I know what you meant. It's just that you're empiricalmy wrong. There are evidenfly other ways of resolving differences. — Isaac

Maybe in the sense of just "getting someone to comply". But people arguing -- exchanging reasons in an attempt to convince the other person -- aren't using those methods. You clearly understand that there is a difference between rational discourse and other interactions, since you're insisting that people don't only do rational discourse (which is true). So you must be able to understand that when I'm talking about people doing rational discourse, I'm not talking about just any interaction that might get someone to do something. And I'm only claiming that it's that kind of interaction that implies a belief that some kinds of answers are correct. Someone pleading or coercing or otherwise interacting in a way that just gets someone to go along with something without actually convincing the other person to honestly think differently about anything is not "argument", at least not in sense used in philosophy. (Maybe in the colloquial sense whereby e.g. shouting insults counts as "argument" too).

Where does this 'willing to agree to disagree' come from — Isaac

I explained this later in the previous post: it's not that relativism obliges anyone to tolerate anything, but rather it undermines any justification for not tolerating. If you want to force people to do differently than they otherwise would on no grounds other than that you don't like it, you can do that (if, in fact, you do have that power), but then you're just nakedly exercising power with no rationalizing excuse. Assuming, again, that we're philosophers here, and care about reason.

For someone who seems so concerned with me becoming a tyrant, you seem awfully eager to say that we don't have to live and let live or agree to disagree, and we don't need any reason to go against that kind of equality besides that we just want to (and, perhaps, that we have enough friends that are okay with us doing that, so we're not gonna catch shit for it from society at large). My view, on the other hand, is that we have to live and let live, or agree to disagree, unless we can give reasons (real reasons besides just our own or popular opinion) that the other person has to be stopped.

I care very much about what's right and what's wrong, I just don't agree that it amounts to anything more than the meaning of the words in my culture. — Isaac

Where you take the meaning of those words to be identical to what some nebulous power-majority of people around you treat as true of the things they apply those words to.

If most(?) people in some culture spoke of the Earth as though it were a flat infinite plane and completely unlike the points of light in the night sky that move relative to the other points of light in the night sky, would that make it true by definition in that culture that the Earth was not a planet? Would someone claiming the Earth is the same kind of thing as Mars or Jupiter just be using words wrong there?

Why would my tribe feel so passionately about my behaviour that they feel the need to take such drastic action to deter it? The answer, of course, could be all sorts of things, but it's clearly false to say that the disagreement of everyone I live with isn't good reason to think I might be wrong. — Isaac

Widespread disagreement with your views can be good cause to question yourself and search harder for evidence or reasons against your views, in case you've somehow missed something that everyone else noticed, but it is not itself evidence or reason against your views.

it's things like this that make me think that you really just have no idea whatsoever what my views (1)actually are. ... (2)I said this: — Pfhorrest

I don't think there's any need for me to spell this out further. You see the difference between (1) and (2), yes? — Isaac

In the same sense that I see the difference between what relativists claim and what I think their views actually amount to, sure. But the only evidence we have for people's beliefs, in a purely textual medium like this at least, is what people say about their beliefs, so to focus on one small part of a set of claimed beliefs that are all supposed to counterbalance each other will lead you to grossly misinterpret me. Someone else could have focused on liberalism instead of universalism and accused me of wanting to "let people get away with murder just so you don't violate their precious rights!"

I've actually noticed that the mere order in which I list my principles completely flips who responds to me and what they accuse me of. I used to list my opposition to dogmatism first, and then my opposition to relativism, and most of the responses I got were from religious people who completely missed out on the universal and liberal parts (which permit them to believe without absolute proof, and prevent the relativism they're so scared of, respectively). When I list them the other way around, I more often get people accusing me of being too akin to those religious people, completely missing out on the same critical and phenomenal parts that the religious folks took such offense to.

You're maybe the only person who's objected to both sides of that, which makes your views seem very dangerous to me, because a relativism that co-oexists with dogmatism is just might-makes-right, not viewing relativism as undermining all claims to power (like some relativists), but viewing whatever dogmatists are in power as entitled to that power, and not because of any kind of supposed infallibility of theirs about what's universally true or good (as the religious would claim), but just on account of having the social support behind them to get away with it.

