IS and OUGHT

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Immanuel Can
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by Immanuel Can »

Harbal wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:03 pm Look, IC, if your conscience is clear regarding how honest you've been with your arguments, it's fine.
It is.

But I'm not my own Judge.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

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Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:52 pm

But I'm not my own Judge.
Well when the time comes for you to explain yourself to him, let's hope he's not as on the ball as I am. :)
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Re: IS and OUGHT

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Harbal wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:06 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:52 pm But I'm not my own Judge.
Well when the time comes for you to explain yourself to him, let's hope he's not as on the ball as I am. :)
It will be more than either of us is, I'm quite certain.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by Harbal »

Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:09 pm
It will be more than either of us is, I'm quite certain.
Well it's bound to be if he simply conforms to whatever you require of him.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

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Harbal wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:25 pm
Sculptor wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 4:10 pm And was there any advantage to her using this deception?
Not really, she just had a thing about P.E. teachers, I don't know where it came from. And she never expressed any wish to become one herself. It was most peculiar. It did cause my wife some embarrassment on one occasion when one of the teachers at my daughters school asked her where she taught.
ROTFL
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by Harbal »

God might tell us what is wrong, but he can't make us feel what is wrong; that can only come from within us.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

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Belinda wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:33 pm
Sculptor wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:26 am
Belinda wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:02 am
So it makes sense to be agnostic as God is not falsifiable. Neither is God verifiable unless the traditional meaning of 'God' is psychologised when a verifiable case can be made for God.
Are you agnostic about the Great Buggblatter Beast of Traal?
Or agnostic about the tooth fairy?
How about being agnostic about salmon fishing on the surface of the sun?
I imagine improbability is ultimately subjective or intersubjective. My scientific knowledge is not too good but such as it is your examples are impossible. That existence is an orderly, nomic, affair seems to me to be possible.
Is that a yes, or is that a no?

I would have thought it far more easy for the universe to come up with The Great Buggblatter Beast of Traal, than an omnipotent being who creates life.
So which is more improbable?
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Re: IS and OUGHT

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Harbal wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:35 pm God might tell us what is wrong, but he can't make us feel what is wrong; that can only come from within us.
Sorry God cannot so easily duck his responsibilities.

Since he is omniscient and omnipotent, he has already known since the dawn of time how you are going to feel about the lies your sister tells since he made you.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

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Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:02 am I've taken quite a bit of time to ponder this and fashion a reply.

If only discourse with you wasn't so darn useful, maybe I could get some sleep. :wink:

Anyway, at length, I've gotten back to your very substantial and thoughtful reply. I've taken the liberty of shortening as many passages as I could, putting in "..." to indicate, as much as I could, when something substantial would need to be tracked from a previous message. But I'm sure you remember what you wrote, and it was necessary in order to keep this from becoming the reply that ate Manhattan.
Sleep is for the weak IC! No, but I get it -- I actually half-wrote a reply last night and deleted it because I was tired and it was too meandering. I think there are now three main components to the post: 1) discussion of whether antirealism has consequences, 2) discussion of doxastic voluntarism, 3) discussion of goods and oughts on the moralist picture. I shall try to scoop them all together into their sections. So, some responses will be out of order to suit this design.

Part 1: Moral Antirealism
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: In any case, yes, I think you describe it right: values are a lot like preferences and lack the ostensible force of whatever a moral ought is supposed to have.
Well, that actually turns out to be one heck of a pill to swallow.

Think about it. It means that there is no longer any way to choose an action, or a political policy, to organize an institution, or to distribute resources, in a way that is authentically, objectively "good." It tells us that the truth is only this: different interest groups have different amounts of power, and different strategies availiable to them. None of these interest groups is actually morally "right" or even "more good" than another, nor are their projects and aspirations "more noble" or "more just" than any other group...because "moral" or "goodness" means nothing other than the level of success their strategies having in seizing the public agenda, or resources, or hegemony, or whatever. In other words, it's an instrumental word, not a moral one.

Do I have to spell the consequence of that worldview out to you? Nietzsche already has. It's a world of raw power, in which "right" has no objective force in the situation. And "rights" or "deserving," or "freedom," or "restitution," or "justice" -- all of them morally-laden concepts -- have no legitimate basis being employed in the discussion at all. They, too, are nothing but propaganda tools. They are devoid of objective reality. And a smart person, one who knows and sees how things really are, can advantageously dismiss them all with the wave of a hand, in the instrumental interest of seizing power.

