributed to the 'something' we come up with together?

they all have some good reasons some bad reasons and arguments against each other highlighting each other’s bad reasons and their own good reasons, and I try to listen to all of those good arguments — Pfhorrest

How are you deciding what is a 'good' argument?

that whatever state of affairs you’re inquiring about, some response will correctly convey what it is. If you ask something about angels and there are no angels, saying so is the answer to the question; if there are any angels, then something else is the answer. “I don’t know” is always an acceptable response, but “we can never know” never is. — Pfhorrest

What is the digital representation of pi? What is the position of all the atoms in the atmosphere?..

Knowing something involves encoding that information somehow in a human brain, which is a finite device. Surely such finitude necessitates “we can never know” as an answer to some questions?

Of course, which in turn signifies that they might be wrong. Or not. — javra

I'm not following; in what sense does this signify that they might be wrong or not?

why then all the debates about whether, for one example, physicalism or idealism is true? — javra

Good question. As far as I'm concerned such debates are meaningless.

if this is to you nonsensical to ask, why then uphold any such or related position as true? — javra

Again, I wouldn't uphold any such position as being true. I think some metaphysical positions are more interesting than others, some more coherent, more elegant, more appealing, more useful, even more moral, but I can't see a way in which any could be more true without their having some consequence, which puts them (at least theoretically) within the remit of scientific investigation.

None of these beliefs can be obtained as brute facts via "pattern-recognition" - and will all require metaphysical interpretation to determine what is and what is not the case — javra

The second half of this proposition is not implied by the first, and so appears to be baseless. That we have what you're calling 'metaphysical' assumptions does not mean that we have some task of establishing them which must preceed their use. It may be that they're hard-wired, it may be that they're learnt unreflectively in early childhood, it may be that they are asymptotic with regards to phenomenal experience...

these historically foundational metaphysical beliefs might, or might not, be fully accordant to reality. — javra

I don't follow how a metaphysical belief as you describe them could be in accordance or not with reality. Accordance with reality has to be measurable (otherwise what form would the discordance take?) as such any discordance would be a scientific consideration. Any purely metaphysical position is, by definition, such that it has no affect whatsoever on reality. If it did we could at least theoretically detect that effect and so model it scientifically.

What I was trying to pick apart was the distinction you might make between this "such-and-such moral philosophy seems right to me and so I'm going to go ahead and say it is right", and moral relativism, which essentially says "such-and-such moral behaviour seems right to me so I'm going to go ahead and say that it is right".

You highlighted a need for some systems to arbitrate in the latter case, but no similar need for arbitration in the former?

I think this is an interesting example because, as noted in e.g. Paul Bloom's Against Empathy, which argues for rational compassion, we are supposed to be biased to extend empathy more to those who are biologically close to us. — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, the notion that is the theme of this thread applies here too. We're set up to be biased to extend empathy more to those who are biologically close to us, but yet again we find ourselves in an environment where children spend most of their life at school, are in near constant conflict with parental objectives and are often disciplined harshly. All of which undermines the natural empathy we are set up to feel.

The person cannot rationally argue for one and the other: they might, for instance, work against another person abusing their child. — Kenosha Kid

Do you think this has much influence on them? I mean, if this hypocrisy was pointed out, do you imagine it would make them uncomfortable enough to want to change, or is our capacity to invent new narratives too slippery to catch that way?

Given how common social stratification is in other primate species, even just considering the usual alpha-omega structures, it seems reasonable that a bias toward social stratification could be selected for, which would require some rewording of the OP wherein morality and sociality are pretty much synonymous. But maybe not. As far as I can tell, there's no consensus that we are genetically driven toward social stratification in the literature, unlike, say, bees. Which begs the questions: why does social stratification arise? — Kenosha Kid

I only have the paper citation, but have you read Sapolsky's research on baboons (Sapolsky RM, Share LJ (2004) A pacific culture among wild baboons: Its emergence and transmission)? It's quite revealing about the role of culture even in animals like baboons in maintaining social systems. My feeling is that only a very basic framework is actually genetic, more like the boundaries of playing field, the resultant system is largely brought about by culture. It raises interesting questions about how social groups create and maintain behavioural norms (well, interesting to me anyway).

It seems to me that social groups have two systems for creation and maintenance of behavioural norms. One is active, the other passive. The active one is about influencial members trying to stand out, the passive one is like a game of Chinese whispers, each member simply trying to copy the other (to reinforce group identity) but making small errors in doing so. Over time, these small errors become magnified and end up as behavioural norms which no one conciously planned and which may even be detrimental to the group. I think this is how some of the more unusual moral rules come about. Of course, how they are then rationalised is another matter.

But that evolutionary account doesn't establish that or why those things are good or bad, just the cause of us often thinking so. — Pfhorrest

Again, same mistake as you seem to be making in the other morality thread. 'Good' and 'Bad' are not platonic ideals which we discover and then afterward try to find out things that fit them. They are words we use to describe, or associate things already thus grouped. We learnt how to use the word 'good' by being told the sorts of things it could be applied to. To suggest now that there's some question over what is 'good' is merely to claim that one does not know how to speak English.

Lots of people do dedicate their time, effort and money to helping the homeless too. While we cannot rely on the altruism of everyone, we can currently rely on sufficient altruism, and that's a factor too: not so much not my problem as someone else has got this. I think your concern is that an idea can grab enough people to make this proportion insufficient? — Kenosha Kid

Yes, I think the mere existence of more than a handful of homeless is testament to the fact that it already is insufficient. Plus, I think in many cases (though I wouldn't say all), even the people helping the homeless are still subject to the same influences by social norm. Many social workers, for example, are cruel to their own children on their return from work - stressed out by a hard day 'altruistically' helping others, they lash out at their own families when they get home. What would explain this phenomena if these people just happened to be more in touch with their empathy than others? I think a better explanation is that they've joined a social group whose norms are the helping of others, but when at home they follow the very family-management norms they've just spent the whole day observing.

