Theists: Hitchens Wager

[henryp]

2nd one 1st.  Could we talk about Tornado morality in the same way we talk about Human morality?  And the only difference is the somewhat arbitrary 'must be human' aspect?

It's not arbitrary, obviously. Humans are able to think about moral actions and think about morality... tornadoes aren't.

You really need to understand how conseuqentalism is defined if you're going to critique it.

It's always underwhelming on AF the amount of times someone criticizes a position before they even know the definition of the very think they're criticizing. It's like you're fumbling about in the dark.

Right, but you don't really believe humans 'thinking' is different than a tornado, do you?  Because we don't have free will.
I can't choose to not kick a lady down the stairs any more than a tornado can decide not to hit the local orphanage.  Was just curious how you differentiated between those two things.

[Edwardo Piet]

Right, but you don't really believe humans 'thinking' is different than a tornado, do you?  Because we don't have free will.

It's different because we think.

Right, a tornado is certainly bad for the same reasons... the consequences. And Hitler is like a tornado because there's no free will. But to say that something non-human is being "morally bad" sounds bizarre.

For starters, here's a reason why it's non-arbitrary: Humans respond to punishment. Tornadoes don't.

That's probably the primary reason to be honest. Humans still have compatabilist free will, tornadoes don't.

I can't choose to not kick a lady down the stairs any more than a tornado can decide not to hit the local orphanage. 

Right. But you do have compatabilist free will. You are able to modify your behavior based on how you are treated. You respond to threats and punishment... praise and blame. It's still useful to hold people responsible even in reality they aren't. It isn't useful to hold tornadoes responsible.

Was just curious how you differentiated between those two things.

Well, moral theories aren't about whether tornadoes are bad or not. You don't put a tornado in prison when they kill someone. You don't expect the tornado to modify its behavior and stop killing people if you punish it.

We still have compatabilist free will. Tornadoes don't.

[henryp]

Also, how long do you have for the consequences to play out?  If I kick a pregnant lady down a flight of stairs, but it turns out her baby was Hitler, does that make it moral?

That's a problem of epistemology. Whether we can know the results is a different matter. You're confusing what is right and wrong in principle and what is right and wrong in practice.

In principle, kicking ladies in the stomach is wrong. Some would think that if they knew the baby was going to be Hitler then that would be okay because it's a lesser evil. I certainly don't because 1) I don't condone such violence in general and 2) If we knew it was going to be Hitler why not just have an abortion instead?

So is kicking a lady in the stomach, who unbeknownst to everyone, is going to be giving birth to Hitler moral or immoral according to consequentionalism?  You kind of wandered off on me there for a bit.  

You think you're being critiqued,  but there are ?'s at the end of these sentences for a reason.  You're not being criticized by me.  You're being asked for clarification.

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Right, but you don't really believe humans 'thinking' is different than a tornado, do you?  Because we don't have free will.

It's different because we think.

Right, a tornado is certainly bad for the same reasons... the consequences. And Hitler is like a tornado because there's no free will. But to say that something non-human is being "morally bad" sounds bizarre.

For starters, here's a reason why it's non-arbitrary: Humans respond to punishment. Tornadoes don't.

That's probably the primary reason to be honest. Humans still have compatabilist free will, tornadoes don't.

I can't choose to not kick a lady down the stairs any more than a tornado can decide not to hit the local orphanage. 

Right. But you do have compatabilist free will. You are able to modify your behavior based on how you are treated. You respond to threats and punishment... praise and blame. It's still useful to hold people responsible even in reality they aren't. It isn't useful to hold tornadoes responsible.

Was just curious how you differentiated between those two things.

Well, moral theories aren't about whether tornadoes are bad or not. You don't put a tornado in prison when they kill someone. You don't expect the tornado to modify its behavior and stop killing people if you punish it.

We still have compatabilist free will. Tornadoes don't.

We both, (i believe) think compatabilist free will is mostly meaningless, no?  We don't put Tornados in prison, because you can't put Tornados in prison.  That being said, we do try to modify non-human objects behavior. 

To get better results from humans, maybe we put them in jail.  To get better results from the weather, we reduce carbon output.  Both are just actions taken to get more desirable results from a system.

[Edwardo Piet]

So is kicking a lady in the stomach, who unbeknownst to everyone, is going to be giving birth to Hitler moral or immoral according to consequentionalism?  You kind of wandered off on me there for a bit.  

No I didn't. You keep jumping to conclusions.

