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.
Astro Cat wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 12:54 am
When I try to understand what it is, it always goes like this:
Person: You ought to value x.
Me: Ok, but I don't hold that value. Why ought I value x?...
P: Goodness is a property that's objectively defined, not personally defined.
M: Objectively defined how?
Different realists answer from there in different ways, so I'll stop the mock conversation there. This is also pretty much the point in this conversation that we're at now with my questions to you regarding what goodness means.
I don't think we actually are, Cat.
We're far past that, in fact. I've suggested that the word "good" means "conformable to the character and wishes of God."
Now, I understand why somebody who'd already decided not to entertain even the possibility of God existing might find that answer unhelpful. At the same time, I suggest it's the right answer...or very close to being the right way to put it. So there really isn't an alternative.
I also understand why you would think that "oughts" have to be amoral and instrumental (or amoral and probabilistic). I have agreed that, given the supposition that the question is not to be answered with reference to God, that there would be no possible answer as to why a moral "ought" would exist. And I think Hume saw the same, really. So, of course, did Nietzsche.
So long, then, as you are committed not to including God in the answer, I'm certain that you will end up with exactly the sorts of conclusions at which you find yourself keeping on arriving...namely, that there is essentially nothing to a moral "ought," and instrumental "oughts" are bound up in if-then, instrumental patterns of thought.
But what's to be done about that? For if we will not hear the real answer, then why would we think we're going to find it someplace else?
Thus, the fact that you keep arriving back at the place you left becomes utterly unsurprising...and very predictable. Because careful, disciplined reasoning, such as you are doing, coupled with a refusal of God, is going to take you back there every time. I'm certain of it. The only way you'll escape the loop is either by changing that presupposition, or by abandoning careful, disciplined reasoning. Do you want to do either?
Immanuel Can wrote:...We end up in a world in which "value" means nothing more than "prefer temporarily." It lacks all force of "oughtness," all duty, all compulsion to "do the right thing," and all moral content. So we have dealt with the concept of "oughtness" by essentiallly banishing it from the realm of the meaningful, or, on the other hand, by accidentally conflating it with the instrumental -- as if something could become a moral duty merely by being efficient for some purpose that itself cannot be morally judged.
And that leaves us with a confusing universe: it's one in which moral language floats around for no reason, referring to nothing. How it even all got started becomes a mystery...it's as if the whole world had suddenly begun to believe in fairies, and are now just discovering there never was any such thing. But what cosmic mechanism would ever produce belief in fairies in the first place, since fairies never existed? And now that we've discovered that the morality-fairies are not real, then why persist in using the fairy language at all? None of it remotely makes any sense.
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.[/quote]
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.
...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?
As for moral language floating around, humans do this sort of thing all the time where their language incorporates things that may not even be real or based on reality. Simple examples are non-believers simply cursing "God damn it!" as an expletive, or even "Oh God!" in the bedroom. People also say things like "knock on wood" or "cross your fingers," or colloquially (but not actually, at least for most people) express something about the surely nonsense concept of "luck." Words like "disaster" come from ancient beliefs about comets and nebulous evil. Language is actually rife with nonsense that most people don't believe (though some do), and that is true for every language. People do tend to just sort of do this.
Of course people do talk nonsense. That's exactly what I'm saying is the crucial issue, though: is moral language
nonsense?
And if we say it is, do not all the other consequences I've listed above also follow? I think they do.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:So, I think all of the oughts we experience are instrumentalist in nature.
Well, then there's no such thing as morality. Hitler had a good sense of the instrumentality of his purposes. His success in executing (if I can use that word) so many of them bespeaks his instrumental effectiveness...and we would have to say that he "ought" to have done something like he did.
Personally, I don't think you and I can live with such a conclusion. However, in an amoral universe, there's no longer any reason why you and I "shouldn't."
On the noncognitivist picture, "oughts" are personal, so one person experiencing an ought doesn't mean someone else does. So I can say that it's true that if Hitler valued genocide, then from his perspective he ought to commit it. It is a dispassionate description of what he does with his value; it can be translated as "if Hitler valued genocide, then a way to further that value would be to commit it." That's what an instrumentalist ought is. We can see that once translated and see that it's simply true, it carries no connotation of being morally right or morally wrong (which are undefined non-concepts on noncognitivism).
Well, again, I can only commend your willingness to go down with the plane, and ride it flaming into the ground. Because if what you're saying is right, then no cause you, yourself seek to advocate has any
moral leg to stand on. You will have to argue for it based on instrumentality...and I think you'll find any such case very hard to make.
