Notes

But if values are not subject to our voluntary control, then how could we ever change them due to rational argument? It actually seems to me that vaules often do not change due to rational argument. The paradigmatic example of this for me was the argument I had with the people from my science fiction club. They had iron-clad arguments that "you have to increase the benefits for your society" in that in killing out of self-preservation, "you can kill up to the number of people in your party, but you can't kill any more than that". But this was not enough to prevent them from landing that stupid ship--they simply said that they would do it, and then that they would feel guilty after it. I thought that that was very convenient for them, allowing them to have their cake and eat it too. What you can say in that situation, however, is that their guilt is their moral disvalue of their action. Their choice to land the ship reflects their prudential value of stayin...

It seems plausible that people's moral intuitions are shaped by their experience. Suppose that two people's intuitions in some ways supervene over their experiences. This means that if their moral intuitions are different with regard to a certain action or person, then it must have been because their experiences were also different in some way. We would not expect that they could have experienced the very same things yet still have different moral intuitions. Yet what can we say of two people who have both been victims of attempted murder, yet one person is in favour of the death penalty and the other is not? Conversely, what can we say of two people who grew up in the same neighbourhood, have the same social standing and so on, yet one becomes a normal member of society and the other becomes Timothy McVeigh? And if the relationship between intuitions and experience is not one of supervenience, then what is it? People's experiences do shape their intuitions, but differ...

I performed a web search on "morality commensurability". The first appalling discovery was that there were only 583 websites containing those two words together. I was also quite unprepared to discover that whoever else types in those search words, even if they do not search for an exact phrase, will find my humble blog ranked first in the search! This is consistent with the claim of my internal reviewer that he regarded my discussion of commensurability as a contribution to philosophy. I am now starting to see just what he meant. It is not as if nothing has been done in this important area, but obviously not nearly enough has been done, and it is still rich for study. The second-ranking page in the search was Henry Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality , Chapter 18 , "The Problem of Value". Section 1, "The Value of Value", seems particularly relevant to my own concerns, and is giving me many thoughts in reading it, which I shall develop in the...

I now consider that I have amassed enough research to fruitfully begin to write my book on an empirical theory of ethics. I am writing the book using OpenOffice.org Writer 1.1.0. Its major inconvenience is that it does not allow me to group endnotes by chapter, but it is a solid program, and it produces wonderfully small master files. The first chapter will be an introduction that will provide nothing more than a synopsis of the chapters that follow, just as it was in the thesis. As such, it cannot be written until those chapters are written. The second chapter will be an amalgam of Chapters 2 and 3 in the thesis, called "Some Problems with Rationalism". I have made minor changes to the content of this chapter from its equivalent in the thesis, mainly to do with the nature of Christian virtue, but it does not influence any of the basic arguments. The third chapter should, rightly, provide an adequate plan and foundation for the development of an empirical theory of et...

I would say that level 1 validation is firsthand experience, such as if you walk through a factory farm and then try to eat a hamburger afterwards. Level 2 validation is secondhand experience, where you might read about factory farming procedures in a book, or on a documentary. Level 3 validation is a realistic hypothetical, where you imagine something that you might well face. Level 4 validation is an unrealistic hypothetical, which in practice is unlikely to happen if ever. The top two levels are the really strong levels of experiential validation, which one would expect for an empirical theory of ethics. The bottom two levels are relatively weak, and the bottom level particularly is so weak that it should probably not be used at all. Hence, I can certainly invalidate the argument with the idiots at my science fiction club on the grounds that it was based on totally preposterous scenarios. It would be impossible to form reliable intuitions on the basis of those hypotheticals alon...

A culture counts as a moral paradigm. Different paradigms are incommensurable, so that different cultures can quite realistically display indefinitely sustainable moral disagreements, but this cannot count as a refutation of our hypothesis. A legitimate refutation of the hypothesis must consist of an example of indefinitely sustainable moral disagreement within the same society, or culture. Note, however, that this must be a disagreement of social mores, not morals as they are abstractly theorised about. My hypothesis is that there is level 2 commensurability with mores, not morals. It seems to me that a candidate for this type of disagreement is the abortion issue. It has been raging for a very long time, and shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Admittedly, once abortion becomes legalised, it does not seem as though there is any reversion to a previous state of illegality, so it would seem that according to empirical observation, there are fewer moral problems with abortion lega...

In writing my Masters thesis, I originally wanted a theory of ethics that I could both preach and practise. I was basing it on common human practice to begin with, on the notion that it would be enlightening to uncover certain basic unwritten rules of human conduct. Unfortunately, this approach was too "disturbing", according to my supervisor. He noted that a prior question was what, if anything, must be the relationship between morality and practice, so I ended up trying to answer that question through an appeal to the tradition of empiricism. My desire to keep morality consistent with general practice resulted in exploring a moral hypothesis consisting of a mild version of sociological functionalism. The rest of the thesis was therefore concerned with exploring problems for sociological functionalism. In this respect, I would have been quite happy to conclusively disconfirm the hypothesis, simply because the disconfirming observations would themselves yield a fresh hypothes...

