Speculation is not philosophy — Pfhorrest

I didn't claim or imply that it is.

... more or less, critical rationalism, i.e. letting any possibility float until it can be ruled out, rather than rejecting all possibilities until they can be proven the unique correct one.

Non sequitur.

Speculation is not philosophy
— Pfhorrest
I didn't claim or imply that it is. — 180 Proof

Then I don’t know what you meant by

philosophical speculation — 180 Proof

... more or less, critical rationalism, i.e. letting any possibility float until it can be ruled out, rather than rejecting all possibilities until they can be proven the unique correct one.
— Pfhorrest
Non sequitur. — 180 Proof

Not at all. You could ask an infinite regress of “why is it that...” but at some point someone might stop and say “I don’t know it just seems true to me!” and that’s fine per critical rationalism so long as there remains some way that it could in principle be shown false if it were.

Likewise, you could ask an infinite regress of “why should it be that...” but at some point someone might stop and say “I don’t know it just seems good to me!” and that’s fine too on my account so long as there remains some way that it could in principle be shown bad if it were.

Apparently, you barely skimmed this :point: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/511367

You could ask an infinite regress of “why is it that...” — Pfhorrest

I've made that point already. You claim answers to "how"-questions were also subject to infinite regresses which may be true in philosophy but not true in science because "how"-answers (i.e. theoretical explanations) are testable-eliminable.

There is equal potential for infinite regress in the “how does” question, and the solution to both is the same: more or less, critical rationalism — Pfhorrest

Yeah. But here you're confusing what I said about science ("how") with philosophy ("why"). Thus, your non sequitur.

Then I don’t know what you meant by

"philosophical speculation"
— 180 Proof

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_reason aka "metaphysics".

I've made that point already. — 180 Proof

I’m responding to that point you made.

You claim answers to "how"-questions were also subject to infinite regresses which may be true in philosophy but not true in science because "how"-answers (i.e. theoretic explanations) are testable-eliminable. — 180 Proof

Being testable alone doesn’t get you out of infinite regress. What gets you into the infinite regress to begin with is demanding that everything test positive before being admitted as a possibility... but then the evidence you used to support that conclusion needs to be tested first... but the evidence to support that evidence would need to be tested even sooner... etc. A science-like empirical investigation could demand absolute positive proof of anything before accepting it... except then it would never get off the ground. It’s the tentative acceptance of possibilities unless they get falsified that gives science its ability to be productively skeptical (critical) without stalling out the gate from staring down a bottomless pit of epistemological despair.

Likewise, the way out of infinite regress in prescriptive questions is not testability, but liberty. You'd get into an infinite regress if you demanded some good end to justify any action, because you'd then have to demand an end to justify that end, and so on. You avoid that infinite regress by not asking "why must this be so?", but "why not?" instead: just like the critical rationalist epistemology employed by the physical sciences allows uncertain possibilities to be tentatively floated, an ethical methodology can allow people moral permission to do whatever things that might or might not turn out to be the most good thing they could do, so long as there's not anything showing that they are definitely a bad thing to do. I'm not at all advocating a draconian, demanding consequentialism here; an infinite regress argument would be a good argument against that position, and I use such argument myself.

All I'm advocating is that in addition to investigating what is the case, what are the causes of various effects, which the fields of study you named are all doing, we also investigate what should be the case, what are the ends toward which the results of those other studies can be means. But just as we don't have to (and could not, so should not try to) complete the infinite regress of causes of causes of causes of causes of the effects we're investigating, we don't have to (and could not, so should not try to) complete the infinite regress of ends of ends of ends of ends of the means we're investigating. We only need to be able to somehow rule out some of those prescriptive, ends-of-means claims, just like we only need to be able to somehow rule out some of those descriptive, causes-of-effects claims.

And to pull this back to the topic again: within the context of advocating that, the novel thing I'm proposing in this thread is that in such an investigation, there are both a meta-investigation into how to conduct such an investigation, and then the results of the actual investigation itself. The first part is meta-ethics, the second part is applied ethics, and normative ethics doesn't really fit into there anywhere, trying to do both and ending up doing them both badly: some nominally different positions in normative ethics are really more like answers to different meta-ethical questions entirely, and the whole thing that normative ethics is nominally aiming to do is really better construed as just the bottom rung of the stack of applied ethics fields.

