One might even venture a developmental model of a cultural history of morality. connecting empathy with a gradual evolution from one-dimensional foundationalism to increasingly multi-dimensional , differentiated social understanding. What we judge in hindsight as genocidal evil becomes a necessary phase in that development. (I’m trying not to sound too Hegelian, or modernist). — Joshs

Not going to lie, dude - that was exceedingly abstruse. What does any of that even mean? That genocide was necessary as part of the evolution of a more pluralistic morality?

The point is not that he was full of shit, the point is he thought he had a plan for improving the world and millions of people agreed with this plan. — Tom Storm

Yes, I get that, but on one side you have justified beliefs, and on the other totally unjustified. There is no symmetry except in terms of zeal perhaps. So I do not find it to be a useful comparison.

This is the key. When we retrofit our own moral judgements and assume people are 'justifying' actions using post hoc rationalisations we are assuming that 'evil' is done by people who know they are evil and what they are doing is wrong. — Tom Storm

I literally said that beliefs cause many good people to do bad things; I totally acknowledge this here:

While beliefs don't force evil people to do evil things, beliefs often times influence good people to do bad things - something that could be more easily avoided imo. — ToothyMaw

I must correct myself, however: some evil people believe they are agents of good, but I still hold that evil people often times just want to do evil things.

When we retrofit our own moral judgements and assume people are 'justifying' actions using post hoc rationalisations we are assuming that 'evil' is done by people who know they are evil and what they are doing is wrong. — Tom Storm

Not all justifications are post hoc rationalizations. They can just mean "the action of showing something to be right or reasonable", which is what I meant when I used the word originally. So it seems we are splitting hairs; I totally agree with you.

I think it is situational. Many evil people try to justify their evil actions, whereas some believe they are, as you say, agents of good.

Appealing to some twisted morality might convince more people that your cause is righteous, but, ultimately, I think it makes little difference what evil people think they are doing - they are doing evil things and should be stopped. And I think we should not compare someone like Greta Thunberg to Hitler - there is good reason to believe that human contributions to climate change matter, whereas Hitler was obviously full of shit.

And it happens that humans are fallible enough to believe some of these justifications.

Good point. But I think many evil people will create justifications for evil acts because of a deeper issue - a lack of empathy, fanaticism, tribalism, etc.

How? No one seems to be presenting a mechanism connecting objectivity of morals to people being somehow unable to act or form beliefs contrary to them — Isaac

I'm saying accepting that morality is subjective gives cover for some pretty horrible beliefs - such as female genital mutilation being acceptable. I know that people could always just form beliefs counter to whatever is the - supposedly - absolute morality, but that doesn't mean we have to allow something like FGM.

Furthermore, even though FGM is absolutely horrible, the people who do it might just see it as justified - and I wouldn't even call them evil. If it could be argued coherently that they shouldn't do it because of some sort of absolute morality then maybe it could be stopped, however. All indicating that creating a justified absolute morality could potentially curb some suffering.

I acknowledge, however, that there is no direct mechanism that would connect the objectivity of morals to people not being able to develop beliefs counter to said morals. But really what we should be talking about is moral absolutism, not objectivity.

I firmly believe things are right or wrong apart from who does them. But, I can't account for how this could be; because every case seems to be about an observer. An early apology for not making a firm case. I thought of some questions and wondered how they would be answered. — Cheshire

Whether or not an action is objectively wrong is different from an action being right/wrong independent of the actor/situation. Moral absolutism says an action is intrinsically wrong regardless of the ends or actor, whereas an objective morality entails that ethical norms are not up to interpretation; they are laws like any other that one can simply point to.

why would it matter if morality was objective or not? Objectively wrong, or subjectively wrong, they don't care either way. Neither force people to do what's right. — Isaac

Yes, but allowing for moral relativism no doubt allows for beliefs that cause actions that then cause unnecessary suffering. While beliefs don't force evil people to do evil things, beliefs often times influence good people to do bad things - something that could be more easily avoided imo.

An attempt at an exploration in search of objectivity, because relativism causes so much harm. Is there anything that can be said about the different answers to the same action? — Cheshire

What you are searching for is an absolute morality, not objective morality.

