and the relevant question is 'on what basis could one think that some interpersonal behaviors are "more significant than etiquette"?' — Janus

Why would that be a mystery? It's a matter of personal judgment--an individual considers x more significant/important than y.

he dishonestly uses any strategy to avoid admitting that his position is inconsistent, — Janus

Can you simply state some P that I'm both asserting and denying?

An example is that Terrapin will counter any argument that appeals to the prevalence of shared values on the most central moral issues (murder, rape, torture, theft and so on) with the objection that the almost universally cross-culturally prevalent attitudes that condemn those is merely a matter of those attitudes being more "popular", which basically gives them no more inter-subjective weight than personal culinary preferences. — Janus

The argument that some P is correct (or "more correct" or whatever you might like to say) because it's more prevalent is the argumentum ad populum fallacy.

Maybe you personally put a lot more weight on something because it's more prevalent, and you're not claiming that the prevalence has anything to do with it being correct, so that it's just a pledge to conformity, essentially, and that's fine. But not everyone is so rah rah conformity. If you want to jump off of a bridge just because everyone else is, be my guest.

And yet when I say that from the perspective of someone who is morally neutral, who is amoral, assuming moral relativism, all moral stances are equal, and that there is thus no inter-subjective rational warrant to prefer one stance over the other, he claims that no one is in fact morally neutral and that this is demonstrated by statistics involving studying "hundreds, even thousands" of people. — Janus

Right, no one is in fact morally neutral, but I said:

"A hypothetical person with no preferences would indeed not be able to find a reason to prefer one moral stance over the other, no matter what the person were to look at. The very idea of that doesn't make any sense. We'd be wondering if a person who has no preferences in domain D might gain preferences in domain D as an implication or upshot of examining some set of facts (such as the fact that J prefers m, K prefers n, etc.), or the fact that A causes B. They wouldn't, because no set of facts implies any preference. That's just the point. So it's an argument in favor of the relativist position, not an argument against it.

"The person might develop preferences based on simple exposure to something they weren't previously familiar with (if John never heard jazz before and then starts listening to a lot of jazz, he might develop (or learn he had) preferences for some of it), but that's a factor of how their brain works, and then it would turn out that it's not true that the person has no preferences after all."

I don't know if you bothered to read that reply to you.

Even if it were accepted that those statistics are accurate and that they reflect what is the case with billions of people, his own position should dismiss it on the basis that it is an appeal to populism. — Janus

I wasn't saying that anything was correct/incorrect because it was popular/prevalent. I wasn't saying anything about conforming to what's popular/prevalent. I merely said that it's a contingent fact that there are no conscious morally neutral people. If that weren't a fact that would be fine. But we can't find any conscious morally neutral people when we look for them.

Because there is no objective (on his view of objectivity) reason why people should not be morally neutral, — Janus

Correct. The fact that there are no conscious morally neutral people has zero implication for what should be the case. It's just contingently the case.

life and death is profoundly important to almost all of us, and that is the "objective" element of commonality — Janus

Commonality has nothing to do with whether something is objective.

And commonality has no normative weight except for people who happen to be rah rah conformity.

Maybe you personally put a lot more weight on something because it's more prevalent, and you're not claiming that the prevalence has anything to do with it being correct, so that it's just a pledge to conformity, essentially, and that's fine. — Terrapin Station

Oh, it's "fine" is it, really?

This is a prime example of how you twist what is said to suit your purposes. As I have already explained many times, I don't put more weight on the almost universally shared moral values merely because they are more prevalent, To the contrary, they are more prevalent on account of the fact that almost everyone puts more weight on them because they involve the most basic questions of life and death, and that's precisely why it is obvious that, contra your one-dimensional view, 'life and death' moral dispositions are not anything like mere personal preferences.

