How can someone with a PhD in philosophy not understand subjective/objective? Albert Bartlett said the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. I think the inability to understand subjective/objective is a close second. Humans are so caught up in their contrived narratives they can't think straight.
We often can't think straight for various reasons. Sanger's article itself is peculiar, because instead of starting off by saying he plans to build on Aristotle, he pretends to derive a teleological perspective which Aristotle already provided in the Nichomachean Ethics. Sanger then offhandedly inserts in the middle that an informed reader may have noticed he was just repeating Aristotle's view. So Sanger wasn't completely ripping off Aristotle, but he could have saved himself the long-winded, pseudo-original formulation and just been up-front about what he intended to add to Aristotle. In short, the article should have been framed as an explicit critique of Aristotle's ethics.
That's not necessarily a crazy thing for him to say. It depends what he means by "objective morality." What he seems to want is for there to be moral facts, for there to an objective answer as to what we ought to do. We ought to enhance our life, he says.
So he wants to ground morality in biology, like Aristotle did. For that you need the final causes, and Aristotle justified his talk of such causes with the flimsy analogy between biological types and human artifacts. Sanger dismisses that analogy and pretends he's solved the problem even though he also dismisses the hurdle of the naturalistic fallacy. I'm not holding my breath in expectation that he'll succeed.
After years of being an agnostic, Larry has decided to start reading the bible and decided to become a christian. No wonder we can't get through to him.
Thanks for the heads-up and for the book recommendation. I read those articles and he says he's thinking about becoming a Christian but he hasn't decided yet. Anyway, if he does become a Christian, that would likely moot that discussion on the basis of morality, since he'd switch from Aristotle to a divine command theory.
I left a comment on the bible reading post. It's from Thomas Paine's Age Of Reason, where he point out the glaring contradictions between Matthew, Mark, Luke and Johns account of the resurrection.
Good article. I'm glad that you seem to be returning to your older style of deep analysis rather than attempting to sum up complicated issues in a few paragraphs.
The moral argument for God is the doubtlessly the weakest of all, since there are so many natural explanations available that probably each played a role in shaping our moral feelings. But while trying to establish a basis for morality is fascinating, I don't think it could strengthen the case for being moral any more than arguments for God strengthen people's faith. You made a interesting comparison between morals & math, remarking that if math were proved to be a fiction, it wouldn't imperil society, but that proving morality is fiction might. Scientists will use math even if they believe it's fictional because math serves a pragmatic purpose & modern science would just be old-fashioned natural philosophy without it. But I think the problem with morality is that it is rarely practical for the the individuals who practice it. Seeming to be moral is necessary, but actually being moral puts you at a disadvantage. So if you want people to be moral, it's not enough to assert that it's real in some platonic sense, you have to convince them that it's in their interests - that it's pragmatic. Look at it this way: do you think the 10 commandments would have any weight if there weren't punishments waiting for those who violated them? If God's word was enough to enforce morality, then Moses would not have had to execute those who violated the commandments. Most people don't care if morality is objective or not, they only care about its consequences for them
Thanks. The next one on presuppositionalism and the incoherence of secularism is on the longer and more in-depth side too.
I'm actually proud of my burst of Medium articles and plan to turn them into an anthology for Amazon, for the fun of it. They're certainly not as in-depth, on average, compared to many of the articles on this blog, but there's something to be said for getting to the point, too. It's been a fun challenge to try to reframe my worldview in this new format, from scratch and for a slightly more general audience. I remember dissing the "thinking Christian" for his SEO-friendly format, for his "baby paragraphs and sentences," and now I've got to write in a similar way to have a hope of finding readers on Medium. But as long as the content is written in good faith, in terms of addressing the real issues head-on, I suppose the increased "readability" isn't too much of a sin.
That's a great point you make about the conflict between pragmatism and morality. It all depends on what we include in the category of morality, of course, but if we go by the most honourable type of values, the kind that flow from a confrontation with our existential predicament, the kind held especially by social outsiders who are alienated from the bad fictions (obsolete myths) and delusions that sustain mass "morality" or servitude, then authentic, semi-ascetic morality will indeed be subversive and not at all attractive to the majority.
So would the loss of authentic morality be such a loss for society, when society prefers to indulge in rationalizations for the animal behaviour that betrays their greater potential? Would society care if the outcasts and introverted bystanders were eliminated along with their angst and radical prescriptions? Not obviously so. As Leo Strauss said or at least implied (according to Shadia Drury), the intellectual elites need to fool the masses with noble lies, to sustain the intellectual lifestyle despite its subversiveness. It's not the other way around.
