As though
A more central part of Harris’s argument:
…it also seems quite rational for us to collectively act as though all human lives were equally valuable. Hence, most of our laws and social institutions generally ignore differences between people.
Ah but they don’t. One big social institution doesn’t, at least not necessarily: the family. Some parents believe in equality, but some don’t; sometimes it’s a matter of what the male head of household believes, because that determines the rules for everyone else.
This is why the claim that maximizing well-being for all can be scientifically shown to be moral or good does not (as far as I can see) get off the ground. It’s because some people’s well-being partly depends on the subordination of other people, and people like that do not consider the de-subordination of “their” subordinates a source of well-being for themselves. Over time that can change, but it doesn’t happen overnight. So the question arises, how would you show such people scientifically that they are mistaken? It can’t be done. You may be able to show them evidence that the subordinates will have more well-being, but that won’t trump their sense of the fitness of things. The issue isn’t factual (though facts can help, or hinder; it depends), it’s emotional.
Yes. Medicine definitely privileges a minority, namely multicellular organisms of only a few species, over the vast majority of unicellular ones.
A particularly valuable insight. ;-)
some people’s well-being partly depends on the subordination of other people, and people like that do not consider the de-subordination of “their” subordinates a source of well-being for themselves.
Maybe I’m not following you. Isn’t it legitimate to say, in a utilitarian-calculus kind of way, that the amount of well-being denied to the oppressed is generally much larger than the well-being that this provides for their oppressors? It’s inefficient, so to speak. It wastes well-being. Isn’t that true?
Are you only saying that writing out this equation (or rather inequality) for the oppressors is unlikely to move them to tears — or are you saying that it’s not true?
Oops, that first paragraph was supposed to be styled as a quote.
I take Harris to be claiming that science, or more accurately, empiricism, can inform conversation about morality. I do not think he is saying that morality can be determined scientifically.
Roy – no, I don’t think that’s true; at least I’m not aware that anyone has shown it to be true in any sort of slam-dunk way. It is true, and plenty of research has shown it to be true, that female equality brings large overall benefits, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing.
Kenneth, no, Harris is claiming that science can answer these questions. All his critics that I know of (including me) agree that science can inform conversation about morality, but Harris is claiming more than that.
I thought what Harris meant by ‘maximizing human flourishing’ is that if we had 1 man oppressing his 3 wives, we can ‘maximize’ it by liberating the women simply because their well being (being 3 of them) is more than the well being he gets by oppressing them. A simple 3 > 1 equation, where we don’t have to convince anyone that female equality brings benefits to others at all.You may have problems working this at large, though, when you’re talking about the well being of 50% of the population vs. the well being of the other 50%. Or, heck, just trying to convince the members of a patriarchal society that female well being counts the same as male well being. In fact, isn’t that the problem?
In this post I hope to mix and match Roy’s views on ethics with Ophelia’s views on meta-ethics.
I don’t doubt that a person who is both subordinated and in denial about it is better off than those that are aware of their subordination. I also don’t doubt that being autonomous is better than both kinds of subordination. But presumably, you need to become aware of your shitty situation before you can become autonomous. So you need to make things worse before they can get a whole lot better.
I don’t know what a utilitarian is supposed to recommend in that situation: stick it out in denial, or withstand misery for future rewards? On the one hand, Bentham says that the passage of time is irrelevant, so you would think he’d ask us to endure misery in order to get into a better situation. And we’re capable (individually and as a group) of doing incredible things by making effective plans — we can increase well-being in the distant future by doing the tiniest things today. So it’s a no-brainer.
But the promise of impossibly great future gains by present labors means that we ought to be spending all our time on those projects. Carpe diem is a problem, here. You have to make room for enjoyment in the present, or else you’ll be striving to reap positive benefits that you will not enjoy. Moreover, these are benefits that no similar actors will ever enjoy (hence rendering utilitarianism impracticable). So distance from the present really does matter to some extent.
So whether or not it wastes well-being depends on which slice of time we’re supposed to be looking at. Who decides the time-slice? I don’t think there’s an actual theory that can legitimately tell us — it’s up to individuals. That’s why Ophelia is ultimately right, even if we presume that utilitarianism or something like it is a plausible ethical (or meta-ethical) system.
This continues to be a very interesting debate that Sam Harris has kicked off. Although I can’t say that Harris is always meticulous in his definitions in this debate, his critics strike me as much more unconvincing. This post, unfortunately, is no exception. More specifically:
It’s because some people’s well-being partly depends on the subordination of other people, and people like that do not consider the de-subordination of “their” subordinates a source of well-being for themselves.
Which is not the point, since we’re talking about overall well-being, i.e. the well-being of more than one person. And in any case, I do not recognize without being presented with further evidence that the subordination of others contributes even to one’s own overall well-being. Similarly, one would have to show that de-subordination of one’s subordinates in fact subtracts from one’s overall well-being.
You may be able to show them evidence that the subordinates will have more well-being, but that won’t trump their sense of the fitness of things.
But “their sense of the fitness of things” don’t enter into it, so to speak. Whether they agree or not doesn’t change the fact that others’ well-being has been increased. (Nobody’s sense of the fitness of the heliocentric model has any bearing on its being a fact.) As far as I can tell, that’s all Harris needs to be able to show for his argument to work, and you seem to grant him as much.
The issue isn’t factual (though facts can help, or hinder; it depends), it’s emotional.
I’m afraid you’re being less than crystal-clear on what “the issue” is, exactly. Anyway, I suppose that Harris would want to reply to this sentence by saying that, of course, emotions are facts, which in principle we are able to assess scientifically.
As I said, I don’t think Harris has been as unambiguous as he possibly can, but then his critics certainly haven’t much improved matters so far.
Oh yeah? Well Harris thinks they have! He says this is what he wanted (not this here, but the discussion) and it’s helpful.
This was just a quick post, I admit, but I did more thought-out ones earlier.
Yes, but in the stuff I’ve seen so far I haven’t seen Harris really deal with the fact that you can’t just deal with overall well-being, as if it were soup. Some kinds of well-being depend on ill-being for other people. That’s how immigration works, just for a start: a large pool of labor depresses wages and thus increases the well-being of some people while decreasing that of other people.
Fine, but try telling that to the people who think their well-being does depend on the subordination of others. Try telling them they’re being unscientific.
Oh really? What if the others’ well-being has been increased and then the friends of subordination punish them for their increased well-being (because it is blasphemous, because it is UnIslamic, because it defies papal orders, because it is not in accord with the bible)? That changes the fact that others’ well-being has been increased!
I’ve said many times that I think science is part of the discussion. But I don’t think it’s the whole of it; I don’t think it’s the answer. That’s partly because it takes more than facts to change people’s minds. Facts can help, but they’re not enough.
Somehow Sam Harris has to show that some plausible and widely inclusive definition of “well-being” is not dependent on widely variable personal and social commitments in the same way that other moral notions are. I do not think he can do this.
