In a variant of the hoary old ‘ungrounded morality’ question, Barry Arrington has a post up at Uncommon Descent which ponders how a ‘materialist’ could in all conscience take a position as clinical ethicist, if he does not believe that there is an ultimate ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of clinical ethics. In contrast to daily usage, ethics here is not a synonym for morality.
I can understand how a theist who believes in the objective reality of ethical norms could apply for such a position in good faith. By definition he believes certain actions are really wrong and other actions are really right, and therefore he often has something meaningful to say.
My question is how could a materialist apply for such a position in good faith? After all, for the materialist there is really no satisfactory answer to Arthur Leff’s “grand sez who” question that we have discussed on these pages before. See here for Philip Johnson’s informative take on the issue.
After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.
I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” is ultimately meaningless.
(The last question is an odd one. You would pay someone to give you the “right answer” so long as they believe that there is such a thing?)
Of course you don’t have to go far into medical ethics before you get to genuine ethical thickets. The interests of a mother versus those of the foetus she carries; the unfortunate fact that there aren’t the resources to give every treatment to everyone; the thorny issues of voluntary euthanasia or ‘do not resuscitate’ decisions; issues raised by fertility treatments; cases such as the recent removal from hospital of Aysha King; the role of a patient’s own beliefs. There aren’t many right answers, when you get beyond the obvious things that you don’t need to pay someone to set guidelines for.
It is a bizarre argument to regard moral relativism as a bar to this job. A moral absolutist may believe that blood transfusion is wrong, that faith in the lord is the way to get better, that embryos should never be formed outside a uterus, or some other such faith-based notion. And they have to persuade others of different, or no, faith that this decision is indeed what objective morality dictates, and whatever their own views on morality they must accept that. So I don’t agree that the ‘grounding’ of an atheist’s personal moral principles has any bearing on their candidacy.
I think both 1 and 3 but possibly using different norms!
Consider the question of how to treat animals for a different flavors of constitutionalism. Is cruelty to animals an act subject to moral guidance?
A preference utilitarian might argue that animals have preferences and so the answer is yes. But the argument that animals have preferences would presumably rely on some definition of preference and some science about which animals have such things. But making that decision would not involve preference utilitarianism.
On the other hand, a rule consequentialist would be concerned about the consequences of cruelty to animals. Part of his or her argument might be that people who are cruel to animals will develop a toleration for cruelty and so be more likely to be cruel to other people. Hence it would be correct to have a rule against cruelty to animals. Here applied consequentialism for people has been part of the process.
Of course, one still needs to establish what cruelty to animals is; so again definition and science are needed.
By the way, to answer an earlier post from Alan F, most would agree that single celled animals don’t have preferences and cannot experience cruel behavior in any morally relevant sense.
At least, that is what my gut bacteria tells me.
The point I seem unable to get across is that the word “decision” implies fixed alternatives. I would say that the interesting parts of life involve something other than choosing. I call it inventing.
I don’t think any discussion of ethics and morality is worth much unless it asks whether a solution can be constructed that is something other than balancing undesirable outcomes.
I think it’s 3.
walto,
The problem is that desires often clash, so their satisfaction cannot be an unqualified good. An ethical system requires something extra so that it can adjudicate among competing desires.
Also, the existence of quarks (or of your computer screen) is much better supported than KN’s claim that human flourishing is an objective moral good.
Denying the former has vastly more consequences for the Quinean web than denying the latter.
It still seems important to separate out the two elements of any theory and to distinguish descriptive from prescriptive definitions. Different methodologies are appropriate for the different elements.
If I you want to investigate what “preference” means then you need to observe how we use the word.
If you want to define “preference” then you need to be explicit that is what you are doing and recognise it may not be the same as other people’s definitions and therefore may not have the same implications.
If you want to justify your attitude to animals based on the fact they have preferences then that is a matter of explaining the logic of the argument and making clear the underlying axioms/assumptions.
And so on.
But I in general I don’t see that happening. It all gets muddled up.
Sure, that makes good sense.
