Posted on 05/02/2002 6:48:03 AM PDT by handk
Rather than go through it again, I just want to ask you, so that I have a clear idea of where you're at, if you would say that there is a way morality can be understood based on how we as individuals experience things, rather than on how it affects the functioning of society. In other words, is there a subjective basis for morality at all, or is it all objective to you? I had to ask, because you seemed to be agreeing with me, while disagreeing at the same time.
Ah, it's neither fish nor fowl to me, really. In one sense, the experiences we have are subjective and arbitrary - you experience pain, but how you feel about pain is largely arbitrary. So in that sense, the foundation is subjective. But from there, if we accept that as the foundation, then objective reason allows us to develop a full and complete system of morality.
Make sense? Think of it this way - suppose tomorrow everyone decided that pain wasn't unpleasant, and stopped feeling that pain was a bad thing. In fact, suppose everyone decided that pain was a good thing, and they enjoyed experiencing pain. If that were to happen, would it still make sense to describe inflicting pain upon others as "wrong"?
The thing itself doesn't change, only people's subjective perception of it. But we simply accept those subjective perceptions and proceed as objectively as we can from there.
Make sense?
I think so, since you seem to be restating what I said in #764: "It's like I said before, I can't know for sure if others can feel pain the way I do, but I can know that if they do, it would be wrong for me to inflict it on them. And, also like I said before, that is the foundation, which we then use logic to proceed from."
The thing itself doesn't change, only people's subjective perception of it.
And that seems to be a restatement of the point I was making in #772 (note the parenthetical contrasting): "I evaluate an experience (by which I mean, the end subjective result of the experience, as distinct from the stimuli which cause it, as the same stimuli might cause different experiences for different people) as being awful, and then say it would be wrong to subject others to that same experience (regardless of whatever stimuli are used to elicit it)."
But we simply accept those subjective perceptions and proceed as objectively as we can from there.
Hence, I would gather that you agree with what I was saying in #778: "And my dispute would be that if these alternate explanations rely exclusively on objective and pragmatic criteria (survival of the species, functionality of society, etc.), then they're seriously lacking."
Ah, I think I understand you now. No, I wouldn't necessarily sign on to that statement. The problem, as I see it, is that you're sort of mashing two issues into a single statement.
Here's the thing. To build a system of morality, I don't need to get more fundamental than the fact that people experience pain, and that they don't wish to. I can stop right there, because that decision about pain is enough for me to move forward and do what I'm interested in doing.
But does that mean that the whole thing rests on subjective criteria? No, of course not - just because we don't care why people don't like pain doesn't mean there isn't an objective, pragmatic reason for people not liking pain. I stop asking questions at the "people don't like pain" step, because that's all I need to know in order to build something resembling morality. I didn't ask why that was so because I don't need to know why it is so for my purposes - just knowing that it is so is enough.
The decision that people make in saying that they don't like pain is entirely subjective and arbitrary, if you limit your inquiry by going no further, as I did. But if you want to shift scope, you can ask yourself "why do people dislike pain?" When you do, though, you have to realize that you're shifting scope, and looking at a bigger picture. You're traveling farther than you need to in order to construct morality.
Not that that's a bad thing, but in a lot of ways, it's sort of like that airy-fairy "root-cause" analysis that the terrorist sympathizers tend to engage in. If you're exploring such things, no matter where you stop and declare "this is it - the root cause", that point is essentially arbitrary. You can always ask "why?" about that thing that you've declared to be the root-cause of whatever it is you're interested in.
So, that's all rather long-winded. But the ultimate answer, in a nutshell, is, no this thing is not necessarily predicated on subjectivity - it only appears so because of where we stopped asking questions. If we ask ourselves "why do people dislike pain?", the possibility remains that there will be an objective, pragmatic reason for that, which would have the effect of putting us right back on an objective, pragmatic foundation for morality.
Is there an objective answer to why people dislike pain? There is, but whether or not you find it compelling is up to you. It starts by realizing that casting it as "deciding" to not like pain is fundamentally a mis-statement - it worked for us before, but now we want to dig deeper. Why do people dislike pain? Mostly, they don't have a choice about it in the first place - it's completely involuntary. And why should it be that way? Hmmmmm.....
