How to argue with subjective moralists

[bridgeforsale]

Hi bridgeforsale,

Love the name. Do you consider yourself a subjective moralist?

Best,
Leela

I suppose I am. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in objective virtue, or ideas that are universally good. For instance I believe peaceable people have a right to liberty, freedom from oppression, dignity and human rights, freedom of religion, etc. I believe anything or any force that opposes these values is evil. But I concede I believe the idea of liberty we base our civilization on is the product of men. In fact I think they’re easy enough to identify. They were the rationalist thinkers, the empiricists of the enlightenment like David Hume, John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Paine, etc. (only one of whom was a theist in the way the term is typically understood). They were the architects of our intellectual foundation; and their ideas have become the gold standard.

 

[Betterave]

Yes, this sounds right. I think that Hume would also say that we have no rational grounds for thinking there is *not *metaphysical reality in the cause-effect relationship. It is simply a matter which we can never issue any educated opinion about.

More broadly, Hume claims that any attempt to prove induction (“the sun will rise tomorrow”, for example) is circular, since it assumes that the unobserved will resemble the observed.

I’ll also agree with that and proceed to criticism: Obviously Hume’s notion of “educated opinion” (not that this is his term necessarily, but that’s the gist) is a fabrication. It is based on an arbitrary stipulative definition that conflicts with what rational educated people know to be the case. Circularity is not arational, it is foundational for reason. (If Hume’s thinking is a ‘gold standard,’ then maybe that’s only because he is a kind of intellectual philistine.)

 

[Leela]

I suppose I am. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in objective virtue, or ideas that are universally good. For instance I believe peaceable people have a right to liberty, freedom from oppression, dignity and human rights, freedom of religion, etc. I believe anything or any force that opposes these values is evil. But I concede I believe the idea of liberty we base our civilization on is the product of men. In fact I think they’re easy enough to identify. They were the rationalist thinkers, the empiricists of the enlightenment like David Hume, John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Paine, etc. (only one of whom was a theist in the way the term is typically understood). They were the architects of our intellectual foundation; and their ideas have become the gold standard.

I’m not sure what is supposed to be meant by “subjective moralist.” I suppose it is something like a moral relativist, but I’m never clear what anyone means by that term either. It usually just sounds like name-calling–a pejorative for anyone who doubts someone else’s claim to have access to the Moral Law.

We nonbelievers are thought to be on worse footing for our moral assertions because we don’t claim that there is a Moral Law “out there” for us to conform to. For example, believers will ask how humans can rights if there is no God to be the foundation of rights. But unless proponents of the Moral Law can demonstrate how we can compare our moral assertions to this Law for agreement, they are on no better foundation. A Moral Law “out there” that we do not have access to is not even worth denying since it can make no difference to us.

Best,
Leela

 

[Prodigal_Son]

A Moral Law “out there” that we do not have access to is not even worth denying since it can make no difference to us.

It’s not out there. It’s in here.

The mystery of moral law and the mystery of a priori reason are one and the same. That is why there could be empirical evidence that there is no moral law – if enough thinking beings (aliens, perhaps) didn’t have the same kind of moral principles that we have.

How can we grasp the relations between things, and be right about these relations? How can we say that “if Bob is taller than Ann, and Ann is taller than Jane, then Bob is taller than Jane” accurately, without measuring the three of them? It is a priori. Why is it true? You might say, “Because of the meanings of the terms”. But how do the meanings of the terms happen to always correlate to our observations? We don’t know. But we don’t doubt that they do.

Moral truths are relations of ideas, but they are relations of ideas with absolute truth values. This should be no more controversial a claim that “the Pythagorean theorem is true”.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

I’ll also agree with that and proceed to criticism: Obviously Hume’s notion of “educated opinion” (not that this is his term necessarily, but that’s the gist) is a fabrication. It is based on an arbitrary stipulative definition that conflicts with what rational educated people know to be the case. Circularity is not arational, it is foundational for reason. (If Hume’s thinking is a ‘gold standard,’ then maybe that’s only because he is a kind of intellectual philistine.)

Your comment on circularity is interesting. I have been thinking a lot about what might be called the “dictionary paradox”. Here’s how it goes:

1. No informative definition may include the word being defined.
2. Many (all?) of the most important words in the language are themselves included in their 2nd, or 3rd, or nth-level definitions.
   Therefore, all of the words in the dictionary which depend upon those words do not carry information.

This seems to make communication impossible, although the paradox must go wrong somewhere. Its circularity is not vicious.

So about Hume…

 

[Touchstone]

It’s not out there. It’s in here.