But of course, after you invent something new, you still need to understand the consequences for everyone affected by it, which may not be uniformly good.
Anyway, philosophers are good at inventing things. All sorts of weird and “wonderful” things.
I am not sure where you see it getting muddled up. If you mean at UD, then of course your are right.
If you mean among philosophers, then many philosophers will agree that other philosophers have it muddled up. But in a much more sophisticated way than at UD.
I’d also add that I think science is as important as linguistic/logical analysis in many cases. For example, Singer wants “preferences” to apply only to sentient animals, that is those that can “feel” hurt or happy. So that makes whether an animal can have a preference partly an empirical question.
Of course, you still need reasoning and definitions, although you may might choose to define “preferences” more precisely than as commonly used, at least if you are doing (3) or (1) and not (2).
There have been many discussions of what “objective” could mean at TSZ. In this thread, KN did not attempt to repeat those by giving a strict definition of objective. Instead, he was careful to say objective ” in roughly the same way that scientific theories are objective.”
Science is fallible. So, as KN makes clear, “objectively- true” theories are those arrived at by a scientific process, that is one using norms like properly controlled and analysed experimentation, consistency with the rest of science, principled peer review. Why accept those norms as resulting in objectivity? I think for pragmatic reasons: they work for making novel scientific predictions and, more importantly perhaps, they work for building better technology which everyone can judge.
In the case of morality, KN claims we should use similar standards to judge objectivity. We should not expect objectivity to mean a deductive argument which can convince anyone. Instead, as in science, we should see theories judged by a series of norms whose efficacy is proven pragmatically.
Specifically, we should judge objectivity of morality by how well it promotes human flourishing.
Now I see three questions one could raise:
1. Why should morality be (mainly) about human flourishing?
2. What is “human flourishing” ?
3. What moral systems best promote human flourishing?
It seems to me that (1) has to be settled up front for any principled discussion. For me, I’d wonder what else it can be about.
Once/if that is agreed, (2) and (3) can be answered with a combination of scientific and philosophical reasoning which can be judged to be objective to the extent it meets the criteria given above.
For example, when applying pragmatic considerations to the success of an historical moral system, we could ask: how many people continued to live in such a society by choice? I don’t mean that as the only criterion, of course.
I’m not sure what you mean by “unqualified,” but satisfaction of some particular desire is, as I wrote, only a prima facie good–just as something seeming green and solid to someone now is evidence, but not conclusive evidence. Percepts also conflict–not only among cultures and different people within the same culture, but within the same person from one minute to the next. Would that there were absolute certainty of SOMETHING, but alas…..
Re the Quinean web, I agree with you. The ethical claims probably are less central.
A lot of what ethics is, or should be, is shoving as much as possible over to the empirical side–where progress can often actually be made. The error is in believing that once one has moved everything over that can ever be moved, there’s nothing left. Because, as Mark said, there’s still getting all the axioms clear and lined up right. And that’s not empirical.
walto,
Perf. Thanks, Neil!
Well, that’s the curse of empiricism. Always bound to facts.
My pointy is that deep differences in preference are not arguable, any more than differences in food preferences or sexual orientation. I don’t see anything to be gained by pretending that we can resolve differences regarding abortion, animal experimentation, war, capital punishment. In general, discussions are little more than rationalizations, not much removed from scholasticism.
My point would be that not many people want to hurt animals or kill people. Those who do generally hide their desires. Or channel them into voluntary forms of mayhem, like contact sports. Sports involve violence, injury and occasional deaths, without inflicting them on innocent bystanders. I don’t promote them as ideal solutions, but as a step away from activities that are widely disliked.
I agree that this is more than morality than science, but I don’t like the word “axioms”.
To me, “axiom” has the mathematical connotation of an assumed and somewhat arbitrary starting point from which to prove theorems through deduction.
Moral reasoning, like scientific reasoning, is much more than deduction.
And the starting points are not arbitrary, but have to somehow relate to the human condition. They may generalize it (eg any rational being or any being that can conceive of a future for itself), but they must encompass what it is to be human.
