The Objectivity of Morality

That’s absolutely wrong—and you do nothing to justify it, or make it even seem plausible. Nobody values pain, just for the fact that it’s painful. The fact that an action causes pain is a reason for not doing it. People value the things I said you can’t get without some pain. That doesn’t mean they value pain itself. If I have to eat broccoli before a chocolate cake—it doesn’t mean I like broccoli.

No shit. Morality has nothing to do with universality----we’re arguing about objectivity in this thread.

There can be many conceivable scenarios where carving your eyes out is the right thing to do. It saves humanity, for example. Universality is not objectivity. Keep them straight. This was in my first post.

Man, I can imagine you saying the same thing in the case of numbers, and me thinking the same thing. You seem to think a moral fact is a thing like a unicorn or a goblin. Why…I have no idea. Moral facts are ordinary facts about the world that give you a reason to act one way rather than another.

I said exactly what morality is, and about its place along a continuum with prudence. The word usage is uttery clear, it hasn’t changed, and it hasn’t been equivocated on. You act like I’m somehow on a fringe because I think morality is about “how you ought to act”----but not a single person has ever defined it differently in the history of philosophy. You toss out some pretty extreme accusations and support them with nothing.

Of course morality is about how you ought to act, but it’s not merely about how you ought to act. This is what you said – “But as it is, morality is the topic about ‘how you ought to act’” Implying that any time we’re talking about how one ought to act, we’re talking about morality. That’s the implication of your statement. And that’s clearly not true. We can talk about how we ought to act in loads of scenarios without talking about morality – again, by your own admission. So, can we agree that morality is not just the topic about how you ought to act? Can we agree that it’s actually a more specific sub-topic of the broader topic about how you ought to act?

Now, when you say “morality exists,” and then you defend that statement by saying, “You can’t go a single day without wondering about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and whether you should keep doing it,” that really, really confuses me. “Morality exists” to you is the same thing as saying “people sometimes wonder whether they should do something.” That’s a pretty shallow form of existence. Yes, people sometimes wonder what they should do. I completely agree. If that’s what you want “morality exists” to mean…I guess I can agree to that, though I’ll cringe while doing it. It’s a weird use of the term, but…I guess tentatively acceptable. I’d prefer if you left “existence” out and just explicitly said “people sometimes wonder what they should do,” as that would be more direct and avoid confusions. Most people mean something different by the phrase “morality exists,” I’m pretty sure.

In fact, that last suggestion, about leaving ‘existence’ out of it – if we continue, that’s actually going to be a very important motif. Reducing your terminology into more clear, precise terms that have no ambiguity.

So, if you want to continue, I’d appreciate it if you removed some of the ambiguity about what morality itself means. We can’t properly talk about the existence/objectivity of something if what we’re talking about isn’t even clearly defined. Do you want to stick with some form of the definition, “Prudence in situations that really matter”? If so, prudence HOW? Personal expected utility? Personal expected value? Group expected utility? Group expected value? Upon what criteria is prudence judged? And how are we judging what “really matters” as well?

Now, I want to throw a caveat out there, something that wasn’t explicitly stated before: if you define morality in such a way that it’s objective, but not binding (ie it doesn’t really matter if I behave morally or not), or the definition has some other clear failure along those lines, you’ve not won. You’ve just defined morality into a useless but trivially ‘objective’ corner.

For example, if I define moral actions as “Those actions which have the highest likelihood in resulting in me getting twinkies,” then the case could certainly be made that that form of morality is ‘objective’ in the sense that some actions have objectively higher likelihoods of me getting twinkies than others. But it’s so far removed from anything anybody else means by morality, and there’s no sense of binding-ness to it, so that wouldn’t be any sort of convincing victory in the case of this debate. Proving morality is objective in such a way is like proving God exists by defining God as a Payless Shoe Store.

So, even if your definition does turn out to be demonstrably ‘objective’, whichever definition you choose, it may not hold in other areas of moral relevance – like being binding, or remotely resembling anything anybody else means by morality. If you prove that it’s objective, but have to define it into uselessness to do so, then you’ve not won.