The mystery of moral law and the mystery of a priori reason are one and the same. That is why there could be empirical evidence that there is no moral law – if enough thinking beings (aliens, perhaps) didn’t have the same kind of moral principles that we have.

How can we grasp the relations between things, and be right about these relations? How can we say that “if Bob is taller than Ann, and Ann is taller than Jane, then Bob is taller than Jane” accurately, without measuring the three of them? It is a priori. Why is it true? You might say, “Because of the meanings of the terms”. But how do the meanings of the terms happen to always correlate to our observations? We don’t know. But we don’t doubt that they do.

Moral truths are relations of ideas, but they are relations of ideas with absolute truth values. This should be no more controversial a claim that “the Pythagorean theorem is true”.

I know you’re wrestling with Hume (I think Hume is winning, btw!) here, but I think Kant would like speak up here and suggest a review of the above in light of the analytic/synthetic distinctions in knowledge propositions. There’s some overloading going on in the use of “absolute” here, and it’s a problem. When Leela says “out there” (or you say “in here”), that’s a statement about the real world, a claim about the state of affairs in our reality. But the Pythagorean theorem is perfectly not that kind of statement, but instead purely tautological, a product of stipulated rules and definitions.

This is important for just the reasons brought out by the “taller” example. We don’t know that our definitions correlate to our observations except for observing the correlations themselves. That is, definitions don’t define reality – Euclid has perfectly nothing to say about the real world in his proof, and neither does someone promoting an “absolute moral truth” – but rather, reality informs our definitions, or at least the terms and concepts we use to describe reality.

The Pythagorean Theorem, then is trivially true, in just the may “moral postulates” would be; insofar as neither are informed by or corrigible by real world observations, they are simply notional. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful or interesting, but they don’t carry the burden of having to square with the real world, and those can’t purport to carrying “real world semantic freight”.

-TS

 

[Prodigal_Son]

I know you’re wrestling with Hume (I think Hume is winning, btw!) here, but I think Kant would like speak up here and suggest a review of the above in light of the analytic/synthetic distinctions in knowledge propositions. There’s some overloading going on in the use of “absolute” here, and it’s a problem. When Leela says “out there” (or you say “in here”), that’s a statement about the real world, a claim about the state of affairs in our reality. But the Pythagorean theorem is perfectly not that kind of statement, but instead purely tautological, a product of stipulated rules and definitions.

Every statement is a product of stipulated rules and definitions. That is what the term “statement” means. “How can our statements be statements about the world?” Sounds like Kant, doesn’t it?

Take the Pythagorean theorem: Wouldn’t it be accurate to say that, **if **there are two things in the world that are finite lines and are perpendicular (call them A and B), then the shortest distance between their endpoints is equal the square root of A-squ + B-squ? If so, then it is a fact about the world. If we can disprove this statement using empirical examples, then the Pythagorean theorem is false. (It is true, mind you, given its assumptions, but its assumptions are false.)

Some a priori claims are not trivial.

This is important for just the reasons brought out by the “taller” example. We don’t know that our definitions correlate to our observations except for observing the correlations themselves. That is, definitions don’t define reality – Euclid has perfectly nothing to say about the real world in his proof, and neither does someone promoting an “absolute moral truth” – but rather, reality informs our definitions, or at least the terms and concepts we use to describe reality.

I agree completely.

The Pythagorean Theorem, then is trivially true, in just the may “moral postulates” would be; insofar as neither are informed by or corrigible by real world observations, they are simply notional. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful or interesting, but they don’t carry the burden of having to square with the real world, and those can’t purport to carrying “real world semantic freight”.

The definitions don’t define reality, but they ought to *describe *reality. If they don’t, they are only playthings. If stacking two blocks on top of two other blocks did not make a four-block stack, then our mathematics would be false. Many, but not all, “necessary truths” can be falsified by the real world.

 

[Touchstone]

Every statement is a product of stipulated rules and definitions. That is what the term “statement” means. “How can our statements be statements about the world?” Sounds like Kant, doesn’t it?

Take the Pythagorean theorem: Wouldn’t it be accurate to say that, **if **there are two things in the world that are finite lines and are perpendicular (call them A and B), then the shortest distance between their endpoints is equal the square root of A-squ + B-squ? If so, then it is a fact about the world.

It’s unknown if that is accurate or not. If space/time in the real world is completely “flat” in the Euclidean sense, then yes, that would be accurate. But if space/time is curved, in either an elliptic or hyperbolic sense, Pythagoras’ Theorem fails, and your math breaks down.

As best we can tell right now, space/time is flat. But that’s a scientific consensus that’s pretty solid over the last few decades or so, but still tentative.

