What is the appeal of "objective morality"

[phiwum]

I'm still not sure exactly why do you think it makes premise 2 the same. Just like with physics, a rock still falls in the same time even if a human isn't around to calculate it, a mathematical theorem is true or false regardless of whether a human is around to calculate it.

The most trivial example is statistics. If a die has a 1/6 chance of landing on a particular side, it will still have the same chance even if it just fell of a shelf in an eathquake, with no human around.

Or if you want maths theorems, Bayes still applies whether there are humans around to calculate those odds or not. The probability for a bird to be a penguin if it's got a black back is still the same, regardless of whether a human calculates it or not.

The theorem of choice? Sure. It just refers to cartesian products in a nutshell, and you can find cartesian products involved in describing for example joint systems. But guess what? The possible state or phase combinations of such a system are still the same, regardless of whether there's any human around to do the maths or not.

None of that requires a judgment in the same way that morality does.

First, let me say that I'm not committed to the claim that mathematics is fundamentally dependent on human opinion. I'm also not saying that mathematics is dependent on human opinion if morality is. I agree that there are fundamental differences between the two.

I was trying to show that Ian's argument works just as well if we substitute certain mathematical concepts for morality, but the conclusion would be absurd in that case. Hence, his argument doesn't seem to work.

Since then, Ian has said I misrepresented his conclusion, and I confess I am still unsure what conclusion he had in mind, so let's leave the argument as a whole out of the question and just focus on whether or not the second premise works with mathematical concepts substituted for morality. The second premise was:

No other known living things, have ever expressed any such notion [as morality].​

Clearly, no other known living things have expressed any such notion as categorical limits, the axiom of choice or the continuum hypothesis[1]. That is all the premise says. It doesn't say anything about whether nature is somehow consistent with certain claims about these concepts (which I chose because there's no apparent physical analogues, by the way, but that is really beside the point).

So, the second premise as stated is, I think, obviously true when we substitute mathematical concepts for morality.

[1] Or Bayes' theorem, but for dull, technical reasons that we needn't get into at present, I'd prefer to focus on these concepts. We can talk about why I don't think Bayes' theorem is a good choice for this point, but in any case, I'm only committed to the claim that certain mathematical concepts work for this argument, and that's enough.

 

[phiwum]

Hm. Intersubjective seems like a useful word I had never heard about

Yes, it's certainly a useful notion when we're discussing morality. Many folks who would balk at claims that morality is objective will agree that it's intersubjective in some appropriate sense.

 

[HansMustermann]

I get what you're trying to do. It's an ad absurdum. It might even have a point. As I was saying, I'm largely with Mill on the issue. I just think that the ad absurdum is not well done.

Morality CONSISTS of those notions, and doesn't exist at all if you remove the notions.

Whereas having a notion about a physical or mathematical truth has that key word: "about". It's not an equivalent of morality, it's an equivalent of something at a meta level.

If you remove notions like "axiom of choice", the underlying truth doesn't disappear too. Certain quantum systems will still continue to be basically based on a cartesian product of the possible states of their subsystems anyway.

That said, I will concede that his second premise is imprecisely enough formulated. So, yeah, I can understand where you're going with it. Just, well, I don't think "expressing the notion" was a very good phrasing on his part, nor particularly productive to follow literally.

 

[phiwum]

I don't think I did say it was a "ridiculous" question. For some reason you keep misunderstanding what I actually wrote by adding things, i.e. attributing things, that I'd never said at all.

Er, yes, this is why I asked you to tell me what the conclusion of your argument is. Look, am I right in presuming that the following two statements are premises in an argument?

(Premise) The only known opinion ever expressed about any such notion as "morality", objective or otherwise, is an opinion voiced only by humans.
(Premise) No other known living things, have ever expressed any such notion.​

I took a guess at what the conclusion was, based on your post. You told me I was wrong, so either tell me what the conclusion of this argument is, perhaps by adding implicit premises, or tell me that I was wrong to think that these were premises in any argument at all. Don't you agree that this is a sensible solution to avoid further misinterpretations?

