Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Should you think about your duty, or about the consequences of your actions? Or should you concentrate on becoming a good person?

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FlashDangerpants
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Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by FlashDangerpants »

This forum now has about 700 threads about moral realism, and so far, those have yielded little. So let's try and have a discsussion about what are the antirealist options? We seem to have a couple of relativists, one or two non-cognitivists and when Belinda eventually works out the bleeding obvious and quits naming her fingers and toes God, we will have one fairly straight forward Value Pluralist on our hands too.

As for me, I'm fairly undecided. Mostly that's becasue I don't see the need for any of the more abstruse arguments. Most arguments start from the position that fact claims of some sort are built into our moral language and that this is why we need to either resolve all the contradictions and find thh actual truth of the matter; or else demonstrate that all these fact claims are erroneous; or if none of those, diagnose the fault in our understanding of our language and blah blah blah.

I've never seen where that starting assumption arises from. None of our moral practices are based around mathematical or practical demonstrations of moral error. When you disagree with somebody about the content of their moral character you aren't diagnosing a technical fault in their firmware, or addressing a deficincy in their vision. You have to persuade them to your side just as you would when your beliefs are in conflict. Where we do have assumptions of fact built into our practices, such as science or murder investigations, we don't stop to persuade, a trail of fact is followed to either a factual conclusion or a conundrum.

So for my base argument, I have fewer needs than some of the more advanced alternatives. We clearly do reason about our moral wants, needs, obligations, expectations and beliefs. What I see no evidence of at all is that we are reasoning about discoverable moral facts. There are manufacturable moral tautologies, murder for instancec is tautologically wrong because it is definitively wrongful killing. These facts are nto discovered though, they flicker into existence when the concept of wrongful "X" is defined.

What we moralise about, and what we therefore construct our moral reasonings out of, are the fundamental things and or stuff of moral concerns. Big words like "Justice", "Rights", "Liberty" and "Duty" that get statues devoted to them. Little words like "fairness", "warrant", "equality" and "due" which get ignored by the monumental artwork community for some reason, and then there's all the states of mind that must be attained somehow. the happiness of the many, the contentment of the individual, the gratification of the lustful and the prurience of the boring. We like to think of those parts of the above which we desire as some sort of happy bedfellows. They are not, those little fuckers stab each other every day.

Tension between even the basic moral concepts that we require for daily living derives from the fact that they are not built for cooperation by a teleological universal design. Nor are they evolved like laws of physics from some basic states of matter. One ape didn't like the way in which some other ape doled out the banana supply half a million years ago, so he invented equality. But another ape didn't want equal shares because that didn't fairly represent extra work he did on behalf of the flange to acquire a surplus of banana, so he invented meritocracy and and after that fairness itself was a moot point... which fairness are we looking for today?

And that's where all these theories we have to deal with enter the chat, but also why they inevitably fail. To make a moral theory that can be sustained by argument, you must resolve the contradictions that arise from there being multiple incompatible types of fairness, of justice and so on. Thus you choose the Good One, and then you make the others subordinate to it, or else eliminate them from consideration. My favoured approach to moral skepticism rests on this - the eliminative necessity - and the absurdity it results in. If the eliminative aspect cannot be avoided then the project is doomed...

That gives me two obvous issues. One is simple to deal with becasue it is stupid to use an argument about the exitence of God to win a petty debate about the logical standing of moral assertions. If you can prove there's a God, fuck off and so that somewhere it matters. The other is Isiah Berlin's Value Pluralism. Seeing as the above is very blatantly stolen from Berlin I probably can't tell the man himself to fuck off like I can Mannie.

My escape there is that Berlin's moral realist take on his own Value Pluralism argument just doesn't make sense. He pretty obviously recoiled in horror from the implications of his own work, and then he simply insists that it doesn't result in an affirmation of moral relativism, let alone skepticism. But he offers no actual argument as such, just an objection. So I have stolen his work to make use of it against his wishes for my own nefarious purpose, which is arguably naughty, but there's no proving it.




So that's how I choose to go about moral anti-realism. As VA is on some sort of vacay, let's make hay. Tell me what your version looks like.
Skepdick
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Skepdick »

Your entire premise/framing is setup for failure. You are asking all the wrong questions.

Moral anti-realism is nothing other than the posession of good judgment.
Start from ceteris paribus principle.
Examine each situation on its merits/available evidence.
Make the least shitty choice possible given the available options.
Invent non-shitty options if possible.

The fact THAT people posess that skill and have been actively practicing that skill for millenia is all there is to the objectivity of morality.

