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. — Olivier5

The objects of moral questions are not ourselves. They are phenomena in the world. We evaluate the morality of those phenomena through our experiences, yes, but we also evaluate the reality of phenomena through our experiences too.

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? — Olivier5

You missed the distinction between appetite and desire, and intention. We can’t control our appetites or desires any more than we can control our sensations and perceptions, but we can and should control our intentions just like our beliefs: by not merely accepting whatever we happen to desire or perceive, respectively, but by checking them against both our and others’ appetitive and sensory experiences, and rejecting the parts thereby ruled out from what we judge good and true respectively, i.e. what we intend and believe.

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? — Olivier5

Future generations are other people, and other people’s experiences explicitly matter on my account.

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"? — Olivier5

That definitionally could not be the greatest amount of good feeling, because the people you’re killing count too. And just because more good feeling is a better end than less good feeling, doesn’t mean that end justifies just any means. That’s consequentialism, which I already said I’m against. Morality has to achieve good ends by just means, neither one nor the other alone is sufficient.

There is no practical way to measure people's feelings. — Olivier5

There’s no way to measure other people’s sensory experiences either. But we can try to reproduce them, by standing in the same circumstances they reported experiencing them, seeing if we experience them too, and trying to figure out what’s different between us or the circumstances etc if we can’t.

You missed the distinction between appetite and desire, and intention. — Pfhorrest

I didn't. This section explicitly speaks of appetites:

"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."

The objects of moral questions are not ourselves. They are phenomena in the world. — Pfhorrest

???? Do you have an example of what you would consider a moral question?

Future generations are other people, and other people’s experiences explicitly matter on my account. — Pfhorrest

How does one account for the future experiences of the yet unborn? And you stop the accpunting at which future generation?

That definitionally could not be the greatest amount of good feeling, because the people you’re killing count too. ... Morality has to achieve good ends by just means, neither one nor the other alone is sufficient. — Pfhorrest

It's possible to kill someone without him feeling anything. And how to weight good means vs good ends? What's the mathematical formula?

There’s no way to measure other people’s sensory experiences either. — Pfhorrest

There are ways to record and measure physical phenomena. But feelings?

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). — Pfhorrest

What do you mean by 'correct'? Is it a useful term? Do you have some objective process by which correctness can be determined or evaluated?

If you don't, then correctness is entirely subjective and delusional; its only benefit is to bring a degree of personal and smug satisfaction.

Do you have some objective process by which correctness can be determined or evaluated? — A Seagull

Yes. Have you not been following the rest of the thread?

I didn't. This section explicitly speaks of appetites: — Olivier5

Right, but then you speak of desire as though it’s synonymous with appetite.

Do you have an example of what you would consider a moral question? — Olivier5

Name any event, or state of affairs. Asking about that event or state of affairs “is that good or bad?” is a moral question.

How does one account for the future experiences of the yet unborn? And you stop the accpunting at which future generation? — Olivier5

We are to build models of what kinds of things are consistently good or bad, tested against the experiences we have access to. (Just like we build models of what kinds of thing are consistently true or false based on the empirical experiences we have access to). Those models then have implication about the experiences that other people would have in various circumstances, and thus what would be good or bad in those circumstances. If our models predict that there would be some negative future experiences as a result of some present action, then that means our best models judge that action to be bad. It’s always possible our model is incorrect, but that’s no different regarding models of morality than it is models of reality.

It's possible to kill someone without him feeling anything. And how to weight good means vs good ends? What's the mathematical formula? — Olivier5

Removing the possibility of someone feeling pleasures is negatively impacting their experience just as much as inflicting pain on them is. There’s also issues of rights and obligations, necessary goods, property, etc, that get involved there, but I won’t go into all that right now.

The more important thing at the moment is that you don’t weigh good means against good ends. You have to have both.

