What could make morality objective?

[Skepdick]

Medice, cura te ipsum!

Ooh, Latin; you must really know your stuff.

Ooooh, sarcasm, you must be so witty . Oscar Wilde said so!

[Harbal]

Ooooh, sarcasm, you must be so witty . Oscar Wilde said so!

You're a strange character, dicky.

[Veritas Aequitas]

This ultimate state of 'freedom' [inherent in human nature] has moral entailment which can be verified and justified empirically to physical neural states, neural algorithms, neurons, genes, DNA and quarks.
These are objective and since are identified with the moral potential and function, they are objective moral facts.

Reading this is like stumbling through fog and bumping into things. Here are some of them.

1 There's an ultimate state of freedom inherent in human nature.

This is mystical claptrap, for which there's no empirical evidence whatsoever. After another bong, we'll be resonating with the cosmos.

You see the word 'freedom' and you go berserk and rabid.
I am not referring to that 'freedom' claimed by theists that caused never ending arguments.

In this case I am merely throwing in a clue and an unjustified premise.
It is a food-for-thought for you.
Tell me, which living thing in existence, especially the higher animals would want to be bonded i.e. 'chained' as unfree from the day they are born?
This impulse to be 'free' implied there is 'something' [a physical process and potential] in the brain and mind that is driving living beings to be free.

2 This ultimate state of freedom inherent in human nature is a premise that entails a moral conclusion.
What moral conclusion? And how does the premise entail it? Even if true, no non-moral premise can entail a moral conclusion.

The 'freedom' [relative not absolute] I mentioned above is fundamental to moral actions triggered by objective moral facts.
As such an restrained to this freedom is immoral.
So that entails a moral conclusion.

3 This unspecified and anyway invalid moral conclusion 'can be be verified and justified empirically to [by?]' physical things in human brains: 'neural states, neural algorithms, neurons, genes, DNA and quarks'.

Twaddle. Outside language, physical things aren't premises in arguments. Neurons, DNA and quarks aren't premises any more than dogs are. And it makes no sense to say that physical things are objective. The fog thickens.

The conceptual mess here is profound, and seemingly irremediable.

You are very lost on this.

What is objective is empirically verifiable and justifiable within a specific FSK or FSR[reality].
Neural states, neural algorithms, neurons, genes, DNA and quarks' within the process, function and potential they are constituted are empirically verifiable and justifiable within the scientific FSK; thus, they are objective scientific facts. You deny this?
The above objective scientific facts related to morality are processed within a credible moral FSK, thus, objective moral facts.

I am not referring to the thoughts and ideas of rightness and wrongness [supposedly related to morality] that arise in individual[s] from the empirically verifiable and justifiable within the moral FSK which are not objective nor facts.

Analogically, it is just like people when thinking, they generate a wide variety of opinions and beliefs, these are not objective facts but are merely subjective;
BUT it is undeniable that the thinking function in the brain and mind is an objective biological, physiological and psychological fact as represented by the physical 'neural states, neural algorithms, neurons, genes, DNA and quarks'.

It is the same with food and nutrition, all humans as a generic digestive system which is physical and an objective metabolic fact; BUT the choice of food produced, prepared and ways of eating are varied and subjective.

Btw, you have not answered my question which I had raised many times;
Are scientific conclusions and knowledge from the scientific FSK, objective scientific facts?
Yes or No.

[FlashDangerpants]

credible

The single word that ruins the entire thing.


Well, the one that most ruins it anyway.

[Skepdick]

You're a strange character, dicky.

Tell me something I don't know.

[Skepdick]

The single word that ruins the entire thing.


Well, the one that most ruins it anyway.

Fucking words! They ruin everything.

You divvy up your ontology into "subjective" and "objective" and then you fight tooth and nail to pretend that the "subjective" category isn't ontological.

[Peter Holmes]

credible

The single word that ruins the entire thing.

Well, the one that most ruins it anyway.

Yep. The credibility of an 'FSK', such as physics, comes from empirically verifiable facts. So those can't be facts that physics - or any 'FSK' - creates or produces. It's the contradiction at the heart of his argument or model.

[Skepdick]

Yep. The credibility of an 'FSK', such as physics, comes from empirically verifiable facts.

Horseshit. The credibility of physics comes from the ability to predict future experiences.

