back to the beginning: morality

“The Moral Case For Nihilism”
By Shane Fraser in Aero magazine

Yeah, this pretty much sums it up in the broadest sense. No God means no foundation, no underlying knowledge that we can turn to in order to establish the optimal answers to questions derived from conflicting value judgments…or from out on the very end of the metaphysical limb.

It doesn’t dispense with meaning and purpose altogether, it merely concludes that in a No God world, both are cobbled together existentially given the choices we make in the act of actually living out lives.

Here’s the thing though. If it is decided that nihilism is a reasonable manner in which to understand the “human condition”, how then do you make arguments of this sort go away?

Well, you can’t, can you? So, as with God, it may well be that even if “objective morality” does not exist, it is “for all practical purposes” necessary to act as though it did exist.

Or, again, to suppose that, given the reality of nihilism in a No God world, the “best of all possible worlds” is probably going to revolve around one or another rendition of the “democracy and the rule of law”.

Arguments like this will go back and forth…probably forever. Yes, nihilism can be used to rationalize/justify any and all behaviors, however appalling they are seen to be by those who reject nihilism. It just comes down to how sophisticated the arguments are.

“Moral Relativism Is Unintelligible”
Julien Beillard argues that it makes no sense to say that morality is relatively true.
From Philosophy Now magazine.

In my view, this is a classic example of a philosopher exploring moral relativism up in the clouds. Are there objective moral truths able to be encompassed in examining, say, the political policies of President Trump in regard to immigration and the building of a wall along the border with Mexico?

Okay, what are the “intelligible concepts of truth” and the “unintelligible concepts of truth” we can all agree on when it comes to actual behaviors that we ourselves choose in becoming politically active with regard to his policies?

And while there may well be no “intelligible concept of truth that can be used to frame the thesis that moral truth is relative to the standards or beliefs of a given society”, when you move from the thesis to an actual description of human interactions down through the ages there are any number of examples of this. Both historical and cultural.

Okay, okay, technically this may or may not be true. But what does it really have to do “for all practical purposes” with the distinction between “John committed suicide while wearing blue socks” and “whatever the color of the socks John wore, committing suicide is immoral?”

What the hell am I missing here in his argument?

Santa’s niece?!

A little help with that please.

“Moral Relativism Is Unintelligible”
Julien Beillard argues that it makes no sense to say that morality is relatively true.
From Philosophy Now magazine.

From my frame of mind, the “objectivist concept of truth” seems reasonably in sync with the manner in which I have come to understand the either/or world. In other words, among other things, the laws of nature carry on with or without us.

Just as the facts able to be established relating to a context in which value judgments come into conflict do not change because someone embraces what they construe to be their own set of facts – facts that are in fact at odds with clearly established facts.

But when this “objectivist concept of truth” is ascribed instead to clearly subjective assessments of right and wrong behavior, where is this truth independent of subjective thoughts?

Then [of course] for some it’s straight back up into the clouds that are the abstract “general descriptions” of this predicament.

What concept of truth relating to what actual relations? What statement is being assessed as true regarding what behaviors in conflict over moral narratives at odds?

Something either is or is not gold. But who is to say whether it is right or wrong for a government to forbid its citizens to own gold?

Consider:

…in 1933, Executive Order 6102 had made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector’s coins…By 1975 Americans could again freely own and trade gold. wiki

Objective facts and subjective value judgments. Seeming truths and actual truths.

From my frame of mind, this turns everything upside down. If what you believe about morality takes precedence over what you can in fact demonstrate to be moral or immoral behavior, it is the belief itself that matters more than the proof that the belief reflects an objective truth value. The trivial pursuit [for me] revolves around substituting a world of words [as a philosopher] for the world as it actually is [a cauldron of conflicting goods].

I must be misunderstanding his point.

A classic example in my view of a “general description” of human interactions relating to value judgments.

