An argument for a new normative theory (and a PhD thesis)

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
41

You’ve introduced two different meanings of “freedom”, I wasn’t aware this two-part division was your definition here. You admit that I have freedom to go to where the party is at or not, and this freedom can be violated if for example you deceive me into going where I don’t really want to go. This is basically just the freedom to act in ways that conform to my desire to act.

Then there is this new class of freedom you allude to, that I only have freedom with regard to what I have ownership over. Obviously I don’t have ownership over what other people do. But how does this ownership issue bear upon my own freedom? Am I “free” to dispose of my property or life as I see fit? Someone can step in an prevent that, or mess it up, in which case my freedom was violated.

Are you claiming that the freedom to act in a way that conforms to one’s desire to act is a lesser class of freedom than is the freedom to dispose of one’s property and life as one sees fit? Remember that this is all ostensibly about lying; do I have a “freedom” to go to a party that you told me about, as you claim there are hot chicks there and now based on that information I obtain a new freedom whereby I am free to choose to conform my actions to my desire with regard to this new information, or do you not consider this a freedom at all?

In the extreme case you could be claiming that freedom is only meaningful when it involves disposing of one’s property (including one’s own life); I would be inclined to include one’s capacity for acting in accord with one’s desires as part of “disposing of one’s life”, but since it doesn’t seem you’re incorporating that I’ll drop it for argument’s sake; but, again, if you’re taking the extreme case per the definition of freedom as property and life disposal, AND if you are claiming that lying is morally problematic only when it violates someone’s freedom, then you are claiming that lying is never morally problematic unless it violates someone’s capacity to dispose of their own property or their own life as they desire to dispose of them.

Is that what you’re claiming?

42

The point is that you lied and said that it IS a choice available, thus altering the understanding and decision making process that would have been there if you had not lied.

It appears obvious that you are attempting to rationalize a preference rather than properly justify an understanding.

43

I would not call the ability to act in accordance with one’s desires “freedom”, but yes I would say that being able to act in ways that conform to your desire to act is not morally relevant in the sense you are using it here.

Likewise, if my desire is to fly to the moon on a winged horse, there is no violation of my freedom in the physical impossibility of doing so.

Dispose of is not the term I would use, but yes I would say that lying is only morally problematic when it affects someone’s freedom over their body, their mind and their property.

44

So if NASA tells you that the space craft has been thoroughly tested and works great (aka “pretty girls at the party”), yet in fact wasn’t tested and isn’t actually capable of getting you all the way to the Moon, you would not be offended, right?

45

Freedom is generally taken to mean the absence of limitations and restrictions. The ability to do something. If one cannot act in the way one would like to act, if the only reason why one cannot act in a given way is because of a limitation and restriction in place preventing that action, then that seems to be a perfect example of an infringement upon a freedom.

You are already defining freedom in the same way I am, it’s just that you are restricting the range of your definition to acts one wishes to do that “affect” “their body, their mind and their property”.

Isn’t there, though? Surely that is a perfect case where you do not have the freedom to fly to the moon on a winged horse. That sentence (“you do not have the freedom to fly to the moon on a winged horse”) makes perfect sense, it is not meaningless at all, nor logically or grammatically incorrect. The use of the word ‘freedom’ in that sentence means something. Expressing freedom in this way, as a negative, as the absence of a freedom, already implies that a potential freedom exists and that it is meaningful to talk about a potential freedom which is presently curtailed somehow.

We used to not have the freedom to cross the oceans, now we do. We used to not have the freedom to survive a bacterial infection, now we do. We used to not have the freedom to put a man in space, now we do. We used to not have the freedom to communicate in real-time with someone on the other side of the planet, now we do. Can you see that these are freedoms, ones that are earned over time precisely because we envision the existence of the freedom before we actually possess it?