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.
[
quote="Immanuel Can"]
Astro Cat wrote:Now this is where I might have confused you originally. Most of us look at this and think, "ooh, that sounds gloomy." So I usually point out the silver lining: "don't worry," basically. "If you possess the common values of empathy and altruism, so do most people.
Wow. That's nowhere near "silver" enough.
Let's suppose that psychopaths are rare. In fact, they are: 1% in the general population. And severe, active psychopaths, like axe murderers...let's say they're only 1 in 1,000. The fact that "most people" do not share their "values" gives us no consolation at all. 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."
Well, on the noncognitivist picture, there's no such concept as a "right" in the context you're using.[/quote]
I did not use the word "right" there, actually. I asked, what's our legitimacy in imposing our "values" over their "values"?
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:That society will not collapse into chaotic hedonism has two possible explanations: one, that you're right; but two, that the residue of conventional morality will continue, for a time, to restrain such impulses, but in a declining way. And eventually, the reasoning behind the idea that there is no substance to morality is bound to take hold of more and more people, precipitating gradual socio-moral decline.
In other words, we shouldn't expect hedonistic chaos to come quickly. We should expect it to come gradually, but increasingly and inevitably. And I might add that we should expect to see seismic eruptions between the forces of moral conservatism and those of moral permissiveness. We should anticipate moral-worded "wars," and increasing erosion of social coherence, increasing antipathies on both sides, and eventual decline into a more general Moral Nihilism.
And is that second explanation not exactly the right fit with what we now see?
And we should anticipate as well (just has happened during the Roman Empire or the Weimar Republic) the increasing of public fears of loss of stability and social control, rising uncertainties as to the future, economic turmoil, political polarization...and inevitably, the rise of a totalitarian leader who, in exchange for unprecedented powers of control, will reassert order by force upon the gathering chaos. And people will give him that power, because they are afraid, confused, debauched and lost.
That's our future, I think, under that moral paradigm.
I'm more inclined to think that I'm right and that it will not matter.
Well, it has in the past. People can only stand just so much moral decay, because it issues in social chaos. Eventually, everybody gets sick to death of being foul and dirty, or of having no rules to guide their lives, or of watching their society fall apart economically, or never being able to predict what's coming next, or to trust the government to do its job. And when they reach the saturation point, that's when the new totalitarian(s) appears.
Society is soon "cleaned up." The economics are restored. The streets are swept and quiet again. Children can go to school. And everybody is very relieved that some order has returned to life...even if it's cost the surrendering of a few personal freedoms...
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."
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:But now we can't account for the intuition. It becomes complete cypher. Why should people (mistakenly) be inclined to think that the creator of a thing has some special warrant for disposing of that thing that others lack?
And yet, that's exactly what we DO think.
I couldn't tell you why belief in things like moral oughts is so prevalent in humans.[/quote]
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.
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:Indeed, which hierarchies are which are probably arbitrary if there isn't moral realism. I think that still accurately describes the world that we see either way: whether moral realism is true or not, it seems our value hierarchies just are what they are (because even on moral realism, some people value differently than others)
Then the existence of value hierarchies themselves becomes inexplicable. They must appear without justification, on no basis, with no criteria involved.
And yet, they do not. People give
reasons for their value hierarchies. They
debate the order of value hierarchies. And we even
agree, in most cases, with the hierarchies of others. (For instance, as I say, it would take a very rare person to believe that the saving of a life ought to rank below the eating of an ice cream cone...regardless of the flavour.
)
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:Because some hard version of doxastic voluntarism is false: we don't choose what our values are.
Oh. Determinism.
Well, I don't believe that. And I don't think you do, either, even if you maybe still suppose you do. I say that because you are here, discussing these concepts with me, debating, exchanging positions and reasons, arguing, and so on. That means you must suppose my values can change, and aren't simply handed to me by nature and nurture. You must think I can "change my mind."
And I suppose the same of you.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
...we can raise awareness
That's Marxist language, I hope you're "aware".
And it partakes of an obvious contradiction with your view.
You can't "raise" that which is not "lower." You've set up a hierarchy again. But we have, as yet, no grounds for so doing that you've been able to provide us.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:
An altruist could go from a moral realist to a moral nonrealist and would still be an altruist (case in point: myself).
Right. This is something I always try to point out immediately: that one's behaviour and one's beliefs can be at variance.
That is the case with Atheists, I think. They are often quite "good" or "conventionally moral" people in their behaviours. But they lack the reasons for being that, as opposed to being morally wretched. And that's the difference between them and the Theists: the Theists can live with a coherence between their beliefs and their actions; the morally-behaving Atheist has no reasonable explanation for why his own actions are actually "better" than, say, recreational cannibalism, if such a thing should come to suit him later.