Is that the world you think we really live in? You seem to say, "Yes." But I suspect you're not fully processing what this does to the causes you love and advocate in your own political activities. However, you can set me straight on that one.
These words would still have meaning in personal contexts; and since many people share some values (overlap is far more likely than non-overlap for particular values) they would even have popular meanings -- after all, that is why they have the illusion of universal meanings to the world that we see (which is not, on the noncognitivist view, a world with moral realism -- obviously).

Just like most people -- nearly all of them, most besides sociopaths -- value altruism in some way, such that altruistic concepts are popularly sensible to talk about, the same would be true for rights based in altruism, freedoms based in altruism, justice based in altruism, and so on. It's not at all true that there would be no "legitimate basis" for employing those words in discussion. Words that are dependent on shared values for a legitimate basis can still be used between those that share the values; and as argued, there are some values that are very popular, nearly universal.

Next, you say that "a smart person, one who knows and sees how things really are, can advantageously dismiss them all..." but this makes an assumption that everyone is a selfish actor that would do this. The supposition, though, is that not everyone is a selfish actor. Just like one that values not stealing isn't going to steal even if they had a 100% guarantee they wouldn't get caught, so would those that value altruism not "advantageously dismiss" things based on that altruism. So this is a non-starter objection. People would still hold their values, they wouldn't suddenly turn to wanton selfishness (and I mean with all Abaddon, sociopathic selfishness like you describe) unless they were already wantonly selfish.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:...my worldview accounts for that as most people are simply born into their cultures and/or religions without much questioning and it is part of the "nurture" aspect of their values. Those that convert to another culture or religion surely do so on the basis of what "feels" the most right to them: they choose based on what is closest to their values!
Doesn't that run together two different explanations, though?

First, you say that people only believe what they're born into. That's one view. But then, sensing the basic flaw in that position, you turn to those who convert. And you say they do so because of "what feels most right to them." But from where do those "feelings" emanate? Not from their socialization, because that's the thing they are throwing over, right?

And we know, also, that "feelings" are treacherous things: think back to, perhaps, the first person you ever "fell in love" with...how do you feel about them now? Or think about when you were betrayed, how, as you might have said, "I could have strangled her." Do you still simmer and want to kill that person? But at the time, you had "feelings" of a very strong sort for them...so "feelings" cannot be trusted. Some are warranted, some are not. Some are merely momentary, even if intense, and some may be more durable. Some are what we call "good" feelings, like being in love for a time; but some are also what we recognize as "bad," such as wanting to strangle somebody in the moment. But the overriding feature of feelings is their variability.

And under that problem, the "feelings" explanation has an even bigger problem: from where do we derive the axiom, "Thou shalt do what thou dost feel?" What tells us that that is some kind of moral imperative? Why do we owe people, or even outselves, to act on "feelings"? Where's the moral imperative for that coming from? :shock:
Feelings are indeed ephemeral and difficult to account for. Values are more like long-term feelings: this is why there's a distinction between our burst of anger, for instance, and checking that anger against what we value. Maybe my friend pisses me off, but I don't strangle her or something because I check my anger against my values.

Yet, indeed, values can be such that they lead to suffering: people can hold values that lead to societies that in general contain more suffering and misery than other values. That is, again, just a description of the reality that we see; and that would be true on either the realist or antirealist view.

As for whether there is an axiom, "though shalt do what thou dost feel," there is not an argument for it. It's definitional: some belief is only a value if it includes the belief that the thing valued should be furthered or preserved in some way. So if you have a value, you already have an instrumentalist ought by definition.

You could ask "well where does the value come from then," and that would be a question for the ages, surely: I don't know where the value comes from, but the noncognitivist picture works without having this knowledge. I don't think anybody knows where their values and preferences come from. Why do I like cheese? Why do I like green, or pink, or black? We could say that something about a past experience informs whether we like these or not, but at the same time, it seems as though if we're exposed to something new (say a new piece of art, or music, or whatever), we just sort of "discover" whether we like it or not. Whatever internal process it is that makes our desires, our values, and our preferences, it doesn't have to be explicitly understood to know how they behave once they're known. So my worldview is safe without some explicit understanding of this process. Likewise, moral realism gets along fine without an explicit understanding of that process either. So I don't think we have to worry about whatever it is.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:I'd take a bullet if it would stop genocide in some way:

You "ought" not.