What about causing distress to someone, or inconvenience, or distorting their perceptions? If I lie about Einstein being in my house, I have distorted the perception of the Nazi soldiers looking for Einstein; if I have lied to my mom about getting the job promotion she was hoping I would get, I have distorted her perceptions as well, and I have placed falsehoods directly into her mind where they will spread and cause further misinformation to occur. If I lie to a friend and say her outfit makes her look terrible, only because I am jealous of how good she looks, then I have caused her emotional discomfort. If I lie to my boss about the content of my report and it turns out my coworker needs to re-write part of my report while I’m not there to make sure it passes spec, then I have caused inconvenience to my coworker and possible to my boss as well.

How can you just parse all this so black and white and say “lying is only morally problematic if it affects the body, mind or property”? Exactly why are you trying to find a sufficient minimum standard here, what is your motivation for doing that? In the case of lying, for example the situation with hiding Einstein in your closet from the Nazis, it seems far more plausible to claim that this is a case of conflicting goods: there is a good involved in telling the truth, and there is a good involved in protecting Einstein. We weigh those goods-in-conflict and come up with a best possible answer. But you are trying to re-define lying to mean something non-conflicting, which goes against the entire reason why lying is morally problematic to begin with. The reason we struggle over whether to lie or not is precisely because lying is inherently expressing conflicting goods.

There is nothing wrong with the conflicting goods view on lying. There is no reason to try and redefine lying into something that is never morally problematic or self-irreconcilable. Morality exists precisely because we often find ourselves in situations in which there is no perfect action or response.

46

Wyld: I am aware “freedom” is generally used in a different way, which is why I made pains to clarify what I meant by freedom.

As for causing distress or inconvenience to someone, I would say that this is not morally relevant. But you are not the first person to bring this up as an objection. I discuss it specifically in my thesis.

47

When it affects someone’s body, mind or property??

Sheesh !!! I could write a whole essay on that!

Let’s see, a slave is property.

Solve it. Seriously, body, mind or property. Solve that.

So a slave master knocks on your door and asks “do you have an Underground Railroad here?”

How do you answer?

I’ll teach you a rhetorical trick, which is only slightly incidental to the nightmare of your formulation…

Say and/or instead of and or or

48

Out of my entire post, this is all you have to respond with?

Ok then.

49

I am compelled here of a philosophically based objection, introduced for the n’th time.

A normative theory reduced to positivist quests to meaning of familiar yet apparently indistinct elements, should prove as indeterminate as it’s terms. Right?

I too was a PHD candidate, not hazarding a thesis this complex, yet I am unable to wrap my mind around the obvious necessity to answer this very basic problem with this dissertation. Can anyone bring some light to this?

Thanks.

50

Ecmandu: Slavery is easy: You can’t own a person.

Wyld: To respond to the rest of it: No, I can see that now we are capable of doing this but you still do not have any claim to a “right” (word used for convenience’s sake) to fly to the moon or a boat to cross the oceans.

My motivation is to explain the logical implications of my normative theory for lying. Yes, you could have a conflicting goods account, but we would need to justify those goods as good in the first place.

Jerkey: I am not entirely sure what you mean by that. Could you expand on that a bit?

51

Daniel,

The thesis of a normative theory in its corpus is purportedly an assumptive quest into the idea that a the theory could satisfy elements consistent with
a general equivocal framework upon which the specifics can be applied to.

So a normative theory is based on the assumption that such a theory is at least possible. Right?

It is not certain that it can define all the applicable elements within itt’s derivation because, some of them further explorations of what those elements may mean. This is the problem with a hypothetical normative thesis, there is uncertainty into meaning. And that is where we find ourselves now. Quibbling about what these elements mean, lying, etc. We seem to be stuck on this level.

Positivism suffers the same ontological fate, as per your reply to Wyild.

If we can get this far, and have mutual meaning ironed out, then we can proceed.

52

jerkey, I think he is trolling.

53

So basically, the solution to your ethics is that we have a world where lying isn’t necessary…

Just to step over the whole problem.

54

Ecmandu: No, my solution to the problem you posed is that slavery is an act of kidnapping and forced labour and is morally impermissible, so you have no obligation to help the master get his slave back, and indeed you have an obligation to lie insofar as not doing so would lead to the recapture of the slave.

55

On the other hand, generic slavery is a product of colonial ideas of submitting populations and races to genetic typing, where they were initially not kidnapped, but invaded and forced into submission.

