The absence of a universally compelling argument is not a unique feature of ethics. Among what are nearly universally considered objective matters (though what’s objective is itself something people seem unable to convince one another of), there are, to be sure, some that nearly everybody will agree about. But there are many that people disagree about, and where they show great resistance to being convinced by any rational argument. And, of course, to get universal agreement on anything we need to exclude some people as insane or irrational; why is it suddenly unacceptable when the defender of objective ethics excludes some disagreements as involving irrationality? I don’t see that you’ve given any compelling reason here to classify ethics as non-objective in preference to the alternative of grouping it with the more difficult and controversial of objective matters. I’m not saying that there are no such reasons, but if there are any, they aren’t in this post.
If you wish to redefine sanity or rationality to include a sets of goals or moral principles, it is possible. However, there is the question of why this should be done- an agent can be highly rational in achieving their goals and simply not share the same set of morals. Why should this be called insane or irrational?
An agent which disagrees on questions on fact, by contrast (assuming they’re wrong), will constantly face contradictions between the facts and their beliefs whenever the issue becomes relevant.
An agent which disagrees on questions on morals, by contrast, can be fully aware of any “contradictory” fact and just not care. The prototypical example would be a highly rational psycopath- they know they’re causing massive harm with their actions, but consider this irrelevant.
“Whenever the issue becomes relevant.” What if the person with the factual disagreement just considers the conflicting facts irrelevant? How is that different from what the psychopath does? Why should we say the psychopath is any more rational than the one who rejects what are less controversially facts?
I realize that it’s not much of an argument for classifying the psychopath as irrational that we do the same to some other classes of people who stubbornly disagree with us. But so far as I can see, you have given no argument at all for doing otherwise; you’ve merely pointed out that doing otherwise is an option. Why should we consider it the better option?
Because when we test the issue, the person with conflicting facts can be found to be wrong. Elizier puts it nicely (for this sort of thing- not for other things) when he says that thinking I can fly won’t save me from falling off a cliff.
You could attempt to parallel this issue by claiming that a psychopath thinking their actions are right or wrong doesn’t change the facts of the matter. If so, however, your definition of “rational” conflicts with the ordinary conception of what the word means, which was my point to begin with.
Pragmatically, the reason I tend to use is that “rational” represents effective thinking for determining the true state of affairs or attaining goals and thus should not be confused with “moral”, whatever that means. “Rational” by my definition is an important category of thought.
From an Epistemic perspective, the problem is how ought facts can be established from is facts in such a way as to have an answer to those who cite Elizer’s argument in The Moral Void for following their intuitions instead. If you reduce them to, say, facts about the well being of conscious creatures, you face the dilemna of those who don’t care about that and instead care about something else. If you drop the prescriptive element of ‘ought’, why even use the word?
But most factual matters aren’t like thinking you can fly. It is not in dispute that ethical issues are not among the easy, obvious matters of objective fact.
As for your appeal to the ordinary conception of what the word means, you certainly will not find anything close to universal agreement that psychopaths are sane, or that immoral behavior is rational. You also make a passing reference to your definition of “rational;” you have certainly made it clear that on your definition the norms of rationality do not include any of what are normally classified as the moral norms, but what you persistently fail to do is give us any reason for thinking your way of selecting the category of the rational is superior to the alternatives. Plato and Kant thought immoral behavior was irrational, and they’ve both had a good deal of influence on what people mean by both “moral” and “rational.” Are you so confident that more people agree with you than with them? And, more importantly, regardless of who wins the popularity contest, what’s wrong with their way of categorizing things? Why is yours preferable?
The dispute between Einstein’s physics and Newton’s physics is an example of a difficult factual matter. Said dispute has had drastic implications for modern technology.
I am not discussing the ordinary definition of what “sane” means but the ordinary definition of what “rational” means. I then appealed to the case of the psycopath who discerns matters of fact better than an ordinary person to argue that they give a better impression of rational.
On matters of particulars, I am a Nominalist which is why I discuss the popularity issue. The example I think Yvain gave when he considered an economics lecture and concluded by stating it was his theory of the atom illustrates why you should not stray too far from ordinary definitions of the word.
