What could make morality objective?

[Atla]

There he goes again blatantly lying about QM and Al-Khalili, and ad homming him too for good measure.

[Belinda]

I suppose if science showed us that reality literally makes no sense, that would be a different matter, but I think all science has done is show that the world is surprising, which isn't the same thing.

You do not realize you are the ignorant and incompetent one.

As a human being I agree with what you believe fundamentally, e.g. mind-independent external world, but I don't grasp it as an dogmatic ideology like you do.
This mind-independence of reality of the external world is only relative and arise out of an evolutionary default. This is a very primal and primitive belief.

Those who are philosophical competent has removed the shackles of absolute mind-independence and move on with this belief of mind-independence as only relative.

The Buddhists and Greeks [Protagoras, Heraclitus] had adopted reality as contingent upon the human conditions where necessary to advance philosophical knowledge and wisdom.

You are stuck inside a tall dark silo of ignorance yet not aware of it.

Science had already shown us reality is its more refined perspective is non-sense, e.g. as with Quantum Physics:


Note this
Here at 54:37
https://youtu.be/ISdBAf-ysI0?t=3268

Professor Jim Al-Khalili stated,
"In some strange sense, it really does suggest the moon doesn't exists when we are not looking. It truly defies common sense."

However, Jim Al-Khalili being entrapped with his primal and primitive instinct could not let go and he admitted he find it hard to move into the more advance paradigm [in the later part of the video.]

Btw, I am hoping you or anyone should respond to my posts [if anyone wish to, that's is up to them], my primary aim is to post it for my selfish interests in refreshing whatever knowledge I have gathered.

Jim Al-Khalili is a great populariser of science so he would use the term "defies common sense". However philosophers commonly are familiar with the idea of absolute idealism, which includes that to exist it's necessary to be perceived.

Stanford D of P:

--an answer that captures what exactly it is that Berkeley rejects is that material things are mind-independent things or substances. And a mind-independent thing is something whose existence is not dependent on thinking/perceiving things, and thus would exist whether or not any thinking things (minds) existed. Berkeley holds that there are no such mind-independent things, that, in the famous phrase, esse est percipi (aut percipere) — to be is to be perceived (or to perceive).

[Veritas Aequitas]

Science had already shown us reality in its more refined perspective is non-sense, e.g. as with Quantum Physics:


Note this
Here at 54:37
https://youtu.be/ISdBAf-ysI0?t=3268

Professor Jim Al-Khalili stated,
"In some strange sense, it really does suggest the moon doesn't exists when we are not looking. It truly defies common sense."

However, Jim Al-Khalili being entrapped with his primal and primitive instinct could not let go and he admitted he find it hard to move into the more advance paradigm [in the later part of the video.]

Btw, I am hoping you or anyone should respond to my posts [if anyone wish to, that's is up to them], my primary aim is to post it for my selfish interests in refreshing whatever knowledge I have gathered.

Jim Al-Khalili is a great populariser of science so he would use the term "defies common sense". However philosophers commonly are familiar with the idea of absolute idealism, which includes that to exist it's necessary to be perceived.

Stanford D of P:

--an answer that captures what exactly it is that Berkeley rejects is that material things are mind-independent things or substances. And a mind-independent thing is something whose existence is not dependent on thinking/perceiving things, and thus would exist whether or not any thinking things (minds) existed. Berkeley holds that there are no such mind-independent things, that, in the famous phrase, esse est percipi (aut percipere) — to be is to be perceived (or to perceive).
[/quote]
When Jim Al-Khalili asserted "common sense" that would also extend to Classical Newtonian and Einsteinian Physics.

Berkeley's theory is in two phases,
In the first phase, he got in right and refuted philosophical materialism.
In his 2nd phase, to avoid solipsism, he attributed to what is really real - the unperceived -to God.
While Berkeley brought in God to avoid solipsism, he was faced with the charge that God is illusory which had to rely on faith.

It took Kant to resolve the above, i.e. that reality is mind-interdependent and the idea of God is an impossible to be real via his Critical Philosophy.