Thanks much.

Oh, I don't think it's at all "obvious" that questions about so-called "morality" are somehow "not fundamentally scientific questions". And one thing that we have certainly learned from science is that explanations for "real" events in this universe (as opposed to mere thoughts or verbal claims) are very often not at all obvious.

If you are going to say that something we call "morality" is not actually open to scientific investigation and explanation (are you saying that?), then I think that you first have to give a clear and precise definition of what "morality" actually is.

I don't think I can give a clear and precise definition, but perhaps I can list some essential features of morality. Part of the reason, incidentally, that a clear and precise definition is not possible is that the answer to the question, "What is morality?" depends on certain meta-ethical considerations. A realist will not answer the question in the same manner as an emotivist[1], for instance.

So, let me answer as a realist would. A fundamental feature of moral norms is that they are about the appropriateness of an act, not to fulfill this or that subjective end of the actor, but in order to attain some objective good[2]. The heart of a moral claim is an "ought" that is intended to express some objective good.

Now, we can actually drop the "objective" part for now, and just observe that moral theories consist of normative claims, that is, "ought" statements. Science does not deal in such normative claims. Scientific theories are purely descriptive in nature. The only way in which we can derive "ought" claims[3] from scientific theories is if we add some value judgment -- If I desire a fire, then (thanks to certain scientific facts) I ought to be sure there is enough oxygen in the area, but that I do indeed desire a fire is not something that I learn from science.

Insofar, then, as the currency of morality is normative claims and science deals in descriptions instead, the fundamental questions of morality are not scientific questions. Science can tell me what people believe they ought to do, but it can't tell me what they ought to do.

[1] Emotivism states that so-called moral claims are not claims at all,
convey no proposition at all, but rather are mere expressions of emotional reactions. If, for instance, I say, "Murder is wrong," I am saying nothing more than, "Murder! Yuck!"

[2] Even some moral realists may balk at this much. For Kantians, the moral status of an act is independent of its fitness to attain any end.

[3] Sometimes, "ought" statements aren't literally normative, as when one says, "It ought to rain today." I'm talking about normative "ought" statements.

 

[phiwum]

I get what you're trying to do. It's an ad absurdum. It might even have a point. As I was saying, I'm largely with Mill on the issue. I just think that the ad absurdum is not well done.

Morality CONSISTS of those notions, and doesn't exist at all if you remove the notions.

Whereas having a notion about a physical or mathematical truth has that key word: "about". It's not an equivalent of morality, it's an equivalent of something at a meta level.

If you remove notions like "axiom of choice", the underlying truth doesn't disappear too. Certain quantum systems will still continue to be basically based on a cartesian product of the possible states of their subsystems anyway.

That said, I will concede that his second premise is imprecisely enough formulated. So, yeah, I can understand where you're going with it. Just, well, I don't think "expressing the notion" was a very good phrasing on his part, nor particularly productive to follow literally.

I can only try to understand what Ian actually wrote. A few times already, he's said that I misinterpreted him when I tried to infer his meaning.

I'm not denying, as I said before, that there may be good arguments that prove his point, but I was trying to evaluate the given argument, not other arguments.

 

[phiwum]

I get what you're trying to do. It's an ad absurdum. It might even have a point. As I was saying, I'm largely with Mill on the issue. I just think that the ad absurdum is not well done.

Morality CONSISTS of those notions, and doesn't exist at all if you remove the notions.

Whereas having a notion about a physical or mathematical truth has that key word: "about". It's not an equivalent of morality, it's an equivalent of something at a meta level.

I should have responded more clearly here.

I'm not talking about notions about mathematical truths. I'm talking about mathematical concepts (i.e. notions) themselves. Maybe it's less clear, since some of the things I used as notions (axiom of choice, continuum hypothesis) are statements. My first example (categorical limit) is a better example of a notion, but less well-known.

