CH 2: The moral iceberg that sinks all ships

[FlashDangerpants]

Part 1: More rambling preambling (Skip this if you don't like long posts)

In part one of our exciting adventure to create a more proper FSK than the morality-proper-FSK, we began our journey with source of moral motivation, namely the BDM model in which motivation automatically accords with our beliefs and desires.

This means that we have a straight forward answer to the question “why does Bertie choose to tell the truth?” In some situation, a desire that Bertie has; such as a desire to have the respect of his peers, if allied with a belief relevant to his desire, such as that his peers don’t approve of lying, is sufficient to explain the motivation he apparently has to tell the truth in some specific instance. But in some other instance, if Bertie believes nobody will catch him perhaps, Bertie might choose to tell a little fib.

We have established therein the basic building blocks of an extremely limited set of moral reasoning, a lowest common denominator perhaps. Courtesy of little else besides desires we have, and beliefs we hold, we are able to perform simple reasoning about our goals and the means by which we can attain them. What we don’t have is any good reason to believe anything yet.

Part 2: So what comes next as we manufacture our systematic, morally neutral FSK thing? (some descriptive/prescriptive stuff)

Practical reason is of course about what to do, and is therefore by its nature prescriptive. But, I propose we continue in a descriptive fashion for so far as that might take us before we drift into making recommendations... If indeed a truly useful and correct proper-morality-proper-FSK would even do so, which as yet is unknowable within the realm of the nascent properly-emproperfied-proper-morality-proper-FSK.

We know that human animals are motivated by wants and desires, shaped by beliefs to take action in order to attain goals. Is there more that we can know of this before we move on? Can we speak to the content of the desires yet, might we be in a position to establish some cause for those before we address questions of good and bad desires?

As of today, we cannot yet speak of whether we are in search of a supernatural moral entity to justify our FSK thing, or any moral design for the universe. But mister Can seems to be challenging mister Harbal to demonstrate that we could do without such things at all. Apparently it is absurd to suppose that the universe does not follow the moral plan of a God.

So without resorting to a Global Debunking Argument (our unfinished FSK might never support those) I propose we look today for what we would add to our BDM based moral inquiry that might or could explain the desires and perhaps even beliefs with or without the need for some true north to direct those at.

Part 3: Thought Experiments for the hard of thinking

It seems that nearly everyone agrees there is a credible evolutionary tale to be told of a gradual development of an ape species called Homo Sapien which widened an ecological niche by exploiting unusual intelligence to access resources using tools and other manipulations of the environment rather than by evolving specific shaped limbs to access specific foodstuffs in the usual manner.

Similar evolutionary tales about the evolution of many species also cover the evolution of social habits among them. Consider the many different species that have social rituals involving grooming each other which serve to deepen bonds among the group or establish hierarchies. We can, and indeed it is normal to use evolution to explain the existence of these habits. And thus we have a question about whether it is plausible that evolution fashioned us as a species with any certain moral desires or beliefs? If undirected evolution did that, then the resultant set of beliefs would be of a form that was somehow useful for survival of the species rather than being directed at truth. That risks contingency… or promises it, let’s see where we end up.

One of the aspects of evolution as an explanation for the arrival of any form is that it can happen any number of times. After all, if evolution made a special effort to create a special little you, that wouldn’t be a very scientific theory. Instead we find that apparently the crab body type has evolved at least five times. So chaos can do the same thing over and over if circumstance recommends it to.

So let us consider what happens if the human phenotype evolves multiple times. Let us imagine there is a lost continent somewhere in the South Pacific, evolutionarily even more remote than Australia, where the various niches got filled up by very different plants and animals. In this Antipodean place evolved the Antipodeans, similar to you and I in many respects: two arms, two legs, opposable thumbs and a big brain. But the difference is that there was never any ape species in these Antipodes, nor mammals. Antipodean man is instead descended from a type of shark that evolved to walk on land millions of years ago.