It's bad if it leads to bad consequences, it's good if it leads to good consequences. But obviously kicking a woman in the stomach is in itself a bad consequence. So it depends how much moral weight you put on that. And that's where subtheories of conseuqentalism come in. Consequentialism as a whole is extremely broad but 1) All subtheories of consequentailism are, obviously, consequentalist. 2)It is my view that all other rival non-consequentalist moral theories ultimately collapse into consequentalism. Perhaps because consequentalism is so broad. Like I said: If certain moral rules or guidelines lead to good consequences generally speaking... then they are good moral rules because they tend to lead to good consequences. And if certain virtues or moral intuitions are good it's because they tend to lead to good consequences.

Any moral theory that usually leads to overall negative consequences and a lack of overall positive consequences... is a bad moral theory.

You think you're being critiqued,  but there are ?'s at the end of these sentences for a reason.  You're not being criticized by me.  You're being asked for clarification.

I don't think I'm being critiqued I think you think I think I'm being critiqued. I think you're questioning me and asking for clarification because you're struggling to understand what I'm saying. And that's why I am continuing to try to explain what I'm saying.

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We both, (i believe) think compatabilist free will is mostly meaningless, no?

I don't think it's meaningless at all I just think it's so trivially true that it's pointless at best and misleading at worst to call that "free will". Compataiblist free will is just having a will that isn't in an especially weak state: a mature will that isn't threatened, drunk or psychotic. I don't think compatabilist free will is untrue, I just think it's completely misleading and unhelpful to call that "free will" because the free will that most people believe in is far more than simply that. So by parading that as all free will is, as this very pedestrian and obvious things, compatabilists go around saying free will is real because duh we have intentional actions and are often not totally drunk and psychotic or mentally immature, etc, etc..... most people just here "free will is real" and ignore the more interesting and non-obvious and non-trivially true question as to whether incompatabilist free will exists. It's logically incoherent and yet most people believe in it and use it as an excuse to punish and mistreat people even when it's barbaric or immoral to do so because it assumes that people ultimately deserve punishment for XYZ rather than because punishing them actually teaches them a lesson or warns others of the consequences of behaving that way as a way to discourage others from behaving badly.

Like, some of the most immoral and most barbaric punishments throughout history were justified in that way, demonizing people as evil in some sort of ultimate "They made themselves 100% be this way" way. The idea of ultimate desert.

It's also a cause of intense arrogance and smugness. People not just feeling glad that they acheived something, but taking ultimate credit and thinking they're better than other people because they caused themselves ultimately to become highly skillful when really even all their hard work and effort is ultimately determined by prior causes. And it's a cause of revenge and tribalism, too. And of course, this explains, to me, why the intuition for incompatabilist free will runs so deep despite being so incoherent: because it's evolutionary useful in primitive societies. Revenge, tribalism, etc. It's a useful heutistic to just assume someone is ultimately bad and punish them, rather than stopping and analyzing it. In hunter gather times analyzing whether someone really deserves to be punished and how much they should be punished justly would just be a waste of energy. All that mattered was a quick rule of thumb as to whether it was appropriate to punish them or not. The evolution of the idea of people being ultimately bad or ultimately good depending on their behavior... makes sense within tribalisitc primitive people.

So I think that's an argument for why we feel this way. That's the nature argument anyway. The nurture argument is that: Incompatabilist free will has largely came from the Bible. "God gave people free will" and all that shite. That was in the old testament, and then Christianity and Islam adopted it too. All three abrahamic religions have all had a huge impact on the world (almost entirely negative in my opinion) and one of the notions that came out of it was free will. In the more ultimate sense, the incompatabilist sense. Free will is pushed so strongly in it that there's the doctrine of original sin. The idea that we are punished by God for the first two people ever to exist. The idea of ultimate punishment is also implied in the whole notion of heaven and hell. The idea of something such as ultimate punishment only makes sense within the context of ultimate free will. The whole of the Bible is this story of ultimate praise and blame, ultimate reward and punishment. It's very extreme on all those grounds.

Buddhism on the other hand... doesn't seem to suggest any such thing. And in fact, the illusion of the self as a distinct entity in buddhism... appears to be analgous with the notion of incompatabilist free will being illusorary. Buddhism is about mindfulness in the sense of spectating one's own thoughts without judgement: as if thoughts just pop into consciousness and think themselves, rather than trying to control one's mind.

You don't tend to find the concept of the absolute sense of free will in eastern religions, to my mind.

Also, think of ancient Greece that also predates the Bible. The philosophers of the time tended to disagree about the free will thing. It was more of a rational open question, whereas in the Bible it's all just assumed to be true.

And notice that the idea of compabilist free will came about thousands of years later. It's the sort of cop-out answer.

  We don't put Tornados in prison, because you can't put Tornados in prison.  That being said, we do try to modify non-human objects behavior. 

