Ok, maybe meaningful wasn't the right word. I could say instead that possibly your verdict doesn't 'matter'. In the same way that if I spin a coin during a football game and use the result of the spin to predict the result of the game, it doesn't matter. The game will play out completely indifferent to what I think.

That we act as if there is right/wrong doesn't necessarily make it so. People also act as if there are ghosts, or fairies, or as if they can influence how their day will go by acting out some ritual with the order they put their shoes on. I'm wondering about whether or not, if we include morality in that type of behaviour, what is really going on?

Well they don't, if in fact there is no such thing as 'right/wrong'. They're irrelevant. That's what I was trying to say with the 'shades of red of the emperor's new clothes' comment.

What if there is no right or wrong is a question it's not descriptive or normative.

I'll try to clarify;

P1 There are no moral facts.

This claim is descriptive, it attempts to describe the world. It is also a meta-ethical claim, meta-ethics is the study of the nature of moral properties, whether they exist and what form they take. Moral nihilism as we've discussed is the thesis that nothing is morally wrong and so is a meta-ethical claim but also a descriptive one.

Normative claims are ones suggesting a course of action, what is morally permissible, what is morally obligated etc etc. So we have these two types of propositions descriptive and normative, descriptive telling how the world is, normative telling how the world ought.

However the link between meta-ethics and normative ethics is complex, while the moral nihilist may argue that there are no moral facts or moral properties she may argue for normative moral instructions regardless. Taking a view that nothing is morally wrong does not entail claiming that we should not make moral judgments even if those judgments are systematically in error. This is because while she may disagree that these states of affairs are morally preferable, there being no moral facts, there are other instrumental grounds for instance where us having a moral framework leads to preferred outcomes.

So saying that morality is a fiction only makes a meta-ethical claim but it makes a poor one, what part of morality, are you talking about moral properties as naturally occurring facts about the world, are morals like mathematics, like colors are they secondary qualities. If you exclude objective moral facts what about objective standards achieved via rational deliberation, these are really difficult questions and I don't think it helps you to try and build a position, that morality is a fiction based on some evolutionary driver, without understanding what the key components of a moral theory are.

Your soccer analogy doesn't really compute for me. Moral verdicts influence outcomes and actions billions of times every day. Your emperor's clothes comment is tautological, as it implies there exists nothing to describe. It would be better to use examples that don't assume your conclusion.

I'm also curious. How would you judge someone spitting in your face (let's assume in private and a non-threatening but arrogant manner) and calling you an idiot? It has no bearing on your survival, so presumable you'd just conclude that there is no moral weight to the action and move on like nothing happened?

Ok, thanks for elaborating. I'm in a tricky spot here in that I think I understand the objection, but I don't understand why my response isn't overcoming the objection, which then makes me wonder if I don't actually understand the objection.... and so it goes round and round.

I get that there may be a name for the area of 'ways of thinking about things' that this would fall under, and that is 'metaethics' and I get that what I'm saying would be classed as 'Descriptive'. But, I don't get why terms that describe ways of thinking about morals (such as 'objective/subjective) matter in a discussion that presupposes that there is not 'right/wrong' and as such, any systems of thought that depend on such a concept, such as morality, is a fiction, a Type 1 error.

I think that Evolution through Natural Selection favours behaviours that increase chances of survival, I'm sure you don't disagree so far. So within that, behaviours occur that directly benefit survival, but also there could be behaviours that don't help much but, importantly, don't hurt our chances of survival. We could imagine that there is a such a thing as right and wrong, and sometimes resulting behaviours increase our chances of survival, but the rest of the time they simply don't hurt our chances of survival. I don't think that morality is the only example of this type of behaviour. The concept of 'luck' might be another, for example. People behave as if it exists, and maybe that sometimes has a survival benefit, but that could be true without luck actually existing.

If you're thinking 'omg, he's just saying exactly what he said 50 posts ago as if we hadn't said anything..' then I honestly just don't know where to go with this. I'll keep reading up and maybe I'll have a eureka moment.

Yes, I just realised that. I think 'luck' is a much better comparison. It influences how many people behave without necessarily being a real thing.

I'm wondering if the things that we regard as 'wrong' are simply things that we wouldn't want to happen to us. And vice versa for 'right'. And also a way of preventing things from happening to us that we don't want to happen to us (e.g. executing murderers).

In your example, if I didn't feel physically threatened, I might do nothing at all, but I wouldn't like to be spat on and called an idiot for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with those things being 'right/wrong'. Hygiene, disrespect, my view of my own intelligence being questioned, etc etc. (unless I agreed that I am an idiot )

I don't see any way this conversation can be read without interpreting you as being very evasive.....its been 80 posts until you provided a single definition of the half dozen words I've been trying to get you to define! But perhaps you are finally ready, after all this time, to engage as you have (sort of) provided a definition.

