What could make morality subjective?

[Scott Mayers]

I'm sorry if you found my response curt and unfriendly, but I didn't put anything about you being some sort of incoherent person.

I commented on a collection of four sentences, not the man. Unfortunately the first of those sentences is something about binary values being all that can be measured, which doesn't make a lot of sense. The second states. "But this doesn't mean that our measures can't include different ones collectively as 'true'", and that serves only to muddy the waters. The third one seems to be following those, but I can't make any sense of it. So although the final sentence in the set is entirely explicable on a standalone basis, as conclusion to the three that precede it, I have no idea what it is trying to say. And honestly looking at in the context of the quote to which that argument is attached simply doesn't help me to know what is going on.

If there is an argument in there, it does need to be rewritten. I can't see how that's an unfair observation. I frequently have to restate may arguments when they are not being understood, it's usually because I have chosen some of the words in them without due care. If you suspend your indignation and re-read it, I think you will probably see my point.

Thank you. I'll just step out of the thread for now though. I shouldn't have tried to step in the middle and don't have a hope of catching up on where you guys are now. We'll discuss elsewhere so that I can be more appropriately invested.

[FlashDangerpants]

I'm sorry if you found my response curt and unfriendly, but I didn't put anything about you being some sort of incoherent person.

I commented on a collection of four sentences, not the man. Unfortunately the first of those sentences is something about binary values being all that can be measured, which doesn't make a lot of sense. The second states. "But this doesn't mean that our measures can't include different ones collectively as 'true'", and that serves only to muddy the waters. The third one seems to be following those, but I can't make any sense of it. So although the final sentence in the set is entirely explicable on a standalone basis, as conclusion to the three that precede it, I have no idea what it is trying to say. And honestly looking at in the context of the quote to which that argument is attached simply doesn't help me to know what is going on.

If there is an argument in there, it does need to be rewritten. I can't see how that's an unfair observation. I frequently have to restate may arguments when they are not being understood, it's usually because I have chosen some of the words in them without due care. If you suspend your indignation and re-read it, I think you will probably see my point.

Thank you. I'll just step out of the thread for now though. I shouldn't have tried to step in the middle and don't have a hope of catching up on where you guys are now. We'll discuss elsewhere so that I can be more appropriately invested.

You aren't missing much. This is one of the stupidest threads ever. the guy who wrote "The moral claim being made is thus: Murder and genocide are objectively wrong" has genuinely announced that objectivity is irrelevant and the word wrong has no application, and he is about to do a whole routine on why he doesn't have to agree with himself to be right because he has evolved beyond medieval notions of consistency.

[Skepdick]

If the other guy actually wants to limit all measurability to binary values we can let him do that for himself. In the meantime, you are skirting other matters.

Before we establish testing parameters for your claim, I suggest starting by explaining what it is.

I can't possibly explain to you what morality is because I don't have any instrument at my disposal which can determine what things are.

Science only ever tells us how things behave and what happens when things interact.

You think in nouns - I think in verbs. Static vs dynamic. So here is a better question for you: What does morality do?

Ok. So you started with an objectivist moral proposition that a thing is 'objectively wrong'.
Since then you have come to reject all use of the words right and wrong anyway.
Then you decided to lambast me for being 'the one who insists on "objectivity"'
Now, when tasked with explaining how betterness and worseness can be applied in this system, now there is a new self destructive swerve.

One of the things we use our moral vocabulary for is deciding what should be described as right or wrong in some situation. Your thing appears to have no such role.

All it seems to do is allow you to assert any opinion that is in your head and then insist everyone else constructs impossibly convoluted falsification criteria, which you will reject if there is any reference to a secret list of no-no words which you are willing to update on the fly, and can include the words you use to state your own position.

Dude. At what point are you ever going to click that you and I are playing this game (whatever this game is) by entirely different rules.

I mentioned (even though you didn't even bother to read the OP). That I am neither going to justify my position, nor define my terms.
My position is empirical in that, hypothesis "morality is objective" is a more likely hypothesis than the alternative "Morality is not objective" (arrived at given my understanding of probability theory/ergodicity/dynamic systems/lindy effect and a bunch of other fancy shmancy theories which are intuitive to me given that systems engineering/risk management is my bread&butter)

There is a very good reason for me saying that. It is an explicit "FUCK YOU! I will not play by your rules". If you want to play this game with me, you need to start right down here next to me - on Earth. And negotiate some rules with me (welcome to contractarianism or something)

And so you've spent all of your energy attempting to make me justify my position to you.
Because you are a moral skeptic and <whatever other reason I don't give a shit about> and because you are indoctrinated in the school of "proper argumentation" (which is also not a school which I give a shit about).

