DO you have the popcorn?

I've got a cup of tea and some shortbread...

I have known many people who, once they have a diagnosis and are in treatment, they claim to not only be the happiest they have ever been, but feel a sense of coherent identity for the first time in their lives. Being diagnosed can also be like a form of empowerment; being known and finally understood. — Tom Storm

Sure. Thinking of oneself as, "I am defective" -- what's not to be happy about??!

Psychology/psychiatry, like religion/spirituality, prefers compliant, obedient people.

Sure. Thinking of oneself as, "I am defective" -- what's not to be happy about??! — baker

That is not their experience. Calling them 'compliant' would be wrong and patronizing. You seem to be a pessimist, so maybe we should end here.

Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, William James, Moore, Hume, Mill, etc, all subscribed to a correspondence account of truth — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I very much doubt that. Think through the implications of 'correspondence' and you will see that it must have profound problems: in what sense does an idea or a proposition correspond to a state of affairs? To even ask that question immediately opens up the whole subject of semiotics and theory of meaning - what 'correspondence' entails, and how it relates to facts. The expression that such-and-such a proposition 'corresponds to the facts' is really just a vernacular expression. It is common-sense realism as an epistemological stance.

Now I don't reject this lightly, since it is the view of Wittgenstein, at least in the Tractatus; and I place great trust in his thinking — Banno

I wonder how you interpret these passages, then.

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world
everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no
value exists--and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any
value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what
happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is
accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since
if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.


6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that is higher.


6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is
transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.) — TLP

——



Something unstated in this thread: the implicit assumption that ‘facts’ concern ‘things’, and that if we’re speaking of morals, then what ‘facts’ can we stake a claim on? The crucial distinction to make is that in respect of morality, the chief subject of the discussion is not things but other beings - beings like ourselves.

So there is a form of respect paid to this by allowing that other beings have a right to their own moral judgements - but those judgements are, then, personal or subjective, what another believes, as distinct from oneself. That is the stumbling block in respect of moral judgements, because, unlike the facts that concern things, there is no objective adjudication as to whose view is the correct one. This is exacerbated by the general tacit rejection of any form of moral realism grounded in religion.

Curiously, I found an accurate analysis of this state of affairs in an encyclopaedia article on Adorno which says:

Adorno’s moral philosophy is... concerned with the effects of ‘enlightenment’ upon both the prospects of individuals leading a ‘morally good life’ and philosophers’ ability to identify what such a life may consist of. Adorno argues that the instrumentalization of reason has fundamentally undermined both. He argues that social life in modern societies no longer coheres around a set of widely espoused moral truths and that modern societies lack a moral basis. What has replaced morality as the integrating ‘cement’ of social life are instrumental reasoning and the exposure of everyone to the capitalist market. According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism. Within a nihilistic world, moral beliefs and moral reasoning are held to have no ultimately rational authority: moral claims are conceived of as, at best, inherently subjective statements, expressing not an objective property of the world, but the individual’s own prejudices. Morality is presented as thereby lacking any objective, public basis. The espousal of specific moral beliefs is thus understood as an instrument for the assertion of one’s own, partial interests: morality has been subsumed by instrumental reasoning.

Already in this thread, I think there are examples of exactly the kind of reasoning that Adorno is describing - which is not surprising as it’s endemic to our cultural situation. Hence many of the attempts to resolve the dilemma being completely artificial - wonderings about propositions or goings-on in infinite imaginary universes. But that is never where the problems of morality appear - they generally manifest in our relationships with other beings.

I wonder how you interpret these passages, then. — Wayfarer

I disagree with what Wittgenstein says there.

Yeah I thought you’d find it an inconvenient passage.

Something unstated in this thread: the implicit assumption that ‘facts’ concern ‘things’ — Wayfarer

This is not so far from what I said here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/537565

I have said as much, previously, and in other threads.

What of it? I've said the OP is interesting because the answer is not obvious.

So why do you take issue with that passage from Wittgenstein? It appears to me a diagnosis of the problem.

Well, it would imply that moral statements were not truth apt... and it seems that they are truth apt. Hence, there is something amiss with his account.

I thought I said that. I must be getting tired.

According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism. Within a nihilistic world, moral beliefs and moral reasoning are held to have no ultimately rational authority: moral claims are conceived of as, at best, inherently subjective statements, expressing not an objective property of the world, but the individual’s own prejudices.

