The rest have to what...? Just put up with whatever their philosopher-kings deem to be right? This here is exactly why I have such a big problem with moral universalism. When you dig into it it's always, without exception, an attempt at authoritarianism. — Isaac

As opposed to... everyone just putting up with whoever happens to have the power deems is right?

That’s what’s going to be the case one way or another, but what kind of decision-making would we like those in power to use? A rational one, or just whatever their gut tells them?

As opposed to... everyone just putting up with whoever happens to have the power deems is right? — Pfhorrest

Everyone is going to put up with that whatever happens, otherwise it wouldn't be 'power' would it?

People in power are going to use their gut to make decisions. Whether we like it or not. That's what our best theories about how the brain works tell us. Again, this is not something we get to choose, it's how biology is.

Yours is a very theoretical framework. Politics are not primarily about ethics, they are about power.

The dilemna is that political power is both necessary to set up and enforce a just legal system, and deeply corruptive on the people who have it.

Take the US right now. I think we can agree that Washington is deeply, structurally corrupt at this point in time. The filthy rich control the system via lobbies, super PACs, etc., the people's vote don't count for much of anything, science is denied and as a result the nation contributes massively to climate change, thus endangering our children's future.

Even if Biden wins, as I certainly hope he does, it won't fix Washington because he is a product of that system.

So how do you fix this by moral discourse alone? No can do. The bad guys are not going to let you just reason them out of power. Only a revolution can work, and a revolution will make its share of collateral damage: murders, looting etc.

The alternative is to do nothing and leave our kids in their misery.

Sometimes there's no moral choice in politics. Quite often it's a choice between two evils.

Note that even the due process of science -- which you see as something effective enough to emulate in the moral or legal sphere -- can be actively corrupted by the forces of money, as has been done for two or three decades now with paid-for climate change denialism.

Everyone is going to put up with that whatever happens, otherwise it wouldn't be 'power' would it? — Isaac

That’s exactly what I said. So advocating that those people in power use a particular method isn’t any more authoritarian than literally any other possibility, where no matter what someone is going to enforce something and everyone else ultimately has to deal with it.

For that matter, I actually have grounds to object to actual authoritarianism, which is a methodology completely counter to my principles. Fully half of the motivation behind my stance is the opposition to authoritarianism. But you have no grounds to object to anything at all; if nothing is actually good or bad, what could possibly be bad about authoritarianism?

How to deal with that dilemma is a large part of my political philosophy, which again is grounded in more fundamental ethics.

Setting aside my proposals for how to better balance power in a better political system so as to fight corruption better, on the issue of just getting something better in place in the first place, changing people’s minds is both necessary and sufficient.

If there was a violent revolution today, completely aside from the collateral damage, and even if the revolutionaries won, the resultant government would still be made up of the kind of people we have today with the kind of values they have. The people who are in power today only have any power inasmuch as enough other people support them and few enough other people oppose them, so without changing that support/opposition balance, the new government will end up with the same kind of people in power as the old government.

On the other hand, if you could somehow mind-control the people into supporting and opposing however you liked, then you could change the kind of people who get in power even within our current system, without any kind of violent revolution. Just make everyone go vote the fuckers out, none of this close election because half the country honestly loves fascism bullshit.

That’s a fantasy scenario for dramatic illustration, but the point is that changing people’s minds, even the old-fashioned way, would be enough to make significant political changes, and even more importantly, it must happen in order for any changes to actually stick past the revolution.

I don’t know how to effectively win it, but this is and always has been a war for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens. So what we’re trying to convince those hearts and minds of — our ethics — matters immensely.

changing people’s minds is both necessary and sufficient. — Pfhorrest

Except where there is a denial of democracy.

Except where there is a denial of democracy. — Olivier5

Whether a democracy is in effect or not is itself a product of people’s political views. You could plop Charlemagne down in modern France and he would have no power at all — unless so many people were so wowed by his historical fame or something that they abandoned the modern French republic to accept him as their emperor again. A monarchy or dictatorship can only exist so long as the people recognize and accept it. A dictator not recognized by the people as their dictator is at worst a mob
boss, to be squashed by the police and military forces that do actually have popular support.

