Good and Evil

[Mudhammam]

I might not be following, but let that not stop me from adding a comment.

Things can be objectively good, but the context in which things are judged good cannot.  Something is good which achieves or contributes to a good goal; and that good goal is judged to be a good goal because it is necessary for a greater, also good, goal.  Things obviously required for life might be considered objectively good, since the desire to live is a goal applied to mankind before it even was mankind-- i.e. the nature of evolution itself-- to allow persistent patterns to persist-- may be called an objective morality.

However, even with this, you cannot transcend that context: the context in which humanity, life, and the process of evolution on Earth matter.  You cannot really say that existence matters-- of individual entities or even of the universe.

I suspect there is a religious vestige in the idea that ANYTHING is objectively good.  There is the assumption that since the universe (maybe deterministically) tended to arrive at the existence of life, then it was an objective process that led to the existence of subjective perspectives, and that ultimately, all morality is therefore object in some sense.  However, is it good for the universe to exist rather than not to exist?  Yes, we are tempted to answer-- because this was necessary for the existence of life, which we've already established to be good.

But there's a vicious circle here, isn't there?

If things can be objectively good, then why couldn't there be a context in which things are judged good? It would require a context that approaches "good" in the same manner that "objective truth" is ascertained---gathering information from the senses and coining definitions to which we can apply seemingly irrefutable conceptual relationships between a body of "facts." Of course, as we move from individuals to species and then to the entire history of the world, the "end" may be more difficult to define with precision and certainty, but this is only to be expected and allowed. I don't think our inability to say that existence---in the hypothetical context of 100 trillion years from now---matters in any real sense, restricts us from saying that existence now, or as it very reasonably may relate to the foreseeable future, whether that's a context that involves our grandchildren or our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, matters, and moreover, matters more than an iota of anything else that could be said to be at all meaningful to sentient beings, present or sure to be in the approaching days, weeks, months, years, decades, and even centuries. We can try to diminish ourselves in the pursuit of truth as much as possible, and to the extent that this proves fruitful in satisfying our vain curiosities, I think it ought to be sought after, but when it---in what you call a vicious circle---diminishes the very pursuit, and the object of truth, itself, rendering both to be nothing short of absurd and worse, even less dignified than the designation of falsehood since we have no basis for claiming anything to be true or false, i.e. in any context outside of our own mental citadels, I think it may be safe to say that we have gone terribly awry. And speaking of vicious circles, didn't the philosophizing of certain presocratics lead them to conceive of god as an eternal sphere? 

Btw, I didn't respond to this earlier because I was hoping my discourse with Pyrrho would shed some light on my views, but with regards to your question that: 

Someone gave the example of antibiotics.  A course of antibiotics will kill more organisms (like trillions I guess) than it will save.  So are antibiotics good or evil?

It seemed to me to be the type of "dilemma" I've heard unthinking theists raise with respect to positing pleasure (which is almost immediately associated with the most base form of hedonism in their minds) as an end in which to place objective goods, which goes something like, "Is it then wrong to cut open a little girl's stomach with a large blade because it will cause her pain" (Even though the person wielding the sharp object is a physician about to perform a life-saving operation)? Antibiotics are good because the killing of trillions of mindless (and most assuredly unfeeling), microscopic organisms is not destroying any form of life that can be comparable in any sense to the well-being of sentient (let alone rational) creatures (a view which I would similarly hold in the case of abortions).

P.S. I don't mean to imply that your question was silly, or on par with "unthinking theists." I think it's a valid point you raised, asked from a place of goodwill, but not too difficult to swat down, and not particularly pertinent to the question of whether anything really is good.

