Faust’s thread about ‘good philosophy being morality’ had me thinking a bit.
Most people usually ascribe to a fact/value dichotomy and we are confronted with examining the world outside leaving aside our value judgments. This fact/value dichotomy was a great pillar of classical empiricism, especially with Hume who claims an ‘ought’ can’t be inferred from an ‘is’. But how does he arrive at such a dichotomy of fact (is)/value (ought)? Well he starts with stating the classical analytic-synthetic propositions dichotomy. So things we know by just their definitions and some by empirical observations. And Hume by this analytic-synthetic dichotomy finds no reason to support value judgments as being part of any of the two classes of propositions, therefore they are not rational at all, they are sentimental propositions. Adam Smith, as well as Schopenhauer, seems to have inherited Hume’s moral sentimentalism.
So the quest for an objective morality can only be in the falsification of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy and then the fact/value dichotomy. Now in rejecting the fact/value dichotomy one doesn’t transform ‘reality’ into what he wishes it to be, rather his values are entangled (as Putnam says) with facts, and in reverse. Scientific Theories do have a series of values inscribed, for example we hold that a scientific theory should be simple and coherent, which are value judgments - something which the logical positivists could not explain.
The analytic-synthetic distinction was mostly attacked by Quine who held that analyticity was circular and rested upon synonyms or on analyticity itself. If this analytic-synthetic dichotomy is to be rejected then the fact-value dichotomy will also have to be rejected and so admitting that our values are entangled with our facts we are left with the posibility of objective morality.
Without the fact/value dichotomy moral relativism and moral skepticism have a hard time explaining themselves. Dewey made an interesting distinction between what is valuable and what is valued. The relativists usually claim that there are no valuables only valued things, the skeptics say that these valued or valuables are irrational. But without the fact/value distinction their claims become irrational. Since drinking poison might be valued by some it doesn’t hold that that drinking poison is valuable.
It’s not your inability to reach certainty …. “I just can’t do a thing,” you begin to think. The evaluation is the problem. The experience is not the problem, but thinking about the experience is the problem.
Stop thinking. Can you stop thinking? You are trying to stop. That means thinking. I am not suggesting that you should not think. Thought is you. If you are not thinking you are not there. Nothing is there. What is there will begin to express itself. Let that express. Then there is no question. Just leave that alone. It will begin to act.
You perpetuate the assessment of yourself through your thinking … nothing is wrong with you at all. You don’t have the courage. Accepting whatever there is is courage. That is intelligence. “I don’t want to be other than what I am --” that is the courage. It is there! It is not a thing to be acquired.
It is so unnatural – the unnatural thing you have accepted as natural. That is our tragedy. You have never questioned that, because, if you begin to question, your existence is at stake. You are that. You are not different from this movement of evaluating.
As long as you remain dependent on any authority outside of you as having the power to control and manipulate the way you think – the way you consider yourself – you remain vulnerable, running the risk of being bad, of having a problem.
The is/ought dichotomy shows not that morality is only of the sentiments, but that morality is wholly personal. Ones factual judgments will render to himself moral judgments. What is, for him, determines what ought to be, what he ought to do.
And yes what most people call “morality” is almost entirely sentimental, and the only factual aspects of it are the appraisals of situations in light of one’s conditioned emotional responses and prejudices. But that is not properly morality, it is merely emotionalism - we dont call it moral when we have feelings, after all; something becomes moral only when it is judged to be required or “good/bad” in some way, that is, a choice is inferred and a value judgment attached to that choice. It is the choice aspect which defines the spaces of moral possibility, and it is the value judgment which explicates the morality in question - and of course, value judgments are, for most people, instinctual and unexamined. Thus their morality is essentially worthless, because it amounts to nothing more than preconditioned responses to situations and certain symbols (images, or words, or stimuli).