The primary divide within normative ethics is between consequentialist (or teleological) models, which hold that acts are good or bad only on account of the consequences that they bring about, and deontological models, which hold that acts are good or bad in and of themselves and the consequences of them cannot change that. The decision between them is precisely the decision as to whether the ends justify the means, with consequentialist models saying yes they do, and deontological theories saying no they don't. I hold that that is a strictly speaking false dilemma, between the two types of normative ethical model, although the strict answer I would give to whether the ends justify the means is "no".

But that is because I view the separation of ends and means as itself a false dilemma, in that every means is itself an end, and every end is a means to something more. This is similar to how my views on ontology and epistemology entail a kind of direct realism in which there is no real distinction between representations of reality and reality itself, there is only the incomplete but direct comprehension of small parts of reality that we have, distinguished from the completeness of reality itself that is always at least partially beyond our comprehension.

We aren't trying to figure out what is really real from possibly-fallible representations of reality, we're undertaking a fallible process of trying to piece together our direct sensation of small bits of reality and extrapolate the rest of it from them. Likewise, to behave morally, we aren't just aiming to use possibly-fallible means to indirectly achieve some ends, we're undertaking a process of directly causing ends with each and every behavior, and fallibly attempting to piece all of those together into a greater good.

Perhaps more clearly than that analogy, the dissolution of the dichotomy between ends and means that I mean to articulate here is like how a sound argument cannot merely be a valid argument, and cannot merely have true conclusions, but it must be valid — every step of the argument must be a justified inference from previous ones — and it must have a true conclusion, which requires also that it begin from true premises. If a valid argument leads to a false conclusion, that tells you that the premises of the argument must have been false, because by definition valid inferences from true premises must lead to true conclusions; that's what makes them valid. If the premises were true and the inferences in the argument still lead to a false conclusion, that tells you that the inferences were not valid. But likewise, if an invalid argument happens to have a true conclusion, that's no credit to the argument; the conclusion is true, sure, but the argument is still a bad one, invalid.

I hold that a similar relationship holds between means and ends: means are like inferences, the steps you take to reach an end, which is like a conclusion. Just means must be "good-preserving" in the same way that valid inferences are truth-preserving: just means exercised out of good prior circumstances definitionally must lead to good consequences; just means must introduce no badness, or as Hippocrates wrote in his famous physicians' oath, they must "first, do no harm". If something bad happens as a consequence of some means, then that tells you either that something about those means were unjust, or that there was something already bad in the prior circumstances that those means simply have not alleviated (which failure to alleviate does not make them therefore unjust).

But likewise, if something good happens as a consequence of unjust means, that's no credit to those means; the consequences are good, sure, but the means are still bad ones, unjust. Moral action requires using just means to achieve good ends, and if either of those is neglected, morality has been failed; bad consequences of genuinely just actions means some preexisting badness has still yet to be addressed (or else is a sign that the actions were not genuinely just), and good consequences of unjust actions do not thereby justify those actions.

Consequentialist models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what is a good state of affairs, and then say that bringing about those states of affairs is what defines a good action. Deontological models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what makes an action itself intrinsically good, or just, regardless of further consequences of the action. I think that these are both important questions, and they are the moral analogues to questions about ontology and epistemology: fields that I call teleology (from the the Greek "telos" meaning "end" or "purpose"), which is about the objects (in the sense of "goals" or "aims") of morality, like ontology is about the objects of reality; and deontology (from the Greek "deon" meaning "duty"), which is about how to pursue morality, like epistemology is about how to pursue reality.

Yes. Have you not been following the rest of the thread? — Pfhorrest

not really. What is your method?

I’m not going to repeat something you can just scroll up and read.

I suspect you're merely describing common morality here. Or can you cite one or two moral prescriptions about which your model disagrees with the average Joe out there?

I suspect you're merely describing common morality here — Olivier5

As I've said, I consider my position the common-sense position, merely shored up against bad philosophy. Like the kinds that say nothing is actually moral or immoral, or that what is moral is so because God or someone just said so, or that no moral claims should be accepted until they can be justified from the ground up, or that the kinds of things that are moral are things that have nothing to do with whether or not anything brings suffering or enjoyment to anyone.