I can now answer the question of whether recidivist criminals need to think that there is nothing wrong with committing the crimes they commit. They can indeed think that they are doing the wrong thing, but can comfort themselves if they practise a relative morality. Killing child molesters in prison is the expression of a relative morality. It means that even criminals have got standards of right and wrong to which they adhere, even if these standards are below those of so-called decent people. Of course, this same principle can apply equally well to the hypocrites at your science fiction society. They may not practise the absolute morality of killing themselves in the spaceship plummetting to earth, but they would still practise some kind of morality relative to pure evil. For example, they would still feel guilty after they had landed the ship, knowing that they had caused the deaths of everyone on earth. It would, after all, say something much worse about them as people if they...

I know that all recidivist criminals have a morality. After all, child molesters are the lowest of the criminals by any viable ethic, because they have to be kept in a separate wing of the prison entirely or else they are killed. Therefore, some kind of ethics is viable for everybody, in which case, might we not speak legitimately of degrees of relativity of morality? In this respect, I can pull out a tried-and-true example of relative morality that quite touches me even today. It happened a long time ago when I was studying at the university library, and in those days kept my wallet in my bag. Foolishly, I left my bag on a desk in the library while I went to the loo, and did not discover that my wallet had been stolen from the bag until I was leaving the library at the end of the night. I went to security to report it and they actually said that I had a good chance of recovering the original wallet--minus the cash, of course! Apparently, the thieves of those wallets take the items...

One of your most basic premises is that moral intuitions are experience-dependent, but how do you support this claim? It was covered in " The experience-dependence of intuitions ". Basically, if you don't practice what you preach, so that your moral intuitions do not come from your actual experience, then they will not be very strong or reliable. What about the utilitarianism screamed by those bastards in that ridiculous argument ? It seemed to me that it didn't matter what scenario you presented to them, they would simply continue to take the utilitarian line, hypocritically. That certainly sounds like the intuitions are strong and reliable, just not viable. But then again, is what constitutes moral belief what you claim to believe in, or what you act on as a matter of course? I seem justified in claiming that their actions speak louder than their words. But then you are in danger of going down a slippery slope. Are we to say that most recidivist crimin...

Why are you so concerned about social mores? Because they seem to be the most natural foundation for an empirical theory of ethics. If moral intuitions are experience-dependent, and viable ethics make for experientially grounded intuitions, then social mores should provide an ideal place to start for an empirical theory of ethics. Social mores are by definition viable ethics, and hence are prima facie a credible index of moral value. Of course, one has to be careful how one formulates this approach. For example, we would not want to claim that the mores of Nazi Germany were a credible index of moral value. Nor would we want to claim that the mores in our society that existed before our present mores remain credible indices for values today, because we acknowledge that some mistakes or other were made in them that we have not made. But of course, this claim does presuppose that social mores progress. Nevertheless, my research strongly suggests that they do progress, and current ...

Observation: Popper's thesis (p.48) is that universal laws are prohibitions, in that any positive universal statement logically equates to a negative existential statement. In order to say that every x is P, one must be saying that there is no x that is not-P, and this is what makes the universal statement falsifiable, by finding an instance of one x that is not-P. Hypothesis: It seems to me that this is rich for an analogy with ethics, although one has to be very careful about how one words and formulates this. Suppose that moral rules are prohibitions--such as, for example, a prohibition against murder (which we could assume to be the willful and premeditated killing of a human being). First, a singular instance of murder can hardly count as a falsification of the moral rule, because the whole point of the rule in the first place is precisely that murder, if it occurs, carries with it some kind of negative consequence. A strong negative consequence would be a legal punishment...

It amazes me that you would rather do all this work for yourself than just get a job as an academic. I left university because I hated it: I didn't want to tutor. I didn't want to lecture. I didn't want to publish. I hated reading philosophy. I had no tolerance for disagreement. I was extremely thin-skinned to criticism. I was angry and I was miserable and more often than not, my supervisor copped my attitude, which wasn't fair on him and which I regret. And I don't see that anything would change if I were to go back now. This is just a hobby to me, and I apply myself to it very intensively, but it will never be anything else than just a hobby. If I write a book from it, I write a book from it, but right now, it has the value that I actually want to do it, and I can guarantee you that most of the joy from it will disappear if I suddenly find that I have to do it because it's my job. Besides, if intuitions are experience-dependent, then I do myself...