If "oughts" are instrumental, then the lives of millions are not a "good" worth dying for. Sure, you could "value" doing that arbitrarily, but I don't think you're going to want to die for a value you already know, deep in your heart, is merely arbitrary anyway. In the face of death, I think reason would invite you to consider that the death of millions is not worse than your own death, and in any case, you can be no "heroine" for so doing.
Again, this ignores our actual values. The only person that gets to decide what's worth dying for is the individual. You make the assumption that everyone, on antirealism, would decide selfishly. But that isn't true if they value altruism for example. Realism doesn't have to be true for someone to value other people and to act accordingly. Again, I think this is the world that we see.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:Well, on the noncognitivist picture, there's no such concept as a "right" in the context you're using.
I did not use the word "right" there, actually. I asked, what's our legitimacy in imposing our "values" over their "values"?
You did use the word "right" there. You said: That still means that we have severely morally disordered individuals among us, and no legitimate explanation of why you and I have any right to impose our "values" over their "values." (emphasis added)

On the noncognitivist picture, "legitimacy" in this context is just another moral word that doesn't mean anything. If you're able to impose your values on someone else, then you're able to. And that is what societies do. Sometimes in the way that people with our values like (e.g., imprisoning murderers), sometimes in ways that those with our values don't like (e.g., imprisoning political enemies for "mere" speech). We have to fight for the ways that we like. Again, this describes the world that we see.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: On the noncognitivist picture, nobody has a "right" to not have others impose their values on you.

But on the noncognitvist picture, it's not "wrong" either if they do. There are no "rights" either way.

So again, we're back to that Nietzschean world, in which only power rules. There is no moral persuasion there...at least, no legitimate, truthful moral persuasion, even if it goes on as a merely-linguistic game.

You're inviting totalitarianism, you know.
Totalitarianism is a threat in either picture (noncog and realism). As for persuasion, persuasion is possible in either picture. We can offer people new vantage points and information to try to sway their values to be more like ours. They may try to do the same to us. Sometimes we'll have different enough values that this will not likely ever happen (we probably couldn't talk Hitler out of genocide just like he probably couldn't talk us into it). Yet that's true on both views, and describes the world that we see.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: We see the rise and fall of entire civilizations all the time looking back.
We do. And with every civilizational fall, we also "see" ruin, misery, suffering, starvation, tyranny, and piles of corpses. So "see" in your sentence, is doing a lot of work, there. Babylon, Greece, Rome, France, Germany, Russia, China...name your "fall," and these are thing things you get with it.

If that's where we're headed, then it's not a matter you and I can simply dispassionately note, as if to say, "Oh well...these things happen."
The argument wasn't "oh well, these things happen." The argument was that irreligiosity doesn't seem to have anything to do with the cycle.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:I couldn't tell you why belief in things like moral oughts is so prevalent in humans.
No, I'm asking you about this particular moral intuition, one you have already admitted you share, in some measure.

Ordinarily, we all think the creator of an art object or perhaps an invention or a creation of some other kind, should have prime say in the disposition of the thing, at least at the outset. And we can't think of anyone who ought obviously to have more.

Why is that so? That's my question.
Astro Cat wrote:I think it's likely that many people value creators of paintings hanging them as they like because we have many values about property, and we have empathy...
Halt.

What makes "empathy" a moral quality? What convinces us we have any "duty" to pay attention to it? Or is this just another "feeling"? (And if so, we can ignore it.) It cannot then explain anything.
Again, it's because property-based values are very common, usually due to experience. We have usually created something and desired to do with it as we wished, and we can project that feeling onto others via empathy and altruism: "I bet that guy experiences the same feeling that he wants to control what he does with his painting," so we generally don't value interfering with him doing so. This is just a case of a popular value.

There are exceptions. For instance, if somebody works for a company and they happen to invent something in their free time while on the clock, sometimes the company feels as though they own that thing, even if the worker feels otherwise (even if they say, "but this had nothing to do with what I was working on, I was just using filler time to work on it"). Different people don't agree on who "owns" the project, it depends on their values. Or consider prisoners, concentration camp victims, slaves, and that sort of thing: the people "in charge of them" don't experience valuing that they own their creations. You and I would disagree with the slave drivers and etc., but again, it's dependent on values. It always is.