The moral skeptic would just say that by "better" they mean they value non-cannibalism more than cannibalism, and that they suspect you do too, so they're using language you can agree on.
Oh, very clearly not.
They're not using the language the same way I am, at all. (And they have no legitimate use for the word "better.") They are using it on non-cognitivist assumptions, and I on mroal-objectivist ones.
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:
But there will be points at which we run out of ability to reconcile. To float a relevant example, we disagree over whether it's moral to call men "women." And I don't think we're likely to make progress on a world in which that is even an option. So there will always be sticking points, so long as values are a thing. And it's not apparent to me that compromise is always possible. Nevertheless, there's merit in eliminating everything upon which we can agree from the field of discussion, so as to get to the truly vexed issues, where they win-and-lose outcomes are unavoidable.
Sociologists refer to this situation as "irreconcilable moral pluralism," or "incommensurability." It means that compromise always has its limits; and in a situation of genuine moral multiculturalism, some "cultures" are going to end up being the losers, and some more the winners...it's inevitable. It didn't used to be thought, among sociologists, that that is the way things were. Guys like Dewey, for example, plugged for what they called "Judeo-Christian consensus" in society, and hoped that ALL human values, worldwide, would eventually be shown to be reconcilable. But as moral multiculturalism has continued to diversify, that hope has been abandoned entirely. "Incommensurability" is now the accepted fact.
I wasn't familiar with that term, that's an interesting aside
.
Really? It's in all the literature these days. Here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/valu ... ensurable/
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.
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.
I did have to ask myself if your intentions were cruel or not,
My intention is to return all people to the state in which they are the best, healthiest and most likely to prosper. And men do that as men, and women do it as women. It's actually cruelty to do otherwise.
So I will continue to "deadname," for two reasons: one is that "deadnaming" is a phony word, and a phony concept, and I refuse to let the accolytes of Karl Marx have access to my language, under any circumstances. And secondly, telling a mentally ill individual he's a woman because that's what his delusions tell him is cruel. He needs treatment, not encouragement in his illness. For his benefit and in respect of the truth, there is no such thing as "deadnaming."
However, for the present purposes, it certainly is an
incommensurable value. We can either encourage or fight body dysphoria: we cannot do both.
...for instance even believing "homosexuality is morally wrong" would not trigger this because the intent isn't to be cruel in all cases)
That's very interesting.
So you would not be "triggered" (another made-up, Neo-Marxist diagnosis, I'm afraid: the right word is "offended") because you realize that people who oppose homosexuality can do it out of a genuine belief that the homosexual acts can be bad for people. But you would be "triggered" by those who oppose chemical sterilization of young women, along with the lopping off of their breasts and the ersatz creation of a non-functional male organ out of the tissue of their forearms?
I'm being deliberately blunt in my description here: but accurate, dead accurate, and fair. This is what is going on; and only the cloud of dishonest language that now surrounds "transing" keeps us from realizing it.
How can anybody in their right mind "value" that?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:Well, I meant something more like this. On my worldview, our value hierarchies aren't right or wrong, they just are. On the moral realism worldview, some are right, some are wrong, some are "more" right, some are "more" wrong. But I don't understand what this means.
It means the same thing that "hierarchy" means. It means that some things are "better" or "higher priority" than others.
It doesn't matter whether we talk about debate
among individuals about their moral hierarchies, or just about the moral hierarchy
within a single, particular individual; the issue is the same.
Some values get placed higher than others. And we want to know WHY. What
criteria produce such differentials in valuation?
Again, I think it's some combination of nature and nurture.
No good, I'm afraid.
Nature or nurture are not
criteria. We're back to the genetic fallacy.
And now we have an additional problem: that my values also change over time. I
must be using criteria, therefore, to select what gets higher and what gets lower.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:I don't know what it means for there to be a "universal right," or "intrinsic right."
If I may be blunt, I can see that that's because it doesn't fit within your worldview assumptions. So it makes perfect sense that you can't figure out what it might mean. In the world you see yourself as being in, there is no place for such things to have an explanation.
But Locke saw how it worked, and he explained how it worked. But he was a Christian, of course. So I can't ask you to concede his rationale or the ensuing rights.
