Posts by BenWilson
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Thanks. I think you just doubled the readership of that blog post.
Heh, yup metaphysics doesn't appeal to so many people. But it was my bag, in my day, and I had a lot of my best discussions about it a little bit drunk.
I'll just say for now for the record, in case it's not clear, that I am not an absolutist.
I don't doubt you. Philosophy training can leave people with an unusual collection of beliefs - not necessarily wrong beliefs, though. Personally a lot of them are held in my mind as theories, possible truths, rather than things I actually believe - that set is very much smaller, and the set of things I absolutely will not budge on is actually empty. To that end people often think I'm insincere. They might even be right but there you go - I'm not going to lie and say I hold firm beliefs in what I don't. It's a fine line between sophisticated and sophistry.
Certainly I think that there are many true statements that can be made about morals and how humans generally see them, and I also have a moral position. I just get less and less convinced that it's 'rational' the older I get.
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Steve, thanks for your reply. That was an interesting post in your blog too.
I think discussing the extent to which philosophy as an entire discipline has produced real answers that have spun off into sciences is a red herring. We were discussing whether it has done so for questions of morality, and it really doesn't matter if physics is now in the hands of physicists, rather than philosophers. The question is "is morality like physics?". I don't think so.
Philosophers in the time of Plato were considered authorities (usually by themselves) on both morality and physics. Don't you find it highly suspicious that after 2 millenia, one of those disciplines gradually left the hands of philosophers and the other did not? We are still having a debate right now that Plato would surely understand and probably have had with his mates. But he sure as hell wouldn't get much about relativity physics, or how the internet works, or evolutionary biology. So much progress has been made that we take for granted, that he just wouldn't have the background at all.
I know what you are trying to say about the 'reasoning' behind liking broccoli appearing quite dissimilar to the reasoning behind morals. Physical taste has a logic of its own, as does the way that children change their preferences for favorite animals. What you are trying to say is that the reasoning behind moral decisions is in some way superior to those kind of things. What I'm saying is that this is an assertion .
You can't prove that moving from an anti-homosexual position to a pro-homosexual one is a rational decision, just because someone who became educated changed their position. I discovered a taste for broccoli during my own university education, mostly on account of living with someone who cooked it nicely. But I can't claim that broccoli IS nice, on the strength of that. At University, it's likely that one will meet quite a few openly homosexual people and discover that they are not bad after all. But the opposite can happen too - I'm damned sure a few people I know became much more homophobic during the same period.
I hope you can see my point that you've done little more to prove that moral statements are statements about facts of the world than to merely assert it. Suggesting that countering "racism is wrong" must be done by argumentation is wishful - most of the ways that we counter such an idea are actually non-rational - we live with people of many races and find that they're not so bad. Or not, quite often, so the matter can't really be considered settled. Sure, I don't like racism, but I don't claim to have the power of science behind me on this one. I don't even claim to have the majority behind me. Perhaps I could claim to have the majority of educated people behind me, but even then, I'm not so sure. Quite frankly, I'm happy enough just to consider it my preference, rather than claim it to be the one true preference. I would like other people to have this preference, and that is pretty much the effect I go for when I condemn racism.
Which is, as I said before, one of the suckful things about the position. It's definitely easier to be an absolutist when one wants to change other people's minds, insisting that there is a truth, and that you know it, carries a lot more weight than merely taking a side.
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Yeah, the same ones that voted for legalised child abuse recently. Not to mention voting for "change" last year.
A post in the style of Lhaws?
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I formally declare this "Lets Talk About Dickheads Week". I'd like a formal ranking to be voted on - who are the biggest dickheads?
1. Undie 500 tools
2. Scientologists
3. Michael LhawsI personally rank them 2, 3, 1.
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I actually meant "why did you ask me ?". Was it just because I was up at that time (late night infant feeding duty)?
It looks like your reason for exceptions to a no-suicide rule are much the same as mine. As I said right at the start - the exact question matters a great deal. I'm firmly in favor of voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill. I recently saw how that can work, even, a friend died of cancer. She was eventually sent home with enough morphine to control the considerable pain, and pretty much overdosed on it, over a period of a few days. But other friends have from time to time expressed suicidal thoughts, and I've always made a point of doing my utmost to talk them out of it, however I can. Usually the best way is to just cheer them up, but in at least one case I (and everyone else) said that the person just needed to get out of their bad relationship. They've been fine ever since they did exactly that.
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Islander, I don't much like the idea of it. It might make sense to relieve oneself from unbearable pain, or a life without prospects of happiness, or to avoid an even worse outcome (like torture, followed by being killed anyway), but as a response to the kind of things a lot of people commit suicide for, it's just shortsighted. Life has many unforeseen reversals.
But it's a difficult question, and highly situational. Why do you ask, btw? I said I was surprised that suicide was considered so acceptable, but by that I mean I thought most people would be against it. For myself, if the question was "Are you always against suicide?" then the answer would be no. If it was "Should anyone who feels like killing themselves any time be allowed to?" then I would answer no to that as well.
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Isn't that contradictory? If morals are totally arbitrary, why would they even be shared amongst groups?
Why shouldn't they? Arbitrary doesn't necessarily mean random.
Also, even in less "enlightened" and scientific times than ours people discussed moral matters using logic and reason.
