Our server costs ~$56 per month to run. Please consider donating or becoming a Patron to help keep the site running. Help us gain new members by following us on Twitter and liking our page on Facebook!
May 15, 2019 at 4:11 am (This post was last modified: May 15, 2019 at 4:14 am by vulcanlogician.)
(May 13, 2019 at 2:23 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: In the limited scope of the debate between non natural and natural realists...
That's the thing. Since I've been debating moral skeptics online, one thing has occured to me: moral naturalism is WAY easier to argue to skeptics than non-naturalism. And it gives me pause.
On one hand, the fact that a position can be successfully argued lends it credibility. After all, aren't the GOOD arguments also the most convincing? (Not that any moral skeptic has ever admitted to being swayed by my arguments, but when I'm arguing moral naturalism I get the sense that the arguments "sink in" and are at least felt by my opponent.) Also, the ease in arguing a position (the fact that so many reasonable and sound arguments come easily to mind) seems to suggest that there's something there.
The reason I'm not a moral naturalist comes from when I'm NOT trying to convince a moral skeptic. The thing about moral naturalism is, all the theories that fall under it are lacking, insufficient, or incomplete. Non-naturalism, such as Moore's, does not suffer from this deficit. Even Plato... let no one say Plato's ethics is incomplete or lacking in wholeness.The most obvious advantage that non-naturalists have is not having to answer Hume's is/ought dickery.
All these things drive me towards accepting non-naturalism, but non-naturalism has its difficulties too. For one, it's vague, while naturalism is precise. Your typical naturalist, say a utilitarian hedonist, can rattle off at an instant what is right and what is wrong. You may have to spend some time at the abacus, but (ultimately) the answer is easy.
For the non-naturalist, there is no easy answer. And there is no concrete answer either. You must be motivated to look at a given situation and determine "the good" without reducing "the good" to something that is easily quantifiable. To me, that sounds like the real ethical predicament. And that's one reason I favor non-naturalism.
May 15, 2019 at 7:51 am (This post was last modified: May 15, 2019 at 8:07 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(May 15, 2019 at 4:11 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: That's the thing. Since I've been debating moral skeptics online, one thing has occured to me: moral naturalism is WAY easier to argue to skeptics than non-naturalism. And it gives me pause.
On one hand, the fact that a position can be successfully argued lends it credibility. After all, aren't the GOOD arguments also the most convincing? (Not that any moral skeptic has ever admitted to being swayed by my arguments, but when I'm arguing moral naturalism I get the sense that the arguments "sink in" and are at least felt by my opponent.) Also, the ease in arguing a position (the fact that so many reasonable and sound arguments come easily to mind) seems to suggest that there's something there.
The reason I'm not a moral naturalist comes from when I'm NOT trying to convince a moral skeptic. The thing about moral naturalism is, all the theories that fall under it are lacking, insufficient, or incomplete. Non-naturalism, such as Moore's, does not suffer from this deficit. Even Plato... let no one say Plato's ethics is incomplete or lacking in wholeness.The most obvious advantage that non-naturalists have is not having to answer Hume's is/ought dickery.
-wall-of-text follows, lol
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. Humes dickery (lol), for it's part, hits every moral theory equally. Every ought is derived from some is in conjunction with at least one evaluative proposition. IDK how to "answer" that other than to say that all moral theories contain many is-es and many evaluative propositions. Regardless of the meta-ethical moral theory, theories of compulsion and desert are universal. Any of them can be applied to any moral system. Kagans geometry of desert, for example, is meta-ethically neutral. You could apply it to platos morality, or to cornells. Similarly, his natural realism accommodates the christian concept of "sin" and humes notion of desire driving compulsion.
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". 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".
Now, I'm not sure exactly how you define completeness, but those moral positions which have the virtue of placement in time after people like plato, hume, and moore, would seem to have the benefit of hindsight and increased knowledge. A moral theory that comes out tomorrow may not be more accurate, but it has the potential of being so in that it can incorporate whatever we may learn today. I'm assuming that by completeness, you mean something like self containment. I think that's an impressive attribute. It shows that the advocate spent alot of time on the propositions. I'm not sure that there aren't contemporary moral theories that are similarly complete....but even so, it would still be the case that completeness as self containment is intuitively satisfying, but no more accurate or thorough than what was contained in the first place. There were things about the world, and man, and our moral nature, that plato et al simply didn't know and therefore could not have included despite however well circumscribed their moral theories may have been. Their self containment, seen as a virtue by cause of our intuitive satisfaction, put in this context, necessarily excludes true and relevant things - unless we believe that no additional true or relevant fact about morality has presented itself in all of the intervening years. OFC, some -other than natural realist- theory could also come out tomorrow, incorporating all of what we learned today....that just isn't the direction that the worm of contemporary ethics has turned.
