thezeus18 wrote:Uh, I fail to see how team ILO's conception of morality is, er, morality.
Morality must entail immorality. Morality isn't description.
And certainly, Team ILO's attempt at morality is nothing more than description. "To do what satisifes your wants and your needs on an individual basis" is how people do, in fact, act. It cannot be morality because it is no more than an observation of human decision making. It leaves no room for immorality, because all human actions are attempts to satisfy wants and needs.
uglypeoplefucking wrote:it is ridiculously simple - i think you guys needed to make a better case that it's actually a MORAL argument - i wasn't convinced that it was ...
I wrote:By shifting the argument from what people should do, to what people do do, PavlovianModel146 has tacitly accepted that it is impossible to define a universal statement of what people should do, i.e. that there is no universal human morality. For whatever Team ILO has described, it can be sure that it is not morality.
Sittlichkeit wrote:
Do to time constraints I will only point out how worthless ILO's position is. To do this I will use their most concise formulations of it, which are incidentally single sentences that make nonsense look like platitudes.
In their first post we get this from Pav. :
"the Universal Morality is that we do whatever we can (within our confines) to satisfy our individual wants or needs. We are moral; we do what is right for us."
I value an education but really don't want to go to class today, if I side with my values, according to you I am being immoral. This is a serious problem with your theory, infact it is so hopelessly confused that this alone overturns and trumps all arguments any of you made.
The problem here is that it is impossible to satisfy both wants. You want to act in a manner that adheres to your values, but you also want to skip class on this particular day, but you can't do both. That is going to be the case anytime there are two different things that you may want to do, but that involve the same period of time in such a manner that you cannot do both.
Carleas wrote:Out of curiosity, Pav, how much merit do you think ILO's definition of universal morality actually has? On the one hand, I find it ridiculous, because morality is generally taken as a motivator, and that definition cannot motivate. On the other hand, I don't think people push morality for any reason other than to get what they want. It seems like the conventional understanding of morality presents an impossible standard, and that ILO just tried to transcend and defy the conventional understanding, since a discussion within that understanding would have been hopeless.
I think that is an oversimplified understanding of want, but I guess I'm supposed to redefine "want" along with ILO and use it as a catch all for every human motivator. I would have to be convinced to do so, rather than just forced to by some underdeveloped sentence that compelled it on all of us unconsciously. But, It lacks explanatory power because it lacks complexity, I would be unable to even explain the inner motivations of myself let alone try to universalize them out to the entire species. A binary account of want doesn't accurately describe the human condition.
The problem ofcourse is that It doesn't make sense for the reason I pointed out in my previous post. Different motivators come into conflict all the time, and the human is not a binary creature that has just one sort of motivation in only one sort of intensity. The two motivators I used were values and attitudes, and I gave a very plausible account of how my attitude is felt more intensely than this sort of "in the back of my mind" values, but I am ultimately moved by my values to action. I don't think any of us can deny that the desire to stay in bed when we've stayed up too late is NOT more intense than the nagging feeling we have that we ought to go to class even though we don't have to. Yet, occasions occur when we are moved by that nagging feeling. The answer is that we have either previously decided to be motivated by our values over our more intense baser wants and desires, we are moved to action out of habit, or we find motivation from values qualitatively superior to motivation by quantitatively superior attitudes. Your platitude is incompatible with all three of these answers, it cannot account for human behavior.
I should have anticipated your response, but the surprise gave me a good laugh, so thank you for that. Your response was in keeping with the ILO position, but it didn't address the difficulties I laid out. Instead it was a descriptive statement that is folk psychological. Focusing on the problem of satisfying multiple "wants" is a problem dear to folk psychology, and saying the most intense wins out is an answer dear to folk psychology, so as per usual your answer is immediately understood and seen as the right answer. But it addressed neither the point that was made, nor made sense beyond a immediate guttural agreement.
That's a good rule of thumb and I am sure it applies to many people, but the way you define it prevents it from being situational.
Nope, doesn't account for one-time decisions for which no habit has been formed.
Anyway, none of your answers work because they are all one or the other, or constitute pre-planning.
Pavlovianmodel146 wrote:How does a motivator, as you put it, not result in a want? If it doesn't result in a want, how is it a motivator?
Sittlichkeit wrote:Pavlovianmodel146 wrote:How does a motivator, as you put it, not result in a want? If it doesn't result in a want, how is it a motivator?
A want is a type of motivator, it doesn't make sense to say "result" in reference to the relation
And if you decide to say that there is only one type of motivator and it is called "want", despite the reasons I gave for not doing so, then the ILO position becomes "we are motivated to action by what motivates us". Such a statement says nothing.
So, we understand that any of these motivators, whether collaboratively or individually result in us taking a certain action. However, we want to take this action in order to satisfy these motivators.
Sittlichkeit wrote:
It's hard to tell, but you seem to be discussing second order volitions. There is no reason to think that everything we do is subject to second order volitions or that wants are the only motivators present during second order volitions. We are all wanton to a certain degree. And as it happens, the ideas I'm offering are most powerful as a response to the problem of second order volitions.
I want to smoke because I'm addicted to nicotine, but I am aware of the concequences it causes to my health so I don't value this want. Now we could say I don't want to want to smoke, but we wouldn't really capture what is going on within me because, in this example, two different motivators are at play. An immediate want that unconsciously compels me to smoke, and then the relation between a higher cognitive processes and my values that makes me disvalue smoking. If we say I don't want to want we are forced into equivocation or unnecessarily vague language. It is simply a very poor way to describe my behavior if I am ultimately motivated by my second order value to quit smoking.
Or consider an example where wants come into direct contradiction with each other. Let's say I want to smoke because I'm addicted, but I don't want to smoke because it makes my house smelly. Let's further say that each of these wants is of identical intensity and I want to want to do both. It is plausible that I am so torn between my wants that it resonates infinitely to any order of desire we wish to investigate. I want to want to want to want....to do both. Your theory cannot account for how I decide which path to pursue, infact it further says that I will never be able to be moved to action at all. I am stuck at an impasse of wants for all eternity. Yet, when situations like this do arise, we clearly pick one path like it is the natural path and don't really even realize what obvious peril we were in. On the other hand, what I have been putting forward has no problem at all in dealing with the situation. It answers with values, or attitudes, or explanatory coherence of past behavior ect.
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