Title of article: Why Our Children Don't Think There are Moral Facts

[Oreoracle]

Cognitive dissonance is another way of saying unreasonable behavior.

Yes, societies and individuals do lose their minds and it is the business of a right thinking philosophy to restore them to sanity if that is even possible.

This rebuttal strikes me as flippant. Could I not just as easily say that, deep down, everyone really assumes morality is subjective and any behavior to the contrary is due to people behaving unreasonably?

If you refuse to judge people’s beliefs by their behavior, then you enter the land of wild conjecture where something is true merely because it is stipulated.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

This rebuttal strikes me as flippant. Could I not just as easily say that, deep down, everyone really assumes morality is subjective and any behavior to the contrary is due to people behaving unreasonably?

If you refuse to judge people’s beliefs by their behavior, then you enter the land of wild conjecture where something is true merely because it is stipulated.

Morality is not descriptive but prescriptive. Morality is not about how people behave, but about how they ought or ought not to behave.

There’s nothing flippant about that.

 

[Oreoracle]

Morality is not descriptive but prescriptive. Morality is not about how people behave, but about how they ought or ought not to behave.

There’s nothing flippant about that.

You’re the one who started talking about human behavior and why we have legal systems, which are not ethical questions. I’m happy to go back to talking about moral axioms if you’d like.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

You’re the one who started talking about human behavior and why we have legal systems, which are not ethical questions. I’m happy to go back to talking about moral axioms if you’d like.

You can’t dissociate moral axioms from legal systems. Our whole legal system is premised on right and wrong.

 

[Oreoracle]

You can’t dissociate moral axioms from legal systems. Our whole legal system is premised on right and wrong.

Where did I say I intended to dissociate them?

 

[edwest2]

You can’t dissociate moral axioms from legal systems. Our whole legal system is premised on right and wrong.

Our whole social order is based on right and wrong. Sheeeesh.

If we want to be good and civil as in civilized, there need to be rules and laws.

Reminds of something I read. I think someone wrote it on a wall in France: “It is forbidden to forbid.” Uh…

Ed

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Reminds of something I read. I think someone wrote it on a wall in France: “It is forbidden to forbid.” Uh…

Ed

I read something like that on a toilet wall.

“Death to all absolutists!”

 

[edwest2]

I read something like that on a toilet wall.

“Death to all absolutists!”

“There are no moral absolutes.”

Me: “Are you sure about that?”

“Absolutely!”

Ed

 

[St_Francis]

Upon re-reading this article, it occured to me that an issue which has been touched upon in one direction touches upon something else.

Look at the definition of fact given in the article: Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Now, some have eliminated the idea of moral ideas as facts because they rest on unprovable statements, ie, axioms.

However, *all *the proofs in the world rest ultimately on unprovable axioms, because science and math are full of them. Any engineering related to shapes rests on the axioms that the sum of the angles in the shapes add up to various amounts. And so on.

So we can either have moral facts or we can have no scentific facts at all.

 

[PseuTonym]

But there is no dichotomy. Facts and opinions are entirely different concepts. The examples that he uses do not refute this. A fact does not have to be qualified in any way. The fact that Washington was president does not require an ‘if’ clause – the statement stands on its own and is either true or false.

An ‘if’ clause is often required when one wishes to assert a generalization that is true. I don’t see how it is possible for you to assert something about a person over a period of time and also ensure that none of your assertions is a generalization.

There was a time when Washington was not President. So are we permitted to say “Washington was not President”? Or does the fact that there was a time when Washington was President prevent us from saying “Washington was not President”?

Washington had a mass of under one hundred pounds. Surely that was true for some period of time, unless you decide that you don’t consider him to have been Washington until after he had a mass of at least one hundred pounds.

Washington was awake, but sleepy. Is that true? One would think that some of the time he was awake but sleepy. Did he go from awake to asleep suddenly, without any transition?