Do you believe in objective morality?
— baker

Objective as in universal, non-relative, yes. — Pfhorrest

Well, this explains everything then. Empathy and moral objectivism are mutually exclusive.

This sounds like you're lashing out at me suggesting you being scared of non-binary people is a psychological problem of yours, not a social problem of theirs. — Pfhorrest

*sigh*
I suppose US culture is different. Here, we have reverse isms. Such as reverse racism, where there is the trend to think of people of other races more favorably than of one's own; and so letting them get away with shit that if done by us would be punished; and being pressured into letting them get away with it.
There's a trend to favoritize minorities (and those who wish to be seen as such) and to give them special rights (even legally), even at the expense of the "natives" and the "ordinaries".

This is why I feel consternation whenever some new identity signifier becomes popular: because it means that yet more people will be able to get away with doing things that we, "the ordinary" couldn't get away with, and we, "the ordinary", will be expected to give them right of way, or be stigmatized as racist, homophobic, anti-Christian, or whatever.

... we also investigate what should be the case ... and normative ethics doesn't really fit into there anywhere ... — Pfhorrest

Okay. This is where I get off the crazy train. I'm neither utopian enough nor scientistic enough for where you're going, Pfhorrest. 'Normative ethics' is, for me, the heart of moral philosophy because judgment & conduct are always already situated in conflicted commons, with 'metaethics' & 'applied ethics' derivative and supplimentary. As sketched on several threads last year, my position is this:

• metaethics – Eudaimonic Naturalism (re: agency-centric) "why" > informed by ontological-existential commitments^

• normative ethics – Negative Utilitarianism (re: harm) "how"-social > informed by prescriptive sciences^^

• applied ethics – Negative Consequentialism (re: injustice) "how"-political > informed by historical sciences^^^

^agency must care for – optimize – agency (à la Spinozist conatus), otherwise performative self-inconsistency ensues; thus, no infinite regress ...

^^always already the case: facticity of natality, or ecology-bound embodied participation in conflicted commons (esp. with strangers) ...

^^^the socioeconomic situation (i.e. status quo, regime, hegemon, etc)

So you see, my friend, one of us is putting the cart before the horse or planting our tree-roots in the sky. :sweat:

Pfhorrest, I don't always agree with you, but your posts are very nicely written and clear. You aim for transparency. Indeed that's how I know if I agree with you or not.

Empathy and moral objectivism are mutually exclusive. — baker

??????

the crazy train — 180 Proof

I actually object to Harris too, for the exact same reason I’m objecting to you: not maintaining the is-ought divide.

Normative ethics' is, for me, the heart of moral philosophy because judgment & conduct are always already situated in conflicted commons, with 'metaethics' & 'applied ethics' derivative and supplimentary. — 180 Proof

Historically, normative ethics is the heart of moral philosophy, yes, and meta-ethics and applied ethics are derivative. The thesis of this thread though is that letting normative ethics split completely between those two derivative directions is the path to the future.

It’s like how the investigation of reality began with speculative “maybe everything is made of water” kind of thoughts that were neither proper natural science nor proper philosophy as we understand it today, but that kind of speculative metaphysics gave rise eventually to both philosophical methods of figuring out what reality is like rather than just speculating about it, and the thorough and rigorous application of those methods in a practice that is no longer philosophical at all.

I think ethics needs to evolve along that same path.

Pfhorrest, I don't always agree with you, but your posts are very nicely written and clear. — bert1

Thanks!

I actually object to Harris too, for the exact same reason I’m objecting to you: not maintaining the is-ought divide. — Pfhorrest

Care to clarify?

Harris thinks that we should stop talking about moral philosophy, just take it as an unquestioned working definition that flourishing is good and suffering is bad, and then start a scientific investigation of what causes flourishing and suffering and therefore what is good or bad. You likewise are are (or seem to be) advocating that good and bad ends are just pre-known or assumed and can’t be investigated any further than those assumptions, and the only thing to investigate is what causes those pre-assumed good ends. In this way, both you and he claim that you can get an “ought” from an “is”, because some “is”’s have baked-in “ought”ness by assumption or by definition.

I think that in practice that is an important PART of actually doing good; we definitely need to know HOW to attain the states of affairs that are good. And the general nature of states of affairs that you both assume or define to be good (all people feeling good and not bad, more or less) are ones I agree with.

