BDM - It's not a sex thing
Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2023 6:44 pm
Part 1: the Rambling Preamble (Skip this if you don't like long posts)
For the last few days I've been witnessing Immanuel Can fruitlessly trying to railroad Harbal, but failing in his usual elegance. A fairly quotidian state of affairs, and certainly not worthy of spawning a rare FlopDooPants thread you may imagine. But the curious thing about it is IC's extreme determination to fail.
Having identified Harbal as falling broadly under the Humean umbrella in these matters, which seems fairly accurate, mister Can made the quite bizarre choice of trying to enforce a Kantian set of deontological assumptions upon his hapless victim by banging on endlessy about imeratives. But what is entirely mad about the choice is that he opted to use motivational power as the cudgel with which to do so. What a week to be alive. The excitement is almost too much.
For anybody who cares to understand basic moral philosphy, moral motivation is a Kantian weakness and a Humean strength, so this move of IC's is much like challenging your enemy to a sword fight when he has a cutlass and you are armed with a cucumber.
Part2: the Next Bit (Still optional)
The reason why any moral take that falls anywhere within the very broad scope that can be considered Humean has no issues with moral motivation is because Hume famously wrote that “Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions” and, you know .... Kant definitely wouldn't write that.
The upshot of this is that Hume's description of morality begins with the motivating bit, the wants, the desires, the passions, the beliefs, in other words, the fucking motivation. Moral reasoning is in the Humean model, reasoning that we do about those motivating things. So if you are asked why you, as some sort of Humean, would choose to act honourably or honestly or something, the obvious answer is that it is because you believe acting honourably and honestly are good things, and you are motivated by your beliefs and desires which is perfectly natural.
The Kantian moral approach works differently. Kant was obsessed by rules, maxims and imperatives which people have a duty to follow, but no natural desire to. the things we naturally want are relegated into an inferior position as fodder for mere hypothetical imperatives. Kant's argument is that a Rational Will would search for a special set of logically desirable imperatives and then will itself to want to follow them. By this method he subdues the passions to become slaves of Pure Reason.
So I think that's enough words to explain why Kant has the problem of explaining moral motivation, something that Hume gets for free. At which point I am done with taunting IC, this thread isn't about him, he just provided an intertesting way for me to introduce the topic and explain why there would be controversy over this stuff.
I may as well at this point throw a quick bit of shade at VA. The reason why both Hume and Kant address moral motivation is because they were real philosophers and they both knew that it goes without saying that any theory of morality must explain motivation one way or another, this being Practical Reason and all. A moral theory that is only a "CLUE" to some jam-tomorrow future situation is not even wrong. So yeah, if Mannie hadn't been so agressively weird at Harbal, that's what I would have used as my entry point.
For a fuller read on the matters raised here, Chapter 7 of Simon Blackburn's Ruling Passions is where it's at, and includes Aristotle at no extra charge. Admittedly he doesn't poke IC and VA, but that's what you retain my services for.
Part 3: Yay, the actual point of this nonsense! (Just read this bit really)
The reason why a Humean type of moral explanation explains motivation so readily is because it is compatible with the BDM model (there are other names such as BDI, BDR.): The Belief Desire model of Motivation/Reason/Intention. Basically this is just the common sense, folk-psychology view of how we are motivated to do things that we believe will match our desires.
I am not saying BDM is the only way that we can account for the "wanting to" aspect of why people often but far from always act in accordance with their moral beliefs, simply that it works and I find this analysis agreeable.
So now the question is how many other people find this same explanation agreeable? Harbal must be in the bag, right? Willy B has expressed a belief that morality is founded on emotions, so he's a gimme. I'll be shocked if Pete and Sculptor aren't onside. IWP seems to like real psychology so I can't assume some homebrew folk-psych shit will work for me there, but it's quite likely.
So that's enough people to make a morality-proper-Harbal-PH-FDP-Sculptor-FSK following all the rules for construction of a "credible" FSK, and to have more people and thus greater credibility than the morality-proper FSK that VA can't even sell to his own mum.
All it really needs is for there to be a systematic belief system (they upgrade to knowledge systems when people believe them, this being the magic of the FSK lifecycle).
Proponents of the FSK don't need to agree on very much, the proposed morality-proper-WillBouwman-Pete-IWP-Sculptor-ATLA FSK really only contends that the BDM model of human psychology best explains [erm, with reservations?.. best explains for now perhaps?] why people in the real world would wish to live according to moral principles at all, and it holds that any explanation of moral life must explain at the very least this one thing.
After that, if Willy B wants to do emotivist non-cognitivism while Harbal might favour more of a quasi-realist approach, both are available as extensions deeper into the morality-proper-Sculptor-PH-and-GANG-FSK namespace.