[bennyboy]

If things can be objectively good, then why couldn't there be a context in which things are judged good? It would require a context that approaches "good" in the same manner that "objective truth" is ascertained---gathering information from the senses and coining definitions to which we can apply seemingly irrefutable conceptual relationships between a body of "facts." Of course, as we move from individuals to species and then to the entire history of the world, the "end" may be more difficult to define with precision and certainty, but this is only to be expected and allowed. I don't think our inability to say that existence---in the hypothetical context of 100 trillion years from now---matters in any real sense, restricts us from saying that existence now, or as it very reasonably may relate to the foreseeable future, whether that's a context that involves our grandchildren or our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, matters, and moreover, matters more than an iota of anything else that could be said to be at all meaningful to sentient beings, present or sure to be in the approaching days, weeks, months, years, decades, and even centuries. We can try to diminish ourselves in the pursuit of truth as much as possible, and to the extent that this proves fruitful in satisfying our vain curiosities, I think it ought to be sought after, but when it---in what you call a vicious circle---diminishes the very pursuit, and the object of truth, itself, rendering both to be nothing short of absurd and worse, even less dignified than the designation of falsehood since we have no basis for claiming anything to be true or false, i.e. in any context outside of our own mental citadels, I think it may be safe to say that we have gone terribly awry. And speaking of vicious circles, didn't the philosophizing of certain presocratics lead them to conceive of god as an eternal sphere? 

Well, to me it always comes down to ambiguism. For example, what does "subjective" mean in an objective world view? You could argue that all ideas, including ideas about what are good and evil, are subjective, because they require minds, or objective, because those ideas are spawned by minds which neither created themselves nor guided their own development.

I said before that free will is as real as any abstract: love, purpose, etc. But while that was taken to mean that I think free will is real, it wasn't exactly that: it's that the truth of something varies as much on the perspective of the subjective agent as on the objective reality.

I think that your aversion to absurdity (and worse) is telling. To people, meaninglessness is absurd. But that aversion isn't a good enough reason to establish meaning as having an objective reality.

It seemed to me to be the type of "dilemma" I've heard unthinking theists raise with respect to positing pleasure (which is almost immediately associated with the most base form of hedonism in their minds) as an end in which to place objective goods, which goes something like, "Is it then wrong to cut open a little girl's stomach with a large blade because it will cause her pain" (Even though the person wielding the sharp object is a physician about to perform a life-saving operation)? Antibiotics are good because the killing of trillions of mindless (and most assuredly unfeeling), microscopic organisms is not destroying any form of life that can be comparable in any sense to the well-being of sentient (let alone rational) creatures (a view which I would similarly hold in the case of abortions).

There are certain red-flag scenarios where people refuse to contine with logical thinking, because doing so seems monstrous. Child-killing, baby rape, voting Republican, stuff like that. But I think we have to be brave and ask the philosophical questions whose answers seem most obvious, and not accept that they really are obvious.

What's wrong with baby rape, exactly? It shows a severe level of genetic dysfunction, or psychological deviation, and is likely to cause physical pain and ongoing psychological suffering. And yet we eat veal. We tear baby animals from their mothers, ignoring their cries of distress because they're "just animals." What's the dividing line? I think it really is just animal instinct: we consider baby rape horribly wrong because it combines our instincts to protect young humans with our instincts against genetically unfit sexual behavior. Being human, our instincts (most of us), fire less strongly for the offspring of other animals. Oh yeah, and just one more word: circumcision. I mean-- fuck. But if I could convince myself that Asian kids (let's say) were a good source of protein and dietary fibre, and could teach myself to disregard their wellbeing, what, objectively, would be wrong with farming them and eating them with A1 sauce?

That's the kind of context I'm talking about. Do you look at the objective development of our ability to feel, and say that our morals are therefore objective? Or do you look at the feelings themselves, and say that any idea or behavior that arises from them, including a moral sense, is subjective? Or do you look back 14.5 billion years and say it all comes from X (fill in your philosophical, scientific or religious hunch here)?

[Pyrrho]

I don't think there is anything that is discovered by reason out in the world, that can serve as the foundation of ethics, or that is "the Good," like some Platonic Form.  I rather like what Hume had to say about this in Appendix I of his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, though I will only quote a bit of it here:

I definitely wouldn't want to take things as far as Plato... but in some sense I think he may have been on to something. Aristotle, however, for as much as he got wrong, seemed fairly spot-on to me with his notions of matter/form, particulars/universals, and how he incorporated them into his ethical theory.