Washington was hungry. Is that true? Did he eat meals by the clock, and never have any snacks? Even if he ate by the clock, was he not hungry at the beginning of a meal?

 

[PseuTonym]

Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.

The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation on offer is that each of these claims is a value claim and value claims are not facts.

Can anybody explain that one to me? It looks as though it is simply a generalization. It is possible for somebody to have an unhealthy but vegetarian diet. For example, white flour, sugar, and vegetable oil are vegetarian, but not particularly nutritious. However, there is a difference between saying that every vegetarian is healthier than every meat eater and making an overall comparison of health for the two groups of people.

Of course, we don’t know what the writer was thinking, so perhaps the statement as written is different from what the writer was thinking. It would be possible for vegetarians to be less healthy than meat eaters, and for vegetarianism itself to improve health.

Is “smoking tobacco is harmful to health” considered to be a value claim and therefore not a fact? This is very strange, because even if we assume that smoking tobacco has no effect whatsoever on health, we would be dealing with a matter of fact. Some claims about matters of fact are true claims, and some claims about matters of fact are false claims. However, all of them are claims about matters of fact.

 

[Oreoracle]

Now, some have eliminated the idea of moral ideas as facts because they rest on unprovable statements, ie, axioms.

However, *all *the proofs in the world rest ultimately on unprovable axioms, because science and math are full of them. Any engineering related to shapes rests on the axioms that the sum of the angles in the shapes add up to various amounts. And so on.

So we can either have moral facts or we can have no scentific facts at all.

Speaking only for myself, the problem is not that morality is based on axioms, but that it is based on moral axioms. In other words, you can’t just start with how things “are” and infer how they “should be”. You must start out with some assumption of how things ought to be before any moral conclusions follow. Thus, as Hume famously argued, you cannot derive an ought from an is. If morality were objective in the sense of being factual, it should be reducible to “is” statements, but it is not.

 

[PseuTonym]

Speaking only for myself, the problem is not that morality is based on axioms, but that it is based on moral axioms. In other words, you can’t just start with how things “are” and infer how they “should be”. You must start out with some assumption of how things ought to be before any moral conclusions follow. Thus, as Hume famously argued, you cannot derive an ought from an is.

In a medical context, diagnosis is a determination of what is, and a particular proposed treatment is a statement of what should be done about what has been diagnosed. If you cannot derive an ought from an is, then how is it possible, given a diagnosis, to propose a treatment? Does the study of medicine lack objectivity? Does the study of medicine fail to focus exclusively on facts and instead involve a biased value-judgment in favor of health and life?

 

[Oreoracle]

In a medical context, diagnosis is a determination of what is, and a particular proposed treatment is a statement of what should be done about what has been diagnosed.

Before receiving their license, a medical professional must make the Hippocratic Oath, which is a list of moral obligations to patients that the professional intends to keep. So while a doctor may not explicitly state their moral axioms when they write a prescription, their moral axioms are implicit in their career choice. Soldiers, presidents, etc., engage in similar rituals when entering their positions.

 

[PseuTonym]

So while a doctor may not explicitly state their moral axioms when they write a prescription, their moral axioms are implicit in their career choice.

The problem is that what you wrote earlier suggests that doctors cannot hold moral axioms that influence their professional work, except at the cost of sacrificing objectivity.

"If morality were objective in the sense of being factual, it should be reducible to ‘is’ statements, but " … replace “morality” with “medicine.”

 

[PseuTonym]

Thus, as Hume famously argued, you cannot derive an ought from an is. If morality were objective in the sense of being factual, it should be reducible to “is” statements, but it is not.

Is logical consequence itself a relationship that can be observed in the physical world of concrete particulars? If not, then we seem to be relying upon the details of language: we express logical consequence using the word “is” as in “T is a logical consequence of S.”

Is causality not a matter of fact? A causal connection between two events does not itself seem to be an event. When we try to distinguish between a mere correlation and a genuine causal connection, are we making the mistake of looking for something that cannot exist in reality outside of our own minds? In the reality outside of our minds, are there no causal connections?

