I'd like to see some evidence of this; I'm not going to convict you on your confession alone. — unenlightened

Good to know. Now how do we change legal conventions?

Well, so we need to address the messenger, too, not just the message, and many things we might need to say to the messenger could be seen as an insult.

Recently, when some men in India got convicted of rape, people took to the streets claiming that these men did not represent Indian people and that Indian people rejected their behavior.

Something similar needs to happen regarding the recent shootings in Christchurch. — Ilya B Shambat

I don't think that any widespread demographic needs to explain that they're not characteristically criminals, psychopaths, etc. Anyone who makes a hasty generalization about a widespread demographic in that vein is simply ignorant.

The only thing that politeness prevents, while maintaining honesty, is personal insults. And that's its point and purpose. Address the message, not the messenger, and politeness will get you wherever you want to go, with complete honesty, but without conflict. Politeness avoids conflict. — Pattern-chaser

I find it more problematic to assume that people are "ideal(ly rational) agents," so that we don't address why they might believe what they believe. People believe all sorts of things due to psychological quirks, due to a lack of knowledge, due to reasoning problems, etc. Their life histories, backgrounds, circumstances, etc. are all relevant. It's a big mistake to assume that personal facts and beliefs aren't entwined.

In a court of law, first hand accounts are evidence. — unenlightened

True, but I'm not a fan of it being sufficient evidence to convict anyone of anything, even in conjunction with other testimony.

That's still missing the point. :eyes:

It can be the case that not everything is relative, yet morality is. — S

Right. What was his response there anyway? I didn't understand what he wrote.

I'm not a fan of complainers, moaners, naggers, moralizers, etc. I try to avoid them in "real life." For the most part (I'll avoid detailing this for robots at the moment) my view is that persons' "lived experience" should be above criticism. What it shouldn't be above is encouragement. Encourage people to be existentially authentic, to do their own thing, to pursue whatever interests they have, to let their freak flags fly, etc.

Now I am not a physicist, but I would remind us all of a conceptual issue that might cause misunderstandings here.

We seem to have a situation where one observer sees a certain situation, and another sees a contradictory situation. A sees p, B sees ~p.

It's worth reminding ourselves that this is not new. The same thing can happen in relativistic physics where one observer will see events in a different sequence to another.

But of course what happens in relativistic is that a set of equations are used to translate between the observations. SO although A sees p and B sees ~p, A will also see that B sees ~p, and B will also see that A will see p.

That is, A and B agree that: A sees p, yet that B sees ~p.

Now it seems to me that objective reality has here not so much been undermined as redefined.

A corollary: this fits in with a view of language, logic and mathematics such that we choose a grammar for our descriptions that suits our purposes. — Banno

It's actually even "less" than that in these experiments. The two observers are not observing the same thing and reaching different conclusions about it. They're observing two different things. X in state m and y in state n. The issues arise merely due to theory about what the relationship between x and y should be, what the values of m and n should be per the theory.

We set up a computer system, including a camera/microphone and a robot arm, in a small room, so that there's also a tree, a totem poll and a bookcase in it.

We type or say or show a picture we drew of a tree. The computer responds by pointing the robot arm at the tree.

We type or say or show a picture we drew of a totem poll. The computer responds by pointing the robot arm at the totem poll.

Is the computer "doing meaning"? In other words, does "tree" mean something to the computer?

Again, this is a poor analogy. there is nothing original about morality. About any issue you can have just three basic positions: for, against or indifferent. Music is nothing like that, music, at least good music, consists in creatively original syntheses; so again you use an inapt analogy to try to shore up your inadequate position. — Janus

That's because you probably have an incorrect ontology of meaning, too. You're thinking that someone says to you, "Murder is wrong," for example, and you're simply for it, against it or indifferent to it at that point. But that's not how it works.

You have to understand the sounds you hear or text marks you read first. That involves doing something unique in your own brain. Part of that involves meaning assignments, which is also doing something unique in your own brain. These unique things do involve original syntheses. Then, in order for you to have a moral stance on anything, you have to make a judgment about it, a la making an evaluation--stating how you feel about something, whether you like or dislike it, whether you prefer one thing to another, etc. Otherwise it's not a moral stance for you at all.

Yes, they created the White Album. My original point was that saying that T Clark was saying that morality was somehow created was a straw man, but then I got confused by your reply to that. — Noah Te Stroete

Ah, re "creation." Why would creation be any more of an issue there than it is for music or the other arts?

