How so? Morality is only human. — bloodninja

No, humans are the only thing capable of understanding the abstract concept of morality.

God is dead. — bloodninja

I don't see the relevance.

Sentience is absolutely irrelevant as far as the grounding of morality is concerned. — bloodninja

What, then, explains morals almost universally apply exclusively to sentient beings, if their grounding is not connected to sentience?

I think you are also misusing the concept "property". How can morals be a property? — bloodninja

Might be, English isn't my first language. Would it be more correct to say that morality is a property of sentience?

To predicate the concept of a human nature upon animal universalities is ridiculous - the question is better put upon by asking: what distinquishes humans from all other animals? I think that we can come to a somewhat sensible conclusion by seperating humans and animals as one entity.
Sartre says that the fact that humans are put upon when living to define their nature is to understand that there are no external nature to which we can base our lives upon - and that we only can have a nature as creatures if we define the defining of things itself as a presupposition of what human nature is all about. I agree with Sartre here. We are the only animals which have to base ourselves upon a partnership (with a distance) between our external and internal self - it is important to point out that the existence of both aspects is an indicator of a human nature having possibility to exist.

1). If there is no human nature, then in what are our moral theories grounded?
2).If there is no human nature to ground ethical theory, then what other ethical position is left but cultural relativism? — bloodninja

Let's take morals to mean the sorting of actions into good/desirable and bad/undesirable. How did they come to be? I burned my hand on the stove. Mary burned her hand on the stove. You saw both of us do that, and learned not to do that.

An accumulation of such simple memories, forgotten in their specifics but still leaving an impression. A few years down the road and I no longer remember who burned their hand, only that I had two votes against doing what they did and no votes for doing what they did.

This to me looks like the atoms of success & failure that form the molecules of morality.

if that is how morality is grounded then how is morality not completely accidental and arbitrary? But morality doesn't seem to be completely accidental and arbitrary...

Also, it's not a genealogical story about how morals came to be that I'm interested in. Rather, I'm asking about their grounding. In other words, what do our morals ultimately appeal to in order to receive their justification?

There is evidence that babies are making judgments about what's right and wrong and human agency from an age of 3 or 4 months. — T Clark

I'd like to see that.

I'd like to see that. — creativesoul

Me too. I really hope that that is not the case, because if it is true (i.e. babies are making judgments from that tender age), it shows how far fucked the human race is ... how soon the contamination of our true essence begins.

That evidence with not be forthcoming for it doesn't exist.

To predicate the concept of a human nature upon animal universalities is ridiculous - the question is better put upon by asking: what distinquishes humans from all other animals? I think that we can come to a somewhat sensible conclusion by seperating humans and animals as one entity. — Vann

A conclusion can be both sensible and ill-conceived.

I think ethics does presuppose a human nature, and also a nature-of-the-world. It presupposes that things and people have innate tendencies, innate patterns of behaviour, that make for overall benevolent interactions and social order, but which aren't perfectly distributed (because bell curve distributions, etc.) and may need a bit of nudging along now and then (hence moral/legal rules).

It's easy to see how this is grounded in biology and physics, but unfortunately that clashes with the currently-fashionable and authoritarian PC cult, so everyone has to pretend there's no such thing as human nature (and not two genders, etc., etc., etc.).

Without human/world nature, which is the grounding for natural law, then either morality is the result of command (God's command) or it doesn't exist (relativism is basically nihilism). The problem with morality being God's command is that ethics trumps commands (e.g. if God commanded you to eat your firstborn, you would revolt).

I think ethics does presuppose a human nature, and also a nature-of-the-world. It presupposes that things and people have innate tendencies, innate patterns of behaviour — gurugeorge

But how would your view incorporate society's moral changes?

I don't think there are any moral changes, what happens is that the relatively stable features of human nature and the world are always juxtaposed against the expansion of possibilities due to technology - so that creates new domains with new possibilities about which new moral questions can be asked.

It's possible that there might be more profound moral change, in a sense, if human nature itself becomes more malleable through technology though, e.g. genetic engineering. But supposing that happened, then that would just be a new kind of morality for a new kind of being, the moral principles for "good old-fashioned human beings" would stay the same.

If the changes went far enough, morality might not apply at all (as it doesn't with most animals), because to an extent morality as a practice (a thing to do, a way to be) is quite parochial (it depends on us being social animals, for example).

Wow that is a very controversial view! Could we call your view biological determinism? It seems to be a naturalism based in our biology or genetics. It would be great to see other people's responses to this... my resopnse would be boring since my view is the polar opposite.