And yet intelligent people argue about them all the time. For examples, search for Singer on Youtube.
Many people change their minds, I think, after listening to such arguments conducted over time in their societies. How else can you explain social change within one generation, like the recent shift in support for gay marriage?
Or even if the change takes longer than one generation, why one particular generation and not another?
If you say it is like evolution, what is the fitness function? Or do you claim all social change is just random drift, eg, tomorrow I may wake up to find I am a creationist?
I agree with all of that.
Bruce,
That’s actually not true. In Islam, for example, morality begins and ends with God’s will, which always trumps human desires.
A simple way to test an allegedly objective truth is to see what happens when you deny it or even assert its opposite. This had better cause trouble. If it doesn’t, then its designation as an objective truth was likely unjustified.
Here’s KN’s assertion:
I find that denying this assertion or asserting its opposite causes no trouble. It leads to no contradictions, and it doesn’t clash with observations. If an assertion and its opposite work equally well, how can we justify the claim that it is objectively true?
Somebody should suggest definitions for absolute, relative, objective, subjective.
BruceS:
My point, though flippant, was that there is a continuum of sentience from the simple “run-and-tumble” strategy of E. coli to the social organisation that sometimes happens in human society.
This TED talk by Frans de Waal contains some convincing clips that fairness is a concept not unique to humans. The last clip of capuchin monkeys is especially telling.
Sure, but existence of gray does not mean non-existence of black and white. Science is needed in this case, of course.
If you mean necessary and sufficient conditions as a definition, I don’t think that would be helpful. There have been many arguments about those types of definitions already at TSZ. I recall Dr. Liddle, WJM, and KN having at it on “objective”, for example.
I don’t think there was a useful conclusion. Just a fight over how to read the dictionary, at one point at least.
I think KN’s approach in this thread of defining the term by giving similar usage in a different context is more helpful.
I believe that is only the case if one is using deductive reasoning only and is also defining objective to imply that one is limited to deductive reasoning.
The moral naturalists propose that ampliative reasoning as well as empirical facts must be part of the process.
That is also partly how they address Hume’s is/ought gap: noting that he meant one cannot use only deductive reasoning to derive oughts from only is’s. Flanagan explains that in more detail in the paper I linked.
I do agree it is important to read KN’s posts as a whole and to look at the references he provides to get a more complete understanding of how he is proposing to use the concept of “objectivity”.
Keith: This is a good point.
I agree we should restrict the cases under consideration to secular attempts to provide objectivity to morality. My understanding of KN’s posts taken as a whole in this thread was that was what he was trying to do as well.
Plus he does admit he thinks objectivity might only work for naturalistic ethics and only if one defines objectivity analogously to how it applies to science. So I am just trying to understand how that restricted case might work.
Theologically-based morality has other approaches of course to claiming objectivity. They have been discussed extensively here at TSZ already.
Sometimes, just a clue about which dictionary definition someone is using can be helpful. Subjective/objective alone has a huge scope for misunderstanding.
Just to be clear, I am trying to understand what it means to say “naturalistic morality is objective in the same way we say science is objective”.
Of course, not everyone agrees science is objective, depending on which dictionary they use! And my (understanding of KN’s) usage of “objective” does not mean true a priori or agreed to be true by everyone (or even by all scientists working in the field).
So I tried to define the usage a bit more precisely by referring to scientific norms and their pragmatic success in an earlier post.
But I don’t know of any dictionary that takes that approach.
I’d agree that individual scientists can lack objectivity but the discipline as a whole, being based on observations of external phenomena, will result in the reproduction of reliable data. (Where else are we to get reliable data?)
keiths:
Bruce:
No, it works with inductive reasoning as well. Inductive reasoning is the backbone of science, after all, and it would be strange indeed to argue that science is incapable of establishing objective truth.
Take the classic inductive example: Your best friend claims, based on induction, that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. If you assert the opposite then within 24 hours you will find your assertion clashing with observation. Your friend’s assertion was objectively true, but the opposite assertion was not.
