My account of ownership does rely on convention, quite explicitly. You're then saying that my account of what counts as a convention (that a convention is when something is used in some way and everyone goes along with that without argument) is, itself, a convention. I'm just turning that back around on you and pointing out the gaping hole of an infinite regress it opens up.

...but that is just yet another convention... — Banno

Is it really, or is it just your convention that views on what constitutes the establishment of a convention are themselves just conventions?

In which case nothing has been lost.

I'm not talking about only land the use of which is currently uncontested; in those cases there's no problem looking for a solution. I'm saying that, in cases where something is currently contested, look back in time to find when there was an uncontested use: when someone was in possession of something and nobody else was fighting or arguing about that, everyone was fine with it. My thesis is that that was when convention was established, and that convention defines rightful ownership. Whoever later broke with that convention is the one doing something illegitimate.

In cases where that original convention cannot be determined or is lost to history, or where all the original contestants are dead and the current contestants have been contesting whose property it rightfully is their entire lives, then obviously that original convention can't be applied, and a new convention must be established to settle the question. Until the new convention is established, basically nobody "legitimately owns" anything in question, and so nobody has any right to exclude anybody else from the use of it. For that new convention to be just it must be fair in a Rawlsian sense -- a convention that everyone would agree if they were blinded to their own place in that convention. That is usually tantamount to everyone having as much and as good as everyone else, centered on whatever they're currently using.

IMO land, like all property, rightly belongs to whoever last had uncontested use of it. Uncontested use establishes convention, and then whoever breaks with that convention is in the wrong.

:100: :up:

False dilemma as already demonstrated IRL. Negative emotions can reduce motivation and positive ones increase it. Just look at depressed people who can’t even make themselves get out of bed, or manic people who ACCOMPLISH ALL THE THINGS RIGHT NOW. Imagine a pill that made you just ever so slightly on the manic side... always feelin kinda good and down to get some shit done.

:up: :100: PBS SpaceTime FTW.

This is what I expected this thread to be about! Something about pragmatic concerns trumping reason or some such.

On the broad topic this thread is about, I am curious: are there contemporary people in “non-Western” countries doing philosophy that is connected to the stuff done in “Western” countries, or vice versa? Basically: are the boundaries between regional philosophical traditions breaking down in the modern global world, or are they still there as much as they’ve ever been?

@David Pearce I just now stumbled across a quote from Blaise Pascal that brought to mind something you said in this thread several days ago (can't find it right now), about how if we change our minds (our brains, our neurochemistry) then every experience of anything can be a joyful or otherwise positive one.

The quote was:

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. — Blaise Pascal

I take it that in your perfect world, just sitting quietly in a room alone would be "enough", above hedonic zero. But of course that wouldn't consign us to perpetual inaction as we just sat in a room alone doing nothing forever (like the "wire-heads" in Larry Niven's Known Space universe, who are addicted to direct electronic stimulation of their pleasure centers), because we would still have the opportunity for even more enjoyable experiences if we went out and accomplished things, learned things, taught others, helped them in other ways, etc.

Does that sound about right?

I know what you meant. It's just that you're empiricalmy wrong. There are evidenfly other ways of resolving differences. — Isaac

Maybe in the sense of just "getting someone to comply". But people arguing -- exchanging reasons in an attempt to convince the other person -- aren't using those methods. You clearly understand that there is a difference between rational discourse and other interactions, since you're insisting that people don't only do rational discourse (which is true). So you must be able to understand that when I'm talking about people doing rational discourse, I'm not talking about just any interaction that might get someone to do something. And I'm only claiming that it's that kind of interaction that implies a belief that some kinds of answers are correct. Someone pleading or coercing or otherwise interacting in a way that just gets someone to go along with something without actually convincing the other person to honestly think differently about anything is not "argument", at least not in sense used in philosophy. (Maybe in the colloquial sense whereby e.g. shouting insults counts as "argument" too).

Where does this 'willing to agree to disagree' come from — Isaac

I explained this later in the previous post: it's not that relativism obliges anyone to tolerate anything, but rather it undermines any justification for not tolerating. If you want to force people to do differently than they otherwise would on no grounds other than that you don't like it, you can do that (if, in fact, you do have that power), but then you're just nakedly exercising power with no rationalizing excuse. Assuming, again, that we're philosophers here, and care about reason.

For someone who seems so concerned with me becoming a tyrant, you seem awfully eager to say that we don't have to live and let live or agree to disagree, and we don't need any reason to go against that kind of equality besides that we just want to (and, perhaps, that we have enough friends that are okay with us doing that, so we're not gonna catch shit for it from society at large). My view, on the other hand, is that we have to live and let live, or agree to disagree, unless we can give reasons (real reasons besides just our own or popular opinion) that the other person has to be stopped.

I care very much about what's right and what's wrong, I just don't agree that it amounts to anything more than the meaning of the words in my culture. — Isaac

Where you take the meaning of those words to be identical to what some nebulous power-majority of people around you treat as true of the things they apply those words to.

If most(?) people in some culture spoke of the Earth as though it were a flat infinite plane and completely unlike the points of light in the night sky that move relative to the other points of light in the night sky, would that make it true by definition in that culture that the Earth was not a planet? Would someone claiming the Earth is the same kind of thing as Mars or Jupiter just be using words wrong there?

Why would my tribe feel so passionately about my behaviour that they feel the need to take such drastic action to deter it? The answer, of course, could be all sorts of things, but it's clearly false to say that the disagreement of everyone I live with isn't good reason to think I might be wrong. — Isaac

Widespread disagreement with your views can be good cause to question yourself and search harder for evidence or reasons against your views, in case you've somehow missed something that everyone else noticed, but it is not itself evidence or reason against your views.

it's things like this that make me think that you really just have no idea whatsoever what my views (1)actually are. ... (2)I said this: — Pfhorrest

I don't think there's any need for me to spell this out further. You see the difference between (1) and (2), yes? — Isaac

In the same sense that I see the difference between what relativists claim and what I think their views actually amount to, sure. But the only evidence we have for people's beliefs, in a purely textual medium like this at least, is what people say about their beliefs, so to focus on one small part of a set of claimed beliefs that are all supposed to counterbalance each other will lead you to grossly misinterpret me. Someone else could have focused on liberalism instead of universalism and accused me of wanting to "let people get away with murder just so you don't violate their precious rights!"

I've actually noticed that the mere order in which I list my principles completely flips who responds to me and what they accuse me of. I used to list my opposition to dogmatism first, and then my opposition to relativism, and most of the responses I got were from religious people who completely missed out on the universal and liberal parts (which permit them to believe without absolute proof, and prevent the relativism they're so scared of, respectively). When I list them the other way around, I more often get people accusing me of being too akin to those religious people, completely missing out on the same critical and phenomenal parts that the religious folks took such offense to.

You're maybe the only person who's objected to both sides of that, which makes your views seem very dangerous to me, because a relativism that co-oexists with dogmatism is just might-makes-right, not viewing relativism as undermining all claims to power (like some relativists), but viewing whatever dogmatists are in power as entitled to that power, and not because of any kind of supposed infallibility of theirs about what's universally true or good (as the religious would claim), but just on account of having the social support behind them to get away with it.

You've still not supported this assertion. It's trivial to demonstrate alternatives (as I did with different languages). The 'correctly word to use to refer to a man is 'man' if you're English and 'homme' if you're French. It is not just personal opinion what the correct word is, but it is relative to the person's circumstances. There's no global answer to what the right word is, that would be nonsense. — Isaac

I would say that there is no "right word" for anything period, not in the sense that there are right actions or right beliefs, exactly because there's not a global answer. Words mean whatever people agree that they mean, and they can only be "wrong" in the sense that they break with a previous agreement. I think there is an analogue of that on the moral side of things, but it's not the entirety of morality: it's the assignment of ownership to property. Nothing is rightly the property of anyone in particular, except inasmuch as there's agreement to treat something as the property of someone; and transgressions against such assignment of ownership is only wrong in the sense that it goes against that convention.

I went over both of these extensively in my threads on types of knowledge and types of justice, respectively, wherein:
- both synthetic a posteriori knowledge (empirical truths) and imperfect duties of distributive justice (hedonic goods) are public and non-arbitrary;
- both synthetic a priori knowledge (conceptual relations) and perfect duties of distributive justice (the categorical imperative) are non-arbitrary but entirely private;
- both analytic a posteriori knowledge (the meaning of words) and imperfect duties of procedural justice (the assignment of ownership) are public but entirely arbitrary;
- and both analytic a priori knowledge (logical implications) and perfect duties of procedural justice (property rights) are public and non-arbitrary again, but depend entirely on a combination of the preceding two respectively private and arbitrary categories, and so are still inferior in a sense to the empirical truths and hedonic goods of the first category.

It's the last two categories, procedural justice matters (property stuff) and analytic knowledge matters (language stuff), where any concerns for social convention factor into my big picture, but that does nothing to undermine the importance of either empirical truth or hedonic goods, in universalist senses both. We can't change what is objectively, empirically true just by changing what we conventionally take words to mean, and neither can we change what's objectively, hedonistically good just by changing what we conventionally take to belong to whom. But we use language with conventionally assigned meanings and properties with conventionally assigned ownership as useful tools in our means of pursuing the actual truth and good, in terms of empiricism and hedonism. (And consequently, patterns in the assignment of meaning and ownership can still be better or worse for that use, even though the particulars are still arbitrary; e.g. when the structures in a language more closely track the structures in the things it's about, or when the ownership of properties more closely tracks the good that can be done with them by whom).

So from what source do we discover the 'intension' of a word, if not it's use. — Isaac

We discover intension from use, the same way we discover extension. We look at the things named by it (the extension) and infer what they all have in common with each other, then take that to be the intension of the word. If something in the set of things named by it doesn't fit the pattern, that raises the question of whether that thing really belongs in that set, or if we've been misapplying the word to that thing.

You've not answered how they understood each other if the misused the word. — Isaac

Same way they both understood what was meant by "the Spaniard" and yet both misused that phrase to identify someone who was actually an Italian.

Why? Is it somehow the default position that either all or none of the principles that apply to factual matters should apply to moral ones, but not anywhere in between? That seems like an odd position to hold without any prima facie reason. — Isaac

Parsimony demands assuming patterns continue as they do elsewhere unless there is reason to think otherwise. I.e. whatever the normal rules of other things are, assume they probably apply to this thing too, unless you have reason to think they don't. I know you think there are reasons to think that they don't, but it feels (and I admit that this is a purely subjective perception of the discourse) like you're really reaching for an excuse for why they don't, like you have some kind of motivated reasoning going on. I expect you'll say the same back at me, and like I say this is just my subjective impression; but also per the start of this paragraph the burden of proof contra parsimony is on the claim that something needs to be treated with different rules than anything else.

Moral beliefs are not reducible to the sorts of theories that can be analysed for complexity by any objective measure. — Isaac

As I said in the post you just responded to, I don't think that moral models* are supposed to be analyzed for informational efficiency but for (in a broad sense) energetic efficiency, which is just a way of phrasing a really uncontroversial thing, barely worth saying, in terms that show it analogous to parsimony: it's preferable if you can get more good done with less work.

It strikes me right now that a similarly casual way of phrasing the principle of parsimony could be something like "it's preferable if you can speak more truth in fewer words".

*(Technically I don't think there are such things as "moral beliefs" and consequently no "moral theories" -- not to be confused with philosophical 'theories' about how to investigate morality -- but rather there are intentions, which are the moral analogues of beliefs, and strategies, which are the moral analogues of theories. A theory is an explanation of how things happen, things that we believe do happen; and a strategy is a plan to make things happen, things that we intend to happen).

The point remains unanswered. If you accept underdeterminism you have to admit that a wide range of theories will be matched by the same data points. You've shown that there's no non-subjective way of judging either parsimony, or elegance, or any other measure of preference for one theory set over another. As such underdeterminism undermines your argument. — Isaac

I haven't shown (or even conceded) that there's no non-subjective way of judging parsimony. I've shown that there's a clear objective way of judging parsimony for clearly formulated mathematical models. The objectivity of preference between less clearly formulated models (as in natural beliefs) will be correspondingly less clear, but that doesn't make it not present at all. It just means that it's hard to accurately assess the comparative parsimony of natural beliefs, not that there is no difference in it and so no reason to prefer one over the other.

This touches on something that I think is really at the heart of motivating relativism: the conflation of uncertainty with the absence of truth ("objective truth", which is the only actual kind of truth). Saying that something or another is the (objectively) correct answer isn't a claim to certainty that this particular thing definitely is that correct answer. You can hold that there is some (objectively correct) answer, and at the same time also that we're not sure what it is.

That's exactly what my two most core principles (universalism and criticism) are about, balancing the two sides of that, denying ever having complete certainty in any particular answer but also denying ever having complete doubt that there even is a right answer.

That doesn't make it impossible, it makes it unwise. exactly one of the 'weeding out' processes you claim have been part of a gradual (if staccato) evolution. Are you, for some reason, eliminating behaviour being unwise from the reasons to eliminate it? — Isaac

I didn't mean that they would abandon him as a punishment, making it unwise for him to try to do it, but just that he has no leverage to actually do anything to begin with. "Do what I say!" "Or what?" "Or I won't let you browse from this tree!" "Okay, I'll find another tree, there's plenty of them all over the place. Not like anybody owns the forest." "I do!" "Haha, right."

He could of course use the old-fashioned "do what I say or I'll hit you" instead, but I don't think it was the advent of agriculture where people began to "explore that option" and then learn that it was bad. That's a kind of moral knowledge that pre-agricultural people would have already had. But moral questions about how best to organize society in light of the structural power problems that are only possible in enormous highly specialized civilizations are things that we only really had the opportunity to learn about once we got into situations where we could screw up that bad.