↪A Seagull I’m not going to repeat something you can just scroll up and read. — Pfhorrest

I can't find anything remotely relevant, so I will just have to take your answer to the previous question as a 'no'.

Go ahead and argue in bad faith, that makes you look bad, not me.

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↪A Seagull Go ahead and argue in bad faith, that makes you look bad, not me. — Pfhorrest

I have no idea what you are talking about.

As usual.

I take your reluctance to debate in plain English as a consequence of your fear that your smug illusion of correctness might deflate.

Take things that obviously weren’t intended as though I actually said them if you want, that just makes you look bad, not me.

(Is that “plain English” enough?)

I consider my position the common-sense position, merely shored up against bad philosophy — Pfhorrest

Unfortunately you are doing bad philosophy yourself in my view, by trying to formalised common morality. For one, because we already have the law, which fulfills that function, so you are reinventing the wheel. For two, because common morality is inherently subjective, fluid and flexible, something which you go at great length to ignore, as if you were afraid of this inherent messiness of humankind. But human beings are not robots; they are subjects, and quite ambiguous ones. Some things feel bad until they feel good; some ideals look good until they kill us; sometimes we fell victim of our own successes. It's complicated, or rather it's complex.

Let's take a few examples. First a classic one: two Jewish sages of old, Hillel and Shammai, disagreed about whether one should mechanically apply the Law regarding "thou shall not lie". Hillel as usual was all nuances, allowing for "white lies", while Shammai was rigidely following the Law. The following thought experiment highlighted the contrast:

Imagine you are at a wedding and you find the bride ugly. Someone at the wedding asks you: ain't the bride beautiful? What do you respond?

Shammai: if I find her ugly, i would say so because I shall not lie.
[Ie even if it seems unconsequential, lying about it would still soften my resolve and make me acustomed to lying, so I'd rather stick to the rule]

Hillel: a bride is always beautiful on her wedding day.
[ie she's usually at her personal best that day, so recognise the effort and avoid yourself and your hosts an embarassment].

What do you say?

What do you say? — Olivier5

I’m not sure if you’re asking me about that specific scenario regarding the beauty of a bride? I would say she looks beautiful, but not because it’s sometimes okay to violate moral principles, but because “never lie” is not an absolute moral principle. For the most part I don’t endorse any simple imperatives like that as absolute principles: never do this, always do that, etc. Context totally matters. But we can still find patterns in which contexts which actions are good and which are bad.

trying to formalised common morality — Olivier5

We can always formalize anything. Formalizing morality is what ethics, moral philosophy, is all about. I am engaging in an ongoing discussion about that topic, and mostly just arguing against previous positions that go against “common sense” in some way or another, trying to come up with a position that allows for reasoning about morality without demanding that people do things that violate that “common sense”.

If sounds like you’re just objecting to doing ethics at all, to people thinking about what’s right or wrong in general rather than just... following their instincts and acculturation... and the law?

For one, because we already have the law, which fulfills that function, so you are reinventing the wheel. — Olivier5

What is the right way to form laws, and should everyone always obey every law? These are questions of political philosophy, which has its roots in ethics. I am giving answers to the questions in those fields, that I think are better than the answers others have given before.

common morality is inherently subjective, fluid and flexible, something which you go at great length to ignore, as if you were afraid of this inherent messiness of humankind — Olivier5

Subjective is not the same thing as fluid and flexible. I am very much in support of flexibility, as shown at the start of this post. Being opposed to subjectivity is something else entirely. You can agree that different things are right or wrong in different circumstances, without agreeing that the exact same event is simultaneously right and wrong to different people who judge it differently, just because they judge thus and their judgement is all there is to being right or wrong. The latter is all I’m arguing against here, not the former at all.