I didn't say that empathy is a "moral quality," as obviously my worldview wouldn't assign meaning to that utterance. Empathy is a common value, though, and it will lead people to make empathetic decisions. That's just a statement of fact, not a moral evaluation.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: Yes, this is why I've said that our values are some combination of nature and nurture;
No, that's not good enough, obviously. That's what's called "the genetic fallacy," which is when we are asked to justify something, and instead, we just talk about its origin...a very different issue.

Here, we need not just a hypothesis about origins, but a justification for the legitimacy of the hierarchy that places life above ice cream. For nothing about either "nature" or "nurture" does that -- not unless we have a prior certainty that "Thou shalt follow thy nature," or "Thou shalt not depart from thy nurture" is an unimpeachable axiom.

And clearly, neither is.
As I said elsewhere in this response, I don't think anybody has an account for why I like peanut M&M's anymore than why I like altruism. But both noncognitivism and moral realism get along fine without a hard theory on where our preferences come from. I didn't try M&M's for the first time and "decide" that I liked them, I discovered that I liked them. Our preferences exist for whatever reason, and that is enough: we don't have to explain why they are the way that they are. It is sufficient to just say that nature and nurture play some role in them to explain why some are more popular than others, and leave it at that. It's like knowing that a car will operate and how to operate a car without necessarily understanding the engineering going on underneath the hood. It won't be necessary to have an explicit theory on exactly how we develop preferences, it only matters to know how our preferences work once they are held.

Part 2: Doxastic Voluntarism
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:Values can change, I've argued this before in this conversation.

Then, again, the nature-nurture-culture explanations are empty. (and again, the genetic fallacy) That values can change is enough to tell us that none of these things is actually determinative at all. So we need a new explanation, one that this time can tell us how it is possible that people can change values, since they manifestly do so against nature, nurture and culture, all three.
I don't think that we do. I don't need to understand exactly what happened that meant I used to dislike the taste of tomatoes to, vaguely, at some point in my 20's finding them acceptable to understand what it means for my actions to hold those preferences. I can know that when I preferred not to eat tomatoes, I'd probably order a sandwich without them. I can know that when I do prefer tomatoes, I'd probably leave them on the sandwich.

We can imagine that in the case of a taste preference like this that maybe some change in the body could be responsible: maybe there has been some change in my taste buds over time, or some change in how the neurons fire when tasting a tomato, or whatever. But it doesn't matter in terms of understanding how preferences and values help to direct behavior.

Likewise, I don't know why I value altruism. I know that I experience this feeling that I want other people not to suffer and to be happy, and that is enough: I don't have to understand where that feeling came from. We can make just-so stories such as "maybe it came from evolutionary history because it would be advantageous for tribes to look out for one another" or "maybe it comes from God implanting what God likes into us" but it just doesn't matter.

Some people experience different preferences and values after head trauma, so if we really wanted to, we could maybe make some neurological argument about our values being related to neurological structures and function and how these behave, and that would be true on either noncog or realism: but I just don't think that it matters. It's a side discussion, basically. All that matters is what the values we hold mean for us. The question of why we hold them and how they change can be swept away by simply pointing out they probabilistically only change under certain circumstances: head trauma, exposure to a new viewpoint, exposure to new information, and so on.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:I am merely pointing out that people don't have conscious control over changing their values.
Oh, I think it's quite obvious they do. Values are a choice, not a given.

Even among the unthinking, there are only some values that are unchosen and unexamined; there are always others that are selected by the individual, for motivations he or she has of his or her own.
Astro Cat wrote:I can't sit here and just will myself to suddenly start valuing genocide, no matter how hard I earnestly tried out of some sick mental experiment. It isn't possible.
Apparently, it is...and rather easily, too. I was telling Harbal about all the studies that have been done on torturers in places like the Third Reich, or South American prisons, or in occupied lands. And the overwhelming finding of these studies is that ordinary people can be, in a relatively short time and with relatively little effort, be turned into monsters capable of the most revolting attrocities.

Two books, just to start: "Hitler's Willing Executioners," and "Ordinary Men."
So, you're talking about things like the Stanford prisoner experiment, or that one with authority and electric shocks and such. These just show that a lot of people's value hierarchies have authority dangerously close to their altruism values. That's a problem on either worldview, not just for the noncog worldview.

But that it's a problem doesn't make noncognitivism false and realism true (especially since it's a problem for both).