According to Pierre Hadot:

twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic philosophy has largely lost sight of its ancient origin in a set of spiritual practices that range from forms of dialogue, via species of meditative reflection, to theoretical contemplation. These philosophical practices, as well as the philosophical discourses the different ancient schools developed in conjunction with them, aimed primarily to form, rather than only to inform, the philosophical student. The goal of the ancient philosophies, Hadot argued, was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos.

The reason being that in today's culture, the cosmos could not be conceived as rational, and our place in it is a consequence of chance. No need to 'put lipstick on a pig', as the saying has it.

Do you believe that if there are moral facts they can only come from a transcendent source (what's the term I need here?)? Does Plato's theory of forms contain ethics or just the values from which ethics are derived?

I was going to suggest that Wittgenstein's passage above is distinctly Platonist in character; that 'the idea of the Good' is an example of the kind of transcendent ground to which I think the passage alludes.

The problem is much of this kind was gathered up under the general heading of 'religion'. It is well-known that theology appropriated most of the best of Platonism and other ancient philosophies. And then with the Enlightenment, this became part and parcel of what was rejected under the heading of 'religion'. So, arguably, the original problem lies with Christian orthodoxy, for their determination to appropriate whatever was good in the Western philosophical tradition, and make it available only on their terms, which you had to accept, on pain of being deemed heretical (and we know what that meant.)

Anyway that's one persective. I don't know if I think it's the whole truth, but I think there's some truth in it.

Meanwhile, I found a comment from Kant on 'correspondence theory':

Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognising it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. — Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic

I was going to suggest that Wittgenstein's passage above is distinctly Platonist in character; that 'the idea of the Good' is an example of the kind of transcendent ground to which I think the passage alludes. — Wayfarer

That wiff of Plato is pretty much why I asked.

I need to be shown how you arrive at a moral fact if you don't hold some kind of Platonist account. Well, you could, I guess express a moral fact about your own beliefs.

You can obviously build a kind of objective ethical system if you first make an assumption that, for instance, the flourishing of conscious creatures needs to be the central concern of all moral positions - a kind of 'idea of Good' analogue. But how do we arrive at agreement on this?

Well, first, I'd be wary of 'objectivity' in this context. Objectivity is part of what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in respect to. Objectivity is indispensable for many subjects but it has no ultimate ground (which I think is an implication of 20th c physics). That is also part of Schopenhauer's general argument - that there is 'no object without a subject'. Whereas realism wishes to assert the reality of a truly mind-independent reality as the criterion of what is real.

But then if you situate the discussion within the context of Platonism in the broad sense, there are ways of framing that issue so that it's less baffling. I mean, after all, up until the early 20th C rejection of idealism, Platonist philosophy was mainstream. The problem is, as I said, that it has generally fallen out of favour, in fact it's violently rejected on the most part. So I think the chance of arriving at agreement is very slight. But the fact remains, in the absence of any kind of foothold in the transcendent, what are we left with? What's worth striving for, or orienting ourselves in regard to? I was referred to a book by Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good, the other day. That is the kind of approach I'm sympathetic to.

Dang. Looks like I've ended up in the wrong century. :cry:

Well, first, I'd be wary of 'objectivity' in this context. Objectivity is part of what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in respect to. — Wayfarer

I hear you. I meant objective subject to a chosen criterion. The hazards of that word...

Objectivity is part of what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in respect to. — Wayfarer

Yep. I guess you could argue the same about a beautiful art work. How else is this founded? Unless you go by personal taste or a set criterion of value.

Objectivity is indispensable for many subjects but it has no ultimate ground (which I think is an implication of 20th c physics). — Wayfarer

Objectivity and subjectivity seem simple but they are two concepts that have given me the pip over the years. I need to reacquaint myself with Murdoch's version of Platonism.

I classify myself as a moral subjectivist.
— Cartesian trigger-puppets

Do you? Why? I don't understand the need to categorise and name - doing philosophy as if it were entomology. It's as if one reached a conclusion and only then looked for the arguments... — Banno

I have read and thought about metaethics for several months now and I have constructed a bit of a theoretical framework to try and understand morality. I have heard various proponents of both normative and metaethical views and have come to think that moral subjectivism (at least some take of it) seems to more closely describe the concepts I've into developed so far. This is not to say that my concepts are correct.

The concepts that I've built are likely quite flawed If not incoherent, I'm sure. However, they nonetheless provide me a starting point for engaging in metaethical discourse.