But the profound point obtains, regardless. The Euclidean definitions don’t control jack in terms of reality. If Hubble (and other) observations had turned out differently, or if we are still missing subtle cues and measurements that point to positive or negative curvature, Pythagoras’ Theorem would not obtain in the real world (it may be close enough for crude operations in the way that Newtonian physics can be used to plot the flight of a baseball, etc.).

This is a particularly instructive example, in that it once again points out the trouble people have confusing the map with the territory. When you ask if Pythagoras’ math is “accurate” in the real world, I can’t respond with “logic” or a priori reasoning. I can only judge the definition against the evidence and observations from reality. For a very long time, when “Riemann”, “Calabi-Yau”, “space/time manifolds” and “spatial topologies” were unknown terms of art, people just assumed that Euclidean geometry was real. In parochial, local tests, the math worked out plenty well, right? The analytics got confused with the synthetic.

Over very large distances, though, your math may still have you way off, for all we know.

Moreover, this is all said in the context of an isotropic space/time. In the real world, mass distorts space/time (gravity), and these distortions introduce curvature at a local level that nukes Euclidean distance calculations just as much as an elliptic space/time manifold would. In that sense, then, wherever gravity is present, a^2 + b^2 will NOT produce the right results for you, and your statement would be inaccurate. If you are talking about applying your statement to locations here on earth, your statement would NOT be accurate. Einstein, for example, named a whole chapter of his book on Special and General Relativity “Gaussian Coordinates”, in which he deploys non-Euclidean geometry to account for the local curvatures in space/time.

Why would he not use Euclidean geometry?

Because it wasn’t accurate!!

If we can disprove this statement using empirical examples, then the Pythagorean theorem is false. (It is true, mind you, given its assumptions, but its assumptions are false.)

Some a priori claims are not trivial.

I don’t think any a priori claims are trivial if they concern reality.

The definitions don’t define reality, but they ought to *describe *reality. If they don’t, they are only playthings. If stacking two blocks on top of two other blocks did not make a four-block stack, then our mathematics would be false. Many, but not all, “necessary truths” can be falsified by the real world.

Euclid’s proof is perfectly necessary as a truth. It’s unassailable, perfect. But its truth is trivial, analytic, tautological. All the “pure truths” are so because they are artificial, abstract. It’s only when statements hazard the real world as their subject that things become difficult, problematic. In terms of “necessary truths” about the real world, I can’t think of a single one, or even how one could provide a coherent basis for “necessary” as a metaphysical feature of reality.

-TS

 

[Prodigal_Son]

It’s unknown if that is accurate or not. If space/time in the real world is completely “flat” in the Euclidean sense, then yes, that would be accurate. But if space/time is curved, in either an elliptic or hyperbolic sense, Pythagoras’ Theorem fails, and your math breaks down.

As best we can tell right now, space/time is flat. But that’s a scientific consensus that’s pretty solid over the last few decades or so, but still tentative.

But the profound point obtains, regardless. The Euclidean definitions don’t control jack in terms of reality. If Hubble (and other) observations had turned out differently, or if we are still missing subtle cues and measurements that point to positive or negative curvature, Pythagoras’ Theorem would not obtain in the real world (it may be close enough for crude operations in the way that Newtonian physics can be used to plot the flight of a baseball, etc.).

This is a particularly instructive example, in that it once again points out the trouble people have confusing the map with the territory. When you ask if Pythagoras’ math is “accurate” in the real world, I can’t respond with “logic” or a priori reasoning. I can only judge the definition against the evidence and observations from reality. For a very long time, when “Riemann”, “Calabi-Yau”, “space/time manifolds” and “spatial topologies” were unknown terms of art, people just assumed that Euclidean geometry was real. In parochial, local tests, the math worked out plenty well, right? The analytics got confused with the synthetic.

Over very large distances, though, your math may still have you way off, for all we know.

Moreover, this is all said in the context of an isotropic space/time. In the real world, mass distorts space/time (gravity), and these distortions introduce curvature at a local level that nukes Euclidean distance calculations just as much as an elliptic space/time manifold would. In that sense, then, wherever gravity is present, a^2 + b^2 will NOT produce the right results for you, and your statement would be inaccurate. If you are talking about applying your statement to locations here on earth, your statement would NOT be accurate. Einstein, for example, named a whole chapter of his book on Special and General Relativity “Gaussian Coordinates”, in which he deploys non-Euclidean geometry to account for the local curvatures in space/time.

Why would he not use Euclidean geometry?

Because it wasn’t accurate!!

Well, insofar as it is inaccurate, it is false. It may be useful, in that it approximates reality to an extraordinary degree. The key point I think we agree on: if the world were a certain way, then Euclidean geometry would be true of it.

