Moral Beliefs as Prices

When these ethical systems are implemented, some authority sets the standard price of “a kid”. Then society can use that to evaluate whether some action was moral or immoral. If you are not in sync with that price, then you are being immoral.

Well put.

I would add also that we have not mentioned the ramifications or essence of doing the bidding of evil. The one who paid. We did the bidding of evil and this evil benefitted in some way. I don’t know what that evil is, what organization or individual. But someone/thing made what it felt was a good purchase.

There is some value there and it is also going to be very hard to track.

One is also, since secrets get out if this even is a secret, sending ripples through one’s family and peers, that you, this decent person they know, was willing to do this. What effects does that have?

So how much of your income do you donate to charities? And how much could you? Could you get a roomate and cut the rent in half, send that out? Are you down at the bare minimum of things and expenses, yet?

We don’t need the ornate example of being paid to kill.

This seems like a semantic point. Consequentialism, as I am using, is the class of moral systems that judge the morality of an action on the outcome (or intended outcome). Deontology, as I am using it, is the class of moral systems that judge the morality of an action based on rules. There are systems that qualify as both (e.g. rule utilitarianism). You can cast “bring about the best outcome” as a rule and say that all consequentialism is deontology, but it doesn’t do a lot for clarity.

Perhaps you bring this up to say that consequentialism is at its base just as arbitrary as any more concrete deontological system, because you have to find some ultimate value on which to judge consequences, and that’s no better or worse than a value like “don’t kill”. One way to reject that claim is to argue that a consequentialist system is logically or empirically necessary, that it is a branch of math or science. I don’t think this makes it any less a real flavor of moral philosophy, as you calim – it’s ultimately trying to answer moral questions – and I don’t see what labeling it ‘science’ does to its force.

This is just question begging. Murder is just one form of death. For consequentialism, the only difference is in including guilt etc. in the tally of outcomes.

I don’t think that’s true. As I argued above, you can feel guilty about things you know to be right. You can also feel guilty about things you haven’t done: Wendy notes that she has experienced this, and the phenomenon of survivor’s guilt is well attested.

Guilt is an emotion, it isn’t rational and it isn’t drawing from some mystical layer of reality that tells you about right and wrong. You can be mistakenly guilty, and can simultaneously feel guilty and know that you did the right thing.

These are non-sequiturs. Yes, some specific people are worth significantly more to me than “a random person”, just as some specific stocks are priced significantly higher than the expected value of a random stock. These claims aren’t in tension.

And the line of argument doesn’t weigh in either direction: if we put a specific, high cost thing on either side of the scale, it changes the outcome in that direction. That isn’t at all surprising.

It’s just a non-sequitur.

Please don’t. If the thought experiment had a different set of givens, we would get a different outcome, granted. That tells us nothing about the concept the thought experiment is trying to isolate.

I agree. As I said in my second post in this thread, trying (unsuccessfully) to move this discussion away from the “ornate example”:

You omitted the second and third part of my post :

If you are prepared to have your kid killed in that consequentialist society, then just say so and we won’t need to raise the point again.

Humans feel emotions. It’s part of our biology. If you want to pretend that’s not a “layer of reality” and that humans ought to only reason and not to feel, then you’re talking about some fantasy world.

Feeling badly about what you did to someone means, at the very least, that you are ambivalent about what you did. Saying that guilt, since it is an emotion, isn’t rational, is confused.

There are no rational morals. There are just moral values built up based on what we care about and what we dislike. Without emotions there are no morals.

There are just practical judgments.

Do this and it leads to this. And no way to determine either what you want or what we think is good.

Unless you believe in God, which clearly you do not, you can have codes of behavior, like the rules of hockey, without emotions, but no morals.

And this is not a shot at atheists, since every one I’ve ever met is informed by their emotions in forming, justifying and understanding their morals.

Without emotions one does not function rationally in society. See Damasio the neuroscientist. Sure, doing math, you don’t need emotions to be rational, but with other humans and society you will fail to make good decisions and even manage yourself rationally without contant input from the limbic system. Damasion goes into what happens when people with damage not longer have the limbic system tied into the loop.

So to say that guilt and emotions have no deep mystical…etc., is a deep confusion.

Without emotions, there is no such thing as morals. There is just behavior and tactics.

And sure, one can feel guilt for things that are not wrong. But when you start killing people for money, you are giving your own mirror neurons and your own limbic system and your own yearning for closeness and good treatment the finger. You pretty much stopped being a social mammal. Now psychotics can be like this. And they lead limited lives.

Alright then, carleas, you are still surprisingly holding your ground. So let’s raise the stakes…

If you knew for a fact that if you tortured one random person forever, and that would make everyone else happy forever, but if you didn’t torture that random person forever, everyone would be tortured forever besides them…

Do you see how absurd this looks?

For one, it’s absurd. It’s a false dichotomy.

People have pointed out repeatedly that if it’s an unknown stranger, that person could be way more valuable than you… who takes a trillion dollars and gives it to charity (a perpetual system) - this random person may solve all poverty issues for all beings in existence, which a trillion dollars can’t do.

Ecmandu, however, but Jesus is such a figure, he took the totality of humanity on his shoulder for ever, given that the passion was eternal, never ending. The contradictory spiritual payoff was in line with the level of contradiction still sustained, by the sign of the cross.

What consequentialist society?