But of course I believe this would be a wasted reply if it were actually addressed to you, since I predict you won't acknowledge and directly address this obvious difference, because it is fatal to your simple-minded moral relativism. And you will never admit you are inconsistent and that your position is explanatorily inadequate; instead you will probably just distort what I said here again to produce more red herrings, to try to make it look like I am indulging in populism or whatever you can think up to try to deflect attention away from the intellectual poverty of your position. So, this reply is really not for you, but for others to make clear to them how I view your tactics. I won't reply to you unless you lift your game, and actually address what is being said without attempting your usual tendentious distortions and professions of incomprehension.

Why are human emotional responses so frequently characterised as mere preferences? Why can't they be, in the context of morality, profound and heartfelt passionate dispositions?

Morality. All humans follow one after (mostly)adopting their first world-view via language acquisition. Morality - all morality - consists entirely of thought/belief about the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Morality makes up the rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Moralities - all of them - vary afterwards. The variances have a direct correspondence with/to that which is subject to particular influence(s). Those include familial, socio-economic, historical, cultural, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and any and all of the other manifestations arising from the evolution of human knowledge.

None of us can doubt the truthfulness of our first worldview. That is true of everyone. We are all borne with the inability to doubt the veracity of our own worldview. Then we all have a sudden, sometimes quite uncomfortable reality check. What happens differs from expectations. We become painfully aware of our own fallibility, assuming one is capable of such a thing. Those who do not better have a fairly accurate understanding of themselves and the world around them, and be fortunate enough to pursue their own happiness. Not everyone can.

War-torn... Abject poverty... Powerless...

Those people have no ability to doubt their own worldview either, until they have one that is... just like everyone else.

The reason for all this is clear enough for all to understand:One cannot doubt the rules of socially acceptable behaviour unless s/he has a baseline from which to do so. That baseline is one's first/initial/original world-view. Those primary baselines are all replete with the language community's moral sensibilities.

All reasonable doubt is belief-based. All doubting is doubting the truth of something or other that has been heard and/or read. All doubting of morality comes via common language use. All language acquisition has universal common denominators. The students' utterly complete inability to doubt the truthfulness of what's being learned about the world and/or him/herself. This holds good regardless of that which is subject to the influence of individual, societal, familial, historical. and/or cultural particulars.

All morality is first adopted.

That which is common to all is universal. There are some things common to all moralities. Those things warrant careful thought experiments. Preferably, this special kind of thought experiment will have some falsifiable/verifiable foundation.

Next?

Yet?

All initial world-views consist of thought/belief about the world and/or oneself. All initially adopted morality consists of thought/belief about the world and/or ourselves. None of us has the ability to doubt the truthfulness of the common language teachers' lessons about life. They are all lessons.

All adoption of one's first world-view is accompanied by an inherent incapability to doubt.

Thought/belief is prior to doubt. Some of that is thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. All thought/belief presupposes it's own truth somewhere along the line. All thought/belief is meaningful to the thinking/believing creature. Some thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour comes prior to learning the social code. I would posit that some thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour is formed and/or held by everyone, regardless of that which is subject to particulars. That is...

Some moral thought/belief is prior to language acquisition and held on a universal basis by everyone.

No one prior to and/or during initial language acquisition approves when another physically harms them.

That which is subject to individual particulars is little to nothing more than an unhelpful distraction during moral discourse. That which is true of everyone lends itself to being a rock-solid dependable foundation.

We are interdependent social creatures by our very nature. The sheer amount of time that a human requires prior to his/her ability to fend for themselves is unmatched in the animal world, aside from elephants. They're comparable. The pure faith upon which one takes on their first world-view is universal. The unmatched trust that we each have(had) in our teachers is also universal and is displayed on an everyday basis.

We trust in each other, as we must.

But you can’t bite the apple and tell someone it tastes both good and bad at the same time. In order to communicate your view of the taste of the apple you have to use adjectives with some degree of objective meaning. — Rank Amateur

Absolutely, but I don't understand what this point has to do with the objectivity of morality. If I say "this apple tastes good", I have to be referring to at least what I hope is some common feeling 'good' in order for my interlocutor to know what I mean.

So 'good', in that context, has a shared meaning, in that we use it to describe states of mind we think we share.