*A priori *justification, then, is like an arrow that may or may not be pointed at the right target. If we had a better way to get at understanding our reasoning capacities than *a priori *reasoning, we should use it; but we don’t. Psychology (and all science) can only “explain” our capacities by first assuming their accuracy. We may study who gets the “right” answers on certain tests, but we cannot step outside ourselves and see why these answers are objectively right (or, why we think they are, but they aren’t).

This is Hume’s limitation, which he knew very well. His exploration was a contingent quest: “if I can about the world accurately, then this is the most rational way to think about it.” But the idea that there are rational ways to think about the world presupposes that our ideas get at truth, at least sometimes, which seems to be a precondition for rationality.

How do we seize on the right *a priori *ideas, such that they will apply to the real world? In science, we guess and check. In morality, we also guess and check. Some people make better guesses than others, and we can be given background information from others that helps or hinders us. The moral constraints are encountered through our natural responses to external stimuli, stimuli that function on the human person in certain ways (causing joy, pain, guilt, etc.). Why are we affected in such a way? Because of our nature, which was the result of evolutionary processes. Why do these processes conform to a universal moral law? Because God created the universe, and thus created man.

Euclid’s proof is perfectly necessary as a truth. It’s unassailable, perfect. But its truth is trivial, analytic, tautological. All the “pure truths” are so because they are artificial, abstract. It’s only when statements hazard the real world as their subject that things become difficult, problematic. In terms of “necessary truths” about the real world, I can’t think of a single one, or even how one could provide a coherent basis for “necessary” as a metaphysical feature of reality.

So you would say simple mathematics is contingent upon someone existing to count, I suppose?

 

[Touchstone]

Well, insofar as it is inaccurate, it is false. It may be useful, in that it approximates reality to an extraordinary degree. The key point I think we agree on: if the world were a certain way, then Euclidean geometry would be true of it.

Yes.

*A priori *justification, then, is like an arrow that may or may not be pointed at the right target. If we had a better way to get at understanding our reasoning capacities than *a priori *reasoning, we should use it; but we don’t.

Psychology (and all science) can only “explain” our capacities by first assuming their accuracy.

Yes, but this “assuming” is of a different kind than a brute assumption; it’s provisional. The scientific model doesn’t assume our reasoning is accurate a priori. It’s a research program, where various models are tried, constrained by the physiological commitments we have to embracing the reality of reality. Our faculties may only be dimly accurate, or not at all, so far as we can say at the outset. We take on different models as the are proposed and see how they fare.

We may study who gets the “right” answers on certain tests, but we cannot step outside ourselves and see why these answers are objectively right (or, why we think they are, but they aren’t).

Yes, but so what? “Right” answers are as far as we may go. Our reasoning powers and experience are limited.

This is Hume’s limitation, which he knew very well. His exploration was a contingent quest: “if I can about the world accurately, then this is the most rational way to think about it.” But the idea that there are rational ways to think about the world presupposes that our ideas get at truth, at least sometimes, which seems to be a precondition for rationality.

I think you have that reversed. Rather than presupposing any necessary accuracy or “truth-finding” in our thinking, Hume would say, empiricist that he was, that we observe that this way or that way of thinking about the world produces a coherence and symmetry with our other observations that commends itself as accurate, and that ‘accurate’ obtains its meaning in just that correspondence, between the observations we have, and ways of thinking about them that agree with that, especially when that agreement occurs in non-trivial fashions (precise, novel predictions, for example).

There isn’t any a priori justifications like you are supposing that I can find in Hume beyond that which is physiologically necessary, that which is the predicate for empiricism – that our senses and observational faculties reflect reality. Hume doesn’t require that such faculties guarantee any kind of intelligibility that must arise from this or be presumed.

You were on the right track, stating the quest: If I can think about the world in performative, coherent ways, then this is the most reasonable way to think about things. That’s basically a tautology, equating “reasonable” with “most performative and coherent” as a matter of definition.

But then you suggest that this somehow presupposes that we must be getting at the truth, as that is a precondition for rationality. That doesn’t follow. As any empiricist will tell you, that is just a beg to the principal question: what do you mean by ‘truth’ there? For the empiricist, the most performative, coherent model is the best proxy-for-the-truth to be found.

So that doesn’t presuppose any particular amount of alethic power for the thinking man. Instead, the empiricist esteems performative models as the best we can do, fully aware that that may not be very good at all in absolute terms.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

How do we seize on the right *a priori *ideas, such that they will apply to the real world? In science, we guess and check.

Right. We only presuppose that reality is real, and try on different models to see how they perform as models.