In this hypothetical scenario, the land sharks form a society more like that of cats or bears than monkeys and wildebeest. As the intelligent development of solitary predators, Antipodean moral concern is heavily skewed towards matters such as strength, stealth, privacy and territorial integrity. During the mating season, the males often fight admirably to the death over possession of those females with cloaca fat enough to spurt out the millions of offspring needed to hold a statistical probability of genetic survival. The rest of the year it is honourable to hunt and feast on your rival’s spawn if they aren’t fast enough to get away. This hunt is beyond virtuous, almost sacred, revered as a means of maintaining the vigour of the species.

Eventually Christian missionaries arrive in the Antipodes, and are of course eaten as a sign of respect to this Jesus guy who was kind enough to send dinner all that way. The Antipodeans value piety above all things other than strength, stealth, privacy and dinner. For them it is morally wrong to spare the weak, to experience pity for your dinner is shameful. Rape is not really a thing for them as they don’t exactly do sex stuff the way we do. But to wank over another man’s egg pile is ok if you can get away with it, for his lack of diligence is your opportunity, and to squander opportunity is weak, which is usually the same as bad.

Shark men living in some Mega-Australia would therefore I think be expected to wear a very different set of basic moral undergarments than we do, before their society goes so far as to develop a profound set of moral discourses. Eventually though, they begin to form complex societies in order to get similar benefits to those our ancestors (protection from roving vagabonds, slavers and cannibals being chief among them I expect) and then we might very well see some degree of convergence towards a set of moral criteria that naturally would assert itself in any city environment? We should put a pin in that one, it could come in handy later.

[FlashDangerpants]

Part 4: Descriptive moral theory part II… (You're over the hump now!)

Perhaps it is a giant coincidence, and the true explanation is something else... But human morality does seem prima facie to have a lot of those components which we would imagine are applicable to any intelligent ape species that lives in communities if we were those shark men wondering what some other island might be like. All that dividing resources according to social hierarchies stuff would be the stuff of science fiction to them.

Among us apes there’s a strong emphasis on trust; a lot on loyalty; and on how much sharing is too little to offer, or too much to ask. There’s a problematic fascination with some group(s) we call “us” that deserves extra loyalty and demands more resource considerations than this other group called “them” who are often to be feared and sometimes not given resources at all. This all makes a lot of sense against a background of monkey to ape to gentlemen evolution where children are vulnerable and expensive so they have to be protected through their stages of development and the troupe is our aggregate strategy for making that happen.

Had we evolved from solitary hunters we might favour the strength or guile to remove resources from the weak or foolish over promise keeping for instance. Such a society might well have a pattern of behaviour around making and keeping promises similar to ours, but hold that it works more like international diplomacy than other instances of that sort of thing –The maxim being something along the lines: make all the treaties you like, but ensure that you also have either an enforcement strategy or an appeasement one, otherwise really you only have yourself to blame.

Had we evolved from a creature that spawns millions of nymphs rather than one or two babies per year, per female, we would have a very different set of familial expectations I am sure. Language barriers are only one of the reasons it would be hard to get into a debate about abortion with a spider who just sent 60 thousand offspring into the world and can expect up to three of them to not get eaten within the month.

In either case though, it is unmistakably true that once we have desires, and beliefs the thing we do with those objects is called reasoning, at least up to a point. In the words of a prominent moral realist of the Kantian Constructivist school...

“As rational beings we need to justify our actions, to think there are reasons for them. That requires us to suppose that some ends are really worth pursuing, are absolutely good. Without metaphysical insight into a world of intrinsic values, all we have to go on is that some things are certainly good and bad for us and the other animals. That then is the starting point from which we build up our system of values. We take those things to be good absolutely and with that we take ourselves to be ends in ourselves.”
(source: a little before 35 minutes at this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chnWsG8WZsI)

And that sort of thing is all very well, but the vast majority of our moral landscape lies in fallow fields that we simply take for granted. What Hume calls the common point of view. If we ask our friends in the social sciences or academic psychology, what we will uncover there is a vast array of evidence that people rarely bring these matters to the surface for actual rational decision making. Instead we use short-cuts, we copy our assumptions from our parents when we are tiny, and our friends when we get larger, and teachers and whatever churches we may attend, and then when we approach death apparently we all switch to Fox News or something so that we can die angry and confused.

