Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang, Essays on Mind and Matter

[TheHumanHydra]

Until the buck stops somewhere other than your personal preferences, I don't think you've arrived at a non-subjective source for moral behaviour.

And I contend this is impossible, since the buck-stopping itself is a personal preference.

That gets into greater questions of 'how do we discern truth?' which I'm not competent to argue (but I think Bacchus is). But yes, if we determine the buck-stopping is a preference, then morality remains without objective basis.

[TheHumanHydra]

Why do you think we need a non-subjective standard for morality HumanHydra? If I get your argument you seem to insist there just IS an objective measurement (X Deity says Y), but why?

Sorry, I may have misunderstood you as saying there was an objective standard for morality that didn't depend on a deity. I was trying to demonstrate that any such standard would be subjective -- but if we already agree, then no need!

I do hold that a certain deity says a few things about behaviour, though that wasn't what I was trying to prove. I was just saying that if one does want to insist on such a measurement, I think it implies a deity.

(By the way, the morality generated by the deity is his subjective preferences, it's just objective relative to us and because he is held to have instilled it into the universe.)

As to why, that's one of the grand questions of existence, I suppose. I've argued earlier in the thread that most of us will choose what to believe based on how personally satisfying we find it, deriving from what actions it allows us to perform. I'd add to that social factors and, yes, intellectual factors such as what we are convinced by. For me, I can tell you that

a) I find a non-idiosyncratic moral standard psychologically satisfying. For example, it enables me to feel good about 'fighting injustice.' I'm sure there's a whole field about the psychology of religion one could delve into that would explain it much better than I could, but I can try harder if you'd like.

b) Relatedly, religion gives definition to concepts such as self-fulfillment, purpose, etc. that are psychologically appealing.

c) Socially, I was brought up in my religion and peer reinforcement and communal bonds render it very satisfying to remain within it.

d) Intellectually, my religion seems to provide an explanation for the origin of all things (pre-Big-Bang) that I at least have not had communicated to me by areligious science. This is probably the least compelling reason for faith, however. (Additionally, I find Christianity, while problematic, more reasonable than other religious systems I have scant knowledge of.)

That's a very clinical look at why I hold to my religion (and objective moral standard) -- I'm attempting to do the deconstruction myself. What I'm supposed to tell you is that my religion is invigorating and vitalizing and like music in the heart and the colours of the world in sharper contrast, and that I am loved and prompted to share love, and that it's a hard road, yet the best of journeys and with the best of destinations, and that I know who I am and who I must become, and why, and why again, but something tells me that won't carry across the experiential gap ('hooey!'). 

[Bacchus]

THH, your points on oughtness are absolutely spot on. There is, as always with philosophers, a technical term for the set of questions you pose, they are questions of normativity -- how can anything have normative force, how can we make a jump from an <i>is</i> to an <i>ought</i>? And you are absolutely right that it's a particular problem for introductory interpretations of the Kantian categorical imperative. Ok, so we are not free, unless we act morally, but so what?

One preliminary is in order, and that's whether normativity and morality are the same thing, which is something that you seem to assume. The general thinking is that they are not, there are other sources of normativity, of which a prominent one seems prudence. Prudence has actually already been alluded here quite a bit, firstly by T-Hawk -- to the extent that you have goals, what you ought to do is to take the means to fulfilling them. And of course you ought not do whatever would undermine them. That's a pretty dirty definition of prudence, but I think the direction is clear, and it also seems clear that whilst your goals are subjective, the principle of prudence can at least appear subject-independent. You both have also already alluded, interestingly enough, to political normativity -- the things we ought to do to preserve social peace, the conditions of co-existence in society. One could name legal normativity and logical normativity as other candidates. Accounts have been offered why all these can be objectively be sources of normative force. Of course accounts have been also challenged, and there is an active discussion of whether various types of normativity are reducible to each other, and whether there is just one basic normativity.

I am actually currently reading Christine Korsgaard, who has spent a lot of time working on those topics, including an entire book The Sources of Normativity. She is particularly of a Kantian disposition, and I greatly look forward to seeing how she goes about giving the categorical imperative normative force. I'll take a crack at a possible justification for utilitarian morality though (which I don't believe in, but it's worth trying, I think).