Note to those who share his assessment:

Relating to a specific context in which value judgments do come into conflict, what is he attempting to convey here regarding “triviality”, “the argument of disagreement” and moral “claims”.

First of all, all is not reduced to a question of morality. Think about your day to day interactions with others. How many times do you stop and think, “is this the right thing to do?” Most of what we do revolves around behaviors that allow us to pursue those things we want and need. And here the question “for all practical purposes” comes down to this: how do I attain them? It is strictly a collection of more or less rational choices that lead us to our accomplishing the tasks in the shortest amount of time. It’s life unfolding in the either/or world.

Only when what we want and need results in a conflict with others, does the “is/ought” world come into play. You want or need something that others insist that you ought not to want or need. Drugs, for example. You want to get high. And you are able to choose behaviors that result in your getting high or not. But when you get high there are consequences. And sometimes those consequences rub others the wrong way. They want you to stop. They think and feel that it is wrong that you get high. They give you their reasons. You give them your reasons why you think and feel you have the right to get high.

Okay, which “emotionally self-serving components” here are most in sync with “the right thing to do”? Such that the interactions between the parties will result in the least “corrupted” relationship?

No, there are any number of factors – facts – clearly shown to be in sync with the objective world. There are things that we do and consequences that result from the things that we do that all reasonable people can agree with.

But: What constitutes the “objective world” when two or more people disagree regarding the consequences of a particular set of behaviors? Thus entailing a discussion of moral narratives and political agendas that may or may not be in conflict.

“Moral Relativism Is Unintelligible”
Julien Beillard argues that it makes no sense to say that morality is relatively true.
From Philosophy Now magazine.

The first way. The second way. The third way.

You know, theoretically.

But this is only of interest to me given the extent to which these ponderous intellectual “ways” are intertwined in flesh and blood human interactions such that the “way” individual men and women think about morality results in behaviors that bring about actual consequences.

Yes, there are no doubt those moral relativists who argue that. But this moral relativist [me] does not deny the existence of objective morality, only that no one has been able to demonstrate [of late] that their own rendition of it is applicable to all rational and virtuous men and women.

And the only “other kind of moral truth”, that I aim to explore here is in discussing and debating the three components embedded in my own rendition of moral nihilism.

Again [so far] he doesn’t even seem to need an actual context in which to demonstrate his own point. It’s all “theoretical”.

It’s the argument that makes the most sense to me. But only given the assumption that we live in a No God world. We all come into the world with the same genetic code. And, as folks like Satyr like to point out, that is no small thing.

But we are the only species on this planet that, presuming some measure of free will, have, down through the ages, amassed an extraordinary accumulation of memetic variables in turn.

And while we can debate endlessly how the exact interaction of genes and memes works given any particular context, I merely “raise doubts” regarding any moral narrative – God or No God – that is not embedded in an actual context. And that does not take into account the “objective truth of any moral code” given the three components that are imprtant to me.

nah its not an ‘endless’ debate because its over pretty quickly. memes don’t interact with genes. they interact with gene carriers, but not the gene units themselves. which means, there is no code-script through which they can pass. furthermore, the manner in which they interact with carriers makes them extremely unstable… in the sense that because the meme unit is as idea, it is open to sudden and ambiguous change, unlike genes which are subject to relatively stable selection pressures.

so it’s rather inaccurate to speak of memes as replicating units synonymous to genes. there is replication in the form of behaviors that imitate, but imitation does not modify a physical gene and is in this context an epiphenomena; it has no causal effect on physical genes.

you gotta watch out when you see philostophers talk about genes and memes, man. better to stay in the sciences and consult a biologist.

Which would mean that the interact with genes via the carriers. Memes which lead the carriers to thrive, would affect the transmission of the genes of those carriers in that they would continue in future generations. I would bet that memes have epigenetic effects also, since they would affect stress levels, emotional reactions, coping patterns, which would then affect offspring and how genes are expressed, just as in other epigenetic factors.

