Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 am
The force of Singer's arguments in Famine Affluence and Morality and All Animals are Equal do not depend in the very least whether one is a consequentialist or a non-consequentialist in normative ethics nor whether one is a constructivist, non-naturalist, or expressivist quasi-realist in metaethics.
I disagree; they only have "force" in the most superficial sense of if you arbitrarily agree with the premises, but nothing in these meta-ethics compels agreement with the premises (that's a big problem).
The point is that these arguments can not be deductively substantiated in all systems from the meta-ethics, and if they can't then they're nothing short of arbitrary declarations that people can just as easily reject as accept based on their preferences.
The fact that somebody may consider something temporarily persuasive is irrelevant: my question is one of foundation. I'm looking for incontrovertibility.
We could persuade somebody of something based on some kind of scriptural interpretation too, but that doesn't guarantee any kind of stability because they could change religions, or simply read the scripture differently. There's nothing that logically necessitates a certain interpretation, or logically demands that religion.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIf you talk to real-world consequentialists and non-consequentialists, like Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the normative ethical views of the other.
That presumes that these perspectives themselves are capable of issuing normative claims with the same force at all. I do not agree that they are.
Non-consequentialist systems aren't really coherent by their nature. If you prop them up with enough complex arbitrary ad hoc rules to force them to work they become increasingly absurd and decreasingly convincing as a natural foundation for ethics; a tower of assumptions easily toppled, likely leaving the ex-adherent stuck in some form of nihilism to spite the charade.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amand note this carefully: Peter Singer, like the Sidgwick to Ewing school before him, is a non-naturalist; see e.g. his recent book with de Lazari-Radek on The Point of View of the Universe
The last I heard he was a classical utilitarian of some kind, having waffled back from preference utilitarianism.
I would call satisfaction of preferences or interests natural too, since it's a state that corresponds to something empirically real.
If you want to stretch the definition of non-naturalism to include idealized interests, despite there being some evidently objective and empirical methods to arrive at those, I guess, but I don't think that qualifies as Moore defined it (or in the way he claimed it couldn't be defined), or any other definition I've seen.
Maybe you're going by something more contemporary?
SEP lays out a few: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/
Very roughly, non-naturalism in meta-ethics is the idea that moral philosophy is fundamentally autonomous from the natural sciences.
Something I could not disagree with more. Such distinctions leave morality without objective foundation, abandoning it as either magical gnosis or subjective whim.
Assuming non-naturalistic moral beliefs are theistic is
charitable, because for an atheist we're talking about something much worse.
More accurately, a family of related but distinct doctrines has gone under the heading ‘non-naturalism’. In some contexts, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the semantic thesis that moral predicates cannot be analyzed in non-normative terms (see Shaver 2000 and Gibbard 2002: 153).
This is less clear, and I don't think it's really useful since again it degrades into subjectivism or gnosis. There are also serious metaphysical issues with "shoulds" in themselves as related to determinism.
In other contexts, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the epistemological thesis that knowledge of basic moral principles and value judgements are in some sense self-evident (see Frankena 1963: 85–86). However, this view (which some self-styled naturalists would actually accept) is more often and more usefully referred to as ‘intuitionism’ and I shall henceforth also refer to it as such.
Again, down to some kind of magical intuition or gnosis. These are not reasoned arguments, they're faith based assertions.
Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.[...]
Bingo. It's fundamentally a metaphysical belief in a supernatural substance of morality if it is in any way substantial.
I think any atheist who claims to be a non-naturalist is by nature being intellectually dishonest, in the very least by dodging the only meaningful question at hand.
And if Singer has claimed this (he has said some odd things in the past) I would say the same of whatever his views have evolved into.
This part was well said:
Moreover, each of these different conceptions of non-naturalism bears interesting relations of support to the others. For example, a prima facie plausible explanation of the alleged immunity of moral predicates from analysis in non-normative terms (non-naturalism in the first sense) would be that moral predicates denote non-natural properties (which entails non-naturalism in the third sense). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moore accepted non-naturalism in all three of these senses. Because non-naturalism is far more often understood in the third of these three ways I shall henceforth use ‘non-naturalism’ with the third of these three meanings unless otherwise noted.
