Re: back to the beginning: morality

Cerebellum gets all the attention but don't skip brain stem day.
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The drive to organize our judgments of actions into a logical structure, the urge to rationalize or justify them, is surely one significant explanation of the existence of permissibility rules.
Those who value reason and psychic harmony will likely be attracted to rules that justify their gut feelings. If you feel that bull-fighting is wrong, and you like to have reasons for your feelings, you will be open to a rule that implies bull-fighting is wrong. But the causal chain can also go in the opposite direction.
An inclination for rational orderliness may cause your moral feelings to align with your current theoretical commitments. Some who have no pre-theoretical moral dislike of bull-fighting may well come to have a moral dislike of it because a rule they accept brands it as wrong. Many a philosopher has become a vegetarian not out of any sympathy for animals, but from a love of consistency and acceptance of a permissibility rule that forbids causing gratuitous suffering.
Metaethics and Moral Disagreement
Although it brings all possible actions under a single standard, a permissibility rule can be complex, and its application sensitive to circumstances. A permissibility rule may require that the time, place, effects, and the nature of the people involved be considered when evaluating an action. It may even take into account the acceptance of different permissibility rules by other people.
Indeed, objectivity demands the incorporation of information from as many perspectives as possible. Information about other peoples’ rules should shape a moral perspective, but it doesn’t undermine its validity.
For instance, I know that there are people who categorically accept the rule that one should never mistreat their holy scriptures. I accept no such rule, but my awareness of others’ acceptance of the rule, combined with a rule I do accept, that everyone should show respect for others’ feelings, results in me not mistreating others’ holy scriptures. I do not respect the ‘holy scripture rule’ in itself; but I respect the holders of that rule, and in doing so I must often respect their rule. But this derivative respect for their permissibility rules does not mean I accept their rules to make my moral judgments.
Relativists, Nihilists, Amoralists and Objectivists
If you, dear reader, claim in perfectly good faith not to accept any permissibility rules, then I could in haste judge that you are without morals. But not to worry; I believe that your moral nihilism is probably only a theoretical posture, inconsistent with your actual acceptance of permissibility rules, as reflected in your actual judgments of particular actions.
Although your acceptance of permissibility rules implies that you accept that those rules are applicable to all actions and judgments, including your own theoretical judgments, your permissibility rules may allow you (as mine do me) to temporarily pretend that you do not accept them, in order to see what might in theory follow from their non-acceptance. But temporarily playing the amoralist in order to try and imagine how the world looks from that perspective, is not genuine amorality.
The assertion of a robust moral relativism means adopting a perspective from which all permissibility rules are viewed as equally valid.
It is important (and often difficult) to keep in mind that moral relativism is not the descriptive claim that people have different and conflicting moral judgments; rather it is the normative claim that no moral judgment is more or less correct than any other. To become a sincere moral relativist one must abandon one’s permissibility rules without embracing other permissibility rules. A relativist could consistently act in accordance with any permissibility rule, but she cannot consistently believe there are any justifications for these actions.
Now if your permissibility rules conflict with the rules I accept, we are both objectivists, but we’re in fundamental moral conflict. To remain true to my acceptance of rules that allow but do not demand carrot eating, I must conclude that you are mistaken to think eating carrots is immoral. True to your different permissibility rules, you must judge my moral indifference to carrot consumption morally incorrect.
Anyone tempted to take a perspective above the fray will either have permissibility rules from which she can judge which of us is correct (if either), or she has not accepted any permissibility rules. If she has accepted permissibility rules, they will either allow or disallow carrot eating. She is an objectivist, just like us, and can weigh in on our dispute.
If she accepts no permissibility rules whatsoever, the very idea of moral permissibility has no claim on her, and she has nothing relevant to offer those of us who do feel the pull of permissibility rules. She is not an objectivist, and both you and I (albeit by virtue of different rules) must conclude that she is without morals. Hardly someone we should ask to arbitrate our moral dispute over carrot eating.
Relativists, Nihilists, Amoralists and Objectivists
If you...claim in perfectly good faith not to accept any permissibility rules, then I could in haste judge that you are without morals. But not to worry; I believe that your moral nihilism is probably only a theoretical posture, inconsistent with your actual acceptance of permissibility rules, as reflected in your actual judgments of particular actions.