You can do the same with KN’s assertion:
If you assert the opposite, nothing bad happens. No contradictions are generated, and the new assertion does not clash with observations.
If an assertion and its opposite work equally well, then how can we justify the claim that one of them is objectively true, while the other isn’t?
Is it? Count me as a skeptic.
Sure. Laws of nature are arrived at inductively. They are generalizations from a finite set of observations.
Bruce,
From a different angle, I would say that scientific reasoning can establish that:
1. It is objectively true that some people regard human flourishing as the goal of morality.
2. It is objectively true that some things promote human flourishing (suitably well-defined) and others impede it.
3. It is even objectively true that if human flourishing is an objective moral good, then systems that promote human flourishing are objectively moral to that extent.
What scientific reasoning cannot establish is this:
4. Human flourishing is an objective moral good.
You will run into trouble if you deny #1, #2, or #3. Deny #4, however, and nothing bad happens. You can even assert this…
5. Human flourishing is an objective moral evil.
…without running into trouble. No contradictions, no conflicting observations.
That’s the “Just so” story that I see coming from philosophy of science. But I cannot find any evidential basis for it.
It is definitely the case that science cannot establish that this or that is a (or, if you prefer “an objective”) moral good or evil–unless we start out with items that science can count–e.g., excitements of nerves of certain sorts or the satisfaction of various desires, and we also take a utilitarian position regarding the comparison of events for good and evil.
But it is also definitely the case that nothing can be both a (an objective) moral good and a (an objective) moral evil–that’s obviously just a self-contradiction. The correct conclusion to draw from this is that science is not the sole manner of determining objective truths. In fact, it is not even the sole manner of determining non-ethical objective truths. For example, that I now seem to be seeing a computer monitor is an objective truth.
Neil,
If you disagree with the standard view, you’re welcome to set forth your own view along with a supporting argument.
walto,
Right. It’s either one, or the other, or neither. My point is that if you can just as easily deny a purported “objective truth” as affirm it, with no resulting contradictions or observational conflicts, then you weren’t justified in regarding it as an objective truth in the first place.
Sure, and the fact that I regard gratuitous cruelty as immoral is also an objective truth.
The difference arises when we look at the referents of those mental states.
There are many distinct and independent ways of corroborating the existence of your computer monitor, each of which buttresses the others and makes it less likely that the monitor is illusory.
Not so for my moral intuition. I know that I feel that gratuitous cruelty is immoral, and I know that others also feel this way, but I have no way of demonstrating that gratuitous cruelty is objectively immoral.
What kind of test could I perform to demonstrate this? What distinguishing predictions are entailed by the hypothesis that GC is objectively, as opposed to subjectively, immoral? I can’t think of any.
In my view, we test our moral intuitions in much the same way as we test our perceptual takings. We “look” from other angles, we ask others how they feel about the same thing, We look again later. We ask people whom we believe to have good “vision” on these matters. These additional reports will buttress or tend to disconfirm our original take on the situation.
But, yes, of course, values are not the same types of things as factual statements and they can’t be confirmed or disconfirmed by scientific investigations. But just as my ostensible perceptions indicate perceptual objects which could be entirely dreamt (as could all my apparent confirmations of those observations) so, IMO, do my emotions of approbation and disapprobation indicate values about which I may either be right or wrong, in spite of the possibility that I’m entirely confused. I don’t let the possibility of the truth of skepticism convince me that my apparent perceptions are all wrong and see no reason for letting the possibility of there being no values convince me that my moral intuitions are all wrong.
walto,
You’re still neglecting the important differences between the two cases.
As humans, we know that we are susceptible to both perceptual and cognitive illusions (and plenty of them). If you see your water heater smiling at you, you do not automatically accept the perception as veridical. You first ask yourself whether you are dreaming, or drunk, or forgot to take your meds, or are on an episode of Candid Camera. You do this because you have lots of independent and well-established reasons for doubting that your water heater is capable of smiling, and lots of distinct and independent methods of verifying (or disconfirming) your perception.