So when I say "murder makes me feel good" everyone knows what the feeling is that murder gives me. When I say "murder makes me feel 'bad' I everyone also knows what the feeling is that murder gives me. These are completely objective meanings of 'good' and 'bad'. None of this has any bearing on proving that" murder is bad" is an objective fact.

No one has yet describe what "murder is bad" even means for the objectivist.

I take it to mean "murdering someone (or the thought of doing so, or the thought of associating with someone who does) makes me feel bad".
"Bad", in this sense has a perfectly objective meaning, but which actions make me feel it is entirely subjective.

What is the equivalent definition of "murder is bad/wrong" for the objectivist?

We tried "Murder is something which most people feel one shouldn't do" but that directly replaces 'thing most people feel one shouldn't do' with 'wrong/bad'. This would make women voting wrong/bad in the 19th century.

We tried "murder is something which does not bring about social harmony" - fine, I'd agree with that, but it does not capture any obligation not to do it. What compels me to care about social harmony?

We tried "murder is something one wouldn't do if one intended to bring about social harmony" - again, a fact I pretty much agree with, but doesn't explain why murder would still feel awful even if it were being done with the intention of bringing about social harmony, and it still suffers from the problem of just kicking the can. Why must anyone care about social harmony? We've had the argument that the vast majority of people simply do care about social harmony, so we can presume it to be a fact and follow from there. But again, this still ends up relative. It still ends up with "for all those who care about social harmony (the vast majority), murder is wrong" ("for those who don't, it isn't").

We tried "murder is irrational", but I'm afraid I've still yet to understand how rationality alone, absent of any objective makes any sense. It's like just having peano's axioms and an equals sign and expecting to get the correct answer. No one has even set the sum yet.

So I'm still waiting. Could some objectivist please translate for me, from their point of view "murder is wrong/bad" without reusing the terms "wrong/bad" because those are the ones whose use I'm struggling to understand.

If you murder someone because that action is the lesser of two evils how is that relevant to the point that an act is moral if its intent is to do the least harm possible to social harmony? — Janus

Because I want to know what your definition/explanation is for that feeling under your system. By your definition, if murder is being carried out with the intent to bring about social harmony, then it is moral. If it is moral, then what prevents someone from undertaking it with great pleasure. What name do you give, and preferably explanation of, the fact that most of us would still find murder abominable even if it was being done to bring about social harmony.

You still haven't explained my basic emotion. I think torturing a child is monstrous and I have no intention of ever doing it. Full stop. I have not had to carry out any rational calculations to arrive at this decision. I have not gone through all the consequences of doing so to check whether or not social harmony will be brought about in the long term. The feeling of abomination is already there, it always has been. I don't recall ever giving long term social harmony a second thought.

Long term social harmony may very well be the reason evolution put that feeling in my brain. I think that's a very sound explanation. But evolution is a natural force, it doesn't make 'mistakes' because it doesn't have any intentions. So if, for whatever reason, evolution did not put that feeling in someone's brain, on what grounds do we say that they are 'wrong'?

what you say here only seems to support what I have been arguing, against the notion that morality is merely a matter of personal preference. — Janus

You'll have to explain that, I don't get the link at all.

I'm not saying that we may always access the evidence required for strong induction (or are always capable of interpreting it), I'm saying that in some situations we can do so sufficiently, especially with regard to negative moral claims. — VagabondSpectre

Yes, I'd agree with you here. Given equal objectives, there are definitely some situations where the evidence is sufficiently overwhelming that I think it a reasonable strategy against those who follow a different route, to simply point this fact out of in the hope that they too will be overwhelmed by the inductive certainty of the conclusion.

Any disagreements with the above? — VagabondSpectre

No, basically I think you've captured it. I think the only point you may have overemphasised is that I'm not really arguing that intuition is a good (or better) guide than reason in terms of getting the right answer (meeting our long term objective).

I think it can be sometimes, with regards to vaccination, for example, the intuition that we do not simply inject healthy children with an unknown (to the decision-maker) chemical for some advantage we've simply been told will accrue t later down the line, is one which certainly should require a high degree of evidence to overcome.

