The view that moral values are 'our values' is actually even less plausible than the view that moral values are 'my' values. For both views are obviously false in that we cannot make rape right by favouring ourselves raping people, and the latter - your proposed view - has the additional vice of being incoherent, given that only individual subjects can favour things, but groups cannot.

Puts me in mind of a certain Monty Python script (but then most things do)

Brian: He raped you!?
Brian's Mum: Well, at first...

Nope; if we all think 'rape each other!', then raping each other is morally valuable.

Funny thing is, we don't.

Okaaay. Thank you wise one.

...but by consulting our reason. — Bartricks

Hm. That's debatable. Values do not pop into logic all that easily. One is more likely to introduce them as premisses. Your Cartesian views mislead you here, perhaps?

I do remember thinking, the only problem with rape is not enough people approve of it.

Gosh, I am getting a good education here.

I have not mentioned an 'absolute entity' and I don't know what one of those is when it is at home. — Bartricks

You have argued that to be moral is to be valued by a subject. And you have argued that since we, as subjects, often value differently, we human subjects cannot be that subject who is the moral-maker.

Now if I count something as a moral value, it is a moral value (at least) for me; but for the sake of your argument this is not good enough; that is it is not good enough that it be merely moral for me, it must be moral per se, even if it is not considered moral by some other subjects.

So you are positing absolute, as opposed to relative, moral values. If relative moral values are contingent on ordinary subjects' valuations then absolute moral values must be contingent upon the valuations of an absolute subject according to your argument.

What else is God (as philosophically conceived by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley Hegel and others) but an absolute subject?

So, I am not asking you to tell me who God is, as you claim I am in objecting to your analogy. It is a bad analogy, because we may not know who did the killing, but we do know it was a human, that is we know what kind of being it was. Likewise we know that if we are positing a subject as a ground for morals then it must be an absolute subject, and there can logically be only one absolute subject. You don't have to call it 'God' if you don't want to, you can call it "Kermot the Turtle" if you like, but that doesn't change the fact that you know what kind of being it must be to logically fulfill the requirements of being an absolute law-giver.

If you want critique then you need to read what others have written, consider it carefully and respond to it relevantly, otherwise others will find interacting with you to be a waste of time.

So there can't be a moral obligation not to destroy a forest, then? That someone who thinks there is a moral obligation not to destroy a forest is conceptually confused? — Bartricks

Not at all. That other people are wholly absent from your line of thought is not so much a problem as a symptom of a deeper one. When it comes to forests, one can still ask: is it a mind that values a forest? Or is it as one who lives with a forest - walks in it, grows food amongst it, breathes from it, who takes care of the plant life, whose body is cooled by its presence and so on.

I imagine cutting out your brain and putting it in a jar on the forest floor. Then you deliberate. By this point, the moral calculus has already changed beyond all recognition. You would, for instance, probably be quite upset about the whole brain in a jar thing to begin with. But your 'moral' reasoning has no space for even that. It is thin, thin to the point of irrelevance.

My arguments are valid and sound regardless of whether our minds are immaterial or material. So again, not relevant to the issue here.

Yes you can. I mean, I am not, But you can. Tim invented the wheel. Then he forgot. Then he reinvented it. So that's wrong. — Bartricks

That's nonsense; we know what wheels are, we haven't forgotten, and so we cannot reinvent them from scratch.

↪Banno The view that moral values are 'our values' is actually even less plausible than the view that moral values are 'my' values. For both views are obviously false in that we cannot make rape right by favouring ourselves raping people, and the latter - your proposed view - has the additional vice of being incoherent, given that only individual subjects can favour things, but groups cannot. — Bartricks

If the folk being raped is part of the "we" - and why not? - then it is singularly unlikely that they will approve of the rape.

Hence, "what is moral is what we agree to" is not going to result in pack rape being morally obligatory.

But if it did, it would.

The incoherence comes from your example.

You lost me here, too.

You have argued that to be moral is to be valued by a subject. — Janus

No I haven't, I have argued that to be morally valuable is to be being valued by a subject (the subject being Reason).

And you have argued that since we, as subjects, often value differently, we human subjects cannot be that subject who is the moral-maker. — Janus

No I haven't. Where? I have argued that as what is morally valuable is morally valuable regardless of whether I happen to value it, then I am not the valuer whose values constitute moral values.

I am not positing 'absolute' moral values at all. I am not an absolutist. I am a relativist.

@Bartricks

the purpose of https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/330068 was to show that there are other ways of bypassing your argument. Its logical validity does not in itself render the argument sound.

No the incoherence comes from thinking a group of subjects is itself a subject.

A group cannot value something. Not unless you attribute a mind to the group - a mind distinct from the individual minds composing it.

Now, if you say that the group of all of us has a mind of its own, then although I think that view has nothing whatsoever to be said for it, I would simply say that that mind - a mind, note, quite distinct from any of ours - is the mind whose values constitute moral values. Or at least, she could be.

But if by 'us' or 'we' you mean not a subject distinct from ourselves, but just a collection of subjects, then your view is incoherent as you are supposing that valuing is something a group of things can do, when in fact only subjects can value things. A mistake, of course, encouraged by our tendency - useful in many contexts, but misleading in this - to talk about groups as if they are people.

