I’m wasn’t trying to promote any value set in this branch of the conversation. I was trying to via discussion learn more about the arguments for egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian family arrangements.
I’ve written extensively on my current position on morality elsewhere. Like I said in the other comment I think we’re having a misunderstanding but I’m not sure where. I think its most plausible I’m missing some context.
As to moral regress, value drift seems to me obviously bad for any set of values that seeks to impact the world. I think we might mean different things by moral regress. It to me seemed the same thing as values changing from your own, which seemed an obviously bad thing from the perspective of nearly any set of morality because of instrumental reasons in the absence of the assumption of moral progress.
Edit: Oh now I get it!
“From the point of view” elides the central issue. Either there are moral facts or there aren’t. If there are not moral facts, moral progress and regress are not well defined concepts. If there are moral facts, the concepts are well defined—although if one believes in conflicts in moral facts, then the concepts are much less impressive.
Just had to read this with a cleared memory cache. I misused moral regress, not keeping with the terminology you established. Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse, just like most possible changes in our map of other parts of reality would be for the worse so would most possible changes in our understanding of morality. Thus all else being equal with these assumptions I think moral regress to be more likely than moral progress.
Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse
But if there are moral facts, there are external constraints on the viable changes to our understanding. If such external constraints don’t exist, what do the moral facts cause? And if they don’t cause anything, what does it mean to call them facts?
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
If there really are moral facts, shouldn’t a similar one-way ratchet exist?
You talked about things “from the point of view” of different object-level moral theories. There’s nothing particularly wrong with relativism as a meta-ethic, but it is an anti-realist meta-ethic.
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
But if you look earlier in history we see much clearer and common examples of technological and even scientific regress. See the loss of technology and science that occured with the decline of Roman civilization or the Greek dark age over a millenium earlier.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress. And even if it does count, that’s before the scientific method was well established, so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Regardless, possible constraints created by “moral facts” didn’t go away just because any particular government or society fell. The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress.
I didn’t talk about the fall of Rome but the decline of Roman civilization for a reason, it was a process that took centuries. Before it people could build things like the Antikythera mechanism afterwards they couldn’t for what seems to be at least a thousand years. Before it literacy was more widespread than afterwards. Even if we didn’t lose any scientific knowledge in the process, something I doubt because of the large number of lost works we know existed from references in the preserved ones, it certainly was known by fewer people.
The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
Wait what?
Of course moral beliefs in humans are affected by cricumstances! We have empirical evidence of this even in lab conditions. Changed economic circumstances seem to have am obviously big impact on social standards of morality as well.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible (unless we are assuing a created mind for this argument as well). Also human minds just get things plain wrong due to limtied resources too.
so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Why do you assume we are good at using the scientific method to discover moral truth? If moral realism was true, then looking at moral change in the past few centuries it looks much more like the changes in naturalist knowledge we saw before the scientific revolution than after it.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes. I think there’s no particular reason to think that the scientific method (or some moralistic equivalent) is available to “discover” moral truths. But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Anyway, we seen to be disagreeing on the meaning of the words “progress” and “regress.” To illustrate: Imagine a plantation manager, overseeing a huge plantation. Usually, the plantation grows enough food to give everyone on the plantation an adequate diet. The manager apply his moral theory and decides to actually feed everyone an adequate diet.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
You seem to be talking about moral regress1 and scientific regress1, while I am talking about moral and scientific regress2. I would argue that regress2 (and its counterpart, progress2) is the concept generally meant by ordinary usage. Further, regress2 is the more useful definition in a meta-ethics conversation, because regress1 is not usually evidence for or against moral realism.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
As an anti-realist, I take the position that “generating less utility than society could” is not a well formed assertion. But the moral realist does think the phrase is universally meaningful.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes.
A thought here: if you genuinely want to steel-man moral realism you need to look at various forms of “minimal” moral realism, which are consistent with moral subjectivism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism and the sub-section “Robust versus minimal moral realism”.
An example here could be a missionary confronting a New Guinea highlander just after a cannibal feast (assuming these really happened). The missionary says “Eating people in your cannibal feasts is wrong”. The highlander says “Eating people in our cannibal feasts is not wrong.” According to a minimal moral realist, one who embraces moral subjectivism, both of these may be true statements—they both correspond to moral facts—because the term “wrong” has a different meaning for the different speakers. Though their meanings clearly overlap e.g. they may both agree that eating people outside special feasts is “wrong” or that sex outside marriage is “wrong”.