OK, this is new (to me). You think that moral behaviour is only that which causes no harm? So I shouldn't trip a gunman over to save a thousand people from slaughter because that would harm him? I don't understand how you could arrive at such a nonsensical view I'm afraid. surely you can't mean that? — Isaac

The gunman morally oughtn't be doing the slaughter to begin with, but of course that alone isn't going to stop him, so I make an exception (to what is already an exception to the general freedom that is the default norm) that it is still permissible to do things that would otherwise be wrong as necessary to stop someone from doing something wrong. That kind of exception still doesn't allow the problematic kind of ends-justify-the-means scenarios that undermine consequentialism, because e.g. the healthy person whose organs you harvested to save five other people wasn't himself doing harm to those other people. If he had stolen organs from other people to save himself, then it would be permissible to take them back and put them back in their rightful owners, even if he died in the process. Of course if what he's trying to save himself from is someone else stealing his organs, then it's also permissible (and omissibly good) to take those organs back to save him too, but that still doesn't justify his organ theft from others.

You'll find this kind of exceptions-to-exceptions-to-exceptions pattern continues throughout my philosophy. We start with defining what a morally good end is. Then define morally acceptable means toward that end. Then morally acceptable responses to violations of those means. On a larger scale, we can build governments that act only according to those principles, but if those are unstable and would be immediately supplanted by a much worse kind then it's okay to have a slightly less-perfect but more stable government in place to stave off the even worse option, and multiple layers of tradeoffs of perfection for stability so as to always be at the least-bad state presently attainable. And in pursuit of that incremental perfecting, it's okay to ally with forces that are not ideal so as to counterbalance them against even less-ideal forces (e.g. voting for the lesser of two evils). We start with the optimum and then make as minimal exceptions as possible to keep pursuit of the optimum from resulting in the worst possibility, and then, as better options become possible in practice, stop using those exceptions, so as to converge back to the optimum.

Why? Taking the word of a trustworthy individual or group with lots of experience is a considerably more efficient game strategy than working the whole thing out for yourself from scratch. — Isaac

It's the "trustworthy ... experience" part that's doing the heavy lifting there. Someone whose explanation of why you should believe them is "because I said so" is not trustworthy. Someone who's explanation is "because this other guy said so" just passes the buck to that other guy: how trustworthy is he? If he's just saying "because I said so", or if the chain of buck-passing ever stops at that, then it's not trustworthy. But if the buck stops at someone who's willing to offer experiential evidence, reasons, in defense of the claims -- even if you don't have the time or energy or expertise or whatever to actually take him up on that offer -- then he's trustworthy. It's that appeal to reason and experience rather than just someone's word that constitutes trustworthiness.

Agreements are few and far enough between for us to not squander them by repetition. I happen to agree with you that hedonism (in the very wide sense you use it) is the proper goal of people's moral feelings, so we needn't go over and over that point. My disagreement is about how to decide what course of action brings about the best of all worlds, I don't disagree that the best of all worlds would be the one in which everyone had their appetites satisfied. — Isaac

:up: :smile:

Then are you arguing that no-one should value any other ends than the avoidance of negative affect? — Isaac

Yes, but see above about the means to those ends for my response to the rest that came after this. The point about what good ends are is just the start of the whole picture. It gives us a direction to head toward, a criteria by which to measure progress, and so by which to value other things instrumentally for their usefulness at making such progress.

I don't see the link. The government control the law which lists the consequences of certain behaviours. It doesn't have any say at all in what's right and wrong. — Isaac

I thought your position was that it's those social consequences that make things right or wrong.

Though that isn't my position of course, I read the prohibition or obligation of certain behaviors as an implicit claim about what's right and wrong, even if that claim might not be true. At least in modern states exercising Weberian rational-legal authority; a old-fashioned charismatic authority could just be nakedly punishing things he doesn't like without any claim that that's morally justified, just that he can get away with it so he does.

In any case, in my envisioned system, the people conducting moral research have no more authority than natural scientists do today. Their end-products are trustworthy (see earlier) texts about what kinds of systems of what kinds of things produce positive or negative experiences for what kinds of people in what kinds of situations, to the best of their ability to ascertain such things. Voluntarily subscribed-to defense, mediation, and advisory organizations voluntarily use these texts as neutral guidelines about such contingent moral matters as they become applicable to the disputes that such organizations are mediating, or as the basis for their advice in avoiding such conflicts to begin with. (And that whole network of such organizations is the substitute for the state in my form of governance). If the people conducting that research are somehow less trustworthy than others, then people aren't going to subscribe to the organizations that use their texts, but will pick ones that use texts from more trustworthy sources; thus it's in the interests of said organizations to vet their sources for trustworthiness, and the emergent consensus will be on the output of whichever experts that people generally trust.

Right. Which, given unarguable facts about complexity means that de facto you're including short-term gains and ignoring long-term ones, because long-term gains cannot be so easily accounted for. — Isaac

This is a very black and white way of looking at things. (Also, you're speaking only of gains, whereas my focus is equally if not more so on avoiding losses). If the longer-term just is harder to plan for, as you say is inarguable, then there's not much that can possibly be done to plan for it one way or another. But however much it is possible, I advocate that we try. And as I've already said, I think that planning for that hard-to-foresee long term mostly involves keeping options open and improving flexibility and adaptability so whatever we end up needing to do when the time comes close enough that we can figure that out, we're in a position to be able to do it.


====


As a purely pragmatic discursive thing, I would really like to find some way for us to make these posts shorter. I can't afford to be spending hours every day replying to you.

why is the only way to resolve differences to decide that one view is objectively right? — Isaac

I didn't think it was necessary, on a philosophy forum, to specify that I mean rational discourse when I say "resolve differences": exchange reasons why one view is better than another to get all on the same page as to which is which. That implies that the involved parties think that there is some scale (independent of their own opinions, which differ already) on which the options can be ranked as better or worse, more correct or less correct.

Why does it need to be settled which of them actually is right? — Isaac

I said "They're acting like they each think [...] it needs to be settled which of them is [actually correct]." I'm not here asserting in my own voice that it needs to be settled, only that people arguing about a disagreement are acting as though they think they need to settle it.

Not at all. I'd also prefer a world in which no-one liked Justin Bieber, doesn't mean I think it's objectively wrong to do so, it would just be a better place to live. — Isaac

When you say "it would just be a better place to live" do you mean anything more than "I would prefer to live in that world"? I expect not. And by "doesn't mean I think it's objectively wrong" do you mean something like "I don't think that people who don't prefer that world are wrong to prefer it, as though they have to be convinced to change their minds; they're entitled to their tastes, I just don't share them myself"? I expect so.

In that case you are a relativist about tastes in Justin Bieber, which is fine because Bieber is probably morally irrelevant. But do you feel the same way about your differences with Nazis? I expect not. I expect (and hope) that you're not just willing to agree to disagree with Nazis, and wouldn't just say you have different tastes in genocide than them but leave them to their genocides like you'd leave Bieber fans to their music. In that respect, if my expectations of your attitude toward Nazis are accurate (and I sure hope they are), then you act toward Nazis like a universalist.

You've just totally misunderstood relativism, despite having it clearly set out by the SEP quote. Nowhere in the definition of relativism does it specify that people with different opinions about what's right must be allowed to get on with it by people who think it's wrong. Relativism says nothing whatsoever about how we should act. I could (as above) start a campaign to rid the world of all Justin Bieber records, to ban him from the airwaves and make it illegal for him to sing. None of that would have any bearing on whether I think other people are 'wrong' to like his music. It's just a reflection of how strongly I don't like his music. — Isaac

As a sidenote, there is a kind of moral relativism (normative moral relativism) that does claim that there is a moral obligation to tolerate differences, but I think (as do most philosophers) that that's even more incoherent than the meta-ethical moral relativism we're talking about.

But with regard to that meta-ethical moral relativism, I'm not talking about the relativism obliging behavior, but rather about it not justifying prohibiting behavior. You could start a campaign to ban Bieber from the airwaves and make no pretense about it being because that's what objectively ought to be done, but then you're just nakedly exercising power to curtail others' behavior without offering any justification for why that's warranted, why others should be prohibited from what you're prohibiting them from doing. Others might say "stop, I don't like Bieber either but banning him is wrong!" And your response would be what, "doesn't matter, I can so I am"? That's pretty explicitly giving up on caring about what's right or wrong, just like I say that relativism amounts to.

That there will be consequences for you is a reason to support or oppose some kind of action. — Isaac

Only in the non-rational sense that "swear your belief in our god or be tortured to death!" is a "reason" to believe in said god. It doesn't give you any internal reason to honestly think that that god exists, it just gives you incentive to let the others see you appearing to believe in it. Likewise, the threat of punishment for acting otherwise than compelled doesn't give you any internal reason to honestly support that course of action, as in to aim to do that of your own will, because you think that's what should be done; it just gives you incentive to be seen doing it.

You did catch that I'm an anarchist, right? — Pfhorrest

Yeah, right! — Isaac

See, it's things like this that make me think that you really just have no idea whatsoever what my views actually are. Way back in the OP of this very thread, before the start of our interminable series of conversations where you obsess about the moral side of one of my four principles (universalism) to the neglect of all of the other principles, which are all there explicitly to temper each other away from the extremes you think that one principle of universalism would lead to, I said this:

I think that these principles necessitate things like:

An empirical realist ontology
A functionalist and panpsychist philosophy of mind
A critical rationalist or falsificationist epistemology
A freethinking philosophy of education
A hedonic altruist account of ethical ends
A compatibilist and pan-libertarian philosophy of will
A liberal or libertarian account of ethical means
An anarchic political philosophy — Pfhorrest

It's particularly the principle of liberalism that's behind those: that by default anything goes (both beliefs and intentions, and therefore actions), and the onus is on those who want to show that some option is a wrong one.

I also explicitly affirm that we can in principle show some options to be wrong, that nothing is just completely beyond all question: that's the principle of criticism. But the burden of proof is on those who want to claim so, and they must appeal to experiences in common with their interlocutors to accomplish such proof.

In light of the principle of criticism, that principle of liberalism is actually demanded by my principle of universalism, because with criticism and without liberalism you would be left with "cynicism" (for which I wish I had a better name) -- the view that by default nothing goes, and the onus is on those who want some option to be considered to first show conclusively that it is the right one. Which is a standard that cannot possibly be met, leaving all options (of what to believe or what to intend) forever ostensibly rejected. But because we can't actually believe nothing and intend nothing, that just leaves us believing and intending whatever we're inclined to and calling it right because we're inclined to, without any self-judgement as to whether we actually believe or intend the right things or not. Which is, as you call it, individualist subjectivism, the extreme end of relativism.

So universalism, in denying relativism, demands that we also reject cynicism, as it inexorably leads to relativism. That could all by itself allow taking recourse in dogmatism, as you seem to assume universalists must do. But together with the principle of criticism (which denies dogmatism), universalism leaves no option but accepting liberalism, so as to avoid cynicism and therefore relativism. And liberalism plus criticism, translated into the descriptive and prescriptive domains respectively, equal critical rationalist epistemology and libertarian deontology, which in turn demand the rejection of all claims to epistemic and deontic authority: religions and states, respectively. TL;DR: universalism (with criticism) demands anarchism.

Relativism states that the correctness of a moral statement is relative to the person issuing it. Not that there is no such thing as correctness. — Isaac

Yes, I get what the claim of relativism is, and I'm arguing that it's incoherent. For something to be "correct relative to someone" is no different from it being someone's opinion. Everyone agrees that people have different opinions, that everyone thinks their opinion is correct, and will call an opinion that agrees with theirs correct -- even people who explicitly say that there is no such thing as correct in any sense agree with all that. The question at hand is if there's anything more than that to consider, a sense of correctness that's not just the same thing as being someone's opinion; and relativism says no to that question.

They understood the word 'right' to mean something like protecting the fatherland against the communist menace by any means. — Isaac

This bit makes me think that perhaps part of the problem here is that you're not differentiating between the intension and extension of language. The Nazis undoubtedly understood something like "protecting the fatherland against the communist menace by any means" as within the extension of the term "right": that is a thing that they consider to be within the set of things that are right. But undoubtedly that wouldn't capture the full intension of what they mean by "right". This issue goes all the way back to Socrates, who when asking for the meaning of "piety" or "justice" etc was first met with lists of examples and then rejected those as not giving the real meaning of the word. The language of "intension and extension" didn't exist in his time of course, but that's what's at issue there: a list of examples of things that a word applies to tells you something about its extension, but it doesn't necessarily tell you anything about its intension.

If you only talk about the extension of a term, that leaves you no grounds whatsoever to ask whether or not something belongs within the extension of the term. The intension gives you some kind of criteria by which to measure up a thing and decide if it is a member of the set denoted by that term. The extension just gives you a list of the things denoted by it. So if all you have to define a term is its extension, there can be no question as to what does or doesn't belong in that set: the set is defining the term.

With the Italian and the Spaniard example, we both understand that there is an intension for each of those terms that the Nazis agree on, and that they have applied the criteria of the intension of "Spaniard" to the man in question the same way as each other, and so included him within the extension of "Spaniards" as they mean it at that moment; but, given the information you and I have but they don't, we know that they must have somehow misapplied those criteria, because the man they're including within the extension of "Spaniard" doesn't actually fit the intension.

