I argue against *strict* quantification.

Why?

I don't think it hurts to consider those things. But I also don't think that one should narrowly define their concept of morality by these things.

Eh?

If you take a deeper look at the heliocentric example you brought up, you would find that the Ptolemaic system actually had a lot of observations to support it. It's often the case that people pretend that the *only* reason anyone believed in a geocentric universe was some sort of Biblical argumentation.

The fact that there are reasons to believe something something doesn't automatically make it true. So the fact that the sociopath has convinced himself something about his own experience and understanding of morality in no way implies that the sociopath is correct.

I don't claim that eudaimonia is a static object and has only one interpretation. I'm saying that it's a useful concept for considering questions of ethical behavior.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the same level of truth." This probably is a call back to the "subjective truth" that you had mentioned earlier.

I don't see the problem with parameter-dependent statements. The statement "I like to eat chicken" is contextually constrained to the chicken being cooked. It's also constrained to include things like "well-seasoned" and "not overcooked." (Or maybe it's more of a general statement about liking chicken and not a universal claim to like all chicken of all forms, just most of the forms in which it's served.) It doesn't change the truth value of the statement, but simply requires further elaboration on the details of the situation.

A deepening understanding of morality comes from a deeper understanding of the parameters that impact the moral reasoning. It's not that the moral reasoning has changed, but rather that the parameters have changed.

The problem here, which seems to have gone over your head, is that a concept of morality which puts equal weight to evidence from case study/subjective experience runs the problem of needing to demonstrate how or why the sociopath's moral standards do not align with the true ethereal standards, in which you proclaim. When you put undue weight on evidence from subjective experience/introspection/case study, this becomes impossible.

You cannot deny someone else's subjective experience, and their moral standards therein, on no basis at all. You need some sort of standard by which to compare their experience, and thus gauge its level of alignment with the true standard. The problem is that you cannot develop any kind of 'true standard' if you're putting undue weight on subjective experience/case study evidence...

Subjective experience and case-studies differ so significantly between one another that they cannot serve as a reliable source of evidence, in cases where you're asserting the existence of some uniform/blanket standard.

So which is it then? case-study evidence, or statistical (empirical) evidence? If neither, then how do you develop the 'true standard' by which to compare individuals' moral standards: and by which to determine whether any single individual is aligned with the true standard or not?
Disagree. If you care at all, for empirical evidence, then you would know that low socio-economic backgrounds correlate much more highly with deviant and immoral behaviours. You'd also know that other environmental factors, such as getting a brain tumor, can turn individuals from highly caring/giving people to murderous monsters. It is indeed these parameters that change people's moral reasoning, not the other way around. The parameters determine the moral reasoning.

What is "undue" weight? Are you saying *any* weight is undue? How have you determined the level of weight that is undue?

I do not intend to deny their subjective experience. But to claim that their subjective experience has any influence over the existence of moral standards or any specific moral statements is highly suspect. I can allow a person to claim "I saw a ghost" (regarding a subjective experience leading the person to the conclusion of having seen a ghost) and accept the person's statement as being true (regarding their perceptive experience) and yet simultaneously accept the claim "Ghosts do not exist" as a statement regarding reality.

Again, what's your concept of "undue" weight?

You're conflating the issues in a particularly odd way. How do you think case studies are used in general?

It's both and more. I don't think that case studies and statistical evidence are incompatible with each other. I also don't think that such studies can fully account for everything.

If your statement were true, then there's no sense in which you actually create any type of moral reality, but rather your moral reality is a function of the various parameters of your life, including your socioeconomic background and that brain tumor that you had.

What I would say here is that not all moral reasoning is logical, much in the same way not all arguments are logical. People make illogical arguments all the time. The fact that they make such arguments, and even that they believe those arguments, does not change the underlying nature of logic.

Accepting any claim about moral standards that deviates from the standard that is arrived at through empirical/statistical evidence. If you accept even a single moral standard that deviates from the 'true standard', which you proclaim, then it is no longer a true ethereal standard, that you assert to believe in. Since there are no acceptable exceptions to what gravity is defined as there ought be no acceptable exceptions to what the true moral standard is defined as, otherwise you cannot equate it with gravity and you cannot imbue it with the moral authority that you believe in either.
I don't think they're incompatible either. But you cannot use cases of subjective moral standards to arrive at a universal moral standard, unless you quantify and you look at these cases in large numbers.
Precisely. At best, you experience the delusion of making moral choices and moral realities, just as I experience the delusion of being able to change my moral reality or the world's moral standard. Of course, we speak of these things as real, since its far more cumbersome to refer to things as they are.