It isn't an instance of people changing their values, it's manipulating circumstances to make their valuation of authority higher than their valuation of empathy and altruism at the time. Now, perhaps their values would shift over a prolonged exposure to such conditions. But again, that would happen on either worldview, so I don't know why it's brought up as some kind of point.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:We don't control our values, not consciously.

Yep, we do. I'm quite certain we do.

The only people who don't are those who follow nothing but what are called "received values." But the very term itself indicates that these are not the only sorts of "values" one can have; and critiques of them show that cognitively chosen "values" can outweigh the "received" ones.

That's actually fairly routine.
Show me a "cognitively chosen value" and I will show you that you had some value leading to you pursuing it that you didn't choose consciously.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: For instance, I bet I couldn't convince you that I'm actually an extraterrestrial beaming down these messages to Earth.
No, but that's only because of the lack of evidence and reasons you might be able to produce. The reason you couldn't get me to beleive that is not because I'm locked into nature-nurture, but because it's a prima facie implausible explanation, for which you have nowhere near adequate opportunity to change my mind.

But if you swooped down and took me on your spaceship, I'm quite sure I would change my mind.
But this is just admitting that there's more to changing a belief than willpower: that it's impossible to change a belief on willpower alone. You agree, then: doxastic voluntarism is false. You can't bring yourself to believe I'm an extraterrestrial just by thinking about it, and you wouldn't be able to help where the threshold of convincing you lies, either: you will just find that there is a threshold somewhere (that you didn't decide), and once it gets crossed, you can't help but to become convinced. You don't control that process consciously.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:You might say the obvious "well it's technically possible," but you wouldn't help but to doubt it. You couldn't just decide to furrow your brow, think really hard, and force yourself to actually believe it.
Well, only because that's not how beliefs ever change. Beliefs change when one perceives sufficient reasons for abandoning one theory and adopting another. They don't change arbitrarily.

You've defined down "conscious control" to mean nothing more than "arbitrary will." But that the choice to believe or disbelieve, especially when we have two fairly plausible theories in hand, is very much an ordinary thing.
You're ignoring that you don't control what is "sufficient reason," though. You're going to have a threshold at which you're convinced and you don't consciously set that threshold. Some people have a different threshold, and we might call them overly credulous or overly skeptical because our threshold is different than theirs. All of epistemology pertains to justification and warrant, but there is no hard, objective determinant when something is justified to the point of warranting belief: that's personal. And we don't set the bar by our willpower, we just find that the bar is there.
Immanuel Can wrote:But I don't think the non-cognitivist response there is even ingenuous. I think the alleged "non-cognitivist" knows darn well that cannibalism is immoral. I don't think he "feels" that less than I do, nor that he fails to suspect it's objectively true. I take it he just wants to keep his theory intact, in spite of the morally reprehensible position it forces him to.
I think this is just confusing what it means to value. The noncognitivist that values human life and dignity is of course going to feel the same sense of outrage and disgust at the notion of casual cannibalism as you. On their view, you both just share some values.
Immanuel Can wrote:But it's not an "aside," actually. It's very germaine. It means that in the "values" battles, there are going to be winners and losers, and there is absolutely nothing anybody can do to prevent that from being the case. No amount of alleged "tolerance" or "inclusion" or "I'm-okay-you're-okay-ness" is going to cure that. So we cannot avoid a hierarchy of values -- not so long as we live in a pluralistic society.
And that is exactly what happens: society enforces a hierarchy of values. I don't think this is a point against noncognitivism. This happens on both views, in fact.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:The thing that bothers me is the deadnaming thing,

Aha! :shock:

The concept "deadnaming" is of extremely recent and deliberate coining. It was never even a thing people could possibly worry about until transing started. And THAT is what upsets you?

I'll warrant you didn't get your antipathy for "deadnaming" from your nurture. And you sure as heck didn't get it from nature. So where did you get it from?

I'll answer, because I know the answer. You got it from your new friends when you joined their circle. Before that, it never even occured to you, and you had no idea it existed. But you chose your de-valuing of "deadnaming" out of reaction to your new circle. And you chose it consciously.
As I've said, values can be added or changed on exposure to new situations and new information. That doesn't mean you're consciously choosing the value. You find that you value it or you don't: you discover that you value it, in other words, rather than causing yourself to value it.