That’s exactly right. And if you think that’s clearly not true, then feel free to explain the difference. Morality is about how you ought to act, period. I’m just using the predominant view in the history of philosophy. At the start, you wanted me to explain to you what morality was. Now, having had it explained quite clearly to you, you want to say that that’s not what it is, (as if you didn’t really want it explained to you at the beginning), and you’re also saying that whatever morality is, it doesn’t exist. This is clearly inconsistent on your part.

I don’t think it can get any simpler or more straightforward than defining ‘morality’ as the topic concerning how you ought to act, and ‘objectivity’ as the position that there are right and wrong answers to those questions, independently of your opinion. What could be more clear, unambiguous, and straightforward? Now what you’re asking me to do is argue on behalf of a moral theory—i.e., a specific set of criteria for answering moral questions, and argue that it is better than other moral theories. I’m happy to do that, but it’s a tangent from the point of this debate, because the only way to object to any given moral theory is by implicitly assuming that morality is objective, in order to argue that it’s objectively false. My arguments work regardless of your theory. If you want a specific criteria, take the pain argument—and my response to the poor objection of masochism.

I’m pretty sure they don’t. And you can verify this by answering whether you think the sentence, “You should not stab my eyes out with a fork” is true. If the answer is that you don’t think that’s true, then please offer some sort of explanation----because explanations are required when you say outlandish things, go against ordinary languge, go against ordinary phenomenology, ordinary experience, etc. By your rationale, these strange bizarre things called “numbers” don’t exist—they’re like goblins and gremlins. And that doesn’t strike you as odd.

You keep thinking I’ve committed to a specific moral theory, but there’s no point theorizing in the first place, unless you take morality to be objective—and the arguments I’ve made work regardless of what you theory you use. If I tell you that you always have a reason to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, are you going to say, “aha, no sometimes you should maximize pain and minimize pleasure”—because that’s incoherent. You need to do the experiments that I offered in my first post. You know, bend the knuckles on your fingers backwards, and tell me if a physiological creature of the type you are likes pain. Pain gives you a reason to act one way rather than another. It can be outweighed. But whatever else you want to claim morality is, it at least involves that. And every one of my arguments works even if avoiding pain has nothing to do with how you ought to act.

First you say that whether you ought to masturbate with your left or right hand is not a moral issue, but then you insist that every question about how you ought to act is a moral question. So, I’m a bit befuddled.

This is what I said:

It was clear then that when we use the word ‘prudence’ it’s on one end of a continuum, and ‘morality’ on another. If you’re having trouble understanding this, then here’s an analogy that might help: What is the difference between an adult and a child? (This is going to be an analogy about how prudence and morality are different by degrees, not kind—both concern how you ought to act). The difference between an adult and a child is a difference of degrees. Sure, you can attempt to put an essential distinction between adult and child, and say that anyone over 18 years is an adult… but clearly not everyone under 18 years acts like a child. Just think of someone caring for a sick parent, looking after everything himself. And clearly not everyone over 18 years old is an adult—someone dependent, no competent to look after themselves, makes immature decisions, and so on. But the moment you think of the difference between adult and child as between who can look after their affairs and who can’t—or something along those lines—you admit of degrees between what counts as an adult, and what counts as a child----and when you use either term, you use them by degrees. You may even have some cases where you’re not sure which word to use. I call masturbating with your left hand or your right not a moral issue----but that’s not because it’s not technically within the domain of how you ought to act, it’s just because we happen to communicate better when we don’t rigidly apply terms even when they technically do apply. We have subtlety in language. This is the difference between morality and prudence—a difference of degree. And the moment you accept objectivity in what we ordinarly call prudential issues, you’re going to admit of objectivity in what we call moral issues.

facepalm I really am done now. If that means I forfeit, I’m fine.

First he says not all oughts are moral issues, then he insists they all are, and then he says they’re not again. I can’t get anywhere.

