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There is no "ought"

I Ratant said:
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Yes, we ought not to do that, lest the more impressionable see beyond our guidelines of how they ought to behave themselves, and learn there are shades of gray between right and wrong.
Only our words ex-cathedra are meaningful.
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There are no shades of gray between right and wrong anymore than there are types of angels between god and the devil.

Both god and right are crude, outdated tools for navigating the world.
 
There are innumerable shades of gray.
Actions can have both a good and a bad conclusion... curing/preventing a greater injury by inflicting a lesser.
Happens all the time.
 
I Ratant said:
There are innumerable shades of gray.
Actions can have both a good and a bad conclusion... curing/preventing a greater injury by inflicting a lesser.
Happens all the time.
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You mistake my meaning.
I'm not saying there are no shades of gray because I deny the complexity, but because I deny the linear construction of that complexity implied by a continuum between good and bad.

Instead, there are specific outcomes which can be viewed from the vantage point of specific goals.
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
Similarly, there is no “right” or “wrong”.
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But there IS majority rules. Those who deviate from accepted norms are considered wrong by the majority. In that case, morality is dictated by the masses, rather than a person's individual thought processes. This is where the morality argument becomes convoluted... When you shift the discussion from many people to an individual, the entire context is changed, yet the word "morality" is still present. It's like trying to explain a sociology problem with psychology.
The only way to have a meaningful discussion is to clearly define the words you will use.

Cavemonster said:
The important differences between the two are at that level at which I'm urging the discussion be conducted.
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Again, I think the lack of a common definition is usually the culprit to a non-constructive conversation. That's also the case even when you attempt to strip morality to it's components. For example, you and Manopolus mentioned in passing the issue of killing in wartime vs. murder. In doing so, you both used the words "murder" and "killing" as if they were the same word with the same definition. They are not. ;) Soldiers killing other soldiers in war are not breaking the law, and can't really be morally compared to a guy who murders people on the street -- unless the context of the deaths is shifted, or the words more clearly defined.

It's too easy to assume the person you're arguing with knows what you're talking about and how you're using your words.
 
MikeSun5 said:
Again, I think the lack of a common definition is usually the culprit to a non-constructive conversation. That's also the case even when you attempt to strip morality to it's components. For example, you and Manopolus mentioned in passing the issue of killing in wartime vs. murder. In doing so, you both used the words "murder" and "killing" as if they were the same word with the same definition. They are not. ;) Soldiers killing other soldiers in war are not breaking the law, and can't really be morally compared to a guy who murders people on the street -- unless the context of the deaths is shifted, or the words more clearly defined.

It's too easy to assume the person you're arguing with knows what you're talking about and how you're using your words.
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I absolutely agree with you on common definitions. And you're very right on the importance of unpacking killing and murder.

In the context or "moral" qualities though, I think they are either meaningless or stand ins for various qualities that aren't often useful in ethical discussions when they are lumped together.

As you noted above, one facet of "good" is "What the majority agree to support" another would be "What would result in a positive(physical, financial, experiential etc) outcome for the group".

Sometimes, often even, these underlying meanings are in contradiction. Technically you could ascribe one of those meanings to "good" at the beginning of a conversation and call out the others explicitly, but that's likely confusing for anyone joining in the middle, and frankly, the exercise of making that assignment is likely more time consuming and detrimental to civil discourse than just explicitly naming all underlying meanings and leaving those vague normative words out of it completely.
 
Cavemonster said:
Sometimes, often even, these underlying meanings are in contradiction. Technically you could ascribe one of those meanings to "good" at the beginning of a conversation and call out the others explicitly, but that's likely confusing for anyone joining in the middle, and frankly, the exercise of making that assignment is likely more time consuming and detrimental to civil discourse than just explicitly naming all underlying meanings and leaving those vague normative words out of it completely.
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The moral concepts of right and wrong are so entrenched in our minds, I think leaving those words out would be even more difficult. When discussing issues that rely on opinion for debate (abortion, war, etc.), most people tend to adopt an attitude of "this is what I'd do because ...."
Turning off one's ego and opinion for the sake of a productive debate is a great idea, but not likely for most people I've spoken with. Unless of course you're debating with a Vulcan or a robot. Or that hot alien chick from V.
 
MikeSun5 said:
The moral concepts of right and wrong are so entrenched in our minds, I think leaving those words out would be even more difficult. When discussing issues that rely on opinion for debate (abortion, war, etc.), most people tend to adopt an attitude of "this is what I'd do because ...."
Turning off one's ego and opinion for the sake of a productive debate is a great idea, but not likely for most people I've spoken with. Unless of course you're debating with a Vulcan or a robot. Or that hot alien chick from V.
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The moral concept of a god was pretty entrenched in western society for a long time too. We're starting to get over that.

It's not a matter of turning off your ego and opinion, but of ceasing to conflate them with objective truths about the state of the universe.
 