In the case of claims about objective morality, your judgment rests on nothing more than your moral intuition and the moral intuition of others. You can’t consult your other senses for confirmation, and you can’t employ scientific instruments to verify your claim. Even if everyone you ask agrees with your judgment, you can’t be sure that all of you are not subject to a similar moral illusion. After all, they, like you, are simply consulting their consciences.
“X is objectively immoral”, by itself, has no testable consequences that are not shared by “X seems objectively immoral”. Given this, it shouldn’t be surprising that we can’t establish the former assertion as true.
Contrast this to the existence of your monitor, which can be corroborated by almost all of your senses, by scientific instruments, by pre-established knowledge, by the observations of others, etc. Is it possible that you are mistaken about the existence of your monitor? Sure, but that would require a complicated network of many coordinated illusions: Your vision would have to mistakenly tell you that a monitor was there, and would have to create the illusion that coherent sentences and paragraphs were displayed by it. Your touch would also have to mistakenly give you the impression that a monitor of the correct size, heft and texture was there, that its warmth was appropriate for the amount of time it had been turned on. When you reached out to touch it, your vision would need to mistakenly show your hand contacting the monitor at exactly the time your sense of touch mistakenly told you that you had made contact with it, and so on. Factor in your other senses and your knowledge and it gets even more complicated.
A judicious application of Ockham’s Razor tells us to prefer the simpler explanation: the monitor is really there.
Fill your room with people from around the world, and you can convince them all of the reality of your monitor. Persuading them that human flourishing is the goal of objective morality will be a different story, and for good reason.
Finally, although we have evolutionary reasons to expect that our sensory perceptions are largely reliable and objective, we don’t have similar reasons to expect our moral intuitions to be objective. Evolution “cares” about our sensory perceptions. Failing to perceive a predator can be a fatal mistake. So can mistaking a poisonous plant for an edible one, or misjudging the distance to the edge of a cliff. There is no analogous penalty for failing to recognize something as objectively moral or immoral. There would be no selective pressure for developing such a sense.
(Note: I am not saying that moral intuition is evolutionarily unimportant — just that it is unimportant whether it reflects objective morality.)
I was thinking more of WJM’s type of arguments on whether science is objective.
Saying it results in reliable test data means it is objective is what I meant by pragmatic justification.
But if you restrict test data to “results of scientific experiments”, some might counter that the test data is only reliable because of the rules scientists impose — so it is a circular justification.
That is why I also pointed to the technology that all can use that is based on scientific theories as a source of pragmatic justification.
Keith:
I was thinking more of cases of science where incompatible models/theories are still both found to be useful or debated, because the evidence is incomplete or interpreted different ways by scientists, for example. But it is still valid to call both scientific theories objective.
It is also probably a good idea to separate an “objective” process from “truth” to avoid getting into whether scientific realism is true which I don’t think is relevant to this particular issue.
Also, as in science, pragmatic evaluation has to be involved. I don’t claim that anything can be asserted as a moral norm and said to be objective.
Keith:
Sure, that distinction is the same as the one I made to Mark Frank.
I am not trying to establish anything as “an objective good”. Only to say that naturalistic ethics can be regarded as objective in the same way science is objective.
To try to detail the analogy: an output of science is theories/models, which are governed by norms, which are justified by their pragmatic success.
An output of naturalistic ethics are norms for living with people (including yourself) and for structuring how people live together, these norms are based on science and metanorms, and the metanorms are justified by the pragmatic success of the resulting moral systems in real societies.
Making “human flourishing” the heart of the matter is not something I claim to be objectively true is the sense that it can be proven deductively somehow. It is rather a statement about what secular morality has to be about. Further, I am not saying that this statement is an output of naturalistic ethics. I am saying it is a basis for any secular morality to get started.
ETA: In reviewing some of the discussion with Walt, I wanted to clarify a possible confusion which I thought occurred in those exchanges. I am NOT saying we use scientific reasoning to justify moral norms. The analogy is at a higher level as I tried to explain in above.
