“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?
“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.
“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
This [to me] is merely a description of any of hundreds of particular human communities in which members have more or less reached a consensus regarding the right things and the wrong things to do. Predicated on one or another combination of “might makes right”, “right makes might” or “moderation, negotation and compromise”.
My own argument doesn’t kick in until 1] the rules of one communitity come into conflict with the rules of another community or 2] within the community someone decides that the rules should be changed.
Then what in regard to “moral objectivism”?
In other words, instead of embracing or enduring the “law of the jungle”, where the strong and the powerful always prevail, we come together and, in a civilized manner, create a set of rules that more or less sustain the interests of those own and operate the global economy. The historical advent of capitalism. They sustain what they deem to be permissible or not permissible behaviors. In accordance with what sustains their own interests. Until the Communinists came along and insisted that other behaviors were more consistant with the advent of scientific socialism.
So, okay, how does the author here go about determining which behaviors ought to be permissible such that everyone is able to agree that this constitutes “objective morality”.
Still, which of these “other philosophers” have been able to intertwine their intellectual contraptions with the world of actual human interactions out in a world still bursting at the seams with conflicting goods?
As for the “soft sciences”, what have they managed to pin down with regard to our ubiquitous moral and political conflagrations? What constitutes “the most acceptable rules” in order to ensure fairness and equality among those dealing with an unwanted pregnancy, or mass shootings, or the immigration quagmire.
This is a good post. But I still think it gives short shrift to unconscious morality. It’s good to have an “examined life” and make sure that the decisions you make unconsciously are morally good ones but outside of rare, really deep decisions (and even then) that’s going to be retroactive. I make good decisions because I’ve spent time morally cultivating myself. I don’t morally cultivate myself so I can make good decisions. Philosophy is like going to the gym.
This gets tricky though. After all, unconscious morality might actually be interchangeable with conscious morality in a wholly determined universe. If human consciousness itself is merely an adjunct of a human brain merely an adjunct of inherent, necessary laws of matter, then even this exchange itself is subsumed in the only possible reality.
This is clearly a “general description” of human morality. What we need to explore now is the manner in which you take this abstract assessment out into the world of actual conflicting goods.
Suppose John and Jane are in conflict over the right to bear arms in America. John, a staunch supporter of the NRA and fiercely anti gun control, insists that “I make good decisions about gun ownership because I’ve spent time morally cultivating myself.” Jane, a staunch opponent of the NRA and fiercely pro gun control, insists that “I make good decisions about gun ownership because I’ve spent time morally cultivating myself.”
If philosophy is like going to the gym, which workout will resolve this once and for all?
“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
This merely assumes that because philosophers down through the ages have attempted to organize our value judgments into what is construed to be either reasonable [permissible] or unreasonable [impermissible] behaviors, that this in and of itself accomplishes the task of actually demonstrating that moral and immoral behaviors can be properly distinguished. At least until you bring their intellectual contraptions down to earth.
Exactly! So, tell us, what behaviors ought to either be permissible or impermissible in regard to bullfighting?
Here I’m thinking I must be misunderstanding his point. Am I?
“Gut feelings” as the basis for permissibility?
How then are the conclusions we come to regarding “consistent” behavior not more the embodiment of the manner in which I suggest that value judgments here are more the embodiment of dasein? One person’s gratuitous suffering is another person’s grand entertainment.
“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
He notes this as though these factors and others are merely incidental to the fact that someone has aligned himself with a set of “permissibility rules” that, as far as he is concerned, encompasses an objective morality.
Is that what he is arguing?
If so, it seems preposterous to me. What happens when your set of rules come into conflict with other sets of rules. What happens when new experiences prompt you or others to want the rules to be changed?
Yes, one can see rules of this sort – a single standard – being sustained in, say, an Amish community. One for all and all for one set of moral prescriptions established by “the elders”.
But how many of us live in that sort of community? Instead, given the interactions most of us engage in there is always the possibility of that which you construe to be permissible behaviors will be deemed as anything but by others.