Just pacing around, I figured out a clearer way of expressing some of my thoughts on the matter:

What we need to do is break down what it means to say “You ought to do X”

Now, some of the disagreement in this thread has come from you comparing morality to prudence. So, let me start by reducing what a prudent ‘ought’ is:

In the prudential sense, when I say “You ought to do X,” what I’m saying is something very much like “If you do X, you will enjoy the results” (or, alternatively, if you don’t do X you won’t enjoy the results)
“You ought to go see this new movie” = “If you see this new movie, you will enjoy it”
“You ought to fuck that bitch” = “You would enjoy fucking that bitch”
“You ought to shut the fuck up” = “You won’t enjoy the feeling of my fist on your nose if you don’t shut the fuck up”

You can also rephrase the prudential ought in terms of, as I said before, expected value or utility. There are a lot of ways to reduce prudential oughts, and they’ll usually look something like the one I said above.

Now, when we reduce the prudential ought like that, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s fundamentally different from a moral ought. When people say “You ought not commit adultery,” they’re not saying “If you commit adultery, you won’t enjoy it.” Enjoyment is pretty much a non-issue in the way the vast majority of people use the moral ought. A person could VERY MUCH enjoy adultery, murder, rape, etc, and the people using these moral oughts would still say “You ought not to do it.”

And so, I have made it I hope a bit clearer why just saying that morality is like prudence, but “higher in degree” or whatever, does not cut it. It reduces differently. It doesn’t make reference to whether the actor enjoys the action in question, the expected value for the actor, or anything like that. It reduces down to something else. What it reduces down to, I don’t know. Probably some mystical mumbo jumbo, but if you can reduce it down to something that actually corresponds to how it’s used by most people and isn’t just nonsense, I’d eagerly listen.

This assumes pleasure is an intrinsic good, and if it’s an intrinsic good then it gives you a reason to act one way rather than another. That’s real, that’s objective. And it’s also one of the oldest moral theories going back to Protagoras or Epicurus. Call it ethical hedonism—pleasure is the highest good, and you should act so as to get pleasure. That’s clearly a moral imperative, and has been since philosophy began.

A few possibilities:

  1. You could just be replacing one theory with another—a theory that implies you have obligations to others beyond your own pleasure. And one of these theories might be false—but guess what you need to assume in order to think one of the theories is false? The answer is: objectivity. The thing you’re supposed to be denying.
  2. You can still be an ethical hedonist and think adultery is something you ought not do. Socrates, for example, argued that it was better to suffer than to cause suffering—because to cause it was a greater harm to your psyche, and not simply your body.
  3. I’m not sure why you’re assuming adultery is wrong.

The bottom line is that you don’t know what the proper domain of morality is, and yet you don’t accept a simple ordinary-language understanding of it—you insist it’s something else, but you’re not sure what. And even though you’re not sure what you think it is, you’re very confident it doesn’t exist. This strikes me as a bizarre approach. If I told you that I had no idea what a Jabberwock was, but also that I am positive it doesn’t exist----would that make much sense to you? If not, then feel what I feel.

It’s no more bizarre than knowing that it exists but not knowing what it is. If you told me that you know jabberwackies exist but don’t know what one is – can’t even give a vague idea – not only is it bizarre, it’s a nonsensical statement. “Jabberwackies exist” “What’s that?” “I don’t know, but people think about them all the time, so Ockham’s razor says they exist.” Doesn’t really make much sense.

What I’m saying is not that some unknown entity doesn’t exist. There are a limited number of concepts which can agreeably be called “objective morality,” judging by common usage. Maximizing enjoyment is NOT one of them. I have a very strong intuition that all possible concepts which can reasonably be called “objective morality” are either nonsensical, nonbinding or nonexistent.

But until you reduce the moral ought into something less abstract, I can’t tell you which one of those applies to yours, if any. So go ahead, reduce it. And no, not enjoyment. That doesn’t match common usage. If it did, then a person that enjoyed rape and was in a situation in which he could get away with it is morally obliged to rape. I don’t think that matches common usage, so I reject it as a feasible definition in the same way that Payless is not a feasible definition for God. Morality does not reduce to personal enjoyment. Try something else.