Both are processes to augment what we have from evolution. Science enhances and corrects unreliable theorizing about the world based on the raw senses and “folk” theories. Naturalistic ethics can perform a similar role for the moral intuitions we start with from evolution.
keiths,
I don’t think the picture you have given is refutable–it’s perfectly possible that there are no values. As I’ve said, however, since so much of our ordinary thinking and talking about the world is value-laden, it makes us wrong about nearly everything.
In addition, I don’t think science or anything else can PROVE that there are computer monitors. It has methods of confirming perceptual judgments that require one to accept the methods it uses (and that there are others besides one in the world at all). These are not demonstratable–they’re prudential.
I take the prima facie goodness of pleasure and the prima facie badness of pain as basic–just as I take the evidence provided by my senses as basic–I can’t prove that either are any good, but I don’t take claims to the contrary very seriously anyhow. No one actually acts as if skepticism about either were true.
That nearly everyone enjoys orgasms and dislikes the feeling of flu shots seems to me a perfectly acceptable grounding of my view of this matter. You note that everyone I ask about the moral goodness of some act might be subject to the same error as I am. Right, but everyone I ask about some percept might be suffering from a like hallucination. Also, I can do more than ask them–I can note what they say to others and how they actually act. I can see if additional experiences or arguments change their views, etc.
What I can’t do is turn values into facts as you seem to want to require. IMO, values are just as fundamental furniture as facts are, whether their basic characteristics are confirmable by scientific investigation or not. If they WERE so confirmable, they wouldn’t BE values. If you insist upon scientific confirmation of values, you will not get it, but, IMO, that’s simply because you are limiting what is in the world to what can be confirmed by science. You suggest we knock out values via Occam’s razor. And, of course, many people do so. But skeptics suggest we knock out the past or the future or even the external world for the same reasons.
Our difference on this matter is basic, I think. You take some kind of inference from best explanation to get us to chairs, quarks, other people, etc. and think that there are no similar inferences we can use to get us to values. I don’t think we use such inferences in either case. I take emotions, like perceptions to be intrinsically intentional.
One other point. Consider aesthetic judgement. One person who has never heard any music other than “Mary had a little lamb” thinks some other piece is beautiful. Another person, who has studied music for many years thinks its shit. On your view, (a) each judgment is as good as the other, and (b) they don’t really disagree because all they are saying is that they like or dislike the piece in question. Both of those claims seem obviously false to me.
Again, there are no proofs available as the beauty of this or that art work. But why must judgments require that there be? Who said aesthetic appraisal was supposed to be just like scientific investigation? There are arts and there are sciences.
I think you were responding to keiths.
I’d agree with keiths on point (a). While I might agree with one judgment, and disagree with the other, that would be my only subjective opinion. I don’t see that there is any standard of goodness that can be applied to such questions.
On (b), it’s a bit more dependent on context. Perhaps the people making judgments did intend what they say to apply to others, in which case they are disagreeing.
Bruce,
But that’s exactly what we’ve been discussing! KN claimed:
I disagree, because human flourishing cannot be shown to be an objective moral good.
walto,
I haven’t argued that values don’t exist, just that they’re not objective.
Only if you insist that values are objective. Acknowledge their subjectivity and the problem disappears. Values are real, they’re important, and they guide our behavior in many cases — but they’re not objective. A value is something valued by a valuer. Different valuers may (and do) value different things.
Nor do I. In fact, I don’t think we can know anything with absolute certainty. We can only regard our beliefs as more or less likely to be true, depending on how well-supported they are.
The existence of your monitor is very well-supported. Not so for the existence of objective morality or objective values.
Their efficacy is demonstrable, and furthermore they derive from styles of thinking that we use in our everyday lives — just applied more rigorously and systematically. We’re surrounded by examples of scientific success, which is why science is held in such high regard as a means of uncovering objective truth.