If this is going to be a large part of the discussion, it is perhaps time to talk about Galen Strawson, who has written a lot about whether we have the power of causa sui in our judgments like this. He does it more in the context of free will, but it also matters here. For instance, Strawson would say that if you're shown a new painting that you've never seen before, you may find that you like it, or you may find that you don't like it. He points out that there's never a step in the process where you consciously decide, "I'm going to like this painting." What happens is that you just discover whether you like it: the liking of the painting isn't a conscious process that you will into being, causa sui.

Likewise I believe he famously used a chocolate and ice cream example where you enjoy both, and sit down to choose one. He says that we have a choice, but that it isn't causa sui: if we prefer chocolate over ice cream today, it isn't that we stopped and furrowed our brow and said "I want to choose chocolate over ice cream," but rather that we just performed some introspection and found that in that moment we wanted chocolate over ice cream, and so we probably chose it.

We could, to "prove to ourselves we have free will," choose the ice cream instead, but Strawson notes that it would still be true that our introspection results on which one we wanted more in the moment didn't come from our consciousness in a causa sui way.

It's also possible that our introspection yields no results, we like them both equally, so we might do a quick mental randomization: but that is still not a causa sui creation of a desire.

Our desires, wants, preferences, values, do not seem to come from our conscious control. We do not have the power of causa sui, and doxastic voluntarism -- or a hard version of it anyway -- is false.

Part 3: Oughts and Goodness (on the moral realism picture)
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: Well, it's hard to clear up a term that I myself don't know what it means. But I get the sense that when a moral realist says "x is good," they mean something like... given enough perception, or thinking, or information, or whatever is needed, that any thinking agent could agree that x is good.

Hmmm. That's not what the Christian use of "good" would be. It is not the case that human beings, unaided by God, have sufficient perspecuity on their own always to discover what "the good" is. It's not the sort of thing that mere mundane logic can deliver. At most, deduction can take us to the realization that there is a God, and that that God has some preliminary elements of a nature; but to say that we can map the moral as a mere cognitive exercise performed by somebody who doesn't even believe in God...well, neither we nor Nietzsche thought that was possible.
Well, why not? Power is a sensible property, and while I doubt that there exists any being which is omnipotent, I can make sense out of what it would mean if there were one (it would be a being with the capacity to actualize any logically possible state of affairs) even without actively adopting that ontology.

So, if goodness is sensible, why can I not understand what that would mean without actively adopting that ontology? I know what omnipotence would mean, I know what omniscience would mean, and I don't believe those exist. Same with the transubstantiation example I already gave, I know what that means even if I think the concept is silly. Why is goodness different?

Now, this already gets answered below (in short, you do provide a sensible definition of what is "good"), so don't worry too much about responding directly to this specific passage. The problem will be, though, that your proposed definition of "good" disentangles it from "oughts" such that we will no longer know why we "ought" to do what is "good." As you'll see below.

Let's hold onto "good = conformable to the character and wishes of God." (from a section I cut for brevity, from the very top).
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:Well, the notion is that "goodness" has to be defined somehow. If God's attitudes, values, beliefs, or commands play a causal, definitional part in what the property of goodness is, then that is DCT.

No, no, it's not.

DCT has that middle word: "command." It presupposes that the reason something is right or wrong is that God "commands" it. But that is not the case, at all: it is right or wrong because it reflects the character of God AND because it does, God also commands it. In DCT, the "command" is doing the work; in my description, it does not do any work in "making" something right. It's "right" already, before God "commands" it. It's right because it conforms to the character and nature of God.
This, coupled with your statements (not quoted) that goodness is not a property-in-itself, does give me an idea of how you use the word "good," and it is, in fact, DCT.

Now, you object that DCT has the word "command" in it, but that is actually irrelevant (that it has the word "command" in it is a historical incidentalism in how Euthyphro phrased the problem). It's as if the complaint might be "ah, but God already believes x is good before God commands to do x, so the command has nothing to do with x's goodness." That's true, but DCT isn't really about the command. It'd still be DCT if God never commanded anything at all and just preferred/valued/believed things (and those things would be defined as "good" because God prefers/values/believes them).

But I am more than willing to just dispense with semantical disputes and drop the term DCT: it won't matter, your position will still suffer from all of the problems that DCT suffers from (because it is the same position).

So, the first consequence of "goodness" or "good" being defined by God's beliefs/values/character/preferences/whatever (I will henceforth just use "values," but it's really the same problem with all of these) is that we can therefore replace all instances of the word "good" or "goodness" everywhere with something like "that which is in accordance with God's values."