You've still not supported this assertion. It's trivial to demonstrate alternatives (as I did with different languages). The 'correctly word to use to refer to a man is 'man' if you're English and 'homme' if you're French. It is not just personal opinion what the correct word is, but it is relative to the person's circumstances. There's no global answer to what the right word is, that would be nonsense. — Isaac

I would say that there is no "right word" for anything period, not in the sense that there are right actions or right beliefs, exactly because there's not a global answer. Words mean whatever people agree that they mean, and they can only be "wrong" in the sense that they break with a previous agreement. I think there is an analogue of that on the moral side of things, but it's not the entirety of morality: it's the assignment of ownership to property. Nothing is rightly the property of anyone in particular, except inasmuch as there's agreement to treat something as the property of someone; and transgressions against such assignment of ownership is only wrong in the sense that it goes against that convention.

I went over both of these extensively in my threads on types of knowledge and types of justice, respectively, wherein:
- both synthetic a posteriori knowledge (empirical truths) and imperfect duties of distributive justice (hedonic goods) are public and non-arbitrary;
- both synthetic a priori knowledge (conceptual relations) and perfect duties of distributive justice (the categorical imperative) are non-arbitrary but entirely private;
- both analytic a posteriori knowledge (the meaning of words) and imperfect duties of procedural justice (the assignment of ownership) are public but entirely arbitrary;
- and both analytic a priori knowledge (logical implications) and perfect duties of procedural justice (property rights) are public and non-arbitrary again, but depend entirely on a combination of the preceding two respectively private and arbitrary categories, and so are still inferior in a sense to the empirical truths and hedonic goods of the first category.

It's the last two categories, procedural justice matters (property stuff) and analytic knowledge matters (language stuff), where any concerns for social convention factor into my big picture, but that does nothing to undermine the importance of either empirical truth or hedonic goods, in universalist senses both. We can't change what is objectively, empirically true just by changing what we conventionally take words to mean, and neither can we change what's objectively, hedonistically good just by changing what we conventionally take to belong to whom. But we use language with conventionally assigned meanings and properties with conventionally assigned ownership as useful tools in our means of pursuing the actual truth and good, in terms of empiricism and hedonism. (And consequently, patterns in the assignment of meaning and ownership can still be better or worse for that use, even though the particulars are still arbitrary; e.g. when the structures in a language more closely track the structures in the things it's about, or when the ownership of properties more closely tracks the good that can be done with them by whom).

So from what source do we discover the 'intension' of a word, if not it's use. — Isaac

We discover intension from use, the same way we discover extension. We look at the things named by it (the extension) and infer what they all have in common with each other, then take that to be the intension of the word. If something in the set of things named by it doesn't fit the pattern, that raises the question of whether that thing really belongs in that set, or if we've been misapplying the word to that thing.

You've not answered how they understood each other if the misused the word. — Isaac

Same way they both understood what was meant by "the Spaniard" and yet both misused that phrase to identify someone who was actually an Italian.

Why? Is it somehow the default position that either all or none of the principles that apply to factual matters should apply to moral ones, but not anywhere in between? That seems like an odd position to hold without any prima facie reason. — Isaac

Parsimony demands assuming patterns continue as they do elsewhere unless there is reason to think otherwise. I.e. whatever the normal rules of other things are, assume they probably apply to this thing too, unless you have reason to think they don't. I know you think there are reasons to think that they don't, but it feels (and I admit that this is a purely subjective perception of the discourse) like you're really reaching for an excuse for why they don't, like you have some kind of motivated reasoning going on. I expect you'll say the same back at me, and like I say this is just my subjective impression; but also per the start of this paragraph the burden of proof contra parsimony is on the claim that something needs to be treated with different rules than anything else.

Moral beliefs are not reducible to the sorts of theories that can be analysed for complexity by any objective measure. — Isaac

As I said in the post you just responded to, I don't think that moral models* are supposed to be analyzed for informational efficiency but for (in a broad sense) energetic efficiency, which is just a way of phrasing a really uncontroversial thing, barely worth saying, in terms that show it analogous to parsimony: it's preferable if you can get more good done with less work.