I quoted the descriptive claims in contention many times, it wasn't this one. It was all the claims about humans evolving a sense of morality, see 110 for a list. This is very different from the metaethical claim that morals don't exist. Just starting at we evolved to have a sense of morality doesn't get you to the metaethical claim, and you can't just go back and forth between these two as you did for half the thread as if they are interchangeable. (I don't particularly care to call the metaphysical claim itself descriptive, that is slightly broad for me but no matter). Maybe you descriptive claims about evolution and your metaphysical claims about morals are consistent with each other, but there is a wide array of moral perspectives out there that, like you, don't accept some objective moral truth in the universe, yet nonetheless have a meaningful conception of morality whike possibly being subjective, possibly having utility of various forms and so on. There is so much more to talk about if you get beyond "I assumed morality doesn't exist (whatever morality and exist means, you don't say) so I don't even need to learn any term relevant to morality"

I've previously provided descriptions, definitions and mentioned what I think it means, I honestly have no idea what I did differently this time that satisfied you. However, read what I say below, it may explain a few things.

A lot becomes clear at this point, in my first post on this particular issue I said "Morality may have evolved" but have been at great pains since then to make it clear that what I meant was that our perception might have evolved in a way that we think there are things that we call 'right/wrong' but in fact they simply don't exist. Because right and wrong don't exist, it follows that moral facts can't exist. I.e. morality is a fiction. It was my first post, I hadn't learned to articulate it the way I would now, and have been doing pretty much ever since. (And I think that what you quoted in #110 supports this, see the difference in the phrasing.)

Once I mentioned the Presupposition failure form of Moral Nihilism, this should have been clear, since it would be contradictory that I would be saying 'morals evolved' alongside 'there are no morals'.

I've never said that 'I don't need to learn' terms relevant to morality, I've been saying that they are irrelevant to this discussion. Hopefully we're on the same page now. If you're serious about defining 'morality' and 'exist' we can do that.

I thought there was a chance you could engage the point when for the first time you gave sorta kinda definitions, but I was wrong. Look what happens to the key point I've been trying to make for 80 posts: I literally put it in back to back sentences the descriptive and metaethical distinction. In your response you break that up into completely separate sections, don't address it in either, and for the metaethical one just riff off on the distinction between refusing to define something because it isn't "relevant" (hint: it is) and fusing to learn something. Just no engagement of the key points.

Well, no point in me continuing to eat my head against a brick wall.

It has been pointed out to you that properties of rightness and wrongness are not identifiable via perception. Instead they are the product of our intuition or rational deliberation. I know you are prepared to give that study up but when you continue with the line that our perception may evolved in such a way your maintaining your support for a thesis that you now have nothing to cite to endorse it. I'm not sure why I should take such a claim seriously.

I should have qualified my previous post with the following,

There are serious disagreements between philosophers as to whether there are moral properties, there are further disagreements within the realist and anti-realist camps but I certainly think a discussion based on work done by moral theorists rather than work done by cognitive scientists that make no claims about morality nor any claims that the anti-realist should seek to leverage.

I wasn't continuing that line, I was trying to explain to Uke the point he has been missing.

I originally said 'morality evolved' but I meant our perception that there is such a thing as morality (similarly to our perception that there is 'luck'), I just didn't articulate it well because I hadn't spent as long talking about it at that point as I have now. Pretty much since that first post I've been saying 'what if there are no moral facts? No right or wrong?', which is why the Moral Nihilism thing came up. So there's no point trying to have a conversation about morals, 'if they exist'. I've been trying to discuss what else might be happening, if they don't exist.

I only backed off the perception issue because your only reason for being in the conversation, you said, was to show that the study I linked didn't support my point, and I didn't need it. But, I think perception includes processes of pure thought - "Perception - the way in which something is regarded, understood, or interpreted.". I think Perception is both the way we use our 5 physical senses to perceive the environment, and also how we then interpret that input and how we then think about it. We perceive that there is right and wrong.

When I asked if you wanted to discuss perception, you said that you weren't interested. For my position, I don't think it really matters what cognitive process is responsible so I was happy to drop it, but I don't agree with you though.

Yeah, I feel exactly the same, that you simply won't engage on the pertinent points, so I think we've been talking past each other the whole time, maybe we should call it a day.

I don't really believe you here. I think you would be furious if someone spat on you and called you an idiot, and I do think you would find them very much in the wrong. Spitting someone in the face (in our culture at least) is a very degrading action.

Symbols, esthetics, social relations, our species, our biology, our experiences... all these play into moral verdicts. To say "morality should just relate to survival" is a bit like saying "all houses should be identical, that would make everything simpler".

The problem is that such rational ideals implicitly claim knowledge on what life is all about. Falsely so.

No, no, no. You don't get to paint this as some form of equivalence. Quote me a "pertinent point" of yours I have been ignoring. Because I can quoted a dozen times in a row I have asked you address a point and you have managed to not once do it. It took 70 posts to get from you saying your claim was not a meta ethical one to you providing a definition of metaethics. This not even remotely close to a "both talking past each other".

This is always my issue with nihilism. Where is the indifference when i steal their car.

Okay then we can discuss perception.

From wiki on cognitive science;

The first distinguishes perception and reason and it is by reason that I am claiming that we come to know moral facts if they exist. The second clearly states perception is the ability to gather information via the senses.

What you could do is try and find research that supports your claim, the research could be in philosophy or cognitive science or both Moral Psychology ed Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is a decent place to start.