If nothing surprising happens in future - the model is "correct".
If something surprising happens in future - the model is "incorrect".

The model itself tells you how to interpret the phenomena in question; and gives you the vocabularies to talk about them.

That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism

[Harbal]

You're a strange character, dicky.

Tell me something I don't know.

How am I supposed to know what you don't know?

That was a rhetorical question, so don't answer it, whatever you do.

[Skepdick]

How am I supposed to know what you don't know?

That was a rhetorical question, so don't answer it, whatever you do.

I was also being rhetorical, but hey...

You just can't resisting being a wise ass

[Harbal]

You just can't resisting being a wise ass

It's my antidote to too much philosophy.

[Age]

What makes 'morality' objective is objectivity.

Is there SOME 'thing' that makes ANY 'thing' so-called 'objective'?

If yes, then what is 'that thing', EXACTLY?

However, the process of finding objective Facts in regards to 'morality' or 'moral issues' is a very simple and very easy process indeed.

[FlashDangerpants]

credible

The single word that ruins the entire thing.

Well, the one that most ruins it anyway.

Yep. The credibility of an 'FSK', such as physics, comes from empirically verifiable facts. So those can't be facts that physics - or any 'FSK' - creates or produces. It's the contradiction at the heart of his argument or model.

These FSK things - fields of study and whatnot - are fundamentally belief formation and justification regimes considered appropriate to particular types of question.

The zoology "FSK" being a methodologically scientific approach to the answering of questions about zebras and octupuses for instance. It therefore only addresses questions about living organisms that can in principle get a scientific answer. So there can never be a zoological question of whether octopuses are totally fucking cool, because that sort of coolness is not scientifically calculable under any circumstance.

Where VA is losing his shit is that he skips consideration of method entirely, his idea of zoological credibility lies in the number of zoologists who agree about something zoological. He's in it entirely for the bandwagon.

As such VA also believes most strongly that if he assembles a set of people who all agree with him, and they concoct a stupid calculus for asserting that X is evil with an evuilness quantity of Y then Y measures the evilness of X and that result is credible. But that is based on the bandwagon assumption he has constructed about these other FSK things - a mistake he needs to grow out of.

He is missing the part where there is some reason why zoology is credible and can answer certain questions. Specifically, if you get a bunch of people and you create "zoology-proper" and start assigning animals a coolness value such that a squid is 907 SGU (sun glasses units) of cool, but an octopus is 966 SGU, under VA's description, you have created a cridible new science. But anyone who isn't a complete brainless shitstain will tell you that Zoology-Proper is stupid, and you are a stupid bastard.

That is the fate of Morality-Proper.

[CIN]

No. It's more or less as I wrote - I'm not sure by what argument fairness and pleasure maximisation come to be the two natural goods while all other candidates would be presumably subsidiary to them. But I guess you have an argument for that objection.

Any argument you do have for that objection might be useful to Henry because he has a whole thing on the go that is intended to condense without loss all moral stuff into a single principle, but it is bad because he cannot account for all sorts of stuff such as reciprocity upon which the whole thing depends. So perhaps whatever you use to select a second principle - the thing that makes you not a utilitarian - would help him out of his situation.

Thanks for explaining.

Okay: fairness. I come at fairness via pleasure/pain, because fairness is to do with how we should distribute pleasure/pain among beings who have moral standing. Since, on my theory, pleasure and pain are good and bad, all beings capable of experiencing pleasure/pain have moral standing. The question then is, given this fact, how should pleasure/pain be distributed?

The classic utilitarian answer is that it doesn't matter. I think this is a mistake. The reason it's a mistake is that it overlooks the fact that, since it's entirely by virtue of having the capability to experience pleasure/pain that beings have moral standing at all, it must be the case that every being capable of experiencing pleasure/pain has the same moral standing. If I have 100 units of pleasure to distribute between a man and a mouse, then on the assumption that both the man and the mouse can experience pleasure, I should aim to give 50 units to each of them, or get as close to this as I can. To give the man more than 50 and the mouse less than 50, or vice-versa, would be unfair, because it would be treating them as having different moral standing when their moral standing is in fact the same. (I'm not suggesting that we can actually measure units of pleasure: all of this is simply to establish the basic principles.)