That sounds optimistic and doesn't concur with recent political evolution in the US and a number of other countries. It seems that someone far worse than Charlemagne is making a come-back.

An important ethical question, I guess, is how does one deal with evil. I think you are right that it calls for people's mobilisation, à la Sanders. But sometimes it's hard to believe... We don't have much time before the climate gets all wacko. Western civilisation as we know it is getting toast fast.

That sounds optimistic and doesn't concur with recent political evolution in the US and a number of other countries. It seems that someone far worse than Charlemagne is making a come-back. — Olivier5

My understanding of the causes behind that accords with those of thinkers like Chomsky: people with bad intentions have gotten very skilled at generating widespread popular support for things that are actually against the interests of the very people they're getting the support of, "manufacturing consent".

In other words, the recent political evolution you're talking about has happened because too many people support those changes and not enough people oppose them. That support and lack of opposition was created by the people it benefits, but they created it by manipulating the minds of the people at large. If we don't change those minds ourselves, just overthrowing the people in charge won't change anything: the manipulated people will just put someone else like that in charge again.

Even medieval monarchs held power in a formally similar, but much less subtle, way. Make a bunch of people afraid of an external threat and make them think that your leadership is the only thing that can protect them; and make anybody who might object to your leadership afraid that if they say anything about that they'll be killed for treason and nobody will come to their defense. Now you have the support and lack of opposition needed for a few people to rule in a way counter to the interests of many people who easily could overthrow them, if only they had the collective will to do so.

We don't have much time before the climate gets all wacko. Western civilisation as we know it is getting toast fast. — Olivier5

Maybe that might eventually get scary enough to motivate people to support and oppose the right groups to make it stop. Hopefully before it's too late.

Climate deniers certainly seem to think that the only reason "warmists" whip up such a big doom story about the future of the planet is to get people to accept "communism" as their only salvation. I think those deniers understand too well how manufacturing consent actually works, and are projecting their own intent to use it on others. But just because rhetoric can be used to deceive, doesn't mean it can't also be used to teach truths.

(Which reminds me, I meant to start a new thread about rhetoric soon...)

advocating that those people in power use a particular method isn’t any more authoritarian than literally any other possibility, where no matter what someone is going to enforce something and everyone else ultimately has to deal with it. — Pfhorrest

You set up your method as an alternative to moral 'right's being determined by whomever has the most power. I'm saying that a direct consequence of them having the most power is that they get to do that. If your advocation influences them in any way, then it is you not them who has the most power (you're able to influence them). Ultimately, whomever has the most power is going to determine the terms of social engagement. You've dodged the argument again by just diverting it. The point was that you said certain people were to be excluded from your "let's not give up discussing the issue" approach on the grounds of your judgement about their open-mindedness. I said that was authoritarian, your reply seems to be that people in power are going to be authoritarian anyway so what does it matter. I tend to agree, but it undermines your argument about resolving disagreements. If you're going to exclude from that discussion anyone you deem to be 'closed-minded', or 'irrational', then you get to set the terms of the debate, you can simply exclude anyone who disagrees with you, ensuring that the resultant 'resolution' is exactly what you wanted in the first place. That is authoritarianism.

you have no grounds to object to anything at all; if nothing is actually good or bad, what could possibly be bad about authoritarianism? — Pfhorrest

Who said anything about nothing being actually good or bad. I think loads of things are good and loads of thing are bad, What's bad about authoritarianism is that it denies people a liberty which I think is a good thing to have.

You set up your method as an alternative to moral 'right's being determined by whomever has the most power. I'm saying that a direct consequence of them having the most power is that they get to do that. — Isaac

Whoever has the most power is inevitably going to get to say what is right, and have people do what they say, because that's what having power is. That's not the same as it being right.

My method is an alternative to whoever has that power just saying that whatever they want is right. Instead, it says it's better if those in power pay attention to what actually brings the phenomenal experiences of suffering or enjoyment to people, without bias toward or against anyone, and then say that the things that preserve or create enjoyment while suppressing or eliminating suffering are good, or at least, better than the alternatives. And, as I've said many times before, my method for doing that involves letting people mostly do what they want to do with themselves (preserving and creating enjoyment), and only saying it's wrong when they hurt other people (suppressing and eliminating suffering); i.e., libertarianism. Your suggestion instead seems to be that it doesn't matter what they say at all; which is tantamount to letting them say whatever they want, tell whoever to do whatever, which is authoritarianism.