I haven’t claimed not to know what morality is—I gave you a very straightforward definition: it’s the topic that concerns how you ought to act. And I’m arguing that the most plausible position is to think that there are objective facts that decide questions about how you ought to act, in any given context. I even gave you an example of such a fact—the intrinsic badness of pain. You are the one who is like, “explain to me what morality is”, and then I do, and your response is, “no no, that’s not what I think it is, I’m not sure what I think it is, but it doesn’t exist!”. You contradict yourself at least twice in one sentence.

Clearly it is—if the history of philosophy matters at all.

You seem to think a person ought not rape when they can get away with it. If that’s what you think, then you need to read my arguments again—because you’ve just undercut your own criticism of them (echoing what I said before). And you should have to object to the arguments I actually presented first, and defend your objection----because every single argument I made works no matter what you think is at rock bottom intrinsically valuable. The arguments work no matter what your particular theory.

None of your arguments worked. I demolished them one by one. The only two I didn’t were the obvious non-sequiturs that don’t really deserve that level of attention.

Now, apart from the enjoyment approach to morality being clearly wrong because it produces results like “you’re morally obliged to rape if that’s what’s going to produce the most enjoyment for you,” it also relegates morality into the realm of uselessness. See, if left-handed masturbation is more enjoyable than right-handed masturbation, then you don’t need to convince someone that it’s more moral for them to masturbate that way. All you need is to convince them that it’s more enjoyable. Right? Once I find out it’s more enjoyable, then wtf use is morality? Morality becomes this superfluous nothing, this unnecessary add-on. People ALREADY want to do what’s enjoyable, they don’t also need to be told that it’s also more moral.

I don’t think a person ought not do or ought do anything, in the moral sense. You put those words in my mouth. I don’t think that moral oughts are useful. I think practical, or prudential oughts are useful. Moral oughts are, as demonstrated, not the same type of thing. But, I do think that if a moral theory produces results like “You’re morally obliged to rape” or “You’re morally obliged to masturbate with your left hand,” it’s got some major problems.

LOL. Good then, I’m happy to leave it now to the judges. I don’t recall you even saying more than a one-liner, and even in some places arguing against the argument that I presented as against my position. So, to the judges then.

EXACTLY RIGHT, if that’s all there is to deciding how you ought to act. This may surprise you, but some people think there are other factors present in deciding questions about how you ought to act. And ‘morality’ hasn’t become a “superfluous nothing”—that’s like calling someone a name after they beat you, just because they beat you. Yes, people want to do what’s enjoyable. And people want to be moral—no shit.

You’re just begging the question again. You haven’t demonstrated anything other than a moral ought, and the ought you thought was not moral—is one of the most famous and common oughts in the history of moral philosophy.

If this were boxing, I would not want to look at your face. I think we’re done here. You have a choice going forward, you can cling to some airy mystical conception you have of morality, that you seem to want to cling to, but aren’t sure what it is, but think it doesn’t exist… or you can shake your head and decide to use concepts in the way that they’re used in philosophy.

I’ll offer a judgement, but if I raise anything in it that you’d like to respond to, or help in anyway to put the two positions squarely against each other, I hope you’ll continue the discussion.

So, right off the bat, I’ll say that Flannel Jesus’s position seems the more likely of the two, but that isn’t in itself a commentary on the quality of the arguments. It’s inherently easier to argue that something doesn’t exist than that it does. I think FJ was right in the disagreement that came up recently: if you don’t know what a Jabberwock is, for all intents and purposes you don’t believe that it exists.

I thought Mo_ made some interesting points that attempted to reframe the question of morality in his favor, and Flannel Jesus didn’t seem to address this directly. Take this syllogism for instance:

Mo_ had said in the lead up to this debate something to the effect that his position was a practical one. This syllogism makes me understand that as an almost scientific understanding of objectivity: science is not truly objective, and there is plenty of room for questioning whether scientific objectivity is possible (solipsism is a hypothesis that doesn’t seem disprovable), but if Mo_ can prove that morality is as objective as science, while we might still have skeptical worries about its ultimate objectivity, most people will be satisfied. I don’t think FJ was responding to this framing, and I think he could reject that standard of objectivity on solid principle, but it would be interesting to hear the response.

