Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?

[vulcanlogician]

-wall-of-text follows, lol

Noice! I'm so happy to delve into ethics with you, man. I had to do research in order to adequately respond to your post! (And it was my pleasure.) Return text wall incoming:

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As you might have guessed, I'm fresh off a reading of Moore's Principia Ethica, and I must say, he resolves a bunch of things that we've previously discussed as my problems with a pluralistic ethics. Moore is a non-naturalistic pluralist. And he's made some pretty convincing arguments.

Platos virtue ethics are very much at home in contemporary realism.  Quantifying virtue and well-being in our universe, if you really boil it down, is the whole enterprise of natural realism.  If you think that virtue ethics is complete and whole, and moral naturalism contains those virtue ethics (but also a bunch of stuff outside of platos virtue ethics) then it would seem as though Plato were the one lacking, and, not for nothing, pervasively wrong about alot of things relevant to his thoughts, or that were products of the same.  

Virtue ethics, as it is understood in modern times is more associated with Aristotle. But I've always argued that Plato was the progenitor of virtue ethics, and Aristotle merely took that ball and ran with it-- ie. he turned it into a more developed theory.

To me, Plato's moral theory is whole. He's a pluralist. He values the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. No "soul" can be said to be good without them (see book IV of The Republic).. And, like a hedonist, he also seems to value happiness as an intrinsic good.

So people are happy when they happen to possess good things; and there is surely no need to go any further and ask why anyone would want to be happy.

But Plato does not value any one particular thing to be a sole good. In some circumstances temperance or happiness might be bad. This is why he urges philosophers to understand the Form of the Good itself rather than looking for goodness in any one particular thing. According to Plato, once one understands what "goodness itself" is, he can then look at any one particular thing and know whether it is good or not. He does not hold being virtuous above knowing the Form of the Good. In fact, knowing the Form of the Good in at least some way is a prerequisite for being virtuous. So while Plato's ethics may contain virtue ethics, Plato is ultimately a pluralist.

Virtue ethics (all by itself) cannot produce a standard of right action that is coherent or non-circular. Therefore, I must reject virtue ethics as a monistic theory. But I think that any complete ethics must include some form of it because of it's emphasis on character. A hedonist, for example, must categorize an abusive, untrustworthy person as highly moral if he somehow manages to maximize happiness in the world when he's not slapping around his wife and kids or manipulating his coworkers for personal gain. Virtue ethicists emphasise committed, well-rounded moralists who are in the habit of doing the right thing in all aspects of life. You just can't put a price tag on something like that-- but the hedonist is quick to throw it in the bargain bin. Thus hedonism and virtue ethics are incomplete-- as I see it anyway.

Though he wrote in a time well before the category was named, Plato was, in fact, a pluralist. He posited that there was the Form of the Good. To Plato, many things in nature partake of this form. But you cannot pin down the Form of the Good simply by studying nature; it is only intelligible to the intellect. In this way, it is metaphysical.

I see Moore as an improvement (or perhaps even a modernization of) Plato's central conceit. Moore is an "ideal utilitarian." So he wants to maximize goodness (because that's what utilitarians want to do) and he is also a consequentialist (as all utilitarians are). Moore's referent in his utilitarian system is the ideal rather than this or that natural object. So, rather than asking what maximizes pleasure, etc, Moore wants to ask how much this or that thing conforms to the ideal.

The first of these meanings of ideal is (1) that to which the phrase The Ideal is most properly confined. By this is meant the best state of things conceivable, the Summum Bonum or Absolute Good. It is in this sense that a right conception of Heaven would be a right conception of the Ideal: we mean by the Ideal a state of things which would be absolutely perfect. But this conception may be quite clearly distinguished from a second, namely, (2) that of the best possible state of things in this world. This second conception may be identified with that which has frequently figured in philosophy as the Human Good, or the ultimate end towards which our action should be directed.

http://fair-use.org/g-e-moore/principia-...chapter-vi

And one also must take this under consideration when determining the ideal:

There is, as will presently be maintained, a vast number of different things, each of which has intrinsic value; there are also very many which are positively bad; and there is a still larger class of things, which appear to be indifferent. But a thing belonging to any of these three classes may occur as part of a whole, which includes among its other parts other things belonging both to the same and to the other two classes; and these wholes, as such, may also have intrinsic value. The paradox, to which it is necessary to call attention, is that the value of such a whole bears no regular proportion to the sum of the values of its parts. It is certain that a good thing may exist in such a relation to another good thing that the value of the whole thus formed is immensely greater than the sum of the values of the two good things. It is certain that a whole formed of a good thing and an indifferent thing may have immensely greater value than that good thing itself possesses. It is certain that two bad things or a bad thing and an indifferent thing may form a whole much worse than the sum of badness of its parts. And it seems as if indifferent things may also be the sole constituents of a whole which has great value, either positive or negative. Whether the addition of a bad thing to a good whole may increase the positive value of the whole, or the addition of a bad thing to a bad may produce a whole having a positive value, may seem more doubtful; but it is, at least, possible, and this possibility must be taken into account in our ethical investigations. However we may decide particular questions, the principle is clear. The value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts.

http://fair-use.org/g-e-moore/principia-.../chapter-i

Think about buying a house, for instance. To Moore (and Plato) a mundane decision like this is also an ethical one. (ie- it has an ethical dimension where one weighs "not good" and "good"-- or better yet, compares each house to "the Form of the Good" or, as Moore would have it, "the ideal").  When you have decided to buy a house and haven't gone out looking for one yet, you construct an ideal in your mind. This ideal becomes a "metaphysical blueprint" to which you compare each house that you consider buying. Let's say that your ideal house has two floors, at least 3 bathrooms, a garage, is in close proximity to work, and is also beautiful. Now, as the real estate agent takes you around, you, of course, see no house in your price range that has all of these things. Therefore, you must select the best house among those that fail to reach your ideal. But how do you do this?

To try to ascribe "point value" to each item and run this through a heuristic (with an abacus-lol!) would be an exercise in futility, if not downright counterproductive. (But this is precisely what the pluralistic moral naturalist must do!) You may find a house that has everything you want except that it is horribly ugly. You may also be shown a house with two bathrooms, no garage, is far from your workplace, but is also quite beautiful and, upon seeing it, you determine this is the best house you have seen. Why? Because whole can equal more than the sum of its parts. This is something a naturalistic ethics can't account for.

And you know what else naturalism can't account for? Beauty! Beauty was one of Plato's fundamental Forms. To Plato, a good life must contain much beauty; any life without it is necessarily bad--and Moore carries Plato's torch in this regard. No form of naturalistic ethics can make sense of beauty (except insofar as it produces happiness or some other natural phenomenon), but a state of affairs where everyone feels pleasure but is surrounded by ugliness cannot be good. It fails to conform to the ideal. Only an ideal utilitarian like Moore, (or a metaphysical ethicist like Plato) can argue for more beauty. A hedonist only values beauty insofar as beauty makes us happy. Beauty that is painful (like your first heartbreak in high school) is always bad to the hedonist. Moore can pronounce it good because the whole (including one's growth to maturity because of the heartbreak) can equal more than its constituent parts.

Humes dickery (lol), for it's part, hits every moral theory equally.

But Moore accepts Hume's conclusion that you can't get an ought from an is. Moore gets his oughts from an ideal.

"How do you get an ought from an ideal?" THAT is a much easier question to answer than "How do you get an ought from an is?"

Now, to be fair, I sympathize with moral naturalists FAR more than the moral skeptics who take up Hume's reasoning. But this is because I think the naturalists have have formed a sort of ideal of their own from a single natural object. But this is also the reason that I want to reject naturalism, citing "incompleteness."
 

Ultimately, contemporary realism subsumed previous moral theories and sought to explain what it was about some x that made us call that thing bad, and perhaps as a tick of logical thought, it focuses specifically on those things for which an objective rational proposition can be offered..which by virtue of the requirement of sound assertions and our current overriding methodological commitments, invariably swirl the naturalist drain, lol.  Plato said that human wellbeing was the goal of morality, and virtues were those tools we needed to attain it.  Naturalism didn't say "nuh-uh", but, instead, said.."and this is what we seem to mean by well-being and this is why those tools work". 

You've given an accurate criticism of virtue ethics, and I agree with you up, down, and sideways on this. Many naturalistic theories stomp (monistic) virtue ethics into dust because of this. Aristotle thought the most important aspect of morality was that it was habitual. He said we ought to give young minds a good example of moral behavior... "show them how it's done" so to speak. A world where people are committed to virtuous behavior (and do it habitually) far outweighs one where people have worked out an accurate theory of ethics but have not the commitment nor the habit of doing good. So Aristotle emphasizes training in virtue; he would have us follow a moral exemplar who has shown us a good example of what to do and how to be.