So, let me try this: ordinal numbers in set theory. That's a notion. The only known opinions about ordinal numbers are voiced by humans, and no other living things have ever expressed a notion of ordinals.

So, I'm not talking about notions about some mathematical truth or other, but the concepts themselves, just as Ian was.

 

[phiwum]

If you remove notions like "axiom of choice", the underlying truth doesn't disappear too. Certain quantum systems will still continue to be basically based on a cartesian product of the possible states of their subsystems anyway.

Hans, this is a bit off- topic from our main point, but are you saying here that certain quantum systems are "based on" infinite dimensional Cartesian products? If not, then the axiom of choice is irrelevant. It is equivalent to the statement that an infinite product of non-empty sets is non-empty and has no bearing on finite products.

Just curious.

 

[IanS]

I don't know that gravity is a fact. I am not a real research scientist. In general I trust the people who know that gravity is fact. So when one of them know that another person as a fact can be wrong, I simply ask how it is known that is fact.

Well you previously gave gravity as your own example of a "fact". And look also at your highlighted words above where you just said that there are people who are to be trusted who do say that they "know that gravity is a fact" ... which scientists have published research papers claiming to show that gravity is a "fact" in the sense of meaning it's a literal certainty?

As I explained previously - physicists do of course think that scientific Theories are factual. We do think QM is generally correct (for example). But if you ask a physicist to be really precise and definitive, then they are unlikely to insist that what we presently describe as "gravity" is an absolute fact in the sense that it's a certainty exactly as we believe it to be.

There are of course extremely good evidential and theoretical/mathematical reasons why we think such things as gravity are almost certain to be the way science describes and understands them ... but ever since we discovered the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, it appears that we should no longer talk in terms of anything being literally 100% certain fact in this universe.

By the way - if you are presently studying philosophy, do you not think you might have a better understanding of what is likely to be true about the universe around us if you switched to core sciences instead (i.e. maths, physics, chemistry ... and perhaps biology)?

 

[phiwum]

Kant, for instance, was interested in the necessary preconditions for one to be rational and he believed that one of these preconditions was that a rational being necessarily values existence as a rational being.

The hilited certainly looks like a definition.

I honestly have no idea why you think that this is a definition, much less how you conclude "He defines being rational as being a rational being?"

A necessary precondition for being a perfect square is being a non-negative natural number. This is not a definition of "perfect square".

 

[phiwum]

I see I'm not the only one with this problem.

Funny for you to say that, when you evidently think that a very partial list of necessary preconditions is the same thing as a definition.

In any case, if I should misunderstand you, please say so and clarify your point. Any misinterpretation is entirely unintentional.

 

[Leumas]

...
I think it's reasonably obvious that the questions surrounding the nature of morality are not fundamentally scientific questions.
...

Utter rubbish and poppycock!!

Only people who want to create trapdoors through which to shove imaginary friends and sky daddies would say stuff like the above statement.

Everything in nature is scientifically researchable and investigable.

People who claim that there are things that do not come under the purview of science want to confound and confuse with linguistic legerdemain and puffs of semantic smoke under which to materialize their wishful thinking and illusions.

All their sleights of pen and tongue are of course in order to furtively sneak in their religious and supernatural insults to reason and sanity and establish them as the magical denizens of those fissures and cracks they cunningly created and shrewdly declared off limits for investigation except by their claptrap sophistry and apologetic casuistry.

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

Well you previously gave gravity as your own example of a "fact". And look also at your highlighted words above where you just said that there are people who are to be trusted who do say that they "know that gravity is a fact" ... which scientists have published research papers claiming to show that gravity is a "fact" in the sense of meaning it's a literal certainty?

As I explained previously - physicists do of course think that scientific Theories are factual. We do think QM is generally correct (for example). But if you ask a physicist to be really precise and definitive, then they are unlikely to insist that what we presently describe as "gravity" is an absolute fact in the sense that it's a certainty exactly as we believe it to be.

