It is.
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.
Well it's bound to be if he simply conforms to whatever you require of him.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:09 pm
It will be more than either of us is, I'm quite certain.
ROTFLHarbal wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 5:25 pmNot 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.
Is that a yes, or is that a no?Belinda wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:33 pmI 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.
Sorry God cannot so easily duck his responsibilities.
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.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.
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.
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).Immanuel Can wrote:Well, that actually turns out to be one heck of a pill to swallow.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.
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.
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.Immanuel Can wrote:Doesn't that run together two different explanations, though?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!
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?
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: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.
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)Immanuel Can wrote:I did not use the word "right" there, actually. I asked, what's our legitimacy in imposing our "values" over their "values"?Astro Cat wrote:Well, on the noncognitivist picture, there's no such concept as a "right" in the context you're using.
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: 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.
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: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.Astro Cat wrote: We see the rise and fall of entire civilizations all the time looking back.
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."
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.Immanuel Can wrote:No, I'm asking you about this particular moral intuition, one you have already admitted you share, in some measure.Astro Cat wrote:I couldn't tell you why belief in things like moral oughts is so prevalent in humans.
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.
Halt.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...
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.
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.Immanuel Can wrote: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.Astro Cat wrote: Yes, this is why I've said that our values are some combination of nature and nurture;
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.
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.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.
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.Immanuel Can wrote:Oh, I think it's quite obvious they do. Values are a choice, not a given.Astro Cat wrote:I am merely pointing out that people don't have conscious control over changing their values.
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.
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.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.
Two books, just to start: "Hitler's Willing Executioners," and "Ordinary Men."
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: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.
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: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.Astro Cat wrote: For instance, I bet I couldn't convince you that I'm actually an extraterrestrial beaming down these messages to Earth.
But if you swooped down and took me on your spaceship, I'm quite sure I would change my mind.
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: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.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.
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.
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 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.
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: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.
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.Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:The thing that bothers me is the deadnaming thing,
Aha!
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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.Immanuel Can wrote:I've suggested that the word "good" means "conformable to the character and wishes of God."
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?"Immanuel Can wrote:I think the alleged "non-cognitivist" knows darn well that cannibalism is immoral.
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?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.
The way you phrase it the latter is more improbable. I don't describe God as a pushmepullyou .Sculptor wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 7:36 pmIs 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?
Using the word God for such ideas is simply an abuse of language.Belinda wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 8:55 amThe 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.
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.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.
Typing on a tiny screen. I’m a nontheist and also not an ontological materialist.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.