But I’m advocating that we can philosophically JUSTIFY treating that as the criterion by which to judge states as good or bad, in a meta-ethics; and that we can directly and reproducibly experience the good or badness of particular states according to that criterion in the first person, as an ethical science; to arrive at MORE than a mere definition or assumption about the good ends that we then go investigating ways to cause, but rather a defeasible contingent measurement, via a sound moral-epistemological methodology, of what is actually good.

You likewise are are (or seem to be) advocating that good and bad ends are just pre-known or assumed and can’t be investigated any further than those assumptions, and the only thing to investigate is what causes those pre-assumed good ends. — Pfhorrest

If that's what you gather from my postings all these months, all I can say is you've profoundly misread me. Please show where I've proposed "innate" or "a priori" assumptions. No humean "Ought from Is" problem on my part, Pfhorrest – unless, for you, ethical naturalism & hypothetical imperatives rest on an "Ought from Is" fallacy – which is why I refer to prescriptive sciences (e.g. human ecology, medical science) as paradigms, or analogues – not scientistic replacements – for reasoning about ethics. And I'm also diametrically opposed to attempts like Harris' and yours to supplant moral philosophy with an "ethical science".

If that's what you gather from my postings all these months, all I can say is you've profoundly misread me. Please show where I've proposed "innate" or "a priori" assumptions — 180 Proof

I could have sworn there was something right in this thread to that effect, to the effect that we already know what the goods we're aiming to achieve are and only need to study how to achieve them, but now I can't find it, so maybe I confused you and someone else here. But...

No humean "Ought from Is" problem on my part, Pfhorrest – unless, for you, ethical naturalism & hypothetical imperatives rest on an "Ought from Is" fallacy — 180 Proof

Ethical naturalism absolutely conflates "is" with "ought"; that's the whole point of the naturalistic fallacy.

Hypothetical imperatives don't, because they use "ought"s in their antecedents: "if you ought to do X then you ought to do Y", which can hinge on a purely logical relationship between X and Y without concern for the "ought"ness of either; but then you're still left with the question "ought I do X?" unanswered.

analogues – not scientistic replacements – for reasoning about ethics. And I'm also diametrically opposed to attempts like Harris' and yours to supplant moral philosophy with an "ethical science". — 180 Proof

I am myself diametrically opposed to scientism and for that reason also to (the foundational assumptions of) Harris' program. I'm not saying "just do (natural) science, that will tell you what's good!" -- I'm completely opposed to that. I'm saying "let's build moral philosophy up the same way that natural philosophy got built up -- just like that got turned into natural science, let's turn moral philosophy into moral science".

The moral or ethical science I propose it not a kind of natural or physical science, but a completely separate analogue to them. My first objection to you in this thread was that you were putting forth some things that are descriptive (natural, physical) sciences, that give "how does" answers, as though they were prescriptive (moral, ethical) fields that gave "why should" answers; my proposal in contrast is to have completely separate analogous prescriptive investigations, that supplement the descriptive ones we already have.

None of that means that philosophy no longer has anything to say on the subject of morality: it means that philosophy's place becomes securing the groundwork for such a project, the same way that philosophy today isn't about wondering out loud whether things are all made of water or of fire, but about securing the groundwork for doing an actual rigorous investigation into questions like that.

I don't want to supplant moral philosophy, but to make the part of moral investigation that philosophy still does more philosophical, more "meta", more about pragmatic concerns regarding how to answer questions (what are we asking? what kind of thing would constitute a correct answer? how do we sort out which proposed answer that is?) than about speculating on answers and arguing about them from our armchairs. And then to augment that, not replace it, with the actual application of those philosophical answers to contingent normative questions about the actual world.

Ethical naturalism absolutely conflates "is" with "ought"; that's the whole point of the naturalistic fallacy. — Pfhorrest

You're mistaken. "If X is natural, then X is good" is a naturalistic fallacy. My agency-centered (meta)ethics, which I claim is naturalistic because agency is accessible to natural science, is not.

Also, this agency is ought-laden is in the same way institutional facts (J. Searle) are e.g. promises, traffic lights, borders, money, etc, which are made explicit as such whenever they fail to, or no longer, function. No conflated is-ought here.