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. At the base of this ethical pillar, there is the contention that some property of a natural act will cause specified harm. In this case harm to ones soul (lol), or in some broader sense, a calamity in this life. Now I think it's amusing that we imagine these non natural souls as things that can be harmed in pretty much the same way our bodies can. Hell isn't full of fire for no reason, lol....but what this does show is that right or wrong about the object of their moralizing, the object does exist in the natural world, and they do imagine themselves to be advocating against some harm it causes. This moral proposition doesn't fail in a natural realist schema on account of it's underlying propositions, but on the basis of the soundness of the assertion of harm. We might ask "whats wrong with murder?" - and again get some explicitly cultural answer ala "ten commandments" but the same literature which contains the deontological product is also rife with stories about the misery, deprivation, and cycles of violence which ensue when one man sets out to kill another. This was the stoic basis of turning the other cheek. Whatever wrong has been done to you, and however justified retaliation may be, the totality of consequence in our own retaliation can far exceed whatever limits our justification might posses. They're assholes, but that doesn't mean we need to make ourselves assholes, or diminish our own character in the slightest way. While we reject one today we still accept the other, even as we understand the problems with that course of action. On some level, we imagine that as a general rule it could lead to betterment. There would still be the one set of initiating face slappers and whatever ill they may do....but their won't be any secondary or chain-slappers to add to that pile.
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. Personally, I think the ease of the argument is exactly why so many people find it unsatisfying, or lacking, in some way. The constant "is that all it is, well, what about this and this, I thought it said more" - the implication being that if it doesn't say that more™, it;s somehow diminished relative to other propositions or the expectations of people.
Quote:All these things drive me towards accepting non-naturalism, but non-naturalism has its difficulties too. For one, it's vague, while naturalism is precise. Your typical naturalist, say a utilitarian hedonist, can rattle off at an instant what is right and what is wrong. You may have to spend some time at the abacus, but (ultimately) the answer is easy.
For the non-naturalist, there is no easy answer. And there is no concrete answer either. You must be motivated to look at a given situation and determine "the good" without reducing "the good" to something that is easily quantifiable. To me, that sounds like the real ethical predicament. And that's one reason I favor non-naturalism.
I think that you're downplaying the difficulty of moral conclusions from the natural realist POV. It doesn't provide easy answers, though it does at least provide the potential for the use of an abacus, lol. The utilitarian hedonist is reciting a deontology with thousands of years of moral reasoning behind it. All that natural realism provides a utilitarian hedonist is access to metrics, so that;s the only thing they have to play with or change as information becomes available. That doesn't mean that whatever moral calculus they're doing isn't difficult. I think we've all sat there and stared at a math (or moral, lol) problem for what seemed like an eternity before throwing our hands up in the air. Some problems may be easy, the moral equivalent of basic addition or subtraction - but I suspect that the more difficult set is the larger set. The things you think about non-naturalism seem to apply equally well to naturalism, with one caveat - being willing to reduce "the good" to something easily™ quantifiable doesn't mean that a complex composite is easier to resolve. It can make it orders of magnitude more difficult, with more moving parts that need to be more accurately quantified. More interrelationships accounted for. 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.
-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.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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:
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.
Quote: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.
In The Symposium, Plato Wrote: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.
Moore Wrote: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.
And one also must take this under consideration when determining the ideal:
Moore Wrote: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.
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.
Quote: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."
Quote: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:
Ethics Textbook Wrote: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:
Quote: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.
SEP Wrote: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."
Quote: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.
Quote: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
...
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.
Quote: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.
Quote:-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:
Quote:(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.
Quote: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.
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.
I understand if I get a tl;dr... fuck! That's a lot.
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:
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.
Quote: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 something of 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.
In The Symposium, Plato Wrote: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.
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.
Moore Wrote: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.
And one also must take this under consideration when determining the ideal:
Moore Wrote: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.
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.
Quote: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."
Quote: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:
Ethics Textbook Wrote: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:
Quote: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.
SEP Wrote: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."
Quote: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.
Quote: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
...
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.
Quote: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.
Quote:-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 moral intuitionism, 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:
Quote:(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.