I am not here to convince you that I am right. I am here for you to convince me why I am wrong.

Which immediately puts all of the burden of proof on your back, to define "wrong" in testable and verifiable terms. You know - terms on which I can confirm my "wrongness" all by myself.

And THEN! (once you've convinced me of my intellectual "wrongness", which surely must be different from the kind of "wrongness" we ascribe to murder) do you have any fucking foundation from which to dismantle my moral position.

Till then I am going to treat you like the ankle-biter that you are, who can't see the forest for the trees.

[Scott Mayers]

Thank you. I'll just step out of the thread for now though. I shouldn't have tried to step in the middle and don't have a hope of catching up on where you guys are now. We'll discuss elsewhere so that I can be more appropriately invested.

You aren't missing much. This is one of the stupidest threads ever. the guy who wrote "The moral claim being made is thus: Murder and genocide are objectively wrong" has genuinely announced that objectivity is irrelevant and the word wrong has no application, and he is about to do a whole routine on why he doesn't have to agree with himself to be right because he has evolved beyond medieval notions of consistency.

I think Skepdick's OP is smart in principle given he is trying a different tactic that might be more revealing. If it is difficult to argue what could make morality 'objective' given the difficulty of defining what IS "objective", reversing the challenge by assuming it 'objective' may help because most people SHARE the meaning of "subjective" better than "objective". This way, the challenge is to determine how you could possibly lead to a possible contradiction that may universally dislodge any 'objective' arguments about morality.

[Skepdick]

I think Skepdick's OP is smart in principle given he is trying a different tactic that might be more revealing. If it is difficult to argue what could make morality 'objective' given the difficulty of defining what IS "objective", reversing the challenge by assuming it 'objective' may help because most people SHARE the meaning of "subjective" better than "objective". This way, the challenge is to determine how you could possibly lead to a possible contradiction that may universally dislodge any 'objective' arguments about morality.

See! Scott gets it.

If a constructive proof is prohibitively expensive (and I say 2500+ years of philosophy with nothing to show for it is evidence to that fact), but a proof-by-contradiction is cheap ( just one bloody counter-example - is this too much to ask for ?!?!?) then it's completely rational to go for the cheap-but-effective option to getting the answer you want!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_of_least_resistance

Work smart, not hard and all that hoohaa.

[Skepdick]

he has evolved beyond medieval notions of consistency.

I can't even explain basic statistics to you. How long do you think it will take you to grok why consistency is a logical red herring?
How long will it take you to grok that logic is a red herring?

I could say things like "incompleteness Theorems" and "Halting problems", but all that shit is just going to go over your head.
You keep insisting I justify my position to you, but your lack of technical know-how is setting me up for failure - I simply lack the shared language to explain it to you.

This is the most polite way to tell you, that despite all of your Philosophical/intellectual posturing you aren't all that smart. And that's coming from a complete and utter idiot such as myself. You don't even understand how much you don't understand, because you can't even quantify it.

There's a fitting pejorative for people like you: IYI - Intellectual Yet Idiot

[FlashDangerpants]

I mentioned (even though you didn't even bother to read the OP). That I am neither going to justify my position, nor define my terms.
My position is empirical in that, hypothesis "morality is objective" is a more likely hypothesis than the alternative "Morality is not objective" (arrived at given my understanding of probability theory/ergodicity/dynamic systems/lindy effect and a bunch of other fancy shmancy theories which are intuitive to me given that systems engineering/risk management is my bread&butter)

Well, as I had never heard of the Lindy effect I just looked that up.
There is no way for it to support a claim that "morality is not objective" nor for it to justify any sort of empirical test of such a thing. If we are to invoke this thing at all then we may as well say that the normal methods by which human societies have discussed and debated moral values including the right and the wrong have been around for thousands of years (empirically true and verifiable through written records), so according to the Lindy Effect they shoud be expected to remain in use for a very long time no matter what ontological skepticism you may apply to the notions of good and bad.

There is a very good reason for me saying that. It is an explicit "FUCK YOU! I will not play by your rules". If you want to play this game with me, you need to start right down here next to me - on Earth. And negotiate some rules with me (welcome to contractarianism or something)

But you have been trying to opt out of the vocabulary that makes discussion of morality meaningful. Doing that makes your discussion of it ... kinda meaningless. I don't see anything to be gained by applying probability theory to morality if you end up with no method to discuss your findings. So there is every reason for you to look at whether you automatically invalidate all your utterances on the matter by excluding yourself from the rules that give your words meaning.

