[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[vulcanlogician]

It wasn't intended to argue that case.  What it was intended to do was provide an inductive argument against believing in arguments for objective morals that are predicated upon subjective assessments as opposed to facts and logic which can be examined.  You haven't offered any reason for believing that you possess a rational and objective foundation for ethics.

So, I've posted this before when the topic of moral naturalism has come up. IDK if it's relevant to the discourse here. Sorry if you guys are talking about something else.

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

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

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

*****

As for intuitionism, as far as I understand, it is not a problem for moral naturalism. It IS a big problem for metaphysical theories (which I tend to prefer over naturalism). G.E. Moore's moral system seems to need to rely fundamentally on intuitions of what is "good." And that is very dissatisfying.

Again, sorry if I'm misunderstanding the argument... but what I've found in my search for a foundation of ethics is that ALL metaethical positions are problematic. If you're a committed skeptic, moral nihilism is where you end up. But the nihilistic position is also very problematic. Just like the realist's argument.

I think that's why most people are tempted to accept relativism, but as I've always said, relativism is an incoherent position. It's untenable. Period. I recently discovered a YouTube video where the lecturer said the very same thing. I really felt vindicated when I listened to it. I'll try to dig it up and include it.

But anyway, though I have settled on realism... to me, moral nihilism is a tenable position. And a nihilist isn't necessarily an evil jerk. A moral nihilist could spend his whole life creating a fair and just society. It's just when you ask him why, his reply will be "Because I want to." or "I prefer justice over injustice," NOT "Because it's the right thing to do."

---

---

[Angrboda]

You've explicitly and repeatedly made such an argument, laying out examples of moral disagreements, and then declaring that is it thus clear that we're arguing opinions or intuitions rather than facts.

No, I have not. As I prefaced my very first post, I'm not arguing whether or not there are moral facts or that if such facts exist we cannot reason from them. What I have argued is that there appears to be no way to inspect moral propositions other than intuition. If you believe there are, a simple counter-example instead of all this bilge would be 1000% more effective. What I have argued is that the lack of agreement shows that no one has established a rational foundation for morals. That's not at all the argument you're representing me as having made.

I can't recall having ever imagined that vaccinating my kids was evil - but I'm sure that I could come up with some scenario where it could be or would be and then I and some other person could argue over the morality of vaccinating our kids...and none of that argument would suggest or imply that either of us weren't being consciously rational, or that there could be no true fact to bicker over.  The rational foundations of morality are, at least in the view I hold, the same rational foundations applied to any other rational or rationalized things.  I talk about moral things and conceive of moral things in the same way that I talk about the color of a thing, and statements about the color of a thing.  There's never been any question as to whether or not moral systems can have rational foundations.  Or that we can employ reason.  It's an open question whether or not any given rational moral system is the Right™ system, ofc.

All reasoning starts from things which are assumed to be true. Thus all reasoning is without an ultimate rational foundation. This is no less true of arguments about color than it is about morals. What is different is that there appears to be rough consensus about which things are reasonable to assume in the case of color, but not as much in the case of morals. Color is rooted in experience. What is the experience of morals rooted in? So far you've given me no alternative to intuition.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's my response most of the time, too. To an extent, I think it's an effect of having been bred for affability.

---

You've explicitly and repeatedly made such an argument, laying out examples of moral disagreements, and then declaring that is it thus clear that we're arguing opinions or intuitions rather than facts.

No, I have not.  As I prefaced my very first post, I'm not arguing whether or not there are moral facts or that if such facts exist we cannot reason from them.  What I have argued is that there appears to be no way to inspect moral propositions other than intuition.  

-all evidence to the contrary in both cases - we're rationally inspecting moral propositions in this very thread - and none of the moral disagreements you reference or that we have imply or demonstrate that we have no way other than intuition to do so.  

All reasoning starts from things which are assumed to be true.  Thus all reasoning is without an ultimate rational foundation.  This is no less true of arguments about color than it is about morals.  What is different is that there appears to be rough consensus about which things are reasonable to assume in the case of color, but not as much in the case of morals.  Color is rooted in experience.  What is the experience of morals rooted in?  So far you've given me no alternative to intuition.

I would certainly agree that morality is no more objective than color and that all rational positions inherit the limits of reason. I think that a more thorough review of the descriptive moral field might lead you to a different conclusion about consensus in moral foundations. That still doesn't put them out of the weeds with regards to my own skepticism - but if this sort of thing interests you it's a fascinating subject.