Although I have a great deal of respect for Plato, I think he is completely wrong in this matter.  In my opinion, what he has done is confused language with reality, and taken properties of linguistic concepts and reified them.

Our concepts come from our attempts to understand the world.  Our concepts do not dictate what the world is.  When our concepts do not line up with the world, it is our concepts that are in error.  Plato, though, thought our concepts are more real than the world.

But though reason, when fully assisted and improved, be sufficient to instruct us in the pernicious or useful tendency of qualities and actions; it is not alone sufficient to produce any moral blame or approbation. Utility is only a tendency to a certain end; and were the end totally indifferent to us, we should feel the same indifference towards the means. It is requisite a sentiment should here display itself, in order to give a preference to the useful above the pernicious tendencies. This sentiment can be no other than a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and a resentment of their misery; since these are the different ends which virtue and vice have a tendency to promote. Here therefore reason instructs us in the several tendencies of actions, and humanity makes a distinction in favour of those which are useful and beneficial.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/341#Hume_0222_585

Let me just say a few things about this: The end, if we take it to be something like maximum happiness, is not indifferent to us. In fact, it's difficult to see what else could really matter to a sentient being. Therefore, the means are not indifferent either. I agree with Hume that "this sentiment can be no other than a feeling for the happiness" of sentient beings (and not exclusively mankind, as he suggests), but then I don't see how it is really any different than our conception of "truth" or "scientific principles." When he says that "reason instructs us in the several tendencies of actions, and humanity makes a distinction in favour of those which are useful and beneficial," he could just as easily be talking about the pursuit of truth through the scientific method as he is about the pursuit of the virtues through philosophical inquiry. 

The point is, what gives these things their importance is our feelings about them.  Thus, the basis for their importance is feeling.  In other words, Hume is right.


As for truth and an affection for scientific principles, you really like to bring up diverse subjects all in one place.  Truth is more complex than it appears at first glance, not least because there are different kinds of truth, yet in English (as well as other languages), there is no linguistic indicator of such differences.  To give but one pair of examples, consider the following:

All bachelors are unmarried.

All bachelors are mortal.

The first of these is a tautology, true by virtue of the meanings of the terms, and so it tells us nothing whatever about the world.  The second is a contingent truth, a truth about the world, not true merely from the meanings of the terms.  One can easily imagine a universe in which not all bachelors are mortal.  But one cannot imagine a universe in which not all bachelors are unmarried (sometimes people pretend they can, and they can pretend this by changing the meanings of the terms, but changing the meanings would be talking about something else entirely).

With some kinds of truth, it is the relation between the statement and the world that makes the statement true, though in other kinds of truth, it is the relation between the different concepts.

Notice with the pair of sentences above, English does not give an indication of which kind of truth is involved, nor does it indicate the extreme difference between the two sentences.  They look pretty much the same, but are in fact fundamentally different.

But this is not the place for a discussion of what truth is, and it is not a discussion I particularly want to have at the moment.

If you are going to maintain that something out in the world is discovered that makes things good or bad, you are going to have a very hard time establishing such a claim.  No one has done it thus far in the history of philosophy.

I just don't see that this is a problem unique to ethics. Consider the idea of truth, or even time. You could also say the following:
"If you are going to maintain that something out in the world is discovered that makes things true or false, you are going to have a very hard time establishing such a claim.  No one has done it thus far in the history of philosophy." Or, "If you are going to maintain that something out in the world is discovered that makes things past or future..." (italics mine). Both of those concepts are dependent of rational animals starting with first principles and utilizing induction and deduction for the purposes of demonstration, ...

I don't agree with the way you say that these matters are started.  We are not doing geometry.  Think about the way children are taught, and how they first learn various concepts.  We don't start children off with first principles and build on them, as if we were teaching them geometry.

If things were constructed as you describe, there would be a very serious problem with deciding which "first principles" should be used.  And how could you justify using one set rather than another?  What you end up with is making everything essentially subjective, based upon the whims of selecting first principles one likes.

