Moderator: Carleas
Imagine that I am carving your eyes out with a fork, out of the kindness of my heart, that I would not have you see what I am about to do to the ones you love. You think that what I’m doing isn’t kind at all. On the contrary, perhaps you think I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. Plausible?
fj wrote:you make examples of things that you think, as far as I can tell, are "immoral" but you DON'T refer to how those actions relate to the expected utility of the actor as all, as if that relationship doesn't matter for morality.
So which is it? Is morality just being prudent in situations that "really matter to you," or is it something different? You claim that it's prudent at first, but your examples betray your real beliefs. You're arguing using one definition, but your intuition leads you to use another.
P1. You experience that pain is irreducibly bad.
(In other words, pain itself isn’t bad because of something else; it’s simply bad.)
P2. Pain is real.
P3. If pain is bad, and real, then there is at least one thing intrinsically disvaluable.
C. Therefore, pain is intrinsically disvaluable.
P1. You think moral sentences are sometimes true.
P2. A sentence is true only if the truth-making relation holds between it and the thing that makes it true.
P3. Thus, true moral sentences are true only because there holds the truth-making relation between them and the things that make them true.
C. The things that make some moral sentences true must exist.
P1. You talk, think, and act as if morality were real.
P2. Common-sense would tell you there are things you should do and things you shouldn’t.
P3. The best explanation of common-sense, and how you talk/think/act is that there are moral facts.
P4. The best explanation is the one we consider true.
C. Moral facts exist.
P1. If you attempt to describe a (im)moral act (e.g., rape), then your description refers to cognitive beliefs about objective (mind-independent) facts in the world. (E.g., the pain caused, the autonomy denied, the agreement broken, etc…).
P2. Your description of the (im)moral act will not make reference to your subjective mental phenomena (i.e., desires, wishes, past history).
P3. Therefore, (from P1 and P2) the simpler explanation of "morality" will make reference only to cognitive beliefs about objective (mind-independent) facts.
P4. The simpler explanation is the better one. (Ockham’s razor)
C. Therefore, morality is objective.
P1. Morality is either objective or it's not (i.e., it's relative somehow).
P2. The best arguments for relativism are wrong.
C. Therefore, morality is objective.
P1. Different cultures agree about most moral norms.
C. Therefore, the truth of most moral norms is universal.
P1. Morality is either objective or its not.
P2. If it is objective, then we can consistently have productive discussions with other people/cultures and speak meaningfully (without talking past each other). We can even criticize each other, legitimately. We can do things we should be able to do, like reflect on our past, claim to have grown, etc. In fact, we do these things anyways.
C. Therefore, morality is objective.
P1. If cultural relativism is true, then genocide was moral in Nazi Germany.
P2. Genocide was not moral then. (This would be question begging, I suppose... except it's true under any moral theory ever talked about)
C. Therefore, cultural relativism is false.
Flannel Jesus wrote:P1. You experience that pain is irreducibly bad.
(In other words, pain itself isn’t bad because of something else; it’s simply bad.)
P2. Pain is real.
P3. If pain is bad, and real, then there is at least one thing intrinsically disvaluable.
C. Therefore, pain is intrinsically disvaluable.
This one was the closest that you got to a reasonable argument. Fails in the case of masochists. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and most certainly some people value pain. One example against is all I need to negate the "intrinsically" qualifier.
P1. You think moral sentences are sometimes true.
P1 is false
And besides, we don't need an explanation of morality. We don't need an explanation for something we haven't even established is true or exists. We don't need an explanation for unicorns. We don't need an explanation for goblins. You only need to explain things after you've reasonably demonstrated their existence. You don't need to explain nonexistent things
I'm pretty certain that when you say "something is immoral" you're NOT saying "it was imprudent of him to do that." I believe your definition, then, is a disingenuous intellectualized definition that you don't actually use except when you're trying to prove something.
Flannel Jesus wrote:You said pain is intrinsically disvaluable. It's clear that some people value some kinds of pain -- and some people certainly value the pain of others.
No shit. Morality has nothing to do with universality----we're arguing about objectivity in this thread."You should not carve my eyes out with a fork" is not necessarily a universally true statement.
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.Since you're the one arguing that morality is about prudence, YOU have to prove that there is no conceivable scenario in which carving my eyes out with a fork is the prudent option.
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.If it's obvious that morality exists, then wtf is this debate for? Why don't you just post a video of morality? Or a pic? I've never seen one before.
Again, generalizing morality to "how you ought to act" is disingenuous. Whether I ought to masturbate with my left or right hand is, as you said, not a matter of morality. Morality is CLEARLY limited to something more specific than that. You're not being clear on your word usage, being flippy-floppy, meaning one thing here and another there. If you can't even clearly define what you're talking about, then I agree, let's end the debate here.
Flannel Jesus wrote: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.
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.
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.If you prove that it's objective, but have to define it into uselessness to do so, then you've not won.
Flannel Jesus wrote: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.
While I think there is no essential distinction between prudence and morality—both concern how you ought to act—I do think there is a difference of degree. We can say that morality concerns how you ought to act when how you ought to act matters most to you. In other words, we use the term ‘moral’ when the stakes really matter. Thus, whether you masturbate with your left hand and or your right is not a moral issue, though perhaps can be a question of prudence, and even some importance. But whether you will save someone’s life with your left hand or you right is a moral issue, and it would be a serious moral failure to attempt with your left hand when you are right-handed, and your right hand is freely accessible. –Someone’s life is at stake man.
Flannel Jesus wrote: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)
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."
Flannel Jesus wrote: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.
Clearly it is---if the history of philosophy matters at all.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.
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.
Flannel Jesus wrote: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?
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.I don't think that moral oughts are useful. I think practical, or prudential oughts are useful.
P1. You talk, think, and act as if morality were real.
P2. Common-sense would tell you there are things you should do and things you shouldn’t.
P3. The best explanation of common-sense, and how you talk/think/act is that there are moral facts.
P4. The best explanation is the one we consider true.
C. Moral facts exist.
Mo_ wrote: every single argument I made works no matter what you think is at rock bottom intrinsically valuable
Value is in the eye of the beholder, and most certainly some people value pain. One example against is all I need to negate the "intrinsically" qualifier.
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.Carleas wrote: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.
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.Again, this exhibits the strength of the "no it doesn't" position in a debate like this.
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).
Mo_ wrote: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.
Flannel Jesus wrote: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.
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