Irrelevant. The outcome of coin flips is independent of all observers. Morality is not. Not that all must agree on morality, I agree that this is irrelevant also. But any morality must be judged in some respect on its impact on those doing actions and those affected by actions. That is where the disagreement on the impact of an action does count.
The only way around this is if your absolute morality is defined as the optimization of some hidden variable that is independent of all actors. For instance, I think you could define an absolute morality defined by maximizing everyone’s wealth, or minimizing the differences in wealth, or maximizing the differences. That you can measure independent of the players. Not much of a morality in my book, YMMV.
I’m presuming you’re a subject and furthermore that you share certain essential characteristics of subjecthood with me, notably self-mediated subjective existence;
it’s my cognition that you are making a claim explicitly about the status of matters outside of subjects.
When given the above, it’s my cognition that you can’t authenticate that claim.
If my presumption or cognitions are wrong, you can point out where.
No, Herder isn’t saying you can judge a culture’s moral code from a moral standpoint, but rather from a logical standpoint.
e.g. If Society A has a moral code which places an absolute value on human life, but still permits the death penalty, one could critique its moral validity on grounds of logical consistency. That’s not making a moral judgement, but simply one of observation and consistency.
And under Pinker’s view, it may be that objective morality exists, but it’s still not absolute… and it’s the very malleability of individuals’ moral viewpoints which work against the notion of an absolute morality.
This assumes that there is no objective and absolute morality, which is precisely the matter under debate. In other words, you cannot use this reasoning to argue for the OP, as it assumes the OP to be true.
I’m not certain I understand this. Pretty well everyone I know who argues for an objective, absolute morality (one not based on essentially religious grounds) bases it not on “maximizing wealth” or any such thing, but on the essential recognition that other concious beings have rights which one is bound to respect - in particular, to be treated with some form of reciprocity.
Thus it is not the case that “morality is independent of all observers”; on the contrary, morality arises in the interaction of “observers”, in the very fact that one “observer” recognizes another as an “observer” him or herself and not simply as a “thing” under observation.
This also disposes of the notion that one culture’s morality cannot be judged from the context of another culture. I would say that all human cultures we know of understand the concept of reciprocity; since it is imbedded within every one, all are fundamentally similar in this basic respect .
You can add me to the list of objective morality “believers”.
Any social species must trade selfish instincts for social behaviours. Human beings only do this some of the time – we’re far from the most socially responsible species. When we label acts as good or evil, when we feel strongly about an action, it is just the application of this simple instinct of good of the group versus good of the individual. This is all morality is.
Perhaps the reason many believe that morality is subjective (or even arbitrary) is because of misleading definitions of morality such as “Morality is one ought to do”.
Apart from such a definition being intuitively wrong (because I can think of many things we ought / ought not to do, that I would never consider to be moral or immoral), it implicitly lumps together several disparate concepts.
Firstly, the raw concept of morality – acting for the good of the group that I’ve already described and believe to be objectively what morality is.
Then, what is the moral action in a given situation – what I would call ethics. Individuals and cultures can certainly disagree on this.
And finally, what the obligation is to be moral – one can know what is moral and yet behave otherwise (this is a fascinating topic but one which sadly is rarely debated in isolation).
I’m not assuming that at all. You can have an “absolute” morality based on the happiness of all people. The exact same actions might be moral or immoral depending on how people felt about it. A coin is always heads or tails. The action of person A whipping person B might or might not be moral depending on if person B liked being whipped. The purpose of this is just to show your coin toss example doesn’t work.
I’d say the automatic happiness meter is impossible, and even if it isn’t judging morality would have to be done on a case by case basis, just as we do it today. Do you consider that to be absolute morality?
I agree that morality based on wealth is not very satisfactory, since it misses out on lots of stuff we consider to be morally significant. I brought it up to show what an absolute value system would need to be like.
However I don’t agree that reciprocity is universal. Most primitive (and many modern) people distinguish between members of their group and others. The others are not considered to be worthy of the rights of the group. Our moral development as a species has been in recognizing that all humans are within the tribe, as it were. Not everyone has quite caught on. Animal rights activists would say that the tribe encompassing all humans is not adequate either. So you and I might consider John Q. Cannibal as being immoral for eating people not in the tribe, but we might be considered immoral for eating cows not considered to be in the tribe.
Ah, but what is the group? Is it the family, the tribe, the religious sect, the nation, or the species? Working for the good of your small group might be against the interests of a larger group. It’s an interesting principle, but it does not lead to any advice on whether a particular action is moral or immoral.
The notion of “moral development” implies the existence of an objective morality, and moreover a hierarchy of morality - that some ways are more moral than others; both of which I agree with.
I also agree that it is an improvement and an example of “moral development” to extend reciprocity outside the clan, tribe, etc. I would also say that some “primitive” people can make this leap (and some “modern” people cannot), and that the former are more morally advanced than the latter whatever their respective degrees of technology.