For some brief words on "truth," see comments above in this post.  For "time," I will be more succinct; time is change.  As that is more properly a topic for another thread, I will presently say nothing more about it.

Additionally, what Hume is saying fits in well with modern evolutionary theory, and with the idea that social animals need to get along with each other (or they would not be social).  The feelings or sentiments which form the basis of this are the foundation of ethics.  Ethical behavior has been observed in nonhuman animals, which further supports the idea that morals are not a matter of reasoning, but of feeling.  This also fits with how deeply these feelings are felt, for they are deeply imbedded in what we are.

I fully agree with Hume on this. I should reiterate some of my thoughts: 1. Morality cannot be divorced from feeling. Sensation is at least half of the determination of what brings pleasure and pain, and therefore happiness, and therefore our ethical foundation. 2. I don't think animals are totally devoid of reason. They may exercise it differently, and the best problem-solvers in the animal kingdom outside of us may appear rudimentary in comparison to our brightest mathematicians, physicists, etc., but they still are able to recognize patterns and put two and two together. 3. I see modern evolutionary theory as more or less related to the epistemology of moral theories (how we come to think we know what real goods are) rather than saying anything fruitful about the ontological status of "the Good" (that what we think we have come to know as real goods are really good), i.e. due to goodness' sake alone.

Up until # 3 we were in agreement.

There is no evidence of "the good" as a thing independent of beings having feelings.  There is no evidence of "the good" being good for its own sake.  You may as well tell me that you believe in God.

The motive or desire for such a thing is understandable, given the very strong, very deep feelings that most people have about such matters.  But feelings are not evidence of external existences for this any more than that they are evidence for the existence of God.

I don't think so.  If you disagree, I think you will find it a bit difficult to come up with evidence that there is something better for its own sake.  That it might be good for something else is easy enough, but that is an entirely different claim.

Like I said, it is more than a bit difficult! Maybe it is impossible. But that doesn't make any alternatives better (with regards to what?   ), and I don't think we should abandon concepts that are necessary for our everyday experiences in the actual world simply because they're difficult to think about. Nobody knows what numbers represent (well, except that they represent themselves!), but we wouldn't begin to think that the values they assign are arbitrarily selected (even though the squiggly lines are).

But Hume's theory is a better alternative.  It explains what we observe, without bringing into the matter some new existence of something for which we have no evidence.

And your idea that an idea of "the Good," as some independent thing, is necessary for our everyday experiences, is just false.  People live their entire lives without getting these matters clear in their minds.  What we observe is that people have strong feelings, and they act based on those feelings.  The idea that there is "something more" is of no explanatory value or use, and only generates an unsolvable problem.  Unsolvable, that is, as long as one holds that there is this independent thing known as "the Good."

I get the fact that you want there to be some something that is "the Good," independent of people.  I can even relate to wanting it.  But wanting it does not cause it to exist, any more than wanting God to exist causes God to exist.


I am not going to say anything about numbers.

When the first principles are at issue, any assumption of them is simply begging the question.  If that is not enough to convince you to rethink things, consider this:  If you assume some set of "first principles" and build your ethical system on that, upon what basis will you be able to select your system over another system, built on a different set of "first principles" that someone else prefers?

You cannot have an infinite regress of demonstrations. You must always begin with definitions, or first principles.

No.  That is not how anyone started.  Look at how a child learns, and you will see the beginnings that people actually have.

I think the basis for which we select these are the same as everything else---reason and evidence---but yes, we may just have to assume that happiness is better than misery, even if we cannot demonstrate this in any other way but an appeal to our experiences and that of everyone (including sentient animals) else---which nobody has trouble doing when it comes to "the problem of other minds."

For the very beginnings of knowledge, it cannot be that reason and evidence are used for selecting first principles.  In the beginning, one has no concepts with which one could even understand a "first principle."

The reason one can do such a thing in a geometry class is that one is not starting from the students knowing nothing.  One uses the knowledge that the students already have in order to explain what is going on in a geometry class.  Try teaching geometry to an infant and you will soon see the problem.

But this is all getting us far away from the subject of this thread.