Ascetic morality is anti-social to the core. The only reason society tolerates it is because so few are willing to practice it. To really damage society, a significant portion of the population would need to become ascetics. In the past, societies dealt with such outsiders by sending them off to monasteries; though there's no obvious solution these days. People who are just too good to live generally end up on the streets along with those who failed for other reasons (poverty, addictions, impulse control). Society doesn't miss them. Most people wouldn't ask any questions if one morning all the 'bums' in town had just disappeared. Good riddance.
But no, I was merely speaking of conventional pro-social morals such as the Mosiac law code (or most any law code). Refraining from lying, stealing & murder are the minimum any society requires to survive; but limit the individuals within it & are positive handicaps the moment someone decides to break them. The only way we can make conventional morality practical for the individual is by consistently punishing any breach. This, however, only addresses visible behavior. There is still no practical incentive to build one's character, have a conscience or refrain from immoral behavior whenever we believe we can get away with it; & not even God could provide such a motive unless He is willing to punish those breaches of morality that society cannot.
You say, "So if you want people to be moral, it's not enough to assert that it's real in some platonic sense, you have to convince them that it's in their interests - that it's pragmatic."
This strikes me as funny, because what you're really saying is that to make "morality" popular, we have to sell non-morality as morality. If people are acting only in their own interests, they're hardly thinking in moral terms. If they're thinking only of what's useful to them, they're closer to being amoral than moral.
Conventional morality is about universal principles, especially altruistic ones. It's about doing what's right even at a cost to yourself. It's about thinking of a good greater than your personal good, and identifying with something larger than yourself, namely with the Good or with God's commandments, with some utopian society we mean to build or with our spiritual bond as intelligent creatures.
Don't get me wrong: I'm sure you're right that most people wouldn't care about true morality unless they could be sold on the usefulness of being selfless once in a while. Indeed, the happiness movement in psychology approaches this neoliberal spin on morality. It's just that it amuses to think of the type of "morality" that would survive such salesmanship.
This strikes me as funny, because what you're really saying is that to make "morality" popular, we have to sell non-morality as morality. If people are acting only in their own interests, they're hardly thinking in moral terms. If they're thinkingonly of what's useful to them, they're closer to being amoral than moral.
For most people morality is exactly what you would call amorality. People are only moral because they believe (correctly or not) that it's in their interests. For such people an amoral or immoral person is just someone who mistakenly believes they are acting in their self-interest but is in fact heading in the wrong direction. It's the difference between doing what you think is best for you versus actually knowing what's best.
Conventional morality is about universal principles, especially altruistic ones. It's about doing what's right even at a cost to yourself. It's about thinking of a good greater than your personal good, and identifying with something larger than yourself, namely with the Good or with God's commandments, with some utopian society we mean to build or with our spiritual bond as intelligent creatures.
That's a very philosophical definition of morality, not what I would regard as a conventional one. Not even most Christians would put it in those terms. I remember I once asked an elder in my church why we should worship a God who doesn't even stop at murdering innocent children (we were discussing the biblical story of the 10 plagues God inflicted on the Egyptians)? His answer: because if we don't worship this God, we could be his next victims. He didn't try to absolve God or justify the plagues. No, it's just a matter of pure self interest: Obey or die. I tried to explain to him why we should be moral even if there is no God or even in spite of God, but he just couldn't get it. To him, the idea of sacrificing oneself for some ideal like 'Love of Truth' or 'Respect for Life' was just stupid, not moral at all.
And it's the same with secular morality, except that God is replaced by the state or your peer group. People become vegans for likes on Facebook; but if they cared about animals they'd weep over all the vermin that had to die so they could live on carbs & proceed to voluntarily starve themselves. All these boomers wring their hands over climate change while driving around in SUVs & jetting around the world on holidays. Hundreds of millions of people remain Catholic despite overwhelming, well-documented & incontrovertible evidence that leaders in the highest echelons of their church knew about the systematic rape of children & did everything in their power to shield the perps from justice so the abuse could continue. Do you really think these are moral people? That the typical Catholic mom cares if her son gets screwed by a priest? Nope; and as long as being Catholic remains respectable she'll continue to not care while bleeding her non-existent little heart out over planned parenthood. I could offer dozens more examples, but why bother? Conventional morality is driven by fear & shame, not compassion or the love of virtue.