Mine was; the sentence should be a definition, if it unambiguously equates a word with an object or process or otherwise sets out how a word is typically to be used, I'll call it a definition. If it's doing anything else, I'll call it a theory. — fdrake

Same here.

The goal justifies only those means which are consistent with the goal. — 180 Proof

Unless I'm mistaken, act utilitarianism doesn't rule out much of any means at all. Whatever action produces the best outcome is right.

Excuse my error; I meant the net amount of pleasure, not suffering/pleasure.

I have read some of that stuff. How is weighing the happiness derived from an act against the suffering caused by it inconsistent with the goals of utilitarianism? I'll make it really simple. One is greater than nine, and the amount of pleasure derived from the act of raping someone could be greater than the suffering the rape victim incurs. If the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number is the goal (nine is greater than one) then the act of raping someone could be justified because the net amount of pleasure derived from the act could be greater than zero.

But it could have some utility in the crappy, narrow hypothetical posed.

Yes, but you have to weigh the pleasure gained from an act and the suffering incurred against each other to justify it. If the act provides more pleasure for the rapists (it could, maybe), and there are also more rapists (there are nine of them) then the act could have utility. Yes, it creates suffering, but it also creates happiness/pleasure. I acknowledge that if there is a net increase in suffering it isn't justified, however, and that it realistically wouldn't be because of the reasons Dingo gave.

Given the goal (i.e. highest good) is "the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people", by definition this is inconsistent with "pleasure for some derived from pain of others"; therefore, "rape" is not justified (i.e. moral) in utilitarian ethics. — 180 Proof

I disagree; according to the greatest happiness principle more people in this example (the rapists) are potentially deriving more happiness than if they hadn't raped the person. The principle does not say that one cannot derive happiness from the suffering of others - it just follows that the rapists would need to, in total, derive more happiness than the person being raped suffers in order to justify it.

Of course, none of this says anything about whether or not gang-rape should be allowed.

The OP. I think he is just fishing for certain answers or is trying to be inflammatory.

I'm not talking about a liscensce to rape i'm talking about a one time thing — Gitonga

If you mean that maybe one person should be raped for the pleasure of gang-rapists without considering what allowing such a thing in general would do to the greater number of people then maybe I guess. But how is that even salient? Ethics is usually concerned with norms, not one-off hypotheticals (unless the hypotheticals help us understand ethical questions better, and I don't see how your hypothetical does that).

This seems like bait to me.

I can respect that.

If we are talking about distinct beliefs and not duplicated beliefs then what I said applies I think.

It can, but it doesn't result in an infinite number of beliefs is what I mean. You just keep adding the same elements over and over again with each new proposition. You treat them as if they are distinct when they aren't. Or am I wrong?

Not to mention how is the entire set B1 a singular proposition? It is a collection of elements - the elements God, Self, and Set.

B2 = {God, Self, Set, B1} is the same thing as B2 = {God, Self, Set, God, Self, Set}

You are representing a duplication of elements with each new proposition. It makes no sense.

Yeah, I understand your post now and see what you are saying. But why on earth is god necessary?

edit: the belief in god I mean

Although I will get a book on set theory when I can.

I know next to nothing about formal set theory; I'm working at a very basic level here, and I'm just going to go with the orthodox view that infinite sets exist.

I see no reason to get god involved, and whether or not there is an infinite set of beliefs is also not relevant, which you would know if you had read the relevant posts. Please post things that are salient, or create a new thread.

Apparently it is indeed pretty dubious, Deepak Chopra uses the term, and while that does not immediately discredit it, it goes a long ways towards raising suspicion that it is bullshit.

Obviously I don't know much about it. It sounded smart to me.

But, if you just want beliefs to be in some reasonably constructed sets, then letters and words clearly can makeup sets, and it seems a very reasonable premise that people really do make decisions based on words (though, not exclusively; so, if this isn't a requirement, it's certainly a starting point). — boethius

No, it doesn't have to be the case that decisions are made based on the words but rather that the words accurately express a belief that can be readily understood to have caused someone to act in such a way as to break a law.