FJ made good use of his position as ‘disprover’, by invoking the exceptions that can’t exist in a truly objective morality (although maybe they can in a scientifically objective morality). For instance, when Mo_ used the concrete example of pain, FJ pointed to masochists as a counter example. I didn’t find Mo_'s response about hockey here compelling, but not being a masochist I don’t really know. And when Mo_ says,

that seems sort of question begging: if we assume that there’s something intrinsically valuable, objective morality is let in the back door. FJ attacks this claim directly:

Again, this exhibits the strength of the “no it doesn’t” position in a debate like this. The point is, if there is nothing intrinsically valuable at rock bottom, do the arguments still work? I didn’t feel like this problem was well addressed. However, since Mo_'s proof of objective morality is scientific, top down, it may be that within that definition we can have a morality with a black box at the bottom the same way we can know that diamonds are made of carbon without having a good grasp of quarks.

One thing I found fascinating was that a couple very fundamental questions ended up being addressed only at the very end, and not in any great depth. What is morality, and is the existence of morality distinct from the existence of objective morality? The first question is obviously quite hard to answer, and the discussion here made clear that it is especially hard to answer in a meta-ethical sense, without espousing a particular moral philosophy. The second question seems particularly important here. The Jabberwock comparison is enlightening: FJ is taking the position that objective morality doesn’t exist because there is no meaningful or important definition of morality itself; if this had come out earlier in the debate I think the whole discussion might have gone differently (or maybe it would have just been shorter).

At this point, I think FJ has won the question, but Mo_ has had a better showing in the debate. The scope of FJ’s rebuttal is limited by what was necessary to refute Mo_'s arguments, but Mo_ presented some interesting ideas that FJ could have hit on. I also at times got the feeling that FJ was being too skeptical. It’s less interesting to say that objective morality doesn’t exist because nothing is objective. FJ didn’t go that far, but conceding more positions, or making ‘even if’ arguments to e.g. defeat objective morality ‘even if’ intrinsic value exists, would have made the position much stronger and would have made for a more interesting debate. In particular, accepting some minimal definition of morality (enough to know that e.g. both utilitarianism and deontology are moral positions) would have gotten us to more interesting ground. If, on the other hand, FJ found it necessary to reject as much as he did to make his point, I think that is itself a credit to Mo_.

I’d love to see more if you have more in you, otherwise, it’s been interesting to read. Thanks and well done to you both.

I’m ok with those results :slight_smile:

In retrospect, I would really have rather done it the way I originally suggested in the first thread. The idea that it’s a “debate” sort of makes it something to win, instead of an opportunity to actually learn something.

The way I suggested in the first thread naturally gives rise, I think, to an essential practice in philosophical conversation: it forces reducing abstract words into what the person really means by them. Instead of saying “morality exists,” for example, you just say what you mean: in this case, “people sometimes ask themselves what they should do, or if what they’re doing is ‘good’” And then we might have to reduce “good” as well.

Maybe we can make another non-debate thread, in which we can actually strive for clarity and agreement. One often finds that when the offending words are taboo’d, two parties agree on most things. For example, one person might say “The tree in the forest doesn’t make a sound if no one is around to hear,” and the other person might say, “The tree does make a sound, even if no one hears,” but when you taboo the word “sound” you find that they both agree that (a) compression waves in the air still happen regardless of anybody being present and (b) obviously those compression waves are not interpreted by any brains into an auditory experience, because no brain is there to do so. We might find similar agreements if we are able to coherently reduce the words under discussion.

If you look at FJ’s responses to the arguments in his second post—where he addressed the actual arguments—all you find is a one-line sentence, to each argument, denying some premise, (e.g., “P1 is false”). That’s not a refutation, that’s just a denial of a premise. If there’s some reason to think the premise false, it needs to be layed out. I think I’ve said plenty to render the premises initially plausible. You seem to recognize this when you say that I had a better showing in the debate, but somehow lost it. That strikes me as incoherent. I’m not sure what it is supposed to reveal but that you think one position is less true from the start, and thus harder to argue for. Typically that’s something to avoid for a judge; it’s like saying, “yes, your side presented the better evidence for your case, but I thought your case wrong moreso from the start, so you had further to go”.