Except where there are quick changes in environments, such as many species are experiencing now and at other junctures in the past.

which comes precisely before…

So, there is controversy and he is correct.

Analogous, not synonymous.

who is not going to be an expert on memes. Nor are they going to be an expert on the interaction between ideas on the physiology of gene carriers, the survivability of gene carriers, the epigenetic effecs of memes and so on.

One should, basically, always watch out, regardless.

True, scientists who actually explore the human brain have not burrowed into one and discovered little genes interacting with little memes.

But over millions of years of life evolving on planet earth, the genetic material that became the human brain was able to invent [compelled or otherwise] countless number of memes given human interaction historically, culturally and interpersonally.

So “for all practical purposes” I think most folks will get my point about the connection.

On the other hand, if we do indeed live in a wholly determined universe, this part…

“the meme unit is as idea, it is open to sudden and ambiguous change, unlike genes which are subject to relatively stable selection pressures”

…is not actually the case at all. What appears to the human mind to be sudden and ambiguous change is merely but one more manifestation of the only possible reality.

The idea of the one and the many has had quite a long run. It has come to the point of realilizing that structural change is at dead center between current, remembered and forgotten lines , some more general some specific
The interconnectedness between general and specific connections uses available connections, the quantification of appropriate sets may not be validated in terms of qualifying the most appropriate set.
Whatever is uploadable in availability can form some kind of connection to recolle tion, be at close or remote to an original…

Stasis is maintained arou a fully compensative teleological and ontological l variables, but with AI be- coming the leading pole around which memes and genes organize. The parallel reality may fit this schema.
This goes hand in glove with a temporal/spatial-less reality, that leads to absolutely limited versions in a matrix.

This reductivity consists by inclusion of the moral imperative , to make sense of it, above all.The return to moral sense is always inadequate, but it infers a moral absolute.

I believe that moral absolutes are a form of midlife crisis, where either the beginnings or the endings of the moral compass experience sudden changes of the rates.of it’s change.

apologies for the delay, karpT. i’m reading what both supporters and critics of memetics are saying, and i tend to agree with the critics. on one hand the type of meme that isn’t defined as a learned behavior through imitation - the ‘idea’ meme - is not analogous to the gene. take a typical idea… religious for instance. two people share this meme, it is said. now separate them and ask each one what they think the idea means. ask them to explain what the idea is… to express it ‘in other words’. you’d find that the two interpretations would increasingly deviate from one another as the idea was expounded on. in this sense, the initial idea meme isn’t discrete, unlike the gene. and as a unit of language, it is subject to all the complexities inherent to the practice of language games and has no original form in the first place. again, unlike the gene.

i also think the concept is redundant and used so much to describe human behavior patterns, that it’s become an arbitrary abstraction almost. if everything people do is memetic, then nothing they do is memetic. see what i mean?

about the only things that could be meaningfully described as memetic are actual observable behaviors that influence fitness level; tool making and use, for instance. and such behavior would not be culturally exclusive. anything else is either a vestigial behavior (neither increasing or decreasing adaptive ability), or so ambiguous it doesn’t constitute a stable, discrete entity in the first place.

before dawkins coined the word ‘meme’, everything anyone has since called memetic has always been called ideological. that general title has worked just fine. but the difference is, these guys are using biological evolution as a template for modeling something that is only analogous to genetics in a very abstract way.

but the easiest way to shut down the meme theory is to simply claim that mental content is epiphenomenal; thoughts and ideas don’t ‘cause’ behavior, but rather emerge in tandem or post-hoc. if such content can’t cause behavior, it can’t be responsible for being either advantageous or detrimental to adaptation and fitness level. memes of this kind would be analogous to scenes in a cartesian movie, so to speak.

“Moral Relativism Is Unintelligible”
Julien Beillard argues that it makes no sense to say that morality is relatively true.
From Philosophy Now magazine.

