Yes and thought is our bodies doing something. It's something our brains do. (Hopefully, at least. :razz: )

Another non answer. No one is keeping score. Do you want to tag along with S and call it human nature? — Rank Amateur

It makes no sense to me why this wouldn't count as an answer to you.

Do you understand that on my view, moral stances are something that our bodies do? So if you're questioning my stance critically, you're questioning the origin of our bodies doing something, questioning why our bodies would do something where there can be such widespread commonality.

http://www.talkorigins.org

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#pred4

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html#observe

You know darn well it was about the commonality of some moral judgments not where our bodies came from. — Rank Amateur

Moral judgments are something that our bodies do in other words. So with respect to my view, you're asking about a commonality of our bodies. (Which is why I brought up the stuff about noses, blood (circulation), etc.)

No my point was what is the origin of this commonality, is it coincidence, evolution, God, something else? — Rank Amateur

So (1) our bodies, due to (2) genetics and environment, and if you want you can explain at least the genetics part by (3) evolution.

That should have been clear from the responses I already posted.

Can you take a second to tell me in your words what you understand my point to be? — Rank Amateur

You believe, for some reason unbeknownst to me, that if morality is simply something that we do as individual human beings, there shouldn't be widespread commonality on some moral stances.

It is imperative to my point for you to try and identify why we all feel that way, and not just keep dismissing it. Why do we all feel that way ? — Rank Amateur

I've addressed it a bunch of times.

First, human bodies do not develop randomly.

Do you agree with that?

Or are all these equal and valid opinions on the item in question? — Rank Amateur

Validity has to do with truth values, and in what perspective would different moral stances be equal?

I am happy to go down any rabbit hole you want.

I am not sure either you or s even understand the point I am making. And I have yet to see it addressed in a complete thought.

Most of what I am hearing is you are wrong and you don't understand.

I keep asking what I think is a reasonable and logical issue, That either you can not, or will not address reasonably and logically. — Rank Amateur

If you're talking about the unanimity thing, we have addressed it. Our bodies don't develop randomly, do they? You're not addressing that. You're not supporting the notion that there shouldn't be widespread commonalities if moral stances only occur in individuals.

The question was why is there such unanimity, and is there some pragmatic difference between near universal agreement and objectivity.


It seems what you really want to argue is if morality has a is a human or supernatural origin. I am not arguing that, I am happy to say that you can have a very large degree of objective morality without any supernatural origin. — Rank Amateur

First, I don't look at it as anything about supernatural stuff, because there are a lot of objectivists who aren't positing anything supernatural.

Re (near-)unanimity on some things (even though I think that tends to be exaggerated), the stuff about almost all of us having noses wasn't rhetorical or facetious. How and why most aspects of the human body develop as they do isn't very controversial. We don't see it as a big mystery that we almost all have noses, that we all have circulating blood if we're alive, and so on. We don't see many people believing that the only way we all have noses and circulating blood is because something outside of ourselves gave those things to us wholesale and we just took delivery of them. So it shouldn't be a mystery that the vast majority of people think that murder is wrong, either, that the vast majority of people agree that 2+2=4, that the vast majority of people don't like drinking hydrochloric acid, etc.

Re "there (being) some pragmatic difference between near universal agreement and objectivity," it depends on what the pragmatic goal is, but what is the pragmatic value of near-universal agreement in the first place? That's simply a fact about the way things are. It doesn't imply anything normatively.

It's frustrating that you can't get folks to follow through on a line of questioning about this stuff, because that could help them understand the other view. It seems almost like they're afraid to "go down the rabbit hole" though. So whenever it looks like they're getting too close to the rabbit hole, they back off.

I think that is my point. Believing in high degrees of subjectivity in moral judgments reduces them to preference — Rank Amateur

And?

I undersatand that, but it does not answer how we as human beings have near universal moral judgments on many things, if there is not some things with a high degree of objectivity- do you have a theory? — Rank Amateur

Human beings nearly universally have noses, don't they? But no one is saying that our noses aren't something that our bodies make.

In order to think that the fact that humans have something or other in common, where (almost) all of us have whatever it is, somehow suggests that the thing in question can't be of us, would only make sense if one thought that either humans are as they are more or less randomly or they have to be constituted/arranged/put in order by something outside of themselves. I don't know why on Earth anyone would think something like that, though.

What is the difference then between near universal agreement and nearly objective? — Rank Amateur

"Objective" doesn't have anything to do with commonality or agreement. "Objective" simply refers to whether something occurs independently of persons.

I don't think that anyone is arguing the relative commonality of any stances. No one disagrees that the vast majority of people think it's wrong to murder, for example.

They might make decisions that they'll come to regret, but big companies do have people whose jobs it is to analyze mountains of data--about their own business, about other businesses in their industry, about consumers, about other industries, about stock markets, about governments and economics in general, about other political, scientific, cultural trends, etc. They also involve other companies, organizations, etc. in this.

