IS and OUGHT

[Belinda]

My question is very simple: if we are not "owned" by God, who "owns" us?

Even for you that demonstrates a really stupid question.

Is it a stupid question because for all we know fickle fortune is our owner?

[Veritas Aequitas]

To update [refresh] your knowledge base...

Yeah.

You're actually wrong, of course; you can't legitimize any political system without also proving it's moral. But maybe I'm trying to drill a hole in water here.

Accept it or reject it, as you wish: it will still be the case. The only think that will change is how much you realize.

Then show me a political system that has been proven to be moral fact, i.e. universal and morally acceptable by all.

[Veritas Aequitas]

There are two imperatives to consider in this case, i.e. the categorical imperative and the hypothetical imperative.

That every human is embedded within their DNA "to breathe else they die" is a categorical imperative. As such this is objective [universal to all humans] and it is represented by a biological potential supported by physical DNA codes and neural connectivity. There is no exception to it. Thus all humans are inherent driven to 'value' life until the inevitable. Can you show me one exception to the above?

Due to epigenetics and environmental factors, the primary categorical imperative may be overridden, a person may grow up to be suicidal, risk death, etc. and thus may end up with a hypothetical imperative.

There may other reasons why people choose premature deaths BUT the inherent primary imperative to survive at all costs is still embedded deep in the person's brain and DNA genes and codes.

Similarly, there is an inherent moral potential in all humans which is represented by genes and DNA codes. Btw, this claim must be verified and justified - albeit I am not doing it here.
It is like the puberty potential in all humans embedded in the DNA codes but are expressed in a later phase of life. The ways this potential is expressed will depend on various epigenetic [not DNA] and environmental factors.

My point was that it's objectively true that humans demographically have values like "I value living" so form imperatives that they ought to breathe, but that doesn't at all cover whether they ought to value living.

A person could ostensibly just not value living, and nothing about the universe means that they're doing something wrong -- there isn't a truth to the utterance "One ought to value life," it's not even false, it's just not propositional because it contains no cognitive content. They either value life or they don't. Most will, like 99.9999% will (figure ex mea culo), because of nature/nurture reasons; but that doesn't say anything about whether they ought to, just that they do. And that's the point against moral realism.

I don't see morality as involving 'right' or 'wrong' as this would be by default subjective, i.e. "one man's meat is another man's poison"
Rightness or wrongness is related to hypothetical imperatives i.e. conditional.
When we refer morality to rightness or wrongness in reference to how human actions, it is obvious there is NO room for objectivity at all but rather it is subjective or the way.
This has been the wrong view of morality as taken by most who discuss morality and ethics.

Other than the obvious subjectivity of morality, there is the normative aspects of morality which is most critical for humanity.
Morality is defined as promoting what is good which is specifically avoiding evil.
Regardless what one feel [subjectively] every human is 'programmed' with an inherent drive to survive at all cost thus avoiding the worst evil, i.e. killing, and this is related to the inherent moral potential embedded in the DNA.

Thus in this case of moral realism we are referring to the inherent physical moral potential in the human DNA and brain, it is not about rightness or wrongness, but rather the inherent oughtness within human nature.
This is the real moral fact, thus moral realism.

The other controversial moral realism refer to moral facts from a God and Platonic universals [claimed to be most real]. This was what Hume was complaining about, i.e. what should humans comply with 'oughts' from an illusory God and other ungrounded 'oughts' that humans must comply with.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs;
when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.
David Hume - Treatise of Human Nature

On the other hand, my version of moral realism is based on verifiable and justifiable empirical facts from the scientific FSK [not available to Hume] and processed via a credible moral FSK.

[Immanuel Can]

This is long but I expect that hopefully it still only comes in a few chunks that can just be block quoted.

My position is that all oughts are constructed by hypothetical imperatives ...

I know. But that's non-responsive to the question.

My question is very simple: if we are not "owned" by God, who "owns" us?

It does respond to the question, though. You defined this concept of ownership as being that P owns S if S ought to do as P wishes.

Actually, I didn't. Those are your words.

So who is the putative alternate "owner"? Or, if you prefer other wording, who is the entity who rightfully determines your "oughts"?

I think we intuit that creators of paintings may place them where they wish empathetically, and that what we're doing is still a form of instrumentalism.

Her thinking in choosing a place may be. But ours, in deciding that it is her who has that right, is not evidently so. Rather, we're deciding -- before all instrumental concerns even come into play -- that it is she who has the primary right to decide the disposition of her creation.

Why do we do that?

I think they are prone to agree with her because most humans have empathy...

Empathy is not a moral quality, though. It's merely an affective state. One can have empathy with evil people and things, and people often do.

Then, of course, we have to remember that values come in complex hierarchies.

That's a curious claim. I'm not sure what it can mean, more than the trivial observation that some people value some things more than they value others, but are under no obligation to do so.

Can you develop that thought?

And a second thing about simply "valuing" something and then finding an "instrumentalist" way of making it happen: it's amoral. I don't mean it's necessarily "immoral," but rather that it has not thing to do with moral "oughtness." And this can be easily shown.