You've dodged the argument again by just diverting it. The point was that you said certain people were to be excluded from your "let's not give up discussing the issue" approach on the grounds of your judgement about their open-mindedness — Isaac

The only people to be excluded from the "let's not give up" conversation are the people who say "let's stop talking about it", either because they insist that they just have the right answer and you have to trust them on it no questions asked, or because they insist that it's impossible for anyone to ever have the right answer.

You seem to be in the latter camp. You think there can't be a right answer, and want everyone else to stop trying to figure out what it is. That just means everyone else gets to ignore you, until you decide you want to join in again and actually consider the possibility of there being an answer, and figure out what it is with them.

Who said anything about nothing being actually good or bad? — Isaac

You, this entire time? That's the entire point of disagreement. I say some things are actually good or bad -- not just baseless opinions, but things that we can be correct or incorrect about. You, by all lights, seem to vehemently disagree with that.

I think loads of things are good and loads of thing are bad, What's bad about authoritarianism is that it denies people a liberty which I think is a good thing to have. — Isaac

And if a majority of people disagreed with you that liberty is good and authoritarianism consequently bad, do you think that that would make you definitionally wrong, because all that makes them good or bad is majority of the linguistic community using the words "good" and "bad" to apply to them that way?

Or is it possible that a majority of people would say liberty is bad and authoritarianism good, but they would nevertheless be wrong?

people with bad intentions have gotten very skilled at generating widespread popular support for things that are actually against the interests of the very people they're getting the support of — Pfhorrest

Indeed, they conned the public, defunded public education, created media like FAUX specialized in lying, gerrymangered districts and more. Hence the current denial of democracy in the US. It's a fake democracy now.

:up:

My method ... says it's better if those in power pay attention to what actually brings the phenomenal experiences of suffering or enjoyment to people, without bias toward or against anyone, and then say that the things that preserve or create enjoyment while suppressing or eliminating suffering are good, or at least, better than the alternatives. — Pfhorrest

So what? You either have the power to influence them in this way (in which case you are the one in power, not them) or you don't, in which case you're pissing in the wind. I'm merely pointing out the pretending your position is an alternative to authoritarianism is a facade. It's whoever is in in power who gets to control the discourse, gets the loudest voice, gets to influence other people into agreeing with them, gets to say who's too 'irrational' to take part, gets to intimidate, manipulate, bribe, seduce, beguile, tempt, mislead... all until enough people in this 'global debate of your agree with their position to swing the 'accounting' process in their favour.

Your suggestion instead seems to be that it doesn't matter what they say at all; which is tantamount to letting them say whatever they want, tell whoever to do whatever, — Pfhorrest

If I had a choice (ie had the option of not 'letting' them) then I would be the one with power, not them, wouldn't I? That's the meaning of the word 'power' in this context. The ability to control something.

The only people to be excluded from the "let's not give up" conversation are the people who say "let's stop talking about it", either because they insist that they just have the right answer and you have to trust them on it no questions asked, or because they insist that it's impossible for anyone to ever have the right answer.

You seem to be in the latter camp. You think there can't be a right answer, and want everyone else to stop trying to figure out what it is. That just means everyone else gets to ignore you, — Pfhorrest

Exactly. Anyone not with the program is ignored. And you're trying to avoid authoritarianism?

I say some things are actually good or bad -- not just baseless opinions, but things that we can be correct or incorrect about. You, by all lights, seem to vehemently disagree with that. — Pfhorrest

You're equivocating over 'actually'. Things being 'actually' good or bad, and there being a single correct answer to each moral problem are not the same thing. 'Good' and 'Bad' are terms in a shred language, as such there are things which fit them and things which don't. My disagreement is over the cause of those criteria. Your claim is that we can (and should) have a conversation aimed at determining which behaviours fall into which category, assuming there's some external 'right' answer. My position is that those definitions are already largely determined by biology, culture and our upbringing and it's pointless pretending to have a discussion about edge cases because any result will be immediately overridden by the force of biology and cultural movement anyway.