It strikes me right now that a similarly casual way of phrasing the principle of parsimony could be something like "it's preferable if you can speak more truth in fewer words".

*(Technically I don't think there are such things as "moral beliefs" and consequently no "moral theories" -- not to be confused with philosophical 'theories' about how to investigate morality -- but rather there are intentions, which are the moral analogues of beliefs, and strategies, which are the moral analogues of theories. A theory is an explanation of how things happen, things that we believe do happen; and a strategy is a plan to make things happen, things that we intend to happen).

The point remains unanswered. If you accept underdeterminism you have to admit that a wide range of theories will be matched by the same data points. You've shown that there's no non-subjective way of judging either parsimony, or elegance, or any other measure of preference for one theory set over another. As such underdeterminism undermines your argument. — Isaac

I haven't shown (or even conceded) that there's no non-subjective way of judging parsimony. I've shown that there's a clear objective way of judging parsimony for clearly formulated mathematical models. The objectivity of preference between less clearly formulated models (as in natural beliefs) will be correspondingly less clear, but that doesn't make it not present at all. It just means that it's hard to accurately assess the comparative parsimony of natural beliefs, not that there is no difference in it and so no reason to prefer one over the other.

This touches on something that I think is really at the heart of motivating relativism: the conflation of uncertainty with the absence of truth ("objective truth", which is the only actual kind of truth). Saying that something or another is the (objectively) correct answer isn't a claim to certainty that this particular thing definitely is that correct answer. You can hold that there is some (objectively correct) answer, and at the same time also that we're not sure what it is.

That's exactly what my two most core principles (universalism and criticism) are about, balancing the two sides of that, denying ever having complete certainty in any particular answer but also denying ever having complete doubt that there even is a right answer.

That doesn't make it impossible, it makes it unwise. exactly one of the 'weeding out' processes you claim have been part of a gradual (if staccato) evolution. Are you, for some reason, eliminating behaviour being unwise from the reasons to eliminate it? — Isaac

I didn't mean that they would abandon him as a punishment, making it unwise for him to try to do it, but just that he has no leverage to actually do anything to begin with. "Do what I say!" "Or what?" "Or I won't let you browse from this tree!" "Okay, I'll find another tree, there's plenty of them all over the place. Not like anybody owns the forest." "I do!" "Haha, right."

He could of course use the old-fashioned "do what I say or I'll hit you" instead, but I don't think it was the advent of agriculture where people began to "explore that option" and then learn that it was bad. That's a kind of moral knowledge that pre-agricultural people would have already had. But moral questions about how best to organize society in light of the structural power problems that are only possible in enormous highly specialized civilizations are things that we only really had the opportunity to learn about once we got into situations where we could screw up that bad.

OK, this is new (to me). You think that moral behaviour is only that which causes no harm? So I shouldn't trip a gunman over to save a thousand people from slaughter because that would harm him? I don't understand how you could arrive at such a nonsensical view I'm afraid. surely you can't mean that? — Isaac

The gunman morally oughtn't be doing the slaughter to begin with, but of course that alone isn't going to stop him, so I make an exception (to what is already an exception to the general freedom that is the default norm) that it is still permissible to do things that would otherwise be wrong as necessary to stop someone from doing something wrong. That kind of exception still doesn't allow the problematic kind of ends-justify-the-means scenarios that undermine consequentialism, because e.g. the healthy person whose organs you harvested to save five other people wasn't himself doing harm to those other people. If he had stolen organs from other people to save himself, then it would be permissible to take them back and put them back in their rightful owners, even if he died in the process. Of course if what he's trying to save himself from is someone else stealing his organs, then it's also permissible (and omissibly good) to take those organs back to save him too, but that still doesn't justify his organ theft from others.