But: what happens when these many perspectives are not able to arrive at the optimal perspective? Imagine, for example, taking his argument to those fiercely at odds in regard to conflicting goods that have rent our species now for thousands of years. Which perspectives will take precedence when it comes down to enacting actual laws in which certain behaviors are punished if engaged.
Let’s look at his example:
Okay, but in a world where religion is often more or less intertwined with political power, the respect you have for another’s “permissibility rules” may well be shunted aside. You are instead construed to be an infidel. The Other are only interested in sustaining the one true set of righteous behaviors. Their own.
Same with secular ideologies. In some cases moderation, negotiation and compromise are embraced based on the assumption that this is the least dysfunctional manner in which to reduce conflict among those who are most strongly invested in their own permissible behaviors. But this is basically predicated on the assumption that right makes might is just as unreasonable as might makes right.
And where in the world does objective morality fit in here?
Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
For me, it’s not a question of accepting or not accepting permissibility rules but of exposing the gap between such rules [in any given community] and objective morality.
Clearly, down through the ages, historically and culturally, men and women have been able to establish rules of behavior. A consensus is reached based on one or another combination of might makes right, right makes might and democracy and the rule of law. This is permissible, that is not. But what does this or that have to do with conflicting goods that often come into existence between communities? Or how contingency chance and change within any one particular community precipitates new contexts in which some want the rules to be changed?
It’s not a question of being without morals, but of recognizing how clearly “situational” moral and political narratives are out in the real world of human interactions; rather than in a world of words assessment in a philosophy magazine.
It is the moral objectivists who are more likely to embrace a “theoretical posture”. Worse, to the extent that some try to impose their own “permissibility rules” on the entire community, we know where that leads. “Permissibility” comes to revolve around a sacred or a secular dogma.
Temporarily pretend? People who embrace objective morality in the modern world today, don’t do a whole lot of pretending. They are generally hell bent instead on insisting that their own permissible rules of behavior ought to be yours and mine as well.
On the other hand, sure, I am completely mussing his point here.
Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
First of all, “robust” is all in the mind of the beholder. To the extent that my own understanding of moral nihilism is in fact a reasonable frame of mind, there is very little in the way of a robust reaction on my part. Instead, “I”, in being both fractured and fragmented and down in an existential hole, precipitates considerably more glum and gloomy reactions to the world around me.
Yes, “I” have more options in not being anchored to an objectivist font, but: those options are never construed by me to be anything other than existential contraptions rooted both precariously and problematically in dasein.
And the narratives conveyed by those on differing sides of any particular human interactions that precipitate conflicting goods are deemed less to be “equally valid” and more to be predicated on assumptions that the other sides can’t necessarily make go away.
So, given one or another set of assumptions, the arguments of the pro-life camp and the pro-choice camps can be construed as reasonable.
Then what? Sans God.
This is not at all what I am arguing given my own particular rendition of moral nihilism. My point is that if one assumes the priority embedded in the abortion conflagration is the “natural right” of the unborn baby to live, then “permissibility rules” will be very different from the ones embraced by those who insist the priority must be embedded instead in the “political right” of women to choose abortion.
Then what are philosophers/ethicists able to determine are permissible or unpermissible behaviors?
Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
Here [believe it or not] he addresses the question, “Is it immoral to eat carrots?”
Now, from my frame of mind, the focus here revolves less around the fact that Jim believes eating carrots is permmisible while Jane believes it is impermissible, but why they came to believe this given the life that they have lived. What actual experiences with carrots did they have that led them to this conclusion? What were they told about carrots by others? What had they read about carrots that drew them to conclude what they did?
Then the part where the reasons they give either do or do not appear reasonable. Why should it be either permissible or impermissible to eat carrots? Are there actul demonstrable facts about carrots that would obligate all rational and virtuous men and women to either consume or not to consume them?
Finally, the part where one side or the other is actually able to enforce a policy [through political power, through the law, through rewards and punishments] that establish actual consequences in regard to eating carrots.
Meaning the more individuals you involve here the greater the likelihood that permissible rules of behavior [believed to reflect objective morality by each party] will become hopelessly entangled in conflicting goods.
