That's what I was talking about, too. I was talking about the stagnation vs. volatility of meme mutation.
Oh, my mistake. I've not heard it put quite that way before.
Is a fin more fit than a claw?
It would depend on the context, since it would depend in which would increase fitness. Different behaviors can increase or decrease fitness depending on environmental contexts. (As in, I don't know which, but I would guess--like with most things--a balance would need to be stuck.)
you ARE talking about population size? What on Earth is the metric, here?
Fitness, from the biological idea of fitness. "Population size" is too narrow a metric, because depending on context that can be helpful or detrimental for the continued flourishing of a society.
I think you need to understand that you can't "help evolution." Evolution is simply what "is."
For example, I say I'm "helping evolution" by killing every human without naturally blonde hair. The result will be a population entirely of blondes. That will be the "evolved" population, because "evolution" is the change in the genetics of a body of organisms as genetic drift occurs and selection takes its toll -- in this case, I represented the deadly selective environment. But it's absurd to say that what I did was "right" or "moral." Evolution doesn't "want" anything whatsoever. It doesn't "want" the "flourishing" of any species. It's just that organisms with traits adapted to their environments tend to persist.
Fitness, from the biological idea of fitness. "Population size" is too narrow a metric, because depending on context that can be helpful or detrimental for the continued flourishing of a society.
"Fitness" is not a target metric, fitness is the degree to which an organism, based on its properties, facilitates a target metric. Your target metric appears to be the word "flourishing," which apparently is not "has a large population size."
What does "flourishing" mean? Does it have a coherent definition, or is it a philosophical siren, dooming every conversation that depends on it to endlessness and fruitlessness? Everything I have read indicates that it is the latter; it's a word that lacks a positive definition, and is instead what is left after realizing that every coherent target metric, if declared, seems to yield absurda.
If the word means, "Psh, you know, the good stuff," then we have just woken up to find ourselves still docked at port.
Your target metric appears to be the word "flourishing," which apparently is not "has a large population size." What does "flourishing" mean?
Flourishing is “to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes generativity, growth, and resilience.”
However, to me this idea of "flourishing" and "social fitness" is something that would require study to fully understand. You would have to look at human history and start to really break down what worked and what did not work. Propose theories and ways of testing those theories (like simulations).
There is no "health" metric. You can talk about your weight, your body fat percentage, the degree to which you're capable of doing physical activities of which you're fond, whether you know you're dying and how long you have, etc. But "health" itself is too incoherent, and/or ambiguous, and/or many-faced to be used for measurement.
You can measure fitness, however, and state something is more fit than something else.
Sure. In the example above, blondes would be most fit. Fitness means nothing except against a selective environment, which could select for anything. Evolutionary fitness is not synonymous with "goodness" in terms of things humans value in life.
But, you can use it as a comparative metric. We know that the behavior of murdering everyone would be less fit than prohibiting murder.
And if your metric is population size, then forcing every fertile woman to have children would be more fit than not. You need a coherent goal metric. Bandying about words like fitness in a vacuum of value fails to find the El Dorado of moral solutions; it doesn't even leave port.
Flourishing is “to live within an optimal range of human functioning,
"To live within an optimal range of human functioning" has a dangling value reference in the word "optimal." This definition so far adds no information.
one that connotes generativity, growth, and resilience.”
No. Vague connotation of a panoply of items does not get us coherence. That's textbook ambiguous "many-faced-ness," like the "metric" of "health."
It's one thing for a definition to be fuzzy. Fuzziness is blurred boundaries along a single dimension, like "warm <-> hot." "Flourishing," however, like "health," is like a 20-sider with various faces, some of which are incommensurable.
It's very easy to mistakenly think that ambiguous, many-faced ideas are coherent. That's because when you imagine the concept, you are provoked to imagine discrete things. Your brain creates an analogy scene. Perhaps you imagine flowers growing in fast-forward across a field, shining silver buildings popping up, a rainbow over a bustling morning marketplace, a happy family holding their newborn child, a spaceship blasting off, two young girls playing a cooperative video game together, two enemy warriors shaking hands in a truce, a Native American tribal dance around a fire, two monks giving a toast over a new batch of beer, a serial killer being found guilty, a pod of dolphins saving a toddler from drowning, etc.
Maybe that's what you think of when you think "flourishing." That's what I think of!
But that doesn't make it have a coherent definition sufficient enough to be used as a metric.
Though extremestan raises some good points about "fitness" possibly being vague or undefinable, I think I could be convinced that it's possible to derive a metric for evolutionary fitness.
But I have a couple of other objections to your framework:
First, I don't understand why I should select "fitness" or "evolution" or whatever as my value referent. I understand that evolution arguably points towards "fitness," but why does that make "fitness" good, moral, ethical, or valuable. If I say "fitness doesn't matter, instead the highest ethical value is to collect as many purple objects as possible," how do you prove me wrong? Why is "fitness" better than any any other arbitrary value system I could choose.
Second, I don't think your ethical system actually leads to anything resembling what most people think of as ethical results. I'm still not totally sure whether you're talking about biological "fitness" versus some kind of cultural or memetic "fitness," but I'll try to address both.
We know that the behavior of murdering everyone would be less fit than prohibiting murder.
How do we know that? From a biological fitness perspective, it might be highly desirable for me to commit mass murder. For instance, if I am some kind of super-villain and I murder everyone on earth except a dozen young women whom I force to procreate with me at gunpoint, my biological fitness (as defined in the wiki article you linked earlier) might increase astronomically, since all future generations of humans would be my offspring.
Likewise, from a cultural or memetic fitness perspective, the same supervillain scenario might be highly "fit." If a component of my personal values/ethics/culture says "kill everyone except a few women to procreate with," then (assuming I'm successful in doing so) my cultural fitness will increase, since all other value systems on earth will die out, and I can pass my value system onto my offspring.
Looking at less ridiculous scenarios, your system still breaks down. Biologically, rape can be a very "fit" behavior in certain circumstances, since it increases the number of offspring the rapist is likely to have. As long as the rapist can avoid getting caught, he has an evolutionary incentive to rape.
And from a cultural or memetic perceptive, behaviors like the conquest and/or enslavement of other cultures will tend to make your cultures' memes and values propagate. The settlers of the Americas spread European culture and values to the natives by conquering their land and converting them to Christianity, a process that caused a great deal of strife and suffering. Likewise, slave traders spread European and American culture to the slaves they brought from Africa. Both of these behaviors are arguably highly "fit" from the perspective of propagating and preserving a culture, but are considered ethically and morally repugnant by nearly everyone.
"Fitness" is not a value referent at all. It's like saying "excellence" is a value referent. It means nothing in a vacuum, but requires an implicit value referent to receive meaning (for instance, "excellence at playing basketball").
"Fitness" is not a value referent at all. It's like saying "excellence" is a value referent. It means nothing in a vacuum, but requires an implicit value referent to receive meaning (for instance, "excellence at playing basketball").
I agree with you, but I'm willing to entertain the idea that Taylor could conceivably supply a generalized definition of "fitness."
However, even if we could all agree what "fitness" means, I'm not sure how Taylor could (1) show that "fitness" is the "correct" value referent and therefore should be selected to the exclusion of all other values, and (2) show that evolutionary fitness leads to anything resembling ethical results.
Honestly, I have never heard satisfactory answers to (1) and (2) even for more mundane utilitarian or "human flourishing" definitions of ethics. In the end, this is why I accept your basic framework that all ethical statements are relative to a specific value system. If there was a universal definition of ethics, it would need to meet (1) and (2).
Well, evolutionary biology already supplies a pretty good definition of the term "fitness." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology)
They'd have to or it wouldn't be much of a field. It takes very little legwork to adapt that definition to apply to behaviors instead of genetic traits.
