Moral Realism

@JLNobody,

JLNobody wrote:

Frankly, I have no idea why I said that. It wasn't, I think, intended as a challenge. But I must say that I've been too lazy to determine what you mean by "virtue ethics."

I didn't I think Lictung did?

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

...and this is precisely why pleasure and pain are relative to a reference point in a system be it physical or psychological...there´s nothing intrinsic in pleasure and pain without such reference, without the contrast of a default background...

We're in complete agreement. I personally think this "background" is the domain of practical rational activity between human beings. It is both natural and moral, objective and subjective, and as you said, physical and psychological. This is critical I think, since it acknowledges that facts and values interpenetrate each other.

The traditional philosophical view, following from Hume and others has been to fracture these categories into dualistic opposites. As a result, morality is robbed of its legitimacy as a truthful or factual state of affairs. But as many people are beginning to realize, there is no contradiction in holding to the belief that subjective values are relative to an objective domain of intrinsic worth or significance in human affairs. As people finally come around to the reality of moral judgements, I have no doubts that this will have profound implications for how we live our lives, and for how our respective societies promote the moral good for human beings.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

As an aspiring zen buddhist I find your Socratic/Fool statement problematical. As I understand the terms (Socrates was a bit of a fool as far as I could determine, and his voice, Plato, was a destructive force in Western civilization. And the Chinese fool, Hotai, was nothing but constructive and joyful. But I guess it's what we mean by fool. I think Socrates (and people like him: constipated rationalists) and Hotai (a lover and appreciator of things, and people like him) were/are consistently disattisfied and satisfied respectively because of their natures.

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@JLNobody,

...fair...Just change the name Socrates for someone more of your liking...the sentence holds...

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@igm,

Quote:

Two points: we talked before about whether pain is subjective or objective and I said that it was possible that it could be both and you seemed to say it had to be one or the other. But your statement above seems to agree with me i.e. A and B not A or B? So less black and white?

If pain has intrinsic moral value, it has to be justified objectively. Don't confuse that with the statement that pain in one sense exists subjectively. That is different than the moral realist claim that pai has objective value.

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Well I’d say you have to infer them i.e. thoughts or sensations... in others i.e. Cartesian deception could be at play. If someone was able to deceive then that means they could, so therefore your inference is subjective but you could move forward with 'collective probability' if others' agreed with you that your inference was probably correct but it's possible you'd be wrong so because of that I'd say it was subjective

You're confusing common sense empiricism with Cartesian foundationalism. Anyone with a remote grasp of Descartes will know that he dismisses empirical knowledge out of hand, and we all know where that leads him. Cartesian epistemology is a dead end, so dno't bring it up here.

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@bigstew,

You've said very little and what you've said I don't buy. You need to defend your position or carry on simply denouncing posts out-of-hand. Make your case…you haven’t so far… or have you won over everyone bar me?

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@Lichtung,

Quote:

but you have yet to show that it is a "moral" property. I wonder what you would say about a lion that savages another animal for food. Is this immoral? Moreover, what do you think about natural disasters that wipe out whole populations? I'm not sure this qualifies as immoral in the usual sense. I'm ready to call these natural evils, but a natural evil does not necessarily imply "immorality."

I am only saying that pain has intrinsic dis value. It is a straw man to say that all pain, however, is normatively wrong. We can suffer to achieve greater ends for example, so pain in those instances might be justifiable. That shouldn't confuse us though that instances of pain can ground moral judgements.

To answer your question about pain being a moral property, well we have good reasons to believe so. We know pain feels bad, and we know that pain really matters in a morally relevant sense. These arn't proofs, but good reasons to believe pain is a moral property. Obviously you can keep asking "why" but I can't argue further because the "badness" of the feeling of pain is basic, hence why it has intrinsic value. If it was reducible to other goals or non moral facts, pain wouldn't have intrinsic value. But I still don't see good arguments to believe that.

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I believe there are two things that qualify something as moral/immoral: (1) voluntariness/involuntariness; and (2) praise/blame.

These ground moral judgements? They seem conditional to me. What grounds praise/blame?