To say that any X just means "whatever is called X" is to ignore the intension of "X" and only pay attention to its extension. And you seem to do that only with moral terms, not with anything else. That seems suspiciously motivated; really, all of these conversations have, I just haven't put my finger on quite why it's seemed that way. But it's always seemed like you really want only some of the same principles that apply to factual matters to not apply to moral matters. It feels... weasely.

No, you were saying that people's moral beliefs could be analysed for complexity using Kolmogorov. You've yet to even begin to explain how. — Isaac

I was saying that all beliefs, moral and otherwise, have reason to be (dis)preferred compared to each other on account of their efficiency, which in the case of non-moral beliefs means informational efficiency, parsimony, the simplicity or complexity of a belief compared to the data it encodes. (With "moral beliefs", i.e. intentions, it's practical, energy efficiency instead: less work required to achieve the same good is better). You claimed that complexity was completely subjective. I gave things like Komogorov, and compressibility more generally, as examples of objective measures of complexity. You challenged me to apply that to a web of beliefs, and I said that you must surely agree that it applies at least to mathematical models like used in scientific theories, and such theories are a kind of thing that can be believed; and I admitted that less rigorously modeled beliefs can only be correspondingly less rigorously judged more or less complex. You said you don't surely agree that it applies to such models, so I explained how. Then you said that doesn't do anything to explain webs of belief. And then I said what you just responded to here, and now you're introducing moral beliefs into a sub-conversation that was explicitly only about non-moral beliefs.

Give me some examples of moral activity which was not possible (even in kind) in hunter-gatherer communities that agriculture made possible. — Isaac

From what I have read (i.e. I'm not claiming this as my area of expertise), extreme hierarchy and authority was not possible in hunter-gatherer communities because the person trying to boss everyone around and horde everything for himself could just be abandoned by the rest of the tribe, moving on away from him; he had no real leverage over them. When people settled and became dependent upon specific plots of land they'd been tending to all year long, a strong man violently excluding them from that necessary capital had leverage to demand obedience to him, which he could use to secure even better leverage over them, with which he could secure more obedience, and more leverage, in a vicious cycle; and every step further away from hunter-gatherer society, every further specialization of labor and dependency on the whole socio-economic structure held hostage by the assholes at the top, gave the assholes more ability to get away with things they could not have done in hunter-gatherer society.

I'm sure you don't mean it, but as a warning shot you do realise how massively insulting this narrative is to modern day tribal people's? They lead alternative lifestyles, not backwards or underdeveloped ones. The path of human development is not at all like one from children to mature adults. It's just one on a number of possible choices, most moderns societies took that path, some didn't. You need to choose analogies that avoid making those that didn't sound like they're backward. — Isaac

I'm certainly not trying to give that impression. From what I've read (I think some of the same sources as the above), many early refugees from agricultural civilization fled from it specifically because they saw the bad things that it enabled, and learned quickly to avoid getting involved with that. In the analogy with individuals growing up, that's like people who saw the crazy shit young adults got up to, preemptively learned from it, and intentionally didn't do that stuff themselves. I'm not saying that tribal people today are the same as people living in pre-agricultural times. They may live lives that resemble them in some ways, but since it's a choice now to live that way, since agriculture is known and could be adopted if they wanted, it's not the same as people living in times before agriculture was invented.

Nothing in the definition of consequentialism specifies that it derive a moral requirements as opposed to a moral proscriptions, and negative utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_consequentialism — Isaac

I'm aware of negative utilitarianism, and it's not the same as my view; it is still consequentialist, as you say. A negative utilitarian still faces the same "ends-justify-the-means" problem of all consequentialism: one could, in principle, justify killing one healthy person to harvest their organs and save the lives of five people who need organ transplants on a negative utilitarian account (your end is to prevent suffering, you prevent more suffering than you cause this way, therefore the means are justified, according to the negative utilitarian). On my anti-consequentialist view that kind of argument can't fly: it doesn't matter that your actions prevent more harm than they cause, they still cause some harm, and so are unjust.

(Preemptively: yes, I know it's very hard in practice to avoid causing any harm to anyone, and in those circumstances my view says to cause the least harm possible, but that's different from saying to do whatever it takes to minimize any harm that happens at all for any reason).

I know. The argument you keep failing to address is that when we have a choice about what criteria to use (which we do), dealing with the uncertainty in applying those criteria is one of the merits we should consider. You want to just ignore how practical your chosen criteria are to apply, for some reason. It's just daft to say we're going to choose the criteria first regardless of any pragmatic implications, then deal with the pragmatic implication of applying them later. Why would we do that? — Isaac

What I was saying was that you were saying something non-sequitur. We were talking about my hedonism even counting concerns for pleasure or pain in the afterlife, and you said that that rolls all religious morality under my hedonism too. I said not all religious views of morality are concerned with pleasure and pain in the afterlife. Then you said something about God knowing best and uncertainty... which doesn't track with the rest of that subthread at all.

In any case, you seem not to have noticed that my very argument for the hedonistic criteria (as well as all of my principles) is a pragmatic one. Just taking someone's word for something without question is an impractical way of finding out what's actually a correct or incorrect thing to think. Avoiding just taking someone's word for something requires some experiential standard, apart from anyone's word. When it comes to questions of good and bad, experiences of things seeming good and bad are hedonic experiences.

Therefore hedonism, for the sake of practicality. If doing hedonism is still hard... well, we'll just have to do our best at it, because the alternative is even less practical. Nobody said anything would be easy.

A person who wants retributive justice despite the negative consequences on human suffering truly does value retribution higher than suffering — Isaac

It's not a question of which they value more than the other, it's a question of whether they value them independently as ends in themselves, or one only because it's instrumental to the other.

Say I'm willing to help an old lady carry her groceries from the store to her car, just because I value her well-being and comfort intrinsically; I'm not doing it because I get anything out of it. (I'm stipulating that as part of this scenario, not putting it up for debate). But then I find out that she's not carrying them to her car, but carrying them to her home, significantly further away. Perhaps I might not be willing to go that far out of my way to help her, because I also value my own well-being, and judge that the cost to me is not worth the benefit to her. (Setting aside for now whether that judgement is correct.) That doesn't prove that my willingness to help the old lady was selfish all along, only instrumental to my own well-being. It just proves that I also value my own well-being in addition to hers.

Likewise, if these retributionists want "evil people" to suffer just for the sake of them suffering, even if it's not very effective at preventing the suffering of many others, that shows that that's not just instrumental to universal suffering-reduction, but something they consider intrinsically valuable in and of itself. They want it because they want it, not because it gets them something else they want. The fact that they might let an "evil person" get off without retribution if that's necessary to prevent the suffering of a bunch of innocents doesn't prove that all they really cared about was preventing suffering all along. It just proves that they also care about preventing suffering, in addition to caring about retribution for its own sake, and sometimes the cost to one of those ends might not be worth the gain to the other.

To be clear, if you want your moral theory to be actually applied in the real world you need to deal with the fact that what people say they believe and what people actually believe are not the same thing. You can argue against what they say they believe in an academic game, but if you want to apply it to the real world you have to deal with what they actually believe. — Isaac

Even so, getting people to stop advocating things that they don't actually believe is still a step in the right direction. The only benefit I think philosophical arguments can really have is to get people to make their thoughts and actions more consistent, both within each of those domains and between them. In doing so, if we can manage to do so, we can get people who do have practical, functional, correct views as the deepest parts of their belief networks to bring the rest of themselves more in line with that; and also, expose any people who do have truly deep-seated dysfunctional views, make them face up to that and deal with it.

Why would rational discourse be the only way that doesn't constitute giving up? — Isaac

Like I said... ugh... three hours ago... I didn't think it was necessary, on a philosophy forum, to specify that I mean rational discourse as the thing I'm talking about not giving up on.

Right. So a consequence of your proposed system is that the rich get to decide what's moral. Saying you don't want that to be a consequence isn't sufficient. — Isaac

If only that part of my system were implemented in an otherwise unchanged world, sure -- though that wouldn't really be a change, because the rich already get to decide what is declared right or wrong today, since they control all governance. Other parts of my system are meant to specifically fight against that.

And also, the point of mentioning science was that this isn't a problem unique to this domain, but a much wider problem, that we already have, across all domains.

Very well. You claimed not to be interested only in predictable consequences (undeniably dominated by the short-term ones) and then said "I'm just advocating that we consider what gains we're able to predict" How is that not a direct contradiction? — Isaac

You said I advocate attending only to short-term easily-predicted things to the neglect of long-term hard-to-predict things. I countered that I advocate attending to all of those, as much as we can from each, given their differences. I'm not advocating that we neglect the long term, but if it's hard to get good data on the long term one way or the other, then of course we can't plan as narrowly for it, and instead have to broadly plan as well as we can afford for everything in the range of possibilities, in proportion to whatever likelihoods we can manage to figure out about them.

Only if you've already begged the question of whether the X in question is objective. If the X in question is true relative to the person expressing it, then Alice thinks X and she's right to do so, while Bob thinks not-X and he's right to do so is not the same as saying both X and not-X, because a statement X without the context of a person stating it would not make sense. — Isaac

If you're already invoking a question of "rightness" in any way separate from mere agreement (and of course everyone already agrees with themselves), then you're talking about objectivity already. "Is true relative to the person expressing it" means nothing more than "is the opinion of that person", and we already agree that there's no problem with Alice just thinking that X and Bob thinking that not-X; that's totally possible. But that says nothing more than "it is possible for people to disagree". Duh.

What remains is the question of whether there's any resolution of that disagreement to be had; whether either of them is right in their opinion, in a sense other than the trivial sense of "agrees with their own opinion". You can refuse to consider that question if you want, you can claim that there's no way to answer that or no sense to make of it, but then you are just bowing out of the conversation between people who are trying to figure out the answer to it. Which is your prerogative, you don't have to participate in that conversation, but then you are doing exactly what I said in the post that all of this is in response to: giving up on that question.

Of course they're acting as if what they respectively think can't both be true at the same time, it can't - for Alice, or for Bob. For Alice, Bob is wrong and Alice can't do anything but argue as Alice so she's going to argue as if Bob is wrong, because Bob is wrong for her and she can't argue as if she weren't her (or at least it would no longer be a moral argument if she did). — Isaac

Then they are not acting as relativists on this matter, but as universalists. They're acting like they each think they are actually correct, and it needs to be settled which of them is; like they can't just have their separate opinions neither being in any way better than the other.

If I think Xing is morally bad it means I don't want people to X. In what way does that lead to the conversation about X not being worth having? It's the conversation in which I express that Xing is wrong. — Isaac

In which case you're acting in a universalist fashion, not a relativist one.

From a cultural perspective, I'm saying "in our tribe Xing is wrong, so if you don't want to be ostracised, you'd better not do X". That's not only an argument worth having, but for a social species it's an incredibly powerful one. — Isaac

What you're saying then is "Xing is disliked in our tribe". That moves the focus of disagreement from Alice and Bob to some Alician tribe and a Bobian tribe. The Alicians disapprove of some kind of action, and the Bobians think it's fine. Do they just tell each other "alright you do you, it's not like either of us is actually right about this", or do they act like the other is actually wrong -- do the Alicians act like the Bobians are letting people get away with moral atrocities, and the Bobians act like the Alicians are being tyrants for not permitting something harmless? If they act in the latter way, they're acting like universalists, like there is such a thing as correct in a sense other than just "our opinion" and there is a disagreement about what that is.

The part about ostracization, furthermore, moves from the realm of rational discourse to the realm of threats. You're not talking about reasons to support or oppose some kind of action or state of affairs, but just about the fact that someone or another does support or oppose them and there will be consequences for you if you act contrary to their opinions. On the inter-tribal level, it's the difference between, on the one hand, the Alicians and the Bobians talking to each other about whether Xing is a moral atrocity or perfectly harmless and trying to convince each other's people to agree to support or oppose Xing in their own respective societies (which then has to appeal to something other than what their respective societies already support or oppose); and, on the other hand, one or the other of them threatening to invade and force the other to change if they don't comply with their own judgement.

Further still, and maybe most importantly: where do you draw the line around a "tribe"? Is California my tribe? Ventura County? The Ojai Valley? My block? My household? Or in the other direction, the United States? The world? The whole universe? And how many of the people in whatever unit you pick have to be in agreement for that to be the thing that is "actually right or wrong relative to that unit"? If half of my tribe thinks something is terrible and the other half think it's fine, am I right or wrong to do it? Why can't I just call the half that thinks what I want to think "my tribe" and then claim that I am right by that definition? Why can't I keep doing that until it's just me identifying myself as my own tribe and claiming that since I agree with myself (of course) that I am right, and anyone who disagrees can fuck off because it's not like there's any better standard than the one I'm appealing to (the standard of "I agree with it") by which they can call me wrong. Unless you say that a larger consensus within a larger group is "more right", in which case the "most right" would be universal unanimity... and oh look you've arrived at universalism. That's the basic dichotomy here: relativism collapses to egotism, or else expands to universalism. We're in agreement against egotism, so...

Yeah, sounds about right - only a few years into your reign before your favourite music becomes mandatory because your panel of experts deemed it to actually be the best and anyone thinking it isn't is just factually wrong. Ever spoken to a Pink Floyd fan? — Isaac

You did catch that I'm an anarchist, right?

can't say it would. As I've tried to explain, the 'truth' of moral statements is context dependant, and for me, Hitler did do something morally wrong. Asking whether it's 'true' without context is already assuming objective morality. I could pretend to be a Nazi, and say, "no Hitler didn't do anything wrong", I expect that's what a Nazi would say, but why would I care what a Nazi would say, I'm not a Nazi. — Isaac

Then you act like a universalist with regards to Nazis. :up:

If a Nazi said to another Nazi "don't do the wrong thing, you must do the right thing" the second Nazi would understand that as meaning 'shoot the communist' (or whatever atrocity we're thinking of). This is unequivocal proof that 'wrong' and 'right' meant those things to those people. If they didn't then they wouldn't have understood each other. — Isaac

If one Nazi said to the other "shoot the Spaniard, not the Italian", and the second Nazi shot the person that the first Nazi meant for him to shoot, but in fact both of the people in question were from Italy, does that prove something about the definition of "Italian" and "Spaniard" in the Nazi's language-game? Of course not, it only shows that both Nazis thought that one of the two people they were discussing was Spanish, but they were both incorrect about that.