I’ve already given reasons for why it’s pragmatic to classify “rational” and” moral” seperately from most purposes, and an epistemic argument. Perhaps I edited them in too late and you missed them, in which case I apologise.
I’m not sure I can extract anything from your post that looks like a pragmatic argument. An epistemic argument is presumably one which maintains that we should not believe in objective morality because we know of no knowledge-producing mechanism which would give us access to objective moral facts. I may have misinterpreted you in thinking that your epistemic argument was based on the argument from disagreement, that you thought there couldn’t be any such mechanism because if there were it wouldn’t produce such conflicting results in different people. If you intended that, I think I’ve explained above why I think that’s unconvincing. The Einstein/Newton case is once again not an especially helpful analogy; one thing which stands out about that case is just how much evidence is relevant. Again, even among uncontroversially objective facts, many are not like that.
But I can see signs that you might have instead, or perhaps additionally, wished to argue that there is no means of generating moral knowledge just because we don’t know the details of how any such means would operate. In that case again worrisome analogies are plentiful; there are few cases of objective knowledge where we have a really detailed story to tell about how that knowledge is acquired, and the cases where we don’t seem to have much to say at all include logic and mathematics. So the fact that we don’t know how we could acquire a certain kind of knowledge does not seem a decisive reason for denying that we have it.
By pragmatic, I meant pragmatic in the ordinary sense of the word. Since the meaning of a word is not set in stone, it should be made to effectively serve a purpose-hence why I appeal to that sort of pragmatism.
As for my epistemic argument, see The Moral Void. Any rational argument to demonstrate something is the “right” thing to do is comparable to Eliezer’s argument for killing babies if it feels like a moral wrong to do the ” right” thing emotive lot. This is a new clarification of what I was trying to say earlier.
For the Einstein/Newton case you can substitute any case where there is a scientific test which could, in principle, determine a result one way or the other. This is not true in ethics- although Moore’s Open Question argument is flawed, it does demonstrate that determining a proper philosophical criterion of what “should” is is necessary to discuss it. Any means of doing so must be philosophical by nature.
Just as the absence of evidence means that we assume unicorns don’t exist by default, so the absence of evidence means we assume a way to establish ought from is does not exist by default.
The absence of a universally compelling argument is not a unique feature of ethics. Among what are nearly universally considered objective matters (though what’s objective is itself something people seem unable to convince one another of), there are, to be sure, some that nearly everybody will agree about. But there are many that people disagree about, and where they show great resistance to being convinced by any rational argument. And, of course, to get universal agreement on anything we need to exclude some people as insane or irrational; why is it suddenly unacceptable when the defender of objective ethics excludes some disagreements as involving irrationality? I don’t see that you’ve given any compelling reason here to classify ethics as non-objective in preference to the alternative of grouping it with the more difficult and controversial of objective matters. I’m not saying that there are no such reasons, but if there are any, they aren’t in this post.
If you wish to redefine sanity or rationality to include a sets of goals or moral principles, it is possible. However, there is the question of why this should be done- an agent can be highly rational in achieving their goals and simply not share the same set of morals. Why should this be called insane or irrational?
An agent which disagrees on questions on fact, by contrast (assuming they’re wrong), will constantly face contradictions between the facts and their beliefs whenever the issue becomes relevant.
An agent which disagrees on questions on morals, by contrast, can be fully aware of any “contradictory” fact and just not care. The prototypical example would be a highly rational psycopath- they know they’re causing massive harm with their actions, but consider this irrelevant.
“Whenever the issue becomes relevant.” What if the person with the factual disagreement just considers the conflicting facts irrelevant? How is that different from what the psychopath does? Why should we say the psychopath is any more rational than the one who rejects what are less controversially facts?
I realize that it’s not much of an argument for classifying the psychopath as irrational that we do the same to some other classes of people who stubbornly disagree with us. But so far as I can see, you have given no argument at all for doing otherwise; you’ve merely pointed out that doing otherwise is an option. Why should we consider it the better option?
Because when we test the issue, the person with conflicting facts can be found to be wrong. Elizier puts it nicely (for this sort of thing- not for other things) when he says that thinking I can fly won’t save me from falling off a cliff.
You could attempt to parallel this issue by claiming that a psychopath thinking their actions are right or wrong doesn’t change the facts of the matter. If so, however, your definition of “rational” conflicts with the ordinary conception of what the word means, which was my point to begin with.