In morality, we also guess and check.

I think that’s basically false. I agree that we can test some “moral hypotheses” with some prospect for objective feedback, a way to test it as performative in terms of resonance with people. Studies regarding “fairness”, for example, report a wide consensus across age, culture, gender and ethnicity that puts “fairness” in a discrete band of interactions and transactions. Insofar as we might experiment with a scenario and objectively record the “response of the masses”, we can “check”.

But this does not actual “check” the morality in any value sense beyond what is governed by our physiology. We can suppose that “sex before marriage is wrong”, and poll the population both for their opinions, as well as whatever measurable consequences we might be able to establish from abiding by that rule or not. But even then, we have not “checked” anything in the moral sense. Slavery might produce overwhelming benefits for the slaveholding majority, for example. Is that a “check” that supports slavery (no!)?

We can guess, but “checking” doesn’t cohere, conceptually, beyond simply canvassing humans for their opinions.

Some people make better guesses than others, and we can be given background information from others that helps or hinders us. The moral constraints are encountered through our natural responses to external stimuli, stimuli that function on the human person in certain ways (causing joy, pain, guilt, etc.). Why are we affected in such a way? Because of our nature, which was the result of evolutionary processes. Why do these processes conform to a universal moral law? Because God created the universe, and thus created man.

It doesn’t follow that if God created the universe, God created man, any more than my shuffling the deck “creates” the particular hands that get dealt. God may be the material cause but not the formal cause, that is.

More importantly, the salient takeaway from our knowledge of evolutionary processes is that it doesn’t require telos, and is a form of stochastic, impersonal creativity. This is a more parsimonious view than any theistic/telic gloss on evolutionary processes. And it still accounts for the moral constraints we observe in our nature, what man has long superstitiously confused with “natural theology”. We do have an instinctive moral grammar, an inborn sense of basic “oughts” and “nots”, but the more we learn, the more unnecessary and problematic the injection of a deity becomes by way of explanation. Economy is realized without such notions.

So you would say simple mathematics is contingent upon someone existing to count, I suppose?

It depends on what you mean by “simple mathematics”. Four stones piled atop one another was four stones 5 billion years ago, even as it is now – the physical reality is what it is. But if by “simple mathematics” you mean our concepts of cardinality, addition, the law of identity, etc., then sure. You don’t have concept without language and mind.

-TS

 

[Leela]

It’s not out there. It’s in here.

If it were “in here,” then no one would disgaree about morals, but of course we do.

The mystery of moral law and the mystery of a priori reason are one and the same. That is why there could be empirical evidence that there is no moral law –

I don’t know what you mean by, “That is why there could be empirical evidence that there is no moral law.” Can you explain? What sort of evidence do you think would support the claim that there is no moral law?

I don’t think there is any interesting mystery about “pure reason.” As philosopher of religion Jeffrey Stout said, “…unless something substantial can be made of the appeal to pure reason without tacitly smuggling in the content donated by tradition, we should not be tempted to think of our moral thought as somehow lacking simply because it has not been given a basis in pure reason. To have such a basis would not be to have anything more than we already have.”

We’ve never had access to a God’s-Eye-View that would allow us to claim a universal foundation that everyone else will have no choice but to accept, so we are no worse off than we have ever been for dropping foundationalism and the idea that there is some ahistorical faculty called “pure reason” since even if such a faculty exists it could only operate on tradition-bound concepts.

At the same time, this does not mean that we have no hope of holding justified true beliefs about moral matters. Stout continues, “We may have no power to transcend our traditional inheritance completely–for we are finite, historically situated beings–but we do not have to rise above history to call our assumptions into question. The attempt to stand outside one’s age, Hegel said in a famous phrase, is like trying to jump over the Rhodes. You cannot do it. the danger comes when you think you have, for then you will be more likely to set limits on criticism. You will view some of your asumptions as eternal deliverances of reason. It would be better to think of them as predjudices…any one of which can be placed in question provided most are kept in place at any given moment.”

Do you see the danger in thinking that you have managed to stand outside of your cultural context to access the Moral Law? Such people will give up on trying to justify their beliefs or be critical of their current beliefs and find better beliefs that are more likely to be true. They have granted their current predjudices the prestige of the eternal rather than holding their beliefs as provisionally true but subject to revision when new arguments and evidence become available.

if enough thinking beings (aliens, perhaps) didn’t have the same kind of moral principles that we have.

