Moral Beliefs as Prices

K: I will try to answer without getting too far away from your original premise…

the idea that morality is somehow fixed within us is an assumption…
the fact is we have see people blow by conventional morality…
psychopaths like IQ 45 don’t even notice conventional morality…
morality is something other people do, not psychopaths…

morality isn’t inherent within us… it is taught… it is part of the
biases and myths and superstitions and habits that I often speak of…
that we are taught when we are young… now, as we get older we think
that morality somehow was born in us… but look at children… I am parent…
and we have to teach them what is right from wrong… think George Washington
and his cherry tree… morality is inherited from our society, state, schooling,
our culture…it doesn’t exist as posited by thinkers like Descartes…
put inside of us by god…

now depending on the culture, your question isn’t even a question because
of the existing “morality”… Sparta or Rome for example, your question
wouldn’t even make sense because they don’t view morality that way…

the fact we can talk about morality in the fashion that you are speaking of,
is a factor where we put a great deal of emphasis on money…
your very question reeks of culture bias… how do we understand
morality in terms of money and what does our culture value
more then anything else, money………

so we see morality in terms of money and another culture would
see morality in terms of god and his values or another culture might see
morality in terms of honor or perhaps in terms of Arete… the Greeks thought
in terms of excellence…….Arete means excellence…

now will your statement have meaning at some future date, no…
because of changes in the culture that will change even the meaning
of the words you use and will also change what our words mean…

read Milton’s “Paradise lost” it is a morality play that no longer
means anything today because of changes in society since then……

it is simply a poem to read… not for its morality but for how
Milton approaches the subject matter……….

we no longer approach morality like Milton did, we have changed because
of experiences and those experiences have made Milton no longer accessible
and the morality he promoted, irrelevant…

your point argues from a very specific time and place and culture…

that we can see morality from a monetary viewpoint speaks to who we
are today… and it doesn’t say anything good about us…

it is not the question that you ask but the premise from which you can ask
that question… the underlying thought is that morality can be somehow
be monetary based is directly something our culture can work with because
we are a monetary based culture…

and our questions become monetary based… a life has X value in money…
think of a society that would even have dared asked that question…
certainly not the Greeks or the Romans or the Middle ages or any
age afterwards, not until money became the driver of
our thought process…not until the “Modern” age…

it is not enough to ask the question that you asked, but you have to
question the underlying basis of such a question…

what would Socrates have thought of your question?

Kropotkin

True: we disagree, and at least one of us is wrong.

This doesn’t follow. Compare it to the rules of an artificial game. It can be true that at time (t_1) the team was offsides, even if at time (t_2) the game is over and the teams have disbanded and a fair has been set up on the playing field rendering the concept of ‘offsides’ meaningless.

So too can we identify moral rules that apply now, that are rational and necessary now, and that will remain rational and necessary now ((t_1)).

Moreover, an enduring future is not sufficient for morality. Nothing about an infinity of time entails morality.

Thanks for this response, you make some points that hit directly at the original premise.

First, I do think morality is objective even if it’s contingent. As I’ve argued elsewhere, morality has an identifiable goal (make the group survive); it is present in all normal humans as an instinct (though it isn’t present in certain mentally handicapped people like psychopaths); and its specifics are learned. I think that accounts for its change overtime, and the need to teach much of it (but not all of it) to children.

Second, regardless of money’s role in a specific society, money is also an abstract concept, and I’d argue that it can be applied to any society in which trade occurs (and possibly to others). As I’ve stated repeatedly, without justification or clarification, money mediates value. By that I mean that money is an external representation of value, and that anything one values, in whatever way they value it, can in theory be represented in monetary terms. This is clearly true for anything of value that people actually do buy and sell for money. But I would take it further. We (thankfully) no longer buy and sell people (at least openly, in the first world), but we can’t get away from the need to estimate the monetary value of a human life so long as things we do buy and sell interact with human lives.

This doesn’t have to be sinister. When we’re building a car, we can keep adding safety feature indefinitely. We’ve literally build vehicles that can protect someone in a fall from space, we could make cars significantly safer than they are. The trade off is price. If I tell you that you can modify a car in a way that will reduce the odds that you’ll die in it by .001% and it will cost you $10,000 to add that feature, you can either accept that exchange or not. And when you make that choice, you implicitly provide information about the price your life. If the probability of a reduction in death doesn’t seem worth it, you are saying that the risk-weighted value of that increased safety is worth less than $10k, and we can work backwards from there to calculate an upper limit on the subjective monetary value of your life.