I’m not sure if you’re asking me about that specific scenario regarding the beauty of a bride? — Pfhorrest

Yes. Not for the sake of your answer, but to help demonstrate that there is often no right or wrong answer. There's the answer given by Hillel, which you side with, and the one defended by Shammai. Different people see things differently, they values different things. Some are more diplomatic, others more frank.

Interestingly the Talmud, which recorded this story as well as many other other disagreements between rabis, doesn’t explicitly take side in those disputes. It just says in essence: here is one interpretation of the Law, and here is another...

Let’s take a less obvious example: the policy response to the COVID pandemic has varied from one country to the next. On one side of the spectrum, some countris have imposed very strict lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus and avoid many deaths. This has created a big economic slow down. On the other end of the spectrum, other countries have not imposed any lock down, our of fear for the economy. In doing so they implicitly accept a certain number of COVID death as the price to pay to keep the economy running. That may sound heartless but it’s not, for them it’s just recognizing that people can die of poverty and hunger, too.

What would be your call, if you were president of your country?

Yes. Not for the sake of your answer, but to help demonstrate that there us often no right or wrong answer. There's the answer given by Hillel, which you side with, and the one defended by Shammai. Different people see things differently, they values different things. Some are more diplomatic, others more frank. — Olivier5

You gave an example of a disagreement, but that in no way demonstrates that there isn't a right or wrong answer. There are frequent disagreements about facts either, but that doesn't mean there is no objective reality.

Let’s take a less obvious example: the policy response to the COVID pandemic has varied from one country to the next. On one side of the spectrum, some countris have imposed very strict lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus and avoid many deaths. This has created a big economic slow down. On the other end of the spectrum, other countries have not imposed any lock down, our of fear for the economy. In doing so they implicitly accept a certain number of COVID death as the price to pay to keep the economy running. That may sound heartless but it’s not, for them it’s just recognizing that people can die of poverty and hunger, too.

What would be your call, if you were president of your country? — Olivier5

Well a president doesn't usually get to make such unilateral decisions, but my choice would be to impose lockdowns to the extent necessary to avoid overwhelming the medical system ("flatten the curve"), and redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor to keep people from dying of poverty or hunger (something that should be happening anyway). If, in a counterfactual scenario, there somehow weren't enough actual resources to go around regardless of the distribution of nominal wealth (money), I'd say to make exceptions to the lockdowns as necessary to allow the production of necessary resources, so long as that results in fewer deaths from poverty than deaths from disease. (Or generally, results in less suffering overall).

In any case, I'd make all such decisions based on the advice of a variety of experts in different relevant fields, listening to arguments for and against different strategies, weighing the merits of those arguments against each other, and trying to brainstorm together creative new solutions that account for all the good arguments everybody has to make simultaneously. While remaining aware that my knowledge and judgement are imperfect and despite these best efforts I might still be making the wrong decision.

But a decision can't even be wrong if there isn't any such thing as wrong, just differences of opinion, none of them more right or wrong than any other.

Okay so you would think very hard and take some kind of decision, based on some sort of guessing...

The point is that to weight those arguments and arbitrate such trade offs, one essentially needs to put a price tag on human life. More generally, when weighting several contradictory goals or values with heterogenous metrics against one another (eg protecting human lives vs protecting the economy) one needs weights to translate one metric into the other. So, how many dollars for one life? That depends on one’s value system. There is no objective answer to this question.

You gave an example of a disagreement, but that in no way demonstrates that there isn't a right or wrong answer. There are frequent disagreements about facts either, but that doesn't mean there is no objective reality. — Pfhorrest

There is no right or wrong answer in this case either. It all depends on whether you value frankness over social ties, or vice versa.

That depends on one’s value system. There is no objective answer to this question. — Olivier5

There is no right or wrong answer in this case either. It all depends on whether you value frankness over social ties, or vice versa. — Olivier5

You keep giving examples of different answers people might give to different morals questions and concluding that therefore nobody is any more right or wrong than anybody else. But it’s entirely possible, for all you’ve argued, that one side of such disagreement is just objectively wrong. Or that they both are, in different ways, and what is objectively right is something that’s not wrong in either of those ways.