Although your acceptance of permissibility rules implies that you accept that those rules are applicable to all actions and judgments, including your own theoretical judgments, your permissibility rules may allow you (as mine do me) to temporarily pretend that you do not accept them, in order to see what might in theory follow from their non-acceptance. But temporarily playing the amoralist in order to try and imagine how the world looks from that perspective, is not genuine amorality.
The assertion of a robust moral relativism means adopting a perspective from which all permissibility rules are viewed as equally valid. It is important (and often difficult) to keep in mind that moral relativism is not the descriptive claim that people have different and conflicting moral judgments; rather it is the normative claim that no moral judgment is more or less correct than any other. To become a sincere moral relativist one must abandon one’s permissibility rules without embracing other permissibility rules. A relativist could consistently act in accordance with any permissibility rule, but she cannot consistently believe there are any justifications for these actions.
If you sincerely and fully, even if only in theory, accept, say, a rule that it’s immoral to torture people, a rule that it’s immoral not to torture people, and another rule that torture is morally indifferent, then you’ve taken an incoherent theoretical position that’s equivalent to the denial of morality – moral nihilism.
When we come into the ethics classroom, we find ourselves tasked with discussing many of the traumas that our students are dealing with outside the university. Philosophy, at its best, connects directly and meaningfully with everyday life – and everyday life can be incredibly hard to talk about, and to teach ethics is, unavoidably, to discuss topics that can be confronting and even traumatic, from matters of life and death, to more everyday problems of power and suffering.
For all the talk of ‘safe spaces’ on campus, the ethics classroom must be a fairly daunting prospect for anyone who has been assaulted, lost a loved one, or ended a pregnancy, just to name a few. In one of my units, my students discuss abortion, euthanasia, sex work, and pornography – all topics that have pronounced capacities to bring up painful life experiences.
Sometimes they choose to share their experiences. Just recently, in a discussion on euthanasia and the introduction of voluntary assisted dying in our state, a student mentioned that his family were very conscious of this due to his mother’s terminal illness. These can be useful moments for teaching, but they can also make the very discussion itself seem glib or crass. And for every student who shares their experiences, you can be sure there are many more who choose not to.
“My life is my work,” Simone de Beauvoir once said. Spoken like a true Existentialist: to her, life and thought were inextricably linked; we are what we do.
Existentialism is a philosophy that outlines the conditions of human existence but rejects any conception of human nature; a philosophy that affirms human freedom but emphasizes that it brings with it not happy empowerment but anguish and despair, a philosophy that stresses that humans have choices but expresses little optimism that we will make good use of them or even understand what it would mean to make the right choice.
Beauvoir’s Existentialism is scattered through her many works, both literary and theoretical, including her classic feminist text The Second Sex. However, it finds it’s clearest and most rigorous form in her relatively underrated book The Ethics of Ambiguity.
The title is intriguing and unattractive at the same time: The fact that an Existentialist talks explicitly about ethics (rather than simply stressing our inescapable freedom) is a rare treat, but surely an ethics that bonds itself to ambiguity is hardly promising to propose any useful answers to moral problems?
Beauvoir accepts Sartre’s Existentialist tenets that there is no human nature and that human freedom is absolute, i.e. that in any situation whatever we always have a choice. In other words, human life is not on autopilot, nor is there an instruction manual telling us how to make the right decisions. This means that there is a good deal of ambiguity, and, in short, Beauvoir tells us to face up to it and live with it.
Given this ambiguity there would seem to be very little opportunity for moral theorizing. Not so, objects Beauvoir to this standard Existentialist conclusion. We must not expect absolute solutions and lasting answers: “Man fulfils himself in the transitory or not at all.” But this doesn’t mean that all ways of living, and all courses of action, are equally good. The way forward is to look at the nature of our relationship to other people.
Sartre’s Existentialism leads to a clear individualism, in which the fact that there are other people presents a constant threat of falling into ‘bad faith’. Others judge us and impose limits on us to the unbearable degree that “hell is other people”.
By contrast, Beauvoir’s own individualism is more nuanced, in a Kantian way: “Is this kind of ethics individualistic, or not? Yes, if one means by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value and recognizes in him alone the power of laying the foundations of his own existence...The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals…. His freedom can only be achieved through the freedom of others.”