There are of course extremely good evidential and theoretical/mathematical reasons why we think such things as gravity are almost certain to be the way science describes and understands them ... but ever since we discovered the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, it appears that we should no longer talk in terms of anything being literally 100% certain fact in this universe.

By the way - if you are presently studying philosophy, do you not think you might have a better understanding of what is likely to be true about the universe around us if you switched to core sciences instead (i.e. maths, physics, chemistry ... and perhaps biology)?

I don't get it??? Why do you project a need for certainty onto me. I don't need 100% certainty.
Further why do you assume that I find the concept of truth important. If I am studying philosophy it could be that I accept the redundancy theory of truth. I.e. I don't what to know about truth, I want to know how you understand and explain yourself and the rest of the universe. There is no universe around us, we are in the universe and a part of the universe. I understand why the idea of the model/map and landscape makes sense, but it has its limit. Right now I am a part of the landscape, sitting in front of a computer writing an answer to you.

So as real scientists have a theory of gravity with all of the above of what you posted in mind, do they have a theory of being wrong?
In short and again with the above in mind if gravity is a fact, is it the same kind of fact, that a human is wrong?

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

Utter rubbish and poppycock!!

Everything in nature is scientifically researchable and investigable.

Only people who want to create trapdoors through which to shove imaginary friends and sky daddies would say stuff like the above statement.

Only people who want to confound and confuse with linguistic legerdemain and puffs of semantic smoke under which to materialize their wishful thinking and illusions claim that there are things that do not come under the purview of science.

All their sleights of pen and tongue are of course in order to furtively sneak in their religious and supernatural insults to reason and sanity and establish them as the magical denizens of those fissures and cracks they cunningly created and shrewdly declared off limits for investigation except by their claptrap sophistry and apologetic casuistry.

Fair enough - could you post a link to a site about the scientific theory of morality. What is the international measurement standard for morality? And so on.
It is simple, Leumas - give the evidence. I.e. the theory.

 

[phiwum]

Utter rubbish and poppycock!!

Everything in nature is scientifically researchable and investigable.

Only people who want to create trapdoors through which to shove imaginary friends and sky daddies would say stuff like the above statement.

Only people who want to confound and confuse with linguistic legerdemain and puffs of semantic smoke under which to materialize their wishful thinking and illusions claim that there are things that do not come under the purview of science.

All their sleights of pen and tongue are of course in order to furtively sneak in their religious and supernatural insults to reason and sanity and establish them as the magical denizens of those fissures and cracks they cunningly created and shrewdly declared off limits for investigation except by their claptrap sophistry and apologetic casuistry.

Yes, that's nice, Leumas. It's good that you have such deep and passionate ideas.

It would be nice, of course, if you would stop accusing me of acting as a proponent of religion on this forum, but I can see that you're quite emotional about this idea that all questions, from mathematics to politics, from aesthetics to music criticism, are fundamentally scientific in nature.

I mean, it's not true, of course, it's a wildly naive notion of the scope of science, but it's really, really good you have an opinion on such matters.

ETA: By the way, you have quite a nuanced view on how spelling corrections can be ad hominems, even in posts where no disagreement occurs. I wonder what you think about statements like, "Only people who want to create trapdoors through which to shove imaginary friends and sky daddies would say stuff like the above statement."

 

[Leumas]

Fair enough - could you post a link to a site about the scientific theory of morality. What is the international measurement standard for morality? And so on.
It is simple, Leumas - give the evidence. I.e. the theory.

Read books on psychology, sociology, anthropology and biology.

But to help you out here are a couple of examples... have a look here

'Selfish gene' Darwinism differs from earlier versions of evolutionary theory in its focus on one key question: Why cooperate? The faculty of speech which distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species is an aspect of human social competence. By inference, it evolved in the context of uniquely human strategies of social cooperation. In these chapters, therefore, Darwinism in its modern, socially aware form provides our theoretical point of departure.