No notion exists in a vacuum; these philosophical claims have substantial implications which are far reaching (much farther than some of the philosophers who claim to hold them would like to believe; they'd like to have their non-naturalism and their atheism too).
Re: Singer, can't say that would be very surprising given how incoherent his views sometimes are, but it's definitely not useful to weasel out of defining moral good by calling it its own magical thing that can't be reduced to anything else; without theistic mandate, that is in practice just subjectivism by another name since it's not only unsubstantiated but undefined and asserted to be undefinable in any useful objective way with respect to reason and empirical reality.
I won't go into my background, but bear in mind I'm coming from a hard science perspective first and sophistry like this is what causes rational people to have such contempt for philosophy (as I did in my misspent youth).
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIf you talk to real-world constructivists like Sharon Street, real world non-naturalists [...] and real world expressivist quasi-realists like Allan Gibbard, they would readily admit that the force of these arguments wouldn't be altered at all if they converted to the meta-ethical views of the others.
I'm sure you could get them to admit that, but that doesn't mean it's actually true, and the fact that they hold these views at all doesn't inspire much confidence in their ability to employ reason properly.
I'm sure you could find Christians who would say the rectitude of some of their beliefs wouldn't be altered by any horizontal conversion into another theistic faith too. Doesn't mean they have any idea what they're talking about or have the slightest notion of the implications of such a shift.
The bottom line for me is that these beliefs don't substantiate anything or deductively entail anything, at best they're ad hoc narratives that provide the language to rationalize beliefs, but like scripture they can be just as convincingly applied to the opposite conclusion with the difference in subjective interpretation.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amAs to what you mean by naturalistic moral realism: can you just explain what you take that view to hold? I'm still not sure what you mean by that phrase.
Realism: People are expressing propositions, and some of them are true or false. (At least the minimal sense of realism)
Naturalistic: The meaning of good can be clearly defined in relation to empirical properties.
That is, it's not some magical metaphysical thing of its own sensed through gnosis "intuition", or anything else I responded to above. There may be some definitions that straddle the line or create ambiguity between what is natural and not (as I understand, some claim that divine command would be natural, or that "sin" would be a natural property if it were metaphysically real). You can probably stretch the respective definitions to overlap them completely, and I recognize that there may be no distinction once thy're broken down enough, but I mean them only in the useful sense where that is not done (and I'm not certain it can be credibly done since there may be some fundamental difference these terms get at).
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amUnfortunately I do not think that my actual evidence that the ingredients of consequentilaism are true (e.g. a principle of beneficence according to which we have strong moral reasons to promote the well-being of others) differs in kind from my evidence for the existence of these special obligations
What "evidence" do you mean? Are you talking about intuition, or word usage?
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amthat the principles remain most plausible after critical clarification of what they are really saying and what they entail in various contexts, in comparison with rival sets of principles.
Plausibility shouldn't really have much to do with it beyond the linguistics of what labels we give these things.
The question we should be asking is whether these ideas are actually systems, that is proper functions; can we
derive anything meaningful from them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_%28mathematics%29
In mathematics, a function[1] is a relation between a set of inputs and a set of permissible outputs with the property that each input is related to exactly one output.
If a proposed moral theory does not allow us to deduce output that doesn't contradict equally valid output, if it's not a proper function, it doesn't generate any rationally compelling normative claims (maybe emotionally compelling for people who want to believe it, but it has no rational force), in effect it's just another formulation of dressed up subjectivism.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amBut I could well be wrong, and it could be, as Sidgwick argued, that only the contents of consequentialism remain most plausible after maximal critical normative-ethical reflection.
Well, they're the only ones that generate workable functions. Likewise, naturalistic realism is the only thing that's going to lead you there.
If a Meta-ethical hypothesis does not lead fairly uncontroversially (or can not be well argued to do so) to some very specific normative heuristic it's just not a viable function.
I think you may have been missing the forest through the trees here; sometimes people get too bogged down in theory to realize most of these fail profoundly upon any attempted application.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amFor instance if there isn't a plausible way to understand affiliative special obligations
It should be enough to say it's not plausible because you have to construct bizarre ad hoc systems to justify them which fail at the basic requirement to serve as rationally compelling functions that let us learn anything at all.