But they aren't different. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah, they are. And just in the same way. One refers to making an evaluation--stating how you feel about something, whether you like or dislike it, whether you prefer one thing to another, etc.

The other amounts to trying to get right, via stating a proposition, some state of affairs.

I'll leave it at that for the moment.

Just as with "opinion," there are different senses of "judgment," and you're conflating them.

At any rate, we can just ignore that and pretend they're the same sense of the term. So what's any evidence of something extramental matching a moral judgment?

Nope, That not everything is relative. — tim wood

I don't understand this response, unfortunately, especially in context.

No doubt some morality is relative - although I think the issue of contradictory imperatives is a problem for any so-called relative morality. But all I claim is that it's not and cannot be all relative — tim wood

If it's individual judgments it's going to be relative to the individual making the judgment.

Written by someone confident in his understanding of the words "true" and "truth." I'd ask you to define them, but I know you cannot. The best you can do is indicate that there are cases when both words can be meaningful. — tim wood

I've posted my truth theory here a handful of times over the years:

‘P’ is true for S iff S judges ‘P’ to have relation R to either S’s phenomenal P, and/or S’s stock of previously adjudged true propositions, depending on the relation R. Relation R is whatever truth theory relation S feels is the appropriate one(s)—correspondence, coherence, consensus, pragmatic, etc.

So in other words, what it is for some proposition, 'P' (quotation marks denoting the proposition literally as a sentence), to be true to some individual, some S, is for the proposition to have the relation R to S's phenomenal P (their phenomenal perception etc. of some state of affairs) or their stock of previously adjudged true propositions, in S's judgment.

That's all that truth value is.

I don't think you "create" morality. I think you make moral decisions based on a complex set of social and personal psychological factors. — T Clark

You're creating it for yourself in the sense of you making the judgments or decisions. Morality is those judgments. You can't literally receive them from elsewhere.

Well, but in the metaphysical sense, the point is that the music you're hearing on the album is a creation of the Beatles and not simply something they're a conduit for, where the identical thing existed outside of them or prior to them. That's not to say, of course, that they didn't have lots of musical influences (and some pieces on the album are pretty clearly kind of a variation on something else, like "Revolution 9" being very similar to John Cage's Rozart Mix), but in a very literal sense, they're creating that music rather than something else creating it.

But doesn’t that suppose by the regression of causality that the Beatles created themselves? — Noah Te Stroete

? No. You mean to tell me that you don't understand what people are referring to when they say that "the Beatles created the White Album"? Hopefully when people say that you understand at least roughly just what they're saying the Beatles did and didn't do, and you don't respond with, "By regression of causality the Beatles created themselves" or "The Beatles didn't create the White Album. It was actually a complex of societal, cultural, musical, etc. institutions interacting with the Beatles that created it."

I don’t think he is saying that. That’s a straw man. — Noah Te Stroete

You mean that he was saying in conjunction with individuals? Yeah, I meant that. I wasn't being that persnicketty about the wording there, I was just more or less copying the way he phrased it. The point is that we don't say that society, earlier musicians, etc. were just as much the creators of the White Album as the Beatles were.

That's the same sense in which folks like me are saying that individuals create morality. We're not denying social influence. But social influence isn't the same thing. Just like musical influence isn't the same thing as any particular tune/piece on the White Album.

Sure, but they didn't develop their musical tastes, knowledge, understanding, and vision by themselves. They heard all kinds of music all through their lives. They've acknowledged the influence other musicians have had. They used standard western chord structure and musical formulations. Their music was played on regular AM radio stations and they had to tailor their music to their listeners. — T Clark

Right, but there's a manner in which it makes sense to say that the Beatles created the White Album themselves, rather than saying that what created it was a complex of societal, cultural, artistic, musical, etc. institutions, as if the complex of societal, cultural, etc. institutions should be getting the royalty/publishing/licensing payments.

The sense in which people (like me) say that individuals create morality is the same sense. We're not denying influences and such, but the influences aren't the same thing as the stuff we're saying that individuals create.

Although you copied my quote directly, you misquoted me in what you wrote. I said "It involves a complex interaction of societal, governmental, religious, and cultural institutions." Do you really think you created your morality out of nothing but your own self? Your parents had nothing to do with it? Do you really believe you created your mind and heart without being influenced by the society and culture around you. To me, that shows a profound lack of self-awareness.