My nontheism is pliable to being convinced, though. It just takes presenting something that would convince me. I do not find theism convincing and don't think people have sufficient warrant to believe in it, but that's provisional: I know I don't know everything, including not knowing what other people know. But I do see what sorts of arguments and thinking is popular, and I know that what I have seen (which is not inconsiderable) is not convincing to me. I don't understand why it convinces other people.
That's all perfectly fair.
We all come from somewhere, assumptively. And we're all on a journey somewhere, rationally. And so long as we are open to what the best evidence actually reveals to us, it's not going to stagnate and stop.
My complaints about "rights" and "goods" are cognitive complaints, at the end of the day: the complaint is that they aren't sensible.
Do transers have the right not to be "deadnamed"?
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:...then we're still stuck trying to answer what it would mean to have something like a "universal good."
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "universal good." The phrase is potentially ambiguous. Do you mean, "good that everybody should do," or "a single kind of goodness that is universal"? Can you clear that up?
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.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:What does that even mean? This is what I'm trying to get answered. It feels like it would mean there's just something about the universe that makes some things undeniably "good" and some things undeniably "bad," which everyone must agree on inspection.
Something about God, not "something about the universe."
God is part of the universe,
Not in Christian thought. He is transcendent of the universe, being its Creator. "Universe" is a physical entity of definite scope and size, and defined by laws and regularities of various sorts. God is not any of that.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:But for one, nobody does seem to agree even on inspection,
Yeah, I think there's general agreement, with some variation. But I don't think it's important that there is, anyway. I think it's what we should expect in a moral world with free will beings in it.
Why, though? I mean, I get people even disagree that the Earth is round. But it seems as though you could pick a skeptic up in a shuttle to show them and they would, if they were actually sane, be forced to admit it. If morals are facts, why can there not be arguments that an ignorant, but willing and well-intentioned person turn to in a thoughtful way to agree, "yes, that is true? That must be true?"
Do you want the Christian answer to that?
It's because we don't get our moral knowledge sorted out without God. Really, He intends it that way. It's not something He's going to let us do on our own, because the whole point of morality is to direct us to Him. Absent that, "goodness" has no meaning anyway. (Meanwhile, there are plenty of contributors to the situation who have a stake in us not figuring it out, and ways to keep us from doing it.) So without the direct intervention of God, a person can expect never to be able to figure it out.
As I said, it's not something we can do by arid, impersonal, academic inquiry; we have to invest ourselves in God to know goodness.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:and secondly, what does it even mean to be "good" at that point if it's not compared to values?
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.
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 P is a good person, then we should be able to give a description of good using P's qualities alone: even if it is not the maximal possible goodness. So let me ask this:
Can we describe what goodness is just using P, without invoking God?
No. We can only describe the extent to which a person (P) is behaving in harmony with the character and will of God. That is what "goodness" is, and will always be.
For example, we could list P's features -- faithful, uncovetous, honest, truthful, free from malice, generous, creative, intelligent, merciful...and so on. All those are good qualities. But when we've done the list, we're no closer to knowing why those are "good" if we don't realize that they are characteristics of God.
If we can't do that -- if we can't define what goodness is in P without invoking God -- then goodness is not a property.
I'm not sure what you mean by "property" here. It's certainly not "a piece of property," like something somebody can "own." But it is a manifestation of the attributes of God, and such things are always good.
We may eventually have to move on to talk about God to contextualize P's property of goodness, but initially, we should just be able to talk about what P's property of goodness means.
There are tasks that are simply impossible, because they are incoherent. To know what "goodness" means, you have to really understand how a property associates with God. Absent that, you haven't "understood" that property at all.
It's like trying to unpack the word "bachelor" without referring to the concepts "maleness" and "matrimony." What you're left with is going to be nothing that does any justice to the word "bachelor," even if you can think of something to say.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:My answer to this is simply that most people are not philosophers, and for historical reasons, most people are nominally moral realists.
So they're just silly and wrong? Or at least, ignorant and naive?
Social justicers are just ignorant proles, who can't extract themselves from the moral language they have been taught? So they really have no justification in any of what they want?
If that turns out to be the case, I really hope they never get any of it. We should hardly want the ignorant and naive to be shaping our society for us. They seem to be flying without a plane.
I don't look down at humans for not all being philosophers, so I don't think in these terms, no. That they use moral language is fairly inconsequential.
Oh, not a bit!
They lean on it like a titanium crutch...for everything.
"Injustice" is a moral term. "Oppressor" is a moral condemnation. "Oppressed" is laden with the assumption that "oppression" is wrong. Or what about "equity," or "inclusion," or "empathy," or "reparations"? These, and all the terms they employ, are loaded to the rafters with intended moral weight...even though most of them are used in nonsense ways, and applied to things that don't fit them at all.