Sure. In the example above, blondes would be most fit. Fitness means nothing except against a selective environment, which could select for anything. Evolutionary fitness is not synonymous with "goodness" in terms of things humans value in life.
...
And if your metric is population size, then forcing every fertile woman to have children would be more fit than not. You need a coherent goal metric. Bandying about words like fitness in a vacuum of value fails to find the El Dorado of moral solutions; it doesn't even leave port.
...
"To live within an optimal range of human functioning" has a dangling value reference in the word "optimal." This definition so far adds no information.
I think what I am proposing is very analogous to the field of economics. What is the "optima" state for the economy to be in? What is the "right number" for our GDP, GWP, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average to be at forever?
Those aren't questions economists can really answer, but they can tell you what is 'better.' They can work on "improving" the economy even if it will never be "perfect."
That can propose theories and provide historical backing, empirical research, and so on for those theories. They can't run out and force nations to follow those theories, but they have other ways of testing them and providing backing for them.
They might not know what is "optimal," but they do know what is "preferable."
Well, evolutionary biology already supplies a pretty good definition of the term "fitness." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology)
They'd have to or it wouldn't be much of a field. It takes very little legwork to adapt that definition to apply to behaviors instead of genetic traits.
It takes the leg-work of "referring to a metric." In the case of evolution, it's "genetic persistence." If "genetic persistence" is what you're trying to optimize, then we're back to the questions I was asking several posts ago.
Those questions include:
* Why ought that be the metric from which an objective morality flows? (Note that by "ought," I am demanding a parent justifying goal. If you proceed to provide that parent justifying goal, I will then ask why ought we care about that goal, demanding a parent justifying goal for that. It doesn't end; this is the realization of existentialism -- there is no ultimately rational source of values or morality -- and it is completely true.)
* If we ultimately value genetic persistence, it means we don't like mutation. Is genetic stagnation really part of your proposal?
Again, evolution doesn't "like" fitness. Evolution "likes" the fit and the unfit. It's just that "it kills" the unfit. You have to value survival walking in; evolution won't tell you that you should want you and your genetic progeny to survive.
I think what I am proposing is very analogous to the field of economics. What is the "optima" state for the economy to be in? What is the "right number" for our GDP, GWP, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average to be at forever?
Resilience is a metric. "That which simultaneously connotes each of resilience and growth and generativity" is not a metric.
Again, this would only be relevant if you deny that you can measure fitness as a relative quantity, IE that something can be shown to be more fit than something else.
Are you denying that is possible?
In the case of evolution, it's "genetic persistence." If "genetic persistence" is what you're trying to optimize, then we're back to the questions I was asking several posts ago.
Again, I am not talking about biological evolution, I am talking about social evolution.
I am not trying to maximizes the fitness of genetic traits; I am trying to maximizes the fitness of moral behaviors.
As I stated in the OP, I am not attempting to evaluate the morality of mucking around with the human genome.
Those questions include:
* Why ought that be the metric from which an objective morality flows? (Note that by "ought," I am demanding a parent justifying goal. If you proceed to provide that parent justifying goal, I will then ask why ought we care about that goal, demanding a parent justifying goal for that. It doesn't end; this is the realization of existentialism -- there is no ultimately rational source of values or morality -- and it is completely true.)
I believe YOU already answered this question for all objective morality earlier on the thread. As in, no one has to agree with me.
I could go on to list the pros and cons of my version of morality, but--as you say--you can simply deny the value in all of them.
I could--for example--state that Whoever set up the Universe clearly made some things fit and some things unfit because They wanted one kind of behavior to flourish over the other, but you could just respond with a "why should we care about that?" ad nauseam.
Again, evolution doesn't "like" fitness. Evolution "likes" the fit and the unfit. It's just that "it kills" the unfit. You have to value survival walking in; evolution won't tell you that you should want you and your genetic progeny to survive.
I've had the teleology argument with Crashing00, and I agree. You do have to presuppose that you value the survivability of the human race, correct.
Do you?
Again, this would only be relevant if you deny that you can measure fitness as a relative quantity, IE that something can be shown to be more fit than something else.
Are you denying that is possible?
This is literally impossible without a value referent. It's like talking about "excellence at specific sport X" without telling me what X is. Fitness in evolution is "excellence at persistence in terms of what the environment demands."
Quote from Taylor »
I am not trying to maximizes the fitness of genetic traits; I am trying to maximizes the fitness of moral behaviors.
I wasn't talking about "fitness," I was talking about the metric to which "fitness" is supposed to be referring. You NEED to stop confusing "excellence" and "the sport at which you're excellent."
If you're trying to maximize the fitness[] of moral behaviors, you need to fill in that "[]" with the goal you're reaching for. You can't put "fitness" in there. "Fitness[fitness]" is completely meaningless. Fitness[flourishing] is near-useless because the term "flourishing" is many-faced and ambiguous to the point of incoherence. Evolution employs "fitness[gene persistence]," but you say that's not what you're talking about.
Quote from Taylor »
I believe YOU already answered this question for all objective morality earlier on the thread. As in, no one has to agree with me.
When I said that, it was because I was talking about the semantics of a term. I might define justice as "retributing in proportion to the infraction with the goal of deterrance, social protection, and rehabilitation," but someone else might define it as "a hot dog."
There is no purely objective morality, as in, morality divorced from the preferences of one or more agents. Folks can disagree with me on that, but they'll be absolutely mistaken to do so.
Quote from Taylor »
I am not attempting to make any value determinations on genetic traits, only behaviors.
You contradict this with the next thing you say:
Quote from Taylor »
I've had the teleology argument with Crashing00, and I agree. You do have to presuppose that you value the survivability of the human race, correct.
Do you?
The human race is a collection of organisms with a fuzzy, but limited, scope of genes. And yet, you're saying you don't care about genes. Which is it? You need to understand that telling me "I don't care about genetic persistence" and also "I care about human persistence" is a contradiction.
I value the survival of the human race, and also the survival of many other species of organisms. Also, the survival of various world heritage sites and natural formations. Perhaps what I value is also valued, 100%, by every other organism of species Homo sapiens. Great. That means we can create a "morality by universal Homo sapiens consensus." Again, we have not left port for "objective morality El Dorado." Calling my dog a unicorn does not make magical horse-like beings, each with a single horn, exist.
Here is the thought experiment you have to solve in order to truly make the "objective morality unicorn" exist: An army of extra-terrestrials named the Krol'Tar comes to Earth in an invasion force, and decides to start killing humans willy-nilly. You manage to make contact with their general, and tell him that their invasion is morally wrong. He asks, "Why?" You have to be able to tell him something that cogently answers his question without appeals to anyone's subjective interests (including attempts at sympathy).
Since you seem to feel that the biological definition of the term is too vague, could you give me an example of what exactly you're looking for?
For example, what metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of the economy's well-being? What metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of a person's physical health? What metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of a person's mental health?
Or do you feel the field of medicine, psychology, and economics suffer from the same chronic problem?
For that matter, what metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of 'scientific advancement?' Or is all of science also susceptible to this?
What would you say lets us know if we are moving forwards or backwards as a civilization? Is everything relative? Are all fields of study shams?
You're not being reasonable in your requirements for this, and I'm pretty sure you know that.
You contradict this with the next thing you say:
No, because I am still talking about behaviors that add to survivability of the human race, not genetic traits.
Here is the thought experiment you have to solve in order to truly make the "objective morality unicorn" exist: An army of extra-terrestrials named the Krol'Tar comes to Earth in an invasion force, and decides to start killing humans willy-nilly. You manage to make contact with their general, and tell him that their invasion is morally wrong. He asks, "Why?" You have to be able to tell him something that cogently answers his question without appeals to anyone's subjective interests (including attempts at sympathy).