To get better results from humans, maybe we put them in jail.  To get better results from the weather, we reduce carbon output.  Both are just actions taken to get more desirable results from a system.

Right. But again, tornadoes aren't intentional agents. There's a distinction between someone accidentally killing someone... say, bumping into them and knocking them off a cliff... and a serial killer that goes around killing people on purpose. There's a difference between manslaughter and fully intentional murder. There's difference between sadistic murder for pleasure (as is often the case in psychopathy) and killing someone to save a loved one. You can't make such a distinction with a tornado. With a tornado it's all accidental. Ultimately everything is an accidental... but when someone intentionally does something, despite the fact that their intentions are ultimately accidental, that says a lot about them and you can expect they may do similar in the future. That is not the case with tornadoes. You don't get tornadoes that happen because the tornado wanted to tornade and tornados that happen by unintentionally when the tornado didn't want to tornade (I made a new verb "to tornade" it means "to behave like a tornado as a torando" lol).... but if you did... and if the desires of tornadoes were indicators of future behavior in the same way that desires are in humans... you could expect tornadoes that wanted to tornade to show up and tornade again in the same place next time. Or maybe somewhere else where they won't get caught. You'd get crafty tornadoes that tried to escape detection before ambushing people. You'd get tornadoes that did all they can to stop us reducing carbon output so they could keep tornadoing.

There's a reason we don't anthropohorize tornadoes. If we had good reasons to anthrorpizne tornadoes then it would make sense to speak of tornado morality.

But even then... I think part of it would be dealing with perpetrators that also have emotions and can suffer. Tornadoes can't be harmed. When you punish an immoral person you can't treat them like some object without feelings or the best way to stop them hurting people would be to just kill them quick and efficently. The point is that: even perpatrators have feelings. We can't treat them like objects. If someone commits a mild crime and we decide that overall they are unlikely to do more good than harm in the world... even if they are likely to do 51% harm overall and 49% good overall... if there's any net negative... it would make sense to kill them if we treated them like objects without feelings.

So perhaps that's the biggest key difference of all. In the realm of morality even the bad guys have feelings and we have to think about how severe the punishment is or how they are treated when they are detained... you don't have to do that with tornadoes.

So I think.... to commit an immoral action you have to be a conscious living being capable of suffering.... otherwise you're just a hazard or an object like a tornado.

[henryp]

The tornado thing really is about clarifying the 'intentions aren't important' aspect. Because intentions are big part of how we differentiate between humans and tornados behavior.

You bring up punishment, which is really a deterrent for bad behavior. But if you have a faultless or unintentionally bad consequence, like opening a door for an old lady, and a bunch of wolves hop out and eat her, trying to prevent that is very similar to trying to prevent a tornado from tornading. Seems more like a 'shit happens' thing.

[Edwardo Piet]

The tornado thing really is about clarifying the 'intentions aren't important' aspect.  Because intentions are big part of how we differentiate between humans and tornados behavior.  

Well, you'll get no disagreement there. I already said they're important insofar as they lead to bad consequences...

You bring up punishment, which is really a deterrent for bad behavior.  But if you have a faultless or unintentionally bad consequence, like opening a door for an old lady, and a bunch of wolves hop out and eat her, trying to prevent that is very similar to trying to prevent a tornado from tornading.  Seems more like a 'shit happens' thing.

Yes it is a shit happens thing. But it's still bad that it happens.

There would be nothing inherently wrong with saying that tornadoes were "immoral"... it just seems silly to use that word about tornadoes.

Preventing suffering caused by tornadoes is just as important as preventing suffering from non-tornadoes, provided the suffering involved is the same in both cases and equally preventable in both cases.

It just sounds silly to use "immoral" in reference to tornadoes. That's the wrong word. It's like calling water "non-dry"... technically it is non-dry but it makes a lot more sense to simply say it's wet.

[robvalue]

I'm just throwing in a couple of thoughts on morality.

I understand that maximizing human wellbeing (hopefully animals too) is a great goal of morality, that we could mostly agree on.

But to me, it's the whole picture which builds up the morality of an action, from the circumstances, the person taking the action, their beliefs at the time, their intentions, and of course the outcome. To ignore almost all of that and just say outcome = morality (only a few people do that) seems strange to me. It's not only redundant as we already have the outcome and no one is disputing it; but it also provides no judgement whatsoever and opens up no dialogue.

It's an absolute pure form of utilitarianism of course. It would rate the "morality" of accidentally running someone over the same as deliberately doing so. And it still enters a massive grey area when you have to decide exactly what you're responsible for and what you're not; how much do your inactions count, for example? How far down the line do you look at the knock-on effects? How much are animals worth compared to humans? Do we look at net or individual results?

