The Objectivity of Morality

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.

FJ, are you denying that the sum total of your response to each argument was roughly one line each, just stating that you disagreed with some premise, but not stating why? Because if you are, I’ll be happy to quote you. And if you’re not, then recognize that that’s no reason to agree with anything you’ve said.

The main area of discussion you wanted to focus on was about the distinction between prudence and morality. That’s fine, but those arguments work whether you think there’s an essential distinction or not.

You focused also on the case of masochism, and how that must be reason to think causing pain has nothing to do with morality, or something. That’s been addressed, and anyone can look at it. No masochist values pain, they value the psychological pleasure that only comes from physical pain. And if some masochist values pain----then that’s a subjective moral fact, and you can no longer claim not to know what a moral fact is.

You still seem to think moral facts must be something like facts with an offical stamp on them, a metaphysical name-tag, or a little halo around their molecules. And perhaps you think it’d be clever to pipe up and say there are no such things. Moral facts are ordinary everyday facts that furnish you with a reason to act one way rather than another. Do you want to throw your child off a bridge? You don’t, do you. That desire that you have is a fact----and it gives you a reason not to throw your child off a bridge, hence it is a moral fact. That’s very likely a subjective fact. But that’s fine—because you’re not even sure what a moral fact is. A moral fact is just a fact that gives you a reason to act one way or another. That an action causes pain—that’s a fact, it’s also a moral fact because it usually furnishes you with a reason not to commit that action. That’s moral fact. It’s really fucking simple. No, it doesn’t have a fucking metaphysical postcard on it… but what the fuck do you think we’re talking about?

Jesus Christ, I said what I was denying. You lost track of the conversation after 1 post?

Here, let me summarize it for you:
Mo: “The arguments you called non-sequiturs were actually for relativism, lol” (this is the second time you’ve said this)
Me: “No, they’re not. [lists arguments and explains why they’re certainly not for relativism].”
Mo: “Are you saying that you didn’t give one word responses?”

The fuck? I didn’t say ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING
about the length of my response. I said that they weren’t for relativism. It doesn’t take a doctorate in English Literature to figure out what my point was.

But, I think you’re smart enough to have known what my point was. You were just a bit too embarrassed to actually say, “Yes, sorry, you’re right, those weren’t arguments for relativism.”

Either that, or you really aren’t smart enough.

Listen, dude, if your reading comprehension skills are such that when I say “These arguments aren’t for relativism” you think I’m saying something about the lengths of my response… #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o

You’re done.

When I look back, it’s hard to know what you were calling a non-sequitur. But you stated that you didn’t respond to some arguments that were clear non-sequiturs,

and the only two arguments you didn’t offer a thoughtless one-liner to were the relativism args. Apologies if I’m wrong about this.

There’s a few things in my last post you might really want to think about. Don’t be lazy.

I was only talking about the arguments that I quoted. The blue ones.

The two that I was calling nonsequiturs were the ones I responded to with “I don’t even need to say what’s wrong with this.” and then “Ditto”. I wasn’t talking about any argument I hadn’t quoted.

My alarm clock is ringing. That furnishes me with a reason to get up rather than stay in bed.
By the above description of what moral facts are, the ringing of my alarm clock is a moral fact.

I don’t think you’d have a very easy time finding someone who agrees that an alarm clock ringing is a moral fact.

And this has been a problem in your arguments: your definitions are so broad that they end up including a lot of things that they really shouldn’t include.

That your alarm clock is ringing is no reason to get up, any more than it is to shut it off and sleep. But if you have to go to work, to pay bills, to eat, to not suffer… then your alarm clock ringing is absolutely a fact about the world with relevance to how you ought to act.

The number of leaves on a tree could be a fact about the world that makes a difference to how you ought to act, in some bizarre hypothetical the particulars of which I’m not creative enough to imagine.

Are you having trouble getting over the fact that nobody is waving a wand or tapping their heals revealing a tiny halo over a particle? What you are doing is bullshit… “yo, explain to me what a moral fact is…” and then, “no, no, that’s totally not what it is, you’re wrong… but try again because I don’t know what a moral fact is… oh, but they also don’t exist”. You’ve gotta be shitting me.

I’m totally not shitting you. If it’s a fact that masturbating with my left hand feels better than masturbating with my right hand, then that furnishes me with a reason to masturbate one way rather than another. So then, by your definition of moral facts, the statement “masturbating with my left hand feels better than masturbating with my right hand”. I don’t think it’s incorrect to point out that such things being called “moral facts” is a gross debasing of the word “morality.” Basically everything can become a moral fact with such a paradigm.