[FlashDangerpants]

Thank you, Flash. You have hit the nail on the head. In ethics, we have to take the real existence of other people as axiomatic, or there will be no subject matter to discuss. And if other people, why not animals, and the rest of the physical world?

All of these metaphysical speculations are irrelevant to the study of ethics, and they shouldn't be in this part of the forum at all. I think they were introduced here by VA, and others have been unwise enough to indulge him by answering him here.

I tend to think the whole question is sort of nonsense even when capable philosophers discuss it in the relevant context.

I think there is a real question there, but I think it is futile to address it. I can't prove that the world around me is real, but I don't see any evidence that it isn't, so I no longer bother to think about it. I suppose if science showed us that reality literally makes no sense, that would be a different matter, but I think all science has done is show that the world is surprising, which isn't the same thing.

I can certainly be criticised for an extremist approach to agnosticism in this matter.

VA is himself an example of an alternative and sillier extremism sadly. But he's not alone and others could learn something useful by his example. The various realist and anti-realist interpretations of this matter are all offering competing but equally viable explanations for how the world around us comes to be and to appear to us as the world around us. Most people here can see that they are sort of equally good for most purposes, and if one happens to be more accurate than all the others on some cosmic level, it really makes no difference to real life which of them it is.

Everybody can see that VA is attempting to throw together a sort of modus ponens in which it is supposed to be the case that the reality of the world is dependent on human sensibility, and without human sensibility there is no reality at all, and therefore any product of human sensibility is as real as the world is. And anybody with a brain can spot that the antecedent and the consequent don't match there.

Thus, by means of a false syllogism, VA has both fooled himself that important universal epistemological matters rest upon the realism/anti-realism thing in general, and that he can simply hallucinate a new 'objective' fact on demand. In so doing, he has blinded himself to the fact that actual questions do rest upon the basis of moral realism/moral anti-realism, a matter he's spent a decade or more discussing, but in which he lacks the basic knowledge required to distinguish between error theory and non-cognitivism. The latter bit is perhaps specialised knowledge, but the gist is obvious to anybody who isn't VA himself.

But sadly people addressing other questions don't learn from this example. I recommend we should make use of VA for what he is useful for; as a partner in discussing philosophical matters he is counterproductive, but as a prime example of a man who has disappeared so far up his own arsehole that the universe now contains a very small puckered void where a man used to be, he is top notch.

So anybody who is concerned with a question where there are many competing options that all purport to explain what is already there and apparent to us all should learn from his hyper-confused example, take a step back, and ask what exactly rests on this question? Everybody currently debating free will on this site should probably think about that. Some of them have gotten a little bit VA themselves.

You won't get VA off this track though because he has committed everything to his notion that if we can reduce objectivity to nothing more than consensus, then anything that gains consensus is objective, and that anything thus rendered objective must be fact. Everything else must, and always will, fall down that hole, himself included.

It might count as doing him a favour to require a ceasefire on all the generalised antirealism in the ethics forum and simply permit moral realism and antirealism within it. I would recommend that everyone give that a go. But he has himself entirely convinced that all philosophy reduces without loss to nothing but a discussion of realism and antirealism, and I don't think he has the ability to internalise anybody else's perspectives, so I predict zero success.

Copy that. The trouble, though, is that views we strongly disagree with are catnip to people like us. I prefer not to talk to people like VA, but in a forum where there is no minimum standard of philosophical competence, who else are you going to talk to?

Quite so. Perhaps cannibalistically consuming VA and rendering his twisted remains as a sort of Aesop's fable about a confused budgie that couldn't see the woods for the trees, and couldn't see the trees for the twigs is the best option there.

[promethean75]

"the reality of the world is dependent on human sensibility, and without human sensibility there is no reality at all"

So Ventrical Ataraxia is saying that we're all in like a collective brain-in-a-vat situation where experienced reality is generated by consciousnesses communicating with a language?

That's fuckin far out Berkeleyean stuff isn't it? VA, you go as hard as the Bishop with your empiricism?

[promethean75]

"It took Kant to resolve the above, i.e. that reality is mind-interdependent"

Kant didn't resolve anything, and he admitted there is the raw, unorganized data of perception before the mind processes it, applying all the categories or reason to make sense of it.