Let me again compare “random person” to “random stock”. A “random stock” has a calculable expected value. If we average all the prices of all the stocks, we get the expected value of a random stock. It’s going to be a lot less than a lot of stocks, even though in theory if we picked one stock at random it could be the most expensive stock possible. The expected value combines the values of all outcomes with the likelihood of those outcomes. The expected value of a roll of the dice at the craps table is negative. The expected value of a fair coin flip is zero. The expected value of the random person functions just the same way.

I hope that this comparison makes clear that “BUT SOMEONE WITH VERY HIGH VALUE IS ONE OF THE POSSIBLE OUTCOMES!!!” is not a rebuttal. So long as every person in the set from which we’re picking has a finite value, the expected value of a random person remains finite even if very valuable people are included.

I said that guilt doesn’t “come from” a “mystical layer of reality”. Phyllo seemed to be claiming that we could draw a syllogism like, “I feel bad, therefore we know what I did was wrong.” That syllogism doesn’t work, because guilt can be mistaken. Like hot sauce feels like burning and mint feels like cold, dumping a girlfriend can feel like being cruel even when we know it’s the most compassionate thing to do.

You may feel guilty, but it’s just another negative value that can be priced. It does not tell us very much about morality or reality.

“I priced it, therefore we know what I did was right”.

“I reasoned it out, therefore we know what I did was right”.

Your pricing can be mistaken and your reasoning can be mistaken.

Guess that pricing and reasoning can’t be used. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Carleas, as I stated earlier (and can you refute this?):

If every being is finite, there is no value to them, oblivion forever - no wrong, no right - certainly not your formula.

Value only truly comes into the picture of beings that are immortal or eternal in some way.

The moment you say that all lives have finite value, you refute your argument.

The moment you say they have infinite value, your argument becomes much more complex than you present.

Sorry, I took us off topic, I think your point is good, and I think mine didn’t deserve the response.

Go back to:

I make two pretty bad points here that don’t advance the discussion.

Forgive me for leading us astray, on reflection I don’t think I’m clear on what role guilt is playing in the argument. If one chooses World A, one may feel guilty for the rest of ones life. I think there are a few questions here, but I’m not sure any change the outcome.
Case G: You do feel guilty your whole life
Case N: You don’t feel guilty your whole life

Case G can be the case if
(1) Guilt is compatible with having done the right thing, and you have done the right thing; OR
(2) Guilt is incompatible with having done the right thing, and you have done the wrong thing.

Case N can be the case if
(1) Guilt is compatible with having done the right thing, and you have done the right thing.
(2) Guilt is incompatible with having done the right thing, and you have done the right thing.

This is how I understand your argument:
(a) we know that we would feel guilty killing a stranger (We are in case G);
(b) we know that guilt is incompatible with having done the right thing (so if we are in case G, we are wrong);
therefore
(c) we know that killing a stranger is wrong.

Is that what you’re saying?

I’m open to seeing some math here. In math as I know it, assigning infinities to constants has the weird outcomes I describe (e.g., you sending me all your money to help that guy with the cough). There may be math that says otherwise, but I predict that when you actually do that math out, you’ll find that it works about the same way that the usual math does without the infinities.

Carleas, I wasn’t even trying to “whoosh” you, but apparently, I did.

Think about this:

At some point in time, eventually, everyone obliviates. Zero. Nothing. EVERYONE!

Now here’s the deal. If we know for a fact that everyone obliviates at some point, morality is meaningless. Torture someone for a trillion years, and then they obliviate! Horrid right? No, after they die it never existed.

So then comes you with some silly one off purchase for what? A trillion dollars? That’s laughable in infinity. Especially if we all obliviate as infinity ticks.

So, my point was, unless everyone has consciousness forever, your argument contradicts itself as incorrect (ultimate oblivion for all beings = no good or bad)

So then we have to argue as if beings are immortal, to even humor your line of thought …

The compelling argument from this standpoint is that everyone pick an unknown stranger to torture forever to make everyone else be in heavenly bliss.

To this, I would say that you don’t understand existence well. That you are incompetent to even make your argument. To suggest that torturing someone forever so everyone else can totally and and absolutely enjoy life forever, is like talking about pigs flying (hypothetically) so that your inane posture can solve mathematically.

I disagree with this. Morality exists within people, it’s not independent, but it is nonetheless a fact about the world at a specific point in time, in the same way that the meaning of the words I’m using are a fact of the world at this particular moment. After the heat death of the universe, no one will understand what I’ve written today, but they still have meaning today, and it is true today that, at time ( t _2 ) = [some time after the heat death of the universe], the statement “At ( t _1 ) = June 18, 2018, the words Carleas wrote were meaningful” will be true.

So too will we be able to construct statements that will be true at ( t _2 ) of the type that, at ( t _1 ), certain actions were wrong or immoral. The point being, those statements remain true after their subjects ‘obliviate’.

And I think that fits with what I’m claiming here: it will also be true at ( t _2 ) that, at ( t _1 ), some stock was priced at some amount, some good was available at a specific location for a specific price, and, if I’m right, that some specific individual valued some specific moral belief at some specific amount of money.

Well, your disagreement doesn’t change facts…

If people kept reproducing to last forever, but each of those people obliviate at death, there is factually no moral good or bad. People who think so would be delusional. I’m not talking about the cold death of the universe here, I’m talking about infinite birth and oblivion upon death. In that scenario, there is no morality as morality only exists based on a hypothetical future. If we know that ultimately there is no enduring future for anyone, then whatever happens to anyone is nothing at all. This contradicts any attempt to assume that anyone is doing the greater good.

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).