We can do something similar to compare across cultures, by taking aspects of human biology that are constant. Take something like “minimum nutrients necessary to fuel a human through their natural lifespan.” That value is roughly constant across time and place. We can look at what that costs in modern society, that use that as a baseline to price other goods in places where money isn’t used. If we know that food is traded for protection in some place and time, and we know that food bears a certain relationship to the minimum nutrients necessary to fuel a human through their natural lifespan, we can calculate how valuable protection is in that time and place. All we need is a series of relative measures, and as long as we can relate them back to something that preserves its meaning into our time and place, we can express the values in those others places and times, regardless of the role money played in those societies.

Finally, we can use these tricks to evaluate things that people aren’t willing to sell for money. Something like honor or love, which by their nature can’t be purchased in practice, can still be priced in theory, because in the course of human affairs we necessarily make tradeoffs between these values that reveal our preferences in a way that can be expressed in prices. And so, for example, the value of marriage is estimated to be about $100k/year:

Actually, it does follow. Morality in an ultimate sense is always solving as moot, when oblivion for all beings at some point for them is reality.

Like I stayed earlier, there must at a minimum, be one eternal life to eradicate this issue.

Playing a soccer game and then going for beers is not an analogy for infinite oblivion.

And yes, moral calculations cannot be made without some concept of a future, the idea of the exchange of goods in some moral calculus requires that it’s possible to exchange them (hence future)

It seems like you’re just restating your position, so let me present the dichotomy as I understand it, and you can either go with it or correct me:

Either
(A) you’re claiming that humans are infinitely valuable, in which case you should show how that doesn’t lead to absurd consequences like the coughing man;
Or
(B) you’re claiming that morality doesn’t exist, in which case no moral claim will satisfy you, and “moral beliefs can be priced” is at worst as empty a claim as “murder is wrong” (though the former may be compatible with moral claims like the latter being incoherent).

If humans know that they live forever in some way by default, then value becomes calculable because of continuity of consciousness towards an endless future.

If humans know that they don’t live forever in some way, than suicide is the most ethical thing to do. Suffering is an easy one… if we knew infinite oblivion was the outcome of a painful death, then we never even had that pain or that death. If we are guaranteed a trillion years of unceasing joy, and then oblivion, people will still say “whats the point? I won’t remember any of it, and people I supposedly help will obliviate as well, so did I do any good? No.”

That’s the point I’m making.

Phyllo,

lol This is certainly true. I was speaking of someone like a Hitler who’s evil wreaked havoc on humanity or on the other side of that coin, someone like Hitler, who to many viewed him as someone to be valued and followed no matter what, without conscious thought
to what was actually occurring.

Insofar as Hitler or someone like him goes, I am not so sure that I would think in those terms. I might think in more practical urgent terms ~~ it was just something which had to be done. I think that I could again use Freddie’s line: "Love is beyond good and evil.

Would someone actually have to think in terms of good and evil if it came down to stopping someone a Hitler? Call me a psycho but I do not think so.

I do not think Carleas’ scenario works where I would kill Hitler. I would have to keep that a secret or it would not work. lol

Hello Flux Fans,

I’ve been following this a bit.

What is a given in Carleas’ assertions is that a monetary based way of looking at things is a reality. (however much humanity, collectively have had the only hand in it.) Let’s just say we made the whole of monetarism up and as such we can create anything else that makes better sense.

But given the thinking that because we made monetarism up, we are stuck with it, I can find a logical position that appears reasonable, within and limited to the constraints of his argument. Another possible distinction is the societal repercussions of murdering a random person. I don’t care how much you would get for it, if the end result is a lifetime behind bars there is no price I would take to be put through that.

I sort of side with Phyllo in the insistence there is thinking available that doesn’t involve monetarism.

Given world A, a society that practices monetarism, Carleas would be ‘right’, in a logically sound sense.
Given world B, a society that does not practice monetarist, there couldn’t be a price.

I’d sure like this world a heck of a lot more if it looked more like B more than A. We are living under the results of A thinking and the questions are growing. Maybe it ‘really’ doesn’t have to be the way it is.

Carleas,

How much are you going to pay an ape to kill another random ape? How much would the ape ask for?

Us human’s, I don’t suppose we are as smart.

How much would a whale ask for to randomly kill another whale.

Seems all species are willing to kill if the reward appears great enough, and sadly that’s a pair of Nike shoes to some. But that’s got nothing to do with money, although all actions come with a “price to play.”

Are we required to “play”?

I do effort to limit my involvement in that game.

A random person? Fuck, I’d do it for free.

Likely as example for the argument with the thinking. If some would do it for nothing what does that say about a price equation?

Clearly there are vast differences in the ‘values’ at play.

Do we really want a system of valuation that is constrained solely on the basis of economics?

Some do, and that IS good.

Some don’t and that IS also good.

How broadly are you able to see the question?