You're likely right about the rarity of what I'm calling "morality." This seems to be largely a semantic issue, though. What you're calling "conventional morality" I'd call "prudence" rather than "morality," since it's based on self-interest. We can define our terms how we like, but I think the way to frame this important question is to ask whether morality could be made to seem prudent.
This is what the social contract is about. We sacrifice the freedom we have in the state of nature and act civilly towards strangers, vowing to keep the peace so we too can live in peace despite the potential threat of being so near thousands of strangers (who could gang up on you and rob you blind).
I agree that conventional morality would really be better designated as prudence unless we are talking about Randian morality. Since there are so many conflicting notions of what's moral, I'd prefer to call what you think of as morality as 'altruism' or 'idealism'. Now, genuine altruism can exist &, contrary to evolutionary psychology, trying to find selfish motives for seemingly altruistic actions doesn't refute the idea that some actions could be selfless. I've personally never seen prudence as virtuous anyways, unless it serves & is moderated a real virtue.
So can altruism be made to seem prudent? I don't think it can if we want it to remain 'altruistic'. Of course people can do apparently altruistic things out of prudence; the recipient of charity does not care if their benefactor gave out of compassion or vanity. And some people will use God to make their altruism seem prudent. A homeless man might return a wallet full of cash when he could have kept it by telling himself that God is watching; though in that case God would just be a little lie he tells himself so that he can seem idealistic & practical all at once. But I think what distinguishes a truly altruistic deed from a prudent one is intent. It's content, not form that matters here.
Larry Sanger FINALLY replied to your comment on his Why Be Moral post.
ReplyDeletehttps://larrysanger.org/2019/09/why-be-moral/
Thanks for the heads up. I'd forgotten I'd sent that reply. I just replied to his reply on his website.
DeleteGreat. This nihilist is enjoying the exchange. He now claims there is no naturalistic fallacy.
DeleteI sent a reply to him. He seems ticked off already.
DeleteHow can someone with a PhD in philosophy not understand subjective/objective? Albert Bartlett said the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. I think the inability to understand subjective/objective is a close second. Humans are so caught up in their contrived narratives they can't think straight.
DeleteI assume you're talking about Sanger there.
DeleteWe often can't think straight for various reasons. Sanger's article itself is peculiar, because instead of starting off by saying he plans to build on Aristotle, he pretends to derive a teleological perspective which Aristotle already provided in the Nichomachean Ethics. Sanger then offhandedly inserts in the middle that an informed reader may have noticed he was just repeating Aristotle's view. So Sanger wasn't completely ripping off Aristotle, but he could have saved himself the long-winded, pseudo-original formulation and just been up-front about what he intended to add to Aristotle. In short, the article should have been framed as an explicit critique of Aristotle's ethics.
Yes, I was referring to Sanger. He has said that if there is no objective basis for morality, then our lives are truly meaningless. Humans are doomed.
DeleteThat's not necessarily a crazy thing for him to say. It depends what he means by "objective morality." What he seems to want is for there to be moral facts, for there to an objective answer as to what we ought to do. We ought to enhance our life, he says.
DeleteSo he wants to ground morality in biology, like Aristotle did. For that you need the final causes, and Aristotle justified his talk of such causes with the flimsy analogy between biological types and human artifacts. Sanger dismisses that analogy and pretends he's solved the problem even though he also dismisses the hurdle of the naturalistic fallacy. I'm not holding my breath in expectation that he'll succeed.
I recently read a good book on the topic of moral nihilism called Power Nihilism.
Deletehttp://www.lulu.com/shop/james-theodore-stillwell-iii-and-matthew-ray-and-brett-stevens/power-nihilism-a-case-for-moral-political-nihilism/paperback/product-23792793.html
After years of being an agnostic, Larry has decided to start reading the bible and decided to become a christian. No wonder we can't get through to him.
Deletehttps://larrysanger.org/2020/01/reading-the-bible-in-90-days/
https://larrysanger.org/2020/01/why-i-have-not-been-a-christian-and-why-that-might-change/
Thanks for the heads-up and for the book recommendation. I read those articles and he says he's thinking about becoming a Christian but he hasn't decided yet. Anyway, if he does become a Christian, that would likely moot that discussion on the basis of morality, since he'd switch from Aristotle to a divine command theory.