Morality is any intentional anti-entropic force. Like all forces (such as the forces physicists talk about) they don't really exist "out there" (as the dualist may say). But "in here" is "out there" anyway...

You want me to put it in words? Sure...I'll tell you how I do it when you tell me how you ride a bycicle.

Your expectations of language; and the practice of arguing (really: overzealous justification) is truly unrealistic.
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Harbal
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Harbal »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 2:45 pm This forum now has about 700 threads about moral realism, and so far, those have yielded little. So let's try and have a discsussion about what are the antirealist options? We seem to have a couple of relativists, one or two non-cognitivists and when Belinda eventually works out the bleeding obvious and quits naming her fingers and toes God, we will have one fairly straight forward Value Pluralist on our hands too.
I don't know what I am, but if I ever post any views on the subject, and you label me anything ending with "ist" on the basis of them, I will be very, very annoyed with you.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Harbal wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:11 pm
FlashDangerpants wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 2:45 pm This forum now has about 700 threads about moral realism, and so far, those have yielded little. So let's try and have a discsussion about what are the antirealist options? We seem to have a couple of relativists, one or two non-cognitivists and when Belinda eventually works out the bleeding obvious and quits naming her fingers and toes God, we will have one fairly straight forward Value Pluralist on our hands too.
I don't know what I am, but if I ever post any views on the subject, and you label me anything ending with "ist" on the basis of them, I will be very, very annoyed with you.
I see we have a ritual non-comformist on our hands!
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Harbal
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Harbal »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:15 pm
I see we have a ritual non-comformist on our hands!
:evil: I'm very, very annoyed with you.
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Astro Cat
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Astro Cat »

Harbal wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:11 pm I don't know what I am, but if I ever post any views on the subject, and you label me anything ending with "ist" on the basis of them, I will be very, very annoyed with you.
FlashDangerpants wrote:I see we have a ritual non-comformist on our hands!
Harbal wrote::evil: I'm very, very annoyed with you.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Iwannaplato
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Iwannaplato »

I have no idea what kind of moral anti-realist I am (and there's a proviso in that that I might turn out not to be one ultimately)

Some wild oversimplification.

Humans have desires and preferences (for how life is, for how interpersonal relations go, etc.)
So, they come up with rules and guidelines (and laws) and then label adhering/not adhering to these moral/immoral/good/bad/good/evil.
But, and a big butt it is...they also develop heuristics not just rules (don't kill people unless X, Y or Z) that they think makes society work better (or the tribe, city state, etc.) Babies good, fathers should stay around them so they get food, etc.
So, we have this sort of individual how I like people to act around me. But then we also have guesses (and also a lot of empirical learning) about what makes (or seems to make) for a successful tribe, city state, fishing village, nation, etc.
These are two ways morals arise, they also overlap.

So, I have opinions about behavior, how to run things, how organizations should relate to us and governments too. I mean, me, talking about what others would call morals. I have opinions based on my preferences and desires for how I am treated, people I care about are treated, other lifeforms are treated, people in general are treated, etc. Given I am not a psychopath, my desires and preferences include concerns even about people I don't know. I then struggle to move things in that direction.

But here's where my antirealism gets a little fuzzy. I do see people who don't seem to like life. I'd like to keep this very abstract right now, because otherwise we get off topic. There is a vita phobia. Generally people don't kill everything and themselves, so I am talking about subtler negative relations to life. Given that I have panpsychist tendencies and have since I was a child there is a backdoor to something like objectivity. But that's as far as I will go now. We can treat this as a tangent.

I do have a problem with what I see as anti-life motivations, especially in corporations, societal trends and governments. I see this as a kind of viral self-hate.

Why do I mention this? Well, you could argue that since I see what others call morals as 'merely' my preferences/desires, what right (ha, ha) do I have to spread my preferences. Well, 1) what the hell is a right? what is it's molecular make-up, say? But then also, there is the assumption that I am utterly disconnected from other people and life. Yes, I hate butterscotch ice cream, but I wouldn't make it illegal, nor do I think it is anti-life to like it. It's close to me thinking it, but if experienced my butterscotch taste-quale, you'd understand. But there are other issues where I feel comfortable getting pushing for rules.

So, what kind of anti-realist am I or at least have similarities to, Flesh?
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Astro Cat »

As some others have said, I'm not sure what "type" of moral anti-realist I am, but as this thread develops I'll be interested in being exposed to more theory.