The more important point, to me, though, is that following intuition simply feels better and so automatically has a higher weight in those situations where the right course of action is being weighed merely on a preponderance of evidence.

In other cases, where the evidence is overwhelming, them yes, intuition can be cast aside.

not all vaccines are inherently profit driven, — VagabondSpectre

No, I understand. I'm only talking about the risk inherent in the uncertainty about whether the actual vaccine in question (or just one of its ingredients) is profit driven, and the extent to which an individual parent can ever know this. Its not as if the doctor, when asked, is going to say "oh yes, this one is profit driven".

Many scientists and researchers in medical fields genuinely are trying to create things to improve life rather than improve corporate profits. Sometimes corporations, even for greedy reasons, do good things. The list of essential vaccines that have saved millions of lives since their inception are among them. — VagabondSpectre

I don't doubt this, and I hope I haven't given the impression that I do, simply in my attempt to play devil's advocate. It's the uncertainty about which any particular vaccine is that I'm wanting to highlight with regards to the effect that uncertainty has on moral decisions.

Aren't you on some level treating people like children in doing so?

I'm with you about the existential and psychological need for happiness, but what if someone is unhappy because they cannot get their own (ridiculous) way? (Or maybe more to the point, what happens when they're unhappy precisely because they've gotten their own way?). Our expectations do not always conform to reality, and in so far as we can inform our expectations (and hence the way we feel about the related action) with reason and evidence, we can tend toward more accurate and consistent feelings about actions. — VagabondSpectre

I'm not quite sure what you're arguing here. My point was that merely "saving lives" cannot be presumed to be a goal above all others, such that any technology or lifestyle change which brings about this goal can be given objective superiority over one's that do less well in this regard. People have goals other than staying alive for as long as possible.

Im not, in any sense suggesting that society as a whole has a duty to make everyone happy, but I think we're really straying too far from our objective common ground when we start deciding that someone's happiness is not 'good enough' type of happiness. Yes, I personally think that getting your own way shouldn't be something that always makes you happy. I personally feel that some of the things people claim to want are 'ridiculous'. But I have absolutely no grounds whatsoever to tell them that they are objectively wrong to feel that way.

Good faith means that when you point out inconsistencies or inadequacies in the other's position they provide a cogent argument to show that it is not in fact an inconsistency, or if they can't, then admit that iit is an inconsistency. — Janus

Fair enough, but can't you see, that's exactly what our side think your side aren't doing either? If we all agreed on what an inconsistency or inadequacy was, this matter would have been solved hundreds of years ago.

As I read this thread (and others) Terrapin never does that, but introduces any red herring he can find, or pretends not to comprehend what is being said, that is he dishonestly uses any strategy to avoid admitting that his position is inconsistent, mistaken or explanatorily inadequate. — Janus

But this is all just from your perspective, and differing perspectives are what constitute an argument in the first place. Of course you think his retorts are red herrings, of course you think his strategy is dishonest and his position inconsistent. If you didn't you'd agree with him. You don't, so you evidently need some reason why that is the case.

You talk as if 'red herrings', 'pretending', 'dishonesty', 'consistency' and 'explanational adequacy' were matters on which some conclusive judgement could be made when 2000 years of philosophical argument stands as glaring evidence that they are not.

Philosophy well done. Put it out there, avail it to proper critique.

The general theme of your series of comments seems to focus on the pre-rational or early rational chronology of moral agency. If such chronology is more reactive to outside influence from which experiences are attained, yet moral philosophy in and of itself is predicated on active determinations, which presupposes fully developed rational capacity with its set of experiences already attained, then it is reasonable to suppose the former is merely forms of consequential inclination, rather than a true system of morality, which is just as reasonably supposed to incorporate a form of antecedent obligation that a psychologically incomplete rationality cannot abide.
———————-

That which is subject to individual particulars is little to nothing more than an unhelpful distraction during moral discourse. That which is true of everyone lends itself to being a rock-solid dependable foundation. — creativesoul

Absolutely. Now all that’s required is a logically and experientially verifiable reduction to that which serves as a rock-solid dependable foundation which is true of everyone. I shall submit, there are but two.