My philosophy wouldn't be able to convince him, nor is it meant to. He's not human, and my philosophy is meant for human societies. I could explain why it would be wrong from a human perspective, but I could give him no reason to care about that perspective. Maybe the Krol'Tar are more sentient than humans anyway.
I also couldn't tell him which economic principles would be best for his Krol'Tar home-world, or what makes a Krol'Tar healthy mentally and physically.
could you give me an example of what exactly you're looking for?
When we're talking about "fitness[]," I want you to fill in that "[]" with something that is not "flourishing" or "fitness." Something coherent and single-faced.
Of course, when you do, I will say, "There's no ultimately rational reason that ought to be valued." This is because objective morality is false.
When we're talking about "fitness[]," I want you to fill in that "[]" with something that is not "flourishing" or "fitness." Something coherent and single-faced.
Of course, when you do, I will say, "There's no ultimately rational reason that ought to be valued." This is because objective morality is false.
Do you take a relativist position, or something else (say, a subjectivist position)?
If you gave me examples--like in those other fields I mentioned--I would have an easier time giving you what I want.
Here's an example. Let's say we're talking about fitness[basketball]. Basketball involves many different skills, and many different metrics. You could rate a person's skill at ball-handling, inside shooting, free-throw shooting, three-point shooting, passing, blocking, stealing, rebounding, etc. You could then give each of these skills a weight, and then do a weighted average to get a final "basketball skill" metric.
Even though "basketball skill" is many-faced, it is coherent. It doesn't require "connotations" or "notions" or "impressions"; each of its subcomponents can be put in terms of plausibly measurable things, and being a 10 in one skill does not create logical problems with being a 10 in any other skill. You being absolutely perfect at inside shooting does not necessarily mean you have to be worse at three-point shooting, for instance.
At the same time, we can also meaningfully talk about whether a certain skill ought to be considered basketball-skill-contributory. We might say that a person's singing skill should have zero weight contribution into the above weighted average.
In the real world, there's a real discussion about whether body fat percentage should be given contributory weight into what is considered "healthy." High body fat percentage might be generally correlated with various things that are consensus "unhealthy," like morbidity and diseases, but it might not be specifically correlated with an individual who is disease-free, will live for a long time, but who is also fat.
Now, there are various parties that want to gloss over that controversy, and brazenly proceed to maintain the use of "healthy" with implications of "low body fat" in their arguments, discussion, and product marketing. Is the proper response to their usage, "Oh, healthiness just has various connotations, we basically get it"? No. The proper response is, "What do you mean, in specific and measurable terms, when you say 'healthy?'"
And if they say "Healthiness is the optimization of health," they have said nothing.
So, the question is, when you talk about a word like "flourishing" that has "connotations" of various other things, I am challenging each of those other things by asking for their justifications. Why is generativity for Homo sapiens objectively good? Why is growth of the species Homo sapiens objectively good? Why is the resilience of species Homo sapiens objectively good?
And if you wish to defend your moral objectivism, you need to answer those questions with something other than, "Don't you agree X is good?" Consensus of subjects is not objectivism.
When we're talking about "fitness[]," I want you to fill in that "[]" with something that is not "flourishing" or "fitness." Something coherent and single-faced.
Of course, when you do, I will say, "There's no ultimately rational reason that ought to be valued." This is because objective morality is false.
Do you take a relativist position, or something else (say, a subjectivist position)?
Both, in the sense that all moral statements are relative to preference referents.
This isn't to say that I'm a pure relativist across the board who denies the veracity of moral statements. As long as all preference referents are explicated, moral statements can have truth values (because they have, by explicating those referents, been thus reduced to mundane world-facts).
Consider the moral dungeon:
You're at the circular platform on the top. Once you hop down, there's no way to get to the other treasure chests. The question is, "Which way should you go?"
This question makes an appeal to 2 things:
(1) Which treat is desired? "Should" has an implicit a value referent in the form of what you're actually going for. If you're gluten intolerant, you don't want a donut.
(2) Which way actually goes to a chest containing the desired thing?
The latter is objective, and thus right decisionmaking does have an important objective component. But the former is completely subjective, that is, it makes an appeal to the preferences of some preferring agent (or group of agents; perhaps you were charged with this mission by a village of donut-eating, sentient mice).
Moral objectivists want to say that you can get #1 without making such an appeal. "Popsicles are just correct," they might say, "regardless of what anybody thinks."
Now, that's ludicrous on its face, and so they'll cloak that absurdity inside an ambiguous word, like "scrumtrilescence." "Nobody can deny that it is right to seek that which is scrumtrilescent," they'll proclaim. "It is objectively moral." And when you hear them say that, you might think, "Sure, I guess."
But then you ask what "scrumtrilescence" means, and they're like, "Oh, everyone knows what it means!" And you're like, "No, really, tell me." And they say things like, "You know... things that are awesome. It is a word with connotations of dolphin-riding, facepainting, and popsicle-acquiring."
My philosophy wouldn't be able to convince him, nor is it meant to. He's not human, and my philosophy is meant for human societies. I could explain why it would be wrong from a human perspective, but I could give him no reason to care about that perspective.
Why would your philosophy convince a human if it can't convince a Krol'Tar? Assuming you can define "fitness," why should an individual human care about the fitness or survival of the entire human race? Wouldn't evolution say I should value my own persistence over the persistence of the human race? Given the choice between dying or killing 1,000 other people, wouldn't evolution favor individuals who would choose to save themselves and kill others?
Here's an example. Let's say we're talking about fitness[basketball]. Basketball involves many different skills, and many different metrics. You could rate a person's skill at ball-handling, inside shooting, free-throw shooting, three-point shooting, passing, blocking, stealing, rebounding, etc. You could then give each of these skills a weight, and then do a weighted average to get a final "basketball skill" metric.
Even though "basketball skill" is many-faced, it is coherent. It doesn't require "connotations" or "notions" or "impressions"; each of its subcomponents can be put in terms of plausibly measurable things, and being a 10 in one skill does not create logical problems with being a 10 in any other skill. You being absolutely perfect at inside shooting does not necessarily mean you have to be worse at three-point shooting, for instance.
Then why are you asking for a single answer to this question?
You keep trying to pigeonhole me by trying to say I feel only 'population size' matters. Well, clearly population size is important to the concept of fitness, but it's not the end all or be all of fitness. Likewise in your basketball example, may factors make up a "good basketball player" you can't just point to on metric and say "that's is!" unless that one metric is "good at basketball." Also, you can have a person that is good at all of the qualities that you mentioned, but still be terrible at basketball.
In the real world, there's a real discussion about whether body fat percentage should be given contributory weight into what is considered "healthy." High body fat percentage might be generally correlated with various things that are consensus "unhealthy," like morbidity and diseases, but it might not be specifically correlated with an individual who is disease-free, will live for a long time, but who is also fat.
Right, you can't call body fat good or bad, since too little is bad and too much is bad. The same could be said for population size and fitness. DEFINING what is the "optimal fat %" it something we are still working on. We know we want to people to be "healthy" but maximizing that isn't something fully understood. YET, medical doctor is still a field of study.
We might not have perfectly quantified "health" to the point were if I asked you how 'healthy' you are you could tell me "78%" or something, but we still have the goal within that field of making people 'healthy.'
So, the question is, when you talk about a word like "flourishing" that has "connotations" of various other things, I am challenging each of those other things by asking for their justifications.
There justification would be how they contribute to the human system being self-sustaining.
Why is generativity for Homo sapiens objectively good?