Perceptions are inputs moral judgements are verdicts and we have the capacity to make moral judgements on hypothetical cases, these hypothetical cases do not start with a perceived event but with an imagined one.

My point is, if you are serious about informing yourself on moral nihilism you should consider the actual arguments academics make for and against this view rather than persisting with a line you thought of on the basis of a study that says nothing about it. If you find any of the moral nihilist positions attractive and want to discuss them I'd be more than happy to. I am not going to get into an argument regarding a claim you alone find interesting.

OK, my pertinent point (my only point really). I want to discuss what might actually be happening if there is no morality, that nothing is right or wrong. I'm not asking 'is there or isn't there morality?', I'm starting at 'there is no morality', and suggesting that there is only our 'perception' (actual cognitive process still to be agreed) that there are things that are 'right' and things that are 'wrong'. But that's wrong, we're making a cognitive error of some kind.

So I'm wondering if during our evolution, along with many other behaviours that are 'wrong' but don't hurt us (like the idea of 'luck', or many cognitive biases), we also had the idea of right or wrong as we tried to make sense of our environment and 'explain' what we observed happening, but they don't actually exist, it's just that believing it didn't hurt our survival and maybe sometimes it even improves our chances and that's why it's still around.

The only explanation I have for why we feel 'right and wrong' is that generally 'wrong' is things we wouldn't want to happen to us, and we sometimes do things that might be wrong to protect ourselves. Vice versa for 'right'.

You're still trying to apply terminology from a way of thinking about something that I'm suggesting might not exist. Something can't be 'wrong' if there is no right or wrong.

I might be furious, I might be disappointed, it would depend on context, but when I said I might not 'do' anything, I didn't mean that I would 'feel' nothing. Of course I would feel something and I went further and attempted to explain my negative reaction in a way that fits into my 'model' of there not being right and wrong. I didn't react negatively because this thing was 'wrong', I reacted like that because my status was being questioned, my intelligence (and therefore my self respect and self image) was being questioned, because spit is gross, and my explanation is that it's something we don't want to happen to us.


I'm not saying morality should just relate to survival, you have the same misconception as Uke. If you read my last post to him, I've tried to better articulate what I'm thinking.

You were right that the emperor's new clothes was a bad analogy to use, but I still like 'luck' and the football example. That match is going to play out utterly regardless and indifferent to what I think I did by tossing my coin. But if I do a gambler's fallacy type of thing, I might start thinking that I predict wins more than losses and my belief that I can do this thing might affect how I behave. It won't hurt me, it might even help me, but it's utter bullsh*t. I think something similar might be happening with morality, that we think it's real, but actually it's not and life goes on completely indifferent to what we think, but thinking that doesn't hurt us, it actually helps sometimes.

Just because someone believes that nothing is right or wrong, doesn't mean that they won't be pissed off when you take their property, there are lots of things that explain that reaction without needing to resort to 'morals'.

If you stole my car, the last thing I might feel is moral indignation. Mostly I'll be feeling possessive and territorial maybe. I certainly won't want to live in a society with people who steal my stuff, so I'm going to help lock you up so that you can't do things to me that I don't like.

What if things that we think are 'wrong' are just things that we wouldn't want to happen to us? It might explain why moral values vary so much.

Great. In the other posts I just made I was still trying to explain what I'm thinking to Uke and TD. Your post about perception I'm going to need more time to think about. It seems to me currently, from a lay perspective, that Perception must be involved in whatever cognitive process might lead us to thinking that there is right and wrong but I don't know what I don't know about it yet. So, I'm not arguing from a position of certainty!

Sinnot-Armstrong was the main professor on a course I did, I really like that guy and his name did come up when I was doing some reading up on Perception before, when I thought we were going to go in this direction.

So, while my main point is about 'what' might really be happening (from the predicate that morals don't exist), this discussion about Perception I think is more about 'how' and maybe even 'why' it is happening. I think it's going to be useful and informative.

Im just reading im not interested in a debate on this. tame_deuces is saying anything i would but much better.

Hey MB.

I recently heard someone argue the same type of point you're trying to make (If I understood you), and I found it pretty interesting.

His basic gist was that morality as an evolutionary adaptation is simply that which aids our survival. What we consider immoral is that which we do not want to have happen to ourselves. We find stealing immoral because we do not want to be stolen from. We find killing immoral for the same reason, and so on. It's basically one big "Golden rule" with a dash of empathy.

The problem is that there is not much of a discussion to be had on this point. It's not very meaningful, per se, beyond thinking about it.

There's lots to be said on the subject it just helps when the material to be discussed is included.

Well, that doesn't make overly much sense. Because from an evolutionary standpoint, beneficial mutations are mainly those that aid passing on your genes. Sometimes these coincide with your own survival, sometimes they do not.

Pregnancy and giving birth for example, are fairly horrible as far as survival is concerned.

I don't think the driver for evolutionary psychology is beneficial mutations but adaptations. Our adaptations can be motivated a range of factors including self preservation, reproduction etc etc.

What the implications for moral theories are changes, especially when one considers normative rather than meta-ethics.