I do think, although I didn't mention it, that a lot of our morality does come from "human nature" whatever that means, I guess it means some sort of genetic predisposition, to behave in a way that makes it easier for us to live together. As I've said many times, we are social animals. We are born to like each other. — T Clark

Would you say that the Beatles created the White Album by themselves?

1) relativism itself is subject to its own radical critique. Relativism itself, then, is relative. Which can only mean that not everything is relative. — tim wood

There are a number of problems here:

(1) You're treating "morality is relative" in the manner of "everything is relative." The two claims are not the same.

(2) "Relativism is relative" is redundant in one sense. Ontologically, if something is relative, then of course it's the case that ontologically the thing in question is relative.

(3) "Relativism is relative" could refer, on the other hand, to the belief of relativism being relative. And again, that's certainly the case, as there are people, like you, who believe that morality is not relative.

(4) People often say "Everything is relative" can't be true, because they see truth as necessarily being "absolute" and usually objective. Of course, not all truth theories have truth as absolute or objective. Part of the issue there is if we're conflating truth with facts. If we look at "Everything is relative" as being something like "the name of a fact," then there's only a problem if one insists that facts are some sort of real (objective) abstract. Otherwise, we're back to (2), and there's no issue with relative ontological things being relative. They wouldn't be relative ontological things otherwise.

A simple example: a chair. A chair is absolutely a chair. — tim wood

I'm not sure what that would be saying. For one, as you said above that part, "absolute" would need to be defined. That would help in figuring out what you're saying there.

You might just be asserting identity--A is A (from perspective x, at time T, etc.)

Thinking that relativists might be denying the above would be a straw man.

No problem. It's a vast wonderland to get lost in once you go down the rabbit hole . . . as are most philosophical topics.

No, I don’t think meaning is a thing. It’s a relation between the associated mental thought and the referent given how a word or symbol is used (I think). — Noah Te Stroete

To me that seems like you're positing something additional to what I posit. Because on my view the relation in question is a property of the "associated" mental event. In other words, the "associated" mental event and the relation in question are the same thing. So I have the mental event, the referent, and the behavior (how the word or symbol is used). And you have all of those things plus a relation that's apparently something more than those three whatever-you-want-to-call-thems (I'd say "things" but people often seem to use "thing" in a technical way)

Classifying as an argumentum ad populum the claim that that appeal to a broad level of intersubjectivity is evidential re morality by playing with the word 'prevalent' and turning it into 'popular', which has different implications, misses the mark. For example, that pain is generally felt as a bad thing is evidential of the general truth of the moral precept 'We ought not to inflict unnecessary pain', and that can't be effectively challenged by claiming we're only appealing to what people popularly believe concerning the feeling of pain (as if there was some kind of free choice involved). No. Pain in itself, its nature, its prevalence, and its effects, not popular notions concerning it, is what's morally salient here and moving away from that is misleading. At the very best, inapt. Which was the specific charge made, and that I'm supporting. — Baden

So the reason I don't usually write long posts, especially to particular people, is exemplified here. I addressed all of that, but you just ignored it.

The expert on apt language usage thought that liking and admiring things might be what we're talking about in this context:

"Morality consists primarily in how people's judgements are borne out in action not how much people like or admire those judgements."

So does argumentum ad populum refer to claims that people like or admire?

The expert on apt language usage thought that liking and admiring things might be what we're talking about in this context:

"Morality consists primarily in how people's judgements are borne out in action not how much people like or admire those judgements."

Re the etymology of "popular": "late Middle English (in the sense ‘prevalent among the general public’)"

Is pain popular? — Baden

Yes.

Maybe you should trying learning more than one sense of a term?

But you saying that pain is "popular" because it is "frequently encountered" will rightly result in people laughing in your face, — Baden

This underscores your philosophical Achilles' heel. You formulate views based on popular belief, popular behavior. Conformity to the norm, to the status quo, is your arbiter.

Nice attempt to shift the goalposts from the original point in question, — Baden

Nice attempt to cover not understanding context.

is constitutive of what's moral because it reflects commmonalities in the human condition unbeholden to the local, i.e. it's an appeal to the broadest level of intersubjectivity. — Baden

This amounts to forwarding an argumentum ad populum. Basically, "It's the answer because it's popular."

by playing with the word 'prevalent' and turning it into 'popular', — Baden

Some sort of language expert you are when you're not even familiar with ""frequently encountered or widely accepted" as a definition of "popular."

and that can't be effectively challenged by claiming we're only appealing to what people popularly believe concerning the feeling of pain — Baden

Yeah, it can, because your argument, particularly in light of the word "truth," is simply an argumentum ad populum. You might not understand that, or maybe you do and you'll just deny in the vein of a political strategy, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an argumentum ad populum.