The big question is why anyone should be interested in pursuing overall wellbeing (whatever that is, but that’s another question which I’ll get to) as opposed to his/her own well-being or the well-being of the people that he she loves. In other words, why should anyone pursue an altruistic policy rather than an egocentric policy or an eroscentric policy? Now, there may be reasons to avoid an absolutely ruthless egocentric policy. It might turn out to be self-defeating. But pursuing a mixture of egocentrism and eroscentrism might turn out just fine. In many circumstances, that would seem to be the rational course for an individual to take.
In any event, I doubt that wellbeing is what’s at stake, unless “wellbeing” is defined in such a way as to make the whole thing tautological. What is really at stake for me is whether the world goes as I desire it to. That doesn’t just mean that things go well for me. It means that my loved ones thrive, that great works of art get produced, that suffering is ameliorated, and so on. The world going as I desire it may involve many things that I value for themselves, not instrumentally for some single end such as global utility maximisation. Other people may value other things, such as their quite different set of loved ones thriving, great and glorious battles taking place, and so on. A society’s moral norms are likely to involve rules that allow enough social stability to allow a lot of people to get some of what they desire the world to be like. They may even get some great and glorious battles, but they’ll have to be with an out-group: if we battle among ourselves beyond a certain point, we’ll just rip our society apart and we won’t get anything much. Life will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, when we’d prefer it to be social, prosperous, nice, civilised, and long.
If we agree not to battle among ourselves, we can have a fairly stable society, and we can have our battles with the fairly stable society next door.
The morality of a society will be a product of its history, but will be built on what people in the society have actually wanted over time. One of the universals that people want is the ability to have societies at all, which requires some degree of internal peace. Because we are responsive to each other, we may also want to ameliorate human suffering, though not necessarily at the cost of removing all opportunities for glory in battle, the desire for which which seems to be all-too-much part of the male psyche (and I think the female psyche has something to answer for here, as well).
All of which suggests that moral systems are based on the contingent psychology of human beings. Partly our evolved psychology, but partly our psychology, as shaped by environmental factors, in different times and places. Our moral systems are not based solely on features of the universe that transcend our psychological makeup. In other words, they are not objective.
OBBB, I think Peter’s point was that a zero-sum system (like one where your well-being is the result of someone else’s ill-being) is not one that an objective morality can defend, because zero-sum games probably don’t produce the overall best result. So Harris doesn’t need to work very hard to deal with this, since there seem to be ready-made answers out there.
But I doubt Peter’s heroic defences can go very far, as I said before, because at the end of the day somebody needs to (non-arbitrarily) and crisply define what count as the consequences we ought to care about.
» Russell Blackford:
The big question is why anyone should be interested in pursuing overall wellbeing (whatever that is, but that’s another question which I’ll get to) as opposed to his/her own well-being or the well-being of the people that he she loves.
How is that related to what Sam Harris says? He talks about being able to determine well-being, not about making people care about well-being. Unless you were addressing Sam’s claim that at the heart of all morality there is the concept of well-being, but I really didn’t see you doing that.
I should also mention that I think Bill is being far too pessimistic. It is banality and truism for us to talk about “basic needs”, as in basic human needs. Well-being can and must be defined with them at the centre.
To be sure, these needs are defined relative to preferences as made in and by a culture, and to that extent they’re relative constructs, not objective in any relevant sense. There is a wide swath of cultural variation, which makes it seem dodgy to talk about needs as if they were some clear and straightforward natural datum. But that point is not as decisive as it appears, since a lot of variation comes from differential access to resources.
So the question is, what conditions would all people with the right faculties (sympathy, mind-reading, and rule-making) strongly prefer about human associations, and hence need, if they all possessed equal access to resources? What, in other words, would people decide in Rawls’s original position? Where we find broad agreement on this, we may (contra Rawls) have found the best candidates for objective standards of well-being.
It is a separate question, however, whether or not objective standards of well-being must lead us to suppose that there are objective standards of morality. I want to argue the former, but am not inclined to accept the latter.
» Ophelia Benson:Oh yeah? Well Harris thinks they have!
Even if that were so, what would that fact compel me to believe, exactly? And what Harris thinks they have been useful is contained in this sentence:
If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all.
Which doesn’t seem to help your argument one bit, and it really wasn’t even an argument.
Yes, but in the stuff I’ve seen so far I haven’t seen Harris really deal with the fact that you can’t just deal with overall well-being, as if it were soup.
Maybe so, but what I haven’t seen you, or any of his other critics, do is engage with the explicit point that he has made throughout: that certain things, like genital mutilation, to mention only one of his examples, do not add to anyone’s, not to mention overall, well-being. His point is that wanton violence and unfairness against other sentient beings are universally condemned—the first part suggesting that there is a universal pattern that lends itself to scientific treatment, the second hinting at morality’s being grounded in the concept of well-being.
a large pool of labor depresses wages and thus increases the well-being of some people while decreasing that of other people.
I think if you’re saying that a decrease in my wage automatically means that my well-being is diminished, you need to think more seriously about the concept of well-being. As I say, Sam hasn’t been too specific about this either, and that’s something he will need to flesh out considerably, but that doesn’t mean that we can start shooting at cartoon versions of his ideas.
Fine, but try telling that to the people who think their well-being does depend on the subordination of others. Try telling them they’re being unscientific.
That is supposed to be an argument how?
Oh really?
Yes, really.
What if the others’ well-being has been increased and then the friends of subordination punish them for their increased well-being (because it is blasphemous, because it is UnIslamic, because it defies papal orders, because it is not in accord with the bible)?
Again, is this supposed to be an argument? A claim? An example of something? I can’t be sure, I’m afraid. And what exactly does this have to do with anything Sam says?
Peter, who said I was responding to Harris? I was responding to Ophelia. I haven’t even read Harris’s new piece and didn’t pretend that I had. My comment discussed points that arose from Ophelia’s post, though they certainly do relate to Harris’s claims in his TED talk where he says that morality is objective. For all I know he may have dropped that claim in his new paper. I’ll get to that when I have time.
Russell: Fair enough. Although I think it is usually safe to assume that a commenter has read the original article that is discussed in a blog post. How else could you be sure that the post’s take actually makes any sense?
“Generally”… depending on what he meant by that, this whole statement is false. The law most certainly does not ignore relevant differences between persons. For starters, the law takes into account motivations for crimes; even if the exact details of a crime are the same, Person A might get treated differently than Person B depending on motivations and so forth. But let’s be generous and assume he meant that it ignores non-relevant differences (race, sex, gender, religion). There’s still a problem in that while are laws are rightfully applied equally, it doesn’t follow that we have to treat everyone morally equally. Should I be expected to treat someone halfway around the world who I will never meet as morally equivalent to my spouse? Or children? Or friends? I don’t mean “it’s ok for my spouse to murder, but not for others”, but “I will treat my spouse preferentially to other people in my day-to-day moral actions”. It makes sense for our legal and political structures to treat people as equally as possible, but are we as individuals morally obligated to do the same?