The apparent (and apparently severe) disagreement over abortion, for example, doesn't often arise out of any actual disagreement over the moral nature of the act of killing a child, or even the issue of whether we have responsibilities to them. Even in thematically religious terms - it doesn't arise out of a body of literature that agrees with either side of the issue in this regard - despite the line being firmly planted in the general vicinity of religious demographics. To use Vulcans example...anti-abortion sentiment seems to have a causal relationship with religiosity that it doesn't have with moral disagreement. This, I would say, is good evidence of intuition driving a moral conclusion - but the mere existence of rational counterarguments which directly address that intuition while accepting their assertions to moral facts would also, then, be an indication of the availability of reason to moral systems and statements.

In a realists formulation, and trying to account for the idea that on balance moral objections to abortion are misplaced - it would seem as though the arguer apprehends a little less than half of the moral import of the situation - and..generously, a human being can be shown some other portion of a thing they didn't previously see and resolve whatever disagreement exists. Ideally, when you go to explain the relevance of that other portion, you'll leverage something that they already believe about things like that. This is why we so often ask about our responsibilities to the mother when told we have responsibilities to other people like unborn children. To the taxpayer when told about the mother. To society when told about the taxpayer - so on and so forth.

All of that - but..in a truly objective moral system, it's almost inevitable that some moral questions won't just have disagreements, but would be completely unresolvable in actuality, not as a result of some mistake or misapprehension or some specific inability of a moral agent. It's possible for two things to have equivalent weight or value. More than just possible - happens all the time.

[Angrboda]

It wasn't intended to argue that case.  What it was intended to do was provide an inductive argument against believing in arguments for objective morals that are predicated upon subjective assessments as opposed to facts and logic which can be examined.  You haven't offered any reason for believing that you possess a rational and objective foundation for ethics.

So, I've posted this before when the topic of moral naturalism has come up. IDK if it's relevant to the discourse here. Sorry if you guys are talking about something else.

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

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

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

I'll have to consider this at more length, but a couple of problems occur to me at first blush. There are strong counter-examples to such propositions. First, free will makes for easy and understandable explanations. That fact doesn't appear immediately probative of whether free will is a reflection of reality. The same is true of folk psychology. The notion that the brain is an engine driven by energies and impulses acting on beliefs and memories is an attractive explanation, but in terms of truth, if something is true because it corresponds to something in the real world, there are obvious problems. I think the difficulty stems from three things. First, Munchhausen's Trilemma, which I just discussed. Second, the assessment of whether an explanation is good or not inevitably turns on coherence, whether the totality of beliefs form a consistent system. Unfortunately, consistency is a bit of a low bar. Things can be consistent without them being true. The fourth is the nature of ideas themselves. All ideas are representations. We don't experience the things themselves. My foot will never know what it is to be a brick, no matter how many times I kick the wall. So our conclusions ultimately must be inferred from experience rather than known through experience.

---

No, I have not.  As I prefaced my very first post, I'm not arguing whether or not there are moral facts or that if such facts exist we cannot reason from them.  What I have argued is that there appears to be no way to inspect moral propositions other than intuition.  

-all evidence to the contrary in both cases - we're rationally inspecting moral propositions in this very thread - and none of the moral disagreements you reference imply or demonstrate that we have no way other than intuition to do so.  

That's not in the least bit true. I pointed to moral disagreements on slavery, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and masturbation as questions as to whether a consensus of intuitions among the majority of thinkers was sufficient to determine whether something is likely to be true. And until someone shows some other basis for morals than intuition then skepticism that such exists is warranted. Reason and rational chains of thought have one thing uniting them that intuitions do not: they are transparent and accessible to inspection. If nobody has presented something possessing those qualities with respect to morals, skepticism is most certainly justified.

The problem is you mush separate things together in your brain like you did with intelligent design in a previous thread, resulting in you making indefensible statements. The technical fallacy is equivocation, which I suspect occurs because you lack the chops to keep ideas and meanings distinct from one another. In this thread I've made several arguments which touch on moral disagreement. Unfortunately for you, your fuzzy reasoning has zeroed in on the one argument that I haven't made.