Authoritarianism is a 'bad' thing. It's one of the things that humans don't like, mainly a part of our basic biology, partly the result of the culture we live in, but it's definitely (in extremis) one of the things we call 'bad', so it is 'actually' bad. I'm also inclined to rail against it, probably to an extent greater than would be called 'bad', but that's nothing to do with morality (which is a social term).

if a majority of people disagreed with you that liberty is good and authoritarianism consequently bad, do you think that that would make you definitionally wrong, because all that makes them good or bad is majority of the linguistic community using the words "good" and "bad" to apply to them that way? — Pfhorrest

Yes, of course. How else do you think language works? In the late eighties, if I recall correctly, Michael Jackson coined the term 'bad' to mean things which he (and his culture) approved of. For that time 'bad' was used in this way. everyone within that culture understood what the term meant. If everyone started to refer to authoritarianism as a 'good' thing, then I would just be using language wrong if I referred to it as 'bad'. Whether I was inclined to support it, or fight against it would remain unaffected by it's socially mediated status. We cannot have our own private meanings for words, it's basic Wittgenstein, fairly well accepted these days.

Thus proving that any process can be perverted. And if you were to propose a process to transparent adjudicate moral claims and if it was ever adopted, it would soon get corrupted by the people who don't like the idea or the result.

In that sense your approach is naïve and unrealistic, in that it assume a degree of good will and concord that just isn't there. It ignores the forces of evil.

Another related weakness of your analogy (which I like, conceptually, but all analogies have their limits) is that studying nature scientifically is more staightforward and objective than studying man scientifically. For the latter ( often called human sciences or social sciences: linguistic, psychology, history, sociology, political science, economy, etc.) the biases are far stronger, because these sciences are about our own subjective selves, so subjectivity is part of the territory. And even more so in philosophy.

So the second weakness is that your analogy ignores the inherent subjectivity of moral questions and agents.

You either have the power to influence them in this way (in which case you are the one in power, not them) — Isaac

We all have power to influence who is in power. Follow along in the other subthread with Oliver: every power structure depends ultimately on enough people supporting and not opposing it. In arguing for one moral this or that or another, we are all using what little share of that power we have to try to persuade other people to align their power together with us so that eventually the prevailing norms that get enforced will be one way or another. I’m pushing for those norms to be unbiased (“objective”), liberal (anti-authoritarian), critical (not just anything goes; some things are wrong), and concerned with actual experiences of things feeling good rather than bad (instead of ritual purity or something like that), because that seems like the only practical way we could all get along together.

If you’re objecting to the “objective” part, you’re just saying that bias is perfectly fine. If you’re not saying bias is fine, just that people are in fact biased, then you’re not actually objecting to what I’m saying at all. This is what I mean about “is” statements not answering “ought” questions at all, and you giving non-sequiturs.

If I had a choice (ie had the option of not 'letting' them) then I would be the one with power, not them, wouldn't I? That's the meaning of the word 'power' in this context. The ability to control something. — Isaac

You do have a choice. A small part of one, but still. They only have power because we all collectively let them.

Anyone not with the program is ignored. — Isaac

Anyone who doesn’t want there to be any conversation is excluded from the conversation. Can you not see how that is different from arbitrarily excluding people just because we disagree with them?

Anything who has any reasons to think one way or another is welcome to share them. Anyone who thinks there cannot be any reasons to think any way or other, or who insists that everyone think this way or that for no reason, is excluding themselves from the reasoned discussion of why to think this or that, and those who want to keep having that reasoned discussion are well justified in not letting the others just shut it down.

Authoritarianism is a 'bad' thing. It's one of the things that humans don't like — Isaac

Then why do humans tend to default to authoritarian social structures? Why is maintaining liberty a constant vigil, if humans are all so inclined against authority? There are usually some
big chink of people who are against whoever currently holds authority, but it’s rare that entire societies are against all authority across the board. “Libertine” is still to this day, to the extent it’s used at all, a pejorative.

I think that tendency toward authoritarianism is bad. If you think whatever people tend toward like that is definitionally good, then it seems you’d have to conclude that authoritarianism is definitionally good.