In this respect Kant was a transcendental materialist, if anything. A materialist who's still a cartesian. He didn't resolve anything but invented a clever way over Berkeley and Hume by building a bridge between them.

[Veritas Aequitas]

"the reality of the world is dependent on human sensibility, and without human sensibility there is no reality at all"

So Ventrical Ataraxia is saying that we're all in like a collective brain-in-a-vat situation where experienced reality is generated by consciousnesses communicating with a language?

That's fuckin far out Berkeleyean stuff isn't it? VA, you go as hard as the Bishop with your empiricism?

That is a strawman.

My position is this:

Philosophical realists like PH, FDP and others claim that reality and the external world is absolutely independent of the mind/human-conditions, i.e. it exists regardless of whether there are humans or not; this is claim as a dogmatic ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism

Philosophical realism –is the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world itself) has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder.

As a Philosophical AntiRealist [Kantian] I do not agree and oppose the above 'ism' and ideology.
It do not agree with philosophical realism's claim of absoluteness when they cannot prove this absoluteness at all.

What I believe As a Philosophical AntiRealist [Kantian] is, the external world is mind-independent but only relative, not absolute. This is not Berkelyan idealism.

What I believe as real is confined and limited to empirical evidences plus critical thinking.

[Veritas Aequitas]

"It took Kant to resolve the above, i.e. that reality is mind-interdependent"

Kant didn't resolve anything, and he admitted there is the raw, unorganized data of perception before the mind processes it, applying all the categories or reason to make sense of it.

In this respect Kant was a transcendental materialist, if anything. A materialist who's still a cartesian. He didn't resolve anything but invented a clever way over Berkeley and Hume by building a bridge between them.

Wrong.

Kant realized transcendental materialism or transcendental realism [philosophical realism] has failed miserably and when faced with greater scrutiny posed hell of a lot of philosophical dilemmas, e.g. Descartes skepticism and potential evil.

To counter the above, Kant introduced his Copernican Revolution, i.e. instead of leveraging humans on external reality, Kant proposed we leverage external reality on humans.
In this sense, Kant did not claim external reality is DEPENDENT of humans but rather he claim humans are SOMEHOW contributing to "what is reality" relatively, i.e. external reality cannot be absolutely independent of the human conditions.

Before Kant, rationalism and empiricism were a dichotomy where the twain will never meet eternally.
Kant [prior to CPR was himself a rationalist] in the CPR reconciled rationalism [reason only] [Descartes, Leibniz, etc.] with empiricism [experience only] [Hume, Locke, Berkeley].
In his reconciliation of rationalism with empiricism, he relied on the Categories and loads of other necessary elements, principles and arguments.

[Atla]

In this sense, Kant did not claim external reality is DEPENDENT of humans but rather he claim humans are SOMEHOW contributing to "what is reality" relatively, i.e. external reality cannot be absolutely independent of the human conditions.

In other words, external reality IS dependent on humans according to Kant.

[CIN]

...he lacks the basic knowledge required to distinguish between error theory and non-cognitivism...

If I wasn't an objectivist, I would probably be an error theorist. I've never thought non-cognitivism plausible. Which of the two do you support, if either?

Trawling back through this thread, I came across this post of yours, which I did not answer at the time (because I wasn't sure how to). I'll try to answer it now.

No. It's more or less as I wrote - I'm not sure by what argument fairness and pleasure maximisation come to be the two natural goods while all other candidates would be presumably subsidiary to them. But I guess you have an argument for that objection.

Any argument you do have for that objection might be useful to Henry because he has a whole thing on the go that is intended to condense without loss all moral stuff into a single principle, but it is bad because he cannot account for all sorts of stuff such as reciprocity upon which the whole thing depends. So perhaps whatever you use to select a second principle - the thing that makes you not a utilitarian - would help him out of his situation.

Thanks for explaining.

