Theists: Hitchens Wager

[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.