[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[Angrboda]

I'm on the bus, and so I'm just skimming and don't expect to respond until tomorrow, but pain and harm are not equivalent terms. We subject ourselves to pain plenty without ever considering ourselves having been harmed. Harm is inextricably linked to self-interest in my view. Pain is not.

[The Grand Nudger]

We harm people against their own self interests and, sometimes, against ours, and very often - for the benefit of others - theirs and ours ignored. We do this thinking some good end or aim will be achieved. I don't think that we're wrong all the time when we do that, or when we think that we're always being irrational.

It's not irrational to think, for example, that abortion is of moral import. It's not irrational to think abortion is bad or that it's good or anything in between. It's not irrational to think that we have moral responsibilities or that our moral responsibilities extend beyond the present and extend beyond self interest.

Nothing is gained by me for example, from holding the position on abortion or environmental responsibility that I hold. I gain more by occluding them. I will never need an abortion because I can't carry kids and my ideological allies would not look kindly on my view of the act. I'll be dead long before anything I do shows any benefit to anyone, if ever..and smart money is on never or just a scant few. I won't even be remembered for it. My name appears on a list with dozens (or more) of others on obsure papers about the commercial viability of a given alternative production method. So what. I honestly don't think that any of my kids are interested in it, even. Most of the time I have to both pretend not to hold the positions I do and also pretend that I hold some other position just to do my job - depending on who I'm talking to.

I have -always- made more money doing harm, I have always had a self interested motive to harm, and I'm good at it in a terrifying array of circumstances and intended aims - and yet here I am - calling that list of self interested things harmful, and bad. Even when I'd do them again, even when I prefer them. Do you have any similar experiences?

[vulcanlogician]

@Angrboda

Have a nice bus ride.

I would add that harm is Nudger's concept. I prefer happiness/pleasure/pain/suffering to make the point. These (hedonistic) concepts are not all there is to morality (at least that's what I think). But they are tangible real things... observable by science... that (in our direct experience) come with the qualities "bad" or "good" baked right into them. Happiness is good. Suffering is bad. Wouldn't you agree? It's very tangible.

So, with moral skeptics I argue for hedonism. With hedonists, I argue that hedonism is an incomplete theory. But (incomplete as it is) for me, happiness and suffering MUST factor in to a moral theory somehow.

[The Grand Nudger]

LOL, bit of a misconception, harm isn't my jam either - I'm just the token realist arguing for bog standard realist propositions to help other people understand in those moments where their objections fail to land, -that- their objections fail to land. I've got alot of ticks of communication - so I'm sure that the kerfuffle is all on me.

Harm, to put it plainly, is just one of the first things to look for. A thing, of many things, with moral import. Pleasure is there too. Don't harm, do help. There are more (or more instructive) instances in which pleasure is present and good is absent than instances in which bad is present and harm is absent, imo. That's the utility for me. More and easier grist for the mill.

I think that it's bad to harm people today for some future good. Abortion, environmental justice or action, same same. At the level of moral facts of a matter, doing a bad thing for a good reason is and always will still be doing a bad thing. I think that a person who does that bad thing for that good reason, eyes wide open, has a clearer view of any moral field which we might call objective. It will be much easier for them to understand the notion of moral objectivity than it will be for any person who believes that the final assessment of composite situation whcih may have exclusively suboptimal outcomes is, by force, equivalent to moral assessment of an act in isolation and relies n just a single proposition which, showing any exception, renders the whole moot.

As you and I have discussed before - I'm a moral realist, sure, but also a moral pluralist. Moral pluralism leads to situations where a bad thing can have a good outcome (consistent with what we see in mere reality). Moral pluralism allows me to be personally against abortion in any case - but deeply pro-choice. Plural realism affords me the specificity and rationality of any other assertion to truth in a world of many relevant variables and cirumstances.

A great example of how this plays out, playing on an earlier question...is that I think it's bad to stick kids with needles. If we could vaccinate kids without sticking them with needles - then we should do that. You'd have to be a lollipop swiping monster to argue this point with me or with a child, lol. We can't - so that's what we're going to do, we're just picking the least shitty thing in our list of available moral responses to a situation of moral import. We could keep kids from getting polio by hitting them over the heads with bricks, too, but I think that theres a reason that we don;t do that. When we talk about morality as laymen we parcel the world up into into obviously™ goods and bads for effect..but..I can't remember who said it...something along the lines of how the world does not come to us or to me, in pieces, discrete - but all at once and as one one thing. The moral decisions we make every day are more like that than our demonstrative examples of moral principle.

A person, in that light, could see and agree with every moral postulate of their opposition, disagree with just one amoral proposition - and come to entirely disparate conclusions about the whole thing. Rationally.

*(also, I want to point out that I have these conversations with four children on the regular - pretty much no one else - I assume that I fall into those same patterns when I talk about it on the boards, which would cause any self respecting adult to rage)

[vulcanlogician]

LOL, bit of a misconception, harm isn't my jam either - 

Well, okay. I said it was your concept, not your jam... but (reading back) I used the word "harm" in my argument, and lumped it in with suffering. So I actually am obligated to respond to the objection that the two are separate. So, I concede the point. They're separate... or at least separable. But they're often found together, which suggests a kind of relationship between the two.

