“Normative” ethical theories

[Alan V]

The left has been arguing for the benefits of fairness, equality, and pluralism, and for paying close attention to the facts, not for moral relativity.

I thought it was cool how, in 2016, Obama dropped 26,000 bombs on seven countries without congressional approval.

From Google:

Details on the 26,000 bombs:

Target countries: The bombs were dropped across Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.

Most targeted areas: The majority of the bombs, over 92% of the total, were concentrated in Iraq and Syria as part of the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS).

Increased rate: The 2016 total represented an increase of over 3,000 bombs compared to the previous year.

Broader context: The use of bombs and drone strikes during Obama's presidency drew significant criticism from human rights advocates and others concerned about civilian casualties and the use of lethal force in undeclared war zones.

Legal justification: The administration justified these military activities under the 2001 and 2003 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) passed by Congress. Critics argued that Obama stretched the use of the AUMFs to target militant groups that did not exist in 2001 or were not directly affiliated with al-Qaeda.

In other words, Obama's use of force is most certainly debatable.

To the point of normative ethics, I suppose some people might support the Taliban's control of Afghanistan under the umbrella of pluralism, though that rather stands the idea on its head since there isn't much freedom there.

[The Grand Nudger]

I wouldn't blame the victims.  The left has been arguing for the benefits of fairness, equality, and pluralism, and for paying close attention to the facts, not for moral relativity.  The right simply lied about all of it because it is easier to tear things down than learn enough to understand the complexities involved.

The right set up propaganda outlets on the radio and television and -- guess what? -- they were effective at flooding people with disinformation, conspiracy theories, and hatred so that they couldn't think straight.  The right largely swallowed the lies and dogmas which made them impervious to the facts about crime, immigration, climate change, the economy, and other Americans.

The normative ethics which the right embraces are still there.  They are just not applied equally to everyone because many of us are now seen as evil.  If anything, the present situation is proof that normative ethics are as weak as we have been saying.  That's just one of many sad facts about the human condition.

The cultural left now finds itself the victim of the political right, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that the political right ended up as the beneficiary of the ethical relativism of the cultural left.  Mind you, when I use the term cultural left I'm not referring to any shadowy or overt set of conspirators. I'm certainly not referring to academia, which shitcanned anti-realist sentiment before most of us were born. I'm referring to the types of arguments and excuses and criticisms arising from the popular left that the right wing propaganda machine took and regurgitated word for word as the script of their contemporary white grievance narrative. In my opinion, this was a matter of rhetorical expediency combined with a misunderstanding about descriptive theories and the history of philosophy in the face of batshitshit arguments and bad faith actors - and not what people actually believes about their ethical or moral statements. Nevertheless, here we are.

I don't think you'll find much disagreement between us about how the right pulled that off, but I do have to point out that no reference to a close attention to facts matters if we're looking for or at ethical systems devoid of such content.  There is only ever one relevant fact in subjective and relative ethics - and it doesn't have anything to do with crime, immigration, climate change, the economy, or other americans.

The political right still embraces a normative ethics, but it's not the normative ethics they embraced even as recently as the obama years, which was itself not the normative ethics they embraced in bush the dumbers term.  Normative ethics aren't weak.  We are weak. Poor craftsmen blaming the tools, and all that. An alternative explanation being that we're stupid. Sacrificing our ideals at the altar of our ideals.

In other words, Obama's use of force is most certainly debatable.

To the point of normative ethics, I suppose some people might support the Taliban's control of Afghanistan under the umbrella of pluralism, though that rather stands the idea on its head since there isn't much freedom there.

Is it? Debatable how, according to what? He was a drone warlord and a deporter in cheif. Those are just stats. With no realist content as a reference we could only be debating whether we liked that or not, not whether there is anything wrong with it. On that count, I have tended to like the ideas of the cultural left quite a bit more. I wish I could say I agreed with the policies the political left enacted....but we really don't have such a thing in the us. My liking them more, and in fact nothing at all, actually makes those policies better than magat shit, though, in context.

[Lucian]

I got to the end of Morris’ Science and the End of Ethics. He actually does turn to how his view of non-retributionist and non-realist moral judgments could pan out.
Given what he values and wants for society which is largely increased happiness for people, he sees the question of how to increase happiness as one central to the question of ethics. He grounds this in studies showing that increased happiness leads to increased prosocial behaviour, and increased prosocial behaviour contributing to the happiness of the one performing those acts as well as others. He looks at a number of elements such as wealth distribution, social mobility and a few others to say that as a matter of politics we could increase happiness and pro-sociality by changing our approach to these - making wealth more evenly distributed, helping people become more content with their social state rather than feeling like they need to judge themselves by comparing themselves to people with more wealth or status.
Something i need to read more on, but all of these come down to an instrumental ought regarding actions - if we want a society with less antisocial and more prosocial actions, as well as more happiness overall, there are policies that can be enacted that don’t rely on realist beliefs and can reject retributionist ones also.

