Morality without God

[vulcanlogician]

So my question for morality is how we can resolve disputes. If one person says that 'eating people is wrong' and another says 'eating people is a good thing', what steps can we take to resolve the dispute? Is there a way that we can eliminate one view or the other and at least say it is false?

We have to agree on axioms, ie. take one thing or another to be self-evident. Hedonism has a pretty good axiomatic foundation. We all know the experience of pain or pleasure. Consider drinking your favorite beverage. Now consider holding your hand over a flame. One of these experiences has the qualitative effect of "bad" or "No!" Likewise, the other experience carries with it enjoyment: "good" or "Yes." From this observation the hedonist concludes that pain is bad and pleasure is good. The "hard" sciences are ultimately based on empirical observation (sense data). The hedonist is using a similar foundation, but rather focuses on the qualitative aspects of the senses.

So, once the hedonist accepts the conclusion that pleasure/happiness is good-- pain/misery is bad, all that needs to be done is plug this formula into moral queries. Does this act cause large amounts of pain and suffering? Then it's bad. What is the best birthday present to get my wife? Something that will make her happy. Is it wrong to let millions of people starve? Well... yes... because starvation involves a lot of pain and suffering.

And it isn't controversial whether pleasure or suffering really exist. Biologists and neuroscientists understand that these are real, observable phenomena.

Hedonists have worked out problems such as "bad things cause good feelings" (crack cocaine), and "good things cause pain/suffering" (muscle aches during your morning jog). To the hedonist, there are instrumental and intrinsic good. An instrumental good is a good that you use to get another good. Like money. If you couldn't spend it, money would be worthless. Likewise, instrumental goods are not good in and of themselves. They are a means to an end. Long story short, the pain from a morning jog is an instrumental good. It is (long term) giving you good health. Is good health good in and of itself? The hedonist says no. We want good health because good health brings us pleasurable life experiences. In the end, pleasure (to the hedonist) is the only intrinsic good. Likewise, crack cocaine isn't bad because it's bad to feel the high from crack. It's bad because (long term) it has the potential to create a large amount of suffering, both for the user and his friends or family.

So that's one moral theory. It has valid axioms. Everything that follows from there is purely logical. It depends on no dogma or superstition, and it's principles are not subject to people's whims or opinions. It's objective... not subjective. And that's my position: morality is objective. I'm not arguing anything more than this.

There are good challenges to hedonism, which is why I personally think it's incomplete... but completeness of a theory is not something we ask of the hard sciences. There are problems with some scientific theories, as good as some of them are. Same goes with moral theories. The point is, it is adequate enough for our needs.

If he was reasonable, I would hope I could convince a cannibal it was wrong to eat people. Well... unwilling people. If this person entered into contracts whereby he exchanged money for the right to eat a person's body after they die, hedonism would say nothing is wrong with such an arrangement. A hedonist might even pronounce it good, so long as the cannibal experienced enjoyment in the act, and the person didn't really care about their corpse, and was happy to receive the money.

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Good link.  I really enjoy the portion about object oriented attention right at the end...and then the subsequent q/a about moores unapprehended world of value.  What about the trees, she wonders.  I like to use a caveman and a fire extinguisher.  

Without rehashing it in full, what gives the fire extinguisher value?  Is it the cavemans goal of not dying in the burning terror box we used our time machine to beam him into?  
(we have all sorts of cool toys and no moral reservations as to their use in my thought experiment world, lol)

Well, no.  That's a statement of his goal, but not a description of why the fire extinguisher is good-for accomplishing that goal.  That explanation will be synonymous with a scientific claim about the chemical composition of the can - which remains unchanged whether anyone apprehends it, both before and after our caveman realizes (or is shown) the use  to-him.  In fact, it's only useful to him, extrinsically useful, because of it's intrinsic utility in suppressing fires.  

His appraisal is subjective, and it can change based on some fact about him changing (his state of knowledge about fire extinguishers, in this case) - but the utilitarian value of a fire extinguisher is there even if there's no one there to apprehend it, even when people fail to apprehend it, and even when there are no fires to put out.  She get's on to that at the very end - with relational realism.  The value is real, (meaningfully)mind independent and object oriented - but exclusively and uniformly apprehend by human beings with regards to it's relationship to us.  

Demonstrating the use of the fire extinguisher to the caveman doesn't create the value, doesn't change anything about the can or the fire or even the cavemans use-value beliefs, but does show the value in relation to him.  It's not subjectively and non emprically good-for putting out fires, such that it's use-value is created ex-nihilo in the mind of the observer.  That's just a tick of human moralization that we're very well aware of, even if we find it difficult to divorce ourselves from (and perhaps even imprudent to divorce ourselves from)...in practice.

Glad you enjoyed it. I actually skipped the Q&A because so often the audience can be tedious and annoying after a philosophy lecture (and hers was so good, I didn't want to ruin it). Nice to know that there more good stuff to be found. I'll have to check it out.