Also, social institutions are under no obligation to treat everyone the same; more specifically, institutions that have a membership which people can join and leave freely. For starters, the organization can treat non-members differently from members; they can also treat some members differently than others.
Meh, this ended up rambling more than I wanted it to. Hopefully this is clear enough.
Argh! Why did I look at this thread just now? I have no time to write just now! But you haven’t heard the last of me.
OB:
Just a quick note, perhaps. Judging from the context, I think it’s a stretch to let “family” be an example of “social institutions.”
Why’s that, Smith?
Really; why is that, Smith?
The family is crucial to this overall argument, and it’s well known that the family does tend to get special exemptions in this kind of discussion, to the enormous detriment of the discussion. If Harris’s claims apply to all social institutions except the family, they immediately become glaringly non-universal, and his intention is very much to make them universal.
In other words if you’re going to pretend to (in the sense of aspire to) ground universal morality, you sure as hell can’t exempt the family. The family is where the subordination of women begins and also where it continues. If it doesn’t end there, it doesn’t end.
“Family” is considered one of the basic structures by Rawls; it most certainly is a “social institution”. Not that anything Rawls says is Word Of God, but his case for it is pretty thorough.
Ophelia: I don’t think you can take the family as an example of a situation where one person’s <i>well-being</i> depends on the subordination of others! How is the male head’s <i>well-being</i> hurt by not being able to smack his wife around?
His ability to dominate is hurt, yes. His power is lessened. But his “well-being”? That suggests that his mental and physical health is somehow being hurt by his wife’s equality. And that is scientifically, demonstrably false.
Ack, sorry for the tags!
My point is that the way the word “well-being” is being thrown around here is misleading. Well-being usually suggests health, both physical and mental, and those are objective and scientific concepts–pomo-anthropologists notwithstanding!
I do tend to agree that morality as a whole isn’t scientifically provable. But I think many particular moral debates can be settled through science, if people were willing to pay attention to the actual evidence. Many debates come down, not to stated differences in values, but to contested facts. People will claim to value equality and to accept gay people, but will say that gay marriage can’t be equal to straight marriage because [insert misstatement of historical and sociological facts here]. Of course what’s really going on is that their bigotry is conflicted with their values, and they try to resolve it by pointing to facts that make this situation different–except that those “facts” are false.
Jenavir, I think well-being is being used here as a rough synonym for “flourishing” and that both are meant to encompass a range of factors – that neither is meant to apply to physical and mental health and nothing more.
Yes, contested facts play a part, but I’ve never denied that. But is it really factually untrue that a man’s well-being cannot depend on the subordination of a resident woman? Isn’t the truth more a matter of competing sources and kinds of well-being? Of whether one prefers the convenience and efficiency of obedience or the challenge and interest of equality? I just don’t think it’s a factual slam-dunk which one is more conducive to well-being.
I do of course think there are persuasive things to be said – but that’s not the same as a factual slam-dunk.
I’m not sure if I’m just barking up the wrong tree here as I’ve not read nearly enough Rawls to be confident on how he argues for treating the family different, but I always thought his reason for treating family as a unit was actually rather practical given that he wanted to avoid the problems of Utilitarianism. It’s pretty much related to TheMann’s point in that Rawls needs to be very careful applying the Original Position to the family so that he doesn’t go down the really unfortunate route of denying parents special obligations to their own children.
In terms of the bigger discussion though, I don’t know if Russell pointing out the historic contingency of any particular set of values does enough. It is perfectly possible for necessary laws to emerge out of contingent facts; it’s pretty much what science does, use experiments to pick out the pattern, the necessary factors, from inside the noise of chance events. Generally this is the whole Nagel View from Nowhere argument where Objectivity isn’t a question of independent existence, but a question of what kind of perspective you have; Sam mentions this distinction as coming from Searle in his first internet response to his critics.
Following this line, I also think the argument that there is a lot of disagreement about moral principles is quite obviously wrong. Bernard Williams has a very good argument here, he starts off his little book Morality with it, where he sets out exactly how hard it is to be Amoral. Basically he points out that the bar for getting moral talk more generally off the ground is incredibly low. All it takes is for someone to care even a little bit about someone else and most of the heavy lifting is done and from there we have useful tools like the Golden Rule to take us the rest of the way. With a bar for entry that low, the challenge is actually to show that there is a way for people to disagree that fundamentally. Exactly the same argument applies when people start saying things about “different ways of knowing”; Sam is exactly right when he points out it’s strange we don’t apply the the same argument to moral knowledge.
I’ve one last point. I think one of the major problems this whole discussion has is that we’re having this argument at the wrong level. Most of this debate is aiming at the Metaethics, or basically the metaphysical level of argument. We’re turning ourselves into a bunch Medieval Philosophers trying to argue the number of teeth a horse has from first principles. All that Metaethics can do is tell us roughly what kind of answers we can give, the place where we decide these answers is in real moral questions and it’s by actually doing the work that we see whether or not moral answers are Utilitarian, Deontic or Nicomachean or whichever broad Metaethical tradition is needed. I’m personally of the view that every last one of these theories has a place: Utilitarianism helps us decide government policy ethically such as when NICE here in the UK denies automatic public funding for personalised cancer drugs because they cost too much for each year of life saved; Deontology does a really good job of showing why a Christian doctor cannot ethically object to providing services to gay patients; Ophelia, you appeal to Aristotle’s ethics every single time you object to the casual use of sexist terms. When we finally stop treating ethics as a game of grand principles and start applying it to real issues I think we’ll find that there’s a lot about ethical talk that’s shocking real and non-negotiable.
Maybe so; I dunno; but whatever his reasons were…from the point of view of women it’s just about the worst thing you can do when discussing morality or justice or political arrangements. The-family-treated-as-a-unit is why women are considered not to matter except as sources of family-flourishing.
I’m happy to appeal to Aristotle’s ethics, by the way. Stout fella, Ari.
@Benjamin Nelson: Neither I nor (if I may) Ophelia is trying to address the question of how you get from being oppressed to being free. That is neither an ethical nor a meta-ethical question, it is a practical one.
@Benjamin Nelson: Neither I nor (if I may) Ophelia — nor Bentham, for that matter — is trying to address the question of how you get from being oppressed to being free. That is not an ethical or a meta-ethical question, it is a practical one.
Russell Blackford said: “The big question is why anyone should be interested in pursuing overall wellbeing … as opposed to his/her own well-being or the well-being of the people that he she loves. … What is really at stake for me is whether the world goes as I desire it to.”
Russell, whether the world goes as you yourself desire it to is not an ethical question. It might be hella fun to work on, it might have all kinds of other lovely features, but it is unrelated to the present topic. Did you have a point you wanted to make about ethics?
I said, “Maybe I’m not following you. Isn’t it legitimate to say, in a utilitarian-calculus kind of way, that the amount of well-being denied to the oppressed is generally much larger than the well-being that this provides for their oppressors? It’s inefficient, so to speak. It wastes well-being. Isn’t that true?”