Okay: fairness. I come at fairness via pleasure/pain, because fairness is to do with how we should distribute pleasure/pain among beings who have moral standing. Since, on my theory, pleasure and pain are good and bad, all beings capable of experiencing pleasure/pain have moral standing. The question then is, given this fact, how should pleasure/pain be distributed?

The classic utilitarian answer is that it doesn't matter. I think this is a mistake. The reason it's a mistake is that it overlooks the fact that, since it's entirely by virtue of having the capability to experience pleasure/pain that beings have moral standing at all, it must be the case that every being capable of experiencing pleasure/pain has the same moral standing. If I have 100 units of pleasure to distribute between a man and a mouse, then on the assumption that both the man and the mouse can experience pleasure, I should aim to give 50 units to each of them, or get as close to this as I can. To give the man more than 50 and the mouse less than 50, or vice-versa, would be unfair, because it would be treating them as having different moral standing when their moral standing is in fact the same. (I'm not suggesting that we can actually measure units of pleasure: all of this is simply to establish the basic principles.)
If there are two fundamental goods, pleasure/pain and fairness, it's possible to face a choice between two actions where one maximises pleasure but distributes it unfairly, while the other fails to maximise pleasure but distributes it fairly. I'm not aware of any rational way to decide which of these is better, and so at this point in time I'm inclined to say that which action to choose is indeterminate. However, I'm not entirely happy with this, so I'm still thinking about it.

I don't know if any of this is helpful to Henry, but he's welcome to talk to me himself if he wants to.

As for why I think other things, such as freedom and justice, are not fundamental moral goods, it's simply that I've never seen any argument or evidence to convince me that they are. To me they look like rules of thumb. I think they're very good rules of thumb, and I think a society that adopts them as a basis for its legal system will usually produce more pleasure or happiness than one that doesn't; but that doesn't make them fundamental principles.

Well, first up, let's begin with my traditional bout of underhandedness. I would say that you have a unique position still among our moral realists at present if a 12 week fetus and a totally vegetablised coma patient are both unable to experience pleasure or pain then they have no standing in their own rights? So technically if my great aunt is on life support, and even if she might pull through and make a recovery, her breathing aparatus is mine to switch off if nobody else really cares just at this moment?

My thinking has moved on a little since that discussion.

I no longer think that all beings capable of experiencing pleasure and/or pain have the same moral standing. Nor do I think moral standing is related to current net pleasure. I am now inclined to think that a being's moral standing is proportional to that being's potential lifetime net pleasure, rather than the net pleasure they are experiencing at the moment. Suppose a child and an old lady are trapped in a burning building, and you can only rescue one of them. The child is terrified and unhappy, and has a broken leg which is very painful but mendable; the old lady is calm and not in any pain. If we decide who to rescue on the basis of their current net pleasure, we will rescue the old lady and leave the child to die. I think this would be irrational: more lifetime net pleasure can be created for the child than for the old lady, so the child has the greater moral standing. We should rescue the child and let the old lady die (sorry gran).

Whether your great aunt and the foetus have moral standing, then, depends on whether they have potential positive lifetime net pleasure. If they do, then they have positive moral standing. To abort the foetus or withdraw life support from your great aunt would be to treat them as if they had no moral standing at all. If they have potential positive moral standing, this is a moral error. If something is a moral error, then I think it can be regarded as morally wrong.

I also note the oblique reference to utilitarian calculus, but I assume you wouldn't go so far as to endorse actually creating a measurement system to assign units of pleasurability and pain-ness to the mouse and the man's situations, assuming them to be scientific data now, because that would be giberring insanity?

I think we do recognise that some pleasures and pains are more intense than others, and I can't see how this could be the case unless it is also the case that pleasures and pains are quantified. But I would agree that quantified does not necessarily imply measurable.

I am not sure up front how you can use fairness that way. The thing that makes utilitarianism tempting is that it massively simplifies the situation and provides a principle allows assignation of internally uncontroversial statuses of right and wrong. By which I mean that all who agree to the pleasure/pain thing can agree on which is the rigth or wrong course of action in any hypothetical or factual scenario where the outcome is known. but fairness breaks that unless you deal with the rthings that might make any outcome fair or unfair. That would at the very least include dessert, unless we are simplifying "fairness" into equality of outcome or something?