Morality does not exist in the way most people assume it to exist - morality is properly moral only for the individual, and only the enlightened and heightened individual who is capable of rational thinking, self-awareness and genuine sentiments. If one is not in control of himself, he cannot act morally. And even these individuals cannot be called “moral” in the common sense of the word, because no one holds claim to them but themselves. They treat others morally not because others “deserve it”, or because they “ought to”, but merely because it is in their nature to do so - their reasoning is entirely personal.
Morality is essentially health, which is where the value judgment derives from. What is good for a person is what one ought to do. And for the philosopher, what is good (ie. healthy) is to be honest, to speak the truth to oneself, to refrain from false consciousness - that is the only proper morality. And it is “objective” only in the sense that the determination can be arrived at rationally and impartially; it is not objective in the sense that it is either non-subjective/non-personal or is “out there” somewhere “in reality”, imposing standards and/or judgment upon us.
And how are we to separate is from ought? Are we ever capable of observing facts free of value? If a historian writes that Stalin was cruel, is that only a value judgment or is it also a fact?
I think that the knowledge of facts requires a knowledge of values, values which must be capable of being ‘objectively’ right, else we wouldn’t be able to set facts straight. We all have some sort of epistemic values, we want facts that are clear, coherent, simple to grasp, etc. The same could be said of ethical values.
So basically you can’t just have the is/ought dualism that easily, and as I think this is/ought dualism doesn’t hold out much (along with the analytic-synthetic distinction from which it has roots).
Not that I think we can ever have a final moral code or anything, but we can choose between ethical statements because of the fact-value entanglement, meaning we can have morals without resorting to sentimentality.
The only problem here is why one feels the need to look for some sort of absolute separation. The assumption of dualism is the problem, not the fact that is and ought are intertwined most of the time.
Yes, some facts contain implicit value judgments - but not all. It is possible to have “pure” facts, like “Stalin was alive at X time in Y place.” That fact is free of value judgments. But of course much of our facts are not so simple, and it is the case that the way in which we perceive and apprehend facts is not so strictly robotic and devoid if sentiment - we understand facts based on implicit values we possess.
So we can have “pure” facts and value-laden facts. Pure facts are meaningless morally speaking, they are just statements about a state of affairs. But values need these sorts of facts in order to be values - for example, the value judgment “Stalin was a bad man” rests upon pure facts like “Stalin killed X amount of people”. And of course that pure fact derives moral significance when we attach the value “it is wrong to kill people” to it. So we see that it is not so simple as the “is/ought dichotomy” would assume.
Are there also pure values, like there are pure facts? Of course, these are our basic emotional sentiments and desires, sentimental and instinctive in nature. We desire to be alive naturally, so we place value upon human life and thus the value “it is wrong to kill” arises; we feel sorrow or angry when others hurt us, so we create the value “it is wrong to hurt others”, etc etc. These basic values are part conditioned by society and upbringing, and partly instinctive/genetic in nature, and they form the basis upon which we take pure facts and make of them “value facts”, if you will, the most common way in which we organize our world. . . that is, most facts contain implicit value judgments, even pure facts. And once again there is nothing wrong with this.
Hume et.al. are mistaken because they see is and ought, facts and values as separate with a wall between them. That is incorrect - as I have shown there is much bleeding into each other, and an is will beget an ought, just like an ought begets an is. Rather it is the need to see these as separate entities which creates the “dichotomy” of dualism. In otherwords the dualistic, black-and-white mindset which is incapable or unwilling to think in subtleties is the culprit here.
Yes, the dualism doesnt hold out much, because mostly it is in our heads. We are rational as well as emotional beings, we assign facts just like we assign values. There is nothing wrong with that.