Ophelia said, “I don’t think that’s true; at least I’m not aware that anyone has shown it to be true in any sort of slam-dunk way. It is true, and plenty of research has shown it to be true, that female equality brings large overall benefits, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing.”
Jason A. said, “I thought what Harris meant by ‘maximizing human flourishing’ is that if we had 1 man oppressing his 3 wives, we can ‘maximize’ it by liberating the women simply because their well being (being 3 of them) is more than the well being he gets by oppressing them. A simple 3 > 1 equation, where we don’t have to convince anyone that female equality brings benefits to others at all.”
This sounds right. A dictator steals a billion dollars from a million citizens. The citizens suffer horribly. The dictator has a wonderful time — but it is not possible for him to be a million times as happy as the citizens would be if they were not starving. The same reckoning applies to a sex-mad priest and his hundreds of young victims. There is no way that he can be enjoy the total amount of well-being that he has stolen from them. Utility has been squandered.
Jason A. continued, “You may have problems working this at large, though, when you’re talking about the well being of 50% of the population vs. the well being of the other 50%.”
First: as R.M. Hare points out, that there are cases where utilitarian calculations are difficult or even intractable does not invalidate the utilitarian principle. Every moral system has difficult cases.
Second: “50% of the population” is not a moral agent. A demographic sector, a government, a religion — none of these hurts people, or helps them. A person hurts people, or helps them. If there were no person who was willing to shoot, or bomb, or rape another person then there would be no wars, and no dictators.
Going out on a limb (my accustomed habitat), is it not true that in general, one person harming one another person is going to result in happiness being wasted, since in general the injured person is deprived of way more well-being than his or her attacker can possibly enjoy? (In many cases, the attacker will not have enjoyed the attack at all. For example, he or she might have been forced to do it by a higher-ranking tormentor, or by mental illness, and found it approximately as horrible as the victim did.)
Hurting people is wrong because it is a waste. That might sound like a claim regarding the a priori, but I don’t mean it that way. Isn’t it pretty damned plausible from an empirical point of view?
Let’s listen to Ophelia again. To my claim that “oppression wastes well-being,” she replied,
“I don’t think that’s true; at least I’m not aware that anyone has shown it to be true in any sort of slam-dunk way. It is true, and plenty of research has shown it to be true, that female equality brings large overall benefits, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing.”
I think we disagree only on that last clause. Is female inequality not an example of oppression? Of course it is. (Unless it’s a result, not an example. But that probably doesn’t matter in this context.) Sure, my claim that “oppression wastes well-being” is very broad; maybe too broad to be demonstrated “in any sort of slam-dunk way.” On the other hand, if “plenty of research has shown it to be true, that female equality brings large overall benefits” then that’s a good start! Let’s do more research of that kind — the kind where everybody wins.
Themann, certainly the family is a social institution, though Rawls is no help there. He waffled on the issue throughout his career. Also, while Rawls was generally decent and interesting in ethics and social philosophy, his idea of institutional analysis was underwhelming (at least in my view).
Roy, yes, I have made the issue is the overall wellbeing involved in becoming free. That’s because your issue was overall utility, and Ophelia’s issue was the zero-sum game. When you see two people talking past each other, it helps to connect the dots and see what happens. So I connected the two points in a particular way that I found interesting and conclusive against your position. Connect the dots your own way if you like; but I have reasons to think you’re off-base, which you can consider if you’re interested.
To be clear. I argued that that a utilitarian can examine Ophelia’s concern with zero-sum games in a certain way: through examining the effort required in becoming free. But as you may or may not have noticed, I argue that such an analysis fails to preserve the language of objective morality, since the question of what “overall” even means is irresolvable.
I’m not sure your latest comment is germane or sound. To say that a thing is “a practical question” as opposed to an ethical one is to say something that is alien to the utilitarian (or their closest welfarist alternative). Morality is practical. That’s the entire point — utility.
Benjamin Nelson said, “Morality is practical. That’s the entire point — utility.”
Not sure I’m following you, but maybe I should have said ‘logistical’ instead of ‘practical’.
“How can we free ourselves from this oppression?” is a logistical question, not an ethical one.
An ethical question would be something like, “They’re oppressing us — should we kill them?”
Montag & Benjamin Nelson: I really recommend section 50 in <i>Justice As Fairness</i>, as it’s entirely devoted to the family as an institution and parsing out these issues. I’d do it pretty terrible justice attempting to summarize it.
I think Harris is throwing these ideas out there because the treatment of ethics is analogous to the treatment of religion. With religion, you have clerics and theologians claiming sole expertise over the subject, and refusing to allow scientific study anywhere near it. The same thing seems to be happening in the field of ethics, only in the field of ethics, the people guarding the area are philosophers.
I think it’s a bit late to wonder whether we should take an empirical approach to ethics. We already do, and always have–we just don’t do it very well. We or others try different societal arrangements, different ethical assumptions and systems, and we take note of what happens. The brightest men of the late eighteenth century had gained the benefit of observing what happened when religion was allowed to run society. The results were awful, so they dropped the project. In 1990, everyone finally admitted that communism was pretty much a disaster. It turns out that freedom works.
More recently, we learned, again, that it also turns out that some government regulation is necessary. And when people argue about these things, they judge ethical positions by their results. Most of the links that show up on this site are presented as evidence for what are essentially ethical arguments.
The whole is-ought thing is overused as well. Hume was targeting Natural Law, according to which what is is good. This is still used by the Catholic Church to argue that the status quo is right (because God made it, of course.) But Hume was not trying to argue against the use of any empirical knowledge whatsoever when talking about ethics, any more than he supported the radical skepticism that some attribute to him.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could organize our knowledge of historical observations and conclusions about ethics in a way that could form a basis for the future. Wouldn’t it be better if it was as obvious to people in the future as it was to Jefferson that theocracy is a bad thing? Wouldn’t it be better to head off the next Stalin before he gains power?
The fact that you cannot convince someone of something has no bearing on its truth; you will never convince a fundamentalist of the truth of evolution because they simply do not share your commitment to science–and that too, begins as an emotional commitment. The difference is that science really works, but to the believer, religion appears to work too.
So it isn’t likely that everyone will be sold on a science of ethics tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean that one can’t be started, building upon observations from history, anthropology, economics, computer science, political science, psychology, neuroscience, etc. Most of these fields didn’t even exist until the last century. Yes, many people can’t agree on even the most basic principles of ethics. Most people can’t do math either. It took almost two and a half millenia to get from early Greek science to Einstein.
Harris isn’t saying that he has all the answers, he’s just trying to ask the questions. It seems that taking on religion isn’t the only way to be declared a heretic.
I don’t think the treatment of ethics is really analogous to the treatment of religion, because with ethics the claim is that science can’t provide answers, not that it can’t say anything at all.
It’s funny that people keep claiming that Harris is saying less than he is. He’s not just asking questions. If he were, there wouldn’t be so many people arguing with him! (And the argument isn’t hostile, and Harris welcomes it, so really, there isn’t any need to minimize what he’s saying.)