Quote: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.
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.
I understand if I get a tl;dr... fuck! That's a lot.
It seems like moral nihilism would be an anti-morality. A moral nihilist might still have a "code" of their own, or advocate things they like/oppose others they dislike similarly to non-nihilists though.
I don't think moral relativists who advocate a theory of justice contradict themselves. Yes, it's weak, but saying this is justice according to society isn't a contradiction. Of course, moral relativism has many other problems I believe.
I'm glad you linked to that paper. So far I've been hard-pressed to find arguments for moral realism that were understandable (trying to read some academic philosophers' work on this was no help). Strangely, mostly I've seen arguments against it and for anti-realist theories. The best I've come across is from Russ Shafer-Landau in "Whatever Happened To Good and Evil?" where he basically just argues to show every other theory fails, leaving moral realism (specifically ethical non-naturalism) by default.
May 22, 2019 at 2:07 am (This post was last modified: May 22, 2019 at 2:44 am by The Grand Nudger.)
I don't think that you're giving hedonists a fair shake, at all, lol. It's not impossible for a hedonist to declare something good or beautiful or pleasurable on account of the whole over it's constituent parts. Paint is just paint, but a painting is another animal. More to the effect that some of the constituent parts may not be beautiful or good, and that end results being equal, it would have been better to derive whatever pleasure or betterment without that pain - if possible...
.....and have you ever read up on how some of that paint is manufactured, lol?
There's an argument for genocide from hedonism too. It may be that the most effective way to maximize happiness and minimize suffering is to exterminate a good portion of all life...and isn't this precisely what we've done as we rose from scavengers to spacefarers? The confrontation of that truth is uncomfortable and unsatisying, so much so that no matter how well articulated or demonstrated the point might be, many folks (myself included) will immediately reject the course of action and insist that there is a better way. Same as above, essentially.
This thing you have about pluralist values and the totality of x does seem to cut to the core of your issues with particular meta-ethical positions. I;m not sure why, though. If the good and bad reduce to natural properties there isn't exactly a shortage of those properties to be derived from. If the good and the bad are instrumental properties - then there's a potentially infinite set of them. Nothing prevents a naturalist (or a hedonist) from considering the totality of some x before a moral consideration. There's no other point to identifying and tallying up parts to be weighed against one another. Now, I don't know how many values there are, but I can say with confidence that harm and help* are among them, and also that a fully competent moral conclusion is impossible unless a person takes the nature of an act, the character of a person, and the consequences of that person committing that act into account. No complete deontology or desert can be derived without that full accounting. The fact that I don't require any other metrics to apply to these disparate moral theories is why I employ value monism without making a binding commitment to it. There may be more, but as some random french fucker said, I just don't need them.
*even here, help might be reducible to anti-harm, lol.
I'm not sure why you think the things you do about beauty (either that naturalism can't account for it or that idealism somehow does). Nor do I think that your nazi example was anything more than an issue of the limitations you placed on the thought experiment. If the world were full of nazis then the best nazis would be the most virtuous people. They're as good as you;ve allowed them to be, how better -can- they be, and what is the silent evaluative premise informing you that this won't stand, and on what grounds of desert do you reject their classification as good people?
On moore, I think he had some good things to say, obviously..but if his idealism was either wrong or content equivalent to naturalism (and it's one or the other, lol) then it doesn't matter if he left room for pluralism. Humes dickery is emphatically not what you think it is nor does moore actually derive his oughts from an ideal anymore than hume avoided deriving oughts from is-es (or moore oughts from natural is-es). His conformity to ideal is the evaluative premise, and that's judged by empiracal facts..satisfying humes conditions in the same way that any other moral theory does. The is-ought problem is the most misquoted and overemphasized bit of ethical philosophy, imo. It's a problem -if your evaluative premises are a problem- but I'm not aware of anyone who can competently argue that the mere presence or employment of an analytical bridge necessarrily entails a commitment to some non natural x in anything other than the novel sense of "non-natural" as thoughts. Knowing what we do, now, about the brain and our cognitive apparatus, I don't think that any meta-ethical position that makes that distinction is even remotely coherent.