All invasions of enemies and territorial equisitions are considered the enslavement of the conquered populations. Again, the meaning of slavery comes to the fire.

56

In the context of his general argument, though, I think it’s fair to say that no moral agents are violating his freedom.

57

Why does freedom need to be violated by “a moral agent” in order for freedom to be violated?

58

This gets to the problem with all this: conceptualizing freedom in this limited, narrow way is not helpful, and in fact is being done precisely to avoid the real issues and problems that a philosophy of morality ought to be addressing head-on. We are supposed to conclude that lying is morally insignificant whenever it doesn’t produce any restriction on the “bodily or mental freedom” or “property” of another person? What the fuck kind of definition of lying is that? It’s not just empty consequentialism, it isn’t even fucking philosophy. The entire meaning of “to lie” has been cut away.

What is lying? Lying is knowingly speaking an untruth. We can perhaps condition the “knowing” by adding that it is possible to lie without realizing it, to speak untruths that one does not know are untruths, but to call that lying would be questionable. Lying typically means that we say or present something in such a way that it will deceive, and we know it will deceive precisely because we are aware of the deception at the time the lie is spoken.

Do deceptions and a desire to deceive need to cause tangible harm, either in Daniel’s very narrow understanding of harm here, or in a larger understanding, to be considered morally problematic? Daniel doesn’t seem to care much for truth, given that he wants to normalize deception outside of any appeal to truth qua standard of measure. In philosophy we hold truth as a high value, and truthfulness and honesty, for indeed the capacity for honesty is just the capacity for mind, for the intellect itself, and without ruthless honesty and self-honesty nothing in philosophy would be possible. The subsequent value of deception and dishonesty lies in its capacity to expand and tempt truth (and our minds, which come from our having been truthful) to new frontiers and insights, to expand and push back against limits; basically we become self-critical when we discover the ability to deceive and to lie, but that does not mean deception and lying are to now replace truth as a standard of value.

I haven’t seen an analysis here of the capacity to deceive and to lie, nor of the nature of deception and lying; all I see here is an approach to abandoning philosophy wholesale: we are supposed to restrict the sphere of our philosophical concern to only those lies which end up causing some kind of measurable harm only with respect to a limited purview (“impedes upon bodily or mental freedom, or on property”). You are free to call that philosophy if you wish, but philosophy it is not.

59

The entire gist of this ‘theory’ can be summed up in a single sentence: things are bad when they case harm.

Yeah, no shit. A 5 year old could have come up with that ‘theory’. Or better yet, you could more openly plagiarize Nietzsche and just say outright that morality is a human invention with no real meaning or significance, except where “someone gets hurt”, or something.

For that matter you haven’t even defined harm, as far as I have seen. What is the relationship between harm and pain, or between harm and loss, or between harm and deception, or between harm and untruth, or between harm and stagnation, or between harm and unhappiness? Utilitarianism isn’t a fucking philosophy, it is the desire to avoid philosophizing.

This is all revealing very well the dangers of the analytic/typical academic approach to philosophizing. If you want to start doing real work, go through the following procedures:

A) Define freedom
B) Define truth
C) Define honesty
D) Define lying (include showing many different contexts and situations in which lies are told for a variety of different reasons, and to a variety of different results)

Make sure your definitions are as sufficient and as necessary as possible. Then,

E) Define philosophy in terms of A, B, C and D above

In each of your above definitions, you will have three parts: 1) the structure (ontological) of the thing to be defined, 2) the sufficient reason and causality (ontogeny) of the thing to be defined (why and how does it exist?), and 3) how the thing to be defined connects (epistemology) to that which it is not, including to philosophy at large, to the individual self (you and me, or anyone else), and to other areas of theory and discipline.

Once you finish with (E) you will have a philosophical platform and substance in terms of which you can now go back to posit lying to see how it all connects, what lying means or does not mean. You will also now be able to work on F) Define morality. Your project will naturally unfold from here.

60

Wyld, that is not remotely a fair summation or characterization of my theory or my position on lying… as I think I have made clear in every previous post.