The delusion feels very real though, and it is important for our survival, but I am not convinced that your ethereal moral authority model takes any such notions of determinism into account. Indeed, it all rests on the single fat assumption that we are all self-determining agents.

Eh?

Eh?

I'm not tracking with you. It seems to me that you're using an extremely strict concept of moral absolutism in order to make your argument make sense. I can posit true moral standards without requiring moral absolutism.

I don't know why you keep wanting to go all-or-nothing on this. I don't see why one must deny the application of reason when attempting to pursue things that are true. You seem to be saying that one must turn a blind eye to reason as a means for attaining information and simply follow only empirical methods. That seems absurd to me.

In other words, you're not saying anything at all and you have full license to just make up whatever you want and accept it as true? So... pure moral relativism.

Give me a true moral standard, for which I cannot find an exception.

And if I can find an exception, then I'll ask you how loosely you're defining 'true'.

And if you're defining 'true' loosely, then what authority can you really imbue that 'truth' with?

Furthermore, if there are exceptions to your 'true moral standard' then where are the exceptions to our understanding/description of gravity? or to the universal constants? If there are any exceptions you simply cannot equate gravity with your concept of morality. I fail to see how you're failing to see this.

P.S. I'm purposely avoiding the process of placing moral beliefs into boxes, such as 'moral relativism', 'absolutism' etc. Grouping things as such only distracts from the logical process, since each box comes with its own set of unnecessary implications.

Let's deconstruct it all instead.

This will be particularly difficult for me to do in this context because your concept of morality is made manifest by individual beliefs, customs, and brain tumors. If you are the one looking for an exception, I don't know how I would be able to prevent you from doing that.

But I would say that a true moral standard is "Doing good is better than doing evil." Another one is "It is important to care for the poor."

But mostly, I expect that you're trying to impose a particular framework that is incompatible with the framework I'm using. The direction of this conversation seems to me (and I could be wrong) seems that you're not actually engaging with my framework directly, but trying to show me that my framework doesn't fit into your outlook.

Are you proposing that your framework is utterly distinct from all frameworks that precede it? It is likely that you're going to go down a path of noise and nonsense if you do that.

I tried doing that earlier. You told me not to get bogged down in the ontology of the reality of morality when you say things like you have 100,000 times your size of influence moral standards.

In all circumstances? what about when something evil must be done, in order for something good to come to fruition? For example, what about in the case where we must murder someone to stop them from murdering multiple other people?

If this moral standard that you've provided, does not hold true across all circumstances, then it could be said to be circumstantial or 'context-dependent' in other words, no? Even if it holds true across most circumstances, it is still context-dependent. Is gravity context-dependent?

I'm just trying to deconstruct the separate elements that comprise your claim about morality's equivalence to gravity.
Once again, while this may be true on average, it also depends on circumstances/context-dependent. It is not always and in all circumstances important to care for the poor. Sometimes caring for someone rich can help the poor more, than if you'd dedicated your care to the poor.
Whether it fits with my outlook or not, is only coincidental. As mentioned before, I am instead trying to demonstrate that your claim about the equivalence between morality and gravity is in fact not as thought-out as it appears on the surface.
I don't think it's likely to be distinct seeing as there's mountains of evidence behind scientific determinism/against the notion of self-determining agency: upon which your framework relies.
I hadn't done the maths personally, but thank you for doing them for me.

Upon determination of that which is good, do the good thing.

There are situations in which the effects of gravity are considered negligible, such as when thinking about the interaction between protons and neutrons within a single atom, or looking at diffraction patterns of light rays through a double slit. This neither denies the existence or influence of gravity in those situations.

What elements are there to separate? I can probably help if you knew how to describe what you're looking for.

But you're not denying that it's important to help the poor.

It's important insofar as you may or may not be able to leave your own outlook at least for the duration of the consideration of mine. You have already demonstrated a tightly held utilitarianism, which I've already said is an incomplete approach to morality.

I welcome the further inquiry.