As you know, I think pluralism beats any monistic theory. But the monistic theories are still valuable. They precisely map the moral landscape. But ultimately, each fails because it fails to conform with intuitions in some way. Especially when you bring in fringe cases.

[The Grand Nudger]

Absolutely. I think that those fringe cases are as difficult as they would be in any objective appraisal which respects differences, but also that they rationally inform the misapprehensions that a person with a commitment to forced birth must then have a commitment to environmental issues, or vv.

I like to think that I have a rational commitment to environmental issues and not to forced birth, even though I objectively see that I'm against abortions and for deference to existing moral agents. I'd like to think this because I can give any number of rational explanations for why I have those commitments, and how those commitments play out in practice in accordance to those statements. Even though any or all of those rational explanations could be wrong - factually speakin...and allowing that some if not all are, in fact.


For the other thing-
Two people might agree that babykilling is wrong as a moral fact of that matter.
Two people might disagree that abortion is babykilling - as a circumstantial fact of the matter.
Those two people would then be expected, especially if they employed reason.....to disagree on the matter of whether abortion were wrong. Is the disagreement a moral disagreement, or a circumstantial disagreement of moral import? Properly?

The answer to that question will probably map to positions about moral metaphysics. One person might think that we can't make objective statements about things up to an including colors, by some standard. They don't doubt moral truth. They doubt truth in toto. I thinks that's (somewhat) rationally defensible. I just don't think that doubting truth in toto is the same thing as doubting one category of truth, or that the argument for the one or any other, compelling as they or it may be, are equally compelling as arguments for those others with all of their own and disparate continencies.

Either we cant get it wrong or right, wrong and right are fundamentally meaningless. Or we can, and it's hard, and we get it wrong alot.

I can see how a rational person might believe any combinations of these assertions to moral fact. There's no criticism of those assertions to fact that wouldn't apply to [i0any[/i] assertion to fact.

[vulcanlogician]

What if I told you that Neo doesn't have a commitment to forced birth? What if I told you that Neo has a commitment to the welfare an unborn child?

It just so happens that the institution that convinced Neo of the worth of the unborn child was really just committed to making forced birth endemic.

Sad story.

[Pat Mustard]

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.

Given that your side is vehemently opposed to protecting the rights, either moral or legal, of actual living people, I find you coming on here trying to hijack the moral ground with faux appeals to "protecting potential people" to be simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.

To give evidence to the claim in my first clause, the groups vehemently opposed to abortion to protect a clump of cells' "right to life" are vehemently in favour of allowing parents to murder their children through medical negligence because of "sincerely held" religious beliefs. To the religious right and their followers and fellow travellers, a blastocyst has more rights than a 5 year old.

Fix your immorality to actual human beings before lecturing us about potential human beings Wooters.

[The Grand Nudger]

What if I told you that Neo doesn't have a commitment to forced birth? What if I told you that Neo has a commitment to the welfare an unborn child?

It just so happens that the institution that convinced Neo of the worth of the unborn child was really just committed to making forced birth endemic.

Sad story.

I don't think that we'd ever run out of examples where motivated propagandizers exploit a shared moral assumption for some other unrelated or marginally related end.   In the case of abortion, the aim is political might - not the welfare of children, but since it would be hard to find a person who doesn't understand and agree with our responsibilities to children in general - it plays.  That, ultimately, is the answer to how american christendom became consumed by abortion while simultaneously resistant to environmentalism.  Environmentalism is an opposition viewpoint.  It doesn't matter that the arguments could be the same in either case - because the argument isn't over moral postulates.

[Angrboda]

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?

There's plenty of debate as to whether mathematical objects are real or not. When you say that mathematics can't survive this sort of skepticism, you are implying that math does or should survive such skepticism when the reality is that there is considerable disagreement as to whether it does. Science is on a little different footing because it is based upon experience. Perception is a kind of intuition, but it is different in that the consensus is that our experience is caused by the existence of things independent of us, that something real is the cause of our experience (excluding certain religious positions for simplicity). When you show an apple to two people, both experience seeing a colored object in a way that immediately convinces them the object exists. Morals aren't experienced this way and are closer to mathematics in that regard. You show two people two men kissing. One person perceives nothing additional. The other person perceives that what he is seeing is immoral. That's not at all like the case of two apples, or the case like mathematics in which composites are built from simpler primitives which consensus experience / apprehension can be agreed upon. When something is supposed to be real, yet some people perceive it and others do not, I don't think the skepticism is unreasonable.

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...

You're confusing bad in the moral sense with non-moral senses of bad. It would be bad for me to put my hand on a hot stove, but it wouldn't be bad in the sense of being immoral. The problem comes in with whether what a person wants is relevant as to whether harm has been done. If I go in for surgery, and I experience pain during the surgery, that doesn't mean the surgeon harmed me in any way that is morally relevant. Let's say that my father is dying of cancer and is in terrible pain all the time and wants the doctors to end his life. So I sneak into his room one night and smother him with a pillow. Unbeknownst to me, in the darkness I had mistaken my father's roomate for my father and killed a man who was only in the hospital for gall bladder surgery. Does it make a difference to the morality of my killing that I killed him instead of my father? I think it does. Yet the difference in this case is the subjective wants and desires of the victim.