As I said, I attribute true morality to health, which is always a personal and individual thing. Thus what is good for a person determines what that person ought to do. Where this fails to capture so-called “moral” behavior, then the behavior in question is not a moral one. Most people consider so many things moral when in fact they are not, rather they are merely arbitrary classifications and judgments based on superficial feelings and social or genetic conditioning. We feel aversion to murder and pain, so surely it is wrong to kill others or to hurt them! Ive always been taught that lying is bad, so surely it is immoral to lie! Etc. Those things are not moral properly speaking, unless we look at it from the view of the acting individual alone - are those actions good (healthy, aligned with his nature and benefit) for that acting person, or not? Of course that is debatable in many cases. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and much of the time it is both. But when we realise that only self-aware people who are in control of themselves by virtue of their dominant reason and self-consciousness are capable of acting morally, then we can dismiss these sorts of cases as mere animal behavior - people will always act impulsively, based on animal instinct or blind passion or irrational thinking. And of course those sorts of behaviors are not “moral”, at least not in the sense that I use the word.
Basically, it comes down to this: people are animals and will most of the time act like animals; and “morality” is just a word we use to assign certain things to certain categories which we attribute judgment to, by virtue of our already existing values. “Morality” properly speaking does not exist. What exists are people acting based on numerous types of reasons and factors. If they wish to attribute “morality” to this, then that is up to them, but there is no actual “judgment” or “wrong” or “ought to” that actually applies to them or the action in fact. Such things are only in one’s head. Morality is just an idea, to be accepted or rejected as one wishes. Thats pretty much it. Any moral theory which views morality or values as anything other than wholly personal and subjective, that treats these judgments as if they exist “out there” in reality somewhere, is false. But of course it is very comforting for people to believe these fictions.
Well I said in my o.p. that Hume (i take his case only) first states the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions (which Kant follows as well) and then Hume says that moral proposition are not empirically verifiable and they aren’t known a priori either.
But the object ‘Stalin’ is entangled with both facts and value judgments. And in my opinion all objects are, even if not all the propositions are entangled with both facts and values.
Yet I can say that “Stalin was alive at X time in Y place.” implies the value that we trust official documents, world geography about the place where he was born, trust historians, etc.
I think that all facts are value-laden, here I mean either epistemic or ethical.
“Stalin was alive at X time in Y place.” - As I said, would imply epistemic values (like trust in the knowledge of someone else, since nor you nor I personally were present when Stalin was born or killed someone).
“Stalin was a bad man” - This would imply ethical value-laden facts. We know he was one of the main architects of the gulag system. We know milions died without a fair trial. And this is entangled with our ethical value of fairness, when we ourselves understand what it means to be ‘wronged’ by someone.
I agree that we are all conditioned by society and by biology, no room for free will, but I do think we can rationally assert objective morals from inquiry into our history, especially past morals and compare what can be called ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
But you can’t have value free facts, I mean you can have ethically free value-ladden facts, but all facts are epistemic value-ladden. I hope you understand what I’m saying, since we have falliable knowledge we rest it upon some values that we think helps us to better understand the world objectively. If we had infalliable knowledge we could throw away any kind of epistemic value out the window.
Well we do live in a society and seeing as we are ‘forced’ to cooperate we have no choice but to select standards which benefit all. But I do not agree that we can ever be ‘in control of ourselves’, how do you think you can escape social/biological conditioning? I really see no room for freedom of self. It would imply that there is a ghost in the machine, some little man who pushes buttons in order for you to choose above what you are conditioned by environment/nature to do.
The attribution of morality to health seems pretty ‘good’, I can say that to have bodily and ‘mentally’ healthy humans rather than sickly humans is objectively valuable.
Yes, but my point is that this analytic/synthetic divide is nonsense.
Yet there is nonetheless a difference between saying “Stalin was a man” and saying “Stalin was a bad man”. Your description here cannot account for this difference, as it treats these the same (from the perspective of value).
Thats like saying that the fact of my sitting here in this chair depends on the “value judgment” that “I trust my sense to relay correct information”. That isnt a value judgement, we dont base our reliance upon our senses or upon historical documentation on “values”. Rather, these are based upon the simple repeated demonstrability of the accuracy of these faculties as we experience them. I have little reason to suspect that my senses are wrong in telling me that I am sitting in this chair, just like I have little reason to suspect that the entirety of accepted historical record is wrong in telling me that Stalin killed X many people. And I dont based those conclusions on values of “trusting sources”, I base them on the learned trust that these sources tend not to be wrong, based on my experience. That is wholly different from the value judgment “it is wrong to kill people”.