Individualism, to me, is best summed up as an ideology designed to console and, eventually, subdue guilt (by stimulating counter-empathetic responses, for instance) arising from systematic antisocial attitudes toward people outside of our virtual social groups. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, absolutely. The tendency is used to manipulate people into acting in the favour of those doing the manipulation. I think though, that the tendency would arise naturally just as a result of our social arrangements, maybe just in a lesser form. With a few notable exceptions, inequality (not meeting the needs of your fellow) is unheard of in nomadic hunter-gather tribes, but as soon as there is settlement (the ability to store surplus) we start to see the emergence of it. This suggests some purely circumstantial element to the emergence of selfishness as a tactic. Interestingly though, not all settled groups abandoned egalitarianism. Selfishness only become a possible tactic, it's not mechanical environmental-determinism, there's still a social group of complex humans involved, it's just that something which was previously off-the-table as an option is now a consideration.

In other words, with an already existing idea of 'good' based on naturally-selected for social drives, moral philosophy is a somewhat important pragmatic tool (e.g. as an idea to rally people around and a tool for debating). Metaphysics, on the other hand, weakens that fight by making 'good' as easy to undermine as anything we might consider 'bad', such as the doctrine of individualism. — Kenosha Kid

Interesting. I don't exactly disagree, but this runs somewhat counter to my personal understanding which is more about actions than words. I genuinely don't think it is even possible to debate someone into being more altruistic. As I believe you've mentioned, most rationalisation is post hoc, we try to understand the behaviours we're inclined to do (and the objectives and affects we're inclined to feel) in terms of a narrative which attempts to unify what are, in reality, a completely disparate set of urges/feelings. I think persuasion has to be more subtle than philosophical debate ever is. It has to present an attractive alternative narrative, one which makes the undesirable behaviour stand out as incoherent. Then there's a concomitant need to present an alternative set of social norms (as behaviours, not theories) for people to feel comfortable with, and a social group whose identity is dictated by those behaviours. Only all three aspects will work, I think. Narrative, social norms, available social group identified by those norms.

"F*** everyone else. Except dolphins, dolphins are cool." — Kenosha Kid

Ha! Exactly. The 'rules of membership' for social groups are not in any way designed, or intended, to be consistent. That's the point I was making about the social worker, and it seems you and I might be on the same page here. We wear different masks for different social roles.. there's nothing wrong with that, until one of the masks seems to so wildly contradicts another that we feel there's no possible unifying narrative. That seems to make us uncomfortable. Part of the reason why I believe that available social norms and groups are so important is that people seem quite genuinely distraught about conflicting social roles and yet feel powerless to do anything about it. If the solution were available to them easily by thought alone, I think they would have found it. There seems to be a need for some practical element too.

Working sufficiently well means not being vulnerable to any reasonable criticism. Whether or not a particular solution is vulnerable to any criticism is up to each particular reasoner to evaluate. In my evaluation, there are sound objections to all the things you listed: people have problems with them and I can see why, their reasons for not completely accepting them seem sound to me. — Pfhorrest

So the moral philosophy you're advocating is one which seems right to you? Yet if other people advocate a different moral philosophy they're not merely of a different opinion, but they are wrong?

you brought these things up in the context of moral nihilism. To think that any of these actually is morally sufficient is already to reject moral nihilism. Moral nihilism would have it that none of them are and nothing possibly can be sufficient, because the questions are inherently unanswerable. — Pfhorrest

I don't think any morally sufficient, I'm trying to understand your position, not presenting mine.

eaving open the question (or else presuming an answer) to whether that stuff we evolved to do is moral. — Pfhorrest

'Moral' is a word, we use to do some job. We didn't pluck the concept out of some platonic realm and then wonder what things fit it. We already know what things fit it. If we didn't have some broad collection of similar things to define we'd never have invented the word in the first place.

It's really not that complicated.

Generation 1 are responsible for bringing up generation 2 to cope well with whatever is thrown at them.
If generation 2 fail to cope (come up with bad policies in response, or fail to reverse bad policies after they're no longer appropriate), then generation 1 has done something wrong (or failed to do something right).
Generation 2 are responsible for bringing up generation 3 to cope with whatever is thrown at them...

I don't understand why you're having such trouble comprehending such a simple concept.

If generation 2 implement, or fail to reverse, policies which are bad, then generation 1 has failed in their task of preparing them for whatever is thrown at them.

If such a situation has occurred (and I agree it has), it is patently foolish to look back to the approach which absolutely, without doubt, lead directly to where we now are. We have to change something about the previous approach otherwise we will just re-run the same process.

It's like you're setting a ball rolling down a hill, you're fine with it near the top whilst it's going quite slowly, soon it gets out of control and starts running away from you. Your solution is just to take the ball back to the top of the hill because you liked it there. But we know exactly what will happen if you start the same ball rolling down the same hill the same way. It will be fine for a while and then start running out of control, just like it did last time.

As for your faux offense, any complaints about the state of affairs implicitly blames someone (even if only of dereliction). If you want me to say nothing about the fault in your generation, why do you get to harp on about the faults in mine, or my descendents.

If none of them work sufficiently well then yes. — Pfhorrest

What would working sufficiently well consist in? Is it the extent of agreement with the answer, the extent to which you agree with it?

Say, hypothetically, we asked the world "should we give a tithe to charity", by vote. The vote was 60/40 in favour of a tithe. Everyone agreed that this is a fine way to decide. Would that then make democratic vote a 'good' method for you?