I'll read the substantive part of your post and try to formulate a response. But are you looking for such a critique? — Banno

I would very much appreciate any critique but I must warn you that I'm a bit pedantic when it comes to argumentation insofar as I require the actual grounding propositions that warrant such an inference rather than just an assertion or an empty conjecture, and I am quick to dismiss the lack thereof. I'm just being honest about forming a new belief.

To be honest, I am not familiar with TAK. Is it a theory in epistemology? What it is that I'm trying to say is not so much that moral declarations are facts of the world but rather that moral declarations are representations of our moral beliefs and it is a fact that we hold such beliefs. For example, let's say I have a friend named Lindsay who believes that Earth is flat. I'm not saying that her believing that the earth is flat makes her statements that the earth is flat true or factual, but that it is (at least it seems to be) a fact that she holds a belief that the Earth is flat. Does that not get me anywhere?

I think of facts such as mathematical facts, logical facts, aesthetic facts, etc, and I think that some facts must represent abstract entities as well as entities that exist in physical reality. I think truth more or less is an attempt to understand the fundamental nature of objective reality.

What would you call your conscious experience right now? Is it a fact or a truth that you are having an experience? What about information? It seems that everything comes to us through information and this information is either a distorted representation that our brain and nervous system reconstructs into an interface for interacting with the external world or that all information is internally created by our sensory perceptual systems. I tend to lean towards the former.

If everything must at least come to us through information that is filtered and representative of the world, then how is that only our concepts that are concrete and that we can have a physiological awareness of can be said to be factual or true? I understand that they may not exist in reality but what does that make them? Logic and mathematics leads us independently toward similar trajectories of thought and ideas which alter our interpretations of reality.

I guess it really depends on which theory of truth we are considering, too. A correspondence theory would impose the sort of existence conditions to truth that you are extending to facts as well. I have read much less about facts than I have about truth, which has not been enough to really grasp what it is and what it can be applied to. I'd like to hear your thoughts on both.

If no ethical statements are true, then not only is it not true that murder isn't wrong but also: murder isn't wrong. — Cuthbert

This is getting really interesting. Your words, in my humble opinion, get to the heart of the issue in the blink of an eye as it were. Why should moral statements have anything to do with truth? The entire issue of moral realism and its detractors seem to revolve around the relationship between truth and morality but before we get our knickers in a twist and get all bent out of shape over this, shouldn't we ask the simple question, does morality and truth have anything to do with each other? I can't seem to think beyond this point though. All I can say with any degree of confidence is that morality may not be truth-apt, the fact that they're expressed in propositional form may just be a linguistic accident or perhaps is done out of necessity.

What pops into my head are commands like "shut the door!", "put down the gun!", etc. Commands, according to a book on logic that I read some suns ago, aren't propositions and so, can't be true or false. Divine Command Theory?

In a sense I'm envisioning, something that I don't do very often, a moral theory that can be right/wrong but not necessarily true/false.

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. — TLP

By definition, nothing lies outside the world.

In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no
value exists--and if it did exist, it would have no value.

Begging the question.

If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what
happens and is the case.

Ditto. Also 'value that does have value' is meaningless.

For all that happens and is the case is accidental.

No, most of it is at least partly deterministic.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental.

No, for the reason just given.

It must lie outside the world.

And again, there is nothing outside the world.

6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.

'Hitler was a bad man' is a proposition of ethics.

Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

'Higher' is meaningless.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

See the above proposition about Hitler.

[quoyte] Ethics is transcendental.[/quote]
'Transcendental' refers to nothing and is therefore meaningless.

(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

No, aesthetics is about beauty, which does not come into ethics.

Dear Herr Wittgenstein, we have read with interest your Ethics examination paper, but we feel you have not yet mastered the basics of the subject. Since you seem to prefer talking pretentious and inflated nonsense to logical argument, we suggest you enrol for the priesthood. Yours faithfully, The Examiners.

All I can say with any degree of confidence is that morality may not be truth-apt, the fact that they're expressed in propositional form may just be a linguistic accident or perhaps is done out of necessity. — TheMadFool

'Hitler was a bad man' is a true proposition. (He killed 6 million Jews, remember? This is not about a linguistic accident.) The challenge is to explain how it can be true. A good place to start would be to work out what property is referred to by the word 'bad'.

What pops into my head are commands like "shut the door!", "put down the gun!", etc. Commands, according to a book on logic that I read some suns ago, aren't propositions and so, can't be true or false. Divine Command Theory? — TheMadFool

'Hitler was a bad man' is not a command, divine or otherwise.