A deeper consideration of that statement will yield the obvious fact that the question of determinism is a scientifically underdetermined question. No amount of evidence can prove or deny determinism/free will.

But I will ask you to consider carefully the idea of logic in your framework. You have side-stepped it several times so far. Logic and reason are not seen to physically determined structures. Yet we believe in them, and we operate within them all the time. How does your empirical approach address the issue of logic? If you can understand that, then you should be able to make the bridge to my position far more easily.

In your framework:

Is it self-evident that its important to care for the poor? or is it important to care for the poor because of reciprocal mechanisms (game-theory) that make it important?

In other words, does the importance attributed to the poor stem from other causes? or is that importance self-generated/not caused by anything?
Because we rely on logic, and cannot believe anything without using logic, does not mean that morality is the same. It does not mean that we rely on specific moral standards, or that we cannot behave or survive without those standards.

Something so broad as: doing good is better than doing evil, is an almost meaningless claim, up there with "I know nothing".

It does not suggest how we should behave, since there's so much room for interpreting what the 'good' thing is. It simply states that X>Y. For this reason, I'll concentrate on the 'caring for poor' standard instead. It has more meaning to it.

Simply saying "I'll pray for you" is NOT imposing ones beliefs any more than saying "Thank you" for passing the salt at the dinner table. You being unable to accept that as a form of sympathy and concern rather than of an open invitation of religious conversion is on you and the liberal ideology of "tolerate all, unless they disgree with you."

Except that America's government was established wrt religion.

Praytell, who does rule?

If there's no God, "sin" ceases to exist. There are moral precepts for a society to implement that attempt to "keep the peace" between citizens, but without God, a person doing good or bad holds no meaning beyond a personal choice to act/react in a desire he/she chooses according to societal norms and not according to "sin"

And by becoming enraged in response (when the comment made isn't directed at you), you're demonstrating yours.

Back to what I mentioned initially that you have a hatred for any mention of religious context. If you are so angered by something that you know without a doubt was make believe, why should it bother you? That's certainly a personality flaw to be certain of, yet angered by, false claims. Eapecially when those claims arent even directed at you as your OP suggests.

This entire thread was started because you've taken people mentioning God in a casual conversation out of context.

It's somewhere in the realm of the concept of ethical reciprocity. This is not the same as game theoretic reciprocal mechanisms in that there's no sense in which caring for the poor is driven by material gain (though material gain may happen).

I consider the idea that altruism is a good thing (or at least something like altruism being a good thing) to be somewhere between self-evident and a generalization of human ethical patterns. If good is even a legitimate concept to begin with (good simply standing relative to evil), then it seems somewhat self-evident that caring for the poor is good. But even without that, we see ethical reciprocity appearing in the vast majority of human ethical systems, across both time and geography. How people arrive at that conclusion varies, but the conclusion itself is quite stable.

I view this as similar to many cultures arriving at a concept that resembles "1+1=2" despite there being many different types of representation of the numbers and even different conceptions of number itself. It seems to point to some underlying truth that "1+1=2." It's not that this is self-evident per se (it's not at all clear, in the absence of any type knowledge at all about arithmetic relationships, that "1+1=3" couldn't be true), but once we know what it means, it seems quite absurd to think that anything different would reasonably be understood as true.

See the paragraph above. I think trying to assert a singular cause-effect relationship is too naive to be useful. It's far more complex than that.

Indeed. I don't claim that morality is logically necessary. It's easy to posit a world in which morality doesn't exist in any meaningful way. But that doesn't appear to be the world we exist in, so such an assumption seems unwarranted.

You can state that, but much in the same way that humans are endowed with an intuitive sense of numbers, even without really having any concepts of numbers, I think people are endowed with an intuitive sense of morals. The ideas are blunt and ill-defined (just as it is with numeracy), but they seem to originate from a very deep level. So the inability to unwind the information to a point that you're re-starting the game from absolute first principles is probably a philosophical error.

Consider for a moment the primacy of such a relationship in any moral system. You said you wanted to deconstruct the ideas. But now you're balking at the deconstructed ideas. Please make up your mind.

Okay.

You are missing my point. I am not saying there is no God. I am saying that if there is one, he is likely going to take into account how much you sin regardless of your beliefs. I think Jews tend to agree. Christianity was invented because most people realize that they are screwed if this is actually how God thinks.