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I disagree. Virtue ethics is likely the most defensible position you could take. If you're a moral naturalist or non-reductive naturalist you can easily account for virtue and eudaimonia through practical reasoning. And consequentialism is complementary to virtue ethics, it doesn't undermine its central claims. Reducing everything to pleasure and pain I think misses the point. It might be easier to justify empirically, but isn't nearly as coherent as you might suspect from an epistemic or ontological perspective.

1. Virtue ethics assumes telelogy (proper function=eudamonia->assumes proper functions exist ), how is that metaphysically and epistemicly coherent? If you defend the practical wisdom position, you'll find yourself going in circles to defend the grounding of moral judgements themselves, or the direction practical wisdom itself takes moral reasoning.

2. When virtues conflict, how do we determine which action is more virtuous? If appeals to consequences are made in any way, virtue itself isn't doing the work. If that is the case, and I believe to some extent it has to be, it makes no sense to base ethical judgements from a theoretical stand point on virtue does it?

3. Alot of the problems with the ontological/epistemic nature of intrinsic values has to do with a lack of understanding of intrinsic values themselves, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. We havn't been able to reduce psychology/biology/sociology to physics have we? So should we give up on these sciences or should we instead critically consider the assumptions made by reductionists?

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@igm,

I've given you straight to the point replies. I'm not skirting around your concerns at all. Read again and if something doesn't make sense to you, feel free to ask why.

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@bigstew,

bigstew wrote:

From what I've been reading, it seems that there is at least good reason to believe that pain has intrinsic moral value: pain.

Premise: Pain has intrinsic moral value

So what are your thoughts?

Does truth exist? Many say that it doesn’t. So you say that pain has intrinsic moral value. Since you believe this statement to be true then you have to prove that it is true, even though many philosophers believe that truth does not exist. You will not prove all those philosophers are wrong so therefore you cannot win this argument. But you’re welcome to try. Also, many believe that intrinsic value per se doesn’t exist either. The burden of proof is on you.

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@igm,

Value is very obviously relational there is no such thing as intrinsic value...lol !
(...I don´t even understand why you keep at it...anyway have fun ! )

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@igm,

Quote:

Does truth exist? Many say that it doesn’t. So you say that pain has intrinsic moral value. Since you believe this statement to be true then you have to prove that it is true, even though many philosophers believe that truth does not exist. You will not prove all those philosophers are wrong so therefore you cannot win this argument. But you’re welcome to try. Also, many believe that intrinsic value per se doesn’t exist either. The burden of proof is on you.

And you take these arguments seriously? Have you even carefully considered the arguments at all?

I know the burden of proof is on me, hence the OP. However, if you now expect me to provide a proof that truth exists I'm going to have to seriously consider your rationality. We are all going to have make assumptions at some point, and obviously some assumptions are more credible than others. If you cannot assume at a common sense level a degree of truth, that our beliefs for the most part describe reality and inasmuch these beliefs can get things right, then there is no point in having a rational discussion with you.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

Value is very obviously relational there is no such thing as intrinsic value...lol !

Well you'll have to say why value (all value) is relational won't you? I've provided arguments for intrinsic values which are non relational (or conceiving independent). I haven't heard a peep from you that shows yet why these premises are fundamentally flawed.

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@bigstew,

I have spent half of my posts speaking in functions and relations as the basis for all things day in day out, and very honestly its not my fault you did n´t spare any time to read them or to find any value in them, to each its own...and further, unless of course you believe the world is a collection of transcendent items or failed to see the point beyond the obvious in Einstein´s relativity my opinion by now should be altogether far well established...90% of the time I spent writing in this forum I don´t care enough to present a formal argument with a principle middle and end be it because of the audience which is not worth it mostly, be it because to those who can actually think a good hint is sufficient enough...Moral, a poor third class phenomenal effect to my understanding should not even be an object of to much study, imagine then intrinsic moral values...tell you what I truly believe, the only thing intrinsic there is, is the bloody world altogether in an atemporal conception which is far beyond our temporal computational processes...that said, there´s nothing else to debate as intrinsic...but whatever bigstew, your formatted scholar knowledge probably won´t ever be able to catch what I am talking about so don´t bother to spare any of your precious time with my undigested meta-concepts... Wink

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One need not bother to DEDUCE a proof of the relativity and relationality of values. Just look around at how values vary with different personalities and cultures and it seems the case that events, objects, etc. do not present themselves with either their names or their value.
Regarding their "names," I'm thinking of the farmer who asked the astronomer how his discipline discovered the names of the planets.