So, the goal as you rightly say is to justify why satisfaction is to be promoted and why suffering is to be avoided as a matter of fact -- by everyone, regardless of what they happen to think on the subject or feel about it. We start with the questions themselves: what ought to be done, what ought not to be done? The questions are primary, they are preliminary to any normativity, if these questions don't even arise, no discussion on the matter can even be had -- a stone is not amenable to talk about reasons. Of course, the questions do arise, they arise as a matter of fact, because people have will. They have to choose between courses of action. The courses of action themselves, however, have no value, they provide no guide to the choice. Neither do, in general, their consequences.

However, there are two specific types of consequences that do provide such a guide -- some courses of action can result in satisfaction, others in suffering. What is satisfaction? Satisfaction is just our capacity to appraise a state of affairs as desireable and suffering is what makes one undesirable. That we are capable of feeling satisfaction objectively makes certain states of affairs desireable for us, and them being desireable for us just means that they are the ones we should bring about when selecting among available courses of action. The opposite holds for suffering. There is no question of valuing satisfaction, because satisfaction itself is a valuation. It literally is what values states of affairs. Someone could claim to "not value satisfaction" or to "enjoy suffering" of course, but that people are able to speak nonsense or that words have multiple meanings has no bearing on objective morality. Now someone, like a Genejack, could have no capacity for satisfaction or suffering, that is no capacity for positively or negatively valuing states of affairs and yes, for such a being morality there would be no objective morality, but for us there is.

[Bacchus]

And some Korsgaard for discussion:

I have argued
that a human being is an animal who needs a practical conception
of her own identity, a conception of who she is that is normative
for her. Otherwise she could have no reasons to act, and since she
is reflective she needs reasons to act. But you are a human being
and so if you believe my argument you can now see that this is
your identity. You are an animal of the sort I have just described.
And that is not merely a contingent conception of your identity,
which you have constructed or chosen for yourself or could conceivably
reject. It is simply the truth. Now that you see that your
need to have a normative conception of yourself comes from the
sort of animal you are, you can ask whether it really matters
whether animals of this kind conform to their normative practical
identities. Does it really matter what human beings do ? And here
you have no option but to say yes. Since you are human you must
take something to be normative, that is, some conception of practical
identity must be normative for you. If you had no normative
conception of your identity, you could have no reasons for action,
and because your consciousness is reflective, you could then not act
at all. Since you cannot act without reasons and your humanity is
the source of your reasons, you must endorse your own humanity
if you are to act at all.

It follows from this argument that human beings are valuable.
Enlightenment morality is true.

So far I have argued that the reflective structure of human consciousness
gives us legislative authority over ourselves. That is why
we are able to obligate ourselves. And just now I argued that once
we understand how all of this works, we must concede that our
humanity is an end in itself, that human nature as the source of
our values is itself a value. This, I should add, is what gives rise
to moral obligation.

[Bacchus]

That gets into greater questions of 'how do we discern truth?' which I'm not competent to argue (but I think Bacchus is). But yes, if we determine the buck-stopping is a preference, then morality remains without objective basis.

Buck-stopping seems to mean precisely agency. It's what Korsgaard means by reflective consciousness -- you reflect upon impulses, preferences, desires or whatever, and you pick them as good reasons to act, or discard them as bad ones. I don't think there is a way out of this simply as a matter of psychology. But the reflection itself calls for an external standard. Preferences are just not enough, you need reasons. At this point you can engage in seemingly endless forms of mental gymnastics to appraise reasons -- religion as I see it falls into those gymnastics just as well, you still need to select, as a matter of agency, the God-given commandments as a source of reasons. God doesn't force this selection. You are still able, as a matter of agency, to ignore them, or spitefully rebel against them.

Now there do seem to be standards to reflective agency -- rationality for example. I don't see a reason why we can't apply rationality as an objective standard here as we would to pursuit of knowledge. When learning about the world, someone can surely proclaim that "I know I hold contradictory statements to be true, but I spit on your so-called logical consistency!", and we would both register this stance as his preference and categorize his views as objectively mistaken. Agreement with experience, or empirical observation, or reality, whatever your metaphysical position would be another standard. I think this already leaves a big enough hole for an objective morality to squeeze through, at least as objective as any statement we can make.