Today I have completed your morality-proper-FSK for you.
For the last few days I've been witnessing Immanuel Can fruitlessly trying to railroad Harbal, but failing in his usual elegance. A fairly quotidian state of affairs, and certainly not worthy of spawning a rare FlopDooPants thread you may imagine. But the curious thing about it is IC's extreme determination to fail.
Having identified Harbal as falling broadly under the Humean umbrella in these matters, which seems fairly accurate, mister Can made the quite bizarre choice of trying to enforce a Kantian set of deontological assumptions upon his hapless victim by banging on endlessy about imeratives. But what is entirely mad about the choice is that he opted to use motivational power as the cudgel with which to do so. What a week to be alive. The excitement is almost too much.
For anybody who cares to understand basic moral philosphy, moral motivation is a Kantian weakness and a Humean strength, so this move of IC's is much like challenging your enemy to a sword fight when he has a cutlass and you are armed with a cucumber.
Part2: the Next Bit (Still optional)
The reason why any moral take that falls anywhere within the very broad scope that can be considered Humean has no issues with moral motivation is because Hume famously wrote that “Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions” and, you know .... Kant definitely wouldn't write that.
The upshot of this is that Hume's description of morality begins with the motivating bit, the wants, the desires, the passions, the beliefs, in other words, the fucking motivation. Moral reasoning is in the Humean model, reasoning that we do about those motivating things. So if you are asked why you, as some sort of Humean, would choose to act honourably or honestly or something, the obvious answer is that it is because you believe acting honourably and honestly are good things, and you are motivated by your beliefs and desires which is perfectly natural.
The Kantian moral approach works differently. Kant was obsessed by rules, maxims and imperatives which people have a duty to follow, but no natural desire to. the things we naturally want are relegated into an inferior position as fodder for mere hypothetical imperatives. Kant's argument is that a Rational Will would search for a special set of logically desirable imperatives and then will itself to want to follow them. By this method he subdues the passions to become slaves of Pure Reason.
So I think that's enough words to explain why Kant has the problem of explaining moral motivation, something that Hume gets for free. At which point I am done with taunting IC, this thread isn't about him, he just provided an intertesting way for me to introduce the topic and explain why there would be controversy over this stuff.
I may as well at this point throw a quick bit of shade at VA. The reason why both Hume and Kant address moral motivation is because they were real philosophers and they both knew that it goes without saying that any theory of morality must explain motivation one way or another, this being Practical Reason and all. A moral theory that is only a "CLUE" to some jam-tomorrow future situation is not even wrong. So yeah, if Mannie hadn't been so agressively weird at Harbal, that's what I would have used as my entry point.
For a fuller read on the matters raised here, Chapter 7 of Simon Blackburn's Ruling Passions is where it's at, and includes Aristotle at no extra charge. Admittedly he doesn't poke IC and VA, but that's what you retain my services for.
Part 3: Yay, the actual point of this nonsense! (Just read this bit really)
The reason why a Humean type of moral explanation explains motivation so readily is because it is compatible with the BDM model (there are other names such as BDI, BDR.): The Belief Desire model of Motivation/Reason/Intention. Basically this is just the common sense, folk-psychology view of how we are motivated to do things that we believe will match our desires.
I am not saying BDM is the only way that we can account for the "wanting to" aspect of why people often but far from always act in accordance with their moral beliefs, simply that it works and I find this analysis agreeable.
So now the question is how many other people find this same explanation agreeable? Harbal must be in the bag, right? Willy B has expressed a belief that morality is founded on emotions, so he's a gimme. I'll be shocked if Pete and Sculptor aren't onside. IWP seems to like real psychology so I can't assume some homebrew folk-psych shit will work for me there, but it's quite likely.
So that's enough people to make a morality-proper-Harbal-PH-FDP-Sculptor-FSK following all the rules for construction of a "credible" FSK, and to have more people and thus greater credibility than the morality-proper FSK that VA can't even sell to his own mum.
All it really needs is for there to be a systematic belief system (they upgrade to knowledge systems when people believe them, this being the magic of the FSK lifecycle).
Proponents of the FSK don't need to agree on very much, the proposed morality-proper-WillBouwman-Pete-IWP-Sculptor-ATLA FSK really only contends that the BDM model of human psychology best explains [erm, with reservations?.. best explains for now perhaps?] why people in the real world would wish to live according to moral principles at all, and it holds that any explanation of moral life must explain at the very least this one thing.
After that, if Willy B wants to do emotivist non-cognitivism while Harbal might favour more of a quasi-realist approach, both are available as extensions deeper into the morality-proper-Sculptor-PH-and-GANG-FSK namespace.
Today I have completed your morality-proper-FSK for you.