Yes, but an “epistemic value” is just a factual observation based on experience - it is not inherently sentimental or judgmental in the way we consider values to be - that is, it does not effect a prior filter and lens with which things are judged according to “good/bad” criteria. The epistemic “value” of “I trust my history book” isnt a value in the sense that we typically mean valuing something, it is just a statement that “my experience has been such that I feel justified in trusting what this book says here”. Thats it.
If you want to stretch the meaning of value to include these sorts of factual observations, then sure, go ahead, but it seems to pretty much destroy the meaning of what it means to value.
Even if you split up value in this way, which I still think is unjustified, nonetheless they bleed into each other at every turn. You cant, then, have an “epistemic” value without a likewise “ethical” value, and vice versa, because one necessarily implies the other.
I didnt say there was no room for free will. All I am saying is that we are conditioned in a prior way to a large extent.
If you want to call “This cup is here on this table” as a “value-laden fact”, then sure. But like I said, that seems pointless to me.
Well infallible knowledge is a contradiction in terms, because we are not infallible beings. So that point is moot.
And yes we use certain solid beliefs in order to stabilize our empistemic perspectives. But these I would call beliefs, not values. I believe that I can trust my sense, I do not “value that I can trust my senses”. I think what you are talking about here are beliefs, cognitive states describing an expected effect or outcome. Beliefs are different from values, at least to me they are. A belief is values-neural in that it is merely a description of some event – values, on the other hand, are loaded with judgment based on emotionalism or “good/bad” sentiment. Yes beliefs have this structure much of the time, but that only means that they are beliefs about values, such as “I believe that it is wrong to kill people”. Yet this does not mean that there is no essential difference between a belief and a value.
But I suppose its just a different way of looking at things. It may be the case that we are both describing the same thing with different words.
You dont need to escape it 100% in order to gain some control over it. To see a range of choices and determine one of them is control, even if the choices themselves are predetermined and out of our control. Likewise to resist an impulse is to exercise control, even if the alternative is merely another impulse. Control is not absolute, the will is not “free”, but this does not mean that we dont have control, that we dont have a will.
But I imagine you dont want this to turn into a discussion on free will – or do you? I wouldnt mind if it did.
This view is merely the result of an insufficiently deep and subtle understanding of human choice and instinct. It is not so simple as the “ghost in the machine” view imagines. What you demand is a standard of perfect “free” choice, but of course perfect freedom is a contradiction in terms. What we have are relative degrees of freedom to choose between various alternatives. Yes these alternatives are determiend for us, but we nonetheless can exercise choice with regard to them. Self-awareness, consciousness of our consciousness and of the processes that make it up, give us this capacity.
If youd like, I will PM you a large essay I wrote on the subject. It might be good to find common ground on the whole free will thing if we are to do anything here but talk past each other.
It is “valuable” only because it is in our nature to do so. A life form which disregards its health and does not work towards its health would not exist to propogate itself. Thus our instincts compel us in this direction, and it is rational to act to better our health insofar as we value being alive. Most people do value being alive, and most people value the quality of that life. Thus, the “morality” of health is generated, the “ought to do” regarding what is beneficial for the body-mind (the organism as a whole), and the “ought not to do” regarding what is detrimental to the organism.
But once again, this isnt really “morality” in the common meaning – because the common meaning is nonsense. I use the term “morality” here loosely, as applied to my own standards of health.
This sums it up. So what is it we are trying to fit into a value system? If morality is not known, then what exists in you that guides you morally. Saying that you only know what is ‘good’ for you is fine. If you didn’t know, something would be wrong with you and that’s far from the case.