I understand these words(because I looked them up), but I don't know how "generativity for Homo sapiens" has baring on this discussion. You're going to have to break it down for me if you want me to answer.
Why is growth of the species Homo sapiens objectively good?
Because we have defined the process that created Homo sapiens as being good/desirable. I will point out--yet again--that this was an axiomatic assertion, and subject to all of the weaknesses thereto.
Why would your philosophy convince a human if it can't convince a Krol'Tar?
The general idea of "fitness/flourishing" being desirable would still apply to the Krol'Tar, but without knowing anything more about the species I can't really say if wiping out the humans would help or hurt them in that endeavor. For example, I could try and appeal to their empathy, but they might not even have any.
Assuming you can define "fitness," why should an individual human care about the fitness or survival of the entire human race? Wouldn't evolution say I should value my own persistence over the persistence of the human race?
Because part of our survive depends on empathy. We evolved as pack animals, and tribalism is a strong concept within our psych. An individual human cannot survive on his own; we NEED each other to flourish.
The iterated prisoner's dilemma teaches us a lone psychopath can do well in a society, but a society of psychopaths can't do as well as a society of collaborators. It behooves a society to remove its psychopaths.
Given the choice between dying or killing 1,000 other people, wouldn't evolution favor individuals who would choose to save themselves and kill others?
Clearly not, or else no one would have evolved Altruism.
I understand these words(because I looked them up), but I don't know how "generativity for Homo sapiens" has baring on this discussion. You're going to have to break it down for me if you want me to answer.
You're the one who used that word when you defined "flourishing"!
Quote from Taylor »
Because we have defined the process that created Homo sapiens as being good/desirable. I will point out--yet again--that this was an axiomatic assertion, and subject to all of the weaknesses thereto.
I must have missed this the first time. Once you assert a good, whether it be the resilience of the human race or the conquest of the planet by fungi, you'd be correct that an objective morality flows therefrom on the applied-side.
Quote from Taylor »
Survivability is objectively good. We just happen to be humans--therefor--that is the survivability we evolved to care about.
Okay... stuff like this is why I'm having trouble understanding your position. Your previous response -- "Because we have defined the process that created Homo sapiens as being good/desirable. I will point out--yet again--that this was an axiomatic assertion, and subject to all of the weaknesses thereto." -- should apply here, and yet now you're again talking about objective morality.
If it makes a reference to something somebody cares about, then it's not an objective good. An objective good is something that is good intrinsically without an appeal to anybody's tastes, preferences, or desires. This is why nothing is objectively good.
You're the one who used that word when you defined "flourishing"!
You're right!
I was c/p'ing the definition of Flourishing from here. I deleted "goodness," since clearly that was circular in this context.
Anyway, each of those properties are only "good" in the context of helping "flourishing," they are not objectively good in their own right. I guess that's your point?
However, things like "body fat %" are also not objectively healthy or unhealthy. You need to evaluate that factor within the greater context to say if it's good or bad for a person.
Once you assert a good, whether it be the resilience of the human race or the conquest of the planet by fungi, you'd be correct that an objective morality flows therefrom on the applied-side.
Right, and my argument is just as susceptible to the Münchhausen trilemma as any other. I apologize if I implied otherwise.
Okay... stuff like this is why I'm having trouble understanding your position. Your previous response -- "Because we have defined the process that created Homo sapiens as being good/desirable. I will point out--yet again--that this was an axiomatic assertion, and subject to all of the weaknesses thereto." -- should apply here, and yet now you're again talking about objective morality.
Well, I think the confusion is probably--in part--one of definitions.
When I say "objective" I am talking about it in the sense of "reality." As in, I am trying to link morality to objective reality and physical laws and have it evaluated in that context.
Also, (and this is probably my fault) you seem to think when I talk about "evolution" I am always talking about "biological evolution" not "social evolution." I'm probably not being careful when I switch between the two.
When I say:
I am saying we can observe behaviors and saying some behaviors would help obtain our [fitness] and some would not; and that there is a range.
THAN I am saying--within that framework--you can safely call actions against "bad" and actions for "good."
Maybe I was mistaken, but I thought once you have a goal you implicitly move from a descriptive evaluation to a normative evaluation.
I am saying that I am talking man's "nature" (his genes) to be fixed and then talk about improving fitness through actions.
Clearly, this assumption that man's nature is fixed isn't completely accurate, but I think it would be "within error:"
Anyway, evolution is continuing, correct, but the changes are not drastic. So maybe the "best behavior" is changing, but not fast enough for our approximations to be invalid day to day. When the changes caused by progressive evolution are outside of our error bars, THEN we can start worrying about them. To do so otherwise, I would say, would be premature.
If it makes a reference to something somebody cares about, then it's not an objective good. An objective good is something that is good intrinsically without an appeal to anybody's tastes, preferences, or desires. This is why nothing is objectively good.
Assuming you can define "fitness," why should an individual human care about the fitness or survival of the entire human race? Wouldn't evolution say I should value my own persistence over the persistence of the human race?
Because part of our survive depends on empathy. We evolved as pack animals, and tribalism is a strong concept within our psych. An individual human cannot survive on his own; we NEED each other to flourish.
The iterated prisoner's dilemma teaches us a lone psychopath can do well in a society, but a society of psychopaths can't do as well as a society of collaborators. It behooves a society to remove its psychopaths.
Given the choice between dying or killing 1,000 other people, wouldn't evolution favor individuals who would choose to save themselves and kill others?
Clearly not, or else no one would have evolved Altruism.
First of all, this "clearly not" explanation reminds me of creationist arguments about evolution like "if humans evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?" or "if having a high IQ is better, then why hasn't evolution gotten rid of dumb people" or "wouldn't people be more adapted to survive if we could fly?" You can't just look at an ex ante trait and conclude that evolution shaped it in a mathematically perfect way. Sufficed to say, evolution is a sloppy and imprecise process, and it 'seeks' (to the extent one can apply that word) local maxima, not absolute maxima. Altruism might be a local, metastable fitness maxima. You are probably right that the sociopathic, iterated prisoner's dillema would destroy society (meaning it would be unstable) but it would probably lie at a higher fitness level than altruism for the individual genes engaging in the behavior. Evolution operates at the gene level, it can't "see" a society or a species. So are you introducing time-invariance as an additional criterion, or is fitness maximization still sufficient?
Moreover, every evolutionary explanation of altruism that I've ever read, including your link, speaks only to "in-group" altruism. Humans had an evolutionary incentive to be altruistic to their families and their tribe, with whom they share genetic material and resources. In addition to altruism, evolution created racism, xenophobia, genocide, and other decidedly horrible things. "Go kill all the men in the neighboring tribe so you can procreate with their women" was a behavior decidedly incentivized by evolution, and which has been extremely prevalent in, as far as I'm aware, every human society ever. Name even a 5-year period in the history of mankind during which widespread genocide was not occurring somewhere in the world.
And if you think that individualized behaviors like murder and rape are disfavored by evolution, think again. Sure, evolution doesn't say "murder and rape everyone you can at all times," it says "murder and rape at certain times when you achieve a significant benefit." That's why, even in the highly civilized and highly educated western world, with laws that promise life in prison or lethal injection, thousands and thousands of rapes and murders still happen every year. I'm not saying everyone is just waiting for their chance to kill and rape (I'm certainly not, and I like to imagine most people aren't), but these behaviors would have no reason to persist at such a high frequency, against the threat of such horrible punishments, if evolution hadn't favored them in the past.
And that's why I think an evolutionary ethics system is doomed to failure. Most of the benefits of modern society have been about overcoming our darker evolutionary tendencies. Evolution doesn't say "be altruistic." Evolution says "be altruistic when it benefits the proliferation of your genes, kill when it benefits the proliferation of your genes, and basically do whatever it is at any given point in time that benefits the proliferation of your genes."