Aaron: A fundamentalist's definition of Christian morality could be "Morality is that which comports with God's will." I haven't seen you connect morality with your theology at all (just a brief comment "If it's God's heaven and God's standards..."). Your views on morality could be completely secular from the discussion I have been reading so far. Do you connect morality with God in a direct way, even if it is a more dilute version of the fundamentalist example?


VeeDDzz: I'm not really following some of what you are saying either wrt 'subjective truth'. I also think you are interchangeably commenting about i) what morality is (defining what is meant by moral / immoral) and ii) moral behaviour (once we have defined what is moral / immoral, looking at how people's behaviour can be described according to those definitions).
e.g.
You seem to be suggesting that changing people's behaviour would also, eventually, change something from being moral to being immoral (or vice versa). That doesn't seem right to me. Another example given was that of committing an immoral act in order to have an end result that would be considered good. Under my own understanding, that immoral act does not beome moral due to the overall good outcome, but it sounds like you are suggesting that it does. I would've called it a necessary, but still immoral, decision. Even that is arguable: there are people that would say that they could not commit a greatly immoral act even if the outcome was extermely favourable e.g. they could not bring themselves to kill a person, even if it meant saving many others. That should not be the case if an immoral act 'became' moral because of the overall positive outcome, would it?


Sorry for butting in, I find the morality topic really fascinating.

I'm presenting a "secularized" version of it because it is a better conversation. I don't believe that it needs to be secularized to be meaningful, it's just that there's quite a bit less to say if it's taken from a more "fundamentalist" perspective.

One of the difficulties/nuances of my position is that I don't feel the need to tie it down into an all or nothing pattern. Is there a sense in which I believe God is the source of all morality? Yes. I can affirm statements about God's holiness and man's shortcomings to God's holiness. And I can further affirm statements about God's holiness establishing the standard of what is morally good, and which is beyond our capacity to attain of our own efforts.

But I also believe that God reveals himself through the universe and our experiences of it. Therefore, in observing the world around me, I can find the traces and echoes of those same thoughts in various ways in nature, which includes aspects of our human nature.

This is what I was getting at at various points in the conversation in connecting these thoughts to mathematical concepts.

There's a very real sense in which we can think of "1+1=2" as being a "fundamentalist" claim. "That's just how it is." Or maybe viewing this as some type of Platonic object that's simply there. And I can go with that and be happy with that explanation.

But the idea that "1+1=2" as represented by having one apple and another apple and finding we have two apples is a "secular" type of claim. We're looking at data, and patterns, and using words to describe the thing that we're finding.

I think they're both true and that there's value to both ways of understanding "1+1=2."

Why does it not seem right? I don't hold any behaviour or belief about what is moral/immoral as permanent and unchangeable.
You can define a 'moral act' or a 'moral decision' as separate from a 'moral outcome' but then I'll simply ask you to redefine 'moral'.

If an immoral act or decision can produce a moral outcome then the definition you're using to define 'immoral/moral' opens itself up to criticism.

It's like saying that 'killing people is immoral' yet in a circumstance where the lives and survival of 100 people are dependent on killing one single person, killing that person is clearly not immoral. So then, how do you reconcile this if you're defining 'moral/immoral' separately to the outcome?

Let's consider another circumstance where in nature for example, there are very limited resources available for a particular species, due to geographical barriers, such as a flood, preventing access to other areas. In this circumstance, the outcome of accessing and feeding on those limited remaining resources, may indeed be highly, to entirely, dependent on killing other members of the species and thus maximizing the chances of you feeding.

In this circumstance, could you really say that it is 'immoral' for an individual of this species to kill its own? or have the mediating variables (flood blocking access to other resources) made you consider redefining 'moral/immoral', by also considering the outcome in your definition of it?

On this point. Also ask yourself why some species have evolved to live a predatory lifestyle; why some species have evolved to hunt and live almost completely on their own; and why some species are altruistic and live in groups. These are important questions to conversations on morality I believe, yet they're so commonly ignored by philosophers, who tend to biasedly attribute more value to the human mind, than to everything else in nature.
I'm not sure that whether or not it would, is particularly important.