DeleteI left a comment on the bible reading post. It's from Thomas Paine's Age Of Reason, where he point out the glaring contradictions between Matthew, Mark, Luke and Johns account of the resurrection.
DeleteGood article. I'm glad that you seem to be returning to your older style of deep analysis rather than attempting to sum up complicated issues in a few paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteThe moral argument for God is the doubtlessly the weakest of all, since there are so many natural explanations available that probably each played a role in shaping our moral feelings. But while trying to establish a basis for morality is fascinating, I don't think it could strengthen the case for being moral any more than arguments for God strengthen people's faith. You made a interesting comparison between morals & math, remarking that if math were proved to be a fiction, it wouldn't imperil society, but that proving morality is fiction might. Scientists will use math even if they believe it's fictional because math serves a pragmatic purpose & modern science would just be old-fashioned natural philosophy without it. But I think the problem with morality is that it is rarely practical for the the individuals who practice it. Seeming to be moral is necessary, but actually being moral puts you at a disadvantage. So if you want people to be moral, it's not enough to assert that it's real in some platonic sense, you have to convince them that it's in their interests - that it's pragmatic. Look at it this way: do you think the 10 commandments would have any weight if there weren't punishments waiting for those who violated them? If God's word was enough to enforce morality, then Moses would not have had to execute those who violated the commandments. Most people don't care if morality is objective or not, they only care about its consequences for them
Thanks. The next one on presuppositionalism and the incoherence of secularism is on the longer and more in-depth side too.
DeleteI'm actually proud of my burst of Medium articles and plan to turn them into an anthology for Amazon, for the fun of it. They're certainly not as in-depth, on average, compared to many of the articles on this blog, but there's something to be said for getting to the point, too. It's been a fun challenge to try to reframe my worldview in this new format, from scratch and for a slightly more general audience. I remember dissing the "thinking Christian" for his SEO-friendly format, for his "baby paragraphs and sentences," and now I've got to write in a similar way to have a hope of finding readers on Medium. But as long as the content is written in good faith, in terms of addressing the real issues head-on, I suppose the increased "readability" isn't too much of a sin.
That's a great point you make about the conflict between pragmatism and morality. It all depends on what we include in the category of morality, of course, but if we go by the most honourable type of values, the kind that flow from a confrontation with our existential predicament, the kind held especially by social outsiders who are alienated from the bad fictions (obsolete myths) and delusions that sustain mass "morality" or servitude, then authentic, semi-ascetic morality will indeed be subversive and not at all attractive to the majority.
So would the loss of authentic morality be such a loss for society, when society prefers to indulge in rationalizations for the animal behaviour that betrays their greater potential? Would society care if the outcasts and introverted bystanders were eliminated along with their angst and radical prescriptions? Not obviously so. As Leo Strauss said or at least implied (according to Shadia Drury), the intellectual elites need to fool the masses with noble lies, to sustain the intellectual lifestyle despite its subversiveness. It's not the other way around.
Ascetic morality is anti-social to the core. The only reason society tolerates it is because so few are willing to practice it. To really damage society, a significant portion of the population would need to become ascetics. In the past, societies dealt with such outsiders by sending them off to monasteries; though there's no obvious solution these days. People who are just too good to live generally end up on the streets along with those who failed for other reasons (poverty, addictions, impulse control). Society doesn't miss them. Most people wouldn't ask any questions if one morning all the 'bums' in town had just disappeared. Good riddance.
DeleteBut no, I was merely speaking of conventional pro-social morals such as the Mosiac law code (or most any law code). Refraining from lying, stealing & murder are the minimum any society requires to survive; but limit the individuals within it & are positive handicaps the moment someone decides to break them. The only way we can make conventional morality practical for the individual is by consistently punishing any breach. This, however, only addresses visible behavior. There is still no practical incentive to build one's character, have a conscience or refrain from immoral behavior whenever we believe we can get away with it; & not even God could provide such a motive unless He is willing to punish those breaches of morality that society cannot.
You say, "So if you want people to be moral, it's not enough to assert that it's real in some platonic sense, you have to convince them that it's in their interests - that it's pragmatic."
DeleteThis strikes me as funny, because what you're really saying is that to make "morality" popular, we have to sell non-morality as morality. If people are acting only in their own interests, they're hardly thinking in moral terms. If they're thinking only of what's useful to them, they're closer to being amoral than moral.