Perhaps I value Aryan-ness, let's say. Instrumentally, setting up a system of xenophobic legislation is the instrumentally best way to guarantee what I happen to value. And I can get my society to go along, too: I'll simply tell them that other "races" are "inferior," and that our great, Aryan nation will rise to supremacy when we eliminate intermarriage and "resettle" in interlopers, or otherwise eliminate them. I'll incentivize them with economic and military gains, or public-works projects that make society seem better to the majority of Aryans. And I'll increase the size of our country by invading inferior nations, and by making war on weaker powers.

There. I have something I value. And I have the most instrumental ways of achieving it. And I have the support of my society, as well.

Does that mean I "ought" to do it? Is it now "moral"?

As far as I can tell, all oughts are amoral.

So what Hitler did, to which I allude above, is, for you, simply amoral? It's not immoral?

Did it become immoral when he rounded up and gassed homosexuals, or would it still be just a matter of moral indifference to you?

Unless you can demonstrate there can be a moral ought, my position is that all oughts we experience in everyday life are instrumentalist oughts.

Well, that position would certainly be amoral, if not also Moral Nihilism.

I'm not sure that I agree that free agency is always good (is a being that always chooses evil somehow more good to exist than a being that only chooses evil because of its programming? That doesn't feel right even on moral realism),

I don't think that objection works. Because if a creature only ever chooses evil, in what sense can we speak of it having any "choice" in the matter? What would be our evidence that such an entity has moral free will at all?

But I think the AI argument, as a whole, is a dead herring...not merely a red one.

As a physicist I learn quickly that if I really want to test an idea, I need to test it at extremes and see if it holds up.

I have no objection to extreme scenarios, particularly those premised on real facts...as you say, they are often useful in pushing an argument to its logical conclusion. But I doubt that ones based on total fantasy are in any way so useful. They're not so much "extreme" as just "wildly speculative" and ultimately "irrelevant."

...if oughts come from values...

They don't, of course.

But let's clear that up, because you say three things that don't work together, I think.

Do you think "oughts" come, ultimately and finally, from values, or from instrumental considerations, or from social consensus?

In other words, is racism wrong because Cat values anti-racism? Or is racism wrong merely because we can't make it "work" for us in some way? Or is it wrong because Cat believes the majority of society doesn't like racism?

Those three are very different claims. And however one tries to blend them, one has to be the primary and decisive explanation. For it's manifest that the three can easily be at variance -- the values of Cat can be not those of her society, and they can be not those that have particular instrumental utility in a given case -- and we need to know which one to pay attention to, when that happens. Which one is the true, root explanation for "oughtness"?

Well, now I'm uncertain whether we're still not on the same page on what I mean by "instrumentalist ought" and "moral ought" if you're asking this, so let me hopefully try to be as exactingly concise as I can. [/quote]
No, I understand what an instrumentalist ought is. But it has nothing to do with a moral ought.

Nobody doubts the existence of instrumental oughts. Everybody uses such all the time. But one of the hallmarks of difference between moral oughts and instrumental ones is this: instrumental oughts only tell you what you can most effectively do to produce an outcome that you already value. It can do nothing to tell you if that is a "good" value to have. In contrast, moral oughts tell you what you should do regardless of which direction other considerations (instrumental, values, pragmatics, social pressure, impulses, etc.) push you. Moral oughts are things you ought to do even when you don't feel like it. They tell you what you should value, not merely what you do value.

In fact, to know what you do value, you need no moral thinking at all. You just need to consult your own inclinations...wrong though those inclinations may often be, in themselves.

Anyway, you asked me, paraphrased, "Do oughts come from values, instrumentalist considerations, or social consensus?"

My response is that instrumentalist oughts come from values.

No, they don't, actually. They come from "what works."

To be "instrumentalist" is to take the legitimacy of one's own values entirely on blind faith, and to proceed only on practical considerations of how to achieve those values, without ever examining them at all. But the legitimacy of the values remains utterly unestablished by the pragma of instrumental utility. There can be a quick way to do an evil deed.

Racism isn't intrinsically wrong...

Goodbye, social justice.

So to complain "but if murder isn't intrinsically wrong, nothing stops people from valuing murder" is just sort of an argument towards consequences fallacy (if you're not careful).

No, I'm not invoking consequences. Rather, I'm doing what you claimed you do with physics: pushing your view to the extreme conclusion it entails, to test it. And I'm not relying on any fantasy to do it...I can just refer to history, as you note.

Also, thanks for the response to my question on syllogisms. I think it's hard to break everything down to two lines and a conclusion chained together, e.g. sometimes the complexity of some idea seems like it takes multiple premises to get to a conclusion (see for instance the Problem of Evil). But I get what you're saying.

You're welcome.

The solution to that is to do a series of three-step syllogisms, rather than one long "chain" one. You'll find it clears things up admirably, but still enables you to make longer and more complex arguments.

So, for example, do P1, P2, C.
Then use C as Q1, and add a Q2 and a further C.
Then use that C as Z1, and add a Z2, and so on, as long as you like.

So long as each syllogism is truthful and properly formed, any final C you arrive at will be fully warranted.