But there is a problem with all of this. Put in definition form by my ethics textbook, it goes something like this:

An act is morally right just because it is one that a virtuous person, acting in character, would do in that situation.

I think we both see the problem here. There is some inherent circularity in it when you define it in plain terms.

In a world full of nothing but Nazis who are okey-dokey with gassing dissidents, you may find a particular Nazi who is more virtuous than all the others. He still affirms gassing the enemies of the Nazi party, but he is otherwise kind and courteous, gives to charity etc.. Because no one else in this world is a better exemplar, virtue ethics would say that you ought to follow his example. This simply won't do. But a theory like utilitarian hedonism cuts through all the Nazi bullshit and says, "Only acts that reduce suffering in the world are good. Even the Nazi who serves as a moral exemplar is bad because he promotes a system that increases suffering."

In short, virtue ethics is VERY MUCH incomplete. But it is hardly material for the waste basket. The same could be said of hedonism. All monistic theories, really. This is where Moore comes in with his non-naturalistic ethical pluralism:

Hume contended that moral compulsion was not solely derived from reason.  Naturalism didn't say "nuh-uh", but, instead, said "and here are the very natural reasons that we desire moral conformity, as well as the very natural reasons that we should and when/why those reasons work at cross purpose to our motivations and interests."  Moore posited that we comprehended moral nature non-empirically, but that we apprehended a given state through empirical prompts.  Natural realism didn't say "nuh-uh", but, instead, said "and these are those prompts, and the mechanics by which we can perceive them".  

True, but what I get from Moore is a resolution of my difficulty in forming a naturalistic ethics. Formerly, only Plato did this for me, and his theory is very ancient and very problematic. But Plato had the right idea all along. Moore produces a type of Platonism that can be understood and affirmed by a modern empiricist. Plato fails miserably in that regard, as correct as Plato might have been generally. Like Plato, Moore compares an act to an ideal, looking at the whole act and not calculating the sum of its parts. In theory, a state of affairs may fail by several metrics of naturalistic ethics yet still be better (as a whole) than a state of affairs that naturalistic ethics would approve.

One of [Moore's] larger aims was to defend value-pluralism, the view that there are many ultimate goods. Moore thought an important bar to this view is the naturalistic fallacy. He assumed, plausibly, that philosophers who treat goodness as identical to some natural property will usually make this a simple property, such as just pleasure or just evolutionary fitness, rather than a disjunctive one such as pleasure-or-evolutionary-fitness-or-knowledge. But then any naturalist view pushes us toward value-monism, or toward the view that only one kind of state is good. Once we reject naturalism, however, we can see what Moore thought is self-evident: that there are irreducibly many goods. Another bar to value-pluralism was excessive demands for unity or system in ethics. Sidgwick had used such demands to argue that only pleasure can be good, since no theory with a plurality of ultimate values can justify a determinate scheme for weighing them against each other. But Moore, agreeing here with Rashdall, Ross, and others, said that “to search for ‘unity’ and ‘system,’ at the expense of truth, is not, I take it, the proper business of philosophy."

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moore-moral/#4

Now, I'm not sure exactly how you define completeness,

When you look at monistic hedonism that says "pleasure and happiness are the sole good," I say, something is missing. There are other goods! The hedonist doesn't value autonomy, for example. When Plato or Moore says that there is a metaphysical ideal that (in fact) contains all these goods-- and in their proper proportions-- I call that complete. It's vague, mind you. But it's complete insofar as I can't say "Hey Plato, you forgot about autonomy." I suppose, by strict definition, Plato and Moore would be incomplete if clarity were considered to be important to an ethical system... which it arguably is....

But the reason I'm drawn to moral non-naturalism is that it makes pluralism intelligible in a way that pluralistic naturalism cannot. When considering naturalistic ethics there is this "pull" towards monism.

It may be that natural realism is not the most accurate meta-ethical theory.  Part of the fundamental basis of moral naturalism is to identify some quantifiable proposition in common to the many descriptive relative and subjective moralities.  Not to show that by virtue of commonality this or that set is the true set, but more to establish what it is we're all talking about.  So we might ask "why do christians believe that homosexuality is bad" - and the easy and superficial answer is that there's something that magic book said, or that god said.  That's not a good faith exploration of the subject, though, if we stop at the final deontological product of the moral system
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They're -trying- to do natural realism.  They're just failing at it for reasons we know a hell of alot more about now than we did when we came up with them. 