Morality. (The human constituency) All humans follow one (the human activity) — creativesoul

, is one. May we agree reason is the other? Reason the human constituency first, reason the human natural activity second.

Next?

What's

With

All

These

Separate posts?

, and that's precisely why it is obvious that, contra your one-dimensional view, 'life and death' moral dispositions are not anything like mere personal preferences. — Janus

What in the world would the argument be for this claim:

Iff moral stance M is prevalent to at least r extent (I don't know just how prevalent it has to be in your view, hence the variable), then moral stance M is not anything like a mere personal preference.

?

And you will never admit you are inconsistent — Janus

If I were both asserting and denying the same P, sure I would.

What's the P I'm both asserting and denying? This is the second time I'm asking you.

Why are human emotional responses so frequently characterised as mere preferences? Why can't they be, in the context of morality, profound and heartfelt passionate dispositions? — ChrisH

Exactly. There's a weird bias against things that are mental phenomena, where the bias has it that something is far less valuable, worthwhile, worth talking about, etc. if that's the case.

Given how important love is to most of humanity, you'd expect this bias to lead to people claiming that love can't be just a mental phenomenon--and maybe some folks do claim that, I don't know.

Morality. All humans follow one after (mostly)adopting their first world-view via language acquisition. — creativesoul

In my view it doesn't at all depend on language-acquisition. A baby, from the start, is going to be okay versus not be okay with some things that you do to it, and that's all that morality is--those sorts of dispositions. It takes a bit more time/development for the baby to extend those reactions to behavior not directly involving itself--in other words, it takes a bit more time for empathy to develop, but it doesn't take very long, and it certainly precedes language acquisition.

You have your tag-line, "reason the slave of the passions." Beyond that, not so much. Why don't you put your sling-shot away and take a little time and make all this clear, including what your tag-line means.

In my view, reason is the slave of reason, nothing else, and not a slave either, but a partner. — tim wood

If you know why Hume said that, then you'll know why I said that. You are unfamiliar with Hume, I take it? There are some good online resources to help you understand what his point was. Otherwise, why do we need to start from scratch as if you have no background knowledge, or as though you can't get yourself up to speed?

As for your view, good for you, but what are your arguments against Hume?

The general theme of your series of comments seems to focus on the pre-rational or early rational chronology of moral agency. If such chronology is more reactive to outside influence from which experiences are attained, yet moral philosophy in and of itself is predicated on active determinations, which presupposes fully developed rational capacity with its set of experiences already attained, then it is reasonable to suppose the former is merely forms of consequential inclination, rather than a true system of morality, which is just as reasonably supposed to incorporate a form of antecedent obligation that a psychologically incomplete rationality cannot abide. — Mww

Indeed. Moral agency requires thinking about thought/belief. A language-less creature cannot do this. I'm after what grounds all morality in order to compare it with conventional moral discourse.

Hume's notion of passions and reason fails to draw and maintain the distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. Reason can change one's passions. Therefore, it is not a slave to one's passions.

Moral agency requires thinking about thought/belief. — creativesoul

Because?

(Mww seemed to suggest the equivalent of a "true metal" argument--is that what you'd shoot for here?)

Reason can change one's passions. Therefore, it is not a slave to one's passions. — creativesoul

Okay, go ahead and reason me out of my passionate belief that murder is wrong.

I'm after what grounds all morality in order to compare it with conventional moral discourse. — creativesoul

Unless you bring it with you, other than my brief and scattered remarks, and perhaps not even then, you won’t find what you’re after here. People are too bound up in projecting outward to demonstrate, rather than retreating inward to discover, those grounds.

Moral agency requires thinking about thought/belief. — creativesoul

Does it?

A language-less creature cannot do this. — creativesoul

Can't they?

I'm after what grounds all morality in order to compare it with conventional moral discourse. — creativesoul

Strange... You seemed to just somehow know all the other facts, what's eluding you about this one, have you lost your direct line to God?