Hypothetical imperatives don't, because they use "ought"s in their antecedents: "if you ought to do X then you ought to do Y" ...

And so I begin: (On pain of performative self-contradiction to do otherwise) If agency ought to optimize agency, then an agent ought to do ... This "antecedent ought" has a subject which reflexively is also its (only) object, and thus precludes any other non-natural considerations since agency is naturalistic (as stipulated above).

My first objection to you in this thread was that you were putting forth some things that are descriptive (natural, physical) sciences, that give "how does" answers, as though they were prescriptive (moral, ethical) fields that gave "why should" answers.

Again, misreading me. My objection to your objection was

I disagree. The sciences I've mentioned also explain optimal functioning of its subjects (agents) and therefore prescribe in situ strategies for avoiding or correcting suboptimization (e.g. ill-health/morbidity; unsustainable commons/negative sum conflicts; and maladaptive vices/pathologies, respectively). — 180 Proof

'Medical science', 'human ecology' & 'moral pathology' describe AND explain AND THEN prescribe 'If X, If X loses Y, then do Z to restore X or mitigate Y'. Any of them can function as an analogue for reasoning about ethics. Only philosophical reflection, however, can address WHY ethics (at all) in the first instance; science cannot ask WHY (this or any other) science.

Model-theoretic explanations 'describe HOW X transforms into -X or vice versa when applicable' and are unequipped, as I've pointed out already, to answer WHY this unfalsified explanation 'works better' than that one; after all, science is not in the WHY (this rather than that) business.This is why moral philosophy, which is in the WHY business, can't be replaced by an "ethical science" – it can't even answer WHY it is "good, and better than" moral philosophy – because science is N O T self-reflexive, or reflective, in the way philosophy is inherently. The philosopher herself is always subsumed by doing philosophy, that is, by implicitly asking WHY do philosophy? with every philosophical inquiry & expression.

Your own moral philosophy now sounds more like a form of ethical rationalism than ethical naturalism, since you're not appealing to empirical facts but to abstract practical reason, so that escapes most of the criticism I had for what I thought you thought.

science is not in the WHY (this rather than that) business — 180 Proof

You're completely correct that the descriptive, natural, physical sciences, like we have today, are not. Which is why I am as adamantly as you seem to be against using them to answer prescriptive, moral, ethical questions. It really seems like you think I'm advocating something I'm not, and that you're arguing against the same thing I myself am adamantly against.

If you like, read every instance where I've said "ethical science" as "ethical analogue of science" instead, if in your mind "science" has to mean the descriptive, natural, physical investigations into reality that we have today. I used to say "ethical analogue of science" myself, so that's fine.

This is why moral philosophy, which is in the WHY business, can't be replaced by an "ethical science" – it can't even answer WHY it is "good, and better than" moral philosophy – because science is N O T self-reflexive, or reflective, in the way philosophy is inherently. The philosopher herself is always subsumed by doing philosophy, that is, by implicitly asking WHY do philosophy? with every philosophical inquiry & dialectic. — 180 Proof

Yes, which is why I'm not saying we should do away with moral philosophy, and why I say that applied ethics (either as we have it today, or transformed as I'm advocating) is not properly a branch of philosophy.

The philosophical questions about morality are about finding the best way to answer our questions about what in particular is the right thing to do in a particular situation. Actually answering those particular questions is beyond the scope of philosophy. What I'm advocating here is that philosophy focus entirely (in its ethical endeavors) on answering those kinds of questions, the general and fundamental kinds of questions about how to tell what is or isn't good, what it even means for something to be good, etc. Moral epistemology, moral ontology, moral semantics, etc.

And then that the answers that philosophy gives to those question then be taken and extensively and systemically applied to answer the particular questions, the "applied ethics" questions. That extensive application of philosophical principles to coming up with systemic strategies for doing good in the real world is all I mean by "ethical (analogue of) science" here.

When talking about how the world should be, saying "but it's not that way" is non-sequitur. — Pfhorrest

Developing a moral theory as a "pipedream, unlimited" ...

"It's not that way" doesn't mean "it can't be that way".

The entire point of moral theory is figuring out how to change things. If they can't be other than they already are, there's no point.