To elaborate, what you're describing here is a coward. Cowardice in its systemic effects, is far worse on people and society, than most human dispositions. So not only do I find such a disposition cowardly, but I also find the behaviour it enacts, as gravely immoral. Failing to value the outcome, at least equally to the principle of the act, is also selfish. It is the outcomes after all, that create the very world we all have to live in.

Moral principles are fine and dandy, for general use, but when they become increasingly de-coupled from intended outcomes then they become dangerous. And the environment always seems to have a way of de-coupling principles from outcomes, forcing us to re-evaluate and re-define those principles.

Right, I'm just looking at the way you described changing peoples behaviour would change reality ("Thereby making my subjective notions of morality: an actual reality"). Can you think of an example? I can't think of anything at the moment that would show that changing ones mind about whether some behaviour was moral or immoral, would change the reality of that behaviour from previously moral to immoral.

Was slavery actually moral before people's minds were changed to accepting that it was actually immoral?

At first glance I thought this might just be a difference in how we label things, and whether we focus on the granularity of actions vs just the outcome. But I'm not sure it's just that, so let's go through the details.

I would still call the killing of that one person immoral even if the overall outcome is greatly moral. You could say that it was necessary to perform this immoral act "for the greater good". But the act was still clearly harmful to the person who was killed. I don't see any reconciliation problems.

What if the killing of this person failed to save the 100 others, through some unforeseen problem, for whatever reason, it just didn't work out as was expected. Would you then label the act of killing that 1 person as immoral, because of the overall outcome? My description did not need to be changed, there was an immoral act (as previously) with no greatly moral outcome.

I'm just viewing life as an ongoing series of actions, some of which can be labelled as moral or immoral, and when we consider some particular collection of actions, we can aggregate the sum of its immoral components and the moral components to determine an overall outcome as good or bad.

With that, it's just a different way of describing things. But as I hinted at above, I'm not sure its only that. Let's proceed

Forgive me for not answering directly, you proposed a few different things here. But if I could offer an alternative circumstance:

What if some random person is brought into a hospital, they have been shot, or something along those lines. Surgeons can definitely save his life with some effort. But, there is a group of other patients in that hospital who are dying of organ failure. The gunshot victim has a healthy heart, lungs, liver etc. If his life is not saved, his organs will save the lives of several other people. If you are looking only at "the ends justify the means", wouldn't you have to say that this person should die in order to save multiple others? You are even hinting that saving the one person is cowardly.

Now, morality is more complicated than any short and simplistic definitions, and I don't want to put words in your mouth you haven't said. But you also haven't suggested there is more to it than the ends justify the means in what you have said so far.

wrt what you said about species-ism, I consider morality to be based on empathy, and not all other forms of life have empathy. I'd say this is more about ethics than morality (but I would say that it can be unethical for humans to wipe out large areas of nature and pave over it with concrete without regard to the life that inhabits these habitats).

I would warn that looking only at the outcomes and, to use your term, becoming decoupled from the process, is dangerous.

The problems of consequentialism are similar to the problems of results-oriented thinking. "I went all-in with 72o and won, therefore it was a good play."

You would have to adopt a probabilistic consequentialism to get around that, but then probability implies indeterminism and if indeterminism is true then you should go with subjective consequentialism because it's hard to reconcile objective consequentialism with actual decision-making mechanisms unless you take a position that looks a whole lot like objective morality, which is the thing that he's trying to avoid.

So... subjective consequentialism? It's not that far away from moral relativism.

You've done this consequentialism -> moral relativism bit before. I didn't get the argument then, and I don't get it here (and the two arguments seem substantially different). I think you really ought to give precise definitions of "subjective consequentialism" and "moral relativism" and so forth.

In particular, I am not seeing how you get from taking probabilistic considerations into ones analysis of the consequences forces things to be "subjective", or anything like "moral relativism". How to play a poker isn't a moral question, but ignoring that in the 72o example a consequentialist would not just look at one hand, they would ALSO be able to consider the outcome of many hands, to study the game, study the probabilities, and deduce that their are different expected consequences of playing 72o and AA. The fact that it is probabilistic doesn't make it subjective. It is an objective fact that AA is better than 72o in the probabilistic sense that it is more likely to win at showdown if all cards are dealt out. Nor does it make it "relative".

Can you clarify the distinction between subjective and objective consequentialism please because I'm not following.

