(July 28, 2022 at 6:01 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

(July 27, 2022 at 6:00 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Well, I suppose we're dealing with a particular formal definition of "coherence" as well, as this certainly doesn't meet the criteria for literary coherence.  Any child capable of understanding that syllogism would immediately start asking questions about what it means to harm a mountain, or how somebody can know that's "bad."

People ask questions about coherent things, that's good - and one wonders what the point of asking questions about incoherent things would be, anyway.  

Quote:I can tell you what I think will happen in practice with this kind of argument.  It won't come in little sets like this that are clear bullshit.  It will come in complex chapters of big fat hardcover text books with "Harvard phD" written on the cover, mentioning perhaps a couple dozen other like works in the first chapter and implying "Read all these, or you won't really be qualified to comment on what follows."  It then will present all kinds of "facts," like charts about American strip mining correlated with budgie deaths in the Netherlands or something.   But in the end, if it takes 500 pages to answer a simple question, you're probably not answering the question at all.

You would interpret a 500 page report on all of the ways that mountaintop removal mining is harmful as not answering the question of how it was harmful?  

Quote:The biggest fear of bullshit-mongers is that some simple moron like me will step into the room and say: "Yea, but. . . why is it bad?"  And then the author will have nothing left to do but hysterically gesture toward his 500 pg. book, which if you read closely enough might as well be titled, "Why the Emperor's New Clothes are Not Only Real but Also Super-Important."  All the face-plant memes in the world won't obscvure the fact that the question is unanswerable in any way that doesn't beg the question.

Yes, nothing left to do but point to 500 pages worth of reasons to make the statement.

While you perceive this to be a dilemma of some kind - that would be pretty much a best case scenario for any realist statement..about morality or anything else.  A very large set of factual data to refer to.  In an objective morality, the more you know, the more accurate and specific your moral statements can be.  If you wanted to consider the issue of mountaintop removal mining, it would help to have a subject matter expert.  The subject in question this time has gone through alot of revision and regulation precisely because of reports like that.  We can still doubt that the first premise as I wrote it is sound or the syllogism as expressed is factually complete.  We can do this by saying, for example, that the things about mountaintop removal mining that we refer to when calling it harmful can either be done some other way, that these specific harms can be mitigated, or remediated.   Or, if we prefer, we could accept that mountaintop removal mining was itself harmful, but that the alternatives were more so and thus, mountaintop removal mining is a mitigation of some greater and more general harm.  

In practice..and with respect to mountaintop removal mining - we do both (then ultimately and inconsistently defer to the almighty dollar, ofc).

The problem is that 500 pages of facts that don't answer the moral question still don't answer the moral question.  Instead, they serve as a red herring.

If the question is, "Why do you define change of state of a mountain as harm, and why is it bad?" there's really no point listing how deforestation causes erosion which leads to landslides and silt in the water table from which people draw their water, how using explosives to open a mine breaks large sections of mountain into rubble and so on.

These so-called objective facts are meaningless without there ALREADY being some evaluation of current-state, feared-state, desired-state, and so on, most of which are not factual in an existential sense.

(July 29, 2022 at 12:27 am)bennyboy Wrote: The problem is that 500 pages of facts that don't answer the moral question still don't answer the moral question.  Instead, they serve as a red herring.

Perhaps not to you, but that may be down to you preferring some other moral system.  In moral realism, that's exactly what answers a moral question - and the only thing that answers a moral question.

Quote:If the question is, "Why do you define change of state of a mountain as harm, and why is it bad?" there's really no point listing how deforestation causes erosion which leads to landslides and silt in the water table from which people draw their water, how using explosives to open a mine breaks large sections of mountain into rubble and so on.

Seems like -the- point, to me.  What else do you think a realist is talking about when they talk about bad things, harmful things....than things like erosion, landslides, water pollution, and detriment to the health of plants and wildlife, through the destruction of the the natural environment?

Quote:These so-called objective facts are meaningless without there ALREADY being some evaluation of current-state, feared-state, desired-state, and so on, most of which are not factual in an existential sense.

They're not meaningless, you're just asserting the basis of your preferred moral systems.  It's the whole "prove it's coherent" thing all over again.

I think that a much more illustrative question will be whether or not you approach all facts this way, or only moral facts? Every asserted fact in your many doomed arguments against moral realism, for example? Are they facts, or similarly meaningless without evaluations of your fear and desire states, which are themselves not factual in an existential sense? Would the fact that a thing apprehended as bad can be desired and not feared be a factual refutation of your claim here? Or is that equally meaningless? We're obviously not afraid of mountaintop removal mining, and we clearly want the stuff.

As for changes from some then-current state. Your current state is to prefer some other moral system. As you tell it, you prefer the others because they allow you to say and believe what you do right now, and because realism would mean that you had to acknowledge things you'd rather not. Could this be the actual source of your objection to moral realism, all these meaningless assertions to fact being irrelevant to that belief, which is not (and need not be) accurate with respect to any existential reality?