So, perhaps it is similar to the case when we state, “Onions taste awful,” that the syntax is configured in such a way to be making a general statement when in actuality, we are making a particular subjective statement.
— Cartesian trigger-puppets
Language affords one many options for expression, including sentences like "I find onions awful", "I don't like onions" and "I think onions taste awful".

So why is it that some people say “Onions taste awful,” and others say "I think onions taste awful"?

Is this the result of a conscious choice?
Do people less or more mindlessly repeat the types of sentences they've learned in primary education? — baker

I think both can be the case. We seem to recapitulate language both consciously and unconsciously. For instance, we understand the meaning of language from both personal experiences, in which terms have more or less a connotative semantics, as well as analytically, in which terms though still fluid are disambiguation and distinguished with a contextual divergence into a broader range of considered vernacular and established technical, or specialized semantics. The former being more broad and dependent upon interpretation and the latter more specific with a rigidly outlined rubric for our interpretation to follow.

But I do think that as our language evolved it was heavily influenced by the absolute and objective sense of moral values (and to a lesser extent an egoistic sense of aesthetic values) imposed by religious authority and thus retains a theocentric syntactic structure of the vast majority of time that our language's has undergone it's development. It is reflective of a time when divine command was the objective truth and fact of moral value.

Or perhaps it is a realistic truth and our ideas and beliefs are simply streams of synaptic electrochemical nerve signals lighting up the the apparatus of the brain. We just get to interpret them phenomenologically instead of sociologically.
But then how do we explain the differences between people? E.g. some like onions and some don't: does this mean that there is something physiologically or otherwise wrong with one of the groups? — baker

Differences between people stem from a unique genetic and ancestral history and from our unique environmental exposures (both social and physical). It comes from different geographic locations, historical references, familial, social, cultural, societal, political and ideological influence, etc. What makes us unique goes by the things that happened to us a neurological millisecond ago to what happened to our genes an evolutionary four billion years ago.

Not wrong. I don't understand how a moral dimension could apply to biological and aesthetic sensory predispositions. We are relative to individuals who share similar genetic structures and relative to the culture of the group we depend upon and develop under.

But I do think that as our language evolved it was heavily influenced by the absolute and objective sense of moral values (and to a lesser extent an egoistic sense of aesthetic values) imposed by religious authority and thus retains a theocentric syntactic structure of the vast majority of time that our language's has undergone it's development. It is reflective of a time when divine command was the objective truth and fact of moral value. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Even if our belief that morality is objective was caused by our or our ancestors' belief that objective moral truths came from God, that does not prove that there are no objective moral truths. We're doing philosophy here, not anthropology or sociology.

'Hitler was a bad man' is a true proposition. (He killed 6 million Jews, remember? This is not about a linguistic accident.) The challenge is to explain how it can be true. A good place to start would be to work out what property is referred to by the word 'bad' — Herg

I'm talking about moral injunctions and not about how adhering to/violating them reflects on one's character. Remember, which comes first - moral codes and these could very well be good but not necessarily true. So, Hitler could be bad but there's a slim possibility that there's nothing true/false about such a pronouncement.

Im not making a claim either way (negative or positive) regarding the issue of whether or not there is an objective morality. I think both sides have a burden of proof and I know that our ignorance doesn't entail that objective morality is false, but there is no reason to think that it is true, either.

I was responding to baker's questions here:

Language affords one many options for expression, including sentences like "I find onions awful", "I don't like onions" and "I think onions taste awful".

So why is it that some people say “Onions taste awful,” and others say "I think onions taste awful"?

Is this the result of a conscious choice?
Do people less or more mindlessly repeat the types of sentences they've learned in primary education? — baker

Not arguing for or against objective morality.

If there are moral facts, how can we know them?
— Cartesian trigger-puppets

Psychologically and socially, there is potentially a lot at stake in terms of morality. I think that sometimes (often?) it is because of these high stakes that moral statements become artificially elevated to the level of facts. — baker

What do you mean by "artificially"? And, saying that there are "high stakes" presupposes a normative value, does it not?

Read William Styron's "Darkness visible" his account of his dealing with depression and with the medical system. He says that at some point, he realized that the only thing worse than his depression was the psychiatric treatment he was receiving for it and that he focused on doing everything just to get out of the system. And no, he wasn't referring to the specific medical treatments they were using back then which would now seem cruel, but to the nature of the psychiatric approach itself, ie. that of being an inmate in a total institution. This has not changed.

Psychologists/psyhiatrists don't seem to be taking into account that patients will sometimes feign compliance just to get out of the system.