Humans, in general, feel guilt. The guilt is caused by morals, by empathy, by what we see are the results of our actions. How can that not have say very much about morality? Or the social reality of humans? There is no other rational ground to morals than human feelings. We can look at practical consequences, but that is not morals. Without emotions which are a part of our reality, we have no morals. We would simply have goals and methods.

This does not mean that guilt is always right - which is a sentence based on a very complicated set of issues.
But even if guilt is ‘wrong’ - again setting aside the complications here - it is real. It is semi-common to contrast emotions with reality. This is always confused - I understand the intent: emotions, just like thoughts, may be part of or caused by false models of reality. But emotions and related phenomena like guilt are always real. In a discussion of morals, they are central, real, social phenomena. Consequences and then of course causein their own right.

Guilt and morals are inextricably connected. As are other emotional phenomena.

Mowk, what do think of this proposition: any thing that can properly be the subject of the game “Would You Rather” can be priced.

Followup: Would You Rather a random person die and you be given a billion dollars, or neither of those things happen?

There are of course limits to what money can be attributed to. “How much would you need to be payed for the whole global monetary system to be dissolved” is nonsensical. “How much would you need to be paid for all of humanity to go extinct?” raises similar issues. But let’s say humanity goes extinct, but not you, and you live on with sex dolls and video games and candy or whatever. Some people would accept, and for them there is a price. No global economy, so money is meaningless, but insofar as that kind of life is achievable now and has a price now, we can calculate the price for that thing. It’s admittedly an edge case that stretches coherence, but it’s priceable in theory.

I disagree with this, but as I said above, I think it’s tangential to the issue here. It sounds like you think that guilt is compatible with having done the right thing (you acknowledge that guilt can be “wrong”, i.e. you can feel guilty when you have not done anything wrong), so there is no syllogism from feeling guilty to having done wrong. Whatever their inextricable connection, guilt is not a sufficient condition for immorality.

Here, where the situation is weird and abstract, we should not be surprised if our hardwired faculties fail us, so a feeling of guilt is readily explained as a misfiring.

For more on morality not based on emotions, I would love to know your thoughts on this thread.

Carleas, you may think you can equate it to a dollar valuation, but you’d just be making that up too. If that works for you great. Knock yourself out. But to insist it is universal is, in my opinion, silly.

Random people are dying all the time and I’m not getting a billion dollars. What mechanism is the cause of this random persons death, and where does the billion dollars come from?

The economic system from within which you ask the question just doesn’t make up a billion dollars so the question seems rather silly.

It would also be silly to say, or neither of those things happen, because all people die whether they are a random person or not. I would not intend to eliminate death, as so far, it appears a much greater reality then the economic system we have contrived.

edit
and for the love of it, please extend the timeout value this site uses to disconnect a logged in user. One could argue it encourages responses that can’t be well thought out because of a lack of time before disconnection.

Sure, dollars are in a sense “made up”. And you can refuse to trade anything for dollars. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a dollar value.

The reason you can turn ‘anything with which you might play Would You Rather’ into dollars is that dollars are something with which you might play Would You Rather. If, in theory, you can answer the questions, “Would You Rather: X or Y”, and “…Y or Z” and “…Z or $10”, and you just repeat the game over and over again with a bunch of Ys and Zs and dollar values, you can find the line where X goes for dollars. If you would rather the dollars than the X, X is worth less than the dollars. If you would rather the X than the dollars, X is worth more than the dollars. Narrow down the dollars and you find the price of X, the minimum number of dollars you would prefer over X.

Same game for bad things, but where X is bad you do “…X+$10 or Z”, modulate the dollar value, and boom.

The thing is, choosing not to play, not wanting that chain of reasoning to be true, doesn’t stop it from being true. If you value absolutely anything in dollars, and you are able to express preferences between the things you value, then all your values can be expressed as prices, whether you decide to play along or not. That’s what money is: money mediates value.

I think this is a distraction, but to move things along:

  • The random person is one additional person who would not otherwise die, and who we can otherwise expect to have a normal human lifespan.
  • They die of magic. God is asking the question, so god will kill the person with magic.
  • The billion dollars is created by every national bank together, distributed so as to be minimally disruptive to any particularly economy. Gross world product is >$100 trillion, so another $1 billion is .001% of the GWP, so it effectively decreases the cash value of all currency on earth by .001%.

But the reason this is a distraction is this: fill in the blanks however you want, you can’t escape the vicarious Would You Rathering that leads back to a dollar value on the moral wrong of killing an innocent.

This has come up a few times. I don’t know why some users experience this, but my strong suspicion is that it has to do with user-side settings rather than server-side settings.

What you are saying here is that if I say ‘I will not let you rape my wife for a 10 billion dollars’ I must be lying. Feel free to increase the number. I openly admit I would run naked down the street for much less. But you cannot pay me enough to rape my wife. Am I incorrect about myself?

