This is yet another use of "ought".
Why? It appears to be what we have been talking about - finding grounds to say that women ought not be forcibly coerced into wearing burqas.
If we were consistent utilitarians we should favour forcible organ donation in such circumstances
Sure. But we're not suggesting a utilitarian approach.
Not everyone is a utilitarian though: Deontologists like Kant or Jesus care about right actions, not right outcomes, and might well argue for a distinction between diverting a locomotive and killing someone for spare parts which is morally decisive to them even though the utility of the outcomes is identical in each case.
Exactly. These examples demonstrate that we care about something other than utility (hence the reason utilitarianism is not in play) if two scenarios which are the same in terms of utility lead to different choices. It means that we have a way to distinguish between choices based on right actions vs. right outcomes without appealing to long-dead authority figures.
I don't think moral claims can be limited to just situations where we discover that some of our behaviours are logically inconsistent with others. For example if we imagine a society that is consistently horrible, such that there is absolutely no incoherence in the behaviour that "is" in their society, we might still have the urge to criticise that society on the basis that we think they "ought" not to behave that way.
We wouldn't be able to treat a horrible, but logically consistent society, as different. The knowledge that Piggy has been referring to tells us that it cannot be presumed that those people living in that horrible society are different from the rest of humanity - that they are there because they are wired differently or fail to have much of anything in common with other humans. So it becomes of interest to figure why a horrible society is the same as ours.
If we look at self-interest, there appears to be a difference between a terrorist who blows himself up in a crowded mall and my husband taking me to a nice restaurant for dinner, but if we break it down we might show that they are the same in that they are both hoping for sex (from the promised 72 virgins for the terrorist). And we can recognize that this is something they can be wrong about and whether they are wrong is discoverable.
Getting back to the horrible society, what we would try to understand is why/how they are the same as as those societies which are not horrible, and then discover whether the apparent horribleness is because they are wrong with respect to their choices. And what is meant by that, is that they would make a different choice if they had the information that they were wrong. If it were known that the terrorist altered his choice to blow himself up based on the promise of 72 virgins (per the kind of scenario investigation i mentioned earlier), then if he received overwhelming information from sources he considered credible and trustworthy that this was wrong, then he ought not blow himself up. If those in a horrible society are, like us, trying to ensure some degree of security, and it is those things which they think provide security which also make it horrible , then knowledge that they are wrong about their security provides grounds for saying that it ought not be horrible.
Note that this is different from saying that science can inform moral claims. In that case, that source of the credible and trustworthy information would be science. Instead, this is what science has to say about the moral claims.
A clear contradiction between the way we treat two cases that should be identical is certainly proof that we are engaging in incoherent or inconsistent thinking, but most conceptions of morality also make it possible to criticise consistently awful behaviour as well as inconsistent behaviour.
Well, we may end up concluding that we are not rational agents, but that's not how we proceed. As Piggy explained more thoroughly in post 652, incoherent or inconsistent answers are not taken to represent human's ability to be rational, but rather reflects how well we managed to explain our moral values. If two scenarios are the same in terms of utility, but we still distinguish between them, then utility is an insufficient explanation. Piggy goes on to explain how the two can be distinguished in terms of the responsible agent. And of course, this can also be tested anew with two scenarios which appear to have the same responsible agent.
I'm pretty sure that's just a misunderstanding: see below.
Ah, okay, I think I see where we got on to separate tracks here.
Teleological interpretations of physical phenomena ("the rock wants to be lower") are pre-scientific.
Teleological statements about or by beings with preferences ("Ted wants an ice cream") aren't pre-scientific at all.
You may call it teleological, but it is also, as Harris points out, a factual statement about a conscious being.
Moral rules almost always (I can think of an exception or two, like the purported "new covenant" Jesus presented which is claimed to have changed the moral rules so the old ones no longer applied) apply forward in time, and hence are teleological in that sense. If I think that murder is wrong now then that implies I should think that murder will be wrong tomorrow and I ought to take steps to prevent future murders. So if we have any "ought" beliefs at all it's highly likely they will have a teleological component.
But this doesn't seem to be at all meaningful. Again, to think that there is some sort of distinction to be made out of considering the past, present and future separately doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with how we approach questions from a scientific perspective. And after all, it is science which has shown us that that these are sort of artifacts of conscious experience, rather than objective labels which can be applied to an event.
Piggy was previously arguing that his ideas were the True Scientific Morality and that everything else was pre-scientific, and I thought you were arguing the same point, but clearly you were actually on a different track entirely.
Piggy and I are arguing two different perspectives (and he isn't arguing for a True Scientific Morality), but I think they converge onto the same general location. Which is also typical of a scientific approach.
Linda