Where, previously, attention has focused on speech as the biological competence of individuals, here our themes are social. To study communication is inevitably to study social structure, social conflict, social strategies, social intelligence….​

Also Look Here

Urban humanity is considered as a product of both biological and social evolution. Evolutionary genetics shows that when there is genetic competition among the cooperators (as for humans but not for the social insects), great limitations are placed upon the degree of socially useful, individually self-sacrificial altruism that biological evolution can produce. Human urban social complexity is a product of social evolution and has had to counter with inhibitory moral norms the biological selfishness which genetic competition has continually selected. Because the issues are so complex and the available data are so uncompelling, all of this should be interpreted more as a challenge to an important new area for psychological research than as established conclusions. It is emphasized, however, that these are important issues to which psychology should give much greater attention, and that scientific reasons exist for believing that there can be profound system wisdom in the belief systems our social tradition has provided us with​

 

[Leumas]

...
I mean, it's not true, of course, it's a wildly naive notion of the scope of science, but it's really, really good you have an opinion on such matters.
...

Yup... that is what I thought you might say!!!

Thanks for proving me right on all counts!!!

 

[phiwum]

Read books on psychology, sociology, anthropology and biology.

But to help you out here are a couple of examples... have a look here

'Selfish gene' Darwinism differs from earlier versions of evolutionary theory in its focus on one key question: Why cooperate? The faculty of speech which distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species is an aspect of human social competence. By inference, it evolved in the context of uniquely human strategies of social cooperation. In these chapters, therefore, Darwinism in its modern, socially aware form provides our theoretical point of departure.

Where, previously, attention has focused on speech as the biological competence of individuals, here our themes are social. To study communication is inevitably to study social structure, social conflict, social strategies, social intelligence….​

Although this is asked in terms of "Why cooperate?" the question is answered in purely descriptive terms. Humans have evolved with a tendency to cooperate, because those who cooperate are more likely to have passed on their genes than those who do not cooperate.

But, of course, this doesn't give reason for a given individual to choose to cooperate in a particular situation. A woman past child-bearing years does not think about the success of cooperation strategies in evolutionary terms in trying to decide whether or not to help someone with a flat tire call for AAA. Rather, evolutionary stories help us understand how it is that certain biological tendencies and social norms have become prevalent. But that's not the question I'm interested when I'm trying to decide what I ought to do.

Also Look Here

Urban humanity is considered as a product of both biological and social evolution. Evolutionary genetics shows that when there is genetic competition among the cooperators (as for humans but not for the social insects), great limitations are placed upon the degree of socially useful, individually self-sacrificial altruism that biological evolution can produce. Human urban social complexity is a product of social evolution and has had to counter with inhibitory moral norms the biological selfishness which genetic competition has continually selected. Because the issues are so complex and the available data are so uncompelling, all of this should be interpreted more as a challenge to an important new area for psychological research than as established conclusions. It is emphasized, however, that these are important issues to which psychology should give much greater attention, and that scientific reasons exist for believing that there can be profound system wisdom in the belief systems our social tradition has provided us with​

Same thing. We can certainly discuss morality in descriptive terms: how did this or that moral norm come to such prominence in this society? Is there an evolutionary story that explains its presence?

But that's different than questions such as whether such moral norms have any objective justification. Such questions are fundamentally normative in nature, and science deals in description, not norms.

 

[phiwum]

Yup... that is what I thought you might say!!!

Thanks for proving me right on all counts!!!

You're more than welcome, I'm sure. Except I didn't prove you right on any count aside from that where you predicted I would disagree.

 

[I Am The Scum]

Where does science tell me why I should eat food?

Science has a lot to say about what happens if I don't, but why should I?

 

[I Am The Scum]

How does science help me analyze the validity of an argument?