1) You say that God's goodness is the "origin" from which all of our goodness is derived. What does that mean? This sounds somewhat like God is some kind of Platonic form or something.

No. If I went looking for some disembodied essence called "goodness," as if it could exist without reference to anything at all, I would be Platonic. I'm not being that. I'm saying that if you have any idea of what "goodness" really is, it's derivative of the ultimate goodness that exists in God.

I don't understand how or why that would mean other objects "derive" goodness as a property from God.

I didn't say that. If you ever accurately describe anything as "good," you derive your attribution of or your recognition of their goodness from God's goodness. There is no other actual meaning for the concept "morally good." His is the prototypical "goodness."

2) You say "if adultery is wrong, it is because God is faithful," and other such things. "The ultimate reason for anything being 'sin' is that it 'falls short of the glory of God'". (Now, I am going to assume I can use "being a sin" and "being intrinsically wrong" interchangeably, let me know if that's not the case). But here we are sort of back to Euthyphro's fork again.

No, Euthyphro is dead. Socrates and I have both showed you that. I can't make you believe it, but it's certainly the case.

Some of your language suggests that God's property of being good is a difference in quantity, but some of your comments suggest it's a difference in quality.

Can you point that out?

...it seemed to me to be saying God's goodness is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from IC's.

No, I was careful. I did not say that.

Light is all the same thing, but comes in different intensities. The light of the Sun is very bright, and one might say, more pure. But the light of a candle is still light. It's not less real than that of the Sun, or less light, either.

...if God is the most good being in the universe, it would make sense to say that God has goodness like anyone else,

"Like anyone else?"

God's goodness is different from human goodness in two ways: first, His is more, and ours is less. But secondly, His is pure, and ours has admixture of evil in it. But that is not to say that the part of human goodness that is genuinely good is not good in the same sort of sense that God's is.

I can accept that His is more and ours is less. That's just saying He has a property in more quantity, which is sensible.

What do you mean that our goodness has an admixture of evil in it?

I mean you can't call IC truly "good." You can say, perhaps, that he "has good in him," and it's genuine, perhaps. But IC, like all humans, is capable of pettiness, of spite, of rage, of maybe even violence...who knows what else? So is there any justice in calling him truly "good," since he can always do these things?

Moreover, even the alleged "good" things IC does can be tainted. Perhaps he runs for charity...but he does so only partly to benefit the poor; part of him does it to be seen to be charitable, and part of him wants a chance to win a coveted trophy. So is his spirit "good"? Partly. But only partly. His charitableness has an admixture of selfishness in it.

I mean I think I can make sense of this. Isn't this like saying that a yellow-green shirt has the property of being yellow but has an admixture of blue in it, and that we could conceive of a shirt that is pure yellow?

That seems fine. But then it wouldn't make sense to say that all other yellow things derive their yellowness from the pure yellow shirt.

Right. It wouldn't. But only because "yellow shirt" is not the ultimate creator or origin of anything.

So we are saying that God's goodness and human goodness are of a kind...but the human is lesser and polluted by our own limitations. However, when we are predicating "good" we have to remember in which direction the predication flows: we don't say that "God is good" because humans have a perfect understanding of what "good" actually is, or that they are perfectly "good" themselves; we say it because inasmuch as you and I even know what "good" actually is, it is only because we have some innate knowledge of the character of God.

Again, God's goodness is the prototype. We are merely the flawed and fallible "detectors of good." We are like slightly off-calibrated thermometers: we detect the "temperature" of good, but only approximately. We can be off by a couple of degrees, at any given time. But in general, we'll be right.

The important point is this, though. We are not the source or definition of goodness. We are not the benchmarks of God's goodness. Goodness is not in origin a human concept at all, but rather a divine attribute for which we have assigned a particular human word, the word "good."

I am not sure what this "prototype" business means.

Well, think about it.

All good things originate in God. There is nothing that we can call good that does not have its ultimate origin in God. There is simply no other Source for things like life, light, health, joy, peace, hope, goodness and so on to have proceeded. And if you and I can discuss them, it's only because knowledge of God, along with a sense of his characteristics, is intrinsic, being instilled by God in all human beings. Absent that, we ought to have no such concepts.

Now, one might wrongly suppose that if God creates all good things that would also mean God had to create evil; but He does not. In fact, the things we call evil are only corruptions and violations of "the good," not things-in-themselves. Evil is actually totally uncreative; it only destroys, corrupts, debases and ruins that which is good. It is a "falling short" of a "mark" we should rightfully have hit. It's a "falling short," as Romans says, "of the glory of God."

-----------------------------------------

Post-Script:

I think that "moral ought" is a nonsense utterance.

I get that. But that is the matter of present debate. We don't agree on that, obviously.

[Immanuel Can]

Show me a political system that has been proven to be moral fact, i.e. universal and morally acceptable by all.

"Right" or "moral" does not mean "universally acceptable to all." Sorry.

The majority, and even all the people on the planet, can, and have been wrong in the past. Remember that at one time, all thought the world was flat.

It wasn't.

People are often wrong. So are political systems.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Show me a political system that has been proven to be moral fact, i.e. universal and morally acceptable by all.