Nature does not use anything as a model. It is only interested in perfecting the species. It is trying to create perfect species and not perfect beings. Some are not ready to accept that. What nature has created in the form of human species is something extraordinary. It is an unparalleled creation. But culture is interested in fitting the actions of all human beings into a common mold. That is because it is interested in maintaining the status quo, its value system. That is where the real conflict is.
We use moral concepts to exploit others. We use thinking as an instrument of destruction. We want to believe that God is on our side. During the last world war, the Germans claimed that God was their copilot, and the British also claimed that God was their copilot. Both of them destroyed life and property. So we would like God to be on our side all the time and use Him. But what has come out of that is only violence. Belief in God, or belief in anything, separates us from others. When we find that we cannot force our beliefs on others we resort to violence. We would like everybody to believe the same thing. When we fail in that attempt of ours to make everybody believe in God, or no God, or even our political systems - the right or the left -, what is left is only violence.
I’d like to contribute a couple of points to this discussion.
First, the dichotomy that would have to be rejected isn’t the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. Rather, it’s the analytic-empirical dichotomy - the dichotomy between the analytic a priori and the synthetic empirical. This would open up the possibility that value judgments are synthetic (factual) while not empirically verifiable. (I happen to think that value judgments are psychological propositions, and hence synthetic empirical, but that’s for another thread.)
Second, there’s no opposition between objectivism and relativism per se. There’s an opposition between objectivism and subjectivism. And there’s an opposition between relativism and absolutism. But you can be an objectivist relativist (if you think it’s an objective truth that different things are valuable for different people) or a subjectivist absolutist (if you think everyone values the same things).
I’m not sure how you’d want to rejig your argument in view of these clarifications.
Maybe you can start a thread on this, I am interested. What is the difference between synthetic and empirical though? They both relate to facts and not definitional truths.
I think there is an opposition, in the fact that relativists cannot account for epistemic values which are used in creating scientific theories. If you hold objective epistemic values you have to hold objective ethical values.
But the interesting case is, as I said, you can’t be an objective relativist… you said
" different things are valuable for different people" but I think instead of valuable it should be valued.
The difference between them being that valued could be something that isn’t valuable. Some people might think worshiping rocks or offering human sacrifice to a God is something valued. But we can find facts which show that these things are not valuable, only valued. People might think the opinion of some religious authority is valued, and we know it’s not valuable. Etc.
Well then why should all judgments be sentimental? Is there any fact-filter faculty in man that is distinct from the rest of his ‘sentimental’ mind? I think not. You have to understand that not all values are sentimental… I mean do not value money because I love it, I value it because it is entangled with the fact that I need to purchase food.
I don’t think the meaning of value is destroyed, I think it’s actually more refined, since people won’t be able to escape into naive relativism about values any longer without this extreme dualism of facts and values.
I don’t mean that belief = “value that I can trust my senses” rather I think belief = “trust in the value of my senses”. And this is why it is hard to act against one’s senses, because he trusts their values, which we might attribute to some evolutionary selected traits for survival, facts like “survival of the fittest” ( a crude way of putting it) influencing the trust in the value of our human senses for the understand of facts about the world.
Actually, my ‘Subjectivism in Metaethics’ thread is about this, but it’s reached such a stage of advancement that it would be difficult for you to join in now (unless I gave a summary).
The analytic-synthetic distinction is about how propositions are true or false: through the meanings of their constituent words alone v. through the relation between those words and something else. The empirical-a priori distinction is about how propositions are known to be true or false: by using the senses v. by just thinking about it.
No, I really meant what I said! There are plenty of examples of objective relative truths in everyday life. Here’s one off the top of my head: the truth that peanuts are dangerous for people with peanut allergies.
So what is a sentimental proposition to Hume (and Smith and Schopenhauer)? Is it a description of our sentiments or an impulse-like reaction to them?
This melding of facts and values indeed might follow from a rejection of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy (I must emphasize might), but I’d prefer to explore the reasons for such a rejection further before granting it.