But you don’t accept the verdict of your senses unquestioningly, as my example of the smiling water heater shows. Like the rest of us, you regard your senses as fallible, and you cross-check them against each other and against your cognitions.
In the case of your monitor, many distinct and independent cross-checks are available. In the case of morality, everything funnels through the conscience (yours and others’). The cross-checks simply aren’t there.
The near-universal human experience of the sweetness of sugar does not demonstrate that sugar is objectively sweet. Likewise, the existence of shared likes and dislikes among humans does not demonstrate that the objects of these feelings are objectively good or bad. There are excellent evolutionary reasons for the fact that we generally like orgasms, dislike the pain of injury, and enjoy the sweetness of sugar, and those reasons are completely independent of any objective goodness, badness, or sweetness, respectively.
The difference is that in the case of morality, one defect — a shared fault of conscience that leads you and the people you consult to an incorrect conclusion about objective morality — is enough to produce an error. (And we already know that people are susceptible to shared illusions, e.g. the Müller-Lyer illusion).
In the case of your monitor, one mistaken sense is not enough to produce an error. Your vision, your touch, your hearing, even your sense of smell also need to be wrong. And not just wrong, but wrong in a tightly choreographed, coordinated way! No wonder people regard this as implausible (though not logically impossible — c.f. Descartes’ evil demon and The Matrix).
But all of these things, at best, trace back to their consciences. The conscience is the Achilles’ heel of any claim of objective morality, because there are no independent ways of checking its correctness with respect to objective morality.
I don’t think they can be turned into facts, which is why they cannot be objective. Nothing is morally wrong or right in an absolute sense — it’s only wrong or right to somebody, whose next-door neighbor may disagree, with no objective means of resolving the difference.
What alternative means of confirmation do you suggest? Conscience itself is faillible and may be systematically flawed, particularly since there is no selective pressure for objectivity. What else is there to go by? What other tests can you perform to determine whether something is objectively moral or immoral?
No, I invoked Ockham to show why it makes more sense to regard your monitor as real rather than as an elaborately choreographed illusion.
Again, I think values are real, but subjective.
walto,
No. By my (subjective) standards, one of the judgments might be far superior to the other, in which case I would say so. What I wouldn’t claim is that my own standards were themselves objective.
This isn’t to say that musical training can’t influence taste, but any changes in taste due to musical training cannot be said to be objectively for the better.
I think ma po tofu is delicious. My mom thinks it’s disgusting. Is one of us right, and the other wrong? Is there an objective fact of the matter? Why not simply acknowledge that “delicious” is in the taste buds (and olfactory cells) of the beholder?
Likewise for beauty. I think Barber’s Adagio for Strings is gorgeous; it gives me the chills. Yet others have described it as mawkish. Does there have to be a correct, objective answer? Why not accept that beauty is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder?
How would you go about demonstrating that one piece of music was objectively more beautiful than another?
It depends on what they mean. If they are arguing over objective beauty, then they clearly disagree. If they acknowledge that beauty is subjective, then to claim that “X is beautiful” is tantamount to saying “I find X to be beautiful”, in which case there is no genuine disagreement.
Judgments don’t require proof if you accept that they are subjective. It’s only when people start making claims about objective beauty or morality that I ask for evidence and supporting arguments.
Not me. I accept that aesthetic judgments are neither objectively right nor wrong.
I take “value” to mean what you mean by “objective value”. When you say there are values, just not objective values, it is akin to saying that X is true for me even though not-X is true for you, which I take to be a confusing way of saying “I believe X and you don’t believe X.” Personalizing properties of this kind just makes a mess. In any case, in my language, you simply deny that there are values. It’s a linguistic point, but I think it matters. I don’t put our difference that you think there are subjective values only and I think there are objective values. I believe that if there are no (objective) values, I am mistaken when I think that something somebody is doing is good and I am wrong. You hold that nobody is wrong about these matters, because to think something is good is simply to approve it. Disagreement makes no sense in that world.