You know literally everyone feels this way, right? There's not a person in the world whose web of beliefs is identical to another's. We all think our own model is the most accurate, that it differs from other in ways where those other models are flawed. It's nothing unique to you, it's human nature. — Isaac

I'm not just saying that I think my views are right and different from the views that I think are wrong; of course everyone thinks that. What I'm saying is that, surveying the different kinds of views that people have had as thoroughly as I could, I couldn't find any views that weren't clearly wrong -- in ways that someone else was usually pointing out too, though they in turn were clearly wrong in ways that still others were pointing out -- so I had to come up with new ones. In other words, there are a lot of philosophical questions where someone asks me "are you an Xist or a Yist?" and the only answer I can give is "no, or yes, depending", because the usual opposite sides of that argument, X and Y, are things I both agree and disagree with in about equal proportion. It's not my views being mine and thinking that some other people are wrong that makes my views seem worth talking about, it's that I haven't seen anyone espousing anything quite like the ones I've settled on.

I would have expected people to have a tendency to come up with unique original views of their own in light of this situation, and I've tried to elicit people to share them, including here on this forum, because finding new and different ways of looking at things is the most interesting thing about philosophy to me. (Likewise, the only reason I share my views at all is that I expect them to be new to someone; I try to avoid getting into arguments where I'm pushing something someone else already knows about and has rejected, because that's pointless.) I try asking people: what's a "third way" kind of view you've come up with that doesn't just agree with one or the other side of some classic disagreement? And very few people seem to be forthcoming about that, so if they're out there, they're strangely quiet. And that's unexpected to me.

That doesn't go any way toward analysing a person's web of beliefs. — Isaac

We were talking about formal scientific models, not natural, folksy webs of belief.

Right. But what you've quite specifically said there is that agriculture caused a change in human morality (or at least the expression of it). So you've undermined your model of morality growing through the exchange of ideas. It appears morality was perfectly adequate without that, agriculture just fucked things up. Maybe an exchange of ideas has occurred since then, but not a necessary one, clearly. — Isaac

On the account that I gave, agriculture enabled an exploration of moral ideas that previously would not have been possible to explore, because in a pre-agricultural society only very narrow ways of living are even possible in practice. Once it was possible in practice to explore those different ways of living, we as a species explored some really shitty options, and have since then slowly been learning why not to do things that way, even though we can.

It's a lot like personal maturation. When we're children and live with our parents our lives are more strictly regulated, and there's a lot of things we simply can't do, even if we wanted to, because our parents won't allow us to do them, or just because we lack the practical means, the power, to do them. When we become adults we're suddenly free from those restrictions and are able to do a bunch of things we couldn't do before -- including a bunch of awful things that we really shouldn't do. In time we learn why we shouldn't do those things, even though we can, and begin to self-impose restrictions and regulations on ourselves. The transition from restricted childhood to wild-and-crazy early adulthood wasn't some kind of negative learning. We didn't know not to do those things before, and we didn't need know that to because we were prevented from doing them anyway. It's not until we were able to do them that we needed to learn why not to.

And that's why I'm not a consequentialist. — Pfhorrest

So something other than the foreseeable consequences of your actions makes them morally right? What would that be? — Isaac

On my account you can't ever positively show that anything is morally obligatory, just like you can't show that any belief is definitely true. You can only show that something is morally forbidden, just like you can only show that a belief is false. That's why consequentialism is the parallel to confirmationism. "This plan would lead to good consequences, therefore this is a good plan" is just as invalid as "this theory has true implications, therefore this theory is true". Affirming the consequent either way.

And yes, because of underdetermination, you can in principle always rearrange a bunch of other plans to counteract the things that would make this one thing wrong, so this thing can be okay, so long as you do a whole lot of other stuff differently to make it okay. But just like with parsimony of beliefs, that's where efficiency comes into play, though it's even more obvious when we're talking about efficiency of actions rather than informational efficiency of beliefs. It quickly becomes the case that it's practically (but not in principle) impossible to do the kinds of things that would counteract whatever makes this or that wrong, as we just don't have unlimited cosmic power to do whatever it takes.

Not all religious moral views say that the pleasure or pain expected in the afterlife is the reason why doing something is morally good or bad, — Pfhorrest

No, some claim that God knows best. Either way it's still a way of dealing with the uncertainty about what is 'best'. — Isaac

We were discussing the criteria by which to judge something better or worse, not the uncertainty in applying those criteria.

You're just straw-manning. You need to provide a quote from someone in support of retributive justice claiming that it is morally right even if it leads to horrific consequences over all timescales. — Isaac

You are straw-manning with that demand, because I'm not claiming that anyone would support retributive justice "even if it leads to horrific consequences over all timescales". It's not that they completely ignore all hedonistic consequences, it's just that not every concern is merely instrumental to those ends. If retributive justice would make everyone suffer forever, then I don't think anyone would be for it, because people do care about some suffering, especially their own. But if retributive justice isn't particularly effective at reducing suffering (of future victims), there are people who will nevertheless be for it anyway, because there are some people (the criminals) who they think deserve to suffer, not because of any instrumental reason, but just intrinsically.

People simply do not arrive at their beliefs and actions by a process of rational consideration. — Isaac

Therefore there's no point in trying to have any rational discourse about such things? Then you really are just giving up like I say all relativism is tantamount to.

Plus also, incidentally, the poor would come out bottom of that list every time. Is that really what you want, ethics decided by the rich? — Isaac

No more than I want science decided by the rich. What I really want is for there not to be rich and poor at all, but given that there are, of course it's only people with at least a certain baseline of material stability in their lives who are going to have the bandwidth to do heavy thinking. Scientists have to be "rich" enough to have afforded their educations and lived the kind of lives where they could succeed in their educations, but that doesn't mean they're "the rich" on par with Buffet or Musk or Bezos or Gates.

All you're really advocating is that we consider short-term, easy to predict gains — Isaac

Not at all. I'm just advocating that we consider what gains we're able to predict — Pfhorrest

...says it all. — Isaac

Quoting partial sentences for cheap rhetorical points? Really does say it all.

Agreed, especially on a philosophy forum, if everyone's arguing in good faith and not just because one gets some weird kick being pissed off or pissing others off. — schopenhauer1

I had a thought the other day that seems like a plausible explanation behind a lot of behavior that I see here and similar places on the internet. Metaphorically, people are looking for the satisfaction of beating someone up. So if you're not fighting them, they'll be upset at you, because they're here to fight damnit! And if you're unmoved by their blows, they'll be upset at you, because just punching a pillow or a brick wall or whatever is no fun, it's only satisfying if what you hit breaks. Not fighting or just quietly absorbing or deflecting their attacks isn't "playing fair", it's some kind of "foul play" in their minds. But of course if you do react to being hit with some kind of hurt response, they'll be gleeful and gloat over that. Basically the only "winning" move (inasmuch as it's a move that will make them stop fighting and not whine about you cheating somehow) is to concede defeat. Because that's what they're here for: the thrill of victory over someone else.

And while philosophy is aptly analogized to a "martial art of the mind", as someone who trained in TaeKwonDo for 11 years I can tell you the kind of students who come into a class just looking to beat someone up for fun are not taken well. Studying how to fight in a calm, friendly, cooperative, disciplined way has a very different emotional energy than an actual fight, and people coming into such a discipline with that actual-fight emotional energy are not usually welcomed.

I wish there was a place on the internet that was more like a real martial arts club than an MMA FFA ring.

I would say having a good faith dialectic with someone is what should be happening (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), considering things that haven't been considered. I don't expect a "winner" but what can happen is that each side finds ways to strengthen their arguments and consider things otherwise not considered. — schopenhauer1

:up: :100:

The only point of arguing is to exchange new ideas.

I've literally just cited the standard definition of relativism which says almost exactly that. 'What is 'correct' is relative to the particular people doing the judging. — Isaac

The 'almost' there is an important difference, that we've circled around a lot before. It's the difference between a claim that Alice thinks X and Bob thinks not-X, which can both be true in a universalist sense at the same time; and a claim that Alice thinks X and she's right to do so, while Bob thinks not-X and he's right to do so, which just amounts to saying that both X and not-X.

This relates closely to another thing you said so I'm going to continue in response to that:

You seem to separate out ethical facts from aesthetic facts purely on the grounds that people do not seem to act as if aesthetic facts were universal, and then you say that what people do or do not think as no bearing on the matter. — Isaac

It's a question of what the kind of speech-act is trying to do. When making aesthetic judgements we're not usually trying to say anything other than that we like or don't like something, and possibly naming the specific details that we do or don't like. If people making ostensibly moral judgements only mean to do that, if they're really just expressing their feelings about things, then those people using ostensibly moral language that way are in the same situation as people making aesthetic judgements.

But then, there's no argument to be had there. The things they're saying aren't meant to contradict one another. They can both be true, in a universalist sense, at the same time. But if Alice says "X is wrong" and Bob says "no it's not" and then they argue about it, like they think they can't both be true (in a universalist sense, though specifying this every time really shouldn't be necessary) at the same time, then it's clear that they're not just expressing their feelings about things, because they're acting as though it's not possible that what they respectively think can both be true at the same time.

Moral relativism denies that the latter kind of conversation is ever had, or at least that it's worth having. It's just to refuse to have that kind of conversation, to give up on answering that kind of question.

I expect you'll ask why I don't object to neglecting to have such conversations about aesthetic matters, and to that I'd say that to have such conversations about aesthetic matters would just reduce to having moral conversations, because the grounds on which an object of aesthetic consideration would be objectively of aesthetic value would be the same grounds on which a matter of moral consideration would be objectively morally right. Conversely, moral relativism amounts to saying that there's no conversation to have about value besides effectively aesthetic value: just "I like it" vs "I don't".

The fact is you can't escape being you, you're own perspective. So if you say Xing is morally wrong, even in a culture that thinks it isn't, you're still just saying that in your language game, Xing is the sort of thinng we use the word 'wrong' for. You're not playing the other culture's language game so obviously you're not going to use their word meanings. there is a difference between talking about another culture and talking in the same language games as another culture. If I say "French is a really beautiful language" I'm using English to talk about French. That's not the same as talking in French. — Isaac

So if a German in 1945 said "Hitler hat nichts falsch gemacht", that would be true? Because Hitler was democratically elected by the German people, and acting in the supposed interests of the ethnically German majority, against the interests of minorities sure but their views obviously weren't the dominant ones in Germany at the time. In other words, Germans in Germany in 1945 were generally of the opinion that Hitler did nothing wrong, so if they said so in their language, that would be true, because that's just how "falsch" (wrong) was used then and there? And if, say, Albert Einstein, over in America, disagreed with that, in German, at the same time, his claim would have been false?

Well no, because unlike the swans example, you're obviously aware that there are many, many philosophical theories which obviously fit the data sufficiently to satisfy perfectly intelligent and knowledgeable people. So 'it seems to fit the data' seems massively insufficient in a way that it wouldn't were you not aware of the countless alternatives. — Isaac

Since we're still talking about my motivation here, not about proving my views correct, the missing piece is that those alternatives all look unsatisfactory to me, and I’m not alone regarding any of them. I didn't start studying philosophy already having these views. I expected to find out what the correct answers that others had already come up with were. Instead I found a bunch of alternatives that all seemed only half-right, and no clear consensus on any of them being completely right, everyone insisting that the other side is completely wrong. So I started trying to figure out what would it look like if I took to heart all of the arguments of every side against each other, what alternatives were there in the wake of that. What I'm trying to "sell", as you put it, is just another alternative that I haven't seen presented before (though most of the pieces of it have been, separately, not all put together like this), and the only reason I think it's worth talking about is because I haven't seen exactly this put forth before. When you've got a bunch of models none of which fit the data perfectly, and no consensus emerging on which is the best way forward, one of the most valuable things you can find is an alternative approach.

FWIW this is also largely why I'm so disappointed with the nature of your responses to me. It's not really addressing the novel big picture that makes any of this worth stating at all, it's just addressing the old pieces with old arguments that have already been tread to death. I don't find those old arguments about the same old things that interesting, and it's just a chore to tread over them again and again in a way that no new ideas are being exchanged, it's just banging the same heads against the same walls as have been done a thousand times. Meanwhile, the actual new bits, the interesting things that make any of this worth talking about, are ignored, just because they're connected to the same old bits it's not even worth arguing about anymore.

Universalism (of either kind) isn't any new thing I'm putting forth; but I am putting forth what so far as I know is a new kind of argument for it (that applies equally to both). Neither empiricism nor hedonism (even in the broad sense I mean it) are new things I'm putting forth; but so far as I know the subsuming of both of them within a broader-than-usual sense of "phenomenalism" is new, and I've got what as far as I know is a new kind of argument for that. Neither liberal deontological ethics nor critical rationalist epistemology are new things, of course; but treating them as the application of the same two principles toward questions with different directions of fit is a new thing, so far as I know, and I've got what as far as I know is a new kind of argument for those.