My current view is that goodness does not imply rightness, and that it is possible for an action to be morally good but also morally wrong. (Good and right are different concepts, so 'X is good' does not contradict 'X is wrong'.) An example is our old friend, the surgeon who kills a healthy patient and uses his organs to extend the lives of five unhealthy patients. His action is morally good, because (we assume) it creates more net pleasure than would otherwise be created; but it involves treating the healthy patient as if he was an object with no moral standing (in Kantian language, treating him as a mere means rather than an end), and since he does have moral standing, this is morally wrong.

Should the surgeon choose what is morally good (killing the healthy patient), or what is morally right (not killing him)? I don't think there is an objective answer to this question. We probably give a relative weighting to goodness and rightness in such cases, but I can't see how there could be a single objective scale against which goodness and rightness can both be weighted, so the choice must be subjective.

All comments on the above (from you, not necessarily from anyone else) welcome, but my ethical theory is a work in progress and could still change, so if you don't want to waste time on it, don't.

[Veritas Aequitas]

My current view is that goodness does not imply rightness, and that it is possible for an action to be morally good but also morally wrong. (Good and right are different concepts, so 'X is good' does not contradict 'X is wrong'.) An example is our old friend, the surgeon who kills a healthy patient and uses his organs to extend the lives of five unhealthy patients. His action is morally good, because (we assume) it creates more net pleasure than would otherwise be created; but it involves treating the healthy patient as if he was an object with no moral standing (in Kantian language, treating him as a mere means rather than an end), and since he does have moral standing, this is morally wrong.

Should the surgeon choose what is morally good (killing the healthy patient), or what is morally right (not killing him)? I don't think there is an objective answer to this question. We probably give a relative weighting to goodness and rightness in such cases, but I can't see how there could be a single objective scale against which goodness and rightness can both be weighted, so the choice must be subjective.

All comments on the above (from you, not necessarily from anyone else) welcome, but my ethical theory is a work in progress and could still change, so if you don't want to waste time on it, don't.

According to Kant,
the individual[s] and the-collective need to strive to be morally competent, relative to his current moral competency abilities. If indexed at 100 then progress to 101, 102 .. and so on, or try to achieve a quantum jump say, 101, 102, 110, 111, 115 .. and so on.

At present, while progressing to an ideal, in any casuistry dilemma, one should act spontaneously to the best of one's ability with a mindfulness of the objective ideal standard.
In the above case, the surgeon can either kill a healthy patient to save 5 premature-dying unhealthy patients [or otherwise] for whatever the reason which to him is the most rational on assumption he is committed to a path of moral progress toward the ideal.

In an emergency situations like a Trolley Cases, one should just act with as little thinking as possible but with an afterthought of how to prevent similar dilemmas happening in the first place in the future.

For Kant, one has to do one's best at the present; for the collective, it has to work towards the future [for elimination or prevention of moral dilemmas] where there are no unhealthy patients to generate any moral dilemma for any surgeon to decide.

For example, I stated, AT PRESENT, given one's psychological and moral competency, one can have as many abortions as one need to; what is needed at present is to inculcate into the individual[s] and society the need to expedite moral progress in the future in preventing the need for abortion due to unplanned births.
The moral solution is to develop high moral competence in all humans to the extent that unplanned births are eliminated or prevented to the extreme minimal so that there is no need to be bothered with the question of abortion.
Abortion is still permitted in warranted unavoidable situations, but the collective will strive to eliminate or prevent "warranted" situations to the extreme minimum in the future.

For FDP as a moral skeptic, he has no moral say in anything moral and will not be bothered with any moral progress. The same for moral relativists who has to tolerate and respect the moral views of others.

If you are a moral objectivists, what plans do you have for moral progress in the future? Engaging with moral dilemmas forever and eternally?
You don't seem to have any?

[FlashDangerpants]

...he lacks the basic knowledge required to distinguish between error theory and non-cognitivism...

If I wasn't an objectivist, I would probably be an error theorist. I've never thought non-cognitivism plausible. Which of the two do you support, if either?