Conventional morality is about universal principles, especially altruistic ones. It's about doing what's right even at a cost to yourself. It's about thinking of a good greater than your personal good, and identifying with something larger than yourself, namely with the Good or with God's commandments, with some utopian society we mean to build or with our spiritual bond as intelligent creatures.
Don't get me wrong: I'm sure you're right that most people wouldn't care about true morality unless they could be sold on the usefulness of being selfless once in a while. Indeed, the happiness movement in psychology approaches this neoliberal spin on morality. It's just that it amuses to think of the type of "morality" that would survive such salesmanship.
This strikes me as funny, because what you're really saying is that to make "morality" popular, we have to sell non-morality as morality. If people are acting only in their own interests, they're hardly thinking in moral terms. If they're thinkingonly of what's useful to them, they're closer to being amoral than moral.
DeleteFor most people morality is exactly what you would call amorality. People are only moral because they believe (correctly or not) that it's in their interests. For such people an amoral or immoral person is just someone who mistakenly believes they are acting in their self-interest but is in fact heading in the wrong direction. It's the difference between doing what you think is best for you versus actually knowing what's best.
Conventional morality is about universal principles, especially altruistic ones. It's about doing what's right even at a cost to yourself. It's about thinking of a good greater than your personal good, and identifying with something larger than yourself, namely with the Good or with God's commandments, with some utopian society we mean to build or with our spiritual bond as intelligent creatures.
That's a very philosophical definition of morality, not what I would regard as a conventional one. Not even most Christians would put it in those terms. I remember I once asked an elder in my church why we should worship a God who doesn't even stop at murdering innocent children (we were discussing the biblical story of the 10 plagues God inflicted on the Egyptians)? His answer: because if we don't worship this God, we could be his next victims. He didn't try to absolve God or justify the plagues. No, it's just a matter of pure self interest: Obey or die. I tried to explain to him why we should be moral even if there is no God or even in spite of God, but he just couldn't get it. To him, the idea of sacrificing oneself for some ideal like 'Love of Truth' or 'Respect for Life' was just stupid, not moral at all.
And it's the same with secular morality, except that God is replaced by the state or your peer group. People become vegans for likes on Facebook; but if they cared about animals they'd weep over all the vermin that had to die so they could live on carbs & proceed to voluntarily starve themselves. All these boomers wring their hands over climate change while driving around in SUVs & jetting around the world on holidays. Hundreds of millions of people remain Catholic despite overwhelming, well-documented & incontrovertible evidence that leaders in the highest echelons of their church knew about the systematic rape of children & did everything in their power to shield the perps from justice so the abuse could continue. Do you really think these are moral people? That the typical Catholic mom cares if her son gets screwed by a priest? Nope; and as long as being Catholic remains respectable she'll continue to not care while bleeding her non-existent little heart out over planned parenthood. I could offer dozens more examples, but why bother? Conventional morality is driven by fear & shame, not compassion or the love of virtue.
You're likely right about the rarity of what I'm calling "morality." This seems to be largely a semantic issue, though. What you're calling "conventional morality" I'd call "prudence" rather than "morality," since it's based on self-interest. We can define our terms how we like, but I think the way to frame this important question is to ask whether morality could be made to seem prudent.
DeleteThis is what the social contract is about. We sacrifice the freedom we have in the state of nature and act civilly towards strangers, vowing to keep the peace so we too can live in peace despite the potential threat of being so near thousands of strangers (who could gang up on you and rob you blind).
I agree that conventional morality would really be better designated as prudence unless we are talking about Randian morality. Since there are so many conflicting notions of what's moral, I'd prefer to call what you think of as morality as 'altruism' or 'idealism'. Now, genuine altruism can exist &, contrary to evolutionary psychology, trying to find selfish motives for seemingly altruistic actions doesn't refute the idea that some actions could be selfless. I've personally never seen prudence as virtuous anyways, unless it serves & is moderated a real virtue.
DeleteSo can altruism be made to seem prudent? I don't think it can if we want it to remain 'altruistic'. Of course people can do apparently altruistic things out of prudence; the recipient of charity does not care if their benefactor gave out of compassion or vanity. And some people will use God to make their altruism seem prudent. A homeless man might return a wallet full of cash when he could have kept it by telling himself that God is watching; though in that case God would just be a little lie he tells himself so that he can seem idealistic & practical all at once. But I think what distinguishes a truly altruistic deed from a prudent one is intent. It's content, not form that matters here.