And evolution doesn't understand we're not still living in a tribal society with limited resources. It tells us to get obese eating fats and sugars, it tells us to distrust people who look different from us, etc. Society and the individual have to put the muzzle on evolution and shut down these horrible behaviors that were selected for in the past.
My approach has basically been this: Treat "ought" as I'm treating it -- a thing that demands a referent, analogous to an equation with a dangling variable. When you do, the is/ought problem is completely and elegantly explained and is no longer a confounding mystery.
Granted. But then again, drop the imaginary points from the complex plane and the Riemann hypothesis likewise ceases to be a mystery. I don't necessarily think the best answer to every quandary is to drop axioms or introduce free variables until it goes away, even though those methods will always work if you apply them assiduously enough.
Furthermore, various non-realist moral theories can be elegantly reduced to it, and various realist moral theories and their confusing mysticism can be elegantly explained as failures to ascertain it.
I do detect a faint hint of well-poisoning here. Incidentally, I don't see how realistic theories don't ultimately reduce to this as well. You've added a parameter, but you can get realism back by fixing the added parameter back to whatever constant realists hold it to be. (Logically speaking, this is actually the general state of affairs when you introduce new free variables.)
Nobody has to agree with me. In fact, when I explain that this is the root of the issue, I sometimes get "that's not what morality is" responses. This is because morality is laden with folk baggage. While I'd like morality to mean only "right decisionmaking," it actually means, to most,
What you are calling "morality" is what I call "means-end reasoning." "Right decisionmaking" -- to my mind at least -- extends beyond means-end reasoning to the choice of ends as well, and thus does include a moral component. For instance, to pick an extreme example, I'd call a free choice to set off a device that ends the universe altogether "wrong decisionmaking" irrespective of the goals of the decision-maker.
Similarly, one can define "moral rightness" as something like "that which conforms to the Slab of Dictates."
Certainly. Wouldn't it be nice if this were just incoherent on its face? The problem is it's not. Debating morality with people who believe that morality does come from the Slab of Dictates can be mighty frustrating. Incidentally, your reformulation doesn't help, because you haven't got any more traction than a realist when it comes to getting underneath their ideas.
Here's a thought experiment I wrote a few weeks ago called "The Fuchsia Fez":
Forgive me, but this doesn't seem to be hitting any particular point. If it's meant to be a critique of realism or other moral theories that use binary ought predicates, I'm not seeing it.
The example seems to turn on the fact that the listeners don't know the particular reason the husband is condemning Atipo for immorality. But couldn't they just ask? And couldn't he give a perfectly coherent one?
A moral realist isn't going to be perturbed by the case of the fuscia fez, I don't think. There will be a fact of the matter. The husband will be right, or he will be wrong. Any ambiguity that arises is a result of the contrivance of the example and the deliberate omission of details.
This seems like it is similar to the issues about incoherence we were talking about in the previous exchange. Incoherence has to be decided by the lights of the thing that is supposed to be incoherent, or other stipulated background material. The husband's statement is only incoherent under a ternary-ought interpretation. A realistic interpretation of his words is perfectly coherent. (though of course he is very likely to be incorrect.)
They would be "unethical" only against !Z. A mundane explication would be, "X ought[Z] to do Y if he wants Z, but I find Z abhorrent, so X ought[!Z] not to do Y."
Or, in other words, if Y leads to Z, then "ought[Z] = Y" and "ought[!Z] = !Y." Once the [] referent in the "ought" is defined, it becomes a mundane mechanical question of whether Y leads to Z.
(I say "mundane" not to mean "actually boring or simple or easy," but to mean, "lacking the folk mystique of traditional ideas of morality.")
Okay, this bracket formalism is interesting, let's dig into that. See, what goes on outside the brackets is what I call means-end reasoning, and what goes on inside the brackets is what I call ethics.
So let's say you hold that "you ought[get rich] rob a bank" and I hold that "you ought[maintain domestic tranquility] refrain from robbing a bank." You mentioned earlier that people could "lobby" each other to change what goes in these brackets, but you've left out some details. How do we do that? Can we have debates or make arguments concerning what goes in the brackets? What would I do to convince you to drop [get rich] and adopt [maintain domestic tranquility]? (Or, more likely, get you to move along some spectrum between those two)
Are there any formal rules for manipulating the bracketed formulae? Here's a candidate: if "A ought[B] C", then maybe "A ought[B v D] C", where v is supposed to be logical disjunction. If we keep playing this game, will we find that the bracketed stuff obeys some kind of formal logic and therefore has the character of truth values? Would this be significant?
Is a fin more fit than a claw?
It would depend on the context, since it would depend in which would increase fitness. Different behaviors can increase or decrease fitness depending on environmental contexts. (As in, I don't know which, but I would guess--like with most things--a balance would need to be stuck.)
Fitness, from the biological idea of fitness. "Population size" is too narrow a metric, because depending on context that can be helpful or detrimental for the continued flourishing of a society.
Fair enough.
If we acknowledge that fact and help the process rather than hinder it; we can aid in the process if we attempt to base our ethics on it.
Of course, as you--yourself--said before:
For example, I say I'm "helping evolution" by killing every human without naturally blonde hair. The result will be a population entirely of blondes. That will be the "evolved" population, because "evolution" is the change in the genetics of a body of organisms as genetic drift occurs and selection takes its toll -- in this case, I represented the deadly selective environment. But it's absurd to say that what I did was "right" or "moral." Evolution doesn't "want" anything whatsoever. It doesn't "want" the "flourishing" of any species. It's just that organisms with traits adapted to their environments tend to persist.
"Fitness" is not a target metric, fitness is the degree to which an organism, based on its properties, facilitates a target metric. Your target metric appears to be the word "flourishing," which apparently is not "has a large population size."
What does "flourishing" mean? Does it have a coherent definition, or is it a philosophical siren, dooming every conversation that depends on it to endlessness and fruitlessness? Everything I have read indicates that it is the latter; it's a word that lacks a positive definition, and is instead what is left after realizing that every coherent target metric, if declared, seems to yield absurda.
If the word means, "Psh, you know, the good stuff," then we have just woken up to find ourselves still docked at port.
You can measure fitness, however, and state something is more fit than something else.
But, you can use it as a comparative metric. We know that the behavior of murdering everyone would be less fit than prohibiting murder. Flourishing is “to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes generativity, growth, and resilience.”
However, to me this idea of "flourishing" and "social fitness" is something that would require study to fully understand. You would have to look at human history and start to really break down what worked and what did not work. Propose theories and ways of testing those theories (like simulations).
There is no "health" metric. You can talk about your weight, your body fat percentage, the degree to which you're capable of doing physical activities of which you're fond, whether you know you're dying and how long you have, etc. But "health" itself is too incoherent, and/or ambiguous, and/or many-faced to be used for measurement.
Sure. In the example above, blondes would be most fit. Fitness means nothing except against a selective environment, which could select for anything. Evolutionary fitness is not synonymous with "goodness" in terms of things humans value in life.
And if your metric is population size, then forcing every fertile woman to have children would be more fit than not. You need a coherent goal metric. Bandying about words like fitness in a vacuum of value fails to find the El Dorado of moral solutions; it doesn't even leave port.
"To live within an optimal range of human functioning" has a dangling value reference in the word "optimal." This definition so far adds no information.
It concludes...
No. Vague connotation of a panoply of items does not get us coherence. That's textbook ambiguous "many-faced-ness," like the "metric" of "health."