Or, for an analogy, consider two normally-sighted people looking at a coloured wall. One says “The wall is orange”, the other says “The wall is not orange, it is red”. Both of these statements may be true—i.e. both correspond to colour facts—because the speakers put the boundary between orange and red in a slightly different place. They have slightly different (though overlapping) concepts of “red”.
It is very hard to refute versions of moral realism like this. You’d have to somehow show that no-one has a properly consistent concept of right and wrong, so that even within the cannibal’s own moral system he is talking self-contradictory nonsense. That’s going to be difficult.
But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Does he? We have quasi random movement in other kinds of maps of reality too. A Catholic moral realist can at the same time believe orthodox theologians have been making progress on understanding morality while the laity has on average morally regressed, just as a doctor can believe medicine is marching forward even if something like homeopathy gains popularity in the time period he lives in.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
Remember a moral realist is not obliged to consider morality personally adaptive. Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
There’s not a different outcome / decision. Without change, how can we say that there is progress or regress of any kind?
Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
Whatever. For the moral realist, the point is that there are real consequences—reduced wealth or lifespan or whatever—caused by immoral behavior. That feedback from objective reality creates strong pressure against moral regress2 - in the same way that failed predictions create strong pressure against scientific regress2.
Your discussion about elite knowledge vs. mass implementation is interesting, but is probably independent of whether moral facts are objective and universal. For purposes of this discussion, it’s probably easier to ignore the issue for the moment. Like ignoring the knock-on effects when discussing torture vs. dust-speck.
I’m wasn’t trying to promote any value set in this branch of the conversation. I was trying to via discussion learn more about the arguments for egalitarian vs. non-egalitarian family arrangements.
I’ve written extensively on my current position on morality elsewhere. Like I said in the other comment I think we’re having a misunderstanding but I’m not sure where. I think its most plausible I’m missing some context.
As to moral regress, value drift seems to me obviously bad for any set of values that seeks to impact the world. I think we might mean different things by moral regress. It to me seemed the same thing as values changing from your own, which seemed an obviously bad thing from the perspective of nearly any set of morality because of instrumental reasons in the absence of the assumption of moral progress.
Edit: Oh now I get it!
Just had to read this with a cleared memory cache. I misused moral regress, not keeping with the terminology you established. Now for the sake of argument assuming moral realism moral regress is not surprising, since morality is complex and most possible changes in our understanding of it probably are for the worse, just like most possible changes in our map of other parts of reality would be for the worse so would most possible changes in our understanding of morality. Thus all else being equal with these assumptions I think moral regress to be more likely than moral progress.
But if there are moral facts, there are external constraints on the viable changes to our understanding. If such external constraints don’t exist, what do the moral facts cause? And if they don’t cause anything, what does it mean to call them facts?
Here’s a discussion of a parallel issue: scientific regress. What’s interesting about the account of the loss of knowledge about how to prevent scurvy is (1) how rare these regresses are, (2) how easy it is with the benefit of hindsight to point to the scientific errors that caused the regression. In short, there’s a one-way ratchet on scientific knowledge because the external facts constrain the viability of different scientific beliefs.
If there really are moral facts, shouldn’t a similar one-way ratchet exist?
You talked about things “from the point of view” of different object-level moral theories. There’s nothing particularly wrong with relativism as a meta-ethic, but it is an anti-realist meta-ethic.
But if you look earlier in history we see much clearer and common examples of technological and even scientific regress. See the loss of technology and science that occured with the decline of Roman civilization or the Greek dark age over a millenium earlier.
I don’t really count the fall of the Roman empire as scientific regress. And even if it does count, that’s before the scientific method was well established, so there every reason to think that institutions would fail at preserving knowledge.
Regardless, possible constraints created by “moral facts” didn’t go away just because any particular government or society fell. The sack of Rome didn’t (or at least shouldn’t) cause farmers in the middle of nowhere to change their beliefs about the moral correctness of beating their slaves in particular circumstances. Changing circumstances != changing moral beliefs.
I didn’t talk about the fall of Rome but the decline of Roman civilization for a reason, it was a process that took centuries. Before it people could build things like the Antikythera mechanism afterwards they couldn’t for what seems to be at least a thousand years. Before it literacy was more widespread than afterwards. Even if we didn’t lose any scientific knowledge in the process, something I doubt because of the large number of lost works we know existed from references in the preserved ones, it certainly was known by fewer people.
Wait what?
Of course moral beliefs in humans are affected by cricumstances! We have empirical evidence of this even in lab conditions. Changed economic circumstances seem to have am obviously big impact on social standards of morality as well.