Mmmm, perhaps not quite. And I think that may be because in #778, I may have misunderstood what you were saying in #777. Anyway, the point of my statement was not to comment on what causes pain to exist. I'll re-post it so we can have it as a reference: "My dispute would be that if these alternate explanations rely exclusively on objective and pragmatic criteria (survival of the species, functionality of society, etc.), then they're seriously lacking." The "alternate explanations" that I was referring to (or thought I was referring to) were not explanations for what causes pain, but explanations for why certain things are morally wrong. I was saying that if you rely exclusively on objective and pragmatic criteria, such as I described, for determining the rightness or wrongness of something, then you're missing a huge piece of the puzzle. And that's what you seemed be corroborating in #783: "The thing itself doesn't change, only people's subjective perception of it. But we simply accept those subjective perceptions and proceed as objectively as we can from there." In other words, you seemed to be agreeing that subjective experience is a valid basis for determining morality.
Because of how I've built this system of morality, it relies in large part on the "subjective" perceptions of people - that they've "decided" that pain is not something they like, that it is unpleasant. What I wanted to get across though, is that this "subjectivity" is as much a quirk of the language we are using. Yes, things appear to be subjective at that point, using that frame of reference. But when you step back, what appears to be a subjective decision dissolves and reveals itself to have a pragmatic foundation in turn. Pain has to be unpleasant, in a sense - there's a pragmatic reason that it must be so.
That may be what I was getting at, but in re-reading, what it sounds to me as though you want to say is that we can base a system of morality on subjective experiences, rather than upon pragmatic concerns - things are wrong because we feel they are wrong, rather than because we've reasoned that something ought to be wrong due to the potential consequences. And certainly, you can do that - that's more or less the system we've got now. But you don't have to do that - a self-contained system based on pragmatic principles could be made to serve just as well.
You can construct a system of morality based on the things we "feel" are wrong, and subjectively perceive to be wrong. That might lead to some rather odd moral pronouncements, but you can do it - imagine if the notion that white pants after Labor Day were considered a moral imperative, instead of a simple faux pas. Or, to pick a real example, imagine if buying underwear and beer on a Sunday were considered morally verboten....
Ultimately, I think a society based on a practical sense of morality is likely to be freer than one that's based on our simple intuition and subjective feelings about what should be "wrong" for people to do. If someone does something that does no harm to others, why should our visceral feelings about that thing override someone else's preferences? You'd probably see no real harm in having a beer while watching the ball game, or whatever it is you do, but Islam and the Women's Christian Temperence Union both proceed from the assumption that that action is inherently sinful, regardless of how you feel about it, or whether any harm is done by it. That strikes me as unacceptable - I only suggest that we make the same calculation about the harm of a beer at the ball game in everything else as well. If we cannot show how someone is harmed by a thing, what right do we have to say that it is "wrong"? God told us it was?
GAAAAHHH!!! And we were getting so close.
What it sounds to me as though you want to say is that we can base a system of morality on subjective experiences, rather than upon pragmatic concerns - things are wrong because we feel they are wrong, rather than because we've reasoned that something ought to be wrong due to the potential consequences.
"Things are wrong because we feel they are wrong." Nnno, that's not quite right, either. Things are wrong because they are, and we can perceive that. That's more like it. I thought we were making progess, because you said in #783, "In one sense, the experiences we have are subjective and arbitrary - you experience pain, but how you feel about pain is largely arbitrary. So in that sense, the foundation is subjective. But from there, if we accept that as the foundation, then objective reason allows us to develop a full and complete system of morality." It sounds like you're agreeing that morality has a subjective (albeit "arbitrary") basis - or axiom, might I say - which we then use reason to proceed from.
But when you step back, what appears to be a subjective decision dissolves and reveals itself to have a pragmatic foundation in turn. Pain has to be unpleasant, in a sense - there's a pragmatic reason that it must be so.
But that's not really the issue. We need not concern ourselves with what the origin of pain is, or what purpose it serves, or anything other scientific understanding associated with it. All we need to know, for our present purposes, is that it exists, and that it 'urts! Thus, it becomes a foundational point of moral understanding. Can't break it down no further than that. And that, I think, is why we're at an impasse, because I think you're asking me to break it down further, and it just won't go no further.
