Posts by Steve Parks
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another +1 for floriditas. Or, slightly less flash but also awesome, and my regular brunch haunt, Roxy (which is opposite logan brown).
I'm clearly going to have to check out Floriditas. Roxy is pretty good.If you go to Scopa, try the hot chocolate.
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meaning by the terms (Reason, Evidence, Taste)
I have been using 'taste' in the limited sense of a sensation (“the flavour of apple is nice”) or an abstract preference (“my favourite colour is blue”). I have done this because that must be the sense emotivists mean. I’m not using “Reason” to be a straight synonym for “The scientific method”, which you seem to do. Your examples seem to be mostly examples of persuasion, psychological factors, or experience allowing the changing of tastes, which I’ve already agreed occurs. Emotivists say taste preferences are just expressions of a sensation, not statements that we can consider as propositions. They compare moral positions to taste to devalue the nature of the former, in the sense that they say morals are just expressions of an unarguable sensation. They literally claim that morals are nothing more than saying “yuk” or “hurrah”. If you expand the notion of taste to something that you can apply reason, you undermine the emotivist position. If they’re wrong to look at taste so narrowly, they’re already wrong about morality.
... you seem to be putting 'becoming comfortable with other races' as a reason and evidence based decision, and I just can't see much difference between the processes.
I think there is, and it brings up again a point you’ve not yet addressed. I’ve changed my taste in olives over the years, in part by eating them now and then and just getting used to the taste. But even so, I don’t consider that my younger self was mistaken in his view of olives as yuk. That was just my sensation. In your ‘other races' example, I imagined a situation like a child raised by racist parents in a small homogenous town. She gets lots of unkind stereotypes about other races. She grows up and moves to a cosmopolitan city, where she mixes with a variety of people and eventually comes to see that the stereotypes she was brought up with aren’t accurate. You were saying such an example was a non-rational change of moral position, but what is non-rational about that? Seems perfectly rational to me. And, like with all changes in moral positions, she will consider her previous position to have been incorrect - unlike with pure taste sensations like my change in appreciation of olives.
I can't deny their assessment of their own taste.
Of course not, hence what I see as the emotivist’s sophistry. Define talk of morals in a ridiculously myopic way – such that a person’s racism is seen as a “taste” in isolation from the reasons for the view – and then conclude we cannot deny their assessment of their own taste, just like we can’t say someone is wrong to dislike beetroot.
Have there ever been any "Moral discoveries"? In which a fundamental new and totally counter-intuitive moral fact was discovered, which led to a whole new theory? This happens in science all the time. For that matter, are there any established moral facts at all ? Name one! Tell me how you can possibly set up a moral experiment, in which observers could agree that some moral point has been settled.
These would be great questions to put to someone who argues that moral philosophy is a rigorous empirical science, like chemistry or physics. Fortunately, I’m not doing that. I am arguing against the emotivist view that moral statements are the same as taste statements. Moral statements clearly do not act like that for the reasons given by Brant. The only counter I’m aware of, and you touched on it here, requires expanding what is meant by taste to a point that vitiates the original case emotivists were trying to make. Interestingly, moral statements do act somewhat like statements we make regarding empirical matters about the world, but I would not go so far as to say that moral discourse is scientific.
As for why we don’t consider that we have moral facts? Well, allow me to bore people with more pontification, outside the original scope of my argument. I know sceptics dwell on how we are still debating moral issues today, as if that shows something isn’t proven, but I do think we make moral progress and would point to a lack of support for slavery as one. Millions of people still argue evolution is unproven; that is, to paraphrase you, millions of observers do not agree that an empirical point has been settled. Anyone who would argue in favour of slavery today should be dismissed like creationists. Maybe we have been handicapped by humanity’s previous default presumption that morality is given to us by an outside deity. To quote Derek Parfit:
Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage.
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hope the PC's all good!
There was a pop up from “Windows” telling us our PC had hundreds of viruses in all sorts of files, and we urgently needed to upload such & such. We found this unlikely, not least because we use the free version of Avira to do our pc security, so what the hell was this Windows thing doing? Either way we had at least one virus, so we rebooted, cleaned it up, and now pay for McAfee. I hope that’ll be more robust. It certainly has more bells and whistles. It tells me about PAS: “We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems”. (Obviously, they didn’t read the Copyright thread.)
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Man, I go away for a few days (computer busted), and I come back to see BenWilson saying the sorts of things I would say. Well, seeing as this thread’s still in the top bunch, I’ll chip in again...
What you are trying to say is that the reasoning behind moral decisions is in some way superior to those kind of things.
No, not so much “superior”, as altogether of a different nature. Tastes can change, but not because of reason or evidence. Reason and evidence simply form no part of the discourse over taste, per se. You either like the taste of carrots or you do not. You do not reason that you do not like carrots – it is a purely subjective sensation you are describing. Saying “I like the taste of apples” is not an argument for the taste of apples, it is just an assertion of a sensation. “White people are superior to people of any other race” is not an assertion of a taste sensation – it is a statement of position based on understandings about the nature humans. If those understandings are not backed up by reality then the position is wrong in a way you cannot be regards your taste in veges.
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 wasn’t saying he necessarily made the change because of rationality (although I rather suspect that he did, at least in part). I do not think people only change their moral views because of rationality and evidence, but the fact that they can is problematic for emotivists, as that isn’t the case for any other taste statements. My point with regard to the friend’s change of view was that he looked back at his previous position as being erroneous, not just different. Why is this always true of changes of moral position, but never of any other kind of change of taste, if moral statements are just like other taste statements?
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.