Michael Jackson coined the term 'bad' to mean things which he (and his culture) approved of. For that time 'bad' was used in this way. everyone within that culture understood what the term meant. — Isaac

They also understood that they were using it in a different sense than usual, and still had language to mean “bad” in our ordinary sense; I would be surprised if they didn’t also continue using a sense of “bad” that meant bad, alongside the new slang sense.

You’re mixing up the general process of defining words with some notion of words being circularly defined as whatever people use them to mean. If people generally say X to mean Y, then the definition of X is Y. But if you say “X is defined as whatever people call X”, you’re giving a circular and so ultimately empty definition, effectively saying that X is meaningless.

Consider for comparison money. Something being money is a social fact. Something is money just if it’s accepted by people as money, sure. But what does it MEAN to “accept as money”? What social function does something have to play to be in fact “accepted as money”?

Likewise, “good” means whatever people use it to mean, but WHAT do they use it to mean? Not examples of things that they use it toward; that would be like saying that money is stuff like gold and paper. Being gold or paper isn’t what makes it money, those are just things that go into the social function of “being treated as money”. What is the function that “good” conveys, that all of these examples of good things are being put through?

Prescription, is my answer. When someone says something is good, they’re prescribing that it be, recommending it, exhorting people to make it so. Anything can in principle have that function applied to it, just like anything in principle can be treated as money.

It’s a separate question as to whether something thus prescribed is well fit for prescription, just like there’s a separate question as to whether a particular token fits well as money. Tree leaves probably don’t. But that doesn’t have anything to do with what “money” MEANS.

And if you were to propose a process to transparent adjudicate moral claims and if it was ever adopted, it would soon get corrupted by the people who don't like the idea or the result. — Olivier5

In the process abandoning my process.

What we should do and how to get people to do that are different things.

Are you just saying it’s impossible and hopeless and we shouldn’t even try to improve? Because if not, I don’t see where you’re in disagreement. I’m taking about what direction would be an improvement. How to get people to go there is another question. And saying “it’s not possible to get people to go anywhere” sure isn’t going to help get anyone to go anywhere.

So the second weakness is that your analogy ignores the inherent subjectivity of moral questions and agents. — Olivier5

The “subjectivity” you describe is only a problem for descriptive sciences about humanity. I don’t think moral questions are grounded in those descriptive sciences. And prescription generally need not be any more subjective than descriptive generally.

I’m not ignoring any “inherent subjectivity”, I’m explicitly denying that there is any.

Simply put, I think we already have a process to take moral decisions, called our moral sense. We also have a process to set socially important moral standards, which is called the law. Hamurabi invented the concept a while back. And we also have a theoretically just process to set the law and apply it, called democracy.

It worked for a while, in some places, not too poorly. It was slowly taking root. Of course the failure of the German Weimar Republic to contain the rise of antidemocratic, ultranationalism and racist elements and rhetoric had led to the Nazi accident along the way, but democracy passed that test ultimately.

In the 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin wall and of apartheid, it looked like democracy had finally won. Then a strange thing happened. At the very moment when democracy could have reached new hights, unburdened by external enemies, some of these triumphing western democracies, chiefly the most victorious among them, the US, started to to rot. To get sick.

Washington got gridlocked by technicalities, drained of energy by lobbies, financially burdened by an enormous military system, and yet it was deregulation after deregulation, and tax break after tax break. And the rich became richer and the poor poorer.

And that's how the system was conned, from the inside. Of course Israel manipulated it too, and now so do the Russians and the Chinese...

Democracy fell victim to its own success. For it was only the fear of the alternative (communism, by then) that kept the elites of liberal democracies firmly in the socio-democratic camp, faithful by and large to the ideas of the New Deal. Once democracy (and with it, capitalism) became victorious in the 1990s, the political urgency for the capitalist class to keep the working class afloat and engaged in social dialogue decreased. Reagan and Thatcher were just the beginning of it. Now we've come to a state of affairs where democracy is perverted, maniulated and gutted out of meaning by the filthy rich.