No, but the truth of its premises does. And you haven't yet cast a reasonable doubt on any of them, so far as I can tell.

A group cannot value something. — Bartricks

Why not?

Indeed, there would appear to be considerable evidence to the contrary.

Your argument may be valid; even commonsense arguments can be valid. But is it sound? Your underlying unstated premise is that there are absolute moral values, and you argument is that since moral values are only such insofar as they are valued by a subject; there must be an absolute subject. If you think that characterization of your argument is incorrect, then point to the error.

Assuming that you do agree with the characterization, how do you know that there are absolute moral values? That there are absolute moral values is what the soundness or otherwise of your argument depends upon.

I mean, if you resist my conclusion on the grounds that if enough of us approve of raping others, then rape will be morally good, then I'm not remotely worried - anymore than I would be worried by someone who insists my claim that 2 + 3 = 5 is false because 3 + 4 = 9678. (Although obviously I'd be worried 'for' them, for they seem to have lost their reason)

My arguments are valid and sound regardless of whether our minds are immaterial or material. So again, not relevant to the issue here. — Bartricks

Hm. I was referring to cartesian philosophical method, not his dualism.

No, there's considerable evidence of the use of metaphor and commission of the fallacy of composition.

Plus, even if a group can value something, you'd have to attribute a mind to the group - and then you haven't refuted my argument for no premise is challenged. All you've done is, perhaps, discovered the subvening base of the mind who is Reason.

What, the method of ruthlessly following Reason?

I mean, I agree - if you don't ruthlessly follow Reason, you probably won't arrive at my conclusion. But that's to my conclusion's credit, I think.

You have argued that to be moral is to be valued by a subject. — Janus


No I haven't, I have argued that to be morally valuable is to be being valued by a subject (the subject being Reason). — Bartricks

Can you explain the difference you apparently see in these two statements apart from "the subject being reason"?

As to the latter can you explain how reason qualifies as a subject (apart form being a subject in texts or discussion for example)? In order to value something a subject must be capable of judgement. Reason as it commonly understood is not, in itself, capable of judgement; it is a faculty we use to justify our judgements, and given different premises reason can lead to contradictory judgements.

The OP is like toy morality. Like a My First Morality Playset™ that you give to undergrads to play with, before slowly introducing them to the things that matter.

Okay, then take me to school Daddio and show me the mistakes.

I am not positing 'absolute' moral values at all. I am not an absolutist. I am a relativist. — Bartricks

If you say that moral values are so as such regardless of anyone's judgement you are an absolutist. The only way you could be considered to be a relativist would be to say that the absoluteness of moral values are relative to the absolute valuations of an absolute subject.

...you haven't yet cast a reasonable doubt on any of them, so far as I can tell. — Bartricks

Yeah. I have. But you may not be able to see it.

Your argument starts with an assumption of the import of the self - the "I" in "I think, therefore I am". It fails to notice that in forming that very argument you make use of language. Now language is inherently communal; it takes more than one. That's the core flaw in the Cartesian method.

Hence, when you try to draw moral values out of your own individual values - as in your first premise - you fall flat. Moral values are about you and others, not only about yourself.

So here is one of your arguments:

1. If moral values are made of my valuings, then if I value something necessarily it is morally valuable
2. If I value something it is not necessarily morally valuable
3. Therefore moral values are not made of my valuings — Bartricks

Sure, it's valid. But then, few if any of us thought moral values are made of my values. So it is not sound.

Further, the assertion - and I can't see were it is actually argued for - that therefore there is a god...

It implies a god exists. — Bartricks

does not even gain a toehold.

This has been fun; damn, I wasn't going to get back into this forum; you sucked me in. But I think we've reached a point beyond which neither of us will benefit.

Thanks.

The word 'reason' is ambiguous which is why I have not used it until now. We have - most of us - a faculty of reason. faculties give us awareness of things (or are capable of doing so). But it is important not to confuse a faculty with that of which it gives us an awareness.

That important mistake is easy to commit when one and the same word is used to refer both to the faculty and that of which it gives us an awareness, as in the case of Reason.

the faculty of reason - what we often call 'our reason' - is a faculty that gives us an awareness of the values and prescriptions of Reason herself. But Reason herself is not the faculty, any more than the things I see are my sight.

mean, I agree - if you don't ruthlessly follow Reason, you probably won't arrive at my conclusion. But that's to my conclusion's credit, I think. — Bartricks

Your way of reasoning is one of infinite regress.

You see, knowledge is either about correspondence with the real, physical world, when the knowledge is empirical, or else, it is about the consistency of language expressions that satisfy particular basic rules, when the knowledge is axiomatic or at least logic-based.

Rejecting a particular choice of basic rules for governing language expressions is not "reason". That view is a complete misconception.

For example, reason in mathematics is about demonstrating that a particular theorem necessarily follows from a particular -- even arbitrary -- set of basic rules. It is never about questioning the basic rules themselves.

Seriously, "reason" is absolutely not what you think it is.

Reasoning is something that a machine can perfectly do too. Feed the basic rules into the device, feed the theorem into it, along with its purported proof, and the machine will perfectly be able to verify if the proof is correct. All of this is purely mechanical; and it has to be. Otherwise, it is not knowledge.