"Right" or "moral" does not mean "universally acceptable to all." Sorry.

The majority, and even all the people on the planet, can, and have been wrong in the past. Remember that at one time, all thought the world was flat.

It wasn't.

People are often wrong. So are political systems.

Your thinking have gone haywire.

What is moral is supposed to be universal as what your God will insist must be accepted by all.
Since political systems are not accepted by all, they cannot be associated with morality.

Thus your claim below is wrong;

So you can't separate ethics from politics. If you imagine you can, then you're being naive, at best, or at worst, mendacious.

[Belinda]

Immanuel Can quoted Astro Cat:

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑
Astro Cat wrote:

My position is that all oughts are constructed by hypothetical imperatives

...
I know. But that's non-responsive to the question.

(IC):

My question is very simple: if we are not "owned" by God, who "owns" us?

(AC):

It does respond to the question, though. You defined this concept of ownership as being that P owns S if S ought to do as P wishes.

(IC):

Actually, I didn't. Those are your words.

(AC):

So who is the putative alternate "owner"? Or, if you prefer other wording, who is the entity who rightfully determines your "oughts"?

Belinda replies: Ownership is a bad analogy. Ownership pertains to worldly power of persons over other persons or things. I suggest swapping ownership for origin, or uncaused cause.

[Astro Cat]

It does respond to the question, though. You defined this concept of ownership as being that P owns S if S ought to do as P wishes.

Actually, I didn't. Those are your words.

So who is the putative alternate "owner"? Or, if you prefer other wording, who is the entity who rightfully determines your "oughts"?

Hmm, I took what you said here:

Let's not say "owns." Let's just say, "Who has the legitimate right to say what a person should do: the person herself, or God?"

And turned it into ownership as "P owns S if S ought to do as P wishes," which I thought characterized what you said well. If it doesn't, I may need to know how not. I'm assuming that "P has a right to say what S should do" is equivalent to "S ought to do as P wishes."

Anyway. The question is "who is the entity who rightfully determines your oughts?" This is a loaded question, as you may well know. It has two terms that may be assuming moral realism at the outset: "rightfully" and "oughts." I do not think these terms have a sensible meaning. I don't know what it means to have a "moral right" or a "moral ought," if that's what you mean; so any answer I give would be some form of "the question itself isn't sensible."

If I try to put on my moral realist cap for the sake of argument and pretend these words have meaning and take my best guess at their meanings (this is sort of like how when "slithey toves gyre and gimble in the wabe," I can get the sense that slithey is an adjective, a tove is a noun, gyring and gimbling are verbs, and a wabe is a place: I can make some sense out of nonsense), then I point to my argument toward why creation in itself doesn't impart any kind of moral duty; because if it did, contradictions could possibly ensue.

The moral realist position would be that "S ought to do what is intrinsically good." If we add the position that "If P creates S, then P rightfully determines S's oughts," then there is a problem if P's determinations are intrinsically evil: the two positions contradict each other. S ought to do what's intrinsically good, but if S's oughts are rightfully determined by P on the fact that P created S, and P has evil intentions, then S is in a position where S ought to do what is intrinsically good and ought to do P's evil at the same time and this is clearly nonsense.

Any sensible moral realist would insist that P doesn't rightfully determine S's oughts if P is evil, because the moral realist would insist that S still only ought to do what is intrinsically good. But the fact remains in the hypothetical that P created S. This suggests that the act of creation does not impart oughts on the creation, that the only oughts a creation should care about are those that are intrinsically good.

Below you call fantastic examples "irrelevant." But they're not. This one is not. It demonstrates how the concept that creation imparts a duty breaks down on the moral realist picture. If the proposition "For any S that is created by any P, P rightfully detemines S's oughts" breaks down as soon as P is intrinsically evil rather than intrinsically good, then the proposition never worked in the first place; and this is how to show that it didn't.

One might try to say "ok, let's just change the proposition to say "For any S that is created by any intrinsically good P, P rightfully determines S's oughts." And that would be progress of a sort, because now the thought experiment no longer causes a contradiction. S can now always ought to do what is morally good and ought to do what P determines for S, since they don't contradict.

But then I would still say that it's debatable whether S ought to do what P says because P created S, or if S is still simply keeping to S's obligation to do what is intrinsically good. It's just that it happens to align with what P says S ought to do (since P is intrinsically good). I don't think it's clear that P "owns" S even so, because S's real obligation is to the intrinsically good at the end of the day, that P created S seems incidental. So it seems to me on the realist picture.

I think we intuit that creators of paintings may place them where they wish empathetically, and that what we're doing is still a form of instrumentalism.

Her thinking in choosing a place may be. But ours, in deciding that it is her who has that right, is not evidently so. Rather, we're deciding -- before all instrumental concerns even come into play -- that it is she who has the primary right to decide the disposition of her creation.

Why do we do that?