So far as I know, grouping those four principles and their antonyms into alternate types of "objectivism" and "subjectivism", "fideism" and "skepticism", where within each I support one of the types while opposing the other, is a new kind of thing. And all of those "new kind of argument" four those four principles are the same basic argument, and even that kind of argument simpliciter isn't entirely new, just the application of it to secular principles like these instead of to the existence of God is new... again, so far as I know. And of course the notion of progress being possible isn't new at all, and the notion of a "spiral-shaped" progress like Hegel's isn't even new; but so far as I know, attributing a variant of that to the consequences the aforementioned critical-liberal methodologies is new. And so on with all of my philosophical views; those are just the ones discussed in this thread so far.

And that same one general argument that yields the principles underlying the scientific method also yields some ethical principles, none of which individually are new at all, but the particular combination of which in exactly this way is, so far as I know. So if the argument yields one very well-accepted conclusion (the scientific method) and also a subtly different approach to ethics combining bits that each have a lot of support for themselves separately... seems like maybe that's something at least worth looking into, and not a weird thing to even consider.

I absolutely do doubt that. How would you even begin? — Isaac

Any mathematical model of data is basically a compression algorithm. A formula for a curve takes less information to state than all of the points of that curve separately. A simpler (smaller, shorter, lower-information) formula that more closely matches more data points compresses that data more efficiently.

Which undermines your argument. — Isaac

The novel part this aspect of my argument (the difference between me and Hegel) is precisely the "slow and haphazard" part.

You'll have to give me an example more than just your hand-waiving claim. Take a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe and talk me through the progress you think they've made by gradual elimination of nonsense ideas to, say, modern America. — Isaac

This is a case where that Dogen quote applies. Nomadic hunter-gatherers, from all I've read, had generally pretty good moral standards for the most part, largely because one couldn't survive well with poor morals. The advent of agriculture then enabled hierarchical and authoritarian civilizations and a lot of really evil shit became possible and even advantageous for the ones who did it. Then, slowly and haphazardly over the ages since then, we've begun identifying the worst of those things and building consensus that they are wrong (and thus social resistance to the implementation of them), with things like (as I mentioned) liberty, democracy, equality, etc, becoming increasingly normal standards we try to hold ourselves to, whereas once they would have been seen as loony impossible dreams doomed to fail.

(FWIW I think this same Dogen-arc happened with regards to models of reality as well. The actual texts of most religious traditions mostly don't appeal to strictly supernatural things verbatim, e.g. "spirit" is literally just "breath", the afterlife in Judaism is a time in the future of this world when everything will be made perfect and the dead will be resurrected rather than some kind of non-physical alternate world, etc. I like to think of the traditional mythology of truly prehistoric people as something just as proto-scientific as it is proto-religious, just attempts at explaining the world as best they could using their limited knowledge. It's not until the same hierarchy and authority that enabled morally awful things arose that truly religious views, in a sense opposed to scientific views, became widespread, and then science has been weeding out that nonsense for a while now since.)

it is this exact problem of what to do with the uncertainty generated by being unable to judge all the consequences all the time — Isaac

And that's why I'm not a consequentialist. This anti-consequentialism is basically the only distinguishing factor between my views and ordinary utilitarianism. (This is one of those novel things that I think is interesting and worth talking about. All your arguments against me are also arguments against utilitarianism, and so old and tired and uninteresting to have. What's interesting, what I'd like to be talking about, is things like "what if utilitarianism, but not consequentialist?")

You've even, on that thread, acknowledged that getting to an afterlife would be hedonistic. So that's all religious moral theories brought into this fold too. — Isaac

Not all religious moral views say that the pleasure or pain expected in the afterlife is the reason why doing something is morally good or bad, even those that do claim there will be a reward or punishment in some afterlife for doing good or bad is this life. In that thread I was responding to a specific Bible quote wherein someone was factoring the expected pleasure of the afterlife into his moral decisions.

If we knew for a fact that some action would lead to masses of suffering for the rest of humanity do you really think any ethicist anywhere would argue that we should nonetheless do it? — Isaac

Probably not that 'for the rest of humanity' part. But there are plenty of people who think certain parts of humanity suffering is straight-up good irrespective of its consequences; see again retributive justice for its own sake. There's also lots of people (though probably not many who'd call themselves ethicists) who think there's a natural, morally-right hierarchy of people, with themselves at the top naturally, and others below them suffering for their (the people at the top's) benefit being morally good. Find a neo-Nazi, for instance, and pose to him a hypothetical post-scarcity technological utopia where not only all white people but all Jews and black people and so on all get their happily-ever-afters equally, and ask if he thinks that that's as good a scenario as one where only the whites get that.

(I expect the reason why they’d think only whites getting it is better would boil down to retribution anyway: they think the Jews et al are evil and trying to tear down the righteous whites, and therefore deserve to suffer for their wrongs).

This begs the question because you couldn't know who constituted 'the best'. — Isaac

In context with the discussion about being able to account for more considerations in our decision-making, "the best" are the people with the capacity to do such broader considerations. Are you familiar with spoon theory? In this context "the best" I refer to are people with "a lot of spoons".

All you're really advocating is that we consider short-term, easy to predict gains over longer-term, more uncertain ones. — Isaac

Not at all. I'm just advocating that we consider what gains we're able to predict, however well we're able to predict them. For things that can be clearly predicted, we should aim more stridently to avoid the predictable bad things and target the predictable good things. For things that are difficult to predict, we should aim instead to be as ready as we can to handle anything, and maybe aim vaguely toward the direction of the slightly more likely to be good things and away from the slightly more likely to be bad things. If it should turn out that we're not able to make great long-term predictions, then so be it; we did the best we could, and that's all I ask.

The closest thing to my ethical system that's well-known out in the philosophical world would be a kind of negative preference rule utilitarianism, where the rules in turn are those of a kind of left-libertarianism. Utilitarianism generally agrees with me on altruistic hedonistic ends, and the negative, preference, and rule versions of it each captures a bit of my take on how ethical means relate to those ends, though even altogether they're not quite the same. The left-libertarian specific rules capture more details about my take on means.

Basically, such a model holds that we can minimize suffering for everyone by following rules that enable each of us to maximize our own preference satisfaction within our own co-equal domains.

Is it 'correct' that 'Green' is the word for the colour of grass? It is if you're English. Not if you're French. It's clearly not only possible, but common, to have different answers constitute 'correct' for different languages in different contexts. — Isaac

It is universally correct that "green" is the word used in the English language for the color of grass, and not the word used in the French language for the color of grass. It might also be universally correct that the English generally think a certain kind of act is morally permissible, while the French generally do not. But that's akin to saying said act is legal in England but not in France. Those are questions about what particular groups think or say, and there is a universally correct answer to those questions.

It's not the case that in England "green" is the English word for the color of grass, while in France "green" is not the English word for the color of grass. An English-language course in France would also teach that the word "green" means that in English, and it would be incorrect in a universalist sense if it taught otherwise. Likewise, an English course on international law would teach that while in English such-and-such is legal, it's not legal in France, and the French course would teach the same thing, or else at least one of them would be wrong.

These are universalist claims about particular peoples and the things they say and do and think, and as such they are uncontroversial, as they do not constitute relativism. It's likewise not relativist to say that Alice thinks such-and-such is permissible and Bob does not: it can be a universalist fact that Alice thinks it's permissible and Bob does not, and anyone who thinks contrary is universally wrong, because what we're talking about here is claims about what people think, not the things they're thinking. What would be relativist is to say that there is nothing more to something being permissible than Alice or Bob or whoever's opinions about it.

'Correct' is a meaningless term without someone to think it. — Isaac

Say you're judging someone else, in the third person, and trying to decide if they are forming their opinions in the proper way; if the things that they think are the correct things to think. Is the only standard you would ever appeal to that of whether or not you think likewise? Or whether a particular someone(s) else (specified how exactly?) thinks likewise?

If so, is that the case for ordinary descriptive facts as well? I know already you're going to say no, for those you can appeal to the standard of objective reality, which you know exists because you can't help but think that it exists, while there's no such thing as objective morality because you can (or because many do) doubt that there is, therefore there isn't.

We've been around and around this before. Aside from the dubiousness of your claim that people aren't generally moral universalists while they are categorically factual universalists: it doesn't matter philosophically what how many people do or don't think. It's logically possible to doubt the objectivity of reality, as well as morality: at the extremes, solipsism and egotism are both well-known things in philosophy. And there are arguments that work against them both equally. Like the kind that I appeal to.

If all such arguments fail, then there's no rational reason not to fall into solipsism and egotism both equally (or lesser relativisms, but there's really nothing rational propping up any other kind of relativism from these most extreme individualist ones). There may remain the fact that people are often just less inclined by nature to do one than the other, even if they're rationally free to do both equally. But that's not a philosophical argument in either direction, not a reason to think one way or the other; that's just a statement of (purported) fact about what people are inclined to think.

You have literally done exactly that. The only argument you've given for your approach is that the data (philosophical theories) fits your theory ("pops-out"). I could come up with a bookshelf-full of theories which fit the data (the whole point of underdetermining, which you claim not to be disputing). So why should we choose your, what are it's other advantages notwithstanding the easy 'qualifying round' of its actually fitting the data. — Isaac

I misunderstood your comment there; I thought you were claiming that one of my philosophical principles was counter to the underdetermination of theory by data (when my principles actually demand accepting that data underdetermined theory), not that I was acting counter to it then.

In any case, I'm not saying "look my model fits the data therefore it's definitely right". You just were asking about the motivation behind my model, saying that it seemed odd, and in response to that I was explaining why it seemed like a plausible thing worth considering, not trying to give a proof of it. It's like if you said it seemed odd that I supposed all swans were white, while every swan I'd ever seen, and I'd seen a lot of them, were white. That doesn't prove that all swans are white (and that couldn't ever be proven, even if it were true), but hopefully it conveys the motivation for supposing they are, why it would seem plausible that they are, why it's not odd to think they are.

Oh and since you seem interested in my motives for posting, this is another. You keep dropping off counter-arguments only for me to find they've been resurrected later. — Isaac

You don't respond to every argument I give you either, and later say things that I feel I've already given strong arguments against as though you didn't read what I said before. This is a pretty common thing that it seems like basically everyone on the internet does. I sometimes do it because I'm getting tired of how (ever-increasingly) many hours I'm spending every night responding to a conversation that's going nowhere.

(Funny you should bring it up actually, because last night I kinda just didn't have anything in particular to say right away to the first part of your previous response, and felt like it was just going around and around something we'd already beaten to death before, and I just didn't want to deal with it yet again, but I imagined if I didn't respond you would say something like this, but then I thought to myself "well he doesn't always respond to everything I say point-by-point either, and it's the middle of the goddamn night and I'm up way later than I should be responding to someone on Australian time again...").

You claimed earlier that complexity of belief systems was an objective measure that could be analysed by Kolmogorov complexity. I asked for an example, but you've abandoned that. — Isaac

That was a genuine oversight. The last part of my post was very long (and as I said, middle of the night) and I forgot that there was another thing to respond to there by the time I finished it.

I don't really know what kind of response to the Komologrov thing you want, and I wasn't committing hard and fast to Komologrov complexity specifically, just throwing it (along with compressibility more generally) out as examples of the kind of way that informational complexity can be objectively measured. You surely don't doubt that the complexity of a mathematical scientific model of reality could be measured in such a way, nor that such models are the kinds of things that can be believed in, no? That's enough to get my basic principle across. That it may be very difficult (or in practical terms impossible) to quantify naturally-formed belief systems in that way is beside the point; this kind of abstract quantitative approach would only practically be used when dealing with mathematical scientific models anyway, and only a much looser folksier notion of "complexity" would in practice be applied to looser, folksier kinds of beliefs.

I asked for evidence, you proffered 'science', I suggested that if it were that case it would be the only such example... You seem to have dropped that too. — Isaac

One example is enough to show the process working in principle, and also, science is literally half of the domain in question (see again about only the two big questions, and science addresses one of those). I admit that progress has been much more slow and haphazard in the moral subdomain, but there is still evidence of some progress over time: concepts like liberty, equality, democracy, etc, getting much more recognition now than thousands of years ago, as well as the secularization of society and a focus more on material well-being than some abstract spiritual purity or such. All of that slow and haphazard, nowhere near monotonically increasing, but then my model doesn't claim that it will.

You also claimed earlier that "we should do our best to follow [your methods] even if we're doomed to do so somewhat imperfectly". I argued that it's not always the case, gave several reasons why one would not want to follow a theoretically perfect, but pragmatically unachievable method. You seem to have dropped that. — Isaac

Your pragmatic arguments there aren't really counter to what I'm advocating. You're basically saying that trying to bite off too much at once can lead to bigger failures than if we set ourselves more modest goals. You're saying that in response to me saying that we should do the best we can do, even if we can't do the best most perfect thing possible. But setting modest goals that we can achieve so as to avoid total failure is doing the best we can do. It doesn't change the fact that doing even more than that would still be better, if we can actually pull it off. In other words, that once we've achieved those modest goals, and don't have other more urgent things that we have to prioritize, that it's worth trying to make a little more progress when and where we can.

To be more concrete about what I advocate and how it related to this: I'm not saying that every single person should be trying to exhaustively think through all of the consequences of all of their actions on the entire universe, present and future. If everyone did that, the consequences of their subsequent (in)actions would probably be worse for the entire universe, present and future. I'm just saying that the measure of judging whether an action is better or worse doesn't have any hard limit where you've considered "enough" people and the rest "don't matter". Consider however many you can handle considering. The others still matter, and if you could handle considering them, that would be better. But if the best you can do is just considering the one person you're interacting with right now, then that's the best you can do, so do that. If you can do better, do better, but if you can't, then you can't. That doesn't mean that better isn't better, just that it's too hard to do... for you, right now. But if you or someone else can manage to do better, then that's still better, and better is always worth doing, if you can do it.