The human animal that evolved from the ape seems to save on brain power and calories by relying where possible on mimesis (copying) and heuristics (simple, repeatable strategies that generally sort of seem to work ok). Do you stop and think through every variable or possible outcome before you decide each instance of racism or dishonesty is bad, or did you make your mind up years ago and just carry on without further consultation for years to come?

Prescriptive approaches to morality – which isn’t something I am permanently ruling out for the proper-morality-proper-FSK-thing yet, we just aren’t anywhere near such a theory at this stage – have a tendency to to focus heavily on the Korsgaard part of the equation, and the idea often is to take some portion of our normal human desires, expose the highest rational part of our existence to them, and get that highest rational part to pursue some perfection of them as a new sort of higher-order desire that overrules the lower order. This isn’t a shot at Kant, Rousseau’s General Will is another example, and there are many more.

Today, I can’t yet see a route to that sort of activity for proper-morality-proper-FSK-thing. The aforementioned belief/desire account of moral motivation explains why we want to do good things if we believe we should. A smattering of genetic inheritance, enhanced with Mimesis, Heuristics, the Common Point of View in the circumstances in which each of us was reared seems to account for much, maybe all of the day to day rationalising about morality and any other aspect of practical reason (what to buy at the shop, which football team to support, the list is endless) that pop up.

Part 5: Clifford the cliff hanger hangs off the cliff… (bringing it home...)

So how do we get from that simple BDM beginning to the big ticket moral theories. Social Contracts, Utilitarianism, Deontology, all the other things that apply a layer of pure reason over the arguably faulty substrate that is practical reason?

Will the most-proper-morality-proper-FSK-thing have any recommendations to make in this matter? Is it desirable to inflict order on the chaos at all? Should we make it official truth that morality cannot be contained in a tight little package, or is there one morsel in the soup that makes the while thing come together?

Unless something more interesting pops in the replies, I will probably make another false-Kantian sort of move in the next part. The general idea being that the Kantian categories of mind which compel us to see the physical world around us in terms of time and space and which on top of those layer relationships such as substance/accident, possible/impossible and cause/effect might have an analogue in the realm of moral reason. That the human mind is similarly pre-conditioned to seek certain types of evaluative category such as balance/unbalance equal/unequal and nice/nasty.

We’ll see how it goes as we prepare to finally eclipse boring old morality-proper.

[FlashDangerpants]

Placeholder 2 kkkkkIIIIIIIIIiiii111VVV

[Sculptor]

Part 1: More rambling preambling (Skip this if you don't like long posts)
to create a more proper FSK than the morality-proper-FSK, we began our journey with source of moral motivation, namely the BDM model in which motivation automatically accords with our beliefs and desires.

What do you mean by FSK?

[FlashDangerpants]

Part 1: More rambling preambling (Skip this if you don't like long posts)
to create a more proper FSK than the morality-proper-FSK, we began our journey with source of moral motivation, namely the BDM model in which motivation automatically accords with our beliefs and desires.

What do you mean by FSK?

Don't worry, I am only mocking VA, I haven't actually internalised his dumb theory.

[Sculptor]

Part 1: More rambling preambling (Skip this if you don't like long posts)
to create a more proper FSK than the morality-proper-FSK, we began our journey with source of moral motivation, namely the BDM model in which motivation automatically accords with our beliefs and desires.

What do you mean by FSK?

Don't worry, I am only mocking VA, I haven't actually internalised his dumb theory.

Phew.
Dumb theories can grow like viruses.

[FlashDangerpants]

What do you mean by FSK?

Don't worry, I am only mocking VA, I haven't actually internalised his dumb theory.

Phew.
Dumb theories can grow like viruses.

I wouldn't put in the effort to write all that stuff for only one purpose. One objective though is to meet all of VA's published requirements for manufacturing one of these FSK things, but to do it better than he can. I think writing one of these FSK things better than VA could is probably quite easy.