Then this part…
Again, from my frame of mind, it’s not that one does not accept permissibility rules. After all, whenever human beings forge a community, rules of behavior follow. Name me even a single community where this was not the case. Instead the question comes to revolve more around why different individuals come to accept different assessments of “okay to do”, “not okay to do”; and then the extent to which conflicts that arise as a result of this are able to be either reconciled or resolved by, among others, philosophers using the tools at their disposal.
All he is basically arguing here is that if the folks in group X all agree that through one or another God or political ideology or set of assumptions rooted in reason or in an enlightened frame of mind, agree on what is permissible that makes morality objective!!!
Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
No, as a matter of fact, when confronting conflicting goods as a moral nihilist, it seems reasonable to me that “I” be both fractured and fragmented.
But: Given the following philosophical assessment:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
Indeed, my challenge to others is that they take their own assumptions about “permissibility rules” and bring them out into the world by focusing in on a particular context. How is their own assessment of “I” here not fractured and fragmented? How are they not drawn and quartered when confronting conflicting goods?
For me, the extent to which a moral nihilist can have moral values revolves around accepting them as existential contraptions derived from dasein and then practiced only in taking leaps to particular political prejudices. Such that, giving new experiences, relationships and access to ideas, “I” is ever subject to reconfiguration in a world of contingency, chance and change.
All I can ask of others here is to explain how, given their own lives, this is not applicable to them.
What on earth is this supposed to mean? Where are particular examples of how this “temporary pretense” might actually play out when value judgments come into conflict?
Anyone here accept his point? If so, how then would you describe it “for all practical purposes” in your conflicted interactions with others?
Sure, I may well be missing his point. If “your acceptance of permissibility rules implies that you accept that those rules are applicable to all actions and judgments” where does the part about pretending come in when others challenge you with opposing rules of behavior? Here the party with the most power prevails, or one side is able to convince the other side to abandon their own rules and accept theirs, or together they agree through moderation, negotiation and compromise to accept a set of behaviors in which both sides get something but no side gets everything.
Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
Here I am tugged in conflicting directions. On the one hand, in the absence of a God or the secular equivalent, it’s true: all things are permitted. Why? Because, for one reason or another, all things can be rationalized. After all, look at the history of human behavior to date. What behaviors haven’t been rationalized? At times as an end in itself, at times as a means to an end.
And then those who are able to justify any and all behaviors because they reason that in the absence of God or any other demonstrable objective morality, their own self-interests becomes the font of choice. For them everything revolves around not getting caught for doing things they know that others deem to be immoral or sinful.
At the same time, however, it is not true that “permissibility rules” are just dismissed out of hand as all equally valid. It depends on the context and the actual substantive arguments made by those arguing for one rather than another set of behaviors. The part embedded in dasein embedded in a particular historical and cultural community in which rules of behavior are necessary to forge a consensus regarding the least dysfunctional society.
Thus:
Yeah, that is one way to look at it. And where is the philosophical argument able to encompass all possible contexts in which torture may occur? An argument in which there is no doubt regarding what one is obligated to do or not do as a rational and moral human being.
Instead, out in the “for all practical purposes” real world that we live in, different people have different opinions about torture. Rooted in particular daseins interacting out in a particular world. Assumptions can be made by those all along the political spectrum. And, one way or another, actual laws have to be enacted to deal with contexts in which torture is a reality.
And here enforced behaviors can revolve either around might makes right, right makes might, or democracy and the rule of law.
Then the extent to which any particular individual comes to be as “fractured and fragmented” as I am out in the is/oight world. That too is no less the embodiment of dasein.
Teaching Ethics: What’s The Harm?
Patrick Stokes discusses some of the ethical problems arising in teaching ethics.
There it is. How does one realistically discuss/teach the philosophy of ethics without taking the technical arguments out into the world and testing them against conflicting moral assessments of what is unfolding given conflicting descriptive assessments of what is unfolding? And then the gap between what individual daseins describe as happening and what they believe ought to be happening instead.