But people do disagree substantially about morals. This disagreement causes a lot of people to question the existence of moral truths, but I don’t see it is a problem since people disagree about scientific propositions while still agreeing that there is some truth to the matter to argue about. I think that moral skeptics tend to make too much of our disagreements, but they are right that we do often disagree and have no way to appeal directly to the Moral Law to settle our disputes. I would point out that our epistemic situation when it comes to scientific knowledge is not so different.

How can we grasp the relations between things, and be right about these relations? How can we say that “if Bob is taller than Ann, and Ann is taller than Jane, then Bob is taller than Jane” accurately, without measuring the three of them? It is a priori. Why is it true? You might say, “Because of the meanings of the terms”. But how do the meanings of the terms happen to always correlate to our observations? We don’t know. But we don’t doubt that they do.

This is no mystery considering that words are symbols created to stand for patterns of experience rather than existing prior to experience.

The transitive property you describe is inferred from experience rather than the content of some entity called Reason, and if our experience ever contradicts such a property, it is the property that must be revised. Our theories are always subordinate to the facts.

Moral truths are relations of ideas, but they are relations of ideas with absolute truth values. This should be no more controversial a claim that “the Pythagorean theorem is true”.

Can you explain what you mean by “absolute truth values”? I think we agree that propositions describing relations between ideas can have truth-value, but I don’t know what is added by the word “absolute.”

Is there a difference between saying “it is true that Bob is taller than Ann” and “it is absolutely true that Bob is taller than Ann”?

Best,
Leela

 

[Ronald_E]

Isn’t the title of this thread subjective? Isn’t being human subjective? Isn’t living subjective?

 

[Leela]

Isn’t the title of this thread subjective? Isn’t being human subjective? Isn’t living subjective?

Some working definitions of subjective and objective would indeed be helpful in this thread. Can you (or anyone?) suggest defininitions of these terms and what it would mean for morality to either be objective or subjective?

Best,
Leela

 

[Prodigal_Son]

If it were “in here,” then no one would disgaree about morals, but of course we do.

Do people disagree about mathematical theorems? Yes. Surely the evidence for the consistency of mathematical theorems, however – which is *the consistency of language *-- is not “out there in the world”.

I don’t know what you mean by, “That is why there could be empirical evidence that there is no moral law.” Can you explain? What sort of evidence do you think would support the claim that there is no moral law?

If no one had similar ideas about morality, this would seem to be evidence that moral rules were invented, not discovered. Or if an intelligent group of aliens were found that functioned on completely different, irreconcilable moral principles, this would also constitute evidence.

I don’t think there is any interesting mystery about “pure reason.” As philosopher of religion Jeffrey Stout said, “…unless something substantial can be made of the appeal to pure reason without tacitly smuggling in the content donated by tradition, we should not be tempted to think of our moral thought as somehow lacking simply because it has not been given a basis in pure reason. To have such a basis would not be to have anything more than we already have.”

Can you explain to me why the “content donated by tradition” cannot be “smuggled” in, whether tacitly or overtly? This seems to be merely prejudice, unless the author has reason to believe that traditional views on ethics are false. I will allow that Mr. Stout holds a very popular view, but popularity is not the same as accuracy.

We’ve never had access to a God’s-Eye-View that would allow us to claim a universal foundation that everyone else will have no choice but to accept, so we are no worse off than we have ever been for dropping foundationalism and the idea that there is some ahistorical faculty called “pure reason” since even if such a faculty exists it could only operate on tradition-bound concepts.

How do you know that we’ve never had access to a “God’s-Eye-View”? The Platonist, the Aristotelian, the Thomist, the rationalist, and the mystic all claim such access, to a limited degree. You are entitled to reject tradition, but to defend this rejection by saying that “we have no access to necessary truths” begs the question.

Do you see the danger in thinking that you have managed to stand outside of your cultural context to access the Moral Law? Such people will give up on trying to justify their beliefs or be critical of their current beliefs and find better beliefs that are more likely to be true. They have granted their current predjudices the prestige of the eternal rather than holding their beliefs as provisionally true but subject to revision when new arguments and evidence become available.

If this critique were valid, it would apply equally to mathematics as to morality. But here’s what I want you to see: our ideas about morality change, and get corrected, by “proofs” so to speak. At one moment, the slave boy in the Meno realizes that the proof of the theorem is true. He has gone from ignorance to knowledge. At the next moment, his master might realize that slavery is wrong, also passing from ignorance to knowledge. The fixed nature of moral reality does not entail that anyone (except God) knows all moral truths – thus, there is no excuse to stop revising our views and act on prejudice.

But people do disagree substantially about morals. This disagreement causes a lot of people to question the existence of moral truths, but I don’t see it is a problem since people disagree about scientific propositions while still agreeing that there is some truth to the matter to argue about. I think that moral skeptics tend to make too much of our disagreements, but they are right that we do often disagree and have no way to appeal directly to the Moral Law to settle our disputes. I would point out that our epistemic situation when it comes to scientific knowledge is not so different.