It's one thing for a definition to be fuzzy. Fuzziness is blurred boundaries along a single dimension, like "warm <-> hot." "Flourishing," however, like "health," is like a 20-sider with various faces, some of which are incommensurable.
It's very easy to mistakenly think that ambiguous, many-faced ideas are coherent. That's because when you imagine the concept, you are provoked to imagine discrete things. Your brain creates an analogy scene. Perhaps you imagine flowers growing in fast-forward across a field, shining silver buildings popping up, a rainbow over a bustling morning marketplace, a happy family holding their newborn child, a spaceship blasting off, two young girls playing a cooperative video game together, two enemy warriors shaking hands in a truce, a Native American tribal dance around a fire, two monks giving a toast over a new batch of beer, a serial killer being found guilty, a pod of dolphins saving a toddler from drowning, etc.
Maybe that's what you think of when you think "flourishing." That's what I think of!
But that doesn't make it have a coherent definition sufficient enough to be used as a metric.
But I have a couple of other objections to your framework:
First, I don't understand why I should select "fitness" or "evolution" or whatever as my value referent. I understand that evolution arguably points towards "fitness," but why does that make "fitness" good, moral, ethical, or valuable. If I say "fitness doesn't matter, instead the highest ethical value is to collect as many purple objects as possible," how do you prove me wrong? Why is "fitness" better than any any other arbitrary value system I could choose.
Second, I don't think your ethical system actually leads to anything resembling what most people think of as ethical results. I'm still not totally sure whether you're talking about biological "fitness" versus some kind of cultural or memetic "fitness," but I'll try to address both.
How do we know that? From a biological fitness perspective, it might be highly desirable for me to commit mass murder. For instance, if I am some kind of super-villain and I murder everyone on earth except a dozen young women whom I force to procreate with me at gunpoint, my biological fitness (as defined in the wiki article you linked earlier) might increase astronomically, since all future generations of humans would be my offspring.
Likewise, from a cultural or memetic fitness perspective, the same supervillain scenario might be highly "fit." If a component of my personal values/ethics/culture says "kill everyone except a few women to procreate with," then (assuming I'm successful in doing so) my cultural fitness will increase, since all other value systems on earth will die out, and I can pass my value system onto my offspring.
Looking at less ridiculous scenarios, your system still breaks down. Biologically, rape can be a very "fit" behavior in certain circumstances, since it increases the number of offspring the rapist is likely to have. As long as the rapist can avoid getting caught, he has an evolutionary incentive to rape.
And from a cultural or memetic perceptive, behaviors like the conquest and/or enslavement of other cultures will tend to make your cultures' memes and values propagate. The settlers of the Americas spread European culture and values to the natives by conquering their land and converting them to Christianity, a process that caused a great deal of strife and suffering. Likewise, slave traders spread European and American culture to the slaves they brought from Africa. Both of these behaviors are arguably highly "fit" from the perspective of propagating and preserving a culture, but are considered ethically and morally repugnant by nearly everyone.
How does your system address these issues?
I agree with you, but I'm willing to entertain the idea that Taylor could conceivably supply a generalized definition of "fitness."
However, even if we could all agree what "fitness" means, I'm not sure how Taylor could (1) show that "fitness" is the "correct" value referent and therefore should be selected to the exclusion of all other values, and (2) show that evolutionary fitness leads to anything resembling ethical results.
Honestly, I have never heard satisfactory answers to (1) and (2) even for more mundane utilitarian or "human flourishing" definitions of ethics. In the end, this is why I accept your basic framework that all ethical statements are relative to a specific value system. If there was a universal definition of ethics, it would need to meet (1) and (2).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology)
They'd have to or it wouldn't be much of a field. It takes very little legwork to adapt that definition to apply to behaviors instead of genetic traits.
I think what I am proposing is very analogous to the field of economics. What is the "optima" state for the economy to be in? What is the "right number" for our GDP, GWP, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average to be at forever?
Those aren't questions economists can really answer, but they can tell you what is 'better.' They can work on "improving" the economy even if it will never be "perfect."
That can propose theories and provide historical backing, empirical research, and so on for those theories. They can't run out and force nations to follow those theories, but they have other ways of testing them and providing backing for them.
They might not know what is "optimal," but they do know what is "preferable."
It takes the leg-work of "referring to a metric." In the case of evolution, it's "genetic persistence." If "genetic persistence" is what you're trying to optimize, then we're back to the questions I was asking several posts ago.
Those questions include:
* Why ought that be the metric from which an objective morality flows? (Note that by "ought," I am demanding a parent justifying goal. If you proceed to provide that parent justifying goal, I will then ask why ought we care about that goal, demanding a parent justifying goal for that. It doesn't end; this is the realization of existentialism -- there is no ultimately rational source of values or morality -- and it is completely true.)
* If we ultimately value genetic persistence, it means we don't like mutation. Is genetic stagnation really part of your proposal?
Again, evolution doesn't "like" fitness. Evolution "likes" the fit and the unfit. It's just that "it kills" the unfit. You have to value survival walking in; evolution won't tell you that you should want you and your genetic progeny to survive.
Resilience is a metric. "That which simultaneously connotes each of resilience and growth and generativity" is not a metric.
Are you denying that is possible?
Again, I am not talking about biological evolution, I am talking about social evolution.
I am not trying to maximizes the fitness of genetic traits; I am trying to maximizes the fitness of moral behaviors.
As I stated in the OP, I am not attempting to evaluate the morality of mucking around with the human genome.
I believe YOU already answered this question for all objective morality earlier on the thread. As in, no one has to agree with me.
I could go on to list the pros and cons of my version of morality, but--as you say--you can simply deny the value in all of them.
I could--for example--state that Whoever set up the Universe clearly made some things fit and some things unfit because They wanted one kind of behavior to flourish over the other, but you could just respond with a "why should we care about that?" ad nauseam.
I am not attempting to make any value determinations on genetic traits, only behaviors.
I've had the teleology argument with Crashing00, and I agree. You do have to presuppose that you value the survivability of the human race, correct.
Do you?
To give me an example of what exactly you're looking for, what metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of the economy's well-being?
This is literally impossible without a value referent. It's like talking about "excellence at specific sport X" without telling me what X is. Fitness in evolution is "excellence at persistence in terms of what the environment demands."
I wasn't talking about "fitness," I was talking about the metric to which "fitness" is supposed to be referring. You NEED to stop confusing "excellence" and "the sport at which you're excellent."
If you're trying to maximize the fitness[] of moral behaviors, you need to fill in that "[]" with the goal you're reaching for. You can't put "fitness" in there. "Fitness[fitness]" is completely meaningless. Fitness[flourishing] is near-useless because the term "flourishing" is many-faced and ambiguous to the point of incoherence. Evolution employs "fitness[gene persistence]," but you say that's not what you're talking about.
When I said that, it was because I was talking about the semantics of a term. I might define justice as "retributing in proportion to the infraction with the goal of deterrance, social protection, and rehabilitation," but someone else might define it as "a hot dog."
There is no purely objective morality, as in, morality divorced from the preferences of one or more agents. Folks can disagree with me on that, but they'll be absolutely mistaken to do so.
You contradict this with the next thing you say:
The human race is a collection of organisms with a fuzzy, but limited, scope of genes. And yet, you're saying you don't care about genes. Which is it? You need to understand that telling me "I don't care about genetic persistence" and also "I care about human persistence" is a contradiction.
I value the survival of the human race, and also the survival of many other species of organisms. Also, the survival of various world heritage sites and natural formations. Perhaps what I value is also valued, 100%, by every other organism of species Homo sapiens. Great. That means we can create a "morality by universal Homo sapiens consensus." Again, we have not left port for "objective morality El Dorado." Calling my dog a unicorn does not make magical horse-like beings, each with a single horn, exist.