And here we finally have it: “No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.” Beauvoir’s ethics views the existence of others as an opportunity. In fact it is the only opportunity we have to give reality and meaning to what we do and therefore to what we are: We must invite others to join our projects.
Beauvoir gives examples of how many of us make poor use, or no use at all, of our freedom. She even explains how freedom for children differs from adult freedom. Children can do what they like to an extent, without being morally judged for it, because they are largely free of responsibilities to others. Not so adults, yet some adults still try and live in the naïve freedom of childhood.
Others try to control or manipulate people in an attempt to limit their freedom – a tactic that according to Beauvoir is ironically doomed to end in self-deception and the limiting of one’s own freedom. A mature and constructive use of our freedom, our only chance of fulfilling ourselves as individuals, involves making a ‘plea’ to others, appealing to them for their attention and cooperation.
The main source of disharmony among both individuals and groups seemed to Einstein to be an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Hence he applied his proven ability for correcting misconceptions to the problem of human conceit; and this led him to point to our feeling that we have autonomous free will as a key mistake.
The non-existence of free will seemed to Einstein so obvious that he did not bother explaining his reasoning in any detail, but the subject does present a serious obstacle when people try to follow his thinking on morality.
Furthermore, Einstein’s lifelong support for individual freedom against authoritarianism appeared to casual observers as inconsistent with his denial of free will.
A correspondence between Einstein and his friend Otto Juliusburger on Hitler’s responsibility for the crimes of WWII illustrates how Einstein proposed to deal with the moral consequences of the absence of free will. He acknowledged that since everyone’s action are determined by prior factors, Hitler could not help but to do what he did, and so the moral arguments used for instance to exempt a madman from retributive punishment – that they couldn’t help or didn’t know what they were doing – could also be applied to Hitler.
In other words, the distinction that lawyers make between a psychopath not knowing right from wrong and someone acting immorally but knowing that it’s wrong, appeared to Einstein unimportant, since both are doing what they must do from the confluence of events ultimately in their brains, which inexorably follow from previous causes.
...instead of focusing on retributive punishment, legal action should be guided by the welfare of mankind; and the welfare of mankind justifies actions to prevent future would-be Hitlers from destroying other people’s lives, just as society might justifiably act to prevent a dangerous delusional schizophrenic from harming others. Einstein also took the non-existence of free will as a wake up call for us not to take our supposed autonomy too seriously: what we jealously protect and shrewdly promote as our autonomy is actually the result of myriads of factors of which we are only vaguely aware.
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.
promethean75 wrote: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.
bro. all that fracturing and fragmenting happens because you are over-analyzing everything. leave that silly shit to the philosophers and just pick something that pleases you. and don't ask 'why' or if it's 'the right thing to do'. do like me, man. i'm irreproachably absolutely positively indubitably certain that i don't like capitalists. like i don't even examine why anymore. that was ten years ago. whether this is a good or bad thing and whether i am compelled by the laws of nature to do this, couldn't be more irrelevant to me. you gotta follow your nose, biggs. like when you look at the world and recognize that there are stock piles of food going bad while millions of people are starving, or that there are more empty, unused houses then there are homeless people in this country, you know something ain't right. you don't need a transcendental critique of pure reason to figure this shit out, homes.
First, of course, this conclusion, in and of itself is, to me, just another manifestation of dasein. You came to it in much the same manner I came to mine: existentially.
Otherwise, one might argue that, actually, using the tools of philosophy or science, one is able to arrive at the one truly rational frame of mind.
And the other bottom line [mine] is that had your life been very, very different, there's no saying beyond all doubt that you would not in fact have become a capitalist yourself.
That is until someone actually is able to establish beyond all doubt the most rational manner in one is obligated to think about capitalism.
You either grasp this as I do or you don't.
Otherwise, one might argue that, actually, using the tools of philosophy or science, one is able to arrive at the one truly rational frame of mind.
promethean75 wrote:define 'truly rational frame of mind'. remember that even complete knowledge - say, understanding epistemology in its fullest sense and arriving at an indisputable conclusion about the nature of knowledge - doesn't get past the naturalistic fallacy and provide any existential guidance for what one ought to do to be rational.
promethean75 wrote:philosophy and science may work together to get to the bottom of this, but neither can tell you what you should do. i imagine you don't just mean by 'rational' being able to practice good inductive reasoning. you mean something more along the lines of moral judgement and having/holding values. no amount of epistemology can help us here.