I need to specify: my idea is that if one is complicit in the forming of a belief and act on it then they are morally culpable; if they were not complicit in the forming of the belief they are not. Whether there are degrees matters, but at its base if one is complicit then they can be held accountable in some way, even if it is hard to say to what degree, and if they are not complicit then they cannot.

You might need to read part of my essay to fully understand what I'm trying to do here.

I'm not sure what you're asking for here. Are you wanting criteria? Because surely we have the means of selecting a belief from a set. All we need do is point to it! Or, if we want to be more formal, we could set up a map between two sets and then whenever you input whatever it is we're mapping to you output the belief. — Moliere

I just need a way of expressing beliefs as a set that can be selected from.

What's the puzzle? — Moliere

I'm trying to axiomatize the chain resulting from someone's beliefs that they are complicit in forming to the breaking of a very specific law, going from belief -> choice -> action breaking the law.

if we want to be more formal, we could set up a map between two sets and then whenever you input whatever it is we're mapping to you output the belief. — Moliere

Can you explain this? It seems to me I only need one set representing beliefs that can be drawn from and if a certain belief is known to have been formed at least partially by one's own free actions we can map that onto a very simple causal model determining moral culpability (in its most simple sense; I know there are degrees of moral culpability).

My main issue was the starting point, how to represent the collection of beliefs.

But I'm not sure the total number of possible beliefs, even in a context, is countable. Given that beliefs can be false, and can incorporate numbers (since beliefs are just statements which will be assented to), it seems to me that you could not separate beliefs into sets if the sets are thought to contain a finite number. — Moliere

That doesn't matter; I just need to have a means of selecting beliefs from a set. Whether that set is finite or infinite doesn't matter, and whether they express quantities or can be false doesn't matter either; all that matters is that the belief is held and can lead to people making choices.

I thought about your linguistic solution and it seems pretty good - elegant even. But how could we know which beliefs (collections of words) are the result of freely interacting with the environment? — ToothyMaw

That actually doesn't matter; one can simply find out the conditions under which a belief is formed by a person.

That is all very interesting stuff. Never would have thought of postulating a consciousness field (but of course I'm not a physicist; I don't know how such things work). That being said, I don't count myself as a philosopher either.

I knew of the mind-body problem, yes.

To say particle interaction "causes consciousness" is to say some particle description we can write down describes to us consciousness; that you can give me some paper with some descriptions of particles and, after review (even very lengthy) I (or any other diligent reviewer) would say "ah yes, these particles / field equations / whathave you, would be conscious in this description. — boethius

I grant all of that, but I think belief is different. Unless I'm mistaken we can actually model belief in the brain, whereas, as you say, we cannot mathematically model consciousness and do not know if it even can be modeled.

I thought about your linguistic solution and it seems pretty good - elegant even. But how could we know which beliefs (collections of words) are the result of freely interacting with the environment?

I actually thought we were getting somewhere.

If beliefs don't exist in the brain then where do they exist? And whether or not brains are conscious seems to be a different problem.

Say I have a box of apples. The apples are separate from each other. I can pick them up, eat them, count them. I don't think ideas or beliefs are separable in that way. It seems much more artificial to me. More open to disagreement. — T Clark

Okay, that makes things clearer. I don't think that beliefs need to be separate in such a way in order to count them as a brain state, or a quality of a brain state. We know that people have beliefs and that they exist in the brain, so even if the brain state isn't separately countable and can't be extracted we know that said person's belief is the result of a brain state - even if said brain state might never be repeated.

Not everyone would have to have the same brain state to believe the same thing, but those beliefs exist as brain states nonetheless.

Furthermore, if there is a finite number of brain states brain states could potentially repeat I think.

edit: Actually even if there is an infinite number of brain states I think they could still repeat.

another edit: the possible number of brain states has nothing to do with whether or not they will repeat it seems to me.

I doubt they exist as separate brain states. I'd guess, without any specific justification, that no brain state ever repeats itself. — T Clark

What exactly do we mean by separate? Separate from other phenomenon in the brain? Or never repeating and identifiable? I used the word because you did.