Sorry for the self-reply, but to expand on my point about the difficulty Westerners have talking about certain dimensions of morality, I want to present an illustrative example from a different perspective.
Let’s say we’re in an alternate world with strong, codified rules about social status and authority, but weak, vague, unspoken norms against harm that nevertheless keep harm at a low level.
Then let’s say you present the people of this world with this “dilemma” to make Greene’s point:
Say your country is at war with another country that is particularly aggressive and willing to totally demolish your social order and enslave your countrymen. In planning how to best fight off this threat, your President is under a lot of stress. To help him relieve his stress, he orders a citizen, Bob, to be brought before him and tortured and murdered, while the President laughs his head off at the violence.
He feels much more relieved and so is able to craft and motivate a war plan that leads to the unconditional surrender of the enemy. The President promises that this was just a one-time thing he had to do to handle the tremendous pressure he was under to win the war and protect his people. Bob’s family, in turn, says that they are honored by the sacrifice Bob has made for his country. Everyone agrees that the President is the legitimate ruler of the country and the Constitution and tradition give him authority to do what he did to Bob.
Was it okay for the President to torture and kill Bob for his personal enjoyment?
Then, because of the deficiency in the vocabulary of “harms”, you would get responses like:
“Look, I can’t explain why, but obviously, it’s wrong to torture and kill someone for enjoyment. No disrespect to the President, of course.”
“What? I don’t get it. Why would the President order a citizen killed? There would be outrage. He’d feel so much guilt that it wouldn’t even relieve the stress you claim it does.”
“Yeah, I agree the President has authority to do that, but God, it just burns me up to think about someone getting tortured like that for someone else’s enjoyment, even if it is our great President.”
Would you draw the same conclusion Greene does about these responses?
Would you draw the same conclusion Greene does about these responses?
For the reasons I pointed out here, it still seems to me that you’re attacking a straw man here. Greene doesn’t conclude from this that morality is not rationally justifiable. He believes that moral realism is false for separate reasons, which are set out at length in Ch. 2 of the dissertation.
AFAICT, the position you’re attacking has only been articulated by Roko.
I do not think it is a strawman that, in the alternate world, Greene would get a good laugh at how people cling so tightly to their anti-torture/murder intuitions, even when the President orders it for heaven’s sake! How strange that “one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth”.
I’m confused. You initially seemed to be criticizing Greene for attempting to conclude, from individuals’ responses to the dilemmas, that morality is not justifiable. I pointed out that Greene was not attempting to draw this conclusion from those data. You now say that your original argument is not a strawman because Greene would “get a good laugh” out of your alternative dilemma.
I would imagine that he might get a good laugh from this situation. After all, being an anti-realist he doesn’t think there are any good reasons for moral judgments; and he might therefore find any circumstance of moral dumbfounding amusing. But I don’t see how that’s especially relevant to the argument.
Whatever one great principle you think human morality flows from, there will be plenty of cases that violate it. Sure, we have some intuitions about minimizing total harm, but there are plenty of people who would have an instinctive moral aversion to many actions that minimize total harm. Many people are actually opposed to torture.
Whatever one great principle you think human morality flows from, there will be plenty of cases that violate it.
Timeout. I did not claim there was a great principle human morality flows from; I merely think there is more regularity to our intuitions (“godshatter”) than you or Greene would lead one to believe, and much of this is accounted for by that fact that instincts must have arisen that permitted social life, cooperation, accumulation of social capital, etc.. But yes, intuitions are going to contradict; I never said or implied otherwise.
Sure, we have some intuitions about minimizing total harm, but there are plenty of people who would have an instinctive moral aversion to many actions that minimize total harm. Many people are actually opposed to torture.
Of course. Minimizing total harm is just one factor. So sure, there are cases where people believe that the torture is worse than whatever it is alleged to prevent. This is not the same, of course, as “not valuing reduction of total harm”.
Then it is a matter of degree: there is a lot of regularity to our moral instincts. But to attack the idea that there are objective moral truths out there it is enough to see that our intuitions do not fit any one great moral principle.
I suppose you could extract one particular regularity—such as “minmize total harm” and call that the objective moral truth. But then someone else will extract some other, distinct regularity such as “never use a person merely as a means” (the golden rule) and call that the objective moral truth. And they contradict each other.
Sorry for the self-reply, but to expand on my point about the difficulty Westerners have talking about certain dimensions of morality, I want to present an illustrative example from a different perspective.
Let’s say we’re in an alternate world with strong, codified rules about social status and authority, but weak, vague, unspoken norms against harm that nevertheless keep harm at a low level.
Then let’s say you present the people of this world with this “dilemma” to make Greene’s point:
Then, because of the deficiency in the vocabulary of “harms”, you would get responses like:
“Look, I can’t explain why, but obviously, it’s wrong to torture and kill someone for enjoyment. No disrespect to the President, of course.”
“What? I don’t get it. Why would the President order a citizen killed? There would be outrage. He’d feel so much guilt that it wouldn’t even relieve the stress you claim it does.”
“Yeah, I agree the President has authority to do that, but God, it just burns me up to think about someone getting tortured like that for someone else’s enjoyment, even if it is our great President.”
Would you draw the same conclusion Greene does about these responses?
For the reasons I pointed out here, it still seems to me that you’re attacking a straw man here. Greene doesn’t conclude from this that morality is not rationally justifiable. He believes that moral realism is false for separate reasons, which are set out at length in Ch. 2 of the dissertation.
AFAICT, the position you’re attacking has only been articulated by Roko.
I do not think it is a strawman that, in the alternate world, Greene would get a good laugh at how people cling so tightly to their anti-torture/murder intuitions, even when the President orders it for heaven’s sake! How strange that “one becomes a lawyer trying to build a case rather than a judge searching for the truth”.
I’m confused. You initially seemed to be criticizing Greene for attempting to conclude, from individuals’ responses to the dilemmas, that morality is not justifiable. I pointed out that Greene was not attempting to draw this conclusion from those data. You now say that your original argument is not a strawman because Greene would “get a good laugh” out of your alternative dilemma.
I would imagine that he might get a good laugh from this situation. After all, being an anti-realist he doesn’t think there are any good reasons for moral judgments; and he might therefore find any circumstance of moral dumbfounding amusing. But I don’t see how that’s especially relevant to the argument.
Whatever one great principle you think human morality flows from, there will be plenty of cases that violate it. Sure, we have some intuitions about minimizing total harm, but there are plenty of people who would have an instinctive moral aversion to many actions that minimize total harm. Many people are actually opposed to torture.
Timeout. I did not claim there was a great principle human morality flows from; I merely think there is more regularity to our intuitions (“godshatter”) than you or Greene would lead one to believe, and much of this is accounted for by that fact that instincts must have arisen that permitted social life, cooperation, accumulation of social capital, etc.. But yes, intuitions are going to contradict; I never said or implied otherwise.
Of course. Minimizing total harm is just one factor. So sure, there are cases where people believe that the torture is worse than whatever it is alleged to prevent. This is not the same, of course, as “not valuing reduction of total harm”.
Then it is a matter of degree: there is a lot of regularity to our moral instincts. But to attack the idea that there are objective moral truths out there it is enough to see that our intuitions do not fit any one great moral principle.
I suppose you could extract one particular regularity—such as “minmize total harm” and call that the objective moral truth. But then someone else will extract some other, distinct regularity such as “never use a person merely as a means” (the golden rule) and call that the objective moral truth. And they contradict each other.