That's the core principles as they apply to every day life. I do also advocate that we should try to have an organized social effort to get the best of us together to do the best that they can for the best of everyone, like we have an organized effort to investigate reality in the form of scientific peer review, not just leaving everything up to isolated individuals. But the epistemic principles underlying science still apply to individuals outside of that organized effort, even if they can't be reasonably expected to accomplish great feats of science all on their own. Science is an organized effort to apply good epistemic principles; those principles themselves aren't dependent on there being such an effort. Likewise, while I do advocate there be an organized effort to apply my ethical principles, the principles themselves aren't dependent on there being such an effort.

For me the point is that I know that getting in a car puts others at risk. Another question: should Bono take a private jet if it helps him fight climate change? Should I continue to feed my beloved, carnivorous cat? Should I threaten to divorce my wife if she doesn't embrace vegetarianism? Recently, my dog had dental surgery under general anesthesia. I asked myself: do vets charge when they accidentally kill clients' pets? Should they charge? — j0e

I acknowledge that those are all difficult questions to decide. My only point on this topic is that the grounds on which to decide them, the costs and benefits to weigh, are in terms of enjoyment and suffering, pleasure and pain. Picking the least bad out of many bad options may of course be the only known-available choice many times. I'm only on about what is it that makes such a choice less bad or more bad.

This analysis still sounds like psychological hedonism. Or some strange version of it where every ethical system is revealed to be ethical hedonism, except the eye-for-an-eye system which is just wrong. I'm not arguing the eye-for-an-eye system but just trying to clarify this issue. — j0e

The relevant difference between accepting death because you expect heaven and retributive "justice" is that the latter is not necessarily rationalized in terms of its expected hedonic benefits (like deterrence, etc), but can be just for the sake of making bad people suffer; while the former is explicitly for the expected enjoyment / absence-of-suffering of heaven. By this account one of those is hedonistic and the other isn't, so this account is not of psychological hedonism (some times people do do things for non-hedonistic motives); but the one that isn't hedonistic is just straight up immoral, so it is an account of ethical hedonism.

Perhaps you would soften this so that bringing pain to none is a sort of impossible target. As I've seen life, there's just no way around hurting others. For instance, should I drive a car when I know that I might destroy someone's life because I have a heart attack on the interstate? But maybe I'm a doctor rushing to the hospital to save someone's life. There's so much fuzzy calculation in life. We can't be sure of our methods or even be sure of our motives at times. — j0e

Sure, making a choice that unintentionally ends up hurting someone doesn't reflect any kind of character defect on your part. You may have been doing the best you could and just couldn't avoid all bad consequences. It's just that if something bad did happen, the thing that bad it bad was that someone got hurt; and that you couldn't have prevented it doesn't make it a bad thing, something that it would have been better to prevent, if possible.

It's good (has been perceived a good) to hurt the tribe's criminals or enemies. It's good to be evil to the evil, and it's bad to be good to the evil. Revenge is still a popular theme in action thrillers. The bad guys are presented as so cruel that the viewer delights even in their torture. What do you make of 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'? Obviously I don't expect that you embrace it, so I'm asking how you classify that paradigm, which seems outside yours. [I'm not advocating for this eye-for-an-eye stuff.] — j0e

I think that that kind of paradigm is just straightforwardly wrong, though I understand the emotional motive for it, and why it would be game-theoretically a successful evolutionary strategy.

For example, my wife has grown in her faith and experienced "joy" in knowing her brother was at peace after his suicide. That doesn't mean anything about the experience was desired or pleasant. It's a joy in faith, which is qualitatively different from, and often absent in pleasant experiences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So would she say that it's better that her brother died, since it brought her this joy through her process of getting past it? Or rather that such joy is merely something good that was able to be taken away from a bad situation? I expect that it's the latter, and that her joy in faith doesn't justify her brother's suffering; that it's not the case that his death ought to have happened, to bring her that opportunity for joy, but merely that, given that something awful did happen anyway, it's good that she was able to find some good as a consequence of that.

When Paul talks about being indifferent to life or death in Philippians, a letter written from prison, he isn't talking about pleasant qualia, but an enlightened state of faith outside such things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree that such a state, as the Stoics called it "ataraxia", is a good thing, but still for hedonistic reasons: being indifferent to suffering or enjoyment is a means of reducing suffering, and is good on that account. (It can also reduce enjoyment, however, and so can be bad on that account: when people don't care about things that used to bring them joy, and are just waiting to die, we usually call it depression today, and don't think of it as a good thing. Whether emotional withdrawal like that is good or bad depends on the context).

"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Factoring an afterlife into things just kicks the ball down the street. If there's a life after this one that is expected to be beyond all suffering, then a desire to get there instead of suffering in this life is still driven by hedonistic concerns. If staying behind is for the sake of helping over people to get there too, then that's out of hedonistic concern for them.

Good issue, and a natural question here is what is correctness? What exactly do we mean by true? — j0e

Right, which is why another of the principles in the OP besides universalism is phenomenalism, which says that what makes something true or not is its relationship to our experiences. Propositions with different direction of fit (factual vs normative) are made true or false by experiences with the corresponding direction of fit (empirical vs hedonic).

The sense in which I'm using 'relativism'

Briefly stated, moral relativism is the view that moral judgments, beliefs about right and wrong, good and bad, not only vary greatly across time and contexts, but that their correctness is dependent on or relative to individual or cultural perspectives and frameworks. — SEP

Note it specifically states that 'correctness' is relative to the perspective, not that there is no correct. — Isaac

I'm aware that that is what such relativists think. My argument is that it's transparently incoherent. Being correct only relative to a perspective or framework is just the same thing as being thought correct by those who hold such perspective or framework. But the very thing at question is whether what they think is correct, so saying "it's correct according to what they think" is a non-answer. Everyone's views are correct according to what they think; the question is whether what they think is correct, regardless of whether or not they think so. "Relative correctness" is just opinion. Culture-relative "correctness" is just popular opinion.

The underdeteminism of data for models is quite a widely established principle now, you'll have a hard time convincing people otherwise. — Isaac

Good thing I'm not trying to.

I'm not promoting psychological hedonism, just ethical hedonism. (But also, in your example of the man saving his family, presumably his gut-reaction interest is in sparing them the horrible suffering of burning to death, so that is still a hedonistic concern, just not an egotistic one).

As far as "if everything is X, nothing is X", I see it similarly to my view on naturalism, which I consider equivalent to empirical realism and thus the descriptive analogue of altruistic hedonism.

In saying that everything is natural and nothing supernatural exists, what we end up saying is along the lines of "something 'existing' in some way yet not meeting the criteria to be natural is an incoherent idea"; to be natural and to be real are just the same thing, and so "supernatural" just means "unreal".

Likewise, in saying that all goods are hedonic goods, what we end up saying is basically the the idea of something being "good" in some sense independent of hedonistic concerns is incoherent; to be altrustically hedonistic, to bring enjoyment or pleasure to at least some while bringing pain or suffering to none, just is the same thing as being good, and so if there were a simple word for the opposite of altruistic hedonism the way "supernatural" is to "natural" (and please let me know if you know one!), it would just be a synonym for "immoral".

You can't ignore the issue of how these brains work and the way in which that limits the things they can do, and the nature of the results they provide. — Isaac

This basically circles back to the issue we've discussed to death before, of how something being hard doesn't make it wrong or unworthy or trying to do as well as possible; not making perfect the enemy of good. It could be that human brains just have insurmountable flaws in their ability to be completely rational, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if they did, but that doesn't change the nature of what a rational process is, or that we should do our best to follow it even if we're doomed to do so somewhat imperfectly. Less imperfectly is still better than more imperfectly.

Yeah, I get that, but you're not raising any argument against relativism, you're just appropriating terms to make your position sound stronger (or rather the other position sound weaker). To a relativist (in the sense I'm using it), there is a 'correct' answer. — Isaac

I'm not appropriating terms, I'm just using different senses of them than you are. I linked you before to an article about different senses of the term "moral relativism" and named which of those I'm using. The sense you're using doesn't even appear there; the closest technical term I'm aware of to the thing you seem to mean is "situational ethics", although that's a more specific, particularly Christian ethical view. I've sometimes seen people use "consequentialism" as though it means that (as though it's the antonym to absolutism), but that's not technically accurate. I am familiar with lay people using "relativism" in the way you are, but not of any professional philosophical source.

I could either help the old lady across the road or not, one of them is the correct answer. — Isaac

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be in disagreement with me? Because I totally agree with this.

What I disagree with is the position that:
- if you think that you helping that lady cross that street there right then is the correct thing to do,
- and someone else thinks that you helping that lady cross that street there right then is an incorrect thing to do
- then you're both right relative to yourselves, or relative to your cultures (say the other person is on the far side of the world hearing about your situation), or something like that.

On my view someone else helping a different lady cross a different street some other time (or not) still might or might not be correct regardless of whether you helping this lady was, depending on the different and similar details of the two circumstances.

You stealing away the word 'correct' for use only when two people disagree — Isaac

Now I'm confused, because I'm not trying to do any such thing. I'm only using a situation with two people disagreeing as an illustration for clarity; there don't have to be two people involved in any particular judgement scenario. It's just that if one held that two people could disagree on their judgements of the exact same event and neither of them would be incorrect, that would mean also that one held there to not be a correct judgement of that event; that there's no particular right or wrong way to judge that situation, just different ways, none of them right or wrong. That is the kind of relativism I'm opposing, and the kind that universalism is the antonym to.

Why? Having established that there are two directions of fit that are incommensurably different, why would the first thing you do be to assume (against all the evidence from our behaviour) that the rule applying to them would be (should be?) the same. Seems a really odd move. — Isaac

My reasoning is the other direction around: first consider abstract principles of how to investigate the answers to questions in general. Then note the different directions of fit in some questions, and see how those abstract principles, formulated "blind" to direction of fit, pan out in the specific circumstances of those different kinds of questions.

Immediately, a bunch of parallels between well-known things in philosophy pop up all over the place. The ontological-epistemological distinction parallels the ends-means distinction in ethics. Functionalist philosophy of mind parallels modern compatibilism regarding free will. Philosophy of education parallels political philosophy. Even particular long-dead philosophers' approaches to different fields end up in parallel positions, even though they presumably weren't conscious of this parallel structure. Mill embraces both an empirical realist ontology and an altruistic hedonist account of moral ends, which are parallel positions on this line of reasoning. Kant embraces a kind of anti-confirmationist epistemology and also an anti-consequentialist account of moral means, which are parallel positions on this line of reasoning. Kant also straight up coins the concept of synthetic a priori knowledge, and meanwhile, without exactly naming it as such, uses something ethically parallel to it in his Categorical Imperative.

With all these big landmarks in existing philosophy already falling into place in that paradigm, I looked to see what gaps there were to fill in. One of the biggest ones was a meta-ethics compatible with this paradigm, which I had to invent almost out of whole cloth... only to later learn that someone else had already come up with basically the exactly thing I did, and just weren't well-known enough to have been taught in my classes.

And we've been around this several times before and don't need to do it again, but I don't see "all evidence from our behavior" running counter to this parallelism at all. People argue about moral things as though one of them was right and the other was wrong and they weren't just different but equal opinions; even across cultures, people argue that this or that culture has this or that moral advantage over another, so it's not just appeal to cultural conformity. People also appeal to expected enjoyment or suffering in those arguments as reasons why this or that is good or bad. People often act like they don't need to give a reason why to do something, only a reason why not to, with it assumed that in absence of a reason not to do something it's fine to do whatever. But people also act like there can be reasons given why someone should not do something, and each other's intentions are not unquestionable.

Those are all four of my principles commonly in action regarding normative decisions. True, people aren't very consistent about their application... but neither are they consistent about their application to factual decisions. I agree that we're all probably more consistent in their application to factual decisions than to normative ones, and that that's why the development of moral philosophy has lagged behind the excellent philosophical underpinnings of the physical sciences. But in light of all of the evident parallels already existing in centuries of philosophical work, that just pops out clear as day as soon as you formulate the problem right, that's hardly reason to call the whole project a fool's errand.

Thanks. That is the kind of answer I would give as well, but as I see it that still boils down to hedonism.

In (I), the reason perseverance in the face of suffering is good because it helps to overcome suffering, shortening and lessening that suffering, which is still a hedonic concern.

In (II), you pretty much spell it out: the bad being avoided is hurt, i.e. suffering.

In (III), the good that comes of perseverance is a kind of heightened, refined, deeper or multi-dimensional enjoyment, where once more enjoyment, like suffering, is a hedonic concern.

And in (IV), the aesthetic experience is enjoyable because of the catharsis of speaking the truth of some suffering you've had yourself, a kind of emotional unburdening and relief; where relieving suffering is, again, a hedonic concern (and in any case, so is aesthetic enjoyment).

This is similar to arguments about whether the senses can be deceptive. We know that we can't always believe the things we think we see because we later find out that what we thought we saw was false. But how do we later find it out? By seeing something to the contrary. So it's still our senses telling us that our earlier senses were wrong. The lesson to be learned is not that all of the senses always lie (and so we need to turn to something beside the senses), but that no one bit of sensation tells the complete truth, and we have to attend to all of them -- which we can only every asymptotically approach -- to get at that complete truth.