It's a classic phenomenon in ecology: species "need" predators, otherwise any new (or old) disease can wipe the whole population out. In this case, the disease is called plutocracy: government by the wealthy, under the guise of democracy.

So if you ask me what we need to do now, I would say reclaim democracy, rebuild it without this corruption, rejuvenate it with better rules, etc.

We don't need your mysterious new process for adjudicating moral claims. We already have one, called democratic law and order. Let's make it work better.

The only question in my mind is how. I believe some democratic revolution à la Sanders is needed but it hasn't fulfilled its promises so far.

moral anti realism

Plato and his 5 stages of regime...we are in the final Regime state IMHO, based on the perspective you presented as I see it.

I MUST note that I suspect that tyranny has been the order of the day since the inception of social commitment...the emotional climate of society is a metric of how well the tyranny is diffused from its associated source and into the public perception of reality.....

To answer this simply confusing OP:

RHETORIC/SOCIAL ENGINEERING/PSYCHOLOGY

we also have a theoretically just process to set the law and apply it, called democracy. — Olivier5

Except even the theoretical justice of democracy (in one form or another; that’s a broad umbrella there) is not a settled matter. Political philosophy is a thing, there are views all over the board on what would or would not be a just way of setting laws.


I have no major objections to your historical account of the corruption of the west, other than to note that its roots go back much farther than Reagan and Thatcher and are inherent in the very theoretical foundation of the state and capitalism, but that’s not the point here... well that last part kind of is.

So if you ask me what we need to do now, I would say reclaim democracy, rebuild it without this corruption, rejuvenate it with better rules, etc. — Olivier5

That’s the first step in the right direction, sure.

We don't need your mysterious new process for adjudicating moral claims. — Olivier5

Very little of my process is entirely new, and none of it mysterious. It’s just the big picture of putting all the pieces together this way, a bunch of tiny details, and my arguments for why to accept these positions, that are new.

My meta-ethics is closely inspired by Hare’s and I recently learned of a more recent paper (from 2000) that puts forth something almost identical to mine and was also inspired be Hare.

My altruistic hedonism is basically just utilitarianism.

Except I reject consequentialism per se, and propose a deontological means for reaching those “utilitarian” ends.

Those means entail basically libertarianism, but with a small tweak that undermines the foundations of capitalism. Libertarian socialism is already a thing though, I just give it a different foundation.

Philosophical anarchism is already a thing too, founded largely in libertarian deontological principles already. And anarchism generally is already mostly synonymous with libertarian socialism.

I give a new (to my knowledge) account of how a stateless (anarchic) government could function stably, inspired by scientific peer review, which basically ends up being a form of consensus “democracy“ (but not majoritarianism).

The biggest novelty is just noting that this whole stack of mostly pre-existing positions parallels the stack of semantic, ontological, epistemological, and educational positions that make up a common account of the scientific method — verificationist semantics, empirical realist ontology, critical rationalist epistemology, and the peer review process — and that arguments can be made that support both stacks at the same time for the same reasons.

I’m just polishing up these pieces and fitting them together into a bigger picture.

there are views all over the board on what would or would not be a just way of setting laws. — Pfhorrest

Indeed, as I was saying it's as always subjective.

My altruistic hedonism is basically just utilitarianism. Except I reject consequentialism — Pfhorrest

That's Chinese to me.

Indeed, as I was saying it's as always subjective. — Olivier5

The existence of disagreement doesn’t make something subjective.

Physicists disagree about whether M-theory or loop quantum gravity is a better theory of quantum gravity, but that doesn’t mean there is no objective answer, just that it hasn’t been determined yet.

Mathematicians disagree about whether the Hodge conjecture is true, but that doesn’t mean there is no objective answer, just that it hasn’t been determined yet.

That's Chinese to me. — Olivier5

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

What makes it subjective, is that it's about the perceptions and opinions of subjects, aka persons, about themselves and other subjects. That's why any moral or political opinion is subjective, including opinions about how best to set the law. It's part of the territory. And your yet to be described process can't escape that either.

In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the following anecdote: he was in Venice, in the bedroom of a courtisane whose company he enjoyed, when he complained about the shape of her left nipple, in his view not as beautiful as her right nipple. She was obviously pissed, and stayed silent for a while. Then she retorted: Zanetto, lascia le donne e studia la matematica!
(Johnny, leave women alone, and study mathematics instead)

Like her, I think you should leave philosophy and study mathematics instead.