[TheHumanHydra]

THH, your points on oughtness are absolutely spot on. There is, as always with philosophers, a technical term for the set of questions you pose, they are questions of normativity -- how can anything have normative force, how can we make a jump from an <i>is</i> to an <i>ought</i>? And you are absolutely right that it's a particular problem for introductory interpretations of the Kantian categorical imperative. Ok, so we are not free, unless we act morally, but so what?

One preliminary is in order, and that's whether normativity and morality are the same thing, which is something that you seem to assume. The general thinking is that they are not, there are other sources of normativity, of which a prominent one seems prudence. Prudence has actually already been alluded here quite a bit, firstly by T-Hawk -- to the extent that you have goals, what you ought to do is to take the means to fulfilling them. And of course you ought not do whatever would undermine them. That's a pretty dirty definition of prudence, but I think the direction is clear, and it also seems clear that whilst your goals are subjective, the principle of prudence can at least appear subject-independent. You both have also already alluded, interestingly enough, to political normativity -- the things we ought to do to preserve social peace, the conditions of co-existence in society. One could name legal normativity and logical normativity as other candidates. Accounts have been offered why all these can be objectively be sources of normative force. Of course accounts have been also challenged, and there is an active discussion of whether various types of normativity are reducible to each other, and whether there is just one basic normativity.

I am actually currently reading Christine Korsgaard, who has spent a lot of time working on those topics, including an entire book The Sources of Normativity. She is particularly of a Kantian disposition, and I greatly look forward to seeing how she goes about giving the categorical imperative normative force. I'll take a crack at a possible justification for utilitarian morality though (which I don't believe in, but it's worth trying, I think).

So, the goal as you rightly say is to justify why satisfaction is to be promoted and why suffering is to be avoided as a matter of fact -- by everyone, regardless of what they happen to think on the subject or feel about it. We start with the questions themselves: what ought to be done, what ought not to be done? The questions are primary, they are preliminary to any normativity, if these questions don't even arise, no discussion on the matter can even be had -- a stone is not amenable to talk about reasons. Of course, the questions do arise, they arise as a matter of fact, because people have will. They have to choose between courses of action. The courses of action themselves, however, have no value, they provide no guide to the choice. Neither do, in general, their consequences.

However, there are two specific types of consequences that do provide such a guide -- some courses of action can result in satisfaction, others in suffering. What is satisfaction? Satisfaction is just our capacity to appraise a state of affairs as desireable and suffering is what makes one undesirable. That we are capable of feeling satisfaction objectively makes certain states of affairs desireable for us, and them being desireable for us just means that they are the ones we should bring about when selecting among available courses of action. The opposite holds for suffering. There is no question of valuing satisfaction, because satisfaction itself is a valuation. It literally is what values states of affairs. Someone could claim to "not value satisfaction" or to "enjoy suffering" of course, but that people are able to speak nonsense or that words have multiple meanings has no bearing on objective morality. Now someone, like a Genejack, could have no capacity for satisfaction or suffering, that is no capacity for positively or negatively valuing states of affairs and yes, for such a being morality there would be no objective morality, but for us there is.

I think I'm just going to respond to the one post for now because it's late.

I was unaware of this concept of normativity and other proposed sources thereof. It's interesting, thanks. I would assert that those other sources either are reducible to objective morality (~law), do not interact with morality (logic, prudence), or demonstrate that common morality is again subjective (the extended argument about prudence). (I mentioned appeals to efficiency, selfishness, agency and reason in my post and discarded each as non-moral -- you can think of a way an action can conform to each and be right or wrong as we understand the latter pair.) Regardless, I think it is moral normativity we are interested in here.

As to the last paragraph, the utilitarian argument,

a) Satisfaction and suffering may alternatively be defined as psychological states which are definitively subjective and which may be produced in different organisms in different measure by different inputs.

b) Regardless, I think both morality and possibly other standards supervene. We can conceive of a circumstance in which it is wrong for a person to be satisfied (a thief) or right for them to suffer (an attempted murderer I just shot, if you aren't a pacifist).*

c) I'm not sure that the sentence on 'not valuing satisfaction' or 'enjoying suffering' holds up empirically.

d) This paragraph doesn't actually address why I ought to seek others' satisfaction and avert their suffering. It is, so? Actually, it doesn't really address why I ought to seek my own satisfaction and avert my own suffering! It would be logical, yes, but why ought I to beholden myself to logic? It feels good -- but that is a subjective reason to do so, it depends on my individual and perceptual experience. Alternatively, I could try to accept and ignore the sensation of pain (and expect others to), as Yang would have us do -- why not?