Likewise with the appetites and goodness, on my reckoning. Sometimes doing something that feels like it's good now can lead us to doing things that we later learn are actually bad, but we learn about them being bad by the same mechanism we thought they were good before. The lesson to be learned is not that all appetites will always all lead us astray (and so we need to turn to something beside the appetites), but that none of them ever tell us the complete picture of what is good, and we have to attend to all of them -- which we can only every asymptotically approach -- to get at that complete good.

If I say "Xing is right" I am not telling you to do it. I am telling you that we are being told to do it. — Bartricks

By whom? And (other than the possible answer to that) how does that differ from what you say no divine command theorist in their right mind would say: that calling something good is saying that we are being told (by God) to do it?

the testing of your faith produces perseverance — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why is perseverance good? (NB that I agree that it is, and I have my answer to that question; I just want to hear yours).

If "good" just meant "commanded by God", then there would remain the question of whether or not to do what is commanded by God, and why or why not.

Likewise, if the meaning of any moral assertion is akin to a command more generally, there remains the question of whether or not to obey each command, and why or why not.

Moral semantics (what do the words mean?) is different from moral ontology (what makes those the correct words to utter, i.e. what makes them true?). And then besides both of those is moral epistemology (how do we know whether what this particular set of words says matches whatever it is that makes such kinds of words correct?).

What labels to use isn't important; that there are separate concepts to be distinguished (by separate labels, whichever you use) is.

:up: :100:

Expressivism, non-cognitivism and non-descriptivism can all be used interchangeably — Bartricks

That's exactly the point at issue here, distinguishing between, them, so if you're just going to refuse to do so then there's no point discussing it further.

embedded in a culture and a language which we cannot shake (we cannot be culture-less) — Isaac

Sure we cannot be culture-less or language-less, but that doesn't mean we cannot change culture or language, just by "doing culture" / "doing language" differently ourselves, even if that doesn't change the culture and language of everyone around us. We have these unquestioned things that we start from, but we can in principle question them and change what we think about them.

This sounds very similar to the debate about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. No doubt that what language we've given shapes our thoughts, but that's a far stretch from saying it necessarily constrains them; because language (and culture more generally) is something we make up, and we can make up new ones and discard old ones if we find we need to.

So your 'relativism' is the opposite of 'there is such a thing as a correct opinion, in a sense beyond mere subjective agreement' ie, that there is no such thing as a correct opinion other than mere subjective agreement? So where does just thinking one is correct fall? You seem to have divided the options into either thinking one is correct (and therefore everyone who disagrees is wrong), or thinking there is no correct (just more or fewer people agreeing with one). That seems to miss out entirely any form of ethics where one can be morally right in neither of those senses. If I feel it is right for me to refrain from punching you, I can feel that way without it being because I think it's 'correct for everyone', nor just that 'most people agree with me'. I can think it's right because it feels right to me. — Isaac

That sounds like it clearly falls on the "nothing is actually correct" side of things, if in thinking it feels right to you (and so is right, but only to you) you're not objecting to someone else thinking it (the same event) feels wrong to them (and so is wrong, but only to them).

My "universalism" is basically the position that if two people disagree about something -- the exact same specific thing, full context included -- at least one (but possibly both) of them is wrong; and my "relativism" is conversely the negation of that.

That seems a reasonable assessment, but says nothing of the universality of those beliefs. — Isaac

Right, I'm not saying that direction of fit demands universality of things with both direction of fit. Just that the kinds of questions to be addressed are distinguished by their direction of fit. One could in principle then treat each kind of question with special rules just for that kind, and one of them might include universalism and the other might not. But I'm just starting with rules that say nothing about direction of fit one way or the other, and then applying those rules equally to questions with opposite directions of fit.

I agree, but this, then, is a subjective matter, not an objective one. What people personally find more or less elaborate, more or less efficient will depend on the extent, clarity and embedded-ness of their other beliefs. — Isaac

I'm talking about the overall belief system, not any one particular belief in it. And there are objective measures of informational efficiency; compressibility, or something like Kolmogorov complexity.

If you're view is that saying "Xing is wrong" is just a strange way of saying "don't do X", then you're an expressivist. — Bartricks

That's not what expressivism is. Saying "don't do X" isn't just an expression of desire about someone not doing X. It's a command. My view is much closer to universal prescriptivism, but not identical to it.

If Xing is wrong, it is not wrong 'because' I don't want others to do it, is it? — Bartricks

No, but that's why I say there's a separate question of what makes the claim right or wrong, aside from what the claim is simply saying at all.

That doesn't make sense. They don't have truth-makers if they're prescriptions. "Do X!" can't be true or false. — Bartricks

Maybe they can't be strictly true or false, depending on exactly what you mean by true and false. But in any case there can conceivably be reasons to accept or reject a prescription given to you, just like there are reasons to accept or reject a descriptive assertion made to you. Descriptive assertions are cognitive because we can give reasons for or against them and so decide if they are the right assertions to make and accept, and those reasons are the truth-makers of those assertions; likewise, if there are some reasons to accept or reject prescriptions, they can be cognitive in light of those, and those reasons are the "truth-makers", or at least analogues thereof, of those prescriptions.

So your view sounds confused to me. But maybe I have not understood it yet. — Bartricks

I'd suggest the professional paper (not mine) I linked in my last post for better clarification. I pretty much agree with it in its entirety and they probably do a better job explaining than me because they're real philosophers and I'm a worthless nobody on the internet.

This is muddled. Criticism is not the opposite of dogmatism as a general approach and relativism is not the opposite of universalism. — Isaac

You apparently didn't re-read the OP of this thread, that this latest post is a follow-up to, where I apply these terms as labels for specific things, not just whatever some common use or another of them might be. I'll spare you the click (and the reading of the extra paragraph where I note my changes in terminology since then) and post an updated quote of myself right here:

My core principles are:

- That there is such a thing as a correct opinion, in a sense beyond mere subjective agreement. (A position I call "universalism", and its negation "relativism".)
- That there is always a question as to which opinion, and whether or to what extent any opinion, is correct. (A position I call "criticism", and its negation "dogmatism".)
- That the initial state of inquiry is one of several opinions competing as equal candidates, none either winning or losing out by default, but each remaining a live possibility until it is shown to be worse than the others. (A position I call "liberalism", and its negation "cynicism".)
- That such a contest of opinion is settled by comparing and measuring the candidates against a common scale, namely that of the experiential phenomena accessible in common by everyone, and opinions that cannot be thus tested are thereby disqualified. (A position I call "phenomenalism", and its negation "transcendentalism").

[...] groups everything into four sets of two:
- Objectivism, which includes both universalism :up: and transcendentalism :down:,
- Subjectivism, which includes both phenomenalism :up: and relativism :down:,
- Fideism, which includes both liberalism :up: and dogmatism :down:, and
- Skepticism, which includes both criticism :up: and cynicism :down:) — Pfhorrest

These are the positions being argued for or against in the post you're responding to. If you think these aren't the most accurate terms for those positions, I'm open to alternative suggestions; I've obviously already revised the terminology I use, based in part on feedback here.

As per Wittgenstein on certainty or Ramsey on truth, we cannot doubt everything, to even doubt requires a framework of hinge propositions which cannot be doubted, so dogmatism (belief held unquestioningly) is unavoidable. — Isaac

You're conflating the distinctions between the two different types of "fideism" and "skepticism" above. What you're saying here is an argument for "liberalism" over "cynicism", and I agree with it. That's different from an argument for "criticism" over "dogmatism". Correct, we cannot (and even if we could, must not) actively doubt to the point of rejection everything all at once, so we must hold some beliefs without having proven them from the ground up. That's "liberalism" over "cynicism". But we can (and must) remain open to the possibilities of each particular belief being wrong, not holding them above questioning. That's "criticism" over "dogmatism".

Relativism is not the opposite of universalism, especially when it comes to morals. That moral rights might be relative (to time, place and individual) does not prevent it from being the case that such rights might be universally so for every replication of that time place and individual. Since such a replication may never happen (or rarely so) a pragmatic relativism may be more realistic, but it doesn't contradict universalism. — Isaac

There are several different senses of "moral relativism", and the usual one in meta-ethics is (surprise) meta-ethical relativism, which very much is just the negation of universalism. Saying that what is right varies with context and circumstance isn't relativism in that usual sense and isn't anything I'm arguing against.

You need to support this. Why, for example, is there not also a question about what is beautiful, what is tasty, what is exciting...? — Isaac

There are questions about those things, but they can be analyzed into some combinations of those big two, because there are only four possible directions of fit and two of them are not applicable to questions (and even if they were, they are themselves combinations of the first two).

As we've discussed before, this undermines your principle of avoiding the 'never find the right answer' state. There are always reasons. Data severely underdetermines theory and theory severely overdetermines confirmation. No-one who wants to hold a particular position is ever going to find themselves unable to produce reasons to prefer that position over another. As such they're going to be in no better a position than the dogmatist or the relativist. All that you've required of them additionally is the imagination to come up with a good post hoc rationalisation for their belief. — Isaac

And as I've rejoined before, there is pragmatic reason to dis-prefer positions that require jumping through elaborate hoops to maintain them like that, namely that of efficiency, which in the case of descriptive knowledge manifests as parsimony. The reason to have a theory instead of an unsorted list of observations is that it's a more efficient way to interface with the world, it's a model of the world that you can use as a proxy, so you can just check what your model says instead of having to go out there and look and see what the world says. If, in order to maintain consistency between your model and observation, you have the choice to either make your model much more complicated and difficult to use, or just switch to a different model, there's always that reason to switch to the different, simpler model. If they really agree in all of their predictions then they're empirically equivalent anyway, so why would you want the harder-to-use one?

(See for example the possibility of constructing a model in which the Earth is flat, or inverted, or what have you, and all the physics still works out the same as observed, but you have to make unwieldy spaghetti of your model's math to accomplish that).

If this were the case you should be able to produce evidence of it happening. — Isaac

See the history of science for reference.

We've had 300,000 years at least as modern humans, so in that time how does your theory explain the first 290,000 years of remarkably similar cultures and then 10,000 years of explosion into the chaos we have now? — Isaac

Writing would be the obvious candidate for an explanation. Hard to make any progress when you're limited by the bandwidth of oral tradition.

Sure, I'd be interested to read it. — Isaac

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/513602

If someone just doesn't give a crap about what's good or bad at all, — Pfhorrest

Now I remember why my earlier attempt to engage you on this topic was a failure. Bye. — SophistiCat

Because...

I presume that most people do give at least some crap about that — Pfhorrest

...?

On such a view, who or what is the source of the prescriptions? — Bartricks

The person uttering the moral proposition is the one making a prescription.

There then remains the further question of when and why to assent to such prescriptions, just as there's the question of when and why to assent to descriptive propositions. But that's not moral semantics anymore, but rather moral epistemology; i.e. it's not about what do moral claims mean to say, but when and why are they right to say so, when and why they are true.

But FWIW my answer to both epistemological questions (about descriptions and prescriptions) is criticoliberal phenomenalist universalism, which on the descriptive side amounts to critical empirical realism (the reason not to believe something is because it dissatisfies an observation, and everyone's observations count), and on the prescriptive side amounts to liberal hedonic altruism (the reason not to intend something is because it dissatisfies an appetite, and everyone's appetites count).

It is not clear to me, as it stands, exactly what the view is. — Bartricks

I wrote a big thread about my own version of this view a while back:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8749/meta-ethics-and-philosophy-of-language

And in the time since I came up with that view on my own I have discovered that someone else (professional) had already come up with something almost identical to it:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/factual/papers/HorganNondescriptive.html

No, because or model of what is real assumes a shared external source of our sensation, Our model of what feels good does not. — Isaac

One again your argument boils down to "some people don't believe in moral universalism therefore moral universalism is false".

Although seeing as most people are religious, and most religious people believe in "a shared external source" of morality even in the sense that you mean it, I'd expect that most people do in fact assume that. We've been over before how that is not the sense of a universal morality I'm on about -- I'm not talking about God putting a conscience in everyone's hearts -- but nevertheless that would establish that most people do agree with me on at least the moral universalism aspect of things, even if they disagree about other aspects of that universal morality.

Not that it should matter at all who does or doesn't agree, but even if it did, you'd be on the losing side there.

No, because I didn't say we shouldn't do ethics (which would be analogous). What we shouldn't do is try meteorology by tracking the movement of every single air molecule, it's too complex, we need shortcuts like pressure and temperature, and even then we don't predict the weather this time next year. Five days is about all we can manage with any accuracy, we are circumspect about our ability to deliver answers and don't do so in situations where we very obviously don't have the data. — Isaac

It's a good thing I'm not advocating that we try to predict what state of affairs will best make everyone happiest at this time next year then. But I'm about to cover that in the other thread, and I'm already bothered enough that your same objections to really very basic common (though of course not entirely uncontroversial) views have once again flooded another thread and displaced any conversation that might have taken place about the actual topic of it.

The OP of this thread assumes a background of libertarian deontology set against a kind of hedonistic altruism, and then goes into great detail on specifics about how to construct a government that's compatible with those kinds of ethics. But you once again jump on the hedonistic altruism part, like you've done in almost every thread of mine tangentially related to that subject for the past year -- while completely ignoring the libertarian deontology that ameliorates pretty much all of your claimed concerns -- to the neglect of pretty much the entire rest of the OP.