Let's revisit exactly how you phrased that:
Immanuel Can wrote:I've suggested that the word "good" means "conformable to the character and wishes of God."
So, we have solved the cognitivity issue on "goodness"'s part: good is that which conforms to the character and wishes of God (or God's values). If x is good, that is the same thing as saying God values x, and x is good because God values x. God's valuation of it is what defines it as being good. Very well, that is perfectly sensible, indeed.

Yet we have a problem in that now goodness and oughtness are separated: the skeptic will now ask, "well, why ought I care what God values if I don't value x?" And indeed, why ought they?

We can't say that they ought to value what God values because it's good to value what God values, because that is just making the silly statement, "you ought to value what God values because God values that you value what God values." It doesn't address the question: why should you care? So what if God values that you value God's values. Why ought you?

If goodness isn't a property, but just a description demarcating what God likes and doesn't like, it removes whatever power it may have been able to have to provide a foundation for an "ought." On this schema, moral realism is actually false (the noncognitivist was correct all along!) because the moral realist supposition is that "for any S, S ought to do x if x is good," but under this schema, this just translates to "for any S, S ought to do x if God values x." But then there is no argument that makes this true: S may simply not share the same values as God. Maybe S doesn't care about wearing mixed fabrics, or maybe S feels attracted to the same sex and doesn't agree with God that there's anything moral or bad about simply loving somebody. S might have some values that align with God's (perhaps S and God both value not-murdering), but there is never a point where S ought to value what God values.

One couldn't even say that "God has the right to impart oughts onto S because God created S." Why ought S buy that? It can't be because it is "good," because again, S doesn't care what God thinks, so its "goodness," being defined as what God thinks, is a moot point to S. Ostensibly the word "right" in this schema also simply means that a right is whatever God thinks is a right, and so why ought S care about that, either? We could argue that God has the power to enforce His views and beliefs, but that is simply what the noncognitivist has been saying all along: and moral realism is still false if it comes down to "goodness" being what some being values, and that being enforces its values with power and violence. The noncognitivist shrugs and says "yes, that's what I've been saying. That's not moral realism. I was right."

Let's revisit something else you said in this post. Earlier, you said:
Immanuel Can wrote:I think the alleged "non-cognitivist" knows darn well that cannibalism is immoral.
But if "immoral" just means "is against God's wishes," then why does the non-cognitivist know that cannibalism is against God's wishes? Weirdly, Christian rituals actually incorporate a strange form of ritualistic cannibalism, for instance. But that's besides the point, the skeptic could wonder, "if morality is just a funny way to say that God likes something, how am I supposed to know what God likes or not unless God tells me?"

That's aside from the problem of why the skeptic "ought" to care what God thinks about cannibalism rather than just care about what they, themselves, think about cannibalism.

Another thing you said earlier was:
Immanuel Can wrote:Well, it means that "values" are not the source of anything, just as eyeballs are not the source of light. Values are our human attempts to approximate the actual "goods" that exist in God. They are "good-detection-attempts," not sources of legitimation.
Astro Cat wrote:Ok, I can file that away to apply later once I know what a "good" is supposed to be:


No, no...that's the answer. You can't "file it away" without denying yourself that answer.

You're looking for a defnition of "goodness" as if it were a thing-in-itself, rather than an attribute of God. And you're never going to find it, on those terms.
If values -- our values, our personally held values -- are "good detection attempts," read "detecting what God likes or not attempts," then why are so many of our values different from or ambivalent to what God supposedly likes?

I don't think that makes sense. Values are just exactly what we think they are, they aren't "attempts" to detect anything about God. We hold values, our own values. And God holds His values, His own values. You can say that "good" corresponds to that which He values, but that doesn't mean we ought to care, or ought to have values in line with His. He just has the biggest gun in the universe, the most power to back it up; so we could argue that, perhaps "you ought to value what God values or else you'll face the consequences", but that is a hypothetical imperative and depends on what you value, and that is what the noncognitivist has been saying morality is this entire time.

None of this even gets into the aseity and sovereignty issues (you have argued before that God can't decide that murder is good all of a sudden because He has a nature): but this still just means that something transcendental to God makes it that way, since God has no control over the matter and can't help but to have the nature He has. So what is "good" may be determined by what God wishes, but what God wishes is determined by God's nature, which God doesn't control, which is relevantly dependent on something transcendental to God. So, if "good = what God wishes," it would be true that if God desired torture for torture's sake, it would be good. Something transcendental to God just prevents that (since God has no control over His nature). That's probably a side discussion at this point, though.