Absolutely! I agree that science and morality are in the same boat here, but I’m puzzled as to how you can hold to this, given your other ideas on morality. In science, “there is some truth of the matter to argue about”. If the moral comparison holds, then there is some truth of the matter in morality, too. Or are you going to hold that truth here is dictated by usefulness? (In which case, what is usefulness?)

The transitive property you describe is inferred from experience rather than the content of some entity called Reason, and if our experience ever contradicts such a property, it is the property that must be revised. Our theories are always subordinate to the facts.

I agree that all awareness of knowledge (or belief) comes from experience. It does not follow that our ability to process and form relations between these ideas comes from experience.

Can you explain what you mean by “absolute truth values”? I think we agree that propositions describing relations between ideas can have truth-value, but I don’t know what is added by the word “absolute.”

All I mean is that it “is the case”. It might *seem *to be the case (to a slaveowner) that slavery is justified, but it *is *never the case.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Touchstone,

I should be able to get to your thought-provoking post soon, but right now I really ought to tend to my family. Happy Consumerism Week!

Prodigal

 

[AntiTheist]

I’ve lost track of this thread, and maybe for good reason:

How can A=A be confirmed through experience?

Because A=A must be true in order for us to communicate, and lo and behold, we can communicate.

Gee, the more we communicate, the more it seems like there’s something to this “law of identity” stuff, eh?

Or because A=A must be true in order for us to interact with the world – and lo and behold, we can interact with the world. Anyone who’s ever played “peek-a-boo” with a baby has confirmed the law of identity. It’s trivially easy to confirm, as anyone who’s halfway paying attention can attest.

The fundamental premise of all empirical thought: The world conforms to our ideas about the world.

This is maybe the most backwards thing I’ve ever read. The world doesn’t “conform” to our ideas about the world – we get our ideas about the world from observing the world. No wonder you’re so confused. You think the world runs on your “intuition.”

There actually is no communicating with someone who starts from the assumption that his assumptions must all be true, without having to look at the world to confirm them. How do you expect to learn anything at all about the world or about yourself when you put up a screen of ridiculous assumptions between yourself and reality?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Because A=A must be true in order for us to communicate, and lo and behold, we can communicate.

Not so much. We must assume that A=A in order to communicate meaningfully. Whether A=A in the external world is another thing entirely. This connects with the conversation I’ve been having with Touchstone. When we make claims about logic or mathematics, we are making claims within our own systems; in order to see if those claims are correct, we have to check with the world itself.

I will agree that we have never seen an exception to A=A. Nor, perhaps, could we see one, even if such an exception existed. And I am quite certain no such exception exists. But the claim that “no exception to the law of identity exists” is a rationalist principle, not an observation about the world.

Consider this: how would the world look to us, if there *were *an exception to A=A? How do we know it wouldn’t look exactly the same as it does now? How do we know we are capable of noticing such an exception? If we don’t know that we’re capable of noticing that A does not equal A, then we don’t know that we’re capable of noticing A=A.

This is maybe the most backwards thing I’ve ever read. The world doesn’t “conform” to our ideas about the world – we get our ideas about the world from observing the world. No wonder you’re so confused. You think the world runs on your “intuition.”

Please read over what I wrote again, good sir. I said that “The world conforms to our ideas of the world was the fundamental premise of empirical thought.” I am **not **an empiricist, however. Thus, I agree that the principle is utterly backward and senseless.

The point I was making was that the empiricist starts by excluding certain potential forms of knowledge (insight, a priori knowledge, intuition), and then invokes Occam’s Razor whenever someone tries to bring in any of the above. Thus, he assumes that the world conforms to his ideas (all of which came from the world).

You might say, “he has nothing else but his senses to go on”. But that is begging the question, because he certainly does have intuitions about morality and beauty and rationality to go on. These intuitions *may *come from the world, but this is precisely what must be proven, not assumed.

Look at it this way. What if a new sort of empiricist comes along, and says that all our senses pertain to the world except taste. He says that taste is merely a phenomenon that occurs in the brain because of emotions and smell. We have scientific means of proving him wrong, perhaps. But what reason have we to assume that, just because we have no scientific means of proving insight to be a real sense, it is therefore false that insight pertains to the world? Is the argument merely based on Occam’s Razor? And what is Occam’s Razor based on?

 

[Leela]

Do people disagree about mathematical theorems? Yes. Surely the evidence for the consistency of mathematical theorems, however – which is *the consistency of language *-- is not “out there in the world”.