If (if if if if..lol) what we're apprehending and communicating when we make moral distinctions are empirical properties of x, then natural realism is facially true. How many empirical properties (and which empirical properties) belong in the good and bad sets..and why, is a great convo..but if that's what we're dealing with than idealism is a non starter on every level. Value pluralism has some subtle but important meta-ethically neutral differences from moral pluralism conceptualized as methodological pluralism (some combination of many different overarching schemas) - mostly in that a person can be a value monist and a moral pluralist in that sense, and vv. Naturalism and idealism ride under the competing moral theories and ideas about value and desert ride neutrally alongside all of them. There's nothing preventing a person from picking any one from those three categories. No fundamental disparity. At least none that I'm aware of but you may have more to say on that that I hadn't considered or read.
Personally, I think that moral naturalisms biggest issue isn't in demonstrating it's fundamental premise, but in how we determine the weight given to some property in consideration relative to others - particularly in ambiguous cases, exclusively sub-optimal fields, and known unknowns.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
May 22, 2019 at 9:47 am (This post was last modified: May 22, 2019 at 10:10 am by The Grand Nudger.)
-more afterthoughts and addendums, lol. Perhaps the unification of virtue ethics and consequentialist ethics lies in the final moral evaluation. Is there some specific problem that can't be resolved at that level of consideration, do you think?
Where we take the example of a mustache twirling villain tying some maiden to the tracks, the train stopping to avoid running her over moments before the engine would have exploded. We see his act, and we see the consequence. The act is un-objectionably evil while the consequence was a net good. Is this a problem, or simply the acknowledgement that bad people can accidentally stumble into doing good things? From the other end, we can see the virtue in a faithful commitment to radical forgiveness - but simultaneously we see the consequence of that playing out when some pastor convinces his flock to apprehend ongoing genocide in this way. Here again, problem for virtue ethics, or just the acknowledgement that a good person can do a bad thing for all of the right reasons?
We (generally) unify these things when we describe desert, what categorization (and consequence) a person deserves on account of he above. We don;t imagine that the mustache twirler deserves praise or reward, least of which to be called a good person, though we hold out the possibility of moral redemption through unintentionally good acts or consequences. Similarly, we don't hold the pastor fully accountable for the outcome he facilitated. He doesn't deserve to be thought of as evil, he was just stunningly and disastrously naive.
The problems, so much as they exist and are problems, aren't properly issues of the moral schema, but in what we might consider half baked declarations of desert. The virtuous nazis don't deserve to be called good (even if they are). So, if they are then this presents itself as a disparity between what they deserved and what they got. Kagans two peaks. It;s presents itself as injustice, unfairness, which seems out of place in a moral system.....but who ever said that goodness was fair...? Perhaps goodness-itself really is stacked against some people and really does favor others. Your poor nazis never could be good, eh, and a useful idiot is almost categorically incapable of being bad.
Moral knowledge is a curse, something something something about a magical fruit in a garden. It may be that none of this wisdom actually helps us to escape our moral circumstances, only informs us of how hard we fail by the standard of the ideal, thus increasing misery rather than reducing it ,lol.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
Moralities are normative positions whereas nihilism is a metaethical position. There's nothing about nihilism that says you should or shouldn't be nihilistic.
June 10, 2019 at 11:05 am (This post was last modified: June 10, 2019 at 11:07 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Arguments to it's truth, properly understood and genuinely believed and to be believed provides it's minimal normative framework.
A nihilist cannot be a nihilist without believing that it is true and that they should, therefore, be so. That the world is so. That other more elaborate normatives are in error. If nihilism does not present some compelling reason to disregard those other normatives as they are, then it doesn't make it's own normative case very well.
Even at it's most reduced, nihilism does tell you to do and not do x, specifically, referring to your moral intuitions.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
June 10, 2019 at 12:22 pm (This post was last modified: June 10, 2019 at 12:22 pm by SenseMaker007.)
Quote:Arguments to it's truth, properly understood and genuinely believed and to be believed provides it's minimal normative framework.
Arguments for metaethical positions are not arguments for normative positions.
Quote:A nihilist cannot be a nihilist without believing that it is true and that they should, therefore, be so.
The bolded part is a non-sequitur.
Quote: That other more elaborate normatives are in error.
You cannot be a moral nihilist without believing that other metaethical positions are logically in error but there's absolutely nothing about moral nihilism that says that you have to believe that any particular normative position is morally in error. In fact, if that were the case it wouldn't be moral nihilism.
Quote:If nihilism does not present some compelling reason to disregard those other normatives as they are, then it doesn't make it's own normative case very well.
It's not making a normative case.
Quote:Even at it's most reduced, nihilism does tell you to do and not do x, specifically, referring to your moral intuitions.
--here on the forums.