If there are two fundamental goods, pleasure/pain and fairness, it's possible to face a choice between two actions where one maximises pleasure but distributes it unfairly, while the other fails to maximise pleasure but distributes it fairly. I'm not aware of any rational way to decide which of these is better, and so at this point in time I'm inclined to say that which action to choose is indeterminate. However, I'm not entirely happy with this, so I'm still thinking about it.

I don't know if any of this is helpful to Henry, but he's welcome to talk to me himself if he wants to.

As for why I think other things, such as freedom and justice, are not fundamental moral goods, it's simply that I've never seen any argument or evidence to convince me that they are. To me they look like rules of thumb. I think they're very good rules of thumb, and I think a society that adopts them as a basis for its legal system will usually produce more pleasure or happiness than one that doesn't; but that doesn't make them fundamental principles.

Well, first up, let's begin with my traditional bout of underhandedness. I would say that you have a unique position still among our moral realists at present if a 12 week fetus and a totally vegetablised coma patient are both unable to experience pleasure or pain then they have no standing in their own rights? So technically if my great aunt is on life support, and even if she might pull through and make a recovery, her breathing aparatus is mine to switch off if nobody else really cares just at this moment?

Let's ignore fairness for the moment. Then the goodness or badness of an action is calculated by working out, in the usual utilitarian way, how much net pleasure it creates (across the entire universe of sentient beings until the end of time; we're going to need a large spy network and a very big computer).

All and only those beings with moral standing are to be taken into account when working this out. All and only those beings that can experience pleasure and/or pain have moral standing. If a foetus is aborted before it becomes able to experience pleasure and/or pain, then it never acquires moral standing, so it doesn't figure in the calculation. If someone becomes a vegetable with no hope of recovery, they have lost their moral standing and cannot regain it, so they don't figure in the calculation.

Whether your great aunt is on life support is irrelevant. (I'm on life support myself: my life support consists of food, water and air.) Is she sentient at the moment? If so, she has moral standing. Is she in a coma, but has a 30% chance of regaining sentience? Then at the moment, she has 30% moral standing, and if she recovers, she will have 100%.

I also note the oblique reference to utilitarian calculus, but I assume you wouldn't go so far as to endorse actually creating a measurement system to assign units of pleasurability and pain-ness to the mouse and the man's situations, assuming them to be scientific data now, because that would be giberring insanity?

Why would it?

In that case, VA has some truly earth shaking scholarship to explain to you. I predict entertainment.

I've talked to VA a bit. It hasn't been good so far.

I am not sure up front how you can use fairness that way. The thing that makes utilitarianism tempting is that it massively simplifies the situation and provides a principle allows assignation of internally uncontroversial statuses of right and wrong. By which I mean that all who agree to the pleasure/pain thing can agree on which is the rigth or wrong course of action in any hypothetical or factual scenario where the outcome is known. but fairness breaks that unless you deal with the rthings that might make any outcome fair or unfair. That would at the very least include dessert, unless we are simplifying "fairness" into equality of outcome or something?

Don't care about simplifying. Only care about truth. If it is true that there are situations where the best action is indeterminate, then we should accept that. Indeterminacy is not a flaw in the theory, it's just a corollary of it. Is indeterminacy a flaw in quantum theory? No, it's just how things are.

For an example (and back to me splendid bastardry): I think it's massively unfair that Americans don't all have quality healthcare free at point of use as it is in Britain.

There's nothing much to envy about healthcare in Britain at the moment, take it from me. It's broken, and we're all scared shitless in case we break a leg or have a heart attack and the ambulance doesn't turn up and there's no free bed in the hospital.

Henry definitely doesn't think it's fair for him to pay taxes so that people who aren't himself can consume cancer medication at his notional expense. We're both really just applying the nebulous concept of fairness very differently.

So I think your list of simple foundational goods must expand beyond pleasure/pain and fairness to a principle of justice that can justify the application of the fairness principle.

I think my fairness principle is quite clear. It is, as I said, simply the principle that every sentient being has the same moral standing — though as explained above, that has to be modified if someone is in a non-sentient state from which they may recover. (Which is why it's usually a bad thing to kill people in their sleep.)

[popeye1945]

Biology, biological consciousness is the measure and meaning of all things, the physical world in its absence is utterly meaningless thus, only biological consciousness can bestow its meanings upon a meaningless world; creating laws, rules, norms, systems, and institutions incorporating these sensibilities and meanings into these mediums and institutions objectifying them in this way.