________________


After writing the above, I finished reading the other posts after yours.  I see that ChadWooters agreeing with you on many points about which I disagree with you makes the comparison to God above seem even more pointed.

[Mudhammam]

Although I have a great deal of respect for Plato, I think he is completely wrong in this matter.  In my opinion, what he has done is confused language with reality, and taken properties of linguistic concepts and reified them.

Our concepts come from our attempts to understand the world.  Our concepts do not dictate what the world is.  When our concepts do not line up with the world, it is our concepts that are in error.  Plato, though, thought our concepts are more real than the world.

I see Plato as attempting to rectify the disparity in the views of Parmenides and Heraclitus in much the same way that Kant sought to reconcile rationalism and empiricism. While he may have reified abstract objects, his failure was not in simply giving undue exaltation to linguistic concepts. He recognized that our faculties of sense perceive a world that is in constant flux while our intellect makes the world intelligible through the usage of conceptual truths that are not. You can say that he's incorrect to give such a lofty position to the realm of the abstract, but refuting his philosophy requires much greater effort than a superficial reading of it.

The point is, what gives these things their importance is our feelings about them.  Thus, the basis for their importance is feeling.  In other words, Hume is right.

That says nothing about whether those feelings of actual goods, that every individual shares and in which there is found widespread agreement, have any basis in objective (or conversely, relative) truth. So, even though I never said Hume was wrong, I do insist that applying his arguments here misses the point.

As for truth and an affection for scientific principles, you really like to bring up diverse subjects all in one place.  

The issues, of objective truths and of objective goods, are not actually all that diverse. Any attempt to justify the one can easily be made to accord with the other. Notice that the question of whether objective truths and objective goods exist and can be known is not the same as the question of how we can come to know them and distinguish either from falsehoods or evils. As I already said, the quotes from Hume on sensation have more to do with difficulties in resolving the latter of those two distinct topics (in other words, your confusing ontology and epistemology).

If things were constructed as you describe, there would be a very serious problem with deciding which "first principles" should be used.  And how could you justify using one set rather than another?  What you end up with is making everything essentially subjective, based upon the whims of selecting first principles one likes.

Have you missed something in the 2,500 year old epistemological debates over that very question? The entire issue of existentialism (likely predated in Protagoras' declaration that "man is the measure of all things") and the relativism that necessarily results is derived from the very difficulty in establishing objective first principles that everyone can agree on. As I said, this isn't related simply to the question of ethics, but of minds, logic, truth, etc.

There is no evidence of "the good" as a thing independent of beings having feelings.  There is no evidence of "the good" being good for its own sake.  You may as well tell me that you believe in God.

There is not "evidence" in the sense of physical qualities that we can touch, see, hear, etc. Of course. But there is evidence, in a priori knowledge, that any discussion of "better and worse" requires a framework outside of ourselves through which a determination regarding the status of an object can be made with the expectation of agreement that is substantiated by more than merely personal dispositions, i.e. as in through syllogistic demonstration coupled with our feelings of empathy and the like.

The motive or desire for such a thing is understandable, given the very strong, very deep feelings that most people have about such matters.  But feelings are not evidence of external existences for this any more than that they are evidence for the existence of God.

Yes, ontological arguments for objective goods are similar to the ones employed by those seeking to justify their belief in God. Except that there is nothing in a rational demonstration of the former that requires personality, omnipotence, omniscience, etc, and all of the other silly anthropomorphic features people like to imagine as necessary for their pet deity. It's as if I appealed to "Supreme Reason," and you responded, "That sounds just like a 'Supreme Creator'." They're both conjectured as abstract somethings that ought to be regarded as reigning supreme over our thinking faculties... and that's about it. So, your quip is just irrelevant.

I didn't respond to every one of your comments, but only to those that I felt were worth a reply. If there's anything that you "feel that I was wrong" to have ignored, I'll be glad to oblige. I might also suggest that, even if you don't really do so, you should at least try not to give off the impression that you revere Hume. I like him a lot, but reverence for philosophers is never appropriate.

[Hatshepsut]

A small off-topic digression on language if anyone is curious; otherwise skip 

---

All bachelors are unmarried.
All bachelors are mortal.