So, to recap:
If you believe in this schema that "good" means "conformable to the character and wishes of God," then moral realism is false unless you can explain why we "ought" to care what God wishes without a hypothetical imperative (e.g., it doesn't count to say "well you ought to or else you'll face consequences").

Pointing out that God created us (ostensibly) doesn't matter because why ought we care about that? It depends on our values whether we care about that or not. I'll tell you right now that I do not value creator beings having "rights" to impart "oughts" on created beings if those beings are sapient and sentient. So why ought I care what God wishes without a hypothetical imperative?
Belinda
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by Belinda »

Sculptor wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:36 pm
Belinda wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:33 pm
Sculptor wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:26 am

Are you agnostic about the Great Buggblatter Beast of Traal?
Or agnostic about the tooth fairy?
How about being agnostic about salmon fishing on the surface of the sun?
I imagine improbability is ultimately subjective or intersubjective. My scientific knowledge is not too good but such as it is your examples are impossible. That existence is an orderly, nomic, affair seems to me to be possible.
Is that a yes, or is that a no?

I would have thought it far more easy for the universe to come up with The Great Buggblatter Beast of Traal, than an omnipotent being who creates life.
So which is more improbable?
The way you phrase it the latter is more improbable. I don't describe God as a pushmepullyou .


As I wrote recently in reply to Immanuel Can, God is not a cause like a locomotive pulling a train of carriages is a cause. Causation ultimately is wholly nomic. For instance night and day are constantly in conjunction. However night does not cause day and day does not cause night. Night and day have a common cause.

All events have a common cause.Some (like IC) say the common cause is God, while pantheists (like me) say the common cause is nature.

The cause of life is not a being among other beings nor an event like the universe is an event.The cause of life is a) the circumstantial cause of everything else and b) the cause of the relational structure of all the events and things.
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Sculptor
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by Sculptor »

Belinda wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 8:55 am
Sculptor wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:36 pm
Belinda wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:33 pm
I imagine improbability is ultimately subjective or intersubjective. My scientific knowledge is not too good but such as it is your examples are impossible. That existence is an orderly, nomic, affair seems to me to be possible.
Is that a yes, or is that a no?

I would have thought it far more easy for the universe to come up with The Great Buggblatter Beast of Traal, than an omnipotent being who creates life.
So which is more improbable?
The way you phrase it the latter is more improbable. I don't describe God as a pushmepullyou .


As I wrote recently in reply to Immanuel Can, God is not a cause like a locomotive pulling a train of carriages is a cause. Causation ultimately is wholly nomic. For instance night and day are constantly in conjunction. However night does not cause day and day does not cause night. Night and day have a common cause.

All events have a common cause.Some (like IC) say the common cause is God, while pantheists (like me) say the common cause is nature.

The cause of life is not a being among other beings nor an event like the universe is an event.The cause of life is a) the circumstantial cause of everything else and b) the cause of the relational structure of all the events and things.
Using the word God for such ideas is simply an abuse of language.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Harbal wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:03 pm Look, IC, if your conscience is clear regarding how honest you've been with your arguments, it's fine. I was just a bit worried about your soul, that's all.
I only dipped a toe in this thread to see if IC would do all his traditional tricks while trying to impress the cat lady. I needn't have bothered, you did me a solid by testing that hypothesis to destruction.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by Harbal »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Thu Aug 11, 2022 1:12 pm
I only dipped a toe in this thread to see if IC would do all his traditional tricks while trying to impress the cat lady. I needn't have bothered, you did me a solid by testing that hypothesis to destruction.
While honesty is an indispensable prerequisite for discovering truth, it can be a positive obstacle when you have already decided what the truth is and come to convincing others of it.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by Astro Cat »

Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:58 pm If you think it's otherwise, show how Atheism can rationalize anything else but some form of Materialism and amorality. I'd be interested in seeing any such argument.
Typing on a tiny screen. I’m a nontheist and also not an ontological materialist.

I think there is something ontological about reality that makes mathematical and logical objects real and discovered rather than invented, and they don’t have mass-energy or spatiotemporal extension (e.g., aren’t material) — though we abstract them from material things often.
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Re: IS and OUGHT

Post by promethean75 »

bro. how can you be a foundationalist when anti-foundationalism has all the real bosses; stirner, nietzsche, pierce, james, AND wittgenstein. 
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