Because we have a value that says so. "I value creators of paintings placing them where they wish." It's a very basic value connected to property values. There's nothing about the universe that makes holding this value correct and not holding the value incorrect. Someone may not hold the value. But it is a very, very common value. So, it's not "before instrumental concerns come into play." The instrumental concerns are what get us from "I value the painter putting the painting where she wants" to "so I ought not interfere with where she wants to put it" and also "I ought to interfere with anyone that does want to interfere with where she puts it" sometimes. Keep in mind, every time I said "ought" just now, these are instrumentalist oughts.

I think they are prone to agree with her because most humans have empathy...

Empathy is not a moral quality, though. It's merely an affective state. One can have empathy with evil people and things, and people often do.

Then, of course, we have to remember that values come in complex hierarchies.

That's a curious claim. I'm not sure what it can mean, more than the trivial observation that some people value some things more than they value others, but are under no obligation to do so.

Can you develop that thought?

Of course it's not a moral quality. On my view there is no moral anything until someone steps up to make a "moral truth" sensible.

As for the complex hierarchies claim, it is the observation that you note: people value some things more than they value others. I have given a very simple example involving only two values: I value property, I value life. I value life more. If I see a hungry person steal food, I'm going to form different oughts about it than I would a person stealing something that's not keeping them alive. With the hungry person stealing food, I might try to pay for the food to satisfy both of my values. If I can't, if circumstances just don't align to where I can (maybe I left my purse in the car), I might even look the other way. None of this negates that I value property even though my valuation of life superseded it in an instance.

So, the reason we have moral quandaries is because we have a lot of values, and they have different strengths. Look at any moral quandary through my worldview lens and you will see how they are all just dependent on what values are held to what degree. It gets a lot more complex than just the interplay between two values as in the food example. This is why there aren't just clear-cut "solutions" or "answers" to these kinds of questions even if moral realism is bunk.

When a moral realist has to decide what is "most right" (such as in a trolley problem) I submit that what's really going on is they, too, are checking their value hierarchy. "Ok, I value not murdering anyone, so I don't want to pull the lever and murder someone. But I value 5 people living that would otherwise die, so do I pull the lever?" I think this is why some people think they're consequentialists and some people think they're deontologists: different value hierarchies. A consequentialist values outcomes more than what happens in between, for instance.

As far as I can tell, all oughts are amoral.

So what Hitler did, to which I allude above, is, for you, simply amoral? It's not immoral?

Did it become immoral when he rounded up and gassed homosexuals, or would it still be just a matter of moral indifference to you?

Unless you can demonstrate there can be a moral ought, my position is that all oughts we experience in everyday life are instrumentalist oughts.

Well, that position would certainly be amoral, if not also Moral Nihilism.

Yeah, it follows that if all oughts are amoral (because they are all based on values, built by hypothetical imperatives), then "moral" does not have meaning, so it wouldn't make sense to say what Hitler did was "immoral." Correct.

Nor would it be "immoral" to gas homosexuals, because the word itself is without meaning.

Now of course, people can hold values that lead them to abhor Hitler and Nazism. I know I do. And they would not be "moral," because again that word doesn't have any meaning until the moral realist succeeds on their quest to make these terms sensible.

I'm not sure that I agree that free agency is always good (is a being that always chooses evil somehow more good to exist than a being that only chooses evil because of its programming? That doesn't feel right even on moral realism),

I don't think that objection works. Because if a creature only ever chooses evil, in what sense can we speak of it having any "choice" in the matter? What would be our evidence that such an entity has moral free will at all?

Well, I think it's actually an interesting question. Plantinga asks it in God, Freedom & Evil (there's that guy again, lol). He supposes that it might be possible for God to be omnipotent but unable to create a possible world with free agents where none of them choose to take at least one evil action because there might be no such available world (in every possible world, every one of them out of infinity, at least one person takes at least one evil action). Plantinga (I think, or someone characterizing Plantinga's work) calls it "Transworld Depravity."

An agent is transworld depraved if in any possible world in which he is created, he freely performs at least one morally reprehensible action.

Now we could of course run along the same lines of reasoning and hypothesize that there might be a really transworld depraved being: one which freely performs all morally reprehensible actions (as in, all/most of their actions are morally reprehensible, freely).

Now, this is getting pretty far out there. I don't think Transworld Depravity as a concept is useful for our main discussion here (and I am not asserting that Plantinga is correct about Transworld Depravity being possible), but I thought you might be interested in this if you didn't already know about it as a quick aside. I really do recommend reading God, Freedom & Evil. But actually, probably more pertinently, I recommend reading his little book, "Does God Have A Nature?" It's maybe a couple of hours to read, and it directly addresses some of our conversation.

As a physicist I learn quickly that if I really want to test an idea, I need to test it at extremes and see if it holds up.

I have no objection to extreme scenarios, particularly those premised on real facts...as you say, they are often useful in pushing an argument to its logical conclusion. But I doubt that ones based on total fantasy are in any way so useful. They're not so much "extreme" as just "wildly speculative" and ultimately "irrelevant."

I mean, if I rejected discussing everything I thought to be total fantasy, I wouldn't even be talking about "moral truths" or God. Yet here I am.