What makes it subjective, is that it's about the perceptions and opinions of subjects, aka persons, about themselves and other subjects. That's why any moral or political opinion is subjective, including opinions about how best to set the law. It's part of the territory. And your yet to be described process can't escape that either. — Olivier5

Empiricism is inherently "subjective" in that sense too (it's about what observations are made by what kinds of observers in what circumstances), and thus all scientific investigation of reality. That doesn't stop reality from being objective. There is a subject and an object to every investigation; it's the relationship between them that is most primary.

And my process is hardly "yet to be described". I wrote 80,000+ words on it and have gone over it in annoying detail in thread after thread here. Everyone (read: Isaac) just immediately gets hung up on the moral objectivist implications of it and every conversation ends up spiraling around that, so none of the rest of it can even get off the ground.

If you've somehow missed all of that, here are a few prebaked summaries of the whole thing:

With regards to opinions about morality, commensurablism boils down to forming initial opinions on the basis that something, loosely speaking, feels good (and not bad), and then rejecting that and finding some other opinion to replace it with if someone should come across some circumstance wherein it feels bad in some way. And, if two contrary things both feel good or bad in different ways or to different people or under different circumstances, commensurablism means taking into account all the different ways that things feel to different people in different circumstances, and coming up with something new that feels good (and not bad) to everyone in every way in every circumstance, at least those that we've considered so far. In the limit, if we could consider absolutely every way that absolutely everything felt to absolutely everyone in absolutely every circumstance, whatever still felt good across all of that would be the objective good.

In short, the objective good is the limit of what still seems good upon further and further investigation. We can't ever reach that limit, but that is the direction in which to improve our opinions about morality, toward more and more correct ones. Figuring out what what can still be said to feel good when more and more of that is accounted for may be increasingly difficult, but that is the task at hand if we care at all about the good.

When it comes to tackling questions about morality, pursuing justice, we should not take some census or survey of people's intentions or desires, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, intends or desires is good. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good. Then we should devise models, or strategies, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be good. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure.

Like her, I think you should leave philosophy and study mathematics instead. — Olivier5

Sorry, I already got a degree in philosophy, and you apparently don't know basic philosophical terms like altruism, hedonism, and consequentialism, so ...

The existence of disagreement doesn’t make something subjective. — Pfhorrest

That is a subjective opinion.

That is a subjective opinion. — A Seagull

That doesn't mean it can't be correct.

That is a subjective opinion. — A Seagull
That doesn't mean it can't be correct. — Pfhorrest

Being 'correct' is also subjective, at least in matters to do with the real world; being 'correct' in axiomatic systems such as mathematics is different as theorems can be proven within the system.

Being 'correct' is also subjective, at least in matters to do with the real world — A Seagull

That's just your subjective opinion. (But that doesn't mean it can't be incorrect).

Empiricism is inherently "subjective" in that sense too (it's about what observations are made by what kinds of observers in what circumstances), and thus all scientific investigation of reality. That doesn't stop reality from being objective. There is a subject and an object to every investigation; it's the relationship between them that is most primary. — Pfhorrest

Of course empiricism is about inter-subjectivity, i.e. agreement between several subjects. But it's easier to come to such agreement with other subjects when the topic is a plant, or a mineral or a star, than when it is yourself.

And my process is hardly "yet to be described". I wrote 80,000+ words on it — Pfhorrest

Apologies, I was not aware of that. Reading through your summary about feelings and apetites, it struck me once again as highly theoretical. A few objections that come to mind:

- What about educating our feelings and apetites? Trying to change them? Acquiring new ones? Is it not an age-old prescription of legions of philosophers and moralists to try and control our own desires?

- Aren't we supposed to care for future generations? How do you factor in their satisfaction? Our present hedonism is their future doom. Can we burn all the carbon we want, après moi le déluge?

- What if in a particular society, the greatest level of good feeling was achieved by, say, killing all people over 70, or killing all red haired people? Would that make such killing "good"?

- There is no practical way to measure people's feelings.