And so you've spent all of your energy attempting to make me justify my position to you.
Because you are a moral skeptic and <whatever other reason I don't give a shit about> and because you are indoctrinated in the school of "proper argumentation" (which is also not a school which I give a shit about).

Your words say that, but your revealed preferences are not consistent with them. You seem to want to get the effect of a proper argument (valid, sufficient, necessary and so on), you just want to do so using irrational tools.

I am not here to convince you that I am right. I am here for you to convince me why I am wrong.

Which immediately puts all of the burden of proof on your back, to define "wrong" in testable and verifiable terms. You know - terms on which I can confirm my "wrongness" all by myself.

You already don't agree with your original proposition. Without me submitting the correct form for your test, you have already abandoned objectivity and cursed me for usingthe word. You have abandoned all talk of right and wrong. So you don't agree that "Murder and genocide are objectively wrong" and you didn't need an empirical test.

And THEN! (once you've convinced me of my intellectual "wrongness", which surely must be different from the kind of "wrongness" we ascribe to murder) do you have any fucking foundation from which to dismantle my moral position.

It's logically impossible for genocide not to be morally wrong, surely that was obvious to you from the beginning? The criminality is defined into the concept and wrongness is the very point. It's a priori (using that term correctly). Finding a test for genocide to be wrong would be like empirically testing whether batchelors are married.

And in any event, medicine commits both murder and genocide, it merely commits them against invisible little critters that we hate. So it's not wrong. You can test whether people object very strongly to the wiping out smallpox as an entire species if you like. So here's your test, put on a lab coat and some PPE, then walk down the nearest high street with a syringe with Smallpox written on it. If people offer to get an injection when you explain its purpose is to prevent the poor germs inside from intentional extinction then people are truly convinced that all genocide is always wrong, and thus with these opinion surveys that you think are a substitute for something, you have discovered your objective knowledge. If people refuse to accept that this accurately and completely tests the morality of genocide, you should say some stuff about ergodicity until they get tired and leave you to it.

[Skepdick]

Well, as I had never heard of the Lindy effect I just looked that up.
There is no way for it to support a claim that "morality is not objective" nor for it to justify any sort of empirical test of such a thing. If we are to invoke this thing at all then we may as well say that the normal methods by which human societies have discussed and debated moral values including the right and the wrong have been around for thousands of years (empirically true and verifiable through written records), so according to the Lindy Effect they shoud be expected to remain in use for a very long time no matter what ontological skepticism you may apply to the notions of good and bad

You've heard of the Lindy effect, just not by that name. It's the colloquial wisdom of "To stand the test of time".

There is one trivial, English intuition for why the Lindy Effect matters and why it's significant.

If the mechanism by which Skepticism/Philosophy filters out "bad ideas" is to stress-test them to the point they explode and get discarded, reality has a much more diverse, intensive and persistent cannon for blowing up crap ideas. Entropy - the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The social systems we have put in place to critique intellectual works are but a tiny portion of the stressors which an idea must endure should it see the light of day.

That which can survive entropy is a far more robust/resilient idea than anything you and I can scrap together by measuring our dicks in verbal combat.

I'll get to the rest of your post later. I got wine to drink and a wife to satisfy.

[FlashDangerpants]

he has evolved beyond medieval notions of consistency.

I can't even explain basic statistics to you. How long do you think it will take you to grok why consistency is a logical red herring?
How long will it take you to grok that logic is a red herring?

Well it doesn't really matter. I can just wait for you to disagree with yourself. That's what consistency is about really.

[Skepdick]

Well it doesn't really matter. I can just wait for you to disagree with yourself. That's what consistency is about really.

What do you think "disagreeing with myself" looks like in practice exactly?

Uttering a contradiction? Why is that "disagreement"?

I exist and I don't exist.
The Earth is flat and Round.
5 > 4, but 4 > 6.

See? Nothing happens. is just symbols. Until you translate those symbols into actions contradictions mean nothing.

Whatever I SAY has no bearing on. my actions. Disagreement in action equals indecision. Do I strike you as an indecisive person?

If I can't make a decision - I flip a coin. "Self-disagreement" resolved. There is time for caution, and there's time for YOLO.

[FlashDangerpants]

Thank you. I'll just step out of the thread for now though. I shouldn't have tried to step in the middle and don't have a hope of catching up on where you guys are now. We'll discuss elsewhere so that I can be more appropriately invested.

You aren't missing much. This is one of the stupidest threads ever. the guy who wrote "The moral claim being made is thus: Murder and genocide are objectively wrong" has genuinely announced that objectivity is irrelevant and the word wrong has no application, and he is about to do a whole routine on why he doesn't have to agree with himself to be right because he has evolved beyond medieval notions of consistency.