I mentioned I bought a book by Gibbard following The Grand Nudger’s suggestions of quasi-realism and Blackburn’s mention of him in the lecture I was linked to earlier in this thread. Turns out the lectures behind the book i bought (Reconciling Our Aims. In Search of Bases for Ethics) are online. First one here

https://youtu.be/94iONGr0SvM?si=c2W0C5GhlaUQWM3D

[The Grand Nudger]

What if we don't want to increase those things? What if we wanted to increase competitiveness and sociopathy?

[Lucian]

Then I can’t argue against you beyond trying to persuade you on non-moral grounds that that may not be great for you. Appeal to your empathy etc
It doesn’t trouble me that I can’t argue someone into a position on these things on objective moral grounds.

[The Grand Nudger]

Perhaps they've already been smuggled in Lucian.

Assume they actually would be good for me. I'm a warlord. I want an entire society of shock troops.

[Lucian]

Then I just need to hope others will join me in stopping you. Don’t need objective grounds for that. I might not succeed, and that is just something I have to accept.

You obviously don’t agree with my position, which is all good. Makes for an interesting conversation now my brain is getting back to functioning. Despite the disagreement, do you think my position is coherent and non-contradictory, or do you see a logical issue in it?

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm not sure it matters which of our positions is correct or whether you would succeed in talking me out of moral realism -or- warlording all over everyone's face, lol. From a utilitarian standpoint, the instrumental value of such an ethics seems nonexistent. One dissenter and we have no safe™ ground to argue towards our goal from? There are hundreds of millions of potential dissenters just here in the us.

Your solution is hoping that other people will join you. Why would they, though? What if I'm the most dangerous sort of warlord? Loyal and loved by his men. I'm going to split the spoils evenly between everyone who joins the cause. Now competitiveness and sociopathy is an instrumental good or potential instrumental good for all of your hoped for support, no? I'm going to increase all of their happiness and raise them all up out of the gutter to robber princes.

The question at the heart of all this being not whether you'd have to accept this as a practical matter, or whether you see no way to argue your cause in keeping with some set of stated ideological commitments, but whether you've selected these utilitiarian goods because you believe that even if a shock troop wanted it bad, and even if their shock troop leader and community said it was the way to go or it would in fact privilege that society over overs, it really wouldn't be good for them. That would be an example of smuggling in realist intuitions.

( I think every cognitivist metaethical basis can be logically grounded in a non contradictory way, and every descriptive basis can be established in an empirical way )

[Lucian]

It doesn’t matter in terms of whether my position is right or not whether they would join me. I agree with Morris that a lot of the division comes from entrenched moral positions where people think that they are both objectively right one key issues and that people who don’t are worthy of disapproval as humans.

Maybe sociopathy is something that could help my aims, but also it doesn’t mean I have to like or acquiesce to any given act driven my it. I am not an “the ends justify the means” kind of thinker.

Also agree that I can’t argue you out of your position, or at least am not likely to. The moral realists I have read are vaguely religious in their kind of arguments, appealing to something that is of a category alien to anything else we know, of a nature we can’t assess, with intuition driving a lot of the thinking and no hard evidence for the thing claimed and different claims as to what is entailed by the existence of this supposed thing by massive groups of people. Appeals to “but if this isn’t true then things would be bad etc. Hard to argue someone out of that.
Note. I am not accusing you of religious thinking, I don’t know you well enough or your arguments and I don’t want to be insulting. Just my feel based on what I have read

[The Grand Nudger]

Why don't the ends justify the means? A purer distillation of instrumental value could not be conceived of.

Many religious and vaguely religious thinkers have fancied themselves moral realists. Have said that they believe in an objective morality. What you'd find on closer inspection is that they tend to be subjectivists and relativists. "Objective" being a cultural item they wish to possess, not a moral system they wish to employ. The thing which, they hope, grants their particular views with social authority.

There are non natural realists, but it doesn't mean what people would expect. GE Moore is where people usually start with that. It's a minority view in contemporary moral philosophy, though. Variants of natural realism dominate. The idea that moral facts are facts exactly like any other kind of fact. Not some special category of knowledge alien to everything else and of a nature we can't access. To wit, the idea that there really is something decent about wealth equality and human well-being regardless of how schemes to increase them might make a person feel, regardless of a given subjects opinion on them, and regardless of a society's amenability to them. This is often expressed in the language of human well-being. IE, x y and z really do increase human well-being regardless of how some people feel or some societies reject them and even if they are not intuitively satisfying - and here are the stats and studies to back that up. So when we say that x y and z are good we are not talking about our feelings about those things, or our opinions of those things, or the dictates of our societies on those things, we are talking about something x y and z - the object- actually do, and demonstrably so.

So, for example, when you think about why a person should want those things, and thus may be compellable to those aims....do you begin to think of natural facts? Where they selected as aims because of those benefits born out by natural facts?