And the other bottom line [mine] is that had your life been very, very different, there's no saying beyond all doubt that you would not in fact have become a capitalist yourself.
promethean75 wrote:but i wouldn't be 'me' then, but another me. so i couldn't say 'i could have been otherwise', only 'i might not have been, and something else would have been instead.' we often make the mistake of assuming what is logically possible can also be actually possible. but in a perfectly determined universe, nothing could be other than how it is. so, we can imagine 'logically' an alternate possible course of events which led to me becoming a capitalist, but this couldn't actually happen in this particular universe. this shit gets complicated though with many-universe theory so let's not go there. it's interesting stuff, yes, but i can't find any use in it. that is to say, if i discovered it were true, i still wouldn't do anything differently.
People who meet this logic for the first time tend to become alarmed – what happens to our vaunted freedom if we have no free will? There is actually no need to be alarmed if we distinguish between two kinds of freedoms: a freedom from prior causes, and a freedom from coercion.
The idea of ‘absolute free will’ supposes that our choices are not determined by prior causes; but few of us actually think of freedom in that way. Rather, we feel a loss of freedom when we are coerced, that is, when we are forced to do something or be in a certain state against our values.
There are certain likes and dislikes that a person regards as characterizing him. This set of values may change with time, but they are stable in the immediate term. Hence it makes sense to redefine ‘free choice’ as a choice compatible with a person’s self-affirmed set of values.
Exuberant Teleportation wrote:iambiguous wrote:As though "I" over time and the immediate "I" are somehow two different entities in a universe where "I" is of, by and for nature inside and out. From the cradle to the grave. And then all the way back to star stuff.
And this deepest, most profound, and sacred of cosmic connections, tying us all the way back to elements spanning eons of years of evolution should make us feel gratitude and awe towards the supreme creative powers of the universe.
The constants of life are positioned in exactly such a way that we can be forged. Alter this absolute stunning elegance in physical laws only slightly, and the blueprint for life gets sucked into the black hole of oblivion.
And you would have to think that, 1 day, before the big chill, that we will go back to brane stuff, wouldn't you say?
Exuberant Teleportation wrote:Exuberant Teleportation wrote:iambiguous wrote:As though "I" over time and the immediate "I" are somehow two different entities in a universe where "I" is of, by and for nature inside and out. From the cradle to the grave. And then all the way back to star stuff.
And this deepest, most profound, and sacred of cosmic connections, tying us all the way back to elements spanning eons of years of evolution should make us feel gratitude and awe towards the supreme creative powers of the universe.
The constants of life are positioned in exactly such a way that we can be forged. Alter this absolute stunning elegance in physical laws only slightly, and the blueprint for life gets sucked into the black hole of oblivion.
And you would have to think that, 1 day, before the big chill, that we will go back to brane stuff, wouldn't you say?
For the last couple of years I have been reflecting on and experimenting with a new ethics, and as a result I have thrown over my previous commitment to Kantianism. In fact, I have given up morality altogether! This has certainly come as a shock to me (and also a disappointment, to put it mildly). I think the time has come, therefore, to reveal it to the world, and in particular to you, Dear Reader, who have patiently considered my defenses of a particular sort of moral theory for the last ten years. In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.
Some people who otherwise might like Einstein’s modest approach to morality might be turned away by his statement that “Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God” (Albert Einstein, The Human Side).
Einstein did concede that his notions of religion and of God were unusual. For him religious sentiment consisted of awe and reverence for the deep mysteries of the universe, such as why there exist precise and universal natural laws. Many people would feel uncomfortable with the apparent implication that only scientists are fully qualified to enter Einstein’s cosmic religion, but actually, Einstein was by no means an advocate for reliance on reason alone.
In his youth Einstein avidly read David Hume’s writings, the influence of which can be seen in his making a distinction between the ‘is’ of observable physical facts and the moral ‘ought’. Since science is only about the ‘is’, he conceded that, besides reason, our acquisition of values involves our intuition, as well as the examples set by moral teachers. Furthermore, the human relationships with which morality is concerned often contain so many variables as to defeat rational analysis. As he wrote, “To be sure, when the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails us”