I think that causal connections are part of reality, and it does no good to claim that we cannot know them. We derive our knowledge of causal connections from a combination of observation and philosophy. We cannot eliminate the philosophy, just as we cannot rely upon devices for making physical measurements unless we are willing to acknowledge that in relying upon the devices we are relying upon assumptions about physical law.

In reality, you are unlikely to ever acquire approximately accurate knowledge of what is unless you believe that you ought to know what is. So we never actually reach the “is” unless we begin with an “ought.”

 

[Oreoracle]

Is logical consequence itself a relationship that can be observed in the physical world of concrete particulars? If not, then we seem to be relying upon the details of language: we express logical consequence using the word “is” as in “T is a logical consequence of S.”

In science one does not demonstrate logical consequence but rather causation. While the former can be used as a model for the latter in some cases, they are “about” very different things. We infer that A causes B by isolating A from all other factors that are candidates for causing B, changing only A, and seeing how this affects B. Logical consequence is inferred by consulting a truth table.

So causation is about finding a sequence of events and arguing that the sequence is not coincidental (in a careful way that avoids a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy), whereas logical consequence is purely semantic.

Is causality not a matter of fact? A causal connection between two events does not itself seem to be an event.

That depends. Causation in one sense may refer to a law, e.g., Newton’s Third Law may be interpreted as saying one force “causes” another, or it may refer to a sequence of events I mentioned before. There may even be another sense that occurs in theory, e.g., gravity causes the distortion of space. I think the word is just used very loosely and its meaning is based on context.

I think that causal connections are part of reality, and it does no good to claim that we cannot know them.

I’m not sure where I created the impression that I don’t believe we can know them.

 

[St_Francis]

Speaking only for myself, the problem is not that morality is based on axioms, but that it is based on moral axioms. In other words, you can’t just start with how things “are” and infer how they “should be”.

I am not sure what you are saying here. It sounds like you are saying that positing “killing innocent human beings is wrong” is not a statement of what is? And then you are saying that from this statement we imfer how things ought tk be? We derive from that statement that society ought to be murderless?

You must start out with some assumption of how things ought to be before any moral conclusions follow. Thus, as Hume famously argued, you cannot derive an ought from an is. If morality were objective in the sense of being factual, it should be reducible to “is” statements, but it is not.

So you and Hume are suggesting that saying “One ought not kill innocent people is derived from the statement killing innocent people is wrong,” is wrong? And one ought not to do it?

 

[Oreoracle]

I am not sure what you are saying here. It sounds like you are saying that positing “killing innocent human beings is wrong” is not a statement of what is?

To be clear, a statement is not an “is” statement just because it contains that word. “Killing innocent human beings is wrong” is another way of saying “it ought not be the case that innocent human beings are killed”. It’s a “ought” statement that is dressed up to sound factual.

Or perhaps there’s just a grammatical reason for preferring the “is” phrasing. People generally prefer using the active voice, and “is” achieves that nicely, whereas the “ought” phrasing sounds awkward (though I think it makes the meaning clearer).

Notice, on the other hand, that a true “is” statement cannot possibly be translated as an “ought” statement. “My eye color is blue” has no such translation, for example.

 

[PseuTonym]

In science one does not demonstrate logical consequence but rather causation.

I quoted what I was responding to:
“Thus, as Hume famously argued, you cannot derive an ought from an is. If morality were objective in the sense of being factual, it should be reducible to ‘is’ statements, but it is not.”

When you said that you cannot derive, and that it should be reducible to, were you referring to causation, and not to logical consequence?

I’m not sure where I created the impression that I don’t believe we can know them.

The question is whether causal connections exist in reality, or whether they exist only within models of reality. In other words, the question is what is known, and in particular whether what is known is objective and factual or merely a byproduct of models created by human beings. Can you derive a statement of the form “X caused Y” from statements that make no reference to causation?