I will defend the example I gave about the evil creator though as being relevant, as I argued above. It led to being able to examine something important about whether it was true the act of creation always imparts a duty on the realist picture, did it not? I don't generally give thought experiments unless I think they're relevant, and I don't give them unless they're the best way to make a discovery or point something out.

No, I understand what an instrumentalist ought is. But it has nothing to do with a moral ought.

Nobody doubts the existence of instrumental oughts. Everybody uses such all the time. But one of the hallmarks of difference between moral oughts and instrumental ones is this: instrumental oughts only tell you what you can most effectively do to produce an outcome that you already value. It can do nothing to tell you if that is a "good" value to have. In contrast, moral oughts tell you what you should do regardless of which direction other considerations (instrumental, values, pragmatics, social pressure, impulses, etc.) push you. Moral oughts are things you ought to do even when you don't feel like it. They tell you what you should value, not merely what you do value.

In fact, to know what you do value, you need no moral thinking at all. You just need to consult your own inclinations...wrong though those inclinations may often be, in themselves.

Ok, yes. So what does it mean to say someone "should" value something? Let's get back to the heart of the matter, I still need to know how to make moral realism even sensible.

What does it mean to say I should value X?

Anyway, you asked me, paraphrased, "Do oughts come from values, instrumentalist considerations, or social consensus?"

My response is that instrumentalist oughts come from values.

No, they don't, actually. They come from "what works."

To be "instrumentalist" is to take the legitimacy of one's own values entirely on blind faith, and to proceed only on practical considerations of how to achieve those values, without ever examining them at all. But the legitimacy of the values remains utterly unestablished by the pragma of instrumental utility. There can be a quick way to do an evil deed.

They do come from values, as you say so yourself in the second paragraph, so not sure why you started with "no, they don't." Yes, the values either just exist in a person or they don't exist -- for nature and nurture reasons combined in some way, surely. The instrumentalist part comes in when the values are used to form hypothetical imperatives, which form oughts. If I value x, then I instrumentally ought to do y if y furthers my value in x in some way.

Racism isn't intrinsically wrong...

Goodbye, social justice.

No, everything still works the same way. People will value social justice, so they will fight for it because they will instrumentally form oughts based on their values. Other people will not value it, so they will resist. That is exactly what we see in reality.

1) You say that God's goodness is the "origin" from which all of our goodness is derived. What does that mean? This sounds somewhat like God is some kind of Platonic form or something.

No. If I went looking for some disembodied essence called "goodness," as if it could exist without reference to anything at all, I would be Platonic. I'm not being that. I'm saying that if you have any idea of what "goodness" really is, it's derivative of the ultimate goodness that exists in God.

Ok, edited my first pass at this because maybe I understand it better after chewing on it.

Are you saying that we can understand what goodness is as a property if we see it in a person, but we would have to understand that it isn't pure goodness? We would have to say, "ok, this person has the property of goodness. I can imagine something having more of this property, a person with even more goodness. Perhaps there is something with the most goodness." Are you just saying that once we reach that part of our thought train, we're talking about God (as soon as we get to "maybe there's something with the most goodness")?

That seems trivial to me, though: I already grant that if God is real and God is good, that God has the maximum of the property of goodness. So if that's all you're saying, then I guess this is sensible.

But it doesn't tell me what goodness is, just that God has the most of it.

I don't understand how or why that would mean other objects "derive" goodness as a property from God.

I didn't say that. If you ever accurately describe anything as "good," you derive your attribution of or your recognition of their goodness from God's goodness. There is no other actual meaning for the concept "morally good." His is the prototypical "goodness."

Hmm. Chewing on this for while now.

If I say something is good, you say that I must derive my attribution of goodness to that thing from God's goodness.

But this sounds to me like if I am to say anything is long, then I must derive my attribution of its having length from a hypothetical maximum length, such as an infinite length. But that doesn't seem true. It seems like I can conceptualize what length is just by looking at a thing with length. I can imagine that maybe something has more length or less length, but I still get a picture of what "length" is from looking at it. That's because properties are descriptions of property-holders. Having length describes the object I'm looking at (I'm looking at my keyboard, lest we start giggling about all this innuendo potential, lol), so I form a conception of length. I never had to imagine an infinite length to grasp what the finite one means.

So, I should be able to know what goodness is by looking at a person, without having to look at God. It might not be pure goodness, just like a yellow shirt is never purely yellow; but I should be able to conceive of what goodness is or what yellowness is if they are properties. It's what it means to be a property: properties being descriptors of the things that possess them. So, I need to know what goodness is.

I know what I mean by goodness in the anti-realist way: goodness is that which aligns with my values. Since I value life, stopping a murderer is good, and someone that stops a murderer is a good person. They have the property of sharing my value, they have the property of goodness from my perspective.

But what does having the property of goodness mean on the moral realism view? Does it mean the person values the intrinsically good (but then what is that)?

2) You say "if adultery is wrong, it is because God is faithful," and other such things. "The ultimate reason for anything being 'sin' is that it 'falls short of the glory of God'". (Now, I am going to assume I can use "being a sin" and "being intrinsically wrong" interchangeably, let me know if that's not the case). But here we are sort of back to Euthyphro's fork again.

