Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

We're misreporting a fact.  We're saying that we object to x for y - when we do not.  We object to x for z, while failing to realize that our misreported y is an assertion to x.  A quick example.  Using mountaintop removal mining yet again.  I say its bad because it causes y.  A team of researchers, engineers, and labor conclusively demonstrates that they can do mountaintop removal mining without causing y.  I persist in my assertions, nevertheless.  This would strongly suggest that my reasons (if I even have any) were always z, just as this entire conversation has made it clear that you have reasons z which persist even after the failure of your many specific objections y.

Even if it does cause y, so what? Follow the algorithm:

1) If "y" is a feeling, stop ("I love trees, and seeing them cut down makes me sad.")-- you've found your moral basis.
2) If "y" is another objective fact, find "z," its basis, and repeat at (1).

In all cases, you will find that under all your objective facts, the root is an instinct or emotional reaction to something. That you may be able to lengthen the chain of objective "bads" indefinitely doesn't mean anything.

I did, you'll recall, describe the way in which you could kick that particular can even farther-- by treating instincts and feelings as objective, by seeing DNA as a collation of objective facts about living organisms' interactions with the environment for a billion years. If you treat feelings as objective inputs INTO sentient experience, rather than as experience itself, then you can say that.

But that applies to ALL discussion of things subjective, not just morality, and we'd still want to talk about our experiences as though they mean something.

[The Grand Nudger]

If at any point a purported factual conclusion relies on the specific emotional biases of the issuer, it is rejected. That's the entire point of moral realism.

In subjectivist moral theories, for example, this can't be done, as all moral utterances are such, and that's the valid expression of moral utterance.

In realist terms, instincts and emotions -are- treated as facts. Facts of the subject. Not facts of the object. Hence, objectivism/subjectivism. In subjectivism, they cannot be, because nothing is fact alike in any sense that any other utterance made by any subject is not. So..if you and I both are standing in the same spot and I say the sun is shining, and you say the sun is not shining - both things are simultaneously true. You and I might betray our objectivist habits....say that they're only subjectively true - or....true in context, but if subjectivism is the source of all assertions to fact.....

So here again, we have another example of your objections y being misreported z's..even as you make assertions to x. Meaning will be another such doomed avenue. You'll question meaning, meaning will be established, but it won't be the kind of meaning you think is meaningful. No shit - could have told you that from the jump.

[bennyboy]

Know - in quotes seems questionable to me.

Assume or believe seems to be more accurate.

A non-zero number of people "know" who their parents are, like 100% degree of certainty, but are wrong.  Maybe mom fooled around with the milk man, maybe they are adopted, maybe there was a mix-up at the hospital.

Christians "know" for sure, some of them, that God is real.  They do not even bother to challenge their beliefs, because they do not consider them beliefs at all, but knowledge.

But in mocking them, how often do I ask myself-- how do I really know that what I'm sure about is after all so sure?  It seems to me the process for us all is pretty similar:
-we learn things from our elders, who we believe
-our positions are confirmed by most of the people around us
-we accept vicarious anecdotes as a fair substitute for direct investigation
-we believe we COULD put the evidence to the test, so we don't actually bother to do so

I've seen dozens of images of a round Earth in textbooks, but up until computers really only a couple different ones reprinted many times.  I've flown above cloud cover from country to country, but never really around the world in a way that would clearly confirm to me that it was round.

I very much believe that the Earth is round-- I'd say I know it-- but people not that long ago knew, in much the same way and for similar reasons, that it wasn't.

[bennyboy]

If at any point a purported factual conclusion relies on the specific emotional biases of the issuer, it -is rejected.  That's the entire point of moral realism.  

In subjectivist moral theories, for example, this can't be done, as all moral utterances are such, and that's the valid expression of moral utterance.

Yes, I know that's the point of moral realism-- that there are objective mores out there which are NOT dependent on opinion or feelings, on any level. "Some things are just bad because they are bad, no matter WHO is considering them."

But I consider it horseshit, as somehow, magically, it turns out that all those objective harms and bads are things that. . . people don't like.