One thing that seems to have been left out of this discussion is empathy. Even if acting with aggression and guile might benefit us and, if directed outward against another society, might not even be destructive of one's own society; we may well find a deep-seated emotional barrier against acting in such a manner, even to our own and our own society's detriment, based on our ability to pet ourselves in the other person's / society's place. Empathy or sympathy might be the source of higher ethical standards such as, for example, non-reciprocal altruism.
 
TimCallahan said:
One thing that seems to have been left out of this discussion is empathy. Even if acting with aggression and guile might benefit us and, if directed outward against another society, might not even be destructive of one's own society; we may well find a deep-seated emotional barrier against acting in such a manner, even to our own and our own society's detriment, based on our ability to pet ourselves in the other person's / society's place. Empathy or sympathy might be the source of higher ethical standards such as, for example, non-reciprocal altruism.
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Absolutely, but it's important to understand that empathy is not morality, in the sense that morality is talked about by moral absolutists.

Empathy, and other kinds of emotional/psychological attachment creates a new risk/reward system in addition to the one provided by the physical world. I don't bang my hand with a hammer because that hurts me physically. I don't bang your hand with a hammer because that hurts me through empathy.

And empathy varies wildly from person to person and culture to culture. We all have mirror neurons, but they are activated in very different circumstances. Some people are able to turn off any empathy when they feel for social reasons that the person suffering "deserves" to. For some people that's terrorists being tortured, for other's it's homeless people suffering for their own "bad decisions" and for yet others it's whole groups of people based on the color of their skin.

That's not even mentioning most people's empathy towards non humans which runs the range of people who can cry for sea sponges to those who have no problem slaughtering cows by hand.

Empathy, along with practical concerns as outcomes are why most people prefer a "moral" society.
 
It's an interesting concept - the idea that the universe is entirely value free, and that all outcomes are of equivalent value. It's interesting because even though it's quite a popular idea among materialists who think seriously about their beliefs, it's also something to which people pay lip service, and then ignore. Do the materialists on JREF really think that it doesn't actually matter if they, say, smash a child's head with a hammer? Or that it only matters subject to some consequence that we wish to avoid? I don't think so.

However, it's reasonable to say - OK, maybe human beings are unable to come to terms with the rational world, in practice. We can logically show that value has no meaning, and that there is no outcome that is better than any other outcome - but our evolutionary drives prevent us from accepting this emotionally.

This just about hangs together in a schizoid kind of way. The materialist can thus live a normal life, assigning value wherever he likes, while at the same time adding in parenthesis that this is simply a pragmatic choice in order to achieve certain aims - these aims being arbitrary and of equivalent value to any other aims that anyone else might choose.

Except... value in the universe is not something that is just made up. It's something we directly experience. I know that different outcomes have different value - because they have different value to me. We understand value before we understand anything else. A baby realises that {being fed} and ~{being fed} are not states of equal value. It knows that before it understands what the universe is, and asserts its contention, quite noisily. Parents learn quickly that the values of the baby overlap with their own values, and cannot be considered in isolation.

Knowing that the universe is not, in face, value-free, may present problems for materialism. It doesn't have any issues for science, which deals with different things in a different way.
 
westprog said:
It's an interesting concept - the idea that the universe is entirely value free, and that all outcomes are of equivalent value. It's interesting because even though it's quite a popular idea among materialists who think seriously about their beliefs, it's also something to which people pay lip service, and then ignore. Do the materialists on JREF really think that it doesn't actually matter if they, say, smash a child's head with a hammer? Or that it only matters subject to some consequence that we wish to avoid? I don't think so.

However, it's reasonable to say - OK, maybe human beings are unable to come to terms with the rational world, in practice. We can logically show that value has no meaning, and that there is no outcome that is better than any other outcome - but our evolutionary drives prevent us from accepting this emotionally.

This just about hangs together in a schizoid kind of way. The materialist can thus live a normal life, assigning value wherever he likes, while at the same time adding in parenthesis that this is simply a pragmatic choice in order to achieve certain aims - these aims being arbitrary and of equivalent value to any other aims that anyone else might choose.

Except... value in the universe is not something that is just made up. It's something we directly experience. I know that different outcomes have different value - because they have different value to me. We understand value before we understand anything else. A baby realises that {being fed} and ~{being fed} are not states of equal value. It knows that before it understands what the universe is, and asserts its contention, quite noisily. Parents learn quickly that the values of the baby overlap with their own values, and cannot be considered in isolation.

Knowing that the universe is not, in face, value-free, may present problems for materialism. It doesn't have any issues for science, which deals with different things in a different way.
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This seems like a bit of a strawman. Actually, a lot of one.

You state that you can experience values therefore the universe has values, so materialists are wrong.

Um, no. That's actually exactly the point that we who propose this idea of morality are saying. That values are based on ourselves and our cultures. That we don't smash a child's head in with a hammer because of emotional consequences for ourselves (I know I would feel bad) and societal consequences (ostracism, jail time, possibility of being killed in revenge etc.) is exactly what we propose.