I think Skepdick's OP is smart in principle given he is trying a different tactic that might be more revealing. If it is difficult to argue what could make morality 'objective' given the difficulty of defining what IS "objective", reversing the challenge by assuming it 'objective' may help because most people SHARE the meaning of "subjective" better than "objective". This way, the challenge is to determine how you could possibly lead to a possible contradiction that may universally dislodge any 'objective' arguments about morality.

Changing up the methodology is fine, coming up with something truly groundbreaking is even better. But just confusing facts and values, and then insisting data about values is mathematically the same as the values is not groundbreaking. The beahviourists did it, the logical positivists did it too. If you read through Skepdick's work in this thread, it's really just a series of echoes of those two failed experiments.

[Skepdick]

Changing up the methodology is fine, coming up with something truly groundbreaking is even better. But just confusing facts and values, and then insisting data about values is mathematically the same as the values is not groundbreaking. The beahviourists did it, the logical positivists did it too. If you read through Skepdick's work in this thread, it's really just a series of echoes of those two failed experiments.

I am not the one confusing facts and values - I can go as far left or as far right as you want on this one. Facts don't exist. Values don't exist.
If we stop drawing a distinction between the past and the future (which is a mind-hack from temporal logic) then the fact/value distinction (like all distinctions) is made up - there is no magical line which separates the present from the future.

Computations made today can make (probabilistically true) statements about tomorrow.

Saddle an instrumentalist horse and figure out why logical positivism/behaviourism failed. They lacked understanding of complexity and they didn't have the horsepower required to do the number crunching to tackle complexity.

Turns out truth is complex. Very complex.

[FlashDangerpants]

Wed Mar 04, 2020 9:22 pm
I'll get to the rest of your post later. I got wine to drink and a wife to satisfy.

Wed Mar 04, 2020 9:30 pm
What do you think "disagreeing with myself" looks like in practice exactly?

These apparently contradictory statements can be resolved in several ways.
1. You changed your mind and decided to keep doing internet stuff
2. You are extremely time efficient in the fields of drinkning and fucking
3. Others

So you can see how one statement prima facie can be taken to contradict another, and in so doing render it untrue. And then there is this thing in boring old logic where the contradiction must be resolved in some way or else one or other statement is untrue.

Your coin toss is an example of resolving a contradiction. It suggests another contradiction though, which is that you have revealed that you do understand the requirements of consistency even though you often claim not to be bound by them.

[Skepdick]

These apparently contradictory statements can be resolved in several ways.
1. You changed your mind and decided to keep doing internet stuff
2. You are extremely time efficient in the fields of drinkning and fucking
3. Others

I'll go with option 3.

The contradictory STATEMENT is not a contradiction in PRACTICE.

If you had more information of how/why the events on the ground are currently unfolding (which you don't) you would understand why there is no contradiction. But I am not going to resolve that for you.

I am going to leave you with the uncertainty, so you can synthesise some better hypotheses. Hint: is just a temporal misunderstanding. The events are unfolding exactly as described.

It's consistent, just not the kind of consistency you expect. In computer science we call it eventual consistency

[FlashDangerpants]

Changing up the methodology is fine, coming up with something truly groundbreaking is even better. But just confusing facts and values, and then insisting data about values is mathematically the same as the values is not groundbreaking. The beahviourists did it, the logical positivists did it too. If you read through Skepdick's work in this thread, it's really just a series of echoes of those two failed experiments.

I am not the one confusing facts and values - I can go as far left or as far right as you want on this one. Facts don't exist. Values don't exist.
If we stop drawing a distinction between the past and the future (which is a mind-hack from temporal logic) then the fact/value distinction (like all distinctions) is made up - there is no line which separates the present from the future

Uh huh. Good luck with absolutely any of that. You won't be able to find any language in which to express those thoughts to other humans though. If I can be bothered with a whole other round of this maybe I will join in, but you probably need to find someone else to do that one though.

Better still, look for somebody stupid enough to let you keep enough of those distinctions in play to use human understandable sentences while you explain that all distinctions are logically meaningless. you can then excercise your paraconsistent ramblings in which truth (totally distinguishable from lies) emerges from the self-contradictory chaos like a thing that rises out of stuff. Some sort of groin yeast perhaps.

Saddle an instrumentalist horse and figure out why logical positivism/behaviourism failed. They lacked understanding of complexity and they didn't have the horsepower required to do the number crunching to tackle complexity.

They didn't have the computing power to do the number-crunching necessary to make better predictions.

Yup. You are the man for the job. You totally grok the problem there, you have the tools!