[The Grand Nudger]

No, Benny..... that's not the point...and the fact that you think it is, is the completely subjective basis for your many objections - not that there aren't other objectitions to any realist statement which do have legs. You just can't get to them, because you're wedded to something else. Also..a fact of a subject. How you're resorting to calling the most mundane and trivial use of terms magic - in the hopes that negative associations might do what you failed to accomplish logically.

Why? I think..if you want to understand the basis for proving this or that in any system..you can figure it out on your own. I think that in contradiction to the evidence of our conversations, btw. You don't actually seem like the kind of person who can get this shit right - but I still think you can for reasons I could not give a 500 page report on. So...all the time I've devoted over many threads to helping you understand this simple thing. Help me understand a simple thing. Why? Why do you persist in objections to x after any specific objection y is thoroughly deconstructed?

I might be a moral objectivist, but I'm an interpersonal subjectivist. I want to know why you're so compelled to fuck this up, as a fact of you, the subject in question. Why, for example, are you compelled to make the statement that harm and bad are limited to things people don't like, calling it horseshit, when you know that people do apprehend things that they do like..as bad? That's not even a moral question, it's a descriptive fact - and yet.....?

[arewethereyet]

Know - in quotes seems questionable to me.

Assume or believe seems to be more accurate.

A non-zero number of people "know" who their parents are, like 100% degree of certainty, but are wrong.  Maybe mom fooled around with the milk man, maybe they are adopted, maybe there was a mix-up at the hospital.

Christians "know" for sure, some of them, that God is real.  They do not even bother to challenge their beliefs, because they do not consider them beliefs at all, but knowledge.

But in mocking them, how often do I ask myself-- how do I really know that what I'm sure about is after all so sure?  It seems to me the process for us all is pretty similar:
-we learn things from our elders, who we believe
-our positions are confirmed by most of the people around us
-we accept vicarious anecdotes as a fair substitute for direct investigation
-we believe we COULD put the evidence to the test, so we don't actually bother to do so

I've seen dozens of images of a round Earth in textbooks, but up until computers really only a couple different ones reprinted many times.  I've flown above cloud cover from country to country, but never really around the world in a way that would clearly confirm to me that it was round.

I very much believe that the Earth is round-- I'd say I know it-- but people not that long ago knew, in much the same way and for similar reasons, that it wasn't.

bold mine

Ever heard of DNA?

Anyhow - I was born in a small naval infirmary.  No other babies to be switched with.  So that's out.  

Have various physical traits that run on dad's family that I have passed on to my kids.

btw - I know the parentage of my kids.  

Try again.

[bennyboy]

How you're resorting to calling the most mundane and trivial use of terms magic - in the hopes that negative associations might do what you failed to accomplish logically.

I think it's pretty obvious why I'm saying that. It's not turtles all the way down-- at some point, any moral proposition worth anything is dependent on subjective valuation. Calling it "magic" is derisively ironic, in case you missed that-- because it is clearly NOT an amazing coincidence that no matter how many objective moral facts you think you can dig up, at the root it's always going to be rooted in someone caring about state A vs. state B.

Why?  I think..if you want to understand the basis for proving this or that in any system..you can figure it out on your own.  I think that in contradiction to the evidence of our conversations, btw.  You don't actually seem like the kind of person who can get this shit right - but I still think you can for reasons I could not give a 500 page report on.  So...all the time I've devoted over many threads to helping you understand this simple thing.  Help me understand a simple thing.  Why?  Why do you persist in objections to x after any specific objection y is thoroughly deconstructed?

I might be a moral objectivist, but I'm an interpersonal subjectivist.  I want to know why you're so compelled to fuck this up, as a fact of you, the subject in question.  Why, for example, are you compelled to make the statement that harm and bad are limited to things people don't like, calling it horseshit, when you know that people do apprehend things that they do like..as bad?  That's not even a moral question, it's a descriptive fact - and yet.....?

Yes, they acknowledge it as bad because they've been taught that. I didn't say YOU have to have feelings about things in order to form a moral view, just that someone does. A total pyschopath can know that killing babies is considered bad. But at some point, someone had to have negative feelings about killing babies, and then verbalize "Hey-- killing babies is bad." But ultimately, if nobody gave a shit about babies, we'd be following them around with rifles killing them "just for fun."

I'm as baffled by your behavior as you claim to be by mine. Is there some objection to thinking that mores arrive out of people's instinctual dislike of certain behaviors or outcomes? Why, or how, would it be otherwise?