(July 29, 2022 at 6:20 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

(July 29, 2022 at 12:27 am)bennyboy Wrote: The problem is that 500 pages of facts that don't answer the moral question still don't answer the moral question.  Instead, they serve as a red herring.

Perhaps not to you, but that may be down to you preferring some other moral system.  In moral realism, that's exactly what answers a moral question - and the only thing that answers a moral question.

Then moral realism is a bad paradigm.

Quote:Seems like -the- point, to me.  What else do you think a realist is talking about when they talk about bad things, harmful things....than things like erosion, landslides, water pollution, and detriment to the health of plants and wildlife, through the destruction of the the natural environment?  

That's the definition of begging the question-- declare X as harm axiomatically, and then point to X harm being done.

Let's say everything we did was maximally harmed to fuck us-- poison the air and lakes, nuke every town, completely wipe out life on the planet. What "objective facts" would you point to to demonstrate that this should not be done? What if I were to point to humans who say things like "I kill animals just for fun," decide that the species, on the whole, is savage and cruel, and decide to go full-bore 12 Monkeys? Can you demonstrate any moral rules that exist independent of a species capable of this level of evil?

(July 29, 2022 at 8:00 am)bennyboy Wrote:

(July 29, 2022 at 6:20 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Perhaps not to you, but that may be down to you preferring some other moral system.  In moral realism, that's exactly what answers a moral question - and the only thing that answers a moral question.

Then moral realism is a bad paradigm.

-for a fact, or is that just your subjective opinion, or just a collection of misunderstandings popular in your society at the time you were educated, or just a miscommunication of "yuck!"? 

You see, this is the trouble.  Realism may be a bad paradigm...but if it's a bad paradigm for any of the reasons you mention, then it's a bad paradigm from which to make assertions to fact - even to facts to the contrary.  Moral realism is a minor sideshow to that larger concern - as the thing that typifies moral realism is to handle moral assertions to fact like we handle any other, of any other kind (which, despite your thinly veiled terror at the prospect, actually leads to the rejection of most specific assertions to moral facts).  My mountaintop removal mining example is ludicrously easy to object to on basis of fact as stated. Whether you think that's good or bad, and whether we succeed or fail to do it in practice, that's what moral realism is.  For a fact.

Quote:That's the definition of begging the question-- declare X as harm axiomatically, and then point to X harm being done.

Let's say everything we did was maximally harmed to fuck us-- poison the air and lakes, nuke every town, completely wipe out life on the planet.  What "objective facts" would you point to to demonstrate that this should not be done?  What if I were to point to humans who say things like "I kill animals just for fun," decide that the species, on the whole, is savage and cruel, and decide to go full-bore 12 Monkeys?  Can you demonstrate any moral rules that exist independent of a species capable of this level of evil?

More misuse of terms.  It isn't begging the question to say that moral realism concerns itself with facts.  That's what it is.  A realist conclusion (about anything - not just morality) is only true insomuch as it accurately reports those facts it purports to report.  We can (and do) disagree on what is and isn't harmful...and something like a 500 page report detailing the evidence of that harm is pretty demonstrative - if the subject is fact-based conclusions about the potential harms of mountaintop removal mining.  

You think we do it some other way.  You think that our well known biases creep in and cause us to misreport.  So do I - but that's still not what realism is or an argument against realism.  It's an observation about us, and the barriers we might have to effectively and consistently employ any realist proposition (yet again..about anything).  

There are, likewise, any number of objective reasons that we shouldn't do maximal harm - but if we fundamentally reject objective reasoning, then it doesn't matter how many there are..and no dearth or surplus of examples is actually relevant to our objections, just like it didn't actually matter that realism was coherent.

We're misreporting a fact.  We're saying that we object to x for y - when we do not.  We object to x for z, while failing to realize that our misreported y is an assertion to x. A quick example. Using mountaintop removal mining yet again. I say its bad because it causes y. A team of researchers, engineers, and labor conclusively demonstrates that they can do mountaintop removal mining without causing y. I persist in my assertions, nevertheless. This would strongly suggest that my reasons (if I even have any) were always z, just as this entire conversation has made it clear that you have reasons z which persist even after the failure of your many specific objections y.

I am assuming that we don't have to prove what we know.

But since this thread is titled, in part - what we "know". The knowing is in question.

You cant prove intuition, but intuition may be capable of producing the thing we call knowledge under some criteria.

Know - in quotes seems questionable to me.

Assume or believe seems to be more accurate.

Do we assume or believe in our names? Or is this directly apprehended as incontrovertible knowledge, even if not by any natural fact? Do I have to prove my name? Can I?

I do have my birth certificate and I KNOW I was named after my great grandmother. So I do know (without quotes) what my name is.

Right, so..refering to your birth certificate is an evidentiary empiricist case, certainly not axiomatic....but not all empiricist cases are evidentiary. There are people who could tell you what their name was, no matter - and in contradiction to..what's on their birth certificate. Do we disregard these peoples statements as knowledge? My daughters name is Mo, she says his name is Mike. It knows these things about itself, as empirical data, but either not evidentiary data or as data that argues against the evidentiary case.