Were any conclusions ever drawn though? Was anything ever actually settled? Seriously, we're still having the same arguments now, and they're still not settled. Doesn't that suggest a paucity of actual truth to the matter?
But is what we think based on reasoning of some kind, to some degree, or purely arbitrary?
That's a very hard question to answer. "Reasoning" can be very unreasonable, to the point of arbitrariness. Especially where morals and tastes are concerned. It can and is frequently used merely to confirm existing prejudices.
The classic refutation of emotivism is from Brant: it’s obvious that moral statements are not like “taste” statements. People can, and often do, change their moral views based on reason. Furthermore, when they do, they no longer consider their old views merely “different” (such as with changes of taste), but actually wrong (such as if they come to understand that the world is not flat after all, but spherical).
Yes, that is a classic example of why my position is not popular. It takes quite a lot of work to point out that you changed your usage of "wrong" mid-sentence there. Certainly people move from calling a view right to calling it wrong, and they give reasons. But if you do not assume that there is truth to the matter, then you can equate calling it wrong to "I don't like it". Which is quite different to a statement like "the world is flat". This is a statement about the world, not a statement about one's own preferences, and there could well be a truth that is independent of the person making the claim. It's could even be independent of people altogether.
Perhaps the dynamic of the movement of these tastes is not identical to tastes of the tongue, since, as you point out, it's not common to 'reverse' a taste, and go from liking it to disliking it. But it can and does happen. Furthermore, a number of tastes are acquired with a huge amount of input from the functions of the mind. Tastes may evoke memories, for instance, which are pleasant and override a (perhaps natural) tendency to dislike them. Or they may evoke unpleasant memories and cause revulsion where it did not occur before. Tastes can build upon each other, in increasing subtlety, until you can like something that you would previously have found utterly disgusting. I think this is not uncommon, even.
Now you could come back to me and say that when people say "X moral is wrong", they are not intending to say "I don't like X moral". They are intending to speak of the actual morality of the matter, and are making a factual statement independent of themselves about the matter. But that again presupposes that there is an actual truth of the matter. Perhaps there is not.
I could say in all earnest say that "All unicorns have a single horn". And I would be fully intending to actually talk about actual unicorns. But since there probably are no actual unicorns, there would actually be no truth or falsity to the matter of how many horns they have, and the statement would most likely end up as false (if you decide that it is a valid proposition). Perhaps morals are like unicorns - human fictions - and everything we say about them is either false (if they are to be considered propositions), or neither true nor false, just something we say for an effect. I think this is the case.
I'm not committed to any particular translation of moral statements into emotive ones. There can be any number of effects one is after in making a moral statement. Often, people espousing morals don't believe in them at all, they just want others to. Sometimes they just want approval from the group, or an individual. Sometimes they're just trying to solve a practical problem.
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I managed to nicely time becoming a moral sceptic with finishing my MA thesis in ethics. Handy that one.
Heh, you held out! I turned moral skeptic during my first class on Ethics, and spent the next couple of years trying to talk myself out of it. I found that it was nearly impossible to continue discussing ethics in a constructive philosophical manner - the position really suggests that any further study of ethics should be pursued from an anthropological point of view, looking at the customs of humans. Normative theories kind of bounce off.
Which is actually a bit of a suckful position to find yourself in, when asked for an opinion (or feeling like your opinion should be heard). It means that I can't give reasons that I really believe in intellectually for any moral position. All I can give is my own intuitions, and if they clash with other people's (and they always do), then we're just left with an impasse. All argumentation on the subject seems dishonest to me, at the deepest level.
So I pursued ethics without wanting to commit to any theory. Some theories came closer to my intuitions than others, (utilitarianism being the best fit) but I always find counter-intuitive examples can be given, so ultimately the theory gets rejected. Not that intuition is much of a better guide - it conflicts internally quite a lot too. Having mastered some of the theories, I find that the only real power that confers is the ability to understand exactly where a whole bunch of dogmas come from, and in some cases to turn other people round by discovering the internal logic of their position. But why they should then move to my position is simple verbal sleight of hand (sleight of mouth?). It's the Socratic tactic of exploiting the logically exhausted mind. Sometimes people turn me around with a powerful counterexample that hits me squarely in the intuitions. All of the theory is just backdrop to that, to make it sound like it's deep.
That said, a discussion of any potential underlying principles can be useful, as most people seem to want to refer to a principle a bit deeper than "we all think this is true".
Yes, I think apparent depth is a powerful thing. It helps us ignore the conflicting moral intuitions that we must otherwise feel...conflicted about. Moral theories are powerful tools for exploiting minds. They're banners to rally around, weapons to beat opponents down with. They may not generally appeal to opponents, but they may consolidate friends, which can be just as important in a battle. It's a symbiotic relationship.
I have to say, it's not the kind of philosophy I liked. I went for logic, language, meaning.
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Greetings Ben Wilson! I want you to bottle two media interviewers, six production assistants and two cameramen. Your reward will be three trollhide inflammable sofas.
You will receive 1g 20s
Excellent, I will use my skinning and tailoring to make one set of flame-proof trollhide armor, which I will auction off at Kiwiblog. Much better than just whaling on pigs for experience.
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I don't think scoring - that's so 1980s computer games. It should be based around "achievements" so everyone gets to be a winner.
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