[bennyboy]

bold mine

Ever heard of DNA?

Anyhow - I was born in a small naval infirmary.  No other babies to be switched with.  So that's out.  

Have various physical traits that run on dad's family that I have passed on to my kids.

btw - I know the parentage of my kids.  

Try again.

That's compelling evidence. I must be wrong that people being sure they "know" things, and them actually being in a position to know them, are not necessarily the same thing.

*topples own king*

[The Grand Nudger]

How you're resorting to calling the most mundane and trivial use of terms magic - in the hopes that negative associations might do what you failed to accomplish logically.

I think it's pretty obvious why I'm saying that.  It's not turtles all the way down-- at some point, any moral proposition worth anything is dependent on subjective valuation.  Calling it "magic" is derisively ironic, in case you missed that-- because it is clearly NOT an amazing coincidence that no matter how many objective moral facts you think you can dig up, at the root it's always going to be rooted in someone caring about state A vs. state B.

Yes.  It's obvious.  Lazy, and sloppy.

Yes, they acknowledge it as bad because they've been taught that.  I didn't say YOU have to have feelings about things in order to form a moral view, just that someone does.  A total pyschopath can know that killing babies is considered bad.  But at some point, someone had to have negative feelings about killing babies, and then verbalize "Hey-- killing babies is bad."  But ultimately, if nobody gave a shit about babies, we'd be following them around with rifles killing them "just for fun."

I'm as baffled by your behavior as you claim to be by mine.  Is there some objection to thinking that mores arrive out of people's instinctual dislike of certain behaviors or outcomes?  Why, or how, would it be otherwise?

If I don't have to have feelings about things to form a moral view then they can't be necessarily subjective.  Weird how one little comment can lead to so much, eh?  

No one has to have negative feelings about anything for things to be bad, in fact.  I know that you have some other view.  I know that you're wedded to that view.  That shouldn't mean...particularly in a subjectivist world....that you have some diehard necessity to reject another's equally subjectively true veiwpoint.

Nope.  You're a realist, making incessant realist statements, without the courage of your asserted convictions. Apparently, additionally....one that never took the time or had the care to learn the foundations of their own factual appraisals - hence the OPQ. How can we should be scratched to how can I.

[bennyboy]

I think it's pretty obvious why I'm saying that.  It's not turtles all the way down-- at some point, any moral proposition worth anything is dependent on subjective valuation.  Calling it "magic" is derisively ironic, in case you missed that-- because it is clearly NOT an amazing coincidence that no matter how many objective moral facts you think you can dig up, at the root it's always going to be rooted in someone caring about state A vs. state B.

Yes.  It's obvious.  Lazy, and sloppy.

Yes, they acknowledge it as bad because they've been taught that.  I didn't say YOU have to have feelings about things in order to form a moral view, just that someone does.  A total pyschopath can know that killing babies is considered bad.  But at some point, someone had to have negative feelings about killing babies, and then verbalize "Hey-- killing babies is bad."  But ultimately, if nobody gave a shit about babies, we'd be following them around with rifles killing them "just for fun."

I'm as baffled by your behavior as you claim to be by mine.  Is there some objection to thinking that mores arrive out of people's instinctual dislike of certain behaviors or outcomes?  Why, or how, would it be otherwise?

If I don't have to have feelings about things to form a moral view then they can't be necessarily subjective.  Weird how one little comment can lead to so much, eh?  

No one has to have negative feelings about anything for things to be bad, in fact.  I know that you have some other view.  I know that you're wedded to that view.  That shouldn't mean...particularly in a subjectivist world....that you have some diehard necessity to reject another's equally subjectively true veiwpoint.

Nope.  You're a realist, making incessant realist statements, without the courage of your asserted convictions.  Apparently, additionally....one that never took the time or had the care to learn the foundations of their own factual appraisals - hence the OPQ.  How can we should be scratched to how can I.

That's a lot of talk, but you have not yet demonstrated that anything is bad, or why.  Harming mountains, you say, is bad.  Why is this bad?  In what sense is inanimate material being harmed?  In what sense is this bad?

Predicted answer: blah blah blah you miss the point blah blah that's not what realism is blah blah
Desired answer: I think X is bad because Y