By “out there” I mean not in the world. I’m talking about the idea of, say, the Pythagorean Theorem existing somewhere “out there” waiting for humans to evolve and discover it and for Pythagorus to come along and prove that it is true. Where was the Pythagorean Theorem during the billions of years before there were minds to contain it? The Moral Law is thought of (erroneously I think) in the same way-- as an essence “out there” that we need to get ourselves in the proper realtionship with.

Your comment about disagreement about mathematics is one I already agreed with. I pointed out that our disagreements about scientific proofs do not cause us to doubt that there is some truth to the matter to disagree about–that someone is actually right and someone is actually wrong. In teh same way, our disagreements about morals do not force us to be more nihilists, skeptics, or relativists. You keep seeing disgareement where we actually agree about the possibility of knowing moral truths.

If no one had similar ideas about morality, this would seem to be evidence that moral rules were invented, not discovered. Or if an intelligent group of aliens were found that functioned on completely different, irreconcilable moral principles, this would also constitute evidence.

While the fact that people disagree is not a problem for moral truth, the fact that people agree about certain things is not evidence that those things are true or that there is some ahistorical Moral Law “out there” waiting to be discovered.

Societies do tend to come up with the same basic morals like don’t kill, don’t steal, no false witness-bearing, cover your head when you enter the temple etc. Some version of the Golden Rule has been articulated by just about every society we know. What do we make of that fact? For theists who are persuaded that morality rests on eternal principles, this fact may be viewed as evidence that eternal principles really exist and as clues that aid in our inquiry into what these principles may be.

Pragmatists, who take a Darwinian view about culture as well as biology, can answer that the fact that various isolated societies have come up with many of the same practices is akin to dolphins and sharks evolving similar shaped bodies though with very different ancestry–what biologists call “convergent evolution.” Dolphins being mammals have early ancestors that left the sea and adapted for land-dwelling and later ancestors that returned and adapted to the sea. Though they have different histories they adapted similar solutions to similar environmental problems such as propelling their bodies through water efficiently. It doesn’t mean that a torpedo-shaped body is more True and eternal. Evolution has no end in mind. It doesn’t impose a single correct way that a ocean-dwelling animal must be. In fact, there are other shapes that ocean animals take. Likewise, we needn’t view the fact that societies have evolved to hold similar ethics as evidence that some supernatural force is trying to impose a single correct way for humans to behave, but we can still argue that some practices that societies developed in the past such as “do unto others…” are morally superior to alternatives such as “run around killing people while trying to steal one another’s pornography.”

To be continued…

 

[Leela]

Can you explain to me why the “content donated by tradition” cannot be “smuggled” in, whether tacitly or overtly? This seems to be merely prejudice, unless the author has reason to believe that traditional views on ethics are false. I will allow that Mr. Stout holds a very popular view, but popularity is not the same as accuracy.

You missed my point here. i was responding to your appeal to “pure reason.” I doubt that such a faculty exists, and even if it does there is no way to appeal to pure reason as a claim to have a foundation for a belief since reason can only operate on tradition-bound thought. The point is that there is no way fro us to stand outside of our historical context.

How do you know that we’ve never had access to a “God’s-Eye-View”? The Platonist, the Aristotelian, the Thomist, the rationalist, and the mystic all claim such access, to a limited degree. You are entitled to reject tradition, but to defend this rejection by saying that “we have no access to necessary truths” begs the question.

I have not been convinced that some people have the ability to step outside of time and culture to directly access the Truth. I certainly don’t make any claim to have this power.

If this critique were valid, it would apply equally to mathematics as to morality. But here’s what I want you to see: our ideas about morality change, and get corrected, by “proofs” so to speak. At one moment, the slave boy in the Meno realizes that the proof of the theorem is true. He has gone from ignorance to knowledge. At the next moment, his master might realize that slavery is wrong, also passing from ignorance to knowledge. The fixed nature of moral reality does not entail that anyone (except God) knows all moral truths – thus, there is no excuse to stop revising our views and act on prejudice.

I agree that someone could have been justified in believing that salvery was not evil at some time in the past, but it always actually was evil wherever it was practiced whether anyone believed it was or not. I agree that the being justified in believing something does not make it true.

Absolutely! I agree that science and morality are in the same boat here, but I’m puzzled as to how you can hold to this, given your other ideas on morality. In science, “there is some truth of the matter to argue about”. If the moral comparison holds, then there is some truth of the matter in morality, too. Or are you going to hold that truth here is dictated by usefulness? (In which case, what is usefulness?)

You are only puzzled because we agree more than you thought we did.

Best,
Leela