We’re already building on observations from history, anthropology, economics, computer science, political science, psychology, neuroscience, etc. That’s already happening. But that still doesn’t cash out as: science can answer ethical questions.
Oh and another thing – nobody is declaring Harris a heretic! He wants input on this subject, he wants to hash it out; he said that in this article. I’m certainly not declaring him a heretic, and I don’t think I’ve said anything that even looks like that.
Roy, if we use that distinction, then the matter is practical, not (just) logistical. I’m not asking the question of how people go about freeing themselves. I’m explaining the fluctuating costs and benefits involved in that process, and then going on to apply that explanation to a wider point we can make against objective consequentialism.
Themann, since we’re throwing citations — I see your Rawls and raise you a G.A. Cohen! (Where the Action is: On the Site of Distributive Justice; Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 3-30)
Back another post or two…
No. It would certainly make things easier in one way if it were true, but no, of course it isn’t true. (And harming is not the same as attacking, either.)
I’m getting a slightly baffled feeling that all I’m doing is saying “It’s not that simple” and lots of people are saying “It is that simple!” But…shrug…it’s not.
How you can answer of course not to a question that was so poorly framed? :~)
Rereading it now, I’m not sure myself what the question means. I have to think about it. I’ll get back to you.
(That’s your cue to say, “Thanks, Roy — I can’t wait.”)
Hahahaha.
Well I thought I did have a sense of what you meant – and that it’s sometimes true, of course. But by no means always.
So, now I’m curious.
If there is no traction for science–that is, no objective basis for ethics, how do you justify any ethical claim? Doesn’t this lead to ethical relativism, and as a consequence, cultural relativism? Doesn’t that render the actions of men who would throw acid into the faces of girls for seeking an education ethically equivalent to the actions of those who educate them?
I’m an ethical realist–I think that there are genuine principles which are an inevitable consequence of the social nature of humans. These principles may be imprecise in expression, but are nevertheless objectively real. That is, I believe that there are ethical stances that are better for humans as individuals, as societies, and as a species, and that the three concerns ultimately converge into one ethical stance. That is, you wouldn’t want to live a society, for example, that sanctions slavery, even if it seems to work in your interest (there are economic arguments, by the way, that suggest that slavery led to the collapse of the American South–even without the civil war.) So I have no doubt as to why throwing acid into little girls’ faces is wrong. I am as little concerned with the idiosyncratic opinions of sociopaths as I am with those of creationists. And as legitimate ethical stances are objectively true, they are subject to empirical inquiry. That is, they can be dealt with scientifically.
But if there is no objective basis for ethics, why are things like this wrong? Or, if there is an objective basis, why is it not subject to scientific inquiry?
OK, here’s the intuition: when one person deliberately harms another person, isn’t there always a net loss of utility? Well, of course not. What if you hit someone over the head to prevent their pushing the Big Red Button? As we all know, sometimes that’s The Right Thing To Do.
The crew of Serenity are gearing up to go out and rescue Malcolm. Shepherd Book says, “I’m coming with you,” and picks up a rifle.
Zoë says [I’m quoting from memory here], “Preacher, doesn’t your book say that killing is wrong?”
He says, “Absolutely. But it’s pretty vague on the subject of kneecaps.”
Mark, I don’t think anyone denies that there is and must be an objective basis for morality-talk. But that’s a separate question from whether or not there’s such a thing as saying that morality is about objective things out there independent of any mind doing the moralising.
There are two issues that are important to recognise.
For one thing, we need to recognise that relativism does not necessarily entail tolerance. You can be a relativist while also being ethnocentric or dogmatic. If you’re dogmatic, you will say: “Yeah, there’s no such thing as “right” simpliciter, there’s just “right-for-me” and so on. That’s not going to stop me from pulverizing what’s right-for-you and everything you hold dear.” Tons and tons and tons of professional scholars of philosophy that make this mistake, both critics of relativists and even a few proponents of it — but it is pathological sloppiness.
For another thing, if you don’t want either relativism or objectivism, you need some other idea of what it is we’re talking about that includes elements of both. Among the materials for building a moral system, you will surely need to include virtues, principles, contracts, choices, consequences, and human nature. Typically, these will involve the faculties of instinctive sympathy, rule-making, and mind-reading / empathy (arranged from most subjective to most objective).
As to what we’re talking about when we talk about morality? The good life, a life of awesomeness. Treat it as a primitive concept, an idealisation that we instinctively understand and strive towards. Questions of objectivity and subjectivity are irrelevant to the concept, because it’s too simple and stubborn for us to put in that kind of language.
Dammit, now I’ll have to snag a copy of that in the library!
Without endorsing it in anything approaching its entirety, Kant’s approach to ethics/morality seems decently grounded. More caveats: I think he really screws the pooch on a number of issues, including Lying To The Inquisitive Murderer and casual sex. But the idea that we shouldn’t follow a maxim that we wouldn’t want everyone else to follow (in relevantly similar situations, etc etc) seems pretty solid, at least as a starting point. This is logic-based, but it’s informed by science: how else are you going to evaluate the ramifications of everyone following the maxim?
Benjamin, I think you’re right. I think we all agree that there is an objective basis for ethics; my question is why that basis eludes objective study. And relativism definitely does not entail tolerance. Some of the most intolerant people I have ever met have been relativists. For that matter, the “Triumph of the Will” that was so loved by fascist movements was itself predicated on the absence of any real values, requiring that values be imposed by force. If there is no truth, the only valid argument is a boot stomping on the face of humanity. These were the bastard children of Nietszche. I say bastard because Nietszche disowned them; his sister Elizabeth married a proto-Nazi, and Nietszche despised him
Here’s why I think Harris might be on to something. Let’s start with a list of all possible goods and values. Throw them all on–you don’t have to choose between them at this point. The original proposals of these values are historically subjective, so yes, this is a combination of subjective and objective. The objective part comes by examining the results achieved by people who stress a particular value, and judging those results by the standards of the other values on the list. For example, self esteem was added to the list about forty years ago, but we have discovered that high self esteem is common amongst criminals and narcissists. So self-esteem gets demoted. Another example is Jonathon Haidt’s moral foundations of ingroup/loyalty, purity/sanctity, and authority/respect. These have a bad history–they map directly onto the slogan “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer!” So academics, who are aware of this historical record, discount these foundations. They get dropped down the list. Others, like fairness, compassion, empathy, and caring, have a near perfect yield. These get promoted up the list. In the 80’s Ivan Boesky and the Wall Street crowd threw greed onto the list. I think we can now safely kick that one off the list. And so you continue through the list, demoting those that run afoul of the majority of the others in practice, promoting those that are conducive, or at least compatible with, the greatest number of values on the list. The result is a hierarchy of values, derived from empirical observation.
What I am talking about here is experimentation and observation in the real world, combined with peer review. The resemblance to science is not accidental. We do this now, and we do it all the time. Butterflies and Wheels spends much of its time debunking the value of faith by detailing the results of emphasizing this value, and judging these results by more robust values. The evidence against the valuation of faith is strong, and continues to mount. We are already doing empirical research into values, and exercising peer review over claims for those values. But we’re doing it piecemeal and haphazardly. Why not do it more methodically?