My position is simply that if I try to imagine what it means for an "ought" to be true, I don't come up with anything cognizant. As I've explained in the "is/ought" thread with IC, I think oughts make sense when they are hypothetical imperatives based on values (e.g., I value the concept of property, so I ought not to steal), but nothing about that means there is something about the universe that makes it in general that "we ought not to steal."

A person could simply ask, "well why ought I value the concept of property?" and we just end up with microcosms: "well, because if you don't value property, then you wouldn't have any property." But then someone could just ask "well why ought I value that?" There is nothing about the universe that I can tell that means we ought to have this or that value. We can of course make hypothetical imperatives to explain some of our own values with other values (if I value being alive, then I ought to eat), but we'd encounter the same problem with microcosms (why I ought I value being alive?) that will either just make more microcosms or never reach an answer.

Imagining that an ought could be true is just strange, it's almost like saying the universe has preferences: that the universe would prefer I not murder. This anthropomorphizing might be why some people attribute the source of moral realism to God, but then we would just be talking about the Euthyphro Dilemma, which I'm already getting into in that other thread.

tl;dr, if I am a particular "brand" of moral anti-realist (I mean, I know I'm some kind of noncognitivist because my problem is not cognizing what moral realism would even be or mean), I'm not sure what it would be called.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Astro Cat wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 2:59 am tl;dr, if I am a particular "brand" of moral anti-realist (I mean, I know I'm some kind of noncognitivist because my problem is not cognizing what moral realism would even be or mean), I'm not sure what it would be called.
The thing is, you are describing the strangeness of morality when envisioned as a property of the world.
So if we use an antique way to word that, you get the big argument from moral error theory too...
Mackie's Argument from Queerness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nnaBkTwzAI

Now I'm fairly sure I have slanderd that exxact argument as overkill somewhere further up the page, but only because it does a job that I prefer to argue doesn't need doing. Seems to me that it is entirely up to that task.
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FlashDangerpants
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Iwannaplato wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 11:00 pm So, what kind of anti-realist am I or at least have similarities to, Flesh?
Erm, not gonna lie... I kind of thought you wanted to be a realist of the virtue ethics type but were encumbered by antirealist observation.

If the people who dedicate their dry little lives to telling you and I what the contents our heads must contain were to give up and the pointless realism vs antirealism conflict to end, what happens after that?

The urge that IC and VA have to regulate and dominate you springs from teh same source as that which leads us all to, often insidiously, acquire moral traits from our family, friends and other sources of nearby influence just as we absorb any other fashions, most of our political views etc.... As social monkeys we demonstrate as matter of fact a desire to harmonise these matters with our peers.

So we still have to converse and persuade, we just ought to learn how to do so with more respect for the inherent uncertainty of moral argument. So some of these failed realist moral frameworks probably should plundered for their good bits.
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Skepdick »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:09 am So we still have to converse and persuade, we just ought to learn how to do so with more respect for the inherent uncertainty of moral argument. So some of these failed realist moral frameworks probably should plundered for their good bits.
Some random bloke shows up at your house waving a gun looking to acquire some new posessions, and maybe use you for some target practice. And maybe you have a lovely wife or a daughter he could persuade into a threesome.

Let me hear your most disuasive argument for avoiding what happens next. You master debater, you!

And please don't appeal to the law. Because that's just a tautology (so say you).
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Iwannaplato »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:09 am
Iwannaplato wrote: Thu Jul 28, 2022 11:00 pm So, what kind of anti-realist am I or at least have similarities to, Flesh?
Erm, not gonna lie... I kind of thought you wanted to be a realist of the virtue ethics type but were encumbered by antirealist observation.
Let me unpack this so we can triangulate. I wanted to be a moral realist of the virtue ethics type. Had to double check virtue ethics and from Stanford's Encyc.
Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent.
And, in the end I find all three reactions really rather disgusting.
1) Consequentialism sounds like some heuristic for robots (think some derivative of Asimov's three rules for robots or Tegemarks exploration of how to protect us from AIs). Sit there with my abacus on the beach as the kid is drowning.
2) Deontologists need to be screamed at 'SERIOUSLY, YOU NEEDED A RULE!!??'
3) Virtue Ethicists, if described like that, are no better than deontologists. Another damn heuristic.

I mean, elephants and other large mammals have been known to pull rhinos out of mud or drag crocodlies off a gnu. Hm, it would be benevolant to help even a creature from another species,' says Mamma Hippo. Nah, and how ookie. I don't want that human over for dinner.

But I think vitue ethics could be worded to something closer to me, but not closer to my position. It's cart before the horse and then you can just ride the horse, so you don't need a cart.