Disagreement isn’t subjectivity. That’s the point at issue here. Pointing out more disagreements doesn’t constitute an argument to the contrary.

For one thing, you haven’t provided any evidence that one side is wrong.

For another, the underlying point in both example is that the result depends on one ´s values and their relative strengths, at least when several values come in tension with one another. Eg, how much does one value frankness vs social convenances in the case of the wedding, or how much is one human life worth, a question one needs to answer if one wants to weight the economy vs life protection issue.

For one thing, you haven’t provided any evidence that one side is wrong. — Olivier5

And you haven't provided any evidence that neither is.

I don't think it can be conclusively proven one way or another whether objectivism is true or not, without begging the question. So it all boils down to the pragmatic choice: of whether to proceed as though it is, and try to reach a conclusion that accounts for all of the reasons everybody brings to the table; or else proceed as though it's not, and just throw up our hands and say there's no resolution to be had, so much for reasoning, now we just fight I guess and who ever wins "was right".

it all boils down to the pragmatic choice: of whether to proceed as though it is, and try to reach a conclusion that accounts for all of the reasons everybody brings to the table; or else proceed as though it's not, and just throw up our hands and say there's no resolution to be had, so much for reasoning, now we just fight I guess and who ever wins "was right". — Pfhorrest

I've no idea why you keep framing it like this when you've been presented with several alternatives just in this thread. Democracy, tolerance, diversity...even persuasion need not be thrown out simply because it is not grounded in anything objective. These are all means of reaching conclusions about moral differences which are non-violent, seem to work for the most part, and do not require moral objectivism.

So I see no sense at all in which it's the pragmatic choice. The pragmatic choice is to let everyone follow their own moral decisions insofar as that is possible, try to persuade others of your preferred position where you'd rather they behaved that way, and resort to democratic institutions where a unified decision is required.

These are all means of reaching conclusions about moral differences which are non-violent, seem to work for the most part — Isaac

...so long as people accept their outcomes as legitimately normative, i.e. as morally correct, as telling us what we ought to do, and not just as "what those people think, but why should I care about that? It's not like they're actually right or something. That's just, like, their opinions, man."

And except for all the times when even people who want to take them as legitimately normative still find them outputting prima facie absurd conclusions (a white majority vote to strip all black people of their rights... hey that's democracy for you!), which is evidence that that (particular formulation of that) principle or procedure is not, actually, legitimately normative, i.e. morally correct, and it needs some adjustments or refinements to eliminate problems like those.

And you haven't provided any evidence that neither is — Pfhorrest

I have, actually, but you haven't paid attention.

I have, actually, but you haven't paid attention. — Olivier5

You've provided examples of disagreements, where each side of the disagreement has some argument, appealing to something that they value. But that's not evidence that each side is equally (in)correct. And now we're going in circles, because that's what I said before that got us to here.

I have pointed out that it is impossible to weight widely different values against one another in an objective manner. Or can you tell me how much money is a human life worth?

so long as people accept their outcomes as legitimately normative, i.e. as morally correct, as telling us what we ought to do, and not just as "what those people think, but why should I care about that? It's not like they're actually right or something. That's just, like, their opinions, man." — Pfhorrest

Well, yes, but that does indeed seem to be what people broadly think. They think it best not to break the law most of the time, they are persuaded by their peers. But you've ignored tolerance and diversity which do not require such beliefs.

except for all the times when even people who want to take them as legitimately normative still find them outputting prima facie absurd conclusions (a white majority vote to strip all black people of their rights... hey that's democracy for you!) — Pfhorrest

Was democracy the only item on my list?

Well, yes, but that does indeed seem to be what people broadly think — Isaac

So most people think these systems are morally correct, and not just someone's opinion? That means most people are moral objectivists.

Was democracy the only item on my list? — Isaac

That was an example.