Harris’ problem is that he does not have a method, and his criteria of well being seems both too broad and too specific. I suspect he’s using this as a catch all term, but if you adhere to that term, the objection concerning the man who thinks his well being relies upon the dependency of others is valid. But the fact that someone limits his range of values to a truncated, ancient set does not mean that we have to. And this man’s highest value, selfishness, is not one that stands up to empirical scrutiny.
Once you start considering the woman as equally important to the man, then yes, it is a factual slam-dunk that wellbeing isn’t increased by the woman’s subordination.
Of course at this point you might say that’s the very problem: so many people don’t consider the woman as the man’s moral equal. But then we get right back to the issue of contested facts. People have fact-based rationalizations for not considering the woman as the man’s equal. She’s not rational, she’s prone to hysteria, she’s weak, she’s not as smart, it is her nature to obey, etc. Even people who use religious reasons to justify women’s subordination generally use “science” or “nature” to support what they say. So we’re back to facts again. I’m not sure if pointing this out puts me closer to Harris or OB–I suspect they’d both agree.
Mark Fournier: just want to note that what you’re saying is very interesting and I think I mostly agree.
Oh right! Jeez! I forgot to consider the woman as equal to the man! Thanks so much, Jenavir – you’re a real eye-opener.
Ophelia, I’d seriously appreciate a response to comment #15, since apparently I haven’t really understood your point yet. :)
Peter,
Well as I said this particular post was just a quick one – but it sort of assumes as background a couple of more argued posts I did earlier. Maybe you could read those to get an idea?
Well in my case that’s partly because I’ve said a lot about FGM already, and it seems otiose and boring and an imposition on readers to keep repeating it. It’s also because I think I did address the underlying idea in the earlier posts.
Lots and lots of people already agree that FGM is bad, including in the sense that it does not promote well-being. You’re not thinking that Harris is the first person to say that, are you? We agree it’s bad; we agree that science can offer evidence that it’s bad. We don’t agree that that’s enough.
But they’re not. They’re not universally condemned, nor are they universally eschewed.
There’s a myth that “all humans agree that _______” with the blank representing some minimal item – but it’s a myth. People just rationalize or re-define the items so that their version is quite all right or a sad necessity or what God wants.
… it sort of assumes as background a couple of more argued posts I did earlier. Maybe you could read those to get an idea?
I have and I didn’t. That’s why I’m asking.
Lots and lots of people already agree that FGM is bad, including in the sense that it does not promote well-being. You’re not thinking that Harris is the first person to say that, are you?
You are aware that nobody has so far claimed that Harris was the first person to say that? Especially since it would be ridiculous? This is a rather irritating distraction, much like the other non-arguments I commented on in #15. Harris’s actual point, which I suppose you don’t agree with or haven’t seen yet, is something different. He says it’s obvious that we agree, qualitatively and in broad terms, on these issues (see below for details). He says in principle they should be amenable to scientific investigation, never mind that we don’t have a way of accurately quantifying them yet. He says there is a pattern, it is more than suggestive, and like e.g. a description of the fight-or-flight response, which similarly would be a sort of statistical statement about complex behaviour, it can be treated as a scientific fact.
They’re not universally condemned, nor are they universally eschewed.
You could say the same thing about murder, just because various people and indeed larger groups of people have participated in this or that genocide. But that doesn’t alter the actual fact that, wherever they live, people overwhelmingly say that murder is wrong.
There’s a myth that “all humans agree that _______” with the blank representing some minimal item – but it’s a myth.
Again, you’re missing the argument part, where you give a reason for your opinion. In this case, the actual research is pretty clear that there are such universals as you claim do not exist. You need go no further than the accessible The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker to be directed to the original research. And Harris’s point, after all, is that in priciple everybody knows that helping somebody in need is generally a good thing, killing them not so much. Which is precisely why killers have to rationalize their actions, e.g. making themselves out to be a hero saving the world from a bad person, or their bad conscience is even stronger and they kill themselves—especially when they’re caught or in danger of being caught, i.e. brought in line with the pretty much shared morality of the rest of the world.
Harris’s point is that we can generally tell the kinds of things tending towards the wellbeing-maximising part of the spectrum from those tending in the other direction. And what he suggests is that there is some kind of algorithmic process that can be used to find at least local peaks in the moral landscape.
Especially since morality as a property emerged from evolution, which is just such an algorithmic process, it seems eminently plausible that it shows as many patterns and factual content as that overarching process from whence it sprang.
I think it would help enormously if we could agree on what Harris actually says first, and only later discuss whether these ideas might lead anywhere interesting.
Peter, in that same book, Steve Pinker also makes a lot of hay out of the fact-value distinction, and uses it to defend evolutionary theory from being slimed with the Social Darwinist accusation, as was done to E.O. Wilson. The demand for a fact-value distinction of some kind is what motivates people to reject objectivism. And it’s what prompts objectivists like Harris to explicitly take on the is/ought divide.
Also, I’m having a hard time with treating “murder is wrong” as a universal platitude. Capital punishment? Human sacrifice?
Steve Pinker also makes a lot of hay out of the fact-value distinction, and uses it to defend evolutionary theory from being slimed with the Social Darwinist accusation …
I don’t treat Pinker, or anybody else, as an authority whose simple word can be used as an argument. I explicitly said that’s where the actual research is referenced. Nothing more about the book or the man should be inferred.
Also, I’m having a hard time with treating “murder is wrong” as a universal platitude. Capital punishment? Human sacrifice?
Both of which need very strong rationalizations from authorities to override the pretty much universally accepted consensus. Which would explain handsomely why human sacrifice is essentially a non-issue and capital punishment more or less restricted to countries with strong religious influences, or authoritarian states, like China and N Korea. Because once the blind obedience to authority is taken out of the picture, people are rather unwilling to do these kinds of things of their own accord.
Yes but they also define murder in such a way that it doesn’t include the particular kind of murder they want to commit or have committed. So the fact that people say that really doesn’t help all that much, and in fact it hinders, because it fosters this illusion that we all agree in the end.
As for what Harris’s actual point, that I haven’t seen yet, is, I’ve already said that I haven’t read all of what Harris has written on the subject, I’m just addressing the items I have read. I think I’m allowed to do that. And then…what you say his point is is, again, stuff that I don’t disagree with; it’s pretty non-controversial, perhaps even self-evident; but he’s said other things that are not like what you say his actual point is, and those other things are what I have been wrestling with.
As for missing the argument part, yes yes yes, but I don’t want to write ten thousand words in every comment, and I do to some extent rely on background knowledge here. I realize that means that individual comments can be shorthand, but I do think that’s preferable to writing ten thousand word comments every time I reply to anything. I’ve talked about this before; I don’t have time or inclination to recapitulate the whole thing every time the subject comes up.
But again – that’s just a banality – and “in principle” covers a multitude of sins. So if that really is Harris’s point, it doesn’t get us much of anywhere.