Nor would you in your system. As described, those matters which cause suffering are determined by a panel of experts. If any individual could argue the case and have it changed in real time on the basis of their argument alone without having to convince any number of people nor with any checks and balances ensuring they're right then it would be chaos. Right now, if an individual believes a law is wrong they can campaign about it, try to convince other people to see it from their point of view, if successful they can lobby, get the 'panel of experts' to agree and it will be changed. It's just a mtter of havign check in place to prevent the law changing every five minutes as some looney thinks they've got an argument against it. — Isaac

It's not a matter of one looney merely thinking he's got an argument against it. It's a matter of the "looney" being able to convince the expert presiding over the case that he has a point, so that that expert will at least suspend judgement while he (if necessary) escalates the issue to those above him and so on as necessary. Like how if a student in a science class somehow finds something that looks plausibly like new evidence against a prevailing theory -- which should get less likely over time, just as described in the OP -- he can show his professor, who can then begin the process of research that might possibly overturn the scientific consensus. And in the mean time, the professor knows that he shouldn't just outright tell the student he's completely wrong, if the student managed to present plausible evidence to the contrary.

What does this have to do with (in)equality? — Pfhorrest

Nothing. — Isaac

Then why did you mention equality ("egalitarian" = equal-itarian) here?

The less dynamic the environment, the less interactions whose feedback need to be accounted for, the less chaotic that probability space is. Hence the many thousands of years of relatively egalitarian societies devolving into the mess we have now. — Isaac

Again what difference does that make to my argument? — Isaac

If we have a generally libertarian society where everyone gets to be master of their own little domain instead of being subject to the whims of others then we don't run into those kinds of conflicts nearly so much and so don't need to predict huge numbers of tiny details far in advance. The only issues that remain are in public spaces, where e.g. Alice is doing something in a public park that Bob claims harms his equal right to use the park, and Alice rebuts that Bob is being an over-sensitive crybaby and she's not doing anything harmful, and we need to decide whether Bob's claim is legit or not. For that we don't need to predict a ridiculously complex dynamic system of all people everywhere years in advance. We just need a "today's forecast", to use your weather analogy from the other thread. We just need to know that Bob and Alice are people with these relevant features in this relevant context and what the research says about the experiences of such kinds of people in such contexts, to resolve that particular conflict. And of course we need to know the analogue of "climate science" for big-picture long-term policy, which of course you know is different from long-term weather prediction, and which you've already admitted is something (the equivalent of which) is possible, i.e. general ethical trends.

No, there's having a new idea but having the humility to recognise that each step is complex and fraught terrain which has been trod before. The only thing I object to about your posting style is the manner in which you text-dump your entire completed world-view, and when anyone questions some part of it you say "that's not what we're discussing here, I've dealt with that elsewhere", then when we look to the thread in which you've dealt with it you say "well, I don't want to waste time with people whom I can't convince (after five minutes) so I'm moving on to the next thread", issues are raised in that next thread and are referred back to the previous one... and so it goes on. Nothing ever gets dealt with because all you want to do is blurt out the entire edifice, but in doing so never deal with any of the issues that arise.

Every single step you take might well be new, exiting and world-shattering (unlikely of course, but not impossible), but you'll not find out if only a short while into the issues you abandon the debate in favour of just assuming you're right and moving on to the next step. The reason philosophy (and science, for that matter) deals with small issues in great detail is that most authors and scientists are humble enough to know that if no-one else has come up with their grand world-view it probably because the issues are extremely complex and so are best tackled one at a time in great detail. Bit by bit we make progress. — Isaac

The reason I'm doing a bunch of threads is precisely to focus in on specific narrow issues, but you keep jumping the gun to complain about implications you think I'm making on topics I haven't even spoken about yet. Let me recap once again a history of our conversations here over the past year, this time narrowed down to just ethics-related things:

- I started a thread that was supposed to be about just having broad philosophical principles with far-reaching implications in general, not specifically about my principles, though I mentioned what my principles were and some far-reaching implications I think they have, as an example of the kind of thing that thread was trying to solicit from others. (a la "What are your principles and what implications do they have?") I mentioned my principles there without presenting any arguments for them, because that thread wasn't supposed to be about them in particular, that was a thread about meta-philosophy more generally, and I was going to do another thread about my principles in particular later.

But you made that thread entirely into an argument about one half of one of those principles (the moral half of universalism), and as a consequence of that disruption I never actually got around to doing a thread giving a proper argument for those foundational principles. I realized that last bit a month ago and went back and made a new post with that argument in that thread, but you ignored that. Maybe go back and read that now? I can link it if you want.

- I did a thread about philosophy of language, including within it an account of moral language, and you once again made the entire thread about the implications of that on moral universalism. That account of moral language doesn't even entail moral universalism, it just leaves it possible, but that was enough to get you riled up. Plus I thought at that point that I had already presented my argument for universalism generally -- forgetting that you had disrupted the thread(s) where I had meant to do that, resulting in me not getting around to it until I realized that 9 months later -- so it seemed like you were just bringing up an argument I had already said everything I had to say on again in a mostly-unrelated place.

- Months later after numerous threads unrelated to ethics, I did a thread with the main thesis that there are two parts to an ethical investigation, the philosophical part of figuring out what we’re asking, what would make an answer correct, and how we apply such criteria (meta-ethics); then the part where we actually do that application and come up with specific answers for the real world based on those philosophical principles (applied ethics); and how normative ethics as usually conceived doesn't really fit in there anywhere. Of course in elaborating upon that I assumed my own general ethics for illustration, and once again you focused entirely on the same points of objection to what I'd had to explain to you of my views in earlier threads (after repeatedly trying to get you to wait until I actually opened a discussion about that specifically, so it wouldn't derail other threads about other things only tangentially related).

- Then I finally did that thread to discuss that issue specifically, giving my more detailed arguments for hedonistic altruism -- with references also back to the disrupted earlier thread on general principles where I had since added the arguments that I never got to because of you -- and you ignored it entirely. Maybe go back and read that now? I can link it if you want.

- I did a thread on free will and its relation to moral responsibility that you ignored, thankfully.

- I did a thread on the libertarian and deontological aspects of my ethics that I'd previously promised would address many of your concerns based out of your assumption that I was some ends-justify-the-means authoritarian, but you ignored it entirely. Maybe go back and read that now? I can link it if you want.

- And most recently I did a thread on how to build a justified government in light of that kind of ethical system, but once again you ignore the specific narrow focus of that thread to fixate on the one thing you just can't let go of, completely ignoring 90% of the OP.

Do you see the pattern here?

If not for your disruptions, I would have done that first meta-ethical thread as planned, then given my actual arguments for my general principles where we could have hashed a lot of the groundwork for this out -- those general principles are supposed to be the boring obvious things that everyone will agree with, to use as a starting point for all the later arguments. That would have spared the disruption of the language thread, and then when I got around to doing actual ethics threads again, maybe you could have actually engaged in the ones that were supposed to be about the topics you kept interrupting every other thread with.

It's like I'm trying to do specific focused threads on various topics in astronomy and you're just hung up on how these all just assume a background of heliocentrism, even if none of them are actually about heliocentrism -- except the one that is, which you ignore.

If you are not with me, then you are not genuinely answering moral questions? — SophistiCat

Other way around: if you are not genuinely (attempting to) answering moral questions, then I'm not with you.

It's not about whether or not they agree with me. I'm stating my (dis)agreement with them to the extent that what they're doing, if done consistently, would(n't) boil down to giving up, by saying either "because ___ said so!" or "it's all just opinions anyway!"

I think many people are doing a lot of things right, but also, often, at least some things wrong (when it comes to figuring out what's right and wrong, I mean). I'm calling out what looks wrong with those approaches and why, and saying hey, let's not do that, let's just do the other stuff, that many of us are already doing, but without this stuff that just gums of the works of all that.

You keep repeating this pitch, but it is unconvincing, because it is empty. If you can give us the motivation - What are we looking for? Why do need it? How will we know when we've found it? - then the rest is a no-brainer. No Pascal's Wager is needed to additionally convince us to go searching for answers. — SophistiCat

My "wager" isn't to convince anyone to go searching for answers, but rather assumes that people are already interested in answers if they may be available to find, and then argues why certain broad approaches would generally impede that search, and so are to be avoided.

If someone just doesn't give a crap about what's good or bad at all, I don't know how to reach them. But I presume that most people do give at least some crap about that, that they'd like to know what those answers are, if there are any to know.

From that basic premise, and the followup that you don't stand much chance of accomplishing anything if you don't try (so therefore anything that undermines the motive to try should be rejected), I argue that both "it's all just opinions anyway!" (relativism) and "because ___ said so!" (dogmatism) would constitute reasons to give up trying (because success is either impossible or guaranteed, respectively, no matter what we do), and so should be rejected.

Not because they are definitely false (and here comes the "wager" part), but because if they're true then it doesn't matter whether or not we believe them (as in that case we'd have no power to figure anything out anyway), but if they're false we're better off (for the purpose of figuring things out) in disbelieving them, so the pragmatic thing to do is always assume they're false.

That gives us the negation of relativism (universalism) and the negation of dogmatism (criticism) as starting principles. Criticism in turn demands that we reject any claims that can't be tested, since we'd have nothing to go on but someone's word for such claims, which gives us a principle I call "phenomenalism", the ethical side of which is hedonism.

So there we have universalism (including moral universalism, i.e. altruism) and phenomenalism (including hedonism).

Liberalism (of both thought and action, belief and intention) likewise follows from universalism, because its negation that I dub (for lack of a better term) "cynicism", by which I mean the rejection of all claims until they are conclusively proven from the ground up, would necessitate nihilism, which in practice amounts to solipsism or egotism, which are just the most extreme forms of relativism. So rejecting relativism for univeralism (as above) demands rejecting cynicism for liberalism as well.

Ethical naturalism is right about a natural ontology, but it wrongly assumes ethical propositions are descriptive cognitive propositions like non-ethical propositions are.

Ethical non-naturalism is right to reject that whole bag, but it’s wrong to identify the problem as the “natural” part.

Ethical non-cognitivism (of which expressivism is the usual species) is right to see that both of those have a common flaw, but wrongly identifies that flaw as cognitivism.

The correct solution is non-descriptivism, which can still be cognitivist in its moral semantics, and naturalist in its ontology, while dodging the problems of all three of the above.

Don't be ridiculous. Everyone is answering moral questions, no thanks to your theory. — SophistiCat

And to the extent that they are genuinely trying to answer those questions and not throwing up their hands and saying "because ___ said so!" or "it's all just opinions anyway!", they're doing things as my theory recommends. I'm not saying that my theory is an entirely new thing completely unlike anything anyone else has ever done. It's mostly just taking bits of other approaches and putting them together, leaving out any bits of those other approaches that (if I'm right, and if they were applied consistently) would end up at one of those two thought-terminating cliches above.

You're asking where my views "find purchase". That reduction of the particular things I disagree with to just giving up is where that happens. If I'm right about all the inferences between things, of course. But that -- "don't just give up" -- is what I'm ultimately appealing to to support everything else.

No, I'm well aware of the fact that you're talking about a dynamic world adapting to satisfy people's changing appetites in real time. I'm saying that such an aim is impossible. the fact that you're prepared to update your world as people's appetites change does not have any bearing on the problem of people's appetites changing faster than you can update your 'ideal world' to accommodate the change. If your 'ideal world' is permanently several years behind the appetites it is supposed to satisfy then what exactly is its purpose? — Isaac

This still sounds like you think like my proposal is that we re-run through the whole elaborate process of "peer review" every time anyone's appetites change, to come up with an updated picture of exactly how the world will be that will then be forced on everyone -- too late, now that everyone's appetites have changed again. That's not what I'm proposing. As I've already said several times before, the "dynamic" solution to the problem I'm talking about is a liberal/libertarian one: let everyone control their own surroundings in real time. No long roundabout multi-year process required for those constant day-to-day fluctuations.

you're not an unprecedented genius — Isaac

You're the one putting that claim in my mouth, not me. I've tried to be very clear that my views are mostly just a combination of other already well-known views, minus the parts of those that are usually objected to, usually substituting those parts with parts of other views instead, but without importing the parts of those other views that are usually objected to, etc.

This altruistic hedonism part of my view is basically just the normal ends of utilitarianism, there's nothing new there. But there's several objections to utilitarianism, including the question of on what grounds we can claim that minimizing suffering / maximizing pleasure is good, and the objection about the ends justifying the means. So I give a pragmatic argument for the first of those that's grounded in something like a secularized version of Pascal's Wager; and for the second thing I separate questions about means and questions about ends in the same way we normally separate epistemology and ontology, and while I agree with utilitarianism about the ends, I don't claim that that justifies just any means, and instead give a deontological account of the acceptable means to those ends, modeled after a falsificationist epistemology, which of course is nothing new of my own, though I do give what so far as I know is a novel argument for it again grounded in that secularized version of Pascal's Wager.

The only reason I'm even putting forth these views myself is because I am unaware of anyone having put forth quite this combination of these facets of these views like this before, after having looked for someone who did. I know that pretty much all of the parts are unoriginal, but I've not seen anyone put them all together like this.

If someone has, and I just don't know, I'm hoping to find out about that. (Like with my meta-ethics: I hadn't heard about anyone combining non-descriptivism with cognitivism, in a way almost but not quite like Hare's universal prescriptivism; but I eventually found out that there had been a paper on just that, inspired by Hare, published just shortly before my philosophy education, which is why it wasn't in my curriculum yet).

And if nobody has, then hey, maybe this is an idea worth sharing, and not just keeping to myself.


You seem to want to force upon me a dichotomy of either me saying nothing new and so nothing worth saying, or else me arrogantly thinking I'm some kind of unprecedented genius because (so far as I can tell) I've had a new idea. What would be an acceptable (to you) thing to say somewhere like this, if neither "I (dis)like this old idea" or "I think this might be a new idea" is allowable?