No it's not biological determinism, it's that human nature is like a tether - you have a fair bit room to wander over possible-social-rule space, some room for variation, but there are limits (just as we can't fly unaided, something like "kill everyone you meet" isn't a possible social rule, whereas you can imagine it being a possible social rule with some weird alien species that's very different from us).

If the biology changes, that's like the position of the stake (to which the tether is tied) changing. Up till now that's only been possible with fairly slow evolutionary changes, but it's possible that technology might enable faster change now.

Essentially, it's like this: a morality is a set of possible social rules, out there somewhere in possible-social-rule space, that maximizes human flourishing, given our biology and the given nature of the world in general. That makes the pattern of rules objective.

However, you could choose any goal to maximize (for example, "maximize what's best for me and my cronies") and another equally objective pattern of possible social rules would fall out. That's the element in morality that's subjective - the choice of that ultimate goal which crystallizes some particular objective pattern of social rules (again, given human nature and the nature of the world).

But there's a fair amount of continuity and crossover between the older maximization goal given us by our biology ("survive and reproduce") and the newer goals we are developing consciously that are more or less built on top of that - which generally fall into a basket of closely-related ultimate goals, something like "maximize human flourishing", or "maximize happiness," or "live virtuously."

There are enough people with innate goodwill and benevolence to make some selection from that basket the type of ultimate goal that most people do in fact tend to have (and encourage/enforce), therefore most moral rules and laws will tend to maximize that generally benevolent goal. But of course that's all debatable, and human beings do debate it all the time.

If the biology changes, that's like the position of the stake (to which the tether is tied) changing — gurugeorge

given our biology and the given nature of the world in general. — gurugeorge

You appear to be grounding morality in biology. That is all I meant by calling your view biological determinism. You seem to be understanding human nature biologically and thus when you say that morality presupposes human nature you ground morality in our biology.

I don't see how biology is relevant to morality. It might help if you give specific examples of how biology is relevant. Also what do you mean by "nature of the world"? The scientific world?

By definition, yes.

Human Nature
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature

Critical Thinking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

We use both, simultaneously; a trait only seen in humans.

There might be aliens, tho.

"Grounded in" isn't at all the same thing as "determined by."

I'm not sure if I can explain my position any better than I already did in that last post, so I'll leave it there.

If there is no human nature, then in what are our moral theories grounded? — bloodninja

You would still have trouble getting from what is the case about human nature to what we ought do.

Perhaps the right thing to do is to fight our nature.

The naturalistic fallacy.

You would still have trouble getting from what is the case about human nature to what we ought do. — Banno

Not really. Aristotle had no trouble, Kant had no trouble, Schopenhauer had no trouble, Nietzsche had no trouble, etc. etc.... I think you are misinterpreting Human Nature to be something biological when it is not this at all. Human Nature is NOT biological.

"Grounded in" isn't at all the same thing as "determined by." — gurugeorge

Words have multiple meanings in different contexts. It is clear that within the context that we are using these words they mean the same thing. By the way, have you ever thought about slavery? Why is owning a slave immoral within our culture but perfectly moral in prior cultures? Do the humans in these other cultures have a different biology? Do they have a different end goal?

Slavery has always had its detractors, and even at worst, most societies that have had slaves have had rules about not mistreating them.

It would be a mistake to think it was "perfectly moral" in earlier societies (it wasn't that "you ought to have slaves"), rather it was expedient, and a function of conquest, for a long time, and it became more and more of a moral question as alternative forms of technology started to come along, which made people realize what had always been the case (that it's immoral to use people to do stuff for you, and immoral to ignore their own agency), as other means to do things, like steam engines. etc., came along. (Also we discovered that paying free people to do things got better results than forcing people to do things.)

So there was always the insult against the dignity of the person, and some people always noticed that, but that signal was swamped by more archaic, immoral patterns of expediency and feelings of superiority, and only became more and more salient as the pragmatic value of slavery diminished.

Our biology is at the root of the bad things (habits and ways of life we call "bad") as well as the good things (habits and ways of life we call "good"); the development of morality is the strengthening of the good tendencies and the falling into disrepute and disuse of the bad tendencies. Or in terms of my post above, it's the gradual discerning of an ideal pattern of social rules, and the gradual eliciting of over-arching goals relating to human flourishing/happiness that we're all gradually homing into agreement on.