If our facts and values are indeed entangled, this would make room for objective morality, but I’d like to break that term - or rather the term “objective fact” which is a broader class into which the term “objective morality” would fall into under this rubric - apart into its component words. First, we have “objective” which connotes only a manner in which a statement or proposition is to be taken. For example, to state “gravity pulls objects towards its source” is objective, not so much because it’s true, but because it is expressed in such a way as to be taken to be universal, or at least true (if indeed it is true) irrespective of one or another particular subject (i.e. it is true for everyone). Contrast that with the statement “gravity seems to pull objects towards its source from my point of view” which is clearly expressed in a subjective manner, which is to say it is meant to be taken as true for the one who’s making the claim but not necessarily for everyone else. Now let’s compare this analysis of the term “objective” with the that of the term “fact” - a fact is such that it is, by definition, true. Both statements above about gravity - the one expressed objectively, the other subjectively - may be true - the first, because it is true for everyone, the second, because it is true for the particular subject making the claim.
Now if indeed objective morality is a subset of the class of objective facts, then the same should hold for this subset as for the whole class. Moral facts (if indeed facts they are) can be objective in the sense that they are true for everyone, and can be facts in the sense that they are true period. But having made this distinction - between objectivity and facticity - one can entertain the possibility of making objective moral statements but without their being facts necessarily. All that would mean is that a statement like “It is wrong to steal” is objective because it is intended to be taken as true for everyone, but not necessarily that it is in fact true (i.e. there may be circumstances under which it is okay to steal).
What this tells us, in the end, is that even if we make the move from moral statements as necessarily subjective to ones which can be objective, we are still held back by the problem of their veracity. In a pragmatic sense, then, we are still hard pressed to make any distinction of what it means - that is, what the consequences would be - for a statement to be morally objective as opposed to subjective. Pragmatically - that is, in its consequences - we would still see the same level and magnitude of disagreement between people holding different moral positions without a firm determinable way of deciding who is right and who is wrong.
I do not think that any moral values are a subset of facts, rather I think that when we express some moral propositions we include facts without even trying to do so. When we use adjectives like ‘cruel’ ‘nice’ ‘good’, etc. we not only express a moral value but also a fact about someone or something, and this leads me to believe that we cannot separate facts and values enough to affirm that all moral statements are sentiments without facts in them. This is the path I think to objectivity in morals, letting me dig up an ought from an is, against poor old Hume.
The problem I see is in defining what is a ‘fact’.
So then values are (sometimes) a component of facts? Could we not say then that a fact that contains a value laden term (like ‘cruel’ in “Mr. Smith is cruel”) is itself a moral fact?
If you’re correct, then these are what are called ‘thick’ terms: terms whose meaning contains an evaluative element and a non-evaluative element. Other obvious examples are ‘murder’ and ‘courage’. But thick terms won’t help you to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ if it’s not already possible to do so (which I happen to think it is), because you’ll be deriving the ‘ought’ from the evaluative element of the thick term’s meaning (the ‘ought’ element) and not from the non-evaluative element (the ‘is’ element).
It’s our criteria of theory selection that are value-laden, not the theories themselves!
Which is to say that we value certain facts (or statements in general), but that doesn’t say anything about whether such valuations are objectively real. One person could value some fact because of its aesthetic appeal while another might dismiss it as dull and unimportant. Neither does it say anything about statements about value or value laden things. We may attribute certain value to a statement like E=mc^2 (say, for example, because of its simplicity) but we don’t typically attribute value to the terms involved (for example, there doesn’t seem to be anything intrinsically valuable to E (i.e. energy) or m (i.e. mass) or the speed of light), and so what the statement refers to is more or less free of human ascribed value. On the other hand, a statement like “The Rolling Stones rock!” is about the value of the Rolling Stones, but it’s the Rolling Stones that we value, not the statement.
Do I misunderstand you? A statement like “Mr. Smith is cruel” doesn’t seem to imply an ‘ought’ - namely that Mr. Smith ought not to be the way he is. This derives directly from the meaning of ‘cruel’ as a character trait that ought not to be. Or is this exactly what you’re saying?