You'll find this kind of exceptions-to-exceptions-to-exceptions pattern continues throughout my philosophy. We start with defining what a morally good end is. Then define morally acceptable means toward that end. Then morally acceptable responses to violations of those means. On a larger scale, we can build governments that act only according to those principles, but if those are unstable and would be immediately supplanted by a much worse kind then it's okay to have a slightly less-perfect but more stable government in place to stave off the even worse option, and multiple layers of tradeoffs of perfection for stability so as to always be at the least-bad state presently attainable. And in pursuit of that incremental perfecting, it's okay to ally with forces that are not ideal so as to counterbalance them against even less-ideal forces (e.g. voting for the lesser of two evils). We start with the optimum and then make as minimal exceptions as possible to keep pursuit of the optimum from resulting in the worst possibility, and then, as better options become possible in practice, stop using those exceptions, so as to converge back to the optimum.

Why? Taking the word of a trustworthy individual or group with lots of experience is a considerably more efficient game strategy than working the whole thing out for yourself from scratch. — Isaac

It's the "trustworthy ... experience" part that's doing the heavy lifting there. Someone whose explanation of why you should believe them is "because I said so" is not trustworthy. Someone who's explanation is "because this other guy said so" just passes the buck to that other guy: how trustworthy is he? If he's just saying "because I said so", or if the chain of buck-passing ever stops at that, then it's not trustworthy. But if the buck stops at someone who's willing to offer experiential evidence, reasons, in defense of the claims -- even if you don't have the time or energy or expertise or whatever to actually take him up on that offer -- then he's trustworthy. It's that appeal to reason and experience rather than just someone's word that constitutes trustworthiness.

Agreements are few and far enough between for us to not squander them by repetition. I happen to agree with you that hedonism (in the very wide sense you use it) is the proper goal of people's moral feelings, so we needn't go over and over that point. My disagreement is about how to decide what course of action brings about the best of all worlds, I don't disagree that the best of all worlds would be the one in which everyone had their appetites satisfied. — Isaac

:up: :smile:

Then are you arguing that no-one should value any other ends than the avoidance of negative affect? — Isaac

Yes, but see above about the means to those ends for my response to the rest that came after this. The point about what good ends are is just the start of the whole picture. It gives us a direction to head toward, a criteria by which to measure progress, and so by which to value other things instrumentally for their usefulness at making such progress.

I don't see the link. The government control the law which lists the consequences of certain behaviours. It doesn't have any say at all in what's right and wrong. — Isaac

I thought your position was that it's those social consequences that make things right or wrong.

Though that isn't my position of course, I read the prohibition or obligation of certain behaviors as an implicit claim about what's right and wrong, even if that claim might not be true. At least in modern states exercising Weberian rational-legal authority; a old-fashioned charismatic authority could just be nakedly punishing things he doesn't like without any claim that that's morally justified, just that he can get away with it so he does.

In any case, in my envisioned system, the people conducting moral research have no more authority than natural scientists do today. Their end-products are trustworthy (see earlier) texts about what kinds of systems of what kinds of things produce positive or negative experiences for what kinds of people in what kinds of situations, to the best of their ability to ascertain such things. Voluntarily subscribed-to defense, mediation, and advisory organizations voluntarily use these texts as neutral guidelines about such contingent moral matters as they become applicable to the disputes that such organizations are mediating, or as the basis for their advice in avoiding such conflicts to begin with. (And that whole network of such organizations is the substitute for the state in my form of governance). If the people conducting that research are somehow less trustworthy than others, then people aren't going to subscribe to the organizations that use their texts, but will pick ones that use texts from more trustworthy sources; thus it's in the interests of said organizations to vet their sources for trustworthiness, and the emergent consensus will be on the output of whichever experts that people generally trust.

Right. Which, given unarguable facts about complexity means that de facto you're including short-term gains and ignoring long-term ones, because long-term gains cannot be so easily accounted for. — Isaac

This is a very black and white way of looking at things. (Also, you're speaking only of gains, whereas my focus is equally if not more so on avoiding losses). If the longer-term just is harder to plan for, as you say is inarguable, then there's not much that can possibly be done to plan for it one way or another. But however much it is possible, I advocate that we try. And as I've already said, I think that planning for that hard-to-foresee long term mostly involves keeping options open and improving flexibility and adaptability so whatever we end up needing to do when the time comes close enough that we can figure that out, we're in a position to be able to do it.


====


As a purely pragmatic discursive thing, I would really like to find some way for us to make these posts shorter. I can't afford to be spending hours every day replying to you.