---

The apparent (and apparently severe) disagreement over abortion, for example, doesn't often arise out of any actual disagreement over the moral nature of the act of killing a child, or even the issue of whether we have responsibilities to them.  Even in thematically religious terms - it doesn't arise out of a body of literature that agrees with either side of the issue in this regard - despite the line being firmly planted in the general vicinity of religious demographics.  To use Vulcans example...anti-abortion sentiment seems to have a causal relationship with religiosity that it doesn't have with moral disagreement.

In a realists formulation, and trying to account for the idea that on balance moral objections to abortion are misplaced - it would seem as though the arguer apprehends a little less than half of the moral import of the situation - and..generously, a human being can be shown some other portion of a thing they didn't previously see and resolve whatever disagreement exists.  Ideally, when you go to explain the relevance of that other portion, you'll leverage something that they already believe about things like that.  This is why we so often ask about our responsibilities to the mother when told we have responsibilities to other people like unborn children.

I'd be interested in hearing what you think the facts underlying the abortion debate are. In addition to providing a good laugh, it could provide an example of Munchhausen's Trilemma applied.

I'll start the ball rolling by pointing out that abortion isn't killing a child in the same sense as killing someone already born is killing a child to pro-choice people. In their eyes, the term 'child' is equivocated upon to mean something it doesn't.

[The Grand Nudger]

If pro choice folks and forced birth folks actually had a moral disagreement over killing children, there would be no utility in forced birthers equivocating over the terms, and no utility in insisting that they've done so.

Convincing a pro choice person who disagrees with you that killing children is evil...that abortion is killing children, would be of no use. Forced birthers take for granted that there is moral agreement over the issue. They're well justified in doing so - even if the equivocation is slimy. That being said, a pro-choicer can believe that the forced birthers are getting something meaningfully right with the attempt. I can see it, and can understand that a rational process rather than pure intuition has been applied to reach the conclusion (and even the moral conclusion) - even if I think they get it wrong. At the bottom of it all, being pro-choice isn't actually equivalent to not having a moral disagreement with abortion in the first place. I have severe moral disagreements with abortion - and remain thoroughly pro-choice.

My foot will never know what it is to be a brick

-and I'll never know what it is to be evil, but that doesn't stop me from knowing that there is evil anymore than your inability to be the brick will stop you from noticing -that- there is a brick. Moral realists think that moral propositions work the same way.

[vulcanlogician]

Here is the basic question.  Do we have moral obligations to future generations?

Intuitively, it would seem so and it is a common consideration for many current policy debates. For example, why should anyone alive today care about preventing environmental catastrophe, say 200 years from now. Everyone alive today will presumably be dead and the beneficiaries of our prevention do not even exist yet, and might never exist. At the same time, if we do have obligations to people not even yet conceived, how can we say that no one has moral obligations towards those who have been conceived but not yet born, as in the case of legal abortion?*  This is philosophical question about if one can be morally obligated to a possible world. One potential solution, would be to treat potential as a kind of existence. In my estimation, the Scholastic tradition seems do so, at least in the following sense. While something may not exist "in act" it still isn’t necessarily nothing at all; it could still exist "in potency".

I don’t know. It’s just something I ponder lately and thought it might be fun to discuss without taking a position.

* Just to be clear, I am NOT interested in playing the “you’re-a-hypocrite-if-you’re-for-one-and-against-the-other” game or having a climate change/abortion debate. The bigger question is more interesting to me and I want to know how some of the more philosophically minded members would approach it.

The debate seems to have drifted into metaethics... but, I want to respond to Neo.

Assuming moral realism, I think we can say something about a moral commitment to future generations.

Our actions affect future generations whether we want them to or not. The fact that they don't exist yet doesn't change the fact that our actions will affect people in the future. We ought to feel the same obligation to them as we do with people in the here and now. There is some uncertainty involved however... we more precisely know the circumstances of those who are present currently. We can less gauge the wants or needs of those who will be born in the future. But we have a pretty good idea that things like rising ocean levels will impact them negatively.

As for abortion, I think "our commitment to a possible world" is to make the world better for those who exist in it. It could, but doesn't necessarily mean, making sure everyone who could exist will exist. Abortion could be seen as preventing lives of anguish and poverty. Only "desired" children are born in the best hypothetical future, when the parent(s) are ready. That "world" contains less grief because it will (theoretically) have it in less impoverished/ignored/uncared for children.

ie. There is a moral argument for abortion-- of course not one that you'd be prone to accept, Neo-- but one that does consider a possible world and one that wants to reduce the amount of suffering in that possible world.