Of course it is not my own intention “here and now” to argue that moral statements are “sometimes true”. Only that within the arguments themselves there are facts that can be established as true for all of us and reactions to those facts that precipitate value judgments that are rooted more subjectively in dasein than in any deontological assessments that philosophers and scientists can themselves demonstrate to be true for all of us.

And I agree that to the extent that moral relativists portray their own arguments as true objectively, they are certainly far removed from my own conclusions.

Or, again, rather, no assessments that I have come upon.

Also, there are the factors pertaining to the “subconscious” and the “unconscious” mind. And the manner in which all of this is related to more “primitive” components of the human brain: instinct, biological drives, libido, psychological defense mechanisms, etc.

Sure, “for the sake of argument” any number of assumptions might be made here. But how to bring those assumption into sync with arguments into sync with what can in fact be demonstrated to be wholly true regarding all of these relationships given a particular context.

Let’s face it, out in the real world it’s not whether moral codes are true or false, but how “for all practical purposes” they actually work to provide different people with different levels of acceptance and satisfaction.

That’s how it works alright. If moral nihilism precipitates reactions that appall particular people then it is not likely that anything I might argue here is going to change their mind. They just know that certain behaviors are right or wrong.

But, really, beyond this what behaviors can they in fact demonstrate [philosophically or otherwise] that all rational and virtuous people are obligated to embrace and defend?

My only assumptions here is that 1] we live in a No God world and 2] that some measure of free will does in fact exist.

friedrich from the philosophy cafe used to try to pull the same shit with his relativism as ‘self-referential paradox’ crap. remember that? guy wrote a whole essay on it. he busted out the kant and rawls and everything. i wuz like ‘dude, claiming that morality is subjective is not a moral claim in itself, but a statement of valueless fact. DUH.’

you need to check out hare’s ‘prescriptivism’, biggs. i think you could get down with something like that because it’s a generically different approach to the effort to save morality from relativism. it’s pretty solid, because hare’s coming from the non-cognitivist camp, so he makes no claim to there being objective moral facts out there in the world.

“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.

And nowhere, in my view, is this myth exposed better than in discussions of conflicting goods amidst human social, political and economic interactions. The closest we come to it is embodied in democracy and the rule of law. But that is basically a historical component embedded in the capitalist political economy. Prior to that, various combinations of might makes right [sustaining empries] and right makes might [sustaining God] prevailed.

And, then, in more “primitive” communities – nomadic, slash and burn, hunter and gatherer – there was the part given over to “the gods” and the part given over to the biological imperatives that sustained particular gender roles in keeping the community going.

There simply wasn’t enough “surplus labor” around back then for a community of philosophers to pop up in order to grapple “intellectually” with things like “neutrality”.

Something worked to keep the community going – fed, clothed, sheltered and defended – or it didn’t. And that generally revolved around there being a proper place for everyone and everyone being in their proper place. No laws or courts around to actually be neutral.

Okay, so the first thing we will need to look for here is the extent to which this age-old “general description” of human morality is brought out into the world of very real conflicting behaviors revolving around actual conflicting goods. And, in particular, when those who share his view that morality is objective go after others [sometimes viciously, ruthlessly] who refuse to embrace their own set of precepts and behaviors.

And, it should be noted, the author will consider all of this given the assumption that we live in a No God world.

“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.

Okay, moral principles are intertwined historically, culturally and interpersonally in an actual community of people out in a particular world confronting particular contexts. And the “for all practical purposes” embodiment of such things as social, political and economic justice, are derived from the principles.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Particular people out in particular worlds validate or invalidate particular behaviors in particular contexts based on one or another transcending font: God, reason, political ideology, assessments of nature etc.

But: I then point out that even this discussion and debate itself is predicated on two fundamental assumptions:

1] that we possess some measure of free will
2] that anything we might conclude here and now seems embedded in the yawning gap between what any particular “I” thinks he or she knows about human morality and all that can be known about it going back to a definitive understanding of existence itself

“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.

This is an important admission for me because my contention is that in the absence of a transending font [which most call God], mere mortals acquire a moral narrative existentially through the course of accumulating experiences that encompass their lives. Out in particular worlds.

Is this the criteria then? Not that you are able to demonstrate that your own moral values reflect the most rational frame of mind, but only that you take them seriously?

Again, there may be those who argue that, in the absence of a transcending font from which to forge an objective moral narrative, you might just as well be plucking down values at random from trees. But that is certainly not my own contention.

On the contrary, my argument is that any number of moral objectivists come into conflict precisely because they are able to construct coherent arguments containing any number of facts to support political agendas from all along the ideological spectrum.

Just choose a particular conflict, a particular context and let the rational assessments flow.

But: Who then is to say what the most rational assessment is? The one able to demonstrate that they take their own values the most seriously of all?

Like, for example, the Nazis?

“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.

You either move the bishop according to the rules or you don’t. If, however, your opponent is distracted and you move the bishop up or down or left or right, you are cheating. That’s when the is/ought world kicks in for most. Some will argue that cheating is necessarily immoral while others will insist all that the counts is winning the game…by whatever means necessary.

Same with flossing. Few will argue that flossing is a moral obligation. They simply note that if your goal is to have healthy gums and teeth, it is reasonable to floss.

Yes, but if your own moral philosophy revolves around sustaining your own self-interests, you’re not concerned with following the rules so much as not getting caught if you break them. If there is money riding on the game and you need money, cheating is merely another option.

How would a philosopher go about demonstrating that cheating here is necessarily immoral? Where’s the argument establishing that?

No, not so. At least not necessarily so. Silver merely informs others that he accepts the rules because he knows that is what they want to hear. That he is not inclined to follow the rule, however, is, from his point of view, his own business. If, for whatever personal reason, it is important for him to win the game, he rationalizes the cheating.

yeah i dunno about this silver guy. he’s already talking bullocks right out the gate. rules don’t ‘motivate’, but govern. what motivates is the desire to reach an end… and the manner in which that is done either ‘follows’ rules or does not.

he also conflates rules following with commands and prescriptions; ‘floss your teeth’ is not a rule, but a prescription. now how you floss your teeth would be an instance of rule following. but that only amounts to exhibiting the behavior you learned which was the ‘right way’ to floss your teeth. but you don’t have to floss your teeth ‘way x’ to participate in flossing your teeth. on the other hand, you do have to move the bishop ‘way x’ to participate in playing the game. if you move it differently, you’re not playing the game. the former is a command, and the latter is a rule.

tighten up, silver.

i tell ya, these objectivists will say anything to try and convince us that morality is objective. see how silver tried to throw us off with that analogy? you gotta watch em, man.

If enough objectivists deflate what silver means by this’n that, then they would not have to keep try’n to outguess each other what they mean.
They can git down right mean of they don’t sort it out. Rules are oft whatever they make it out to be, however they intend at the moment.
At least that’s how they did in the wild wild west.

“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.

What am I misconstruing here? He seems to be arguing that if I accept any particular set of “permissibility rules” that – that – makes me a “moral objectivist”.

Is this what he is really stipulating here? Or am I missing the point?

Sure, if you lived in the only human community on earth, and everyone accepted which behaviors were to be permitted and which were not then, I suppose, for all practical purposes, within that community, morality can be said to be objective.

On the other hand, what on earth does that have to do with the world that we actually live in?!!

Where, in reality, does such a community function? Instead, while there are particular communities who fiercely practice what they preach – the Amish for example – there are always those within the community that question the ethos. And there are certainly any number of other additional communities that may well share the conviction that their own moral narrative and political agenda is objective; but that is only applicable to the extent that the communities don’t come into contact with each other in any significant way.

When that happens prepare for conflicting goods.