I’ve quoted what he’s actually said – that is what I’ve been discussing: things he has actually said. If those things are not representative of what he’s claiming overall, by all means say that, with actual quotations to back it up as opposed to your own summary – but please don’t imply that I haven’t been discussing what he actually says when I have directly quoted him.
Peter – honestly – it’s as if you’ve never heard the phrase “lip service”! You can’t really look at the world and think that people in general, people as such, universally are rather unwilling to kill other people.
Or think about eastern DR Congo for a second. Rape has been used there as a weapon of war for a decade or more, and the result is that now it has become much more common just in general. It’s become just routine; socially acceptable; no big deal. I’m sure lots of men there would say it contributes to the overall well-being of the people of DR Congo.
Peter – honestly – it’s as if you’ve never heard the phrase “lip service”! You can’t really look at the world and think that people in general, people as such, universally are rather unwilling to kill other people.
Obviously I can, but then my biased perspective as such should be just as immaterial as yours: “I’m sure lots of men there would say …” gets us precisely nowhere. Can we please talk about issues that are amenable to scientific treatment in terms of evidence, especially since there actually is such evidence?
And I didn’t ask you to. What I did is point out that your research evidence in itself is underwhelming when you put it back in its original context. His Simple Word is not decisive — but it had better be a consideration, or else you’re just playing a game of pick-and-choose.
You presuppose, here, that capital punishment is bad — that murder in those circumstances is wrong. Except that many people, when confronted with the reality of serial murderers, are ready and eager to accept the idea that in principle, murder of these agents is justified. I’m one of them, incidentally. I say this after stone cold reflection on the matter. Uncle Sam is not breathing down my neck, and I capital punishment is outlawed in my country (Canada), so there is no duress. So in your view, I must be pathological, in some objective sense — is that right?
Yes the last sentence was a conditional, but it’s not all there was. It was a rhetorical finish, but what came before was evidence-based (via a recent Oxfam report).
As for what can we please talk about…well I’ll talk about whatever I feel like talking about!
And since the whole point of contention here is whether scientific treatment in terms of evidence is sufficient for discussing and grounding morality, the answer is No. I have no intention of limiting my discussion to issues that are amenable to scientific treatment in terms of evidence, precisely because that’s not all there is to it.
To make a request in return, can you please take the hostile edge out of your comments? I’m not doing anything to you (that I’m aware of), and I don’t quite see why the hostile edge is necessary.
I’m a bit baffled, I’m afraid. And this is a sincere question: where exactly do you see the hostile edge?
You’re not imagining it, Ophelia. And you don’t have to play the “where exactly do you see it” game.
Thanks for your input, Roy, but before alleging that I think that Ophelia is delusional and that I’m trolling you might have considered that you don’t have the necessary facts to make a judgement. Ophelia knows me from a couple of other blogs, and she knows that I’m not a troll.
Peter, you are mischaracterizing my comment — though I confess that I am not certain I should have made it.
Holy smoke — this commenting-on-blogs business is like a freaking antagonism generator, at least for certain personality types. (In which, of course, I include myself.)
Benjamin
There’s no need to consider you pathological, just wrong. The problem is that capital punishment is one of those genies that even the best of states shouldn’t have. One reason is that despite our best efforts and even with the presumption of innocence, many an innocent person goes to jail. The killing, by the state, of even one innocent man is a price that is not worth paying for the right to kill serial killers. There are other argument to make but the argument above is precisely the kind of thing we’re talking about when we talk about Objective; take a principle and describe it as universally as possible and voila, you find out whether it is an objective moral value.
Now true, I haven’t defined the justification for the moral principle all the way down, in many ways that’s what I’m expected to do when I’m doing Philosophy but quite frankly I’m not sure I’m interested in doing that kind of Philosophy. It strikes me that doing this, taking particular moral principles, applying them to moral problems and seeing whether or not they work is what we do to turn ethics into a science. The idea that in order to do ethics I need to know what the answer is going to look like, which is basically what the current emphasis on metaphysics in ethics seems to boil down to, is just hunkering down and wallowing in my intuitions and look how far that got the Medieval Philosophers . This of course isn’t to say that Metaethics is useless because it does a really good job of giving us a rough guide to the kinds of possible answers, but it’s in the real world that we find out if our morals are real just like it’s in the real world that we find out if scientific hypotheses are real.
There’s a final point that I think needs to get raised. No matter how hard I try it’s impossible for me not to compare this debate as a whole to the debate over materialism in the Philosophy of Mind. It’s the problem of abstract objects, whether beliefs have causal power, and whether or not events can be over-determined. Anyone else think this stuff has something to add?
Try harder. No, just kidding! I think the comparison is apt.
Peter, I do know you from other blogs, and admire your contributions. I detect the edge in a lot of places – all of #58 for instance. But maybe it’s just exasperation or energy.
TGM, I should clarify that I believe that capital punishment is impractical for the reasons you cited, but justifiable in principle, e.g., if there was absolutely no doubt as to the guilt of the murderer.
The approach to objectivity you give is interesting: “take a principle and describe it as universally as possible and voila, you find out whether it is an objective moral value.” We might think of this as a form of objectivity in application. But as I’ve argued, murder is one of those cases that fails the universal description test, because of the in-principle legitimacy of capital punishment, so it isn’t objectively wrong. And even still, your sense of objectivity sounds as though it is less a matter of scientific discovery and more of a matter of scientific technology — and these are codependent, but distinct, notions. In other words, if you are proposing an objective study, then at best it’s only objective in the same sense that computer science is.
The philosophy of mind and social philosophy have a lot to add, especially in considerations of accountability and free will. But then again, these are branches of meta-ethics!
Except, of course, for Jonathan Haidt, and academics who agree with him, and other people who agree with him. (I find him terrifying.)
I think what you mean is that morality is cumulative, and progressive (notwithstanding plenty of regression, and stasis). I think that’s true, and I think empiricism is part of that – but that doesn’t add up to saying it’s scientific, or a branch of science, or decided by science.
Benjamin
On murder you’re right it is an interesting case. I’ll have to get back to you with what I think. My rough stab is leaning towards saying the prohibition against murder is probably not properly formed then, it’s missing bits but I know that’s not quite enough.
Moving on, the definition of Objectivity I’m appealing to is explicitly Nagel’s in the View From Nowhere but it’s basically that objective is by definition about perspective. I’m going to have to read further on Nagel before I can give a good account of how he argues for it, but from what I can tell this is almost the point of science. A really good example is blinded studies. Every single step in a properly blinded study is designed to remove subjective biases both cognitive and contingent, whether that comes in terms of a particular person getting better through pure chance or a particular researcher seeing a pattern where there isn’t one. Replication is important because a the “view” as it were from one researcher is a lot less likely to be right than when we extend the view to several researchers. Yes, this is a question of method, what I assume you mean when you mention the technology of science, but I’m not sure how that isn’t actual discovery.