However we also propose that outside of ourselves, our culture and our species the action has absolutely no moral base. Within the context of the universe as a whole, nothing that we can do is wrong, be it rape, murder or whatever you can dream of a person doing that we as a species would find abhorrent. There is no actual value attached to these actions because there is nothing in the universe other than ourselves which gives a toss.

That doesn't mean we think that you can do whatever the hell you like and everyone else can go hang, it means that rules, laws and ethics are an entirely human construction, and cannot be said to be a universal absolute thing. Hell, even within our own cultures, we have variations and subjectivity when it comes to morality.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
This seems like a bit of a strawman. Actually, a lot of one.

You state that you can experience values therefore the universe has values, so materialists are wrong.

Um, no. That's actually exactly the point that we who propose this idea of morality are saying. That values are based on ourselves and our cultures. That we don't smash a child's head in with a hammer because of emotional consequences for ourselves (I know I would feel bad) and societal consequences (ostracism, jail time, possibility of being killed in revenge etc.) is exactly what we propose.

However we also propose that outside of ourselves, our culture and our species the action has absolutely no moral base. Within the context of the universe as a whole, nothing that we can do is wrong, be it rape, murder or whatever you can dream of a person doing that we as a species would find abhorrent. There is no actual value attached to these actions because there is nothing in the universe other than ourselves which gives a toss.

That doesn't mean we think that you can do whatever the hell you like and everyone else can go hang, it means that rules, laws and ethics are an entirely human construction, and cannot be said to be a universal absolute thing. Hell, even within our own cultures, we have variations and subjectivity when it comes to morality.
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The fact that I experience values - not choose them, actually have experiences with different value to me - proves that the universe is not value-free because I am part of the universe.
 
westprog said:
The fact that I experience values - not choose them, actually have experiences with different value to me - proves that the universe is not value-free because I am part of the universe.
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The phrase "The universe is value-free" is yours, not mine. It's a straw man in regards to the subject matter. Values exist, but what they are are preferences of humans.

Let's say your premise is that right and wrong exist outside of human preferences. How would you measure them? In what physical, observable structures of the universe do they exist?

You feel that crushing a child's head is wrong, therefore... that wrongness is absolute? Let's say you woke up tommorow and felt it was okay, would that prove it's actually right? What differentiates your values from anyone else's and how can you tell which ones are right? If there is no possible way to test different opinions of right and wrong, how can they be said to exist?

Falsifiability and evidence are the benchmarks for the value of a hypothesis. The hypothesis that objective moral truths exist fails both of them.

We can say that there are some widely held, even near universally held moral beliefs, and we could argue that some beliefs are nearly inevitable as emergent from the biological ground of human beings. This is a tenuous position, a tough one to assemble evidence for, and ultimately inapplicable to any moral discussion. Any moral truths that might fall into this category, by definition would be absolutely safe from debate, so aren't really relevant to this discussion.
 
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Cavemonster said:
In the context of this thread, I made conditional prescriptions based on stated end goals. That's very different from normative statements or pure prescriptive statements. If you want conversation to be productive, then you should stop talking about morality. By adding that condition, it ceases to be a broad unmeasurable, frankly meaningless quality of "should" and becomes a claim about the real world, and likely outcomes of particular behaviors, something that can be observed.

"If you want to stay dry, you should wear a rain coat." Makes a claim about the observable world.

There is no ought on it's own, but there very much is an ought if.
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It is obvious to everyone here that there is no such thing as a "universal morality" which we need or should use as a standard of behavior.

So are you suggesting that each situation, or, even better, circumstance, has associated with it (for want of a better term) a "circumstantial morality" or "circumstantial ethos" or call it what you will? A circumstantial morality that can theoretically be different for every circumstance -- although, in all cases, it has for every circumstance both: 1) guarding "No!" and "Yes!" imperatives with no shades of gray, and also optional maybe's and maybe not's, whose shades of gray act more like guidelines than guard rails?
 
There is no ought until they force your hand into a vat of acid. Then there is definitely an "ought! Right?
 
Radrook said:
There is no ought until they force your hand into a vat of acid. Then there is definitely an "ought! Right?
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Why should that situation make an inivisible, impossible thing suddenly exist?

I can say that I passionately dislike such an action and that it has a very negative effect on me. In a broader sense, I can say it's counterproductive to the society many of us would like to live in if people go around putting hands in acid.

But those are statements of preference.
 
eijah said:
It is obvious to everyone here that there is no such thing as a "universal morality" which we need or should use as a standard of behavior.

So are you suggesting that each situation, or, even better, circumstance, has associated with it (for want of a better term) a "circumstantial morality" or "circumstantial ethos" or call it what you will? A circumstantial morality that can theoretically be different for every circumstance -- although, in all cases, it has for every circumstance both: 1) guarding "No!" and "Yes!" imperatives with no shades of gray, and also optional maybe's and maybe not's, whose shades of gray act more like guidelines than guard rails?
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No, I'm suggesting moral anti-realism.
Not that what is "right" varies circumstantially, but that it is an absurd concept, mostly used when people want to dress up their statements of preference.
 
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