Natural realism, if meta-ethically false, still has the potential to be the unifying theory of descriptive moral positions.   That's probably why it's easy to argue once a person has command of the terms.  That ease doesn't make it the true™ meta-ethical position, but it does say something. 

Naturalistic ethics does say something. And it says it clearly, too. Assuming that Plato or Moore is absolutely correct about ethics, naturalistic ethics can still point out the good and the bad by (for purposes of one ethical discussion) saying x is bad because of this or that natural property, say suffering, being present. Therefore, the arguments produced by a moral naturalist ought to be considered valid by a non-naturalist. The only reason that a non-naturalist would take issue is if there were a part/whole thing going on where a moral naturalist couldn't see that the entire whole of something was bad, because a naturalist can only acknowledge the effect of a moral situations constituent parts.

The importance of the value of any given component being able to massively effect the deontological product.  Utilitarian hedonism didn't get easier, for example, when naturalist metrics become more available and sophisticated.

Try giving a utilitarian hedonists summary of the moral relationship between drowning someone, and watching them drown -from a natural realists metrics- for example.

Well said. I am, by no means, writing moral naturalism's epitaph here. It's just that I can't shake pluralism, and Moore with his emphasis on an ideal, creates enough room for pluralism to fit into his theory.

-as an afterthought, we've discussed before our mutual appreciation for moral pluralism.  Pursuant to some comments I made about the potential for any realism to be a unifying descriptive theory even if it;s not an accurate meta-ethical theory, here;s a fun one for you.

Perhaps we're natural agents employing moore-style non natural operations to virtue problems involving empirical properties, lol.  Or, you know, maybe properties and parts and wholes don't exist as described at all, to bring it back round to compelling forms of nihilism.

Well, if properties, parts, and wholes don't exist, I've wasted years of my life reading and contemplating philosophy. 

But I think you have it right. We are ultimately considering empirical properties when we do ethics. If it were otherwise we wouldn't be relating ethics to the real world... which would be pointless.

But Moore contends that we (perhaps unconsciously) compare any empirical state of affairs to an ideal, and this ideal itself is not adequately described in terms of empirical properties. And, furthermore, if we're going to insist on pluralism (which IMO we MUST), we have to ask, "What makes both happiness and autonomy good?" One possible answer to that is we know the good via intuition. But that's a whole new can of worms with its own set of difficulties. Seriously, intuitionism is very problematic. Almost as problematic as pluralism in naturalistic ethics which kind of brings us back to the drawing board. I wouldn't dream of arguing it to the people who argue moral nihilism-- err I mean "relativism" --here on the forums.

The best way, I think, to convince a moral skeptic is an argument I introduced a while back:

(1) A property P is genuine if it figures ineliminably in a good explanation of observed
phenomena.
(2) Moral properties figure ineliminably in good explanations of observed phenomena.
Therefore
(3) Moral properties are genuine.

The ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations is one perennially attractive argument in favour of the metaphysical claims of realism. The initially attractive thought is that moral properties earn their ontological rights in the same way as the metaphysically unproblematic properties of the natural and social sciences, namely by figuring in good explanatory theories. So just as, for example, a physicist may explain why an oil droplet stays suspended in an electro-magnetic field by citing its charge, or a social scientist may explain high levels of mental illness by citing income inequality, a ‘moral scientist’ may explain the growth of political protest movements or social instability by citing injustice. Likewise, just as an observer of the physicist may explain why he believes that the oil droplet is charged by citing the charge itself, and an observer of the sociologist may explain why she believes that income inequality exists by citing the inequality itself, an observer of the ‘moral scientist’ may explain why they believe that a situation is unjust by citing the injustice itself. In such cases, it appears that the instantiation of a moral property – injustice – is causally relevant in producing an effect – a political protest movement or moral judgement.

http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1930/1/T...prints.pdf

This is the best argument for realism I've found. But there is a problem (for me, not for you)-- the word "observed." It's a moral naturalist's argument. Very good, I think, for showing how the skeptics are wrong. Bad though, if you want to have a pluralistic ethics.

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I understand if I get a tl;dr... fuck! That's a lot.