No, they
live by moralizing. It's all they've really got. If people ever stop hearing moral tones behind their SJ language, they're dead in the water.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:This is so close to something cognizable, I think. So people value goodness as a property, so they would value God for having the most of that property: that's completely sensible. But that doesn't tell us what the property is that's being valued, though.
That's because we're never supposed to locate the property-in-itself, in abstraction from God. We're supposed to be
God-aspirers, looking constantly to understand more of our own situation by successive approximations to the character of God, in which the perfections for which you are looking are perfectly found. We're supposed to want to be with Him, so as to participate in those perfections. We are not independent monads, running around this mudball for our own sake. We're supposed to need God in order to enter into these things.
God wants us to know and love Him. And if we could have the "perfections" without the Perfect One, we would have no further need of association with Him, would we? We would be independently possessed of all we needed to know. (Sounds like Genesis, doesn't it? The Deceiver says to the woman,
"God knows that in the day you eat of the fruit of the tree, you shall be like God, knowing good and evil.")
Yet this frustratingly doesn't bring me any closer to knowing what the property of "goodness" is supposed to be. Do you notice that?
Yes. Because you're asking for what you cannot have on the terms you insist on asking for it.
I don't think you do it intentionally, but can you see how a noncognitivist might feel frustration going through their whole adult lives saying "I can't get anyone to define this for me," and then, in fact, no one ever does?
Well, there's the obvious conclusion: morality is not a thing that non-cognitivism can make any sense of. But that's not the fault of morality; it's a failing of non-cognitivism -- if morality is real.
I'm not frustrated in a mad way, but can you see how it might seem like noncognitivism is justifiable?
No, really...I can't. I can see how somebody can choose to believe in it, in order to get away from morality. But I cannot see that having so done, the non-cognitivist is in any position to know anything about the thing he's refused to recognize. And that will only frustrate him or her so long as he/she cares enough about morality to keep wanting to understand it.
That the absence of evidence for moral realism can begin to feel like evidence of absence?
Again, you keep reminding me of somebody who says, "I'll believe in God when you can make Him come to me on my terms," never realizing that if God is an entity I can make come to him on his terms, it won't be God at all. By definition, God is not at the beck-and-call of IC, though He will sometimes graciously condescend to act in IC's life; but God does not do dances for skeptics.
The "absence" in question is a product of you having banished the answer. So it doesn't mean there's an absence of evidence at all.
Can you see how this is a labyrinth of frustrating non-answers, and I mean this politely, and not insultingly to you personally?
Of course. I'm not at all offended. And, I trust, I'm not offending you either...even when I disagree.
I wonder, does it concern you if there isn't a straight answer to this question?
For the non-cognitivist? No, I find it unsurprising.
Would it bother me, if I had no such answer? Plausibly. But I think I do have the right answer.
What if the non-cognitivist is right?
It really wouldn't matter anymore, then.
It would mean that we were just accidental animals on an accidental mudball in space, torturing ourselves with speculations about "morality" that never existed. And that universe wouldn't even waste a hollow laugh on us, and we twisted and tortured ourselves about it. So "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die," would be the only wisdom we could practice.
We can safely assume that God values all good things:
Careful there...
We cannot let that slide, in our thinking, into meaning, "God values things BECAUSE they are ALREADY good." That's not right. But that is what your alleged paradox requires us to do.
What we need to understand, instead, is "God values things because He created them to reflect the goodness of His nature." God values love because He is loving. God values holiness because He is holy. God values persons because He is the Great Person. God values truth because there is no lie in Him...
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:
If “good” is defined as “reflecting the character of God” then what part of the character of God is “good” reflecting? Unless I’m quite mistaken, it can only mean God’s values!
"Good" is a comprehensive adjective, in reference to God. There is no part of God that is not "good." His justice is good, His holiness is good, His wisdom is good, His mercy is good, His love is good...
Can you see that this doesn't tell me what good is?
Yep. Because "good" isn't a thing-in-itself.
I could take what you just said and replace "good" with "slithey" and get just as much meaning out of it, which is none.
Actually, (side note) there is a lexicon for that poem, and "slithey" means "slimy and lithe."
Well, again...you're not going to get an answer to that question in a non-cognitivist worldview...because non-cognitivism itself assumes there is no such thing as "goodness."
But the problem is only
assumptive.
It's in the terms you're
dictating to God.
And, maybe He won't meet with you on this until you deal with something, or change something...assumptively, personally, spiritually, whatever.
Have you considered that possibility?