What I'm advocating here is that philosophy focus entirely (in its ethical endeavors) on answering those kinds of questions, the general and fundamental kinds of questions about how to tell what is or isn't good, what it even means for something to be good, etc. Moral epistemology, moral ontology, moral semantics, etc. — Pfhorrest

I've often been fascinated by similar ideas. Just how does one investigate an action to determine if it is good or bad? I read your brief critique of Sam Harris' wellbeing frame and it seems like you are wanting to redirect this with additional analytic mechanisms - maybe I have that wrong.

I have no philosophy background but have always simply assumed that there is nothing other than the law from preventing us from doing whatever we want. Good or bad can only be determined in relation to some agreed upon criteria - utilitarianism or human flourishing - whatever. But we have to make a choice about where we care about this or not.

I read your brief critique of Sam Harris' wellbeing frame and it seems like you are wanting to redirect this with additional analytic mechanisms - maybe I have that wrong. — Tom Storm

My critique of Harris is really only a critique of his dismissal of other things. The things he actually advocates for rather than against all sound generally good to me: use science to figure out what things contribute to peoples' well-being. My difference from him is that he relies entirely on empirical observation of people in the third person to figure out what constitutes their well-being in the first place, whereas I advocate using repeatable first-person hedonic experiences to confirm what it's like for them to be well; and also that he basically says "stop doing philosophy, just define this factual state of affairs as 'good' and get on with it", but I think that it can be philosophically justified that such states of affairs are good in a way that escapes the problems of the implicit ethical naturalism he espouses.

Cool. Thanks.

:up:

"It's not that way" doesn't mean "it can't be that way".

The entire point of moral theory is figuring out how to change things. If they can't be other than they already are, there's no point. — Pfhorrest

In order to change things, you need to start with how they actually are.

In order to change things, you need to start with how they actually are. — baker

Right, which is why we need the descriptive, natural, physical sciences. But we're talking about prescriptive, moral, ethical matters here. If you say there's nothing to the latter the former then you're implying change is impossible; or at least, refusing to speak about change.

It's like if I say "we need to get to location A" and you say "we are not at location A, we are at location B". Okay, sure... is that supposed to disagree with me? I'm not claiming anything about where we are, but about where we should go. Are you saying that we can't go anywhere other than where we already are? Or are you just saying nothing at all about where we should go?

I'm saying you can't deliberately (!) get from A to B if you don't know how to get from A to B.
Further, you can't deliberately (!) get from A to B if while in A, you don't have the ability to get to B.

I think this is the case with humans and morality. It's not clear whether a change in human morality can be brought about deliberately, or whether such a change is necessarily a side effect of other things. It seems to me it's the latter.

Do a person's notions about what is moral and what isn't change over time? Yes, they do. Do they change because the person was told so? Usually not. I already mentioned Kohlberg and his theory of moral development. He hypothesized that people don't move from one stage of morality to another by an act of will or by contemplating moral issues (such as by reading texts in favor of a particular type of moral reasoning), but that the change appears to come about due to a complex mixture of factors, these factors being time, life experiences of the person, moral reasoning they have done themselves and the one they've been exposed to, and possibly more. It's so complex that the prospect of deliberate, guided moral change seems hopeless.

People's views on reality are equally difficult to change. Many people simply aren't going to engage in a full examination of evidence and argumentation to change their views on something like cosmology, evolution, race, sex, gender, medicine, epidemiology, climate, etc -- just to list some notable contentious issues where the physical sciences are ineffectual at shaping public opinion. Many people come to believe what they believe about those things via a complex set of mostly non-rational causes.

But that doesn't matter, because some people will engage in that thorough examination, and those people are the scientists. They're still not perfect, they've still got their flaws, they're still human, but at least there's an organized effort of some people out there trying to study reality the rational way, and to let everybody else know what the results of those studies are. And the existence of that social institution then influences the beliefs of the public at large through the non-rational means by which they come to their beliefs.

To put the ethical analogue of that in Kohlberg terms, I'm presuming that I'm talking here to people in the second postconventional stage of moral development, people who are driven in their moral thinking by universal ethical principles, and we're here discussing what those universal ethical principles are. We're supposed to be doing philosophy here, after all. That most people won't get on board with that because they're morally underdeveloped is no more an argument against the principles in question than many people's irrational belief-formation processes are an argument against the principles that underlie the physical sciences.