Of course that viewpoint (if anyone should adopt it) also may suggest that abortion is wrong if the child probably would have a happy life. And --also-- this viewpoint only considers the rights of a child who doesn't exist, and ignores the arguments about the negative impact such a child may have on the parents. The rights a woman has to her body etc.

[The Grand Nudger]

There is also a moral argument against abortion with respect to a present and future world that affirms it as a relevant evil - but also includes other equivalent and competing responsibilities to present and future.

That abortion is bad and forced birth is worse. I think I have a tendency to look for these because the pessimistic view is easier to narrativize to skeptics.

---

On to the other side of it? If we do have climate responsibilities to some future world - do those climate responsibilities whatever they are demand or justify (or demand and justify) that we harm a person in the present in order to service those future goals?

I'm allllll the way up this one's dark nooks and crannies, farther than I wanted to be. Environmental responsibility has become the organizing principle of every aspect of my professional life. Oddly, it's harder to get a handle on the personal life. Because I believe in those responsibilities, I think that there's a moral imperative to defer to present realities in order to actualize such a future.

If we kill the people today, we can't save them tomorrow, and if we kill some of the people today, it's going to be harder for us to save the rest tomorrow. With respect to either abortion or climate - I'd say that the work to do...if you're against abortion or against environmental dystopia - is to work to resolve objections to your pitch. If, when we try to convince people that abortion is bad because it's a shit non life for a kid nd someone says "nuh uh, life might be a shit life for that kid" - that's a valid concern. I think we can all see how it could be true (even if we don't believe that it is, at present). If the objection to climate action is that it would make life shittier in the present..that is also a valid concern for equivalent reasons. People invested in either should begin by working to resolve that.

[vulcanlogician]

If you want to peek at what I am arguing, consider Munchausen's Trilemma.  Words or concepts can acquire their meaning in one of three ways.  First, defined in terms of themselves, either directly, or indirectly, through a circular path.  Second, a word can rest upon an infinite regression of sub-definitions, which rest upon more sub-definitions, ad infinitum.  What's generally concluded is that both of these paths are vacuous.  The words don't in any real sense end with a definition.  The third leg of the trilemma is that definitions, concepts or whatever terminate in an indisputably basic fact.  Basic facts are known through apprehension, or intuitively.  You can't define what would constitute a basic fact, as that would lead to another iteration of the trilemma.  So the challenge for those who would argue that morals have an objective foundation is to confront an equivalent trilemma for morals and show either that there is a fourth option that hasn't been acknowledged, or that  there are basic, indisputable beliefs about morals that are objectively true.  Failing to do either is just wasting my time.

IMO this is too skeptical. Math and science can't survive this sort of skepticism. So why require moral realism to pass this test? Or... put a better way... since it is reasonable to assume math and science produce truth statements, isn't it unreasonable to apply a brand of skepticism that renders math and science fictions to moral realism?

And (this is the first I've heard of this trilemma, and I only have the wiki page worth of knowledge about it) but what about founding things on axioms? An axiom is not a dogma, not circular, and not the other thing. (I forgot what it was.)

I also know people that agree with me that harm is a subjective measure.

Seeing the table in front of you is a subjective experience. That doesn't mean the table isn't real.

Causing someone pain has physically provable and observable consequences. If we (in some way... like being rational and sensible) can determine that interpersonally destructive behavior is wrong, the problem isn't that pain, suffering, or harm is subjective. It could theoretically be measured by a neuroscientist. It *IS* an objective phenomenon.

The problem is: how do we know pain, suffering, harm are bad. "We know it intuitively" is an okay answer... dissatisfying as it is. Think about holding your hand on a hot stove. If you could use one word to describe it-- either "good" or "bad"-- which would you chose? To me, the ONLY thing that could make holding your hand on a stove "good" would be like --- you win a million dollars if you can hold your hand on the stove for a minute-- like a game show or something.

But just a hand on a stove? Seems essentially bad to me...

[The Grand Nudger]

IDK, it's still bad, that's why it's a game with a million dollar prize, right? If you can manage to keep your shit together for ten seconds doing this terrible thing, we'll give you enough cash to buy a hovel in MA.

Even hand on stove for money is bad, that's why it's exciting and fun, lol. Exciting and fun kept me doing bad shit (by my own standards) with respect to climate for some time. The fact that it was profitable helped immensely, too.

[vulcanlogician]

I like how in your example you changed the challenge to be ten seconds instead of a minute. Like, "give the poor hypothetical guy a break." haha