Anyhow, I just watched Death Note which is the most awesome Manga I've ever seen. And it's a terrific example of the kind of thing you end up with using such an approach.

I'm not saying utiliwhotsit isn't correct; morality is so vaguely defined that there's no such thing as correct. It needs carefully defining for any debate. But I certainly think it's way too simple to be of any practical use, and even those apparently supporting it would abandon it pretty quickly in moderately complex real situations. I'm not referring to anyone in particular here, and perhaps no one here has such extreme views. If so, don't worry about it. But it's the kind of thing I've heard before and I thought it was worth mentioning.

[GrandizerII]

Anyhow, I just watched Death Note which is the most awesome Manga I've ever seen. And it's a terrific example of the kind of thing you end up with using such an approach.

Great anime series indeed. Now watch Code Geass. Very similar to Death Note in this sense.

[robvalue]

Anyhow, I just watched Death Note which is the most awesome Manga I've ever seen. And it's a terrific example of the kind of thing you end up with using such an approach.

Great anime series indeed. Now watch Code Geass. Very similar to Death Note in this sense.

Alright, cheers

Death Note has some amazingly complex characters and implicit discussions of morality (or "justice" as they like to call it).

[Edwardo Piet]

I'm just throwing in a couple of thoughts on morality.

I understand that maximizing human wellbeing (hopefully animals too) is a great goal of morality, that we could mostly agree on.

Right.

But to me, it's the whole picture which builds up the morality of an action, from the circumstances, the person taking the action, their beliefs at the time, their intentions, and of course the outcome. To ignore almost all of that and just say outcome = morality (only a few people do that) seems strange to me. It's not only redundant as we already have the outcome and no one is disputing it; but it also provides no judgement whatsoever and opens up no dialogue.

Right so I think at the end of the day this just comes down to "It depends what you mean by morality."


If we define "morality" how I'm defining it then it is objective. If we define it how many or even most people define it then it isn't. But to me that is not a fault of it. Science often redefines things so they're talking about something else altogether... but we don't say once the atom has been split "that's not really an atom."

My point I guess would be, if one day there was a science of how I define my morality... and it worked. Then everyone would start using it.

It's not 'mine' of course. I meant the one I'm using.

Some would say that you can't have objective ethics without objective metaethics. "And what even is morality?" is a metaethical question. Again though, I think that would be a problem of semantics. We can philosophize about what we should call goodness, which is what metaethics is about, but if one approach turned out to be clearly better than another and consistently worked in the future... then the kind that worked would start being given the label of morality... and there would be objectively right and wrong answers about things with morality defined that way... which is all I mean.

It's an absolute pure form of utilitarianism of course. It would rate the "morality" of accidentally running someone over the same as deliberately doing so.

Only if you isolate that event. Like...in the big picture utilitarianism would say that doing it deliberately is much worse because the perpetrator is more likely to do it again in the future and is more likely to be a dangerous person in general.

Utilitarianism absolutely does consider intentionally bad behavior to be worse. Utilitatrianism is about the greatest happiness and lowest suffering for the greatest possible number of sentient beings: and people who intentionally hurt others cause far more harm in the long run and are far more dangerous than those who do it by accident.

And it still enters a massive grey area when you have to decide exactly what you're responsible for and what you're not; how much do your inactions count, for example? How far down the line do you look at the knock-on effects? How much are animals worth compared to humans? Do we look at net or individual results?

I agree those are difficult questions but I think they're a question for practical ethics in practice and not normative ethics in principle.

Anyhow, I just watched Death Note which is the most awesome Manga I've ever seen. And it's a terrific example of the kind of thing you end up with using such an approach.

That's my favorite Magna ever!

I think that's a clear straw man though because that's an example of a tyrant thinking he's figured out what's objectively right. It's not an example of being open to the possibility that there really is objective right and wrong even if we can never know it.

I'm not saying utiliwhotsit isn't correct; morality is so vaguely defined that there's no such thing as correct.

I think that's just conflating different definitions of the term though. To me it all comes down to "What do you mean by morality?" and once someone has said what they mean by it we then ask "Can that definition of it have right and wrong answers objectively?".

For the record, I'm a consequentalist but not a utilitarian. I believe suffering is bad but I don't think suffering can be aggregated between individuals due to the consciousness barrier.