Since the basis of this morality is I would say conciousness, I would also agree that, to the extent other creatures possess conciousness at or near human level, it would be a moral development to extend reciprocity to them. I would not agree that not extending reciprocity to cows is immoral, as cows do not possess the requirement for such rights - that is, a human level of conciousness.
Remember the hierarchy almost always has the person talking about more developed morality on the top. There is a Flanders and Swann song about a young man in a cannibal tribe who sings to his disgusted father that “eating people is wrong.” The song ends with his father saying that next he’ll say that killing people is wrong. The shocked young man says “killing people is wrong?” and both father and son finish by shouting “ridiculous!” So my stating that we’re more moral is hardly proof of either objective morality or even that I’m right.
But why is human consciousness the break point? True cows are dumb, but how about chimps, gorillas or dolphins? My dog isn’t conscious (though sometimes I wonder) but he can feel pain, he can plan, he can remember, and he has a big vocabulary. Why is needlessy hurting him more moral than needlessly hurting a baby not yet able to talk? I’m not looking for an answer, actually, but I do want to point out that it is a matter of scale, and I’m far from certain we are anywhere near to what the answer will be in a few hundred more years.
The fact that most people talking about a hierarchy of morality place themselves at the top doesn’t mean that there is no hierarchy of morality. Indeed, in my very post I postulated that it would be quite possible for a less “advanced” person to be nearer the top - better a hunter-gatherer who was willing to extend reciprocity to anyone, than a modern sophisticate willing to murder any not in their chosen clan, even though the latter may consider him or herself the peak of moral evolution.
The notion of “primitive” people being cannibals happily killing and eating everyone is mostly a fantasy - most “primitive” people don’t do that (admittedly some do, but then, some 20th century Europeans invented death camps).
Human-like, not human. And yes, it is a matter of scale - I think most would agree that people owe some duties of reciprocity (such as duties not to inflict needless pain), scaled to the level of conciousness displayed - moreso for a chimp or dog than for a cow; and more for a person than any chimp.
The “Baby” example is easy - babies become fully concious with time, therefore you owe them more duties.
I understand what he’s saying, and he’s incorrect. Of course you can judge a culture’s moral code from a moral standpoint: who’s to stop you? I’ve heard the idea a lot, and I think it’s fatally flawed, inasmuch as it undermines its own authority.
It absolutely doesn’t: as he suggests, our moral sense may literally be a sense, inasmuch as it detects objective truths about the universe. The fact that we perceive qualitative differences between red and green may be a feature of our nervous systems rather than of the cosmos, but that difference in perception accurately reflects a quantitative difference in “red” and “green” light waves. People who are colorblind are simply less effective at perceiving this objective difference in the universe.
Different people may perceive morality differently, but that in no way indicates that there is no objective morality.
If they were moral reasoners they would no doubt put themselves at the top, though I’m not aware of a lot of hunter gatherers with this sophisticated moral reasoning. Diamond quotes statistics on the percentage of so-called peaceful tribes who die in battle - quite high. However, if that other tribe is trying to get you, is trying to get them first not moral? Rape is bad, of course, but are raids that wind up increasing genetic diversity as bad as an ingrown society? I’m not claiming I have answers, only that all this must be considered by any absolute morality.
You don’t know Flanders and Swann, I take it. I recommend them highly - At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat (where this song is from.)
And where is the cut off? Do we know chimps aren’t conscious? They don’t have language, but we now know that some people with brain injuries are actually fully conscious but totally uncommunicative. Shrimp are just a bunch of nerves - eating them is not an issue. But giving humans special privileges seems as arbitrary as giving your tribe special privileges. Now, an absolute morality can be arbitrary - religiously based morality is. But it doesn’t seem very satisfactory to me.
I agree, but as I said in my post, I don’t believe morality and ethics are one and the same thing.
Two people might disagree on whether a given action is moral, but could still understand that they would be in agreement if their definition of “group” was the same.
e.g. I can admit that my position on abortion would be different if my opinion of whether any embryo necessarily counts as a person were different.
What I’m saying is that morality is a very simple concept because the instinct that drives us in this respect is simple.
Just because the application of this concept may be complicated in some situations, is no reason to say the whole caboodle is subjective.
It’s rather like saying money is subjective, because people disagree on what is a reasonable amount of risk when investing in the stock market.
Oh, and to clarify too, I think the concept of morality can be defined without referencing human instincts. We care about it so much because of our instincts. But it’s an obvious concept for any social species / society to acknowledge.
I agree that morality can be defined without involving instincts, but if we do it might seem wrong to us. We’ve evolved a certain moral base, but that isn’t adequate for any objective morality. First, like any genetic trait, some people will be outliers. Second, it is too broad to give specific answers to knotty moral problems. Third, in some case our brains override our genes, and we reason ethically that our instincts are not moral.
Malthus in many ways is referencing our instincts. Even though I actually agree with what he considers moral, I can see alternatives that are also moral, so I can’t buy that they define any sort of objective morality.