Here is the thought experiment you have to solve in order to truly make the "objective morality unicorn" exist: An army of extra-terrestrials named the Krol'Tar comes to Earth in an invasion force, and decides to start killing humans willy-nilly. You manage to make contact with their general, and tell him that their invasion is morally wrong. He asks, "Why?" You have to be able to tell him something that cogently answers his question without appeals to anyone's subjective interests (including attempts at sympathy).
For example, what metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of the economy's well-being? What metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of a person's physical health? What metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of a person's mental health?
Or do you feel the field of medicine, psychology, and economics suffer from the same chronic problem?
For that matter, what metric would you use for the ultimate arbiter of 'scientific advancement?' Or is all of science also susceptible to this?
What would you say lets us know if we are moving forwards or backwards as a civilization? Is everything relative? Are all fields of study shams?
You're not being reasonable in your requirements for this, and I'm pretty sure you know that.
No, because I am still talking about behaviors that add to survivability of the human race, not genetic traits.
My philosophy wouldn't be able to convince him, nor is it meant to. He's not human, and my philosophy is meant for human societies. I could explain why it would be wrong from a human perspective, but I could give him no reason to care about that perspective. Maybe the Krol'Tar are more sentient than humans anyway.
I also couldn't tell him which economic principles would be best for his Krol'Tar home-world, or what makes a Krol'Tar healthy mentally and physically.
Of what term?
"Flourishing?" There is no biological term "flourishing" that is not hopelessly incoherent.
"Fitness?" As I said above, the biological definition of fitness is "fitness[gene persistence]," which you say you're not talking about.
When we're talking about "fitness[]," I want you to fill in that "[]" with something that is not "flourishing" or "fitness." Something coherent and single-faced.
Of course, when you do, I will say, "There's no ultimately rational reason that ought to be valued." This is because objective morality is false.
Or--at the very least--admit that those other fields don't properly met this requirement either.
Do you take a relativist position, or something else (say, a subjectivist position)?
Here's an example. Let's say we're talking about fitness[basketball]. Basketball involves many different skills, and many different metrics. You could rate a person's skill at ball-handling, inside shooting, free-throw shooting, three-point shooting, passing, blocking, stealing, rebounding, etc. You could then give each of these skills a weight, and then do a weighted average to get a final "basketball skill" metric.
Even though "basketball skill" is many-faced, it is coherent. It doesn't require "connotations" or "notions" or "impressions"; each of its subcomponents can be put in terms of plausibly measurable things, and being a 10 in one skill does not create logical problems with being a 10 in any other skill. You being absolutely perfect at inside shooting does not necessarily mean you have to be worse at three-point shooting, for instance.
At the same time, we can also meaningfully talk about whether a certain skill ought to be considered basketball-skill-contributory. We might say that a person's singing skill should have zero weight contribution into the above weighted average.
In the real world, there's a real discussion about whether body fat percentage should be given contributory weight into what is considered "healthy." High body fat percentage might be generally correlated with various things that are consensus "unhealthy," like morbidity and diseases, but it might not be specifically correlated with an individual who is disease-free, will live for a long time, but who is also fat.
Now, there are various parties that want to gloss over that controversy, and brazenly proceed to maintain the use of "healthy" with implications of "low body fat" in their arguments, discussion, and product marketing. Is the proper response to their usage, "Oh, healthiness just has various connotations, we basically get it"? No. The proper response is, "What do you mean, in specific and measurable terms, when you say 'healthy?'"
And if they say "Healthiness is the optimization of health," they have said nothing.
So, the question is, when you talk about a word like "flourishing" that has "connotations" of various other things, I am challenging each of those other things by asking for their justifications. Why is generativity for Homo sapiens objectively good? Why is growth of the species Homo sapiens objectively good? Why is the resilience of species Homo sapiens objectively good?
And if you wish to defend your moral objectivism, you need to answer those questions with something other than, "Don't you agree X is good?" Consensus of subjects is not objectivism.
Both, in the sense that all moral statements are relative to preference referents.
This isn't to say that I'm a pure relativist across the board who denies the veracity of moral statements. As long as all preference referents are explicated, moral statements can have truth values (because they have, by explicating those referents, been thus reduced to mundane world-facts).
Consider the moral dungeon:
You're at the circular platform on the top. Once you hop down, there's no way to get to the other treasure chests. The question is, "Which way should you go?"
This question makes an appeal to 2 things:
(1) Which treat is desired? "Should" has an implicit a value referent in the form of what you're actually going for. If you're gluten intolerant, you don't want a donut.
(2) Which way actually goes to a chest containing the desired thing?
The latter is objective, and thus right decisionmaking does have an important objective component. But the former is completely subjective, that is, it makes an appeal to the preferences of some preferring agent (or group of agents; perhaps you were charged with this mission by a village of donut-eating, sentient mice).
Moral objectivists want to say that you can get #1 without making such an appeal. "Popsicles are just correct," they might say, "regardless of what anybody thinks."
Now, that's ludicrous on its face, and so they'll cloak that absurdity inside an ambiguous word, like "scrumtrilescence." "Nobody can deny that it is right to seek that which is scrumtrilescent," they'll proclaim. "It is objectively moral." And when you hear them say that, you might think, "Sure, I guess."
But then you ask what "scrumtrilescence" means, and they're like, "Oh, everyone knows what it means!" And you're like, "No, really, tell me." And they say things like, "You know... things that are awesome. It is a word with connotations of dolphin-riding, facepainting, and popsicle-acquiring."
Why would your philosophy convince a human if it can't convince a Krol'Tar? Assuming you can define "fitness," why should an individual human care about the fitness or survival of the entire human race? Wouldn't evolution say I should value my own persistence over the persistence of the human race? Given the choice between dying or killing 1,000 other people, wouldn't evolution favor individuals who would choose to save themselves and kill others?
You keep trying to pigeonhole me by trying to say I feel only 'population size' matters. Well, clearly population size is important to the concept of fitness, but it's not the end all or be all of fitness. Likewise in your basketball example, may factors make up a "good basketball player" you can't just point to on metric and say "that's is!" unless that one metric is "good at basketball." Also, you can have a person that is good at all of the qualities that you mentioned, but still be terrible at basketball.
Right, you can't call body fat good or bad, since too little is bad and too much is bad. The same could be said for population size and fitness. DEFINING what is the "optimal fat %" it something we are still working on. We know we want to people to be "healthy" but maximizing that isn't something fully understood. YET, medical doctor is still a field of study.
We might not have perfectly quantified "health" to the point were if I asked you how 'healthy' you are you could tell me "78%" or something, but we still have the goal within that field of making people 'healthy.'
So, since it's not well enough defined the whole field is worthless?
There justification would be how they contribute to the human system being self-sustaining.
I understand these words(because I looked them up), but I don't know how "generativity for Homo sapiens" has baring on this discussion. You're going to have to break it down for me if you want me to answer.
Because we have defined the process that created Homo sapiens as being good/desirable. I will point out--yet again--that this was an axiomatic assertion, and subject to all of the weaknesses thereto.
Survivability is objectively good. We just happen to be humans--therefor--that is the survivability we evolved to care about.
The general idea of "fitness/flourishing" being desirable would still apply to the Krol'Tar, but without knowing anything more about the species I can't really say if wiping out the humans would help or hurt them in that endeavor. For example, I could try and appeal to their empathy, but they might not even have any.
Because part of our survive depends on empathy. We evolved as pack animals, and tribalism is a strong concept within our psych. An individual human cannot survive on his own; we NEED each other to flourish.