Ah, I see now - I hope ;)
Trouble is, I just don't buy it. The problem with this thesis that there's some morality out there, some objective sense in which the things we think are wrong really are wrong, is that we all can't seem to agree on what those preceptions are. If it's a matter of us somehow perceiving something beyond us, why is it that so many of us have faulty perceptions about whatever it is? It seems to me that there are very, very few precepts of morality that are universal across societies, and the ones that come close tend to be awfully broad. Don't eat other humans. Don't have sex with your children or your siblings. Stuff like that. And while those are good and necessary precepts, they're hardly a complete system of morality. And they're not universal and omnipresent in any case - even those two precepts break down readily given the right set of circumstances.
Take something that seems obvious to us - polygamy. It is wrong for a man to have more than one wife. Sounds good, right? But there's nearly a third of the world that just plain doesn't believe that to be true. Why are we seeing something they aren't? Or are they seeing something we're not?
And it's not just that - the number of people in this world who feel that abortion is morally wrong are far outnumbered by the people who do not. There's a billion Hindus who have no particular problem with it, and 1.2 billion Chinese, not just the Orthodox Jews I mentioned earlier. Toss in the folks in the West who don't see it as a moral issue, and you're getting perilously close to a majority of humanity with no particular moral objection to abortion.
How do you reconcile that? The problem is, the only way to call it morally wrong, while being at odds with so many, and still reconciling with the belief that it exists beyond us and we simply perceive the wrongness of it, is if you basically arrogate to yourself the position of "privileged observer" - you see things others do not, and you perceive things that others do not. And why should anyone accept those sorts of claims? Why should anyone believe that you have some special insight into things that they lack?
Because that's about the only way I can think of that you can reconcile this notion that morality exists apart from us with the fact that so few people seem to see it. And even the people who think they see it tend to disagree vociferously about what exactly it is - is that beer a sin or not?
It sounds like you're agreeing that morality has a subjective (albeit "arbitrary") basis - or axiom, might I say - which we then use reason to proceed from.
...
You kept suggesting that pain is something we "decide" to not like, but I don't understand how that's true. Indeed, it seems to conflict with your statement about how it's necessary that pain be unpleasant.
I'll wrap these two into one if you don't object too much, because they're pretty closely related to each other. What I've done is to treat pain as something we make a conscious decision about, even though it really isn't. I treat it as a matter of personal preference, and act as though it were a matter of preference, because it gives me some cover to act consistently later on, when we start talking in moral terms about things that really are a matter of preference. I treat it as arbitrary, because for my purposes, it doesn't really matter that it's not, and in fact it's to my advantage to treat it as though it were.
So, when I say we "decide" pain is unpleasant, it's me glossing over the truth a bit in search of some consistency. Really, you didn't have much of a choice about the unpleasantness of pain in your life - you didn't wake up one day and decide that you just didn't like pain any more, dammit ;)
What this allows me to do is to take your subjective perceptions and treat them in an objective manner - it's a way of creating a little internal consistency in this system. I don't care particularly what your preferences are or where they came from - I simply assign them the status of presumptively valid. I accept your preferences as valid, and when I combine that with one other precept - that your preferences for yourself and your life carry more weight than someone else's preferences for you and your life - I have the beginnings of a system of morality. Treating pain as a conscious decision on your part is simply to give it all a little consistency. You don't like pain, and you don't like tomatoes. Great, I say - I don't really care why you've decided that, but they're your preferences, and you should be allowed to indulge them by not eating tomatoes and by not having pain inflicted upon you.
Sure, pain "has" to be unpleasant, in a sense, while eating tomatoes doesn't. But by treating both of those cases as a matter of preference, and then saying your preferences are valid and paramount to the preferences of others for you, it allows me to treat them both the same way. No pain and no tomatoes for you - check ;)
We need not concern ourselves with what the origin of pain is, or what purpose it serves, or anything other scientific understanding associated with it. All we need to know, for our present purposes, is that it exists, and that it 'urts! Thus, it becomes a foundational point of moral understanding. Can't break it down no further than that. And that, I think, is why we're at an impasse, because I think you're asking me to break it down further, and it just won't go no further.