The set of things that money mediates is a limited set. Limited not because there is only so much I am capable of, but limited also to a subset of things I am physically or behaviorally capable of, it is not the whole set.

I don’t think I did, but let’s ask you…

How much money would you require to rape a random woman`?
The price for killing a random person?

I think it is important that you actually make a clear statement here of amounts of money.

Early in this thread you expressed doubt that I would refuse any sum of money to kill a random person. Do you really think Phyllo and I are incorrect that there are such people and that we are in fact a couple of them?

I think you are making another kind of category error here. I’ll give it my best shot.
I will pay for ice cream. I will pay more for a massage. In both cases that monetary value is contingent and another day the values would be different. All sorts of factors - my health, my diet, my desire in the moment, the economy, my mood, previous experiences of both, my weight, the stress in my life, my financial situation, etc. - shift those numbers around. The numbers do not represent the value of the purchased object, but rather fit in with a complicated set of evaluations and impulses in the moment. I can’t put a number on what I would pay to have you not rape or kill my wife. It does not fluctuate. i would pay everything i had. I would not accept any amount. it is not in the same category.

So one error in your ‘proof’ is that you seem to see the money value as my sense of what something is worth in some timeless way. What vanilla Hagen Daz is worth to me. And so we can start putting things in some hierarchy. The second error is that everything must be like this. Just because I am willing to join the market for some things, means that all things therefore must be marketable.

That is not justified by your argument. It is assumed. Because money can make up for certain kinds of experiences or acts does not entail that it can for all of them. I realize some people will do nearly everything for money, but even those guys will not let me ass rape them with a live cattle prod for 10 years in exchange for some sum. If one of them would, I am sure I can come up with some other scenario for just that psychopath. I say psychopath just to show the reason I now focused on them instead of the random killing or the rape of their wife.

There are things we will not accept money in exchange for, ALL OF US. I suppose some confused people might sign with the devil, but I guarantee they also will regret it and consider that they valued the NOT HAVING THIS EXPERIENCE more than the money they are going to get and made an error.

Your argument seems founded on the idea that there are no possible qualitative differences between things we value, just quantitative.

I like ice cream. I love my wife. I spend 3 bucks on the ice cream. My wife’s value is a real number in dollars, some multiple of ice cream and less than infinity. The father who pulls his kid out of a burning car should at least spend a moment considering how much he can sue the other driver’s insurance company for, before pulling the kid out. And if lawsuit judgments were fair, fathers would have a real conundrum in those situation, knowing the courts were going to truly compensate him for the full value of his child.

Carleas, it sounds as If you have stated the GWP of the population of the planet is say a 100 trillion dollars, that if we divide that by the population total, as an average, one human life is worth $12,500.

I hope that this is at least a live possibility for you. Psychological research suggests we aren’t very good at predicting how we’ll act or feel, or even at recognizing our own motivations for doing what we do. You could be incorrect about yourself.

I disagree. I also think the Hoover Dam has a dollar value, I have no idea what it is, and I don’t need to float an estimate for us to have a productive discussion about whether that value exists.

If I’ve given this impression, I apologize. Substitute (X_t) for any time I used X, to signify X-at-time-t. The fact that X can change over time does not affect my argument.

This is probably the crux of our disagreement. People do not need to accept money in a direct exchange for something in order to price that thing. It’s illegal in the US to buy a human life. Nonetheless, we can and people do calculate the value of human lives all the time. People implicitly price their own lives when they accept dangerous work, or when they buy or don’t buy safety precautions. People implicitly price the lives of others in much the same way.

Similarly, earlier I referenced the Gross World Product, which is calculated and includes infrastructure, resources, human capital, and many other things that aren’t bought or sold directly. Indeed, GWP can’t coherently be directly bought or sold. And yet, we have a reasonable estimate of what Earth’s GWP is.

And it’s incoherent to argue otherwise, in the sense that it leads to absurdities. Above, I made an argument for Ecmandu that the value of a human life cannot be infinity, because it leads to absurd conclusions like him having to send me all his money all the time. The same can be said about very large finite values: if you really would not accept several billion dollars for something, you should be willing to spend x% on something that will reduce the risk of that thing happening by x%. When you don’t, we know that either you are wrong not to, or you are wrong when you say you wouldn’t accept less than several billion dollars for that thing. Your actions are inconsistent with your stated beliefs.

Probably less, since GWP includes natural resources and buildings and the like. But that kind of calculation tells us what the world loses when someone dies, if that’s the price at which we should be willing to kill someone, does that make the price of the moral dimension zero?

Carleas, I don’t know why you’ve referenced this post twice now.

I responded to it by saying that your life also has infinite value, assuming we all live forever (making the point that if we all die forever, life equals zero)

If everyone is giving everyone an infinite amount, we’re all in heaven forever.