On the one hand you are correct consequentialists will label an act good or bad based on results but this is not a decision making theory this is merely to evaluate some act against some consequentialist's definition of the good. On this account consequentialism may be saying "I went all-in with 72o and won, therefore it was a good play." but it is not saying either the player merits praise for the play or that the play should be attempted again. It can pretty much be reduced to "I went all in with 72o and won therefore this time it was a profitable play" while this is tautological it isn't a criticism of the consequentialists evaluation of the act.

It's important to distinguish between our evaluation of the act and our evaluation of the actor. There is no difficulty in thinking the play good and the player bad. Our evaluation of the player may be based on probabilistic considerations but the play either wins or it loses and we can evaluate the act discretely.

If my understanding is correct, objective consequentialism is a position that takes in all objective facts when determining the decision, whereas subjective only takes in the facts that are available.

For example, I'm going to flip a fair coin and hide it under a cup. You did not see the result of the flip and (for simplicity) we will assume that I haven't seen it, either. I offer you the following game: If it's heads, you win $1 and if it's tails, you lose $10. It turns out in reality that the coin is heads under the cup, but we don't know this.

According to the subjective perspective, you would assess the situation and decide that it's a losing proposition, and you would conclude that playing is the correct decision.

However, the objective perspective takes into account the fact that the coin is heads. The objective reality is that you're going to win if you play the game. Therefore, you have made a poor decision because you had a winning play and didn't take it.

I'm not extending it to anything more than "Because I won this hand, it was a good decision." I make no projections about future plays and (at least for now) I make no statement about any sort of subjectively determined probabilities that were used in the decision-making process leading up to the decision itself. A strict consequentialist reading of that situation cannot conclude anything other than it was a good a decision because the outcome was good.

Right. I'm not saying anything about whether the player is a good or bad player. Just that this singular decision was good because the outcome was good.

If you're referring to this thread then it's a completely different matter. In that one, I was claiming you needed moral relativism in order to explain the use of truth values because emotivism doesn't grant you truth values.

In this case, I'm addressing the following:

I'm taking some liberty here in interpreting the statement (because it has yet to have been clarified), but presumably there's some manifestation of reality based on what he believes about it. The closest thing I can see to that is moral relativism.

So I'm actually making the jump in the opposite direction. His meta-ethical claim (that his subjective notions can manifest an actual reality) and his consequentialist perspective (at least relative to some subjective probabilistic understand) seem to go together quite well.

Read my response to dereds and then tell me if you want to continue with your analysis.

The quote from veeddzz (and I didn't read more of his than that) does indeed sound like moral relativism, although I too am not quite sure what is being meant in it. But the description I originally quoted, and subjective consequentialism generally, does not.

Firstly, neither deterministic or probabilistic are relevant distinguishers between objective and subjective consequentialism. We can claim that a consequences is objectively likely to occur. For instance, I can conclude that it is morally superior to kill one person to versus a fair coinflip on killing x>2 people. Yes there is probability and indeterminism in the coinflip but the likelihood of of consequences are objectively determinable. I believe this is standard in the definitions but we could google if you challenge it.

But more importantly, I reject that your description of subjective consequentialism is related to moral relativism. Suppose two people both analyze an identical situation. Both have identical methods of analyzing consequences, but they have two different sets of available information. This results in two different moral judgement. All of this is possible under subjective consequentialism. Is this moral relativism? Certainly whether someone is acting morally does depend on who this actor is, as they are making different judgments. I'm guessing this is the motivation that leads you to think this is the case.

The subjective consequentialist may utter the statement "an action is good if the actor intends good consequences based on their available information". This edict, however, is universal in nature. It prescribes how ALL people are to be judged for their actions. It is true, it gives different results for different people - it depends on their cognitive states - but it depends on their cognitive states in a sort of universal way.

Alternatively, objective consequentialists, deontologists, etc, have a range of different ethical theories. Moral relativism, however, is NOT an ethical theory, it is a META ethical theory, a point you have confused before. It says that that the moral claims made by these different types of ethicists do not represents universal truths in the universe, but are instead relative to various cultures and so forth only. A culture of subjective consequentialists will make claims that are incompatible with a culture of objective consequentialists...and they may very well have a range of different metaethical theories of which relativism would be just one.

Lol at your characterization of our previous discussion, but let's not go down that road again....