What I'm saying is that if you want, you can go further - you can explore why it hurts and why it's unpleasant. But by treating it as a decision, I don't have to go further and explore those issues. I merely suggest that there is an objective foundation underneath even that. The fact that pain hurts is enough to build morality on for my purposes, but just because that's where we choose to build our foundation, that doesn't mean that there's not something underneath that also. We discover that pain hurts, and we stop there, because that's all we need to know to build a moral precept with. But we could explore why pain hurts if we wanted. And there is, IMO, an objective reason why pain hurts, why it has to be unpleasant. But we don't need that information to put together a moral precept about pain - it's enough to know that it's unpleasant, and the "why" of it doesn't matter to us for those purposes.
So, yeah, I say that pain is something we "decide" about. But that's a matter of convenience for me - it's not even really true, but by treating it as though it were true, I can lump it in with all the things you do make conscious decisions about, and call it a "preference" that should be given all the respect that your other preferences are given.
What I've done is to treat pain as something we make a conscious decision about, even though it really isn't. I treat it as a matter of personal preference, and act as though it were a matter of preference, because it gives me some cover to act consistently later on, when we start talking in moral terms about things that really are a matter of preference. I treat it as arbitrary, because for my purposes, it doesn't really matter that it's not, and in fact it's to my advantage to treat it as though it were.
Set me straight if I'm off here, but did you just admit to me that you're altering reality to fit your argument? Not that your paragraph isn't entirely without justification, but... I don't know. In any case, pain is pretty much by definition unpleasant. I'm not sure what else to say in that regard.
I accept your preferences as valid, and when I combine that with one other precept - that your preferences for yourself and your life carry more weight than someone else's preferences for you and your life - I have the beginnings of a system of morality.
COOL!!!... I hope. That is, I think you're acknowledging that morality has more than just a social-pragmatic basis. Is that what you're saying? (Please say yes)
And there is, IMO, an objective reason why pain hurts, why it has to be unpleasant.
This is a relatively minor but not insignificant point: It's true that there's an objective reason why pain hurts (and not just IYO, but AAMOF), but there is no objective description of what it is. And that's what makes it axiomatic in terms of morality. It truly doesn't matter why it hurts, what biological function it serves, what neurotransmitters it involves, whatever. Finding the answers to these questions even in their most fundamental details is not only unnecessary - as you've acknowledged - but not even useful. It would provide no further insight into morality at all. Only the experience of it provides the insight.
Well, yes, I agree with that as far as it goes. But my point in tossing that stuff out was to say that it's not just you and I who disagree on what that foundation is - there are deep divisions among people in general about what the foundations of morality are, and what the precepts of morality are.
Set me straight if I'm off here, but did you just admit to me that you're altering reality to fit your argument? Not that your paragraph isn't entirely without justification, but... I don't know. In any case, pain is pretty much by definition unpleasant. I'm not sure what else to say in that regard.
Not altering reality per se, in the same way that calling an elephant a frog doesn't make it a frog in any sense other than the trivial linguistic sense. What I'm doing there is glossing over the differences in favor of some consistency - I'm not really arguing that an elephant is a frog, just that there are some advantages to treating elephants as though they were frogs ;)
By the same token, me saying that the unpleasantness of pain is a "decision" doesn't really make it a decision, but there are practical advantages to treating it as though it were. The unpleasantness of pain may be inevitable, but the unpleasantness of tomatoes probably isn't ;)
COOL!!!... I hope. That is, I think you're acknowledging that morality has more than just a social-pragmatic basis. Is that what you're saying? (Please say yes)
I can...sort of ;)
In one sense, using the precept that your preferences for yourself should outweigh the preferences of others for you is a subjective judgement. It's a judgement call based on what I see as the consequences of deciding otherwise. I could have just as easily said that one major precept of morality is that my desires for people are paramount to everything, including their own desires. And there have been societies predicated on exactly that premise - think of the god-kings of the ancient Egyptians, for example. What the Pharoah said was absolute law, no matter what you happened to prefer - if he said "eat tomatoes", you were going to be eating tomatoes, no matter how you happened to feel about tomatoes.