I like your point about confirmation via the different modes of sense. I’d like to think about it, but you may be right that that’s not available in the case of values, but I’m not sure it matters. There is either a planet with human life on it that we will never see or there is not. The ability to confirm something–in a manner some like–does not make the property come into being. Values are not facts. If you take only facts to exist, then there are no values, and you take only what science can confirm to exist, and so you get your conclusion that there are no values. It’s a positivist view I disagree with.
And even In the case of food, I think there are objectively bad hamburgers.
Bruce said:
“I don’t claim that anything can be asserted as a moral norm and said to be objective.”
Keith replied:
But that’s exactly what we’ve been discussing!
I should have italicized “anything” in my quote. What I meant was that before something can be justified as an “objective” moral norm, it has to go through an analogous process to what a scientific theory goes through before it can be justifiably called “objective”.
Analogous, not the same.
What I am saying overlaps some of Walt’s arguments. But some of the time, he is referring to individual facts or experiences. My (really KN’s as I read them) points are solely about norms from naturalistic ethics compared to scientific theories.
Anyway, as best as I can tell, I think I am trying to defend a way of thinking about “objective” which is too far from the way you think about it. So I am going to leave it at that.
I want to agree with the general point that there can be objective knowledge about music.
But I do see a challenge: if we use pragmatic means to justify the success of science (predictions and technology) and of moral norms (successful, enduring societies), then what pragmatic means could we use the justify the “objectivity” or the norms applied by trained music theorists?
The best I can see is these norms endure in some sense, although they may become more sophisticated and pick out some different music over time. (However, there should be some music they pick out consistently, I suspect).
But that seems even more hand-wavy than usual for me.
Just wrote a paper on this, Bruce. If it gets accepted, I’ll provide a link.
I’ve been absent from this discussion, but I wanted to say that it was no part of my intention to either (a) assert that human flourishing can be shown to be an objective moral good or (b) give an argument (much less a conclusive one) to establish that human flourishing is an objective moral good.
My intention was to propose “the promotion of human flourishing” as a candidate ‘objective moral good,’ in the minimal sense of functioning as a criterion for resolving differences between different moral frameworks, and esp. with regard to specific moral judgments that are legitimized in terms of those frameworks. If someone insists that “honor killing is morally obligatory,” we can say, “well, you have a system of judgments and emotions which supports that claim, but does that system itself promote human flourishing?” If the person then replies that the promotion of human flourishing isn’t something that he or she cares about, then perhaps the conversation has come to an end.
(Rational discourse can’t solve all problems. A colleague of mine is struggling to deal with a student of hers who is a white supremacist, misogynist, and –of course — “Christian”. He is completely willing to say that justice consists of oppressing other people. Needless to say, my colleague isn’t entirely sure how to handle the situation! There’s a deep truth about the limits of discourse reflected in the fact that Book I of Republic ends with Thrasymachus’s decision to leave the conversation.)
Two theoretical options to address:
(1) “ok, the promotion of human flourishing seems like a good criterion for resolving conflicts between ethical frameworks, but that isn’t not an objective moral good.” This objection relies on demanding a conception of “objective moral good” as something more than “a criterion for resolving conflicts between frameworks”. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I suspect that’s being driven by an intuition that “objective” means “absolute”, or that “objective” means “partially constitutive of the fundamental structure of reality”. Needless to say, those are intuitions which I don’t share — though they might be worth talking about.
(2) “ok, human flourishing seems morally good to us, but is it really morally good in itself?” This is a version of Moore’s open question argument, and like the open question argument, it has no refutation. But I’m not sure if the open question needs to be taken seriously, either.
KN,
In that case I would suggest that the word ‘objective’ is out of place, and that this…
…would be better rephrased as something like this:
Bruce,
And:
In essence, you are arguing that moral norms are objectively good to the extent that they promote ‘successful, enduring societies’. But in so doing, you are unwittingly assuming that successful, enduring societies are an objective moral good.
Many of us desire successful, enduring, societies, but I see no way of establishing them as objectively good. The Rafulans of Beta Centauri may see human societies as an infestation to be eradicated. Who is really right?