This is an example of my criticism of utlitarianism

The objection that "utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons"[92] came to prominence in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. The concept is also important in animal rights advocate Richard Ryder's rejection of utilitarianism, in which he talks of the "boundary of the individual", through which neither pain nor pleasure may pass.[93] However, a similar objection was noted in 1970 by Thomas Nagel (who claimed that consequentialism "treats the desires, needs, satisfactions, and dissatisfactions of distinct persons as if they were the desires, etc., of a mass person"[94]), and even earlier by David Gauthier, who wrote that utilitarianism supposes "that mankind is a super-person, whose greatest satisfaction is the objective of moral action. . . . But this is absurd. Individuals have wants, not mankind; individuals seek satisfaction, not mankind. A person's satisfaction is not part of any greater satisfaction."[95] Thus, the aggregation of utility becomes futile as both pain and happiness are intrinsic to and inseparable from the consciousness in which they are felt, rendering impossible the task of adding up the various pleasures of multiple individuals.

A response to this criticism is to point out that whilst seeming to resolve some problems it introduces others. Intuitively, there are many cases where people do want to take the numbers involved into account. As Alastair Norcross has said, "suppose that Homer is faced with the painful choice between saving Barney from a burning building or saving both Moe and Apu from the building…it is clearly better for Homer to save the larger number, precisely because it is a larger number… Can anyone who really considers the matter seriously honestly claim to believe that it is worse that one person die than that the entire sentient population of the universe be severely mutilated? Clearly not."[96]

It may be possible to uphold the distinction between persons whilst still aggregating utility, if it accepted that people can be influenced by empathy.[97] This position is advocated by Iain King,[98] who has suggested the evolutionary basis of empathy means humans can take into account the interests of other individuals, but only on a one-to-one basis, "since we can only imagine ourselves in the mind of one other person at a time."[99] King uses this insight to adapt utilitarianism, and it may help reconcile Bentham's philosophy with deontology and virtue ethics.[100]

The philosopher John Taurek also argued that the idea of adding happiness or pleasures across persons is quite unintelligible and that the numbers of persons involved in a situation are morally irrelevant.[101] Taurek's basic concern comes down to this: we cannot explain what it means to say that things would be five times worse if five people die than if one person dies. "I cannot give a satisfactory account of the meaning of judgments of this kind," he wrote (p. 304). He argues that each person can only lose one person's happiness or pleasures. There isn't five times more loss of happiness or pleasure when five die: who would be feeling this happiness or pleasure? "Each person's potential loss has the same significance to me, only as a loss to that person alone. because, by hypothesis, I have an equal concern for each person involved, I am moved to give each of them an equal chance to be spared his loss" (p. 307). Parfit[102] and others[103] have criticized Taurek's line, and it continues to be discussed.

I agree with the non-bold criticism here. And the bold section is failure to respond to the criticism in my opinion because the first paragraph is basically just a bare of assertion of "But everyone knows that more people suffering is worse!" which isn't an argument it's just an example of incredulity (Furthermore it's a strawman because he talks about the entire sentient population of the universe being mutilated but refers to one person dying as them merely dying. So he's comparing necessarily painful deaths with a possibly completely painless death. So it's also a false analogy. To me it matters not that it is more people... only that there is more suffering.).

And the second paragraph fails to account for the fact that empathy isn't telepathy and we don't actually feel another person's consciousness when we empathize... we give our best guess of it (and some people are better at it than others. I'm absolutely stereotypically terrible at it but that's of course irrelevant)

So to be clear: it's the parts that AREN'T in bold that I agree with in this quote from Wikipedia (lol look at me going at it ProgrammingGodJordan style with the colorful text. Albeit, I just didn't want you to miss this part, albeit.)

But I certainly think it's way too simple to be of any practical use, and even those apparently supporting it would abandon it pretty quickly in moderately complex real situations. I'm not referring to anyone in particular here, and perhaps no one here has such extreme views. If so, don't worry about it. But it's the kind of thing I've heard before and I thought it was worth mentioning.

I agree with this with regards to utilitarianism (for starters I think utilitarianism is false as mentioned above). But I'd say consequentalism has a use because it's a way of pointing out that all alternative ethical theories ultimately collapse into consequentalism. That may make consequentalism practically useless as a moral guide but it's precisely because it is the requirement for any sort of moral guidance in the first place. It makes no sense to ask what is ethically good in any particular situation unless you first accept that you can ultimately only judge that correctly based on good or bad consequences... which is one argument for consequentalism being objective.

Thank you for your post Rob. It was very helpful even though we disagree. I used to kudos people when they either made me laugh or I agreed with them.... but I have become so frustrated with people not addressing my point lately and being generally unhelpful that I've decided I'm going to change my primary reason for kudosing people: from now on I will kudos people when I feel they are being helpful in a debate... whether I agree with them or not. And that's why you get a kudos.