It's not like Coca-Cola, say, has just one guy who making off-the-cuff decisions where he's really spending most of his time playing Fortnite.

If one wants to persuade people of something, stop worrying about what's objectively true about the thing in question and start reading books like:

* Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
* Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact by Phil M Jones
* Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results by Judith E. Glaser
* Why People Don't Believe You: Building Credibility from the Inside Out by Rob Jolles
* The Art of Persuasion: Winning Without Intimidation by Bob Burg
* Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People by G. Richard Shell

Good points again, and I pointed that same thing out earlier. If we're all objectivists, that doesn't help us to agree. As you point out, we're all objectivists on meta-ethics, after all, and we're certainly not in agreement about that.

Aside from fields where there are formal proof procedures that are pretty well-entrenched, to persuade anyone of anything requires mastering techniques that have nothing to do with whether anything is really subjective or objective.

Causal slippery slope is about causality. Think of it literally. If you kick that pebble it will hit that bigger rock below with enough force to move it, then that rock will hit a bigger one below, and so on, until we have an avalanche.

Slippery slope aside from that doesn't hinge on causality. "If we allow gays to marry, soon people will be marrying goats and even typewriters." The idea is that people will make judgments, decisions that up the ante, so to speak, but we're not saying that allowing gays to marry will "physically" cause people to marry goats, etc.

I think you’re saying I’m not saying anything and that I think disagreeing is saying something. — Brett

???

I was simply pointing out that it's not true that "no one is saying what morality is."

What's true is that you don't agree with what we're saying morality is.

Obviously. Your problem seems to be me not agreeing. — Brett

I had no problem with it. I'm simply pointing out that you not agreeing with a claim isn't the same thing as someone not saying what something is.

Say what?

Whether one agrees with a claim is irrelevant to whether someone is saying what something is.

If Mr. Jones says that water is H2O, but I don't believe him/don't agree with him, has Mr. Jones not said what water is?

that was my point, moral or not is just preference, there is no truth. Vanilla or chocolate, Red Sox or Yankees. One is not the true answer. — Rank Amateur

Sure. And when there's no truth to Yay Red Sox or Yay vanilla, it's not a mystery to you why people care about it--sometimes very passionately--is it?

Even if that were the case, what relevance would it be?

And so far no one has been able to say what morality is — Brett

We've said, but you don't agree.

Would you say "There's no truth value in 'Yay Red Sox,' so why root for them? Red Sox or Yankees--it makes no difference"?

With your flavors analogy, you don't figure that people just buy any arbitrary flavor because it's not objectively the case that one flavor is better than another, do you?

So you think you can work out what morality is with no context? — Brett

Why "no context"? Who is proposing anything like that?

If it doesn’t have a purpose, what it’s good for, then why would it exist? — Brett

In general, not just re morality, because it can, and there's nothing (namely a survival-until-procreation disadvantage) to effectively deselect it.

I think we eat junk food because it’s easy. We dont need junk food to give us a high energy return when we gave other food that we’ve eaten for years. — Brett

Evolutionarily, we have a physiological response that produces positive feelings in response to foods with high fat content, etc., because it wasn't easy to acquire such foods for most of our history, and it's a substance that's important to have, especially when we're doing a lot of exercise, which we routinely did when we were nomadic and had to forage and hunt for food.

So, for me, first you might have noticed that I don't buy that meaning is objective.

And I've stated a number of times, including in this thread, and I'm pretty sure in response to you, that moral stances are not the sorts of things that are true or false.

In a moral context, "x is wrong," " x is bad" or "one should not do x" is an expression of disapproval by the utterer. The utterer doesn't like people doing x, it doesn't sit well with them, or they don't think that doing x is a good idea, because they don't like the notion of the sort of world that they believe allowing x will produce. That's the conventional "meaning," per functional analysis, of "is wrong/is bad/should not do."

So yes, the same thing can be right/wrong, good/bad to different people. That doesn't affect the conventional meaning of right/wrong or good/bad.

I'm basically an emotivist, and that provides a good analogy here. It's easy to understand that people might yay or boo the same thing--supporters of a team are going to yay them as they score, supporters of the opposing team will boo the first team as they score. We're not mystified in that situation what yaying or booing mean (otherwise you'd not be able to figure out who in the crowd supports which team).

Is it true that yay Red Sox? That should seem like a nonsensical question. It's the same with morality. That doesn't imply that yay Red Sox is meaningless, that it's not important to people, etc.

given the fact that collectively, phrases of this kind were meant to harm African-Americans. — Anaxagoras

What sort of empirical research have you done for claims like that, and logically, what do you believe the upshot of that fact is, assuming the empirical support for it is solid?