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@bigstew,

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I am only saying that pain has intrinsic dis value. It is a straw man to say that all pain, however, is normatively wrong.

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To answer your question about pain being a moral property, well we have good reasons to believe so. We know pain feels bad, and we know that pain really matters in a morally relevant sense.

I agree that pain has intrinsic value/disvalue. However, there is an enormous variety of things with this character; most of which are non-moral. I can hardly be said to be acting morally when I sit down to eat my breakfast or when I enjoy the beauty of a sunset.

Quote:

These ground moral judgements? They seem conditional to me. What grounds praise/blame?

I didn't say they "ground" moral judgements. Rather, I'm arguing that they qualify or characterize our evaluative or normative claims as being more or less moral. From a neo-Aristotelian perspective, attributions of praise and blame are reducible to functional predicates.

For example, the act of praising a person for their temperance predicates a range of natural properties inherent to a biopsychological function: In this case, an optimal capability for impulse regulation or self-control with respect to pleasure and pain. Our evaluative and normative judgements on this view are straightforward deductions from natural facts.

There is an objective point of reference for what we can consider temperate or intemperate, just as there is an objective point of reference for what we can consider healthy or unhealthy: Both can be studied empirically. This general pattern of inference can be applied to all natural human functions.

Quote:

1. Virtue ethics assumes telelogy (proper function=eudamonia->assumes proper functions exist ), how is that metaphysically and epistemicly coherent? If you defend the practical wisdom position, you'll find yourself going in circles to defend the grounding of moral judgements themselves, or the direction practical wisdom itself takes moral reasoning.

Most biologists agree that there is teleonomy rather than teleology in nature. Either way, that is not relevant to virtue ethics because teleological functions are inherent aspects of human psychology. All practical rational activity, for example, is goal-directed in precisely this sense. Practical reason is what allows us to calculate the most effective means to our ends, to plan for alternative contingencies, and to resolve normative conflicts.

Practical wisdom is what discovers the highest good for man; independently of our biology. That is, it reveals a set of autonomous values and standards that are embedded in the nature of human social reality. This was covered in the first book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; But I think it was probably misunderstood or taken out of context. He presented an argument that aimed to demonstrate the practical Good by connecting our inherent function as rational creatures to our mutual ends in a society. This is more of metaphysical argument, but I think its highly persuasive. What it does, in effect, is establish an absolute standard against which human values can be judged; at least as it relates to cooperation in a political community. A similar idea is found in his famous function argument, which would provide a similar standard for judging the goodness or badness of individuals.

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@bigstew,

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Also, many believe that intrinsic value per se doesn’t exist either.[/b] The burden of proof is on you.

You've failed to answer the above point. It not so easy to dismiss this as it's at the heart of your assertion. What evidence do you have that 'intrinsic value' exists many notable contemporary philosophers believe that it does not. Check out their arguments and then come back with your rebuttal.

The Contemporary philosophers you'd be arguing against would include: A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, R. M. Hare, Simon Blackburn & Allan Gibbard Hägerström etc. etc. Whole philosophies such as Skeptism, Buddhism, value-nihilism, pragmatism.