No, Euthyphro is dead. Socrates and I have both showed you that. I can't make you believe it, but it's certainly the case.

It's a crucial question that must be answered if you're going to make the claims you're making. I am not being stubborn in insisting that it does matter, because it really does.

The utterance "if adultery is wrong, it is because God is faithful" does demand an answer to whether adultery is wrong because God is faithful (and so DCT is true*), or if adultery is wrong because it is wrong (and God happens to be faithful), in which case God's faithfulness doesn't matter towards whether adultery is wrong. This is crucial. Perhaps the most crucial thing in the whole debate, and you just want to dismiss it outright.

(* -- with nuances mentioned in my post. e.g., such as attempting to say "well adultery is wrong because God is faithful, but God can't be anything other than faithful so it's not a choice," there's an answer to that; it's really just the second horn)

If you really don't want to talk about Euthyphro, then saying things like "if x is wrong, it's because of God's disposition on the matter/God's action on the matter/how God's nature is on the matter" is a surefire way to trigger Euthyphro. Your response about polytheism absolutely does not resolve the problem, not at all. It doesn't even really speak to the problem. So I can't tell if there is a miscommunication happening. One of us isn't understanding the problem, and of course I don't think it's me. That, or you are explaining things in a way that appear to trigger the problem, but perhaps you aren't intending to, and simply more elucidation is required. But the problem is legitimate, and it applies to what you've said here in this quote I was responding to.

...it seemed to me to be saying God's goodness is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from IC's.

No, I was careful. I did not say that.

Light is all the same thing, but comes in different intensities. The light of the Sun is very bright, and one might say, more pure. But the light of a candle is still light. It's not less real than that of the Sun, or less light, either.

Ok, so if I understand you right, then goodness is all the same thing, it just comes in different intensities. That would mean God's goodness isn't qualitatively different than a man's, it's only a difference in quantity.

This I understand, this is a cognitive, sensible aspect of the conversation.

What do you mean that our goodness has an admixture of evil in it?

I mean you can't call IC truly "good." You can say, perhaps, that he "has good in him," and it's genuine, perhaps. But IC, like all humans, is capable of pettiness, of spite, of rage, of maybe even violence...who knows what else? So is there any justice in calling him truly "good," since he can always do these things?

Moreover, even the alleged "good" things IC does can be tainted. Perhaps he runs for charity...but he does so only partly to benefit the poor; part of him does it to be seen to be charitable, and part of him wants a chance to win a coveted trophy. So is his spirit "good"? Partly. But only partly. His charitableness has an admixture of selfishness in it.

I mean I think I can make sense of this. Isn't this like saying that a yellow-green shirt has the property of being yellow but has an admixture of blue in it, and that we could conceive of a shirt that is pure yellow?

That seems fine. But then it wouldn't make sense to say that all other yellow things derive their yellowness from the pure yellow shirt.

Right. It wouldn't. But only because "yellow shirt" is not the ultimate creator or origin of anything.

Well, let me ask this: does the yellow shirt derive its yellowness from God? Could we say this about yellowness? I assume not since God isn't proposed to have the property of yellowness. But then why would goodness need to be derived from God just because God has goodness as a property, while yellowness doesn't have to be derived?

I could just be misunderstanding you though. Like I said above, maybe you were just saying the trivial truth that we can look at a person and see the property of goodness and understand that the person doesn't have maximal goodness, and we could examine concepts of God and understand God does have maximal goodness. But that's so trivially true that I wasn't sure if it's what you were saying (is it?)

My position would be this. If goodness is a property like any other property, then it should describe whatever holds it as a property: be it a person, or an animal, or God: whatever it might apply to. It should be characterizable just from describing the thing that holds it as a property: it shouldn't require having to compare it to some greatest instantiation of the property. I should be able to know what goodness is by philosophically examining a person with it as a property, I shouldn't have to examine God to understand what goodness is even if I'm not seeing it in its purest form. Likewise with yellowness and examining a yellow-green shirt: I wouldn't have to observe a purely yellow shirt to conceive of what yellowness is.

If you're saying goodness is not a normal property, then what is it? If it is a normal property, then we can still talk about God if you want to, but I'm saying that we should be able to explain what goodness is either way if there are things that have goodness as a property we can examine.

I am not sure what this "prototype" business means.

Well, think about it.

All good things originate in God. There is nothing that we can call good that does not have its ultimate origin in God. There is simply no other Source for things like life, light, health, joy, peace, hope, goodness and so on to have proceeded. And if you and I can discuss them, it's only because knowledge of God, along with a sense of his characteristics, is intrinsic, being instilled by God in all human beings. Absent that, we ought to have no such concepts.

I also feel like all yellow things originate in God. There is nothing we can call yellow that wasn't created by God on most theistic worldviews. But what's the use in pointing something like that out? One can still form a conception of what yellow is by looking at a yellow shirt, even an impurely yellow one. They could conceptualize a more pure (and even most pure) yellow based on that.

Likewise, if goodness is a property of beings, then I don't know why we need to point out that God, as creator, made all things able to have goodness because it seems extraneous to understanding what goodness is in the same way that God making the world (so yellow is possible) is extraneous to understanding what yellowness is.