Human Nature is NOT biological. — bloodninja

It remains an is, from which explanation is needed if you are to derive an ought.

Why is owning a slave immoral within our culture but perfectly moral in prior cultures? — bloodninja

So, do you think it moral?

What does your answer tell us about you?

So, do you think it moral?

What does your answer tell us about you? — Banno

No of course I don't. That statement doesn't suggest anything about my character. I was only trying to show that morality changes, which is something gurugeorge denies. Another statement I could have made would have been around womens' former inferior socio-political status in western democracies.

It remains an is, from which explanation is needed if you are to derive an ought. — Banno

You would still have trouble getting from what is the case about human nature to what we ought do.

Perhaps the right thing to do is to fight our nature.

The naturalistic fallacy. — Banno

The naturalistic fallacy seems stupid. For example: A clock is a device used to keep time. When one understands the function of a clock, then a standard of evaluation is implicit in the very description of the clock, i.e., because it "is" a clock, it "ought" to keep the time. Thus, if one cannot pick a good clock from a bad clock, then one does not really know what a clock is. Similarly with a knife. If one does not understand that a good knife is sharp, and a bad knife blunt, then they have fundamentally misunderstood the 'is'. Implicit in the 'is' is the ought that the knife ought to be sharp because a knife is used in-order-to cut. In other words, there is a certain teleology in understanding the 'is' of equipment. I would argue that the whole world is made up of these teleological "ought" (in-order-to) relationships, and that the 'is' is only intelligible upon that basis. In a like manner, if one cannot determine good human actions from bad, then one does not really know what the human person is.

theological — bloodninja

Ah. God did it?

Oh that was a typo. Whoops haha. No I meant teleological in an Aristotlean and Heideggerian sense.

I can't see how that helps you get from an is to an ought. Moore dealt with teleology; unless you enlist a deity of some sort, introducing purpose just begs the question.

A knife's purpose is to cut. To cut knifes ought to be sharp. That knifes ought to be sharp is part of the is. If you don't include the purpose then the knife drops out. A knife, as equipment, is its purpose. A knife is unintelligible if you don't account for its purpose.

Humans are a different being than equipment obviously but by analogy this argument could be extended to humans. How are humans intelligible if you don't account for their teleology, or what they're striving towards/seeking, or how thy understand and interpret themselves in what they are doing, etc.? They are similarly completely unintelligible.

Humans are a different being than equipment obviously but by analogy this argument could be extended to humans. How are humans intelligible if you don't account for their teleology, or what they're striving towards/seeking, or how thy understand and interpret themselves in what they are doing, etc.? They are similarly completely unintelligible. — bloodninja

I don't find that argument at all convincing. People are different to knives. The teleology of the knife comes from the purpose for which it was made. If you think people were made for a purpose, then... whence that purpose?

People make their own purpose.

So it's an argument from analogy. The analogy is that a piece of equipment is only intelligible on the basis of its purpose or 'in-order-to'; similarly a human is only intelligible on the basis of its purpose or 'for-the-sake-of-which'. The kind of purpose is different in each case, however the fact that they are both intelligible only on the basis of their purpose justifies the analogy.

the majority of people on here don't think there is a "human nature" — bloodninja

Hi. In my view the notion of the human is a nature of the human. We can only have this discussion because some pre-interpretation of the word 'human' is in play. So for me the issue looks to be how fixed and/or articulated this notion/nature is.

I think the virtues and vices are grounded in how our cultures are organised, and how they function. Is this arbitrary? Not really. However, I think it does entail that I am a cultural relativist. — bloodninja

I suspect you would also agree that how cultures are organized is 'grounded' in our vices and virtues. It looks all of piece, however unstable around the edges (just like the notion/nature of the human and perhaps with this notion/nature.)

If there is no human nature to ground ethical theory, then what other ethical position is left but cultural relativism? — bloodninja

I have nothing against cultural relativism. But what about the usual option of being non- or just barely theoretical on these matters? Clearly I like and have been exposed to fancy theoretical positions (I'm here after all), but more and more I see the gap between the high talk and the low walk. That walk is 'low' not in its being guilty or inferior but rather in that this walk (which includes ordinary conversation) is down in the messy all-of-the-piece that resists our neat categorizations. We can't say what we know. Not all of it. Making it explicit is a fascinating goal, but perhaps that should include an analysis of this drive toward explicitness. Is it a philosophical prejudice that only that that can be made explicit is fully real?

The analogy fails; the knife does not make itself.