If your arguments are based on 'Moore' then Peter Geach, for example, argues that Moore makes a serious mistake when comparing 'good' with 'yellow' ... because the latter refers to a natural property, the former refers to a non-natural one.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Fil Albuquerque wrote:

I have spent half of my posts speaking in functions and relations as the basis for all things day in day out, and very honestly its not my fault you did n´t spare any time to read them or to find any value in them, to each its own...and further, unless of course you believe the world is a collection of transcendent items or failed to see the point beyond the obvious in Einstein´s relativity my opinion by now should be altogether far well established...90% of the time I spent writing in this forum I don´t care enough to present a formal argument with a principle middle and end be it because of the audience which is not worth it mostly, be it because to those who can actually think a good hint is sufficient enough...Moral, a poor third class phenomenal effect to my understanding should not even be an object of to much study, imagine then intrinsic moral values...tell you what I truly believe, the only thing intrinsic there is, is the bloody world altogether in an atemporal conception which is far beyond our temporal computational processes...that said, there´s nothing else to debate as intrinsic...but whatever bigstew, your formatted scholar knowledge probably won´t ever be able to catch what I am talking about so don´t bother to spare any of your precious time with my undigested meta-concepts...

Classic!

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@Lichtung,

...your OPTIMAL function understanding of Morality as a rational common end in Society does not on itself grounds objectivity in this or that particular or specific value alone which is highly dependent on how a system is organized as a whole and very much on how it dynamically progresses, thus being subject to variation and readjustment...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

...your OPTIMAL function understanding of Morality as a rational common end in Society does not on itself grounds objectivity in this or that particular or specific value alone which is highly dependent on how a system is organized as a whole and very much on how it dynamically progresses, thus being subject to variation and readjustment...

I'm well aware of the dynamic composition of values. But as I said, the idea of the practical Good is more of a metaphysical thesis. You probably would not be able to derive the specific ranking of different values through concrete analysis. However, that doesn't efface the underlying metaphysics of the Good, as it's being conceived through practical reason. Aristotle warned that the study of ethics and politics were imprecise practical sciences. It is sufficient in my view that we can derive our evaluative and normative premises in a general way. For example, we can claim that virtue is a higher good compared to things like honour, wealth, or enjoyment.

This type of analysis would carry over to the political realm in a similar way. A society can be judged as "good" to the extent that it coordinates and promotes the virtuous ends of its citizens, and correspondingly bad to the extent that it fails to do so. And as I've already mentioned, goodness or badness largely depend on the properties and functional characteristics imputed to a natural object, or, in this case, a system. If those structures (e.g., schools, research communities, hospitals, legal systems, military, police forces, mass media, industries, and other institutions) are ineffective, dysfunctional, or maladaptive for the purpose of facilitating virtuous rational activity, they should be criticized, dismantled, and replaced.

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@Lichtung,

Lichtung wrote:

Quote:
...your OPTIMAL function understanding of Morality as a rational common end in Society does not on itself grounds objectivity in this or that particular or specific value alone which is highly dependent on how a system is organized as a whole and very much on how it dynamically progresses, thus being subject to variation and readjustment...

I'm well aware of the dynamic composition of values. But as I said, the idea of the practical Good is more of a metaphysical thesis. You probably would not be able to derive the specific ranking of different values through concrete analysis. However, that doesn't efface the underlying metaphysics of the Good, as it's being conceived through practical reason. Aristotle warned that the study of ethics and politics were imprecise practical sciences. It is sufficient in my view that we can derive our evaluative and normative premises in a general way. For example, we can claim that virtue is a higher good compared to things like honour, wealth, or enjoyment.

This type of analysis would carry over to the political realm in a similar way. A society can be judged as "good" to the extent that it coordinates and promotes the virtuous ends of its citizens, and correspondingly bad to the extent that it fails to do so. And as I've already mentioned, goodness or badness largely depend on the properties and functional characteristics imputed to a natural object, or, in this case, a system. If those structures (e.g., schools, research communities, hospitals, legal systems, military, police forces, mass media, industries, and other institutions) are ineffective, dysfunctional, or maladaptive for the purpose of facilitating virtuous rational activity, they should be criticized, dismantled, and replaced.

...you see but functions are not solely dependent on input characteristics on objects (and those very characteristics are the result of operational systemic value in a smaller scale)...equally they are the very relational dynamic operation input/output between those objects conditioned in a larger set, something similar to final causation...value thus is dependent on the order of primary functions over secondary ones established in a system which may well differ in another with a different organizational method or algorithm...

...in more tangible simple terms it could be said that I am what I am doing and I certainly am doing nothing alone by myself...you need two operators to establish an operation...function depends on contextual systemic background, and value arises in it...

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