It's not plausible if it can not be done in the context of naturalistic realism. And if it can, then we should argue for that mechanism if that's where the empirical evidence points (but then we're beyond the point of sitting around and talking about things and into actual scientific work, which is something many philosophers seem loathe to admit, perhaps because it would make their jobs much less important).
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amIt's just that, from what I've been able to determine so far, underivative special obligations still seem plausible - as plausible as the underivative duties of beneficence that exhaust the contents of morality on consequentialism).
Your view of plausibility, I think, is overly broad.
People claim the Christian God is plausible too, without looking into the implications too carefully. Try to deconstruct them a bit more, and I think you'll find the foundations you see these as plausible within do not hold up.
That said, they're perfectly plausible in a naturalistic realist perspective, although they may not be true depending on what the evidence says.
Human psychology says a lot about what is more or less difficult for us, and difficulty of pursuing an action says a lot about duty to follow through with it in a normative sense of allowing us to condemn character.
Tossing a life preserver into a pool vs. leaping into a raging river to save somebody from drowning; the effect it the same for the victim, but demanded input is much higher in the latter case.
We can understand mitigating excuses like self preservation, and so too can we understand psychologically compelling duties like loyalty and family as excuses even if they aren't morally mandated. The idea that we might have more obligation in certain situations can also hold up to scrutiny if there's evidence of social utility.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amI'm sorry but I don't think that you understood what I was saying. I was understanding consequentialism as the view that we are morally required to bring about the most impartial good, or to bring about the most well-being
With respect to the definition of good outcomes consequentialism is very consistent on this point, but there are different ways to interpret judgement of character and duty within that context that people often overlook (different baselines or averages).
Just because we know what good looks like does not mean it's that simple to know what a good person looks like.
There is not just an absolute shit person and a perfect person, and nothing in between (I think this is the mistake AtheneWins has made in the past). We can normalize and assess character in different ways, and I think there's an under-appreciation of that fact with respect to normative force.
Somebody might be strongly compelled to be neutral or slightly good, very strongly compelled to not be a bad person, but maybe more weakly compelled to be perfect.
Most people want to be good people, but may not be motivated to be perfect people, and we can talk very meaningfully about what that means.
We can understand a "should" in global terms of most preferred states of reality as a consequence of your actions while still respecting the nature of practical heuristics in informing behavior.
The greatest good is not necessarily an overly taxing demand for perfection.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amWhat I was saying was that one can also be required to give up, e.g. 10 units of well-being for oneself in order to confer 8 units of well-being on someone else
Of course, and that is in line with an altruistic interpretation.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 ambecause she might be your child, or someone to whom you've made a promise, or someone you've wronged in the past and is now owed your restitution.
...But this in itself would not determine that.
The question is in burning out or in self destruction which prevents you from doing greater good. The issue is a psychological one, and perception of duty may influence that, but is not in itself a real thing unless there's an element of overriding social utility to it: that is, we did the math wrong, or incorrectly regarded the situation as occurring in a bubble when there were more units of well being created lost or shuffled around by the action than we anticipated.
Margaret Hayek wrote: ↑Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:55 amAgain: I could be wrong. But unlike the idea that duties of non-maleficence are in themselves stronger than duties of beneficence, this is not something where my current normative ethical reflection suggests that Henry Sidgwick is in the right and W.D. Ross is in the wrong.
I have never encountered an issue with consequentialism that wasn't just an oversight, either missing harms or benefits, or mistaking the general good with personal assessment of character.
I have run into some bizarrely steadfast assertions of hedonism, but that's something else.
Either way, if there were such a case that intuitive reflection differed sharply from what is deduced it is not only possible, but by necessity must be so if morality has meaning, that our intuitions are simply wrong, and that deduction in ethics through the only route that provides a coherent function for evaluation (not intuition) has corrected our false assumptions. I think choosing another arbitrary or subjective meta-ethic because we don't like the logical conclusions of the only one that actually serves any meaningful purpose in providing objective determination of morality would be intellectually dishonest.