But, because of the potential consequences of a society like that - not least among them, the notion that power corrupts - I make the subjective judgment that we'd like a society where people's preferences for themselves are given more weight than other people's preferences about them. It's a subjective judgement, but not a completely arbitrary one, since there is pragmatic, practical reasoning underneath the making of that judgement, and supporting that decision.
So, yes, it's subjective, but not arbitrary. How's that? ;)
This is a relatively minor but not insignificant point: It's true that there's an objective reason why pain hurts (and not just IYO, but AAMOF), but there is no objective description of what it is. And that's what makes it axiomatic in terms of morality. It truly doesn't matter why it hurts, what biological function it serves, what neurotransmitters it involves, whatever. Finding the answers to these questions even in their most fundamental details is not only unnecessary - as you've acknowledged - but not even useful. It would provide no further insight into morality at all. Only the experience of it provides the insight.
Yes. Here I think you and I are basically in agreement. For the purposes of building a system of morality wherein inflicting pain on others is wrong, it does not really matter why people think of pain as being unpleasant - the fact that they find it unpleasant is enough. We might be interested in investigating further, and discovering why exactly it is so, but that investigation is not necessary to construct a system of morality.
So, you're saying that something can only be determined "wrong" based on its social implications? There's nothing intrinsically wrong about torturing someone, even if it would have no effect on you or on society?
Let's try looking at it from this angle: You asked me earlier, what makes it "wrong" for someone to inflict pain on me. I'm beginning to think that what you meant by that question was, What consequences would result from that action? But that, alas, is not the question; that's not what "wrong" means. Wrongness, like pain, can not be defined in terms of further consequences (though doing bad things can certainly often have adverse consequences for the doer). Now you can object by saying, "Yeah, so pain is irreducible, and wrongness is irreducible, that doesn't mean one has anything to do with the other." That's true, but since we have nothing further to go on in either case, we can define one as having to do with the other, since they're just names at that point, just as you seem to have defined it in terms of its social consequences. But societies are merely constructs, whereas human experience (I can assure you) is real.
So, yes, it's subjective, but not arbitrary. How's that? ;)
It's fine, although for a different reason than you said. It's non-arbitrariness is not due to its practical effects, but to the fact that pain, by definition, hurts, meaning that it creates an effect that can only be described as "wrong", which one has to experience to understand. Put another way, the fact that I don't like tomatoes may be arbitrary, but the fact that I can experience suffering is not.
Anyway, I want to revisit what we were talking about way way back, speculating about your reactions to those coked-up thugs breaking into your house, etc. More generally, I want to bring up the subject of any feeling of righteous anger, or of remorse for actions, or of any other type of emotion that's based directly on a perception of morality. Now it's true what you've said, that simply looking at how you feel about a subject does not, in itself, determine morality. However, if you feel one of these emotions I described, in response to a certain situation, while it may not necessarily prove that how you feel about that situation correctly reflects true morality, what it should prove is that there is in fact such a thing as right and wrong, intrinsically - the same way that if you see the color red, it does not conclusively prove that photons of a red wavelength have struck your retina, but it should prove that there is indeed such a thing as red for you to be fooled into seeing.
To the gentleman who claimed that Dr. Hovind has been “called out and debunked”; OH PLEASE!!! I read that article. First off, the “proof” that Mr. Henke wanted to present to Dr. Hovind was nothing more than the same old biased ramblings, I’m sure they were made into nice charts and graphs using his own Crayola Crayons, unfortunately, charts and graphs is all evolution has ever had keeping it afloat and they don’t prove anything. Finally, Mr. Henke decided to set out for some real evidence, the laboratory reproduction of a banana evolving into a dog, within 550 days. However Mr. Henke greatly doubted his chances of convincing any of the judges on Dr. Hovind’s panel, so much so, he decided to not go through with his laboratory reproduction of a banana evolving into a dog after all. Hmmm…likely excuse. Could it be that Mr. Henke is full of hot air? Dr. Hovind’s offer still stands good people, he is simply asking for a reproduction of the big bang, or an actual demonstration of macro evolution, no charts please.
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