If goodness is a property, then we should be able to discuss what goodness is if we are talking about a woman (should she have the property of goodness) even if we don't talk about God -- this is in exactly the same way we can talk about a yellow shirt's yellowness without talking about God. Because properties, once instantiated in an object, are understandable by definition by that instantiation.

So if you're just making the trivial point that nothing would be good unless God made them exist in order to even possibly be anything, let alone good, then OK, I grant it. But then I still need to know what goodness is: specifically what intrinsic goodness is.

[Belinda]

Astro Cat wrote:

My position is that all oughts are constructed by hypothetical imperatives ...

The only hypothetical imperative that really matters is the uncaused cause of all persons, paintings , and so forth. This hypothetical imperative , the unique uncaused cause which people call variously "Nature" "God" "Existence itself" "The Absolute" "The Eternal" cannot be denied except by those who claim nothing is a thing.

'Belonging' is worldly as belonging may be contested by courts of law, or by criminal theft, or by aggrieved victims of theft. "God", "The Absolute" etc. is not worldly by definition of 'absolute' and 'relative' and is imperative as a matter of fact : not as a matter of traditional possession or civil law .

[Sculptor]

My question is very simple: if we are not "owned" by God, who "owns" us?

Even for you that demonstrates a really stupid question.

Is it a stupid question because for all we know fickle fortune is our owner?

She is a right bitch.

[Belinda]

Even for you that demonstrates a really stupid question.

Is it a stupid question because for all we know fickle fortune is our owner?

She is a right bitch.

Probably the opinion of a man who has been bitten.

[FlashDangerpants]

Astro Cat wrote:

My position is that all oughts are constructed by hypothetical imperatives ...

The only hypothetical imperative that really matters is the uncaused cause of all persons, paintings , and so forth. This hypothetical imperative , the unique uncaused cause which people call variously "Nature" "God" "Existence itself" "The Absolute" "The Eternal" cannot be denied except by those who claim nothing is a thing.

'Belonging' is worldly as belonging may be contested by courts of law, or by criminal theft, or by aggrieved victims of theft. "God", "The Absolute" etc. is not worldly by definition of 'absolute' and 'relative' and is imperative as a matter of fact : not as a matter of traditional possession or civil law .

And what unlikely thing does "God" mean in that pile of nonsense?

[Immanuel Can]

What is moral is supposed to be universal ...

Yes...

Since political systems are not accepted by all, they cannot be associated with morality.

That doesn't mean that universal assent is what makes morality moral. That's absurd, and obviously wrong.

Morality is "universal" in the sense that even if every single person on the planet failed to believe it at all, it would still be true. It's so universal that it doesn't depend on anyone's mere opinion.

In this, it's like reality. Because reality does not change, no matter what people believe. When every person on the Earth thought there was no such thing as bacteria, that did not mean bacteria did not exist. All it meant was that a lot of people were wrong.

So if the entire planet decided that murdering children was acceptable, they would still all be wrong about that, because the objective truth of morality would remain that murdering children is evil. And God would still know what the moral truth was, even if every person on the planet lost the idea.

As for politics, political systems immediately involve morality. Because political systems involve the way we treat other people. So we can't even design a political system without already having in mind some view of what is right or wrong treatment of others. And we can be right or wrong about what we think.

I would suggest that to accord others dignity, rights and respect is right, and to tyrannize or propagandize them is immoral. And that would mean, all the time, and regardless of what society we were in, or what the people there thought. But even if I were wrong about that, God would know the truth. And He would be right, even when I was wrong.

[Harbal]

Surely, for behaviour or an act to be categorised as moral -"good" or "bad"- it must be motivated by an individual's own sense of right and wrong according to his own moral frame of reference. To behave in accordance with a set of rules, simply because they are the rules, whether they be God's rules or secular, man made laws, is no more than obedience, and contains no element of morality, unless you happen to believe that obeying rules is, in itself, a moral act. I must admit, that makes the whole question of morality a very simple matter for the individual. He only has one moral imperative: Do as you are told.

[Harbal]

Morality is "universal" in the sense that even if every single person on the planet failed to believe it at all, it would still be true. It's so universal that it doesn't depend on anyone's mere opinion.

In this, it's like reality. Because reality does not change, no matter what people believe. When every person on the Earth thought there was no such thing as bacteria, that did not mean bacteria did not exist. All it meant was that a lot of people were wrong.

So if the entire planet decided that murdering children was acceptable, they would still all be wrong about that, because the objective truth of morality would remain that murdering children is evil. And God would still know what the moral truth was, even if every person on the planet lost the idea.

As for politics, political systems immediately involve morality. Because political systems involve the way we treat other people. So we can't even design a political system without already having in mind some view of what is right or wrong treatment of others. And we can be right or wrong about what we think.

This is why an argument between an atheist and a believer about morality is totally absurd, and the amount of effort that has been put into it here has taken it to great heights of absurdity. If one man believes that morality comes exclusively from God, and another does not beliefe that God exists, how on earth can a resolution be reached? It is an exercise in complete pointlessness.