* I think utilitarians believe we should seek the greatest collective satisfaction and avoid the most collective suffering -- but why? Utilitarianism seems to me to be an attempt to observe and document the moral standard, not the source of it. Yes, morality intuitively seems often to oblige us to seek collective satisfaction and avoid collective pain, but why? Whence do we derive that appreciation? Those states are, why seek or avoid them?

Thanks for the discussion. Hopefully I got a few of the standard arguments right! 

[ipecac]

Why do you think we need a non-subjective standard for morality HumanHydra?

Do you want to have meaningful moral expectations of behaviour, e.g. 'don't shoot kittens' or 'save the children' and so forth? Do you want to make meaningful moral judgments of other people's actions?

[ipecac]

How can you tell whether I'm a realist, if you can't specify what I'm supposed to be a realist about, at least in broad terms?

You've talked about how you don't have sufficient conviction for realism.

Clearly you are not suggesting to be a realist about all possible ontologies. Given your disagreement with T-Hawk, nor do you propose to be a realist about any one ontology, I would imagine.

I don't think 'realism about ontologies' makes any sense. Realism is about reality: i.e. there are real things out there, whatever they may be. That's the essence of realism.

There are real things out there, and whatever ontologies we humans come up with are ways to understand and live in such a world of real things. Realism is prior to coming up with ontologies and declaring one (if any) the one truly and wholly correct.

[ipecac]

Thanks for the discussion. Hopefully I got a few of the standard arguments right!

I think you've done well.

A good approach to 'why do we need objective standards' is to ask the questioner about his own moral demands and expectations of other people, as well as his attitudes about justice. If they are just subjective, we can just ignore his stances because why should we care?

The only way to meaningfully hold anyone morally is to hold to objective duties and standards.

[Coeurva]

A good approach to 'why do we need objective standards' is to ask the questioner about his own moral demands and expectations of other people, as well as his attitudes about justice. If they are just subjective, we can just ignore his stances because why should we care?

I define subject as that which perceives (or acts) and object as that which is perceived (or acted upon). Then a subjective conviction can motivate an action towards an object. The subject can be affected by being an object to other subjects.

When two people clash about morals, they do it because they assume that the other's stance threatens their wishful image of the world. This doesn't mean that you'd need to condemn or punish, say, robbery because you fear that you specifically will be robbed, but rather that you think robbery should not occur in the world. I see morals as an extension of the human desire to act as a designer to one's environment. The designer holds himself to standards because (a) they arise from the structure of his consciousness or (b) they arise from his perception of objects (whether these are themselves designed or not). I would call the former "purely subjective" and the latter "analytically subjective", though, or maybe innate and stimulative. I'm not a philosopher; this might just be a renaming of what you mean by subjective and objective.

If you don't expect that my own demands and expectations matter to your design, then you can ignore them.

The only way to meaningfully hold anyone morally is to hold to objective duties and standards.

Yet how do you convince yourself that a duty or standard is "objective"? I see two roads; either by embracing descriptive science as normative to human morals, or by the conviction that you were born with the pneumatic seed and those who disagree weren't. I'd even argue that the latter is neither possible to refute by "dialogue", nor necessarily even desirable to try and refute by "dialogue" if it were, which is why I'm not replying to TheHumanHydra, despite disagreeing with all his opinions on the role of religion. But I think our disagreement doesn't matter, despite concerning how each of us would define the ultimate in objectivity. What I wholeheartedly agree on with him, incidentally, is that which seems to be his quiet insistence on the importance of epiphanies.

I care more about the process of looking for a unifying principle in life (and if it seems to exist, then what it could be) than any intermediate (or let's say mutable) result, which is likely as incomplete as any other attempt to nail down exactly what one is driven towards (except simply listing all items, but then there is no higher-order insight).