Pragmatically, the reason I tend to use is that “rational” represents effective thinking for determining the true state of affairs or attaining goals and thus should not be confused with “moral”, whatever that means. “Rational” by my definition is an important category of thought.
From an Epistemic perspective, the problem is how ought facts can be established from is facts in such a way as to have an answer to those who cite Elizer’s argument in The Moral Void for following their intuitions instead. If you reduce them to, say, facts about the well being of conscious creatures, you face the dilemna of those who don’t care about that and instead care about something else. If you drop the prescriptive element of ‘ought’, why even use the word?
But most factual matters aren’t like thinking you can fly. It is not in dispute that ethical issues are not among the easy, obvious matters of objective fact.
As for your appeal to the ordinary conception of what the word means, you certainly will not find anything close to universal agreement that psychopaths are sane, or that immoral behavior is rational. You also make a passing reference to your definition of “rational;” you have certainly made it clear that on your definition the norms of rationality do not include any of what are normally classified as the moral norms, but what you persistently fail to do is give us any reason for thinking your way of selecting the category of the rational is superior to the alternatives. Plato and Kant thought immoral behavior was irrational, and they’ve both had a good deal of influence on what people mean by both “moral” and “rational.” Are you so confident that more people agree with you than with them? And, more importantly, regardless of who wins the popularity contest, what’s wrong with their way of categorizing things? Why is yours preferable?
The dispute between Einstein’s physics and Newton’s physics is an example of a difficult factual matter. Said dispute has had drastic implications for modern technology.
I am not discussing the ordinary definition of what “sane” means but the ordinary definition of what “rational” means. I then appealed to the case of the psycopath who discerns matters of fact better than an ordinary person to argue that they give a better impression of rational.
On matters of particulars, I am a Nominalist which is why I discuss the popularity issue. The example I think Yvain gave when he considered an economics lecture and concluded by stating it was his theory of the atom illustrates why you should not stray too far from ordinary definitions of the word.
I’ve already given reasons for why it’s pragmatic to classify “rational” and” moral” seperately from most purposes, and an epistemic argument. Perhaps I edited them in too late and you missed them, in which case I apologise.
I’m not sure I can extract anything from your post that looks like a pragmatic argument. An epistemic argument is presumably one which maintains that we should not believe in objective morality because we know of no knowledge-producing mechanism which would give us access to objective moral facts. I may have misinterpreted you in thinking that your epistemic argument was based on the argument from disagreement, that you thought there couldn’t be any such mechanism because if there were it wouldn’t produce such conflicting results in different people. If you intended that, I think I’ve explained above why I think that’s unconvincing. The Einstein/Newton case is once again not an especially helpful analogy; one thing which stands out about that case is just how much evidence is relevant. Again, even among uncontroversially objective facts, many are not like that.
But I can see signs that you might have instead, or perhaps additionally, wished to argue that there is no means of generating moral knowledge just because we don’t know the details of how any such means would operate. In that case again worrisome analogies are plentiful; there are few cases of objective knowledge where we have a really detailed story to tell about how that knowledge is acquired, and the cases where we don’t seem to have much to say at all include logic and mathematics. So the fact that we don’t know how we could acquire a certain kind of knowledge does not seem a decisive reason for denying that we have it.
By pragmatic, I meant pragmatic in the ordinary sense of the word. Since the meaning of a word is not set in stone, it should be made to effectively serve a purpose-hence why I appeal to that sort of pragmatism.
As for my epistemic argument, see The Moral Void. Any rational argument to demonstrate something is the “right” thing to do is comparable to Eliezer’s argument for killing babies if it feels like a moral wrong to do the ” right” thing emotive lot. This is a new clarification of what I was trying to say earlier.
For the Einstein/Newton case you can substitute any case where there is a scientific test which could, in principle, determine a result one way or the other. This is not true in ethics- although Moore’s Open Question argument is flawed, it does demonstrate that determining a proper philosophical criterion of what “should” is is necessary to discuss it. Any means of doing so must be philosophical by nature.
Just as the absence of evidence means that we assume unicorns don’t exist by default, so the absence of evidence means we assume a way to establish ought from is does not exist by default.