Trawling back through this thread, I came across this post of yours, which I did not answer at the time (because I wasn't sure how to). I'll try to answer it now.

You raise quite a few issues so I will chop up my reply for time management reasons. But I think answering your question there would likely provide background for some of what I would raise in response to your other matters.

I would be an error theorist, but I don't really get on very well with the first premise of ET: that when we use moral language we are aiming at a true description of facts of the matter. If I will myself to accept this on the basis that it only describes moral propositions as being a form of linguistic expression that is truth apt, then I can go with it. But that's not how I really think and in truth I just don't believe that we are strictly aiming at facts with this sort of discourse.

But I certainly can't get behind the idea that moral propositions simply express attitudes or emotions that aren't truly cognisable. So I probably am not a non-cog either.

My inclination is therefore towards hermeneutic fictionalism, or something along those lines.... I think that we use moral reasoning for a lot more things than we consciously think about. What we work on is a set of discourses suited to all those things and securing agreements with like minded folk, and the set of concerns and purposes is itself subject to change. So rather than aim at fidelity to an overall one size fits all sort of deal, I think we look for usefulness towards a bunch of social interactions that we juggle.

But I am not super certain as of yet. I never really understood Blackburn's quasi-realism properly, so I bought a copy of the collected essays on that subject, but I haven't read it yet. And I also have a book on fictionalism that I want to finish in case there's something in that which I don't like.

But my boss thinks I am building something called a socks proxy right now, so I probably ought to go and do that.

[CIN]

I would be an error theorist, but I don't really get on very well with the first premise of ET: that when we use moral language we are aiming at a true description of facts of the matter.

If you get time, I'd like to know your reasons for rejecting that premise.

If I will myself to accept this on the basis that it only describes moral propositions as being a form of linguistic expression that is truth apt, then I can go with it. But that's not how I really think and in truth I just don't believe that we are strictly aiming at facts with this sort of discourse.

But I certainly can't get behind the idea that moral propositions simply express attitudes or emotions that aren't truly cognisable. So I probably am not a non-cog either.

My inclination is therefore towards hermeneutic fictionalism, or something along those lines.... I think that we use moral reasoning for a lot more things than we consciously think about. What we work on is a set of discourses suited to all those things and securing agreements with like minded folk, and the set of concerns and purposes is itself subject to change. So rather than aim at fidelity to an overall one size fits all sort of deal, I think we look for usefulness towards a bunch of social interactions that we juggle.

But I am not super certain as of yet. I never really understood Blackburn's quasi-realism properly, so I bought a copy of the collected essays on that subject, but I haven't read it yet. And I also have a book on fictionalism that I want to finish in case there's something in that which I don't like.

Okay. We're in different places, and we probably have different agendas. I can live with the idea that moral discourse isn't exclusively about propositions that can be true about moral facts, but I think I would lose interest in ethics altogether if it was proved to me that it doesn't do that at all.

Having said that, I would be rather pleased if someone proved to me that objectivism per se is wrong (or, equivalently, that all objectivist theories are wrong). It would mean I could leave ethics behind and go and do other things.

But my boss thinks I am building something called a socks proxy right now, so I probably ought to go and do that.

I'm ex-ICT myself, but on the IT applications side (and a long time ago, my last job was in 1999).

[Peter Holmes]

A fact is a feature of reality that is or was the case, regardless of opinion. So a fact has no truth-value.

A factual assertion is one that asserts or denies the existence of such a fact. So a factual assertion, which is typically a linguistic expression, has a truth-value.

The only thing that could make morality objective is the existence of moral facts, just as the thing that makes physics objective is the existence of physics/physical facts - and so on.

Until moral objectivists demonstrate the existence and nature of moral facts, the question as to whether moral assertions can have truth-value - cognitivism vs non-cognitivism - is otiose.

[Skepdick]

a factual assertion, which is typically a linguistic expression, has a truth-value.

So a fact has no truth-value.

A fact is a feature of reality that is or was the case, regardless of opinion.

Is that a fact with no truth-value; or a factual assertion that's false?