Assuming moral realism, the human mind may not be designed to discover truth about morality any more than it is to discover turth about any other aspect of nature, it is designed to be as adaptive as possible (unless we are assuing a created mind for this argument as well). Also human minds just get things plain wrong due to limtied resources too.
Why do you assume we are good at using the scientific method to discover moral truth? If moral realism was true, then looking at moral change in the past few centuries it looks much more like the changes in naturalist knowledge we saw before the scientific revolution than after it.
Remember that I’m an anti-moral realist trying to steelman the moral realist position. As an anti-realist, it is not surprising at all that moral reasoning changes. I think there’s no particular reason to think that the scientific method (or some moralistic equivalent) is available to “discover” moral truths. But the moral realist has great difficulty explaining explaining quasi-random movement in morals.
Anyway, we seen to be disagreeing on the meaning of the words “progress” and “regress.” To illustrate: Imagine a plantation manager, overseeing a huge plantation. Usually, the plantation grows enough food to give everyone on the plantation an adequate diet. The manager apply his moral theory and decides to actually feed everyone an adequate diet.
Now an external event causes the plantation to grow insufficient food for the people living there. The manager applies the same moral theory and decides to feed some people an adequate diet and some an inadequate diet. Under one understanding of regress (“regress1”), this change is moral regress. Under another understanding (“regress2″), the change is not moral regress, merely changed circumstances.
You seem to be talking about moral regress1 and scientific regress1, while I am talking about moral and scientific regress2. I would argue that regress2 (and its counterpart, progress2) is the concept generally meant by ordinary usage. Further, regress2 is the more useful definition in a meta-ethics conversation, because regress1 is not usually evidence for or against moral realism.
But the central feature of most object level moral theories is that acting morally is more adaptive. For a utilitarian, acting morally generates more utility than acting immorally. Given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t we notice when our society is generating less utility than it could? And thus act to change our behavior towards generating more utility. That’s why I think that the existence of moral facts would constrain the behaviors of individuals. If we can’t detect whether more utility is generated, then there’s no reason to believe in the existence of universal and objective moral truths.
As an anti-realist, I take the position that “generating less utility than society could” is not a well formed assertion. But the moral realist does think the phrase is universally meaningful.
A thought here: if you genuinely want to steel-man moral realism you need to look at various forms of “minimal” moral realism, which are consistent with moral subjectivism. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism and the sub-section “Robust versus minimal moral realism”.
An example here could be a missionary confronting a New Guinea highlander just after a cannibal feast (assuming these really happened). The missionary says “Eating people in your cannibal feasts is wrong”. The highlander says “Eating people in our cannibal feasts is not wrong.” According to a minimal moral realist, one who embraces moral subjectivism, both of these may be true statements—they both correspond to moral facts—because the term “wrong” has a different meaning for the different speakers. Though their meanings clearly overlap e.g. they may both agree that eating people outside special feasts is “wrong” or that sex outside marriage is “wrong”.
Or, for an analogy, consider two normally-sighted people looking at a coloured wall. One says “The wall is orange”, the other says “The wall is not orange, it is red”. Both of these statements may be true—i.e. both correspond to colour facts—because the speakers put the boundary between orange and red in a slightly different place. They have slightly different (though overlapping) concepts of “red”.
It is very hard to refute versions of moral realism like this. You’d have to somehow show that no-one has a properly consistent concept of right and wrong, so that even within the cannibal’s own moral system he is talking self-contradictory nonsense. That’s going to be difficult.
Does he? We have quasi random movement in other kinds of maps of reality too. A Catholic moral realist can at the same time believe orthodox theologians have been making progress on understanding morality while the laity has on average morally regressed, just as a doctor can believe medicine is marching forward even if something like homeopathy gains popularity in the time period he lives in.
His son only ever knew the underfed plantation and then feeds them so even when there is enough for everyone. Is this regress1 or regress2 in your view?
Remember a moral realist is not obliged to consider morality personally adaptive. Recall that many classical views of divine punishment or the negative consequences of immorality are not in the bad consequences for the individual but the society as a whole.
There’s not a different outcome / decision. Without change, how can we say that there is progress or regress of any kind?
Whatever. For the moral realist, the point is that there are real consequences—reduced wealth or lifespan or whatever—caused by immoral behavior. That feedback from objective reality creates strong pressure against moral regress2 - in the same way that failed predictions create strong pressure against scientific regress2.
Your discussion about elite knowledge vs. mass implementation is interesting, but is probably independent of whether moral facts are objective and universal. For purposes of this discussion, it’s probably easier to ignore the issue for the moment. Like ignoring the knock-on effects when discussing torture vs. dust-speck.