I see it as lying/dishonesty if one isn't forthright about what one has in mind, and one instead diverts, manipulates, etc. But, I don't see lying as a categorically bad thing. In fact, I think that lying is sometimes a good thing.

Although I don't agree with this:

I think if you are in a position to do something, and then you don't you still have the responsibility for the outcome of events. — wax

And I don't see the "runaway railtruck" dilemma as much of a dilemma. Ceteris paribus, I'd not have to think for a moment that I'd divert the railtruck to kill just one person.

However, I can see some merit to it being a dilemma to some folks because of what you point out. The way I look at it, though is that people are going to be killed in the scenario no matter what I do, so I might as well cause less of them to be killed, barring good reasons other than simple numbers why one side should be chosen over the other.

I agree. I think if we had to explain the striking degree of homogeneity with people's moral judgement, evolved mechanisms to keep communities together would be top of my list of reasons. But I'm not seeing how you're moving from the existence of a cause for moral judgement being the way it is, to the existence of a moral absolute. There's an evolutionary reason why we tend to like junk food, and tend to turn our noses up a boiled veg. It's because we're programmed to seek out high energy return foods. Now, does that make eating junk food mandatory? Is it now the case that we 'must' eat junk food, because we've identified the biological cause of the general preference for it?

I've not doubt that there is some biological basis behind our feelings on moral matters. But there's some biological basis behind all of our feelings and motivations, but that doesn't mean they're all the same, any more than we all have blue eyes. — Isaac

Excellent points.

But 2) is just an unsupported claim. — tim wood

The support is the fact that morality is simply an expression of individuals' preferences of interpersonal behavior. There's zero evidence that it's anything else.

But why would you care, after all, nothing is absolutely true or false? — tim wood

I care because the whole point of doing philosophy is to get right what the world is like.

1. All inanimate things are directed towards ends. — Aaron R

False.

2. If all inanimate things are directed towards ends, then those ends must (in some sense) exist.

False.

3. These ends don’t exist in material nature or in the immaterial minds of any finite creature.

False.

4. Therefore, they must exist in an infinite mind.

False.

At least without arguing towards any of those better, defining the terms better, etc.

that if you do not agree with me (more exactly with the view expressed - I take no credit for it), then in essence you're saying that at the least some murder is not absolutely wrong. If that's your position, that some murder is all right, then please say what kind of murder or what circumstance of murder that might be. — tim wood

Nothing is absolutely right or wrong. Things are relatively right or wrong, and one of the things that's relative to is individuals. (It's also relative to time, context, and other things, depending on the individual in question).

So as mentioned above, murder isn't wrong to someone who has the opinion that it's not wrong.

Because moral stances are only opinions that individuals have, that makes any particular moral stance not absolute.

The moral significance is a proposition or a status claimed in a truth context. A world where an action is moral is different to one in which it is not. Which is in turn different from a world without normative significance. In posing these concepts, we are trying to get something right.

These are concepts about the relations of normative meanings. They aren't "just what someone likes" any more than our sun is "just something we think is there." — TheWillowOfDarkness

So again, the challenge to you would be to present any evidence whatsoever of moral stances, normative stances, etc. being anything other than preferences that people have about interpersonal behavior.

Actually, in hindsight, I think I might have misinterpreted what he meant there. But if so, it was badly worded. Given the rest of his post, which I've just briefly gone over, it seems he might have meant that not everything about morality is relative. But then, that still misses the point. And it is different from what he was claiming before, where he clearly confused moral relativism for relativism simpliciter, which he has been rightly called out for doing.

It is easy to miss the point if you don't understand what it is that a moral relativist is actually claiming. I for one am only suggesting that morality is relative in the relevant sense which I've explained in this discussion. I'm not suggesting that every single aspect relating to morality must be relative to something in some way. I'm not, for example, suggesting that rocks are relative, whatever that means, just because the judgement that it is immoral to throw rocks at people is obviously relative.

It isn't helpful that a number of people in this discussion do not have a good understanding of moral relativism, yet they nevertheless think that they're somehow qualified to criticise it.

Morality, unlike rocks, only makes sense if you apply an interpretation inline with moral relativism. The interpretation of moral absolutism only appears to make sense on the surface, but it crumbles under analysis. No one has succeeded in reasonably demonstrating the supposed existence of any objective or absolute morality. Instead, predictably, we just get dogmatism and bad logic. Even if this discussion were to continue over another twenty pages, my prediction is that that would still be all that we get from them. — S

Good points.

which involves remembering knowledge (semantic information) — Galuchat

I'm not sure exactly what "semantic information" would amount to. Presumably with "knowledge" you don't have "justified true belief" in mind?

Statements that go beyond inner experiences -- e.g., statements about discrimination a person has faced or abuse they have received -- do need to be questioned, though. — czahar

Well, only if/because you might do something to someone else in response. That's questioning an accusation that could land someone in prison, because it could land someone in prison.