This is patently false. If I am talking with someone who is talking about Juxtaglomerulars, Agammaglobulinemia, and Amazias----I have no idea what these are, but I have no reason to think they don’t exist simply because I don’t know what they’re supposed to refer to. And if I were to suppose they didn’t exist, I would be dead wrong.

What you want to ask is what they refer to. If you want to know what a moral fact is, it’s a fact about the world (including the kind of creature that you are) that gives you a reason to act one way rather than another. Take the example of pain. That an action causes pain is an objective fact about the world, and it often furnishes you with a reason not to act in a certain way. I took it to be quite straightforward. If some people like pain, then it doesn’t show that moral facts don’t exist, it shows that whether pain gives you a reason to avoid an action is non-universalizable. Personally, I think that’s false, but it’s tangential to the debate. Masochists get a sort of psychological pleasure that outweights any physical pain, and can’t be gotten without the physical pain. That doesn’t mean they like physical pain, and would pursue it even in the absence of the greater psychological pleasure. That both of you are standing here saying, “yo, pain is good” is incoherent. But even if you could make sense of that claim, then it would support my position—because it’s a fact about the world that gives you a reason to act one way rather than another.

There’s simply no strength in a “no it doesn’t” position unless you justify the denial. This isn’t an argument on a playground.

Morality is just defined by a set of questions to outline the topic that it is: E.g., “How should I act?”, “What is good and bad?”, “What is right and wrong?”. All I have to do is show you that there are objective facts that give you reasons to act one way rather than another. And if that’s the case, then I’ve won, unless FJ wants to claim that the fork example, the rape example, the throwing his child off the bridge example don’t actually give him any reasons to act one way rather than another, or unless he wants to argue that moral facts are subjective. If the latter, that’s fine—but then there’s a handful of arguments about that that he is yet to address at all. What FJ wants is someone to lay out particular criteria for answering moral questions, so that when they do, he can say that that is not what he means by morality. That’s tantamount to insisting on defining morality as something non-sensical in order to prove it’s non-sensical. If ordinary language matters at all, then that’s unjustified.

I think the idea might be that you clearly put in a bit more effort. I was a bit lazy, but just had generally more agreeable points – I could have elucidated more, as I think he said, but even just lazily thrown out there, the points looked solid. You put a lot of back into it, but had less obviously agreeable points, and though you used a lot of words to defend them, they still never really had much philosophical stability, so to speak.

That’s my interpretation of his interpretation anyway.

You did a fine job of stating that you disagree, but never really why you disagree. Call it laziness if you want—I’ll give you benefit of the doubt.

Well, some of them were statements about me. Surely I’m more of an expert on me than you are. Surely I get to make unsupported claims about myself that you do not get to make. If you, for example, tell me that I like anal sex, and I say I do not, then without evidence from you my word is held above yours.
The rest of them were unsupported by you and not very likely in the first place, or clearly nonsequiturs, and I think our beloved judge saw that in the way that I did.

The args you called nonsequiturs were the 2 best args I provided for cultural relativism. Thats funny.

You know, I’ve been trying the whole time to figure out which arguments you keep on saying that about. You keep saying that I was arguing against some argument that was for relativism, but…man, I can’t find which one it was.

Here are the arguments I responded to:

Sounds like it’s for your objective morality

C sounds like it’s for your objective morality

Again

Obviously not for subjectivism here

Again

This argument you posted explicitly against cultural relativism, so it can’t be that one.

C is clearly not for relativism.

Again, clearly not for relativism.

I can’t find which argument you’re saying was for relativism that I argued against. I just went through each one, one by one. Nearly all of them explicitly had a conclusion that was the direct opposite of relativism.

Also, for the record, all of those ones I responded to were in blue. You said the blue was the stuff that I “needed to address”. I assumed that meant it was your arguments for your case, no?

I think you’re just pulling my leg. That, or you’re really very confused.