After that, I speculate that the FSK game won't be fun for him any more, because the thing that he gets out of the FSK game is the joy of being in charge. But I'm not sure that will be enough for him to shut up about it.

For the extra fun of pissing him off, I'm happy for him to think it's my main goal.

[Sculptor]

Don't worry, I am only mocking VA, I haven't actually internalised his dumb theory.

Phew.
Dumb theories can grow like viruses.

I wouldn't put in the effort to write all that stuff for only one purpose. One objective though is to meet all of VA's published requirements for manufacturing one of these FSK things, but to do it better than he can. I think writing one of these FSK things better than VA could is probably quite easy.

After that, I speculate that the FSK game won't be fun for him any more, because the thing that he gets out of the FSK game is the joy of being in charge. But I'm not sure that will be enough for him to shut up about it.

For the extra fun of pissing him off, I'm happy for him to think it's my main goal.

Do you think he will read it?
In my experience he tends to ignore what is written by others.

[FlashDangerpants]

Phew.
Dumb theories can grow like viruses.

I wouldn't put in the effort to write all that stuff for only one purpose. One objective though is to meet all of VA's published requirements for manufacturing one of these FSK things, but to do it better than he can. I think writing one of these FSK things better than VA could is probably quite easy.

After that, I speculate that the FSK game won't be fun for him any more, because the thing that he gets out of the FSK game is the joy of being in charge. But I'm not sure that will be enough for him to shut up about it.

For the extra fun of pissing him off, I'm happy for him to think it's my main goal.

Do you think he will read it?
In my experience he tends to ignore what is written by others.

Fair point. I don't think he can read that many words, nor follow even such a simple argument. I mean I could have put more effort into a structure, it rambles a bit, so I can't be pissed off at him for not seeing the thread of the argument if I tangle it up.

But the content isn't aimed at VA, it's more about IC's claim that without God to underpin all moral reason there can only be what he calls "delusion". Having that discussion direct with IC is a total waste of time, so I can do this to show up VA, and write an efficient enough response to IC in the same move without having to deal with IC's bullshit about atheism and Nietzsche as I go.

[Sculptor]

I wouldn't put in the effort to write all that stuff for only one purpose. One objective though is to meet all of VA's published requirements for manufacturing one of these FSK things, but to do it better than he can. I think writing one of these FSK things better than VA could is probably quite easy.

After that, I speculate that the FSK game won't be fun for him any more, because the thing that he gets out of the FSK game is the joy of being in charge. But I'm not sure that will be enough for him to shut up about it.

For the extra fun of pissing him off, I'm happy for him to think it's my main goal.

Do you think he will read it?
In my experience he tends to ignore what is written by others.

Fair point. I don't think he can read that many words, nor follow even such a simple argument. I mean I could have put more effort into a structure, it rambles a bit, so I can't be pissed off at him for not seeing the thread of the argument if I tangle it up.

But the content isn't aimed at VA, it's more about IC's claim that without God to underpin all moral reason there can only be what he calls "delusion". Having that discussion direct with IC is a total waste of time, so I can do this to show up VA, and write an efficient enough response to IC in the same move without having to deal with IC's bullshit about atheism and Nietzsche as I go.

IC. "I see". the most Certainly does not sound right as an acronym!!
Neither of them have an epistemological or logical leg to stand on.

[Skepdick]

<blah blah blah>

So you want morality AND the iceberg that sinks it?

Make up your mind, bozo.

But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

[FlashDangerpants]

IC. "I see". the most Certainly does not sound right as an acronym!!
Neither of them have an epistemological or logical leg to stand on.

Sadly, if we correct the nickname to something like "IC only as far as the end of my nose" we would sacrifice the primary goal of a nickname, which is of course to be shorter than the full name.

[Sculptor]

IC. "I see". the most Certainly does not sound right as an acronym!!
Neither of them have an epistemological or logical leg to stand on.

Sadly, if we correct the nickname to something like "IC only as far as the end of my nose" we would sacrifice the primary goal of a nickname, which is of course to be shorter than the full name.