Then 'encumbered by anti-realist observation'. Well, that's cart before the horse also, for me, not in general. I didn't come up with my position after observation. My quick sketch above of how morals arise is some kind of after construction, what I have seen after I already was the way I am at a metaethics position level. My childhood presented me a horrible and unique perspective on authority and norms, so early on that I don't think I had the moral outlook implanted, but I definitely preferred people who tended to be thought of as decent sorts, if a little too creative. (so some hints of vitalism, biophilia, pan-something here also). Morals never quite attached to me. I mean, of course that kind of thinking seeped into me, but I was pretty feral at my core. I feel more in common with other social mammals than human moralists on these issues.
If the people who dedicate their dry little lives to telling you and I what the contents our heads must contain were to give up and the pointless realism vs antirealism conflict to end, what happens after that?
Some other kind of power dynamic would come to the fore, used to deny the validity of people with less power. I mean, VA is fairly harmless. But his attachment to science and tech and his utter distaste for the limbic system, aligns him with some pretty strong players out there who I do not think wish the public in general much good will.
The urge that IC and VA have to regulate and dominate you springs from teh same source as that which leads us all to, often insidiously, acquire moral traits from our family, friends and other sources of nearby influence just as we absorb any other fashions, most of our political views etc....
Well, he was originally in some kind of Christian group, presumably his family. But, yes, underneath he is very Christian, if non-theist. Discipline the body, control the emotions/beast within. Techno-austerity utopianism. There are so many dystopias she should read:
As social monkeys we demonstrate as matter of fact a desire to harmonise these matters with our peers.
Sure. And outrage comes when they don't align. When they 'spoil everything'.
So we still have to converse and persuade, we just ought to learn how to do so with more respect for the inherent uncertainty of moral argument. So some of these failed realist moral frameworks probably should plundered for their good bits.
I do think we should be careful just replacing them. Some of these developed over long periods of time, perhaps via unconscious mechanisms. Some may be trash, but others may have good consequences or protect against terrible ones in causal chains that are hard to track. At the very least, caution and empathy about rapid change. A little more...be humble about just how incredibly complex the consequences are of moral positions.

If you read any discussion between say a right wing deontologist and a left wing consequentialist, you see SO MUCH certainty on both sides about what is happening and what it will lead to and epistemology.
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Skepdick »

Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 11:06 am Let me unpack this so we can triangulate. I wanted to be a moral realist of the virtue ethics type. Had to double check virtue ethics and from Stanford's Encyc.
Dumb Philosopher. Have you learned nothing from the current identity politics mess? Identity is undecidable.

Philosophically you can self-determine to be whatever you want to be. Realist. Anti-realist. Virtue-ethicist. Deontologist. Consequentialist. Space cadet.

The discussion about morality precedes the discussion about identity precisely because morality is about the moral qualities of our choices.

If your chosen moral Philosophy (as interpreted; or misinterpreted by you) is what causes you to go on a murder spree is your chosen moral Philosophy moral; or immoral?
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by FlashDangerpants »

Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 11:06 am But I think vitue ethics could be worded to something closer to me, but not closer to my position. It's cart before the horse and then you can just ride the horse, so you don't need a cart.
Bit of a mis-read on my part huh?
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Re: Moral Antirealism's Greatest HITS

Post by Iwannaplato »

FlashDangerpants wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 11:59 am
Iwannaplato wrote: Fri Jul 29, 2022 11:06 am But I think vitue ethics could be worded to something closer to me, but not closer to my position. It's cart before the horse and then you can just ride the horse, so you don't need a cart.
Bit of a mis-read on my part huh?
Well.....I think I end up function in a lot of ways like a virtue ethicist. IOW I like certain traits and dislike others. I am drawn to certain character types and not others. I respect certain ones and less other.

Also I can feel a certain kinship with Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics, where virtues contribute to something like flourishing. Though there version is completely human centered. But there is this hint of vitalism there. Not that I am quite a vitalist. Sorry for the seeming contradictions. I really don't usually think this all out usually.

I do value things like creativity, curiosity, some weird combination of humility and daring, ability to understand what is going on in others, and real big, when I think of philosophy forum participants, good and developing self-knowledge/introspection. So, charateristics matter a lot and they are virtues for me. I like 'em. I want to be around them. I like collaborating with people who have these characteristics.

So, it ends up a lot like I am a specific kind of virtue ethicist, I think. But at a metaethical position, not thinking it's objective.

IOW I think it was actually perceptive. I like the other three normative systems much less. And I think Stanford could have worded virtue ethics less offensively. And ironically, I think VA is a kind of virtue ethicist. Sigh.
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