Pain in itself, its nature, its prevalence, and its effects, not popular notions concerning it, is what's morally salient here — Baden

To not be an argumentum ad populum, the prevalence of pain, and either the mention of opinions about it, or an analysis of it in terms of preferences about it (a la "it's not pain if someone likes it"), can't be presented as if it has something to do with "pain is morally bad" being a "moral truth."

Pain in itself, its nature, its prevalence, and its effects, not popular notions concerning it, is what's morally salient here — Baden

What is the P that I'm both asserting and denying?

you recognize pain and harm as salient, but only when it's inflicted physically, — Baden

Even when "physical" (in quotation marks because "as if anything is not physical"), I don't frame any moral stances simply on the notions of pain or harm.

immunize yourself against any possibility of a rational challenge — Baden

Ultimately there can be no rational challenge for morality, as moral foundations can't be rationally derived.

Now that sequence of silliness is worthy of a lol. — Baden

Too bad you don't feel it's worth a counterargument that holds water and that isn't simply a bunch of posturing and attitude.

In short, you have zero of sense to offer on the subject and when that's pointed out you retreat into the usual nonsense, 'it's just an opinion' etc. — Baden

And here you don't even understand the most basic things I'm claiming. My metaethical views are not at all "just opinions." They're reporting the objective facts of what ethics/morality is.

One piece of advice often given to authors is "Write so that it would be understandable to a reasonably intelligent 10 year-old." Keeping that in mind can help you keep things relatively simple, straightforward and help you remember to explain things sufficiently.

Through shared meaning, communication, socialization. — Noah Te Stroete

Re shared meaning, for example, is your view that people are literally given meanings from others, kind of like you might hand a football to them, say, so that you share that same football with them?

You've got to be kidding me. "Popular," in context, is about admiration you'd say? The argument ad populum fallacy has something to do with liking or admiring the claim in question? lol

Isn't "frequently encountered or widely accepted" a common definition of "popular"?

It comes from a variety of sources. One is religious belief ('the gods have told us what to do, so we ought to do it'), another is social programming ('our leaders have told us what we should do, so we ought to do it'), and a third is the one I mentioned earlier, the recognition that pleasure is good and pain bad, and the entirely reasonable inference from this that we ought to promote pleasure and reduce pain. [\quote] — Herg

Again, if morality is a judgment or assessment of behavior, how can someone else make a judgment for us? If you're saying that we literally receive a judgment from someone else, how does that work?

I already gave my views of the extra-mental in I believe it was the “Horses are Cats” thread. Nothing we can speak about is truly extra-mental. Are you asking me if judgments or assessments can occur in the material realm? That seems silly. — Noah Te Stroete

So then how is morality not of individuals? Are you positing some sort of communal mind?

Morality does NOT come from the individual. — Noah Te Stroete

Would you say that morality is something other than judgments/assessments of behavior? Or is it that you think that judgments or assessments can occur outside of minds somehow?

The way you could constantly misunderstand English is irritating. Look up a dictionary on this too and if you still can't figure it out, I'll tell you. But make an effort. — Baden

Not near as irritating as your attitude. Presumably I'm challenging that there is any difference in this context, right? So how about supporting the notion that there's a difference?

In general:

Try to keep things as simple as you can while still expressing what you need to express.

Keep in mind that readers don't necessarily have the same background as you, the same views as you, and they might not define terms the same way that you do. So provide context, and provide definitions when useful.

Keep your writing logical and focused. Progress from a set of premises or a thesis to a conclusion via some logical progression. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the vein of a formal argument, but there should be at least an informal flow to it. Remove tangents that aren't necessary for the central argument. If your thesis incorporates even a handful of different issues, especially if there is controversy about some of them, consider breaking things up into separate papers/threads/comments.

Not important, I'm more interested in the general point, which is that we're all apt to overestimate our moral autonomy and when it comes to the crunch, fall mostly in line, often inventing some reason why we 'had' to. — Baden

You can't be non-autonomous when it comes to your ethics, because no one else can make a judgment for you.

The difference between prevalence and popularity is?