The first of these is a tautology, true by virtue of the meanings of the terms, and so it tells us nothing whatever about the world. The second is a contingent truth. Notice with the pair of sentences above, English does not give an indication of which kind of truth is involved...They look pretty much the same, but are in fact fundamentally different.

Some languages can make a distinction between sentences that are always or permanently true and those that express circumstantial truths. Middle Egyptian could do so, although as the Egyptians weren't particularly good logicians they would have understood the distinction informally. The first in the pair above might have been written as a sentence of identity using the word pw:

zjw pw nfrw nbw zjw jwtjw Hjmwt.sn
"All young men are men without wives,"

while the second one, if thought contingent on circumstance, would be written using a different word, jw:

jw zjw nfrw nbw r mjtjw jsjrt
"All young men are to become likenesses of Osiris" (i.e., they will die.)

The "young men" thing is just because they didn't have a word for "bachelor." This syntactic provision in Afroasiatic languages (including Hebrew, Arabic, and Berber) isn't as precise as the logic you're thinking of; the Egyptian pw sentence declares something believed a matter of identity or of truth which doesn't change, whether tautology or not, i.e things like "Paris is a town in France." The jw sentence expresses things that are true temporarily or true in specific circumstances, such as "President Obama is in France." Still, it's a tad richer than English in truth-typing.

---

[Neo-Scholastic]

I see Plato as attempting to rectify the disparity in the views of Parmenides and Heraclitus in much the same way that Kant sought to reconcile rationalism and empiricism.

Plato attempted. Aristotle solved. Aquinas refined....

Yes, ontological arguments for objective goods are similar to the ones employed by those seeking to justify their belief in God. Except that there is nothing in a rational demonstration of the former that requires personality, omnipotence, omniscience, etc, and all of the other silly anthropomorphic features...

Perhaps you are not yet as familiar with those arguments as you are those of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Kant. Also those terms with reference to the God of the Philosophers is slightly different that the meanings a typical Evangelical would assign to them.

[robvalue]

What happens if God suddenly decides to rotate the board, like on numberwang? Suddenly all good and evil acts are swapped. Then what?

[Hatshepsut]

Pyrrho & Nestor seem to be resting up from their debate. Hardly surprising, given how difficult Parmenides alone is, much less any differences he might have had with Heraclitus. Parmenides, known only through his fragmentary poem and through Plato's namesake dialogue, is a pretty tough nut to crack. As long ago as 1894, William Waddell was warning students not to read Hegel into Parmenides, and it seems the propensity for surjecting modernisms has continued down to our century. I'll only guess that a little earlier the students were being tempted to read Kant into him as well.

It's enough to discourage me: Abstractions regarding the nature of reality from 2500 years ago are the hardest things to translate with modern equivalents when it's possible no close equivalents exist. We had Zeno's paradox of the arrow arguing that motion or change can't be real when obviously Zeno must have seen arrows in flight. What were these fellas really talking about? It's clear Parmenides distinguished nonverbal perception from construction with words (logos), considering the former unreliable, yet beyond that I'm not schooled enough to tell what he planned to accomplish with his philosophical program. Plato then superimposes a new agenda, to establish a form of dualism, by having Socrates rebut another of Zeno's premises, that things cannot be simultaneously "like" and "unlike." That's about the best I can do with it.

Waddell 1894 ed. of Plato Parmenides, see p. 6 (13 in pdf), in the Preface
http://www.wilbourhall.org/pdfs/plato/th..._plato.pdf

[robvalue]

I don't fucking know, it's too complicated for me. I just try and be nice. Give me a maths sum to do.

[emjay]

What happens if God suddenly decides to rotate the board, like on numberwang? Suddenly all good and evil acts are swapped. Then what?

Exactly. That's the thing that annoys me the most about religion. If it's all about love of god, what if god were to turn the tables and say 'if you love and obey me, I'll send you to hell'. I know that's not quite what you were saying but close enough. Then you'd find out whether the religious really did love god or whether it was just about the prize.