This ties into what I find interesting about Philosophy of Mind in this. What is interesting is not accountability and free will, but far more about abstract objects and to what degree beliefs are real. The problem is how do we find a way to describe beliefs and their relationship to particular states of the brain. There’s no doubt that there’s a particular state of my brain that corresponds to my belief that 2+2=4 and similarly there is a state of your brain that corresponds to the belief that 2+2=4 but in what way are the two beliefs the same belief? There’s something in this too that significantly reminds me of evolution by natural selection. I think it’s safe to say all of us here believe in evolution, but it too isn’t a fact in a look I can point at evolution walking down the street kind of way. It’s not even real because of its effects, it’s more of a statistical rule, a conclusion if a particular set of facts pertain. If evolution is real, why not morality?
The fact that it is difficult to pin down does not prove that it is not real. This is true of ‘morality’, ‘love’, ‘quality’, ‘skill’, ‘harmony’, ‘color’ and ‘logic’, to name just a few.
Up to your old tricks, Roy? You define ethics the way you want, then, in a rather nasty tone, accuse other people of not talking about ethics. It doesn’t work that way. When you act like that, you seem both unpleasant and ignorant.
Apart from the aggressive persona you’ve been adopting of late, I’m starting to think that you know absolutely nothing about contemporary metaethics and that much of the discussion is going right over your head. That would be okay if you were willing to learn. Maybe it’s not your field. Fine. But you posture like you’re some kind of expert.
You’re right, Russell, that was too harsh. I’m sorry.
Let me try to be very, very civilized. I have read a lot of meta-ethics. My current assessment is that there is nothing there. True, some of it goes “right over my head” — but of course this does not prove that it makes any sense.
Writers on meta-ethics ask us, as if it’s a question that cuts right to the heart of things, “Why should I be moral?” I have not seen a better answer than, “That’s what ‘moral’ means, is all — or, if you like, what ‘should’ means.”
But the question elicits an emotional response, too — and I am not sure that it is inappropriate. I mean, isn’t it kind of a creepy question? Doesn’t it make you want to ask gently, while carefully backing away, “Is it very hard on you, this suggestion that one ‘should’ be good to other people?”
Still really, really trying to be civilized, I honestly don’t see how we can not construe “Why should I be moral?” as a rejection of the notion that (it is obvious that) one should be good to others; and a person who makes such an announcement seems like someone I’d not choose to hang out with. We can avoid this reading if we define ‘moral’ as something like ‘following the rules’ — “Why should I follow the rules?” sounds much friendlier than “Why should I be moral?” — but in my experience, that is simply not how the word is used. (Sometimes ‘ethical’ means that, but not ‘moral’.)
I believe that you are a decent person; therefore, I am bewildered by what you have been saying about morality. It sounds as if you are saying, “I see no real reason why I should care about other people’s well-being anywhere near as much as I care about my own.” And that sounds as if you are a sociopath. Presumably, you are not. Ergo, I am not understanding you.
On the other hand, my failure to understand you doesn’t make me ignorant. I may be unpleasant at times — especially when someone is wrong on the Internet — but ignorant? Hell, that doesn’t even offend me. Dirty and fat would be just as absurd. I’m also OK with consumptive, long-haired, and Belgian.
Sorry to be so very late in replying, first I was kind of busy and then I was kind of in China … ;>
As to Ophelia in #67, thank you very much for the kind compliment. I’m flattered, honestly.
But. You think of #58 as hostile? What I intended it to be was two factual statements and a plea for some meat, please. I simply thought the particular arguments (or in some cases not even that) that you used to be very weak, and I said so. Not because I wanted to be antagonistic, but because I care about the issue. And also I don’t like to be wrong, at least where it can be easily avoided. For those reasons, and I’m actually pretty sure that you will agree with all of this, because you have said pretty much the same thing in countless posts and comments of your own, I want to make sure that I understand as clearly as possible what those of different opinions actually think, in case their arguments make sense and should compel me to alter my own stance. The rest is just a little exasperation at not very good arguments (as far as I can tell) from somebody who, quite rightly, is usually held to a higher standard.
I suppose we all have those moments. But that just means we’ll have to deal with, and look kindly upon, other people’s occasional exasperation. :)
58 in combination with the others, yes – you even mentioned your irritation at one point! But as you say, it happens. No biggy.
I’d like to be able to agree with you about murder, but I’ve read way too much about global violence against women to be able to. Men can kill their own daughters and be imperturbably delighted with themselves afterward. Of course you are free to believe they are all eaten up with remorse inside, but they give every reported appearance of being no such thing.
I find this fact unendurably depressing. I don’t believe it because I want to. But – it’s out there, and it makes it really hard for me to be uncritical of the claim that we all have some core moral shared ground.
58 in combination with the others, yes
But still: what exactly seems hostile? What, for example, distinguishes what I say from some of the harsher things we both have said about the Mooneybaums’ peculiar thinking?
And as to murder, you will not expect any disagreement on the incidence of it and maybe not even the apparent unpurturbedness of some of its perpetrators. But that will not touch upon the universal agreement that murder in general is to be condemned. Even the Nazis had laws against, and ethical concerns about, murder in general, and among the Nazis even the SS guards in the death camps who actually murdered people would have agreed with the principle. The trick is to either come up with extraordinary mitigating circumstances or to deny the status of a human being to those you murder. The last worked as well with Jews as it used to do with black slaves. But invariably, you find that these kinds of psychological contortions are necessary if you want to get people to commit such atrocities. Surely, you’ll have to account for these phenomena, and I cannot see how they can but work against your argument.
For an editor not to parse HTML tags when in visual mode sucks.
But those phenomena are so far from rare – they make the claims of a universal rejection of murder look sentimental and hollow, to me.
Oh, if the things we say about the Mooneybaums is the standard – ! But if people talk to me the way I talk to the Mooneybaums, I take them to be pretty irritated!
Maybe we sounded irritated (and not just to the Mooneybaums), and that would be fair enough. But you specifically said “hostile”, and I don’t think we actually are that. Harsh I can possibly get behind, but not hostile. And what I said here was not even harsh, at least not by any standard definition of the word. What I said amounts to something like “you’re wrong about this, that argument is weak (or even missing), and can you please give some evidence for the other thing”. Even adding irritation, that doesn’t even amount to harshness, does it?
I’m hostile. If Mooneybaum want to accuse me of being hostile, I can’t complain. I am. Because of the protracted badmouthing of particular people in a climate where atheists are already widely considered eeevil – I’m hostile. I think that was a bad, unprincipled thing to do.
But anyway – I don’t consider you hostile! I take it back.
Well, I don’t think you were hostile to them, and I certainly hope I wasn’t. At every step along the way I truly hoped that they would engage in a dialogue and give some sort of argument that would actually support their ideas, so that we might have continued to try to come nearer to what is hopefully the truth of the matter. It’s only the resistance to being prodded towards that path that I find irritating, because it precludes me from further sharpening my own grasp of the matter. It’s frustrating in that sense.
But thanks for reintroducing me into your good graces, I appreciate that. :)