I don’t hold that all changes of moral position must be done with formal rational argument, or that there aren’t other ways people change their views. But anyway, if you live with people from other races, and find that they are not so bad, that would be a rational change of view, based on evidence about the world. It’s certainly not arbitrary.
Sure, I don't like racism, but I don't claim to have the power of science behind me on this one. ... 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.
But how can you condemn racism if you don’t think there is really anything at all incorrect in the racist’s assessment? But again, it’s not really about the “one true preference”. Some moral positions are more internally coherent, and more supportable by what we know about the world than other positions. There is plenty of science behind you in your position on race, by contrast to the white supremacist say, who thinks there are hard and fast distinctions between races, and that non-white races are qualitatively inferior. His views do not correlate with what we know about the world; that is, he is as wrong as the stubborn flat Earth believer.
Now we get to the bit where you sound like me:
And there can be a best car in a fixed context, like a drag race. Well, one particular drag race, anyway. [...] I'd agree that there is no "absolute" Best, which is independent of the person(s) making the evaluation. But there can still be a Best (or several), given a set of criteria, which a person or group might settle on.
Yes. Note that the best car for the drag race isn’t a matter of opinion: the best car in context is the fast one, not the slow fuel-efficient one. If the context changes (such as with the family on a farm) then what is best changes, but the assessment of ‘best’ isn’t arbitrary.
And I guess that's really my position regarding morals - there isn't one set that (as Steve Parks put it) is handed to us by God. But as humans, we may very well settle on some set of them and call them Best, that's not impossible. It may, however, be unlikely. But either way, it's a political process, rather than one that could ever come from 'first principles' or scientific inquiry.
I agreed till the last line! Why would you leave reason and evidence (which is what I take you to mean by ‘scientific inquiry’) out of the equation? How else do you discuss morality, when you’re not turning to the gods?
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No, we obsessed about how unfit for office he and his pals were, ridiculed and satirised him and his supporters constantly, instead of debating his ideas and articulating a progressive brand of politics that connected with the electorate.
And it worked out *great*.
Now, this is satire...
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So you're re-reading Foucault's Pendulum as well?
Why, yes. Finally finished it on Monday. It's taken me since June.
Off topic (except it's Friday so there is no O/T huh?), what did you think of The Name of the Rose ? (I assume you have read that also.) Rose is the only Eco novel I've read so far, but I thought it was fantastic. I found it very depressing though... does anyone else think so?
FP is on my ridiculously long list of "to get to" books.
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Steve, thanks for your reply. That was an interesting post in your blog too.
Thanks. I think you just doubled the readership of that blog post.
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.
I'm too many beers into Friday evening to address all your points at the moment. I may do so later in the weekend. I'll just say for now for the record, in case it's not clear, that I am not an absolutist. I think there can be moral truths within certain contexts, and in that sense moral propositions aren't arbitrary, and are not purely expressions of preference. But I don't think they exist as absolute truths either, given to us from God, or an abstract place of ideas.
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Pretty good response, Ben. I’m not convinced, but your rebuttal of the “Brant” criticism is better than I thought it would be.
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?
I guess that depends on what you mean. Progress has been made in many areas. I think the sense of a lack of progress is overemphasized. (I expand on this thought a little in the first part of this old blog entry) Sure, there’s probably someone somewhere willing to argue any moral philosophical point, but so? There are still people who do not accept that the earth not flat. Anyway, further elaboration on this would be too much of a digression.
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.
Sure. My point is not that taste doesn’t change, but that it doesn’t change because of evidence or reasoned argument. For a literal example: I like broccoli now. As a teenager I did not. My previous taste was not incorrect or misinformed - it simply was what it was. There’s no way to make an argument, or show some evidence, that my view of broccoli's taste was wrong. That’s just not how taste works. For a less literal example: kids often have favourite animals as they grow up, and these sometimes change. These preferences are capricious: intuitive, emotive, not amenable to rational argument or evidence - they are truly arbitrary in that regard.
Emotivism holds that moral views are just like those taste preferences above: “Racism is wrong” is the same as saying something like “I think spider webs are prettier than butterflies” or “I don‘t think purple looks good on you”. Excuse the stereotype, but the example I’m about to use is true … My friend from a conservative family in a small town held anti-homosexual views. He changed his views over the period of a few years at university. Clearly his change of moral position on sexuality is not the same as his change of taste for veges, or change of favourite colour. Going back to racism, if it can be argued based on reason and facts we know about the world that racism is wrong, then “racism is wrong” is different from “this tastes nicer than that”. One reason why racism is misguided is that there really is no such thing as race (in the sense basically outlined here). To counter the ‘racism is wrong’ proposition, one must make counter-arguments about the world and facts we know about it. Thus, to say the moral statement “racism is wrong” is no different than the statement “broccoli tastes yuk” is not tenable.
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"Reviewing and lowering drinking water standards
· Permitting local authorities to restrict water supply for unpaid water rates"
As per Matthew: Just... Why? Why even consider this??
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Wow, two emotivists in one place! (Yeah I think you're right, Ben: I'd guess your position isn't very typical.)
It boils down to saying that morals are like tastes - totally arbitrary, although probably shared amongst groups, but certainly without "logical" or "scientific" basis.
Isn't that contradictory? If morals are totally arbitrary, why would they even be shared amongst groups? Also, even in less "enlightened" and scientific times than ours people discussed moral matters using logic and reason.
Actually, I basically agree with this position [the one quoted from Ben above]. Except that I tend to think of it as a variant on social contract theory - the notion that what is right and wrong is, well, what we think it is.
But is what we think based on reasoning of some kind, to some degree, or purely arbitrary?
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).