The iterated prisoner's dilemma teaches us a lone psychopath can do well in a society, but a society of psychopaths can't do as well as a society of collaborators. It behooves a society to remove its psychopaths.
Clearly not, or else no one would have evolved Altruism.
You're the one who used that word when you defined "flourishing"!
I must have missed this the first time. Once you assert a good, whether it be the resilience of the human race or the conquest of the planet by fungi, you'd be correct that an objective morality flows therefrom on the applied-side.
Okay... stuff like this is why I'm having trouble understanding your position. Your previous response -- "Because we have defined the process that created Homo sapiens as being good/desirable. I will point out--yet again--that this was an axiomatic assertion, and subject to all of the weaknesses thereto." -- should apply here, and yet now you're again talking about objective morality.
If it makes a reference to something somebody cares about, then it's not an objective good. An objective good is something that is good intrinsically without an appeal to anybody's tastes, preferences, or desires. This is why nothing is objectively good.
I was c/p'ing the definition of Flourishing from here. I deleted "goodness," since clearly that was circular in this context.
Anyway, each of those properties are only "good" in the context of helping "flourishing," they are not objectively good in their own right. I guess that's your point?
However, things like "body fat %" are also not objectively healthy or unhealthy. You need to evaluate that factor within the greater context to say if it's good or bad for a person.
NP, its buried back there (and I used terms like 'presupposing' and whatnot as well, I think this is only the second time I used 'axiomatic').
Right, and my argument is just as susceptible to the Münchhausen trilemma as any other. I apologize if I implied otherwise.
Well, I think the confusion is probably--in part--one of definitions.
When I say "objective" I am talking about it in the sense of "reality." As in, I am trying to link morality to objective reality and physical laws and have it evaluated in that context.
Also, (and this is probably my fault) you seem to think when I talk about "evolution" I am always talking about "biological evolution" not "social evolution." I'm probably not being careful when I switch between the two.
When I say:
I am saying that I am talking man's "nature" (his genes) to be fixed and then talk about improving fitness through actions.
Clearly, this assumption that man's nature is fixed isn't completely accurate, but I think it would be "within error:"
I think we are using 'objective' differently.
First of all, this "clearly not" explanation reminds me of creationist arguments about evolution like "if humans evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?" or "if having a high IQ is better, then why hasn't evolution gotten rid of dumb people" or "wouldn't people be more adapted to survive if we could fly?" You can't just look at an ex ante trait and conclude that evolution shaped it in a mathematically perfect way. Sufficed to say, evolution is a sloppy and imprecise process, and it 'seeks' (to the extent one can apply that word) local maxima, not absolute maxima. Altruism might be a local, metastable fitness maxima. You are probably right that the sociopathic, iterated prisoner's dillema would destroy society (meaning it would be unstable) but it would probably lie at a higher fitness level than altruism for the individual genes engaging in the behavior. Evolution operates at the gene level, it can't "see" a society or a species. So are you introducing time-invariance as an additional criterion, or is fitness maximization still sufficient?
Moreover, every evolutionary explanation of altruism that I've ever read, including your link, speaks only to "in-group" altruism. Humans had an evolutionary incentive to be altruistic to their families and their tribe, with whom they share genetic material and resources. In addition to altruism, evolution created racism, xenophobia, genocide, and other decidedly horrible things. "Go kill all the men in the neighboring tribe so you can procreate with their women" was a behavior decidedly incentivized by evolution, and which has been extremely prevalent in, as far as I'm aware, every human society ever. Name even a 5-year period in the history of mankind during which widespread genocide was not occurring somewhere in the world.
And if you think that individualized behaviors like murder and rape are disfavored by evolution, think again. Sure, evolution doesn't say "murder and rape everyone you can at all times," it says "murder and rape at certain times when you achieve a significant benefit." That's why, even in the highly civilized and highly educated western world, with laws that promise life in prison or lethal injection, thousands and thousands of rapes and murders still happen every year. I'm not saying everyone is just waiting for their chance to kill and rape (I'm certainly not, and I like to imagine most people aren't), but these behaviors would have no reason to persist at such a high frequency, against the threat of such horrible punishments, if evolution hadn't favored them in the past.
And that's why I think an evolutionary ethics system is doomed to failure. Most of the benefits of modern society have been about overcoming our darker evolutionary tendencies. Evolution doesn't say "be altruistic." Evolution says "be altruistic when it benefits the proliferation of your genes, kill when it benefits the proliferation of your genes, and basically do whatever it is at any given point in time that benefits the proliferation of your genes."
And evolution doesn't understand we're not still living in a tribal society with limited resources. It tells us to get obese eating fats and sugars, it tells us to distrust people who look different from us, etc. Society and the individual have to put the muzzle on evolution and shut down these horrible behaviors that were selected for in the past.
Granted. But then again, drop the imaginary points from the complex plane and the Riemann hypothesis likewise ceases to be a mystery. I don't necessarily think the best answer to every quandary is to drop axioms or introduce free variables until it goes away, even though those methods will always work if you apply them assiduously enough.
I do detect a faint hint of well-poisoning here. Incidentally, I don't see how realistic theories don't ultimately reduce to this as well. You've added a parameter, but you can get realism back by fixing the added parameter back to whatever constant realists hold it to be. (Logically speaking, this is actually the general state of affairs when you introduce new free variables.)
What you are calling "morality" is what I call "means-end reasoning." "Right decisionmaking" -- to my mind at least -- extends beyond means-end reasoning to the choice of ends as well, and thus does include a moral component. For instance, to pick an extreme example, I'd call a free choice to set off a device that ends the universe altogether "wrong decisionmaking" irrespective of the goals of the decision-maker.
Certainly. Wouldn't it be nice if this were just incoherent on its face? The problem is it's not. Debating morality with people who believe that morality does come from the Slab of Dictates can be mighty frustrating. Incidentally, your reformulation doesn't help, because you haven't got any more traction than a realist when it comes to getting underneath their ideas.
Forgive me, but this doesn't seem to be hitting any particular point. If it's meant to be a critique of realism or other moral theories that use binary ought predicates, I'm not seeing it.
The example seems to turn on the fact that the listeners don't know the particular reason the husband is condemning Atipo for immorality. But couldn't they just ask? And couldn't he give a perfectly coherent one?
A moral realist isn't going to be perturbed by the case of the fuscia fez, I don't think. There will be a fact of the matter. The husband will be right, or he will be wrong. Any ambiguity that arises is a result of the contrivance of the example and the deliberate omission of details.
This seems like it is similar to the issues about incoherence we were talking about in the previous exchange. Incoherence has to be decided by the lights of the thing that is supposed to be incoherent, or other stipulated background material. The husband's statement is only incoherent under a ternary-ought interpretation. A realistic interpretation of his words is perfectly coherent. (though of course he is very likely to be incorrect.)
Okay, this bracket formalism is interesting, let's dig into that. See, what goes on outside the brackets is what I call means-end reasoning, and what goes on inside the brackets is what I call ethics.
So let's say you hold that "you ought[get rich] rob a bank" and I hold that "you ought[maintain domestic tranquility] refrain from robbing a bank." You mentioned earlier that people could "lobby" each other to change what goes in these brackets, but you've left out some details. How do we do that? Can we have debates or make arguments concerning what goes in the brackets? What would I do to convince you to drop [get rich] and adopt [maintain domestic tranquility]? (Or, more likely, get you to move along some spectrum between those two)
Are there any formal rules for manipulating the bracketed formulae? Here's a candidate: if "A ought[B] C", then maybe "A ought[B v D] C", where v is supposed to be logical disjunction. If we keep playing this game, will we find that the bracketed stuff obeys some kind of formal logic and therefore has the character of truth values? Would this be significant?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.