I think that basically now what you have to argue about is what is the actual structure of your book. If your basic thesis is really still an empirical theory of ethics that you want to elucidate, then you will have to defend your choice of methodology more than you have done so far in the blog. After all, an ethics that is grounded solely in the tradition of empiricism must be capable of taking a myriad of different directions empirically. Even you have sketched out more than once in this blog alternate directions in which an empirical theory of ethics might go. What makes yours better than all the others? In the first, case, moral intuitions are experience-dependent 1 . That means that three basic things must satisfy any moral judgement for it to be empirically valid: It must not be based on farfetched examples 2 . Generalisations may not be made from trivial examples to important examples, nor from important to trivial examples 3 . One must actually be prepared to act acc...

I have found a legitimate criticism of the use of trivial examples in Anne Maclean's The Elimination of Morality . She criticises R.M. Hare's use of trivial examples in Moral Thinking . She says that the kinds of things that one allows to happen in trivial examples are much more varied than what we would allow to happen in examples where more important interests were at stake. She claims that Hare's use of trivial examples allows him to sneak in premises that we would not accept if he had used more important examples. I can see how her criticism serves her purposes in the book. What I cannot see, however, is that it serves my purposes for an empirical theory of ethics where moral intuitions are experience-dependent. It shows at most that one cannot generalise from trivial examples to important examples because the more important the things are at stake, the greater restrictions we would place upon our choices. But it may simply be inappropriate to impose those same restr...

The main thing of which I require clarification in my mind now is, how do societies actually adjudicate between competing moral paradigms? This was the question I was asking myself before we finished reading Kuhn and started reading Popper. It seems to me to be of importance, because otherwise an a priori moralist is simply going to assert that society chooses the better option, involving himself in circularity. But we must know how it is that society chooses the better option, or the argument is meaningless. In this regard, analogies with Kuhnian science hardly prove fruitful. In fact, Kuhn himself has very little to say about this process, even as it pertains to science, except that which is, in his own words, 'brief and impressionistic'. Basically, apart from the nature of the scientific community itself, there are four main arguments that are appealed to: The new paradigm solves a scientific problem that has caused the crisis in the old paradigm. The new paradigm p...

Well, I am not finding Popper nearly so fruitful for analogy as I did Kuhn. Basically, my reading of Popper is simply to see how I might synthesise him successfully with Kuhn. How well I can do this will depend largely on the degree to which he is able to show convincingly that his method can be used to adjudicate between two conflicting paradigms--something I seriously doubt. On the other hand, something like falsifiability must still hold for ethics and science. It is simply that in the case of science, falsifiability can really only result in the generation of anomalies, which provoke a crisis in science leading to different competing paradigms for a revolution. It does not mean that the original theory gets rejected immediately. Nevertheless, I find of philosphic value one thing that Popper has said already on p. 51, where he discusses the benefits of axiomatising a theory. He notes that investigations of whether a certain part of the theory is derivable from some part of t...

I have bought Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery . Given my attraction to the Friesian school, and their reliance on the Popperian method, I will have to determine whether there is anything to it, even though I still regard myself as primarily Kuhnian. Popper will need to provide a lot of argument to counter Kuhn's claims, but his book is over five hundred pages long, so he's already got a good start. One thing I notice immediately is that Popper's PhD is in Philosophy, while Kuhn's is in Physics; this counts against Popper. Equally, Kuhn's writing is full of references to the history of physics, while Popper's is mainly abstract theorising about science; this also counts against Popper. Kuhn's seems by far the more empirical approach, and this makes me more likely already still to side with Kuhn. Nevertheless, if I am to affiliate myself with the Friesian school, I am going to have to find some way of reconciling these two views. Even i...

Note from the section "Kant and falsifiability" that metaphysical presuppositions underdetermine different falsifiable theories of ethics. Both Kantian deontology and natural rights theory carry the same metaphysical presupposition that human beings have a rational faculty. But this does not make those two theories the same theory with the same content or rationale, at least prima facie. Nevertheless, might not the commonality of the metaphysical presupposition be a source of commensurability between the two theories? That is, might it not provide a way to reconcile the two approaches, mutatis mutandis? After all, where would natural rights theory and Kantian deontology contradict each other? You know what? I think that that question is meaningless without a real dialectic going on between two different ethical theories that are to some degree viable as social mores--otherwise, I am simply shadow boxing. If I am to devise a real empirical theory of ethics, then I am g...

The previous section, of course, brings us to the most important question of all: how do social mores progress? Over the last several sections, I have been entertaining the hypothesis that social mores progress by a process of falsification. In this respect, I have been influenced by the various articles on the Friesian website that I have been reading. However, it is worth noting that Kuhn himself is very skeptical about Popperian falsification, doubting that any such falsifying experiences even exist (p.146). The falsifying experience is analagous to his anomaly, where a theory does not solve a particular puzzle that it is meant to. But no theory ever solves all the puzzles that it is meant to at any given time, so if any falsifying instance were grounds for theory rejection, then we should reject all theories at all times. We might assume that only a strong falsifying instance should be grounds for theory rejection, but then we would need an account of "improbability" or ...