Especially for those intent on arguing that actual moral obligations can be adduced [philosophically or otherwise] given the most rational assessments that there are.
Exactly. I would bring followers of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant etc., into these daunting, painful contexts and explore with them the manner in which the components of my own moral philosophy [nihilism] are out of sync with their own assessments. And as soon as they attempted to yank the discussions up into the clouds of intellectual contraptions I’d yank them back down. I’d make it a stipulation that in my classroom, discussion of moral and political value judgments are always intertwined in theory and practice.
What am I missing here? The discussion is about the pros and cons of euthanasia and a student and his family is embedded precisely in this at times excruciating moral dilemma…but bringing it up is “glib and crass”?
I’d make it clear that in my classroom students were expected to bring the ideas professed by philosophers down through the ages out of the technical clouds by intertwining the definition and meaning given to words in any particular argument out into the world that they themselves have experienced.
Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.
But the ambiguity here derives precisely from the complex and convoluted interaction between what we think and what we do. We think what we do based on the panoply of variables in our lives that are largely beyond our control. Let alone being able to completely understand.
After all, a Marxist or a fascist or a misogynist or a feminist or a liberal or a conservative or an objectivist or an existentialist or a nihilist or a Platonist or a Kantian or a Nietzschean can all claim to be what they do.
So, the far more important question is why do we choose to think the thoughts that precipitate the things that we choose to do.
From my frame of mind, this part…
…still requires one to reconfigure it as a “general description intellectual contraption” into a description of a particular context, out in a particular world construed from a particular point of view.
And here the components of my own moral philosophy are no less applicable to her.
Trust me: the book you are looking for here is her novel The Blood of Others. The ideas encompassed here may not be clear and rigorous in an academic sense, but they take her scholastic argument about an ambiguous ethics out into the world — a particular world in which certain French citizens risked their life and limb in the resistance against Hitler’s Nazis.
And that [in my view] basically explains the reaction of many here to my own take on morality being an existential contraption rooted in dasein. And not just the objectivists. To feel fractured and fragmented down in a reality “hole” is the last thing most of us wish to think or want to believe is a reasonable point of view.
Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.
Which is precisely what most of us choose not to do. For many because they have been indoctrinated to view themselves and the world around them in a particular way out in a particular community; and then basically they embody this received identity all the way to the grave.
Either way it is the psychology of objectivism that sustains their capacity to resist disturbing frames of mind that often prevail when confronting moral/political ambiguity and uncertainty head on.
Indeed, it’s not for nothing they are everywhere in this philosophy forum. And on most others. What they all share in common of course is the belief that there is in fact a “real me” able to connect the dots [philosophically or otherwise] to the “right thing to do”.
They all swear by that, don’t they? Instead where the exchanges often become quite fierce – think liberals vs. conservatives here – is when all sides insist it is their own moral narrative and political agenda that must prevail. Why? Because all rational and virtuous human beings are obligated to think what they do. Then around and around they go.
Some just go further and exclude entire groups from their ranks. Based on gender or race or ethnicity or sexual preference.
Which also explains why so many of them avoid at all cost bringing their political ideals out into the world as I have come to understand it given the components of my own moral philosophy. They’ll be sticking with their objectivist “serious philosophy” one suspects until the day they die.
Here, the liberals may heap scorn on the conservatives heaping scorn right back on them, but: they all cling to the ideals themselves. Only the moral foundation and the political prejudices ever change.
That and the definitions.
Here of course is where this particular existentialist reconfigured himself into a moral nihilist. All courses of action can be rationalized in a No God world. If only because the “nature of our relationships” can in turn become attached existentially to various sets of assumptions that prevail on all sides of the conflicting goods wars.
And then the perspective of the narcissists and sociopaths. There may well be a philosophical argument that obviates the assumptions they make about human interactions in a No God world, but I haven’t come across it of late.
Only I am the first to acknowledge that my own arguments here cannot be excluded from my own arguments here.
Of course all you